by Adam Hall
The young Pole at Immigration was very circumspect as if he was being observed by a proficiency inspector or someone like that.
‘How long do you intend to stay in Poland?’
‘About two weeks.’ I said it first in halting Polish and repeated it in German, the lingua franca, to show him I was happier with that. It was no good making out I couldn’t speak Polish at all because of the letters from the dealers.
What is your business, so forth. I showed him the letters, taking them out of the envelope for I him. The heavy man next to him didn’t say anything.
‘You have a special reason for meeting these people?’
‘Yes, particularly for meeting Mr. Hrynkiewicz. I’m hoping to buy the Lewinski Collection for an American.’ It was respectable thinking on the part of Credentials because the Poles need dollars like the Irish need a drink.
‘What is that?’
I looked blank as if he should know. ‘It’s the authenticated series with the 10-korony Mayer engravings of 1860 and the 1918 German Occupation inverted overprints. Look, here’s the catalogue with -‘
‘It is not necessary.’ But he took the Croydon Philatelic Society membership card because I’d been letting it peep out from among the currency vouchers: they always seize on new colours because anything strange is suspect. While he was making a show of reading it the heavy man beside him reached out and went through the same motions. He wasn’t a Pole, this one: he had the flat bland face of the men you always see on the front page standing close to the Chairman of the Presidium when he’s just flown in, and whenever they’re actually looking into the camera it’s because they think there might be some trinitrotoluene inside it instead of some Perutz Peromnia 27.
He raised his colourless eyes from the card and let them play on my face and I remembered a thousand frontiers and a thousand men with eyes like these and this was the dangers: that my own would show the indifference to scrutiny that will indicate our trade as clearly as the nails of a mechanic will tell of his. So I looked uneasy, as sometimes a tourist does when despite the comfort of his guide book and Instamatic and Diners’ Club card he senses how suddenly close he is to a world he’d rather not consider, where the iron force of alien authority is vested in a single man with eyes like these and where only the conformity of his papers can give him immunity against the nightmare fates that have overtaken other and less invulnerable voyagers, brought namelessly to mind by images of dark windowed saloons slowing along dawn streets, of barbed wire and a silhouetted guard.
I looked at the younger one, the Pole. ‘May I have my letters back?’
He tucked them circumspectly into the envelope. The heavy man took the envelope and pulled them out again, comparing the signatures with the one on my passport. Looking at no one he said in Russian:
‘Ask him why he flew via East Berlin.’
‘Why did you fly via East Berlin?’
‘Because the flight was routed that way.’ Looking quickly around I lowered my tone, tapping the letters in the big square hand. ‘The Lewinski Collection has only just come on to the private market, and of course Mr. Hrynkiewicz would prefer to make a deal in dollars, so he told me to hurry and get in first - you can read what he says.’
‘Put them back in the envelope,’ he told the Pole and looked past me to the next one in the queue.
Going through Customs I remembered the flash of anger in the young eyes of the Pole as he’d folded the letters for the second time. Merrick hadn’t been fooling: there were no tanks in this city yet but it already had the brackish smell of occupation. There was a quietness here, voices and other sounds muffled as if by snow, and everyone - passengers, airport staff and security officials - did their business with each other deftly, ready neither to give nor make trouble in case somewhere a spark were struck to send the whole lot up.
Waiting for clearance I had time to vet the people off the T.U. 104 and picked out a minimum of six ‘tourists’ straight in from the Soviet State Security Service, getting their luggage chalked at the blink of an eye.
My bag came through, the leather panel at one end flapping from the ragged stitches. They won’t bother looking for a hollow bottom when the top’s obviously having a job to stay on.
‘To jest wszystko co mam,’ I told him. ‘Nie mam nic do oclenia.’
‘Jak to sie nazywa po polsku?’
‘Stanley Gibbons,’ I said with a shrug. You can’t put that into Polish. He passed it but dropped the Mail smartly into the receptacle for seditious literature. I’d never thought Kirby much cop but the rest didn’t seem that bad. There were three K.G.B. men just inside the barrier but they didn’t look at me when I went through: their eyes work at a distance while you’re having your shirts picked over and they’ve seen all they want to see before you get anywhere near them.
Outside the building the cold hit like a wave and froze on the face. The queue for taxis had already built up but one or two private cars were nosing in and I took a beat-up Syrena: the owner asked eighteen zlotys, three times the taxi fare and worth it because you didn’t have to freeze to death in the queue, just part of the black market service. He asked which hotel and I said I didn’t want a hotel, I wanted a woman.
There was an open stove burning split wooden road blocks with a galvanised pipe running up through a blanked off window pane. The room smelt of tar and sweat and Russian tobacco; a half-finished bowl of chiodnik had been pushed under the fringe of red velvet that hung from one of the shelves, the spoon still in it. Her hands began moving.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said, ‘I’m not staying.’
Still young and with carbon black ringlets above the sharp dark eyes, a leopard skin coat and knee boots, where was the whip, her forebears on the distaff side a-whoring for the Goths. ‘Come near the stove,’ she said with little white smiling teeth, ‘it will warm you.’
‘What’s your name?’ I switched to German because I wanted her to get it clear.
‘Marie.’ A lot of them use names like that the world over, perhaps to bring into their dingy rooms a touch of the splendid plush and bronze and mirrored ceilings of La Belle Epoque. In German: ‘Come near the stove.’
She began again and I said again that I wasn’t staying and the black eyes sparked: when you don’t want the only thing they’ve got it hurts their pride. She’d said a hundred and fifty zlotys and I put three fifties on the bottom shelf and her head turned to watch, quick as a bird’s. ‘Jan Ludwiczak,’ I told her, ‘got arrested a couple of days ago. I want to know his address and where the U.B. are holding him. Then you make as much again.’
Who are you and what gives you the idea I’d know a thing like that, so forth. She added in the Warsaw vernacular and tones like a sabre being sharpened that the U.B. were the original illegitimate sons of putrefaction incarnate and that she had no dealings with them.
‘You get the other hundred and fifty if you can find out by ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’
Her pride stopped being hurt but she thought up a lot of objections in order to raise the price, trilling the low German is and throwing out the genders, but I kept on at her because I’d come here knowing she’d have a few of the Policia Ubespieczenia among her clients: anywhere east of the Curtain the lower ranks of the secret police can get it for nothing or a girl won’t stay in business.
‘Finish your stew.’
She reached for the bowl and banged it on top of the stove. ‘It is not enough for so difficult a thing.’
It was all she’d get: that bloody woman in Accounts was going to question this anyway when it went in as general expenses and even if I put 1 tart, unused against please specify she’d only put unjustified as soon as she’d come out of the vapours.
‘Where do you pick up, Marie? What bar?’
‘I tell you it is - ‘
‘Oh come on, the Komiwojazer?’ We’d passed it in the Syrena, the nearest corner from here. ‘I’ll phone there tomorrow before ten and if you’ve got what I want I’ll tell t
hem to give you the one-fifty.’
Sulkily she said: ‘I may be lucky this time. Are there other things you will want to know about?’ She poked at the chiodnik.
‘Possibly. But not if you don’t get it right this time. Not if you bitch me.’
It was their reaction that was interesting.
He’d got as far as the airport: perhaps he’d booked on a plane out and they knew that or just suspected it or someone like Marie had sold him out while a U.B. man’s trousers were still slung over the chair. Anyway they got him. A Scandinavian Airlines flight had just come in but most of the people in the main hall were Polish, friends or associates or people with reservations on the S.A.S. plane, and their reaction was interesting because they didn’t just stand watching as most crowds do: there was a distinct movement forward as if they wanted to help, then hesitation.
The Moskwicz hadn’t got a heater so I’d screwed Accounts for a Fiat 1300 because there’d be some surveillance to do and that meant sitting around at anything down to twenty-five below zero. I’d left it in the car park and the Wolga had come up very fast, two of them piling out as it slewed in alongside the Departure doors just when I was going through. He was ahead of me and they’d seen him because he’d turned his face to look back, perhaps sensing the danger or hearing the way the car had pulled up. Apparently he was recognisable to them because they seemed perfectly sure and broke their run and walked in step towards him while he stood there with the dead fixed look of a rabbit in the headlights.
Perhaps they’d hoped they could do it discreetly: he was a man of some age with silver hair below the edges of his black fur kepi, an academic face with nothing desperate in it, only despair; but at the last minute he tried to make a break, nothing sensational, just a kind of token jerk sideways as if he didn’t ever want it said of him that he hadn’t resisted; it worried them and they used more force than was needed, swinging him round and hustling him back to the doors so fast that he couldn’t keep up and they had to half lift him as if they were moving a waxwork. It was, then that I noticed their reaction, the crowd’s, the forward motion as if they wanted to help, then the hesitation when they realised there was nothing they could do.
The B.E.A. flight was twenty minutes late and I read most of the news section of Trybuna Ludu which for double-think motives saw fit to quote some of the problems facing the fourth congress of the Polish Psychiatrists’ Union, now convening in the capital: mental breakdowns up by eleven per cent, suicides up by ten, alcohol and tobacco consumption up by twenty. On a different page full coverage was given to the fall from grace of ‘several hundred’ local civil servants, party workers and journalists accused or suspected of ‘anti-socialist leanings’ incompatible with those in responsible positions, Additionally a further twenty-seven ‘known Zionists’ had applied for emigration, specifically to Israel, this report being innocent of any hint that most of them would follow the fifteen hundred who since 1968 had changed planes and turned up in Copenhagen.
No mention of Jan Ludwiczak. I hadn’t even looked for it: the last faint ripple would have gone by now and the surface would be smooth.
Across the monochrome tarmac the Trident reversed its thrust and drew out a haze of kerosene.
I kept to my cover near the edge of the group. Others bad joined it: they’d moved by casual heel-cooling paces from farther away where they hadn’t seen anything clearly.
‘What happened?’
‘They arrested him.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who was he?’
‘I don’t know.’
They looked away from each other. Across at the tobacco kiosk the sales were going up. What would the Polish Psychiatrists’ Union recommend as a solution to the problem? Chewing gum?
He began looking for me as soon as he was through the Customs and I turned away and gave him a few minutes and took the end doorway, watching him from a distance across the freezing forecourt, the grey winter light striking across his glasses, his shoulders hunched inside his coat, his young forlorn face reddening to the bite of the air. He looked for me everywhere. When he joined the group for the Orbis coach I went and sat in the Fiat, running, the engine to work the heater.
I was fed up. Did he think I’d book on a different plane so we shouldn’t be seen together and then turn up to meet him when he got in? That was one reason. That was why Egerton hadn’t had the nerve to question it: he knew it was routine security. Anyway I hadn’t told him I’d meet him, I’d just said I’d get in touch, so what was he gawping around for?
The coach dropped him at the ‘Orbis office in Ulica Krucza and I stayed in the Fiat, letting him get across Mokotowska so that I could take a long look down the narrowing perspective. That was another reason and so far he was clean. When he turned into Aleje Roz I drove past and parked at the far end, looking through the half-misted rear window to watch him go into the Embassy. He was still clean.
I started up and turned right into Wazdowskie and went round the square and came back and parked on the other side of Aleje Roz so that I could watch through the windscreen instead of the rear window. It was a short street and the Fiat was a bit close to the police observation post but they were there to survey people entering and leaving the Embassy and nobody else, and the afternoon dark was coming down so they wouldn’t be able to see if there were anyone still in the car.
The thing was that I might just as well have taken the cheapest according to standing orders, the Moskwicz 408, because if I wanted any heat in the Fiat I’d have to keep starting up every half-hour and they’d hear that and wonder why I never got into gear and moved off. But even if it meant freezing to the wheel I’d wait till he left the Chancery for the Residence. I’d give him till midnight, wherever he went: wherever he went, till midnight, I’d be there and he’d be safe because if those bastards in London had sent him out with a fistful of marked cards to pass to a contact or shove in a letter-drop I’d be there before he was caught. It was what they wanted, wasn’t it, hold his hand?
They’d done it to Heppinstall and they’d done it to others but they weren’t going to do it to me.
Two hours before dawn there was the tail-end of a moon lying hooked across the heights of the buildings that stood against the west. In the half dark they seemed windowless but windows were there and maybe from some of them another attempt would be made, today or tomorrow, and maybe succeed, swelling the numbers of the ten per cent. The cost of living in captivity was going up and the soul knew a cheap way out.
They brought me hot water and I thought about him while I washed. The worst of the worry was over and I’d slept for nearly five hours. If they’d been going to do it they would have arranged it for some time during his first few hours here: that would be logical, to send him early into the trap as if it were important for him to pass the stuff as soon as he could after landing from London, the implied urgency raising the value of the material in the eyes of the opposition. But his light had gone out behind the shutters in the Residence before midnight and I’d come away.
I didn’t know how long it was going to take me to find my way into the Czyn network or how long it would be before Merrick signalled London through the diplomatic radio to say I was missing. London wouldn’t take any notice but it was the sort of thing he might do because in only two weeks’ training they wouldn’t have covered even a précis of the practical experience he lacked. He’d expected me to show up at Okecie to meet his plane and now he’d expect me to telephone him or call at the Embassy and ask him to infiltrate me into Czyn and help him analyse its potential. That was understandable because he knew those were the orders I’d been given but he didn’t know - he couldn’t instinctively see - that I had to work alone and make my own infiltration simply because it’d be too dangerous not to. They hadn’t checked him from the airport but from now on he’d be under routine surveillance by the observation post across the street from the Embassy. He wouldn’t be given an actual shadow like
the military attaché but if he made a mistake and revealed his connections with Czyn the central monitoring cell of the U.B. would advise the observation post and they’d slap a tag on him every time he left the Embassy.
I’d have to make protected contact with him because my orders were to check and confirm the info he was sending to London and try to make sure his face didn’t get trodden on while he was doing it, but he was expecting me to turn up at the Embassy like a long-lost friend and trot him across the Pink Elephant Club for a drink and I wished he’d got the sense to know that I’d be going as near to him in public as I’d go to a rabid dog.
So I hadn’t unfortunately done it on Egerton’s doorstep. He’d known I’d get the point before long: he’d wanted a particular type of agent to work with Merrick, the type who could do it best by working alone.
The bit of paper that had been waiting for me in the bar bad told me 29 Mica Zawidzka. It was in the Praga district on the cast side of the river and I took up station there in the Fiat an hour before dawn. It had begun snowing and I used the wipers at intervals. She came into the street at half-past eight and turned left, away from me, and for a minute I sat watching the flakes drifting across her dark blue greatcoat, then got out and locked the car and began following.
Chapter 5
ALINKA
Her name was in small gold letters on the triangular block but I needed to know more about her than that.
‘You speak English?’
‘Yes I do.’
She was in uniform, the tunic dark blue like the greatcoat had been, a very white collar below the dense black hair. Clear stone-blue eyes that glanced behind me through the windows and flickered back to my face when I spoke.
