Grzegorz killed his father. Then he killed the cop who had him put away for earlier crimes. He is hunched over the wheel as he drives us relentlessly through milky fog on the outskirts of Kraków, Poland's pretty second city, writes John Fleming
He reaches into the glove compartment - what weapon is he about to pull on us? His phone. He fiddles at it with one hand as he carves a path through the peasouper. With a bashful smile, he shows us a clip of W11, the popular TV crime drama in which he sometimes acts as a bad guy. He explains that, having shot those two men at point-blank range, he was required by the script to lob a grenade into a mechanic's yard. As he shifts down into third gear and swings out to overtake, I stare at the screen: that's Grzegorz running jerkily across a field and away from a ball of flame.
"Sometimes people stop me in the street and say, 'Look, there is the guy from the TV'. And sometimes they are very stupid people," he laughs. "Last week, there was this old woman - she pointed to me and shouted to others in the street: 'There he is. The murderer!'"
Grzegorz is 27 and speaks decent English. He likes awful death metal music. It plays loudly on the car stereo and I can hardly hear him explain that he plans to marry next year. He has been driving for years but the TV acting pays well and the money will come in handy for the church wedding. He is taking us to the Wieliczka salt mines, a place dug so deep into the earth that you feel sure the dull throb in your head is due less to tiredness and the night before and more to atmospheric pressure and reverse bends caused by descending too quickly.
The first level is 60 metres down - just follow the Hungarian guide down all those wooden steps. Work at the mine started 900 years ago and excavation ceased only recently due to salt depletion and flooding problems. Apart from the depth (level three is 135 metres underground) and the number of chambers created by the miners (some 2,000), the marvel here is the number and quality of altars, statues of the saints and reworked bas-reliefs of such works as The Last Supper. They were all carved from salt by workers over the centuries. A large likeness of Pope John Paul II (a former archbishop of Krakow) stands in a vast cavern adorned with sparkling chandeliers, themselves composed of crystal salt.
Another level houses an artificial lake created as an attraction to draw visitors to the mine. But its waters once swallowed three Austrian soldiers from an overladen boat. They fell out, reputedly drunk, and drowned. There's one more reminder of danger not far away: a Gothic re-enactment of explosions and flashes demonstrates how men wrapped in wet rags crawled through these tunnels with naked flames. Their job? To ignite built-up methane gas and render the lair safe for miners.
With a note of irony, the guide points to a wheelbarrow once used for transporting hewn blocks of salt towards the surface. "These devices were called Hungarian dogs," he says. "Dogs because their wheels yelped each time they turned. Hungarian because of the workers pushing them."
Even deeper down is a hospital. Wheezy asthmatics and others with respiratory problems would stay underground for weeks, the rarefied air serving as a tonic. And just when you begin to feel at home in some evil mastermind's underground cavern, it is time to leave.
The lift is a four-floored stove pipe - nine people crowd into the first cage, the door snaps shut and the device rises eight feet to allow people enter the other compartments beneath. Then - ding-ding! Suddenly the stove-pipe lift becomes a bullet shooting vertically towards the surface. It's Jules Verne meets How Green was My Valley. As the salt-rock walls rasp past, for a second we fear we are hurtling not upwards but deeper down on a journey to the very centre of the earth.
Safely back out on the planet's crust, I recall a friend telling me he knew people who had visited Krakow's old Jewish quarter of Kazimierz in 1992. In sickened disbelief, they witnessed a young boy in skull cap and ringlets pursued along the cobbled streets by an SS-uniformed motorbike-rider. They weren't to know this was an idle moment during the shooting of scenes from Schindler's List.
In the Klezmer Hois restaurant on Kazimierz's ulica Szeroka, they dish up good turkey liver and onions. Its plush walls bear dozens of framed photographs: Steven Spielberg hugging a white-haired man, Roman Polanski's scrawled single-line note of approval. The kitchen is now shut, but a bar around the corner looks like it will never close. Poles drinking, dancing.
Twenty-six-year-old Matusz has lost count of the people he knows who have gone to Dublin. While he jokes that the name of Poland's new prime minister, Donald Tusk, sounds like that of a Disney-animated character, he praises him. The Kaczynski twins, Jaroslaw and Lech, were making a mockery of Poland, he says. "Two brothers holding the two seats of power was too much."
Tequila is ordered. The shots are poured and the lemon sliced. And the fog-coloured salt tastes like it is of the earth.