Hope

by Len Deighton

  Among the celebrants there were university lecturers, a diplomat, some journalists, and assorted writers and film-makers. These were the intellectuals, the nomenklatura, the establishment. These were the people who knew how to read the signs that pointed to shifts of power. To them it was obvious that Lech Walesa, and his fellow workers in the Lenin shipyard, had failed in their bid for power. This was a time for the establishment to close its ranks, to find a modus vivendi with the nation’s military rulers; and with the Russians too if that was what Moscow demanded. Meanwhile they would indulge in long, jargon-loaded discussions with the Party’s reformers, watch the Polish generals for danger signals, and down another double-vodka before going back to their warm apartments.

  From the restaurant the girls’ pipe band started playing ‘My Wild Irish Rose’. The music was greeted with heady applause and shouts of appreciation from an audience fired by enthusiasm for things American, or Polish, or Irish. Or perhaps just overcome with vodka.

  I alternated mouthfuls of strong Tatra Pils with sips of Zubrowka bison-grass vodka. With both drinks in my hands I moved around, keeping my eyes and ears open. The UB men were here too. The ears of the Urzad Bezpieczenstwa were everywhere. I counted six of them but there were undoubtedly more. These security policemen were another sort of élite, their services needed by the Party and by the military rulers too. The UB thugs enjoyed their own private shops and housing and schools, and their own prisons into which their enemies disappeared without the formalities of arrest and charge. Such secret policemen were not new to Poland. Dzierzynski, the founder of Russia’s secret police, was a Pole. His statue stood outside KGB headquarters in a square named after him in Moscow. While here in Warsaw another Dzierzynski Square celebrated his widespread fame and power.

  I saw no one I both knew and trusted. Eventually I grew tired of listening to the chatter and watching the deals, and went up to my room on the first floor where, after making my phone calls, I stretched out on the bed and waited. It was two-thirty in the morning when a knock came. A woman pushed at the door and came in without waiting for an invitation. ‘Zimmer hundert-elf?’ she said in heavy and precise German.

  ‘Ja. Herein!’ She was wearing too much make-up. At her throat an expensive Hermes silk scarf looked incongruous with the cheap fur-trimmed overcoat and well-worn white leather high-boots. Snow crystals sparkled on her face, in her dark hair, and on her fur-trimmed hat. She snatched the hat off and, as she shook it, beads of icy water flashed in the light. Noticing that the curtains weren’t closed, she went and tugged them together. She moved across the room with that haughty tottering step that is the mark of the young whore, but she must have been all of thirty-five, perhaps forty, and no longer thin.

  For a long time she stood there – her back to the window – peering around the dingy hotel-room as if imprinting it on her memory. Or as if trying to manage without her glasses. She was no longer the Sarah I remembered: one of a crowd of exuberant young students bursting out through the gates of Humboldt University into the Linden after morning lectures. Now all the mischievous joy had disappeared, and it was hard to find the fragile bright-eyed girl I’d known. That was twelve, maybe fifteen years, ago; a hot dusty day of a sweltering Berlin summer. She was wearing a home-made pink dress with large white polka dots, I was a few yards behind her and she’d turned and called to me, asking me something in Polish, mistaking me for a student from some village near her home.

  Now she put her tote-bag on the floor and stood there looking at me again: ‘Room one one one?’ she repeated in English.

  ‘It’s me, Sarah.’

  ‘Bernd. I didn’t recognize you.’ She said it without much excitement, as if recognition would only encumber an already burdensome life.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ I got a glass from the bathroom.

  ‘My God I do.’ She pulled off her coat, threw it across the bed, and sat down. As the light of the bedside lamp fell upon her I could see that her hair was greying, and one side of her face was yellow and blue and mauve with bruises that paint and powder could not quite conceal. She poured herself a large measure from the bottle of Johnny Walker I’d picked up at Zurich airport, and drank it swiftly. Poor Sarah. I’d seen a great deal of her after that first meeting. She was studying plant biology and when she went off with her friends, tracking down specimens of rare weeds and wild flowers, I’d sometimes tag along with them. It gave me a chance to get into parts of the East Zone that were forbidden to foreigners. ‘Give me a minute,’ she said, and slipped off her heavy boots to massage her feet. ‘It’s been a long time, Bernd.’

  ‘Take your time, Sarah.’ She was from the south; a Silesian village in a frontier region that had been under Austro-Hungarian, Czech, Polish, German and Russian army jurisdiction in such rapid succession that none of her family knew what they were, except that they were Jews.

  ‘Boris couldn’t come. He’s on the early flight to Paris tomorrow.’ She was married to a bastard named Boris Zagan who was a flight attendant for LOT, the Polish government airline. He wasn’t exactly a British agent but he worked for Frank Harrington, the Berlin Rezident, delivering packets to our Berlin office and sometimes doing jobs for London too. I’d heard from several people that he regularly attacked Sarah during his bouts of drunkenness.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ I said. ‘Really good.’ There had never been any kind of romance between us; I’d liked her too much to want the sort of on-again off-again affairs that were a necessary part of my life in those roughneck days.

  She rummaged through the contents of her patent-leather handbag, found a slip of paper and passed it to me. Pencilled on it there were three lines of writing that I guessed to be an address. I studied it and laboriously deciphered the Polish alphabet. ‘Can you read it?’ she asked. ‘I remember you speaking good Polish in the old days.’

  ‘Never,’ I said. ‘Just a few clichés. And what I learned from you.’ Poles liked to encourage with such warm words any foreigner who attempted their language. ‘I never was good at the writing; it’s the accents.’

  ‘Accent on the penultimate syllable,’ she said. ‘It’s always the same.’ She’d told me that rule ten years ago.

  ‘I mean the writing: the “dark L” that sounds like w; the vowels that have the n sound, and the c that sounds like cher.’ I looked at the address again.

  ‘It’s a big house in the lake country,’ she said. ‘Stefan, George Kosinski’s brother, lives there. It’s miles from civilization: even the nearest village is ten miles away. You’ll need a good car. The roads are terrible and I don’t recommend the bus ride.’

  ‘Or the ten-mile hike from the village,’ I said, putting the paper in my pocket. ‘I’ll find it. Tell me about Stefan.’

  ‘The family are minor aristocracy, but Stefan prospers because Poles are all snobs at heart. He makes money and travels in the West. He even went to America once. He displays great skill at expressing his intellectual pretensions, but not much talent. He writes plays, and all of them conclude with deserving people finding happiness through labouring together. Poems too; long poems. They are even worse.’

  ‘Big house?’

  ‘He married the ugly only daughter of a Party official from Bialystok. Boris said the house is vast and like a museum. I’ve never been there but Boris has stayed with them many times. They live well. Boris says it’s Chekhov’s house.’

  ‘Chekhov’s house?’

  ‘It’s a joke. Boris says Stefan stole all Chekhov’s best ideas, and his best jokes and best lines and aphorisms, and then stole his house as well. He’s jealous. You know Boris.’

  ‘Yes, I know Boris.’

  She finished her whisky with that determined gulp with which Poles down their vodka, and then studied her glass regretfully. ‘Would you like another?’ I asked.

  She looked at her watch, a tiny gold lady’s watch with an ornate gold and platinum band. The sort they sell in the West’s airport shops. ‘Yes, please,’ she said.


  I poured another drink for her. If she wanted to sit there and recover, there was little I could do about it, but I wondered why she hadn’t just handed me the address and departed. As if reading my mind, she said: ‘Another few minutes, Bernard, then I’ll leave you in peace.’ She fingered her cheek, as if wondering whether the bruises were noticeable.

  Of course! She had bribed the desk who let her in as if she was one of the whores who serviced the foreign tourists. It was a cover, and she would have to be with me for long enough to make it convincing. Something to be hidden is always a good cover for something worse, as one of the training manuals deftly explained. She said: ‘It’s George Kosinski isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’ I must have looked startled.

  ‘Don’t worry about microphones,’ she said. ‘There are none installed on this floor. The Bezpieca know better than to bug these rooms. These are where the committee big-shots bring their fancy women.’

  ‘I still don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t go cool on me, Bernd. Do you think I can’t guess why you are here?’

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘Everyone’s seen him. As soon as he arrives he shouts and yells and spends his money and gets drunk in downtown bars where there are too many ears. Boris is worried.’

  ‘Worried?’

  ‘Has George Kosinski gone mad? He’s swearing vengeance on someone who killed his wife but he doesn’t know who it is. He’s violent. He knocked down a man in an argument in a bar in the Old Town and started kicking him. It was only after he convinced them that he was a tourist that the cops let him go. What’s it all about, Bernd? I didn’t know funny little George had it in him to do such things.’

  I shrugged. ‘His wife died. That’s what did it. It happened in the DDR. On the Autobahn, the Brandenburg Exit.’

  ‘A collision? A traffic accident?’

  ‘There are a thousand different stories about it,’ I said. ‘We’ll never know what happened.’

  ‘Not political?’

  I went and got another tumbler and poured myself a shot of whisky. At the bar I’d been abstemious but I could smell the whisky on her and it made me yearn for a taste of it.

  ‘Don’t turn your back on me, Bernd. I’ll start to think you have something to hide.’

  I’d forgotten what she was like: as sharp as a tack. I turned to see her. ‘There are political traffic accidents, Sarah. We both know that.’

  She stared at me as if her narrowed eyes would find the truth somewhere deep inside my heart. What she finally decided, I don’t know, but she swigged her drink, got to her feet and went to the mirror to put her hat on.

  ‘Where is George now?’ I asked her. Her back was towards me while she looked in the mirror. She turned her head both ways but spent a fraction of a moment longer when looking at the bruised side of her face.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said calmly. ‘Neither does Boris. We don’t want to know. We’ve got enough trouble without George Kosinski bringing more upon us.’

  ‘I was hoping Stefan or the family might know.’

  ‘The last I heard, he was scouring through the Rozyckiego Bazaar trying to buy a gun.’ She looked at me, but I looked down as I drank my whisky and didn’t react. ‘You know where I mean? Targowa in the Praga?’

  I nodded. I knew where she meant: a rough neighbourhood on the far side of the river. Byelorussians, Ukrainians and Jews lived there in clannish communities where strangers were not welcome. Even the anti-riot cops didn’t go there after dark without flak jackets and back-up.

  ‘Boris said this is what you wanted,’ she said, bringing a brown paper parcel from her tote-bag and putting it on the table.

  ‘Have you got far to go?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m being met,’ she said to the mirror in a voice that didn’t encourage further questions.

  I let her out and watched her walk down the long cream-painted corridor. The communist management showed the usual obsession with fire-fighting equipment: buckets of sand and tall extinguishers were arranged along the corridor like sentinels. When she reached the ornate circular staircase she turned and said ‘Wiedersehen’, and gave a wan smile, as if saying a final cheerless farewell to those two young kids we’d been long ago.

  After she had gone I thought about her and her bruised face. I thought about the way they had allowed her into the hotel, and let her come up to my room. That wasn’t the way it used to work in Warsaw; they checked and double-checked, and the only kind of girl you could get into your room was a genuine registered whore who was working with the secret police.

  And eventually I even began wondering if perhaps Sarah had got past the desk so easily because she was just such a person.

  I opened the brown paper parcel. Inside it Boris had put two tyre levers and a looped throttling wire. So he hadn’t been able to get a gun for me; or maybe it was too much trouble. Boris was not the most energetic of our contacts.

  ‘What did she say?’ It was eleven o’clock in the morning. I’d been out and about. I’d avoided Dicky by missing breakfast, and I could see he was not pleased to be abandoned.

  For a moment I didn’t answer him. Just to be back in the heated hotel lobby, where the warmth might get my blood circulating again, was a luxury beyond compare after tramping the streets of the city looking for George and his bloody relatives.

  The old place didn’t look so forbidding in daytime. It had been a fine old hotel in its day. A fin-de-siècle pleasure palace built at a time when every grand hotel wanted to look like a railway terminal. Crudely modernized from the empty shell that remained after the war, it wasn’t the sort of hotel that Dicky sought. Dicky was unprepared for the austerity of Poland, no doubt expecting that the best hotels in Warsaw would resemble those plush modern luxury blocks that the East Germans had got the Swedes to build, and Western firms to manage for them. But the Poles were different to the Germans; they did everything their own way.

  ‘Come along, Bernard. What did she say?’

  ‘What did who say?’

  ‘The woman who went up to your room last night.’

  I’d avoided him at breakfast, guessing that he wanted me to be his interpreter to interrogate the hotel management. It was not a confrontation I relished, for the interpreters are always the ones left covered in excrement, but what I hadn’t anticipated was that he’d be able to prise from the staff the secret of my nocturnal visitor.

  ‘It was one of those things, Dicky,’ I said, hoping he would drop it but knowing that he wouldn’t.

  ‘You think I’m a bloody fool, don’t you? You don’t send out for whores in the middle of the night; that’s not your style. But you are so devious that you’d let me believe you did, rather than confide in me. That’s what makes me so bloody angry. You work for me but you think you can twist me around your finger. Well, you listen to me, Bernard, you devious bastard: I know she was here to talk with you. Now who was she?’

  ‘A contact. I got the address of George Kosinski’s brother,’ I said. ‘It’s in the north-west and it’s a lousy journey on terrible roads. I thought I’d double-check that George was there before dragging you out into the sticks.’

  Dicky evidently decided not to press me about the identity of my lady visitor. He must have guessed it was one of my contacts, and it was definitely out of line to ask an agent’s identity. ‘That’s a natty little umbrella you’re wielding, Bernard.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I bought it this morning.’

  ‘A folding umbrella: telescopic. Wow! Is this a power bid for Whitehall? I mean, it’s not really you, an umbrella. Too sissie for you, Bernard. It’s just desk wallahs who come into town on a commuter train from the suburbs who flourish umbrellas.’

  ‘It keeps the snow off,’ I said. Dicky was of course merely showing me that he didn’t like being deserted without permission, but that didn’t make being the butt of his tiresome sense of humour any more tolerable.

  ‘An umbrella like that is not something I’d recomm
end to the uninitiated, Bernard. A fierce gust of wind will snatch you away like Mary Poppins, and carry you all the way to the Urals.’

  ‘But the desk didn’t tell you anything about our pal Kosinski?’ I asked, to bring him back to earth.

  ‘I left that to you,’ said Dicky.

  ‘George knows his way around this town. He speaks Polish. He might lead us a dance before we get a definite fix on him.’

  ‘And by that time he could be on a plane and in Moscow.’

  ‘No, no, no. He won’t leave until he’s done what he has to do. With luck we’ll get to him before that.’

  ‘Very philosophical, Bernard. Abstract reasoning of the finest sort, but can you tell me what the hell it means?’

  ‘It means we can’t find him, Dicky. And there are no short cuts except miraculous good luck. It means that you have to be patient while we plod along doing the things that a village policeman does when looking for a lost poodle.’

  This wasn’t what Dicky wanted to hear. As if in reproach he said: ‘Last night, when we first arrived, the reception people admitted that George Kosinski had been here in this hotel. So why won’t they tell us where he’s gone?’