by Adam Hall
‘All I’d like are the London schedules.’
‘B.E.A.?’
‘And your own.’
A. Ludwiczak in small gold letters.
‘B.E.A. operate direct flights to London on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays… ‘
I’m never good at telling their age. Say between twenty-five and thirty and divorced, too efficient to have lost it through carelessness and quite a few years to leave a mark as deep as that: married too young then and the break quite recent or the mark would have gone; with this straight nose and decisive mouth she’d probably got it off with one irrevocable tug and hurled it as far as she could. Not Jan, now being worked over in the glare of the lamps in the 5th Precinct Bureau: he was only twenty-one. He would be her brother.
‘Alinka!’
‘Excuse me please.’ She turned away, taking the form from the girl and signing it, swinging her head up as she turned back, her eyes focusing on someone behind me: ten seconds ago there’d been the thump of the door and a wave of cold air from the street. It was a quick questioning glance, the kind I was getting used to seeing: sometimes there was defiance in it and sometimes fear; I’d seen it on my way here in the tram along Jerozolimskie - they’d made a spot-check on identity cards, the snow on their padded shoulders as they pushed between the seats, and at Zawiszy Square they’d taken someone off, his patient Jewish eyes downcast as he passed me, the blue-veined hand uncertain as it touched the rail, as if doubtful of even this much support.
Apparently it was all right because she looked at me again, though it was an effort to remember what I’d been asking. Three other men and a woman, it had said, adding that their arrest was imminent.
‘We operate on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays.’
‘If I need to know anything else, when do you -‘
‘We are open until five o’clock.’
The main meal, obiad, was from four onwards and she went home for it soon after five. He just kept on past the house without turning his head and I waited till he’d gone before I unlocked the Fiat and got in. It was normal routine surveillance between where she lived and where she worked - it had been a different man this morning - and I wasn’t worried: I’d have been worried if they hadn’t put a tag on a relative of someone they were grilling in the 5th Precinct because that would have been inconsistent with the situation and I’d have had to start beating the air for the answer instead of concentrating on the way in to Czyn. She was the way in, the thread in my hand, and I didn’t want anything to snap it.
Not long after seven there was a tug on it and I waited outside the place so that I could go in immediately behind a group of youths carrying a hollow-ribbed mongrel they’d found in the snow. It wasn’t far from where she lived and my shoes had covered some of the traces left by her own.
She’d been expected and he’d ordered coffee for them both: he sat tall in his chair and his wide confident hands were clasped on the table; now and then he thumped it gently to emphasise a point and she watched him with steady attentive eyes as she tore up, with unconscious efficiency, the blue handout advertising the Hungarian troupe at the Cristal-Budapest: the one on my own table was soaking up some coffee the girl had slopped over when she’d brought it but Alinka was tearing hers into small neat squares as she listened to him but refused to accept that it would be all right, that they wouldn’t be too rough with Jan because he was young and he’d only been printing the stuff for students anyway and as soon as they could find out where, he was being held they could go there and try to see him for a few minutes.
I could hear nothing from where I sat, on the dais opposite the bar, and my interpretation of their attitudes could be wrong because in the past two days I’d already learned how difficult it was to judge people from their behaviour or even their expression: in this city the winter was not only in the streets and they were living on their nerves, the fierce vitality they’d put into their music and their wars now thrust inwards on themselves; and it was worse because the surface of their daily lives seemed still intact: they could sit here and order coffee and complain if it didn’t come, and dance at the Cristal-Budapest and walk with their children in the park on Sundays. All they couldn’t do was call their country their own and for these people their country was their soul.
His big confident hands thumped the table again and anger quickened suddenly on her face as if she needed to defend her right to feel afraid, but he understood and his quiet answer softened her eyes and she shut them for a moment, her dark head going down, and only then could he look away from her, hopelessness dulling his profile, his clasped hands falling open to rest slackly beside the heap of torn blue paper. Then suddenly - and although it was difficult to judge these people by their behaviour I sensed that for him it was an almost violent thing to do - his hand swept out and the paper whirled like confetti on to the floor. They didn’t speak again until they left. For half a minute I watched them through the window where the neon sign flashed, bathing them in its intermittent light. He wanted to see her home but she shook her head, walking away alone.
I switched and he took me north-west and then west across the Slasko-Dabrowski Bridge, walking fast and with long strides, the snow heaped thickly along the boughs in the public gardens, the frozen jet of a fountain curving in an arch of ice, bells tolling somewhere along the remote reaches of the skyline. Left and then left again under the deathly blue of the lamps in Krakowskie Przedmiescie, a tram with a snow-plough attachment nosing along the rails, sparks sizzling from the boom. He’d gone.
These were older houses, four-storeyed, one of them with dark smoke creeping in a downdraught like hair across a face. The lift was still moving when I went into the hall and stood listening, watching for the counterweight to come into view. Small yellow lamps burned, shining on the snow that had dropped from his shoes. The weight stopped at the first floor so I took the stairs to the third, Beethoven in my head suddenly, the theme rhythm, a trick of the memory.
On the third floor I had to push the time-switch. The doors of the lift were narrow panels, swing-opening outwards and with glazed apertures. I couldn’t see any snow on the floor of the passage here.
A cable still quivered in the silence, tapping against one of the guide rails. The fanlights of all four apartments were dark. The floor was composition flint with a buffed surface and even after climbing the stairs my shoes had left moisture but his hadn’t. I checked the floor above and the one below and came back; he’d left no traces. In the lift was a puddle fringed with slush where he’d been standing.
There was no particular hurry but it shouldn’t have taken me so long, you get stale after three months without a mission. The rear panel of the lift was mostly a mirror; damp had got at the silvering over the decades and it looked like scum on a pond but the frame had been reinforced, they’d seen to that. The catch was above and to one side, a flush-fitted knot in the wood with a medium spring, and I pressed it and swung the mirror towards me. The door in the wall behind wasn’t easy to see although I knew I must be looking straight at it: the vertical edges were concealed by the rear pair of guide rails and there was no handle, lock or keyhole. He would have knocked at it to the rhythm my ear had detected when I’d climbed the stairs, my mind failing to register it consciously because from two floors up the sound had been too faint, muffled by the confines of the stair well. Beethoven’s Fifth, three short and one long: the V-sign they’d used in the war, just as they’d used this door when the Resistance had gone to ground.
There was no oblique-mirrored Judas-hole that I could see; I waited for a minute but there seemed to be no kind of warning device that I could have tripped mechanically or electrically. They didn’t know I’d exposed the door.
I came away. This was their base and for the moment it was enough that I’d located it. The sensitive area wasn’t here: it was in Alinka Ludwiczak’s travel pattern because if she were simply a cutout liaising with two or more of the Czyn units she’d become an immediate danger
to them if the secret police decided to pull her in. She looked like a cutout because she’d made contact tonight in a café instead of coming here: but if she were more than that - if she were the unnamed woman under threat of imminent arrest - they’d pull her in as soon as the time came when the boy in the 5th Precinct Bureau just couldn’t take any more.
In either case she could blow half the network and that would expose Merrick.
A new sound had come to the city: the light crunching of chains as they bit into the snow. The sky was clear by midday but the streets were still covered and along Grojecka the heavier traffic had packed the surface into ice. The Fiat had been fitted up by Orbis and before dark I found a slot within fifty yards of the airline office and stayed in the car because it didn’t matter which end of the tag-route I left it and for the next forty-five minutes I wouldn’t have to freeze to the pavement like the little man with the ear-muffs who’d taken up station near the delicatessen soon after I’d parked. It was the same one as last evening: this was his shift.
There was no twilight: the night was suddenly switched on with the lamps. Across the darkened sky an aircraft winked lower on its approach path into Okecie.
She came on to the pavement at 1707 and began walking north towards the crossing and the tram stop and he kept pace on the other side of the street. I locked the Fiat and used quick short steps over the cobbled ice to close the gap to fifty yards by the time she crossed to the island and then to the east side. A tram had started moaning behind me but she wouldn’t be taking this one if she were going straight home: last night she’d caught a No. 16 on the direct route as far as the stadium on the far side of the Poniatowski Bridge but I closed the distance again and so did he because we weren’t certain. The pattern was the same until a four-door Warszawa with smoked rear windows crunched over the ruts alongside the kerb and halted abreast of the little man with ear-muffs. He went up to it and spoke through the open window, turning his head just once towards the tram stop where she was waiting.
It looked like a pickup and I was badly placed but there was a chance so I started back for the Fiat and got there half a minute after the No. 16 ground its way past going north. With the engine running I watched him through the windscreen at a hundred and fifty yards until a snow-caked Mercedes slid against the kerb and I had to pull out and slow again to keep him in view. He was climbing into the Warszawa and beyond it the tram was moving off and they followed, not hurrying. So it was a pickup but they didn’t want to do it here in Grojecka because there were too many people about and there was no need for the rush tactics they’d had to use at Okecie because she wasn’t trying to get on an aeroplane. They’d do it on the far side of the river where the streets were quiet.
Jan Ludwiczak had held out for, nearly three days but now they’d got the names and the heat was on. I couldn’t do anything about the others but there was a thin chance here and the Fiat began sliding a bit as I edged out of the rutted camber and shaped up to overhaul. Two risks, one of them calculated: I might clout someone if I struck a bad patch and that would leave me blocked while they kept on going; or they might pick her up when she changed trams on the other side of the stadium instead of waiting till she got off near Zabkowska and started walking to the house where she lived. I didn’t believe they’d do that because there was no need: her own street was the quietest along the whole of the route and they had her address; they’d follow her there only to make sure she didn’t change her direction. So it was stomach-think, not brain-think, that was playing on my nerves: the fear of leaving her for so long unprotected.
Discount and concentrate.
In Zawisza Square there was a snarl-up and the civil police were using an M.O. patrol car to drag a buckled Trabant clear of the tramlines and I lost nearly seven minutes and began sweating because by precise reckoning I had to reach the Poniatowski Bridge and leave the Fiat and walk back to the tram stop at the Ulica Solec intersection before the No. 16 arrived there in fifteen minutes from now at 1732.
Add a third risk: if someone else caused a snarl-up worse than this one along the main Jerozolimskie it would halt the tram and the passengers would get out and walk till they picked up a bus farther on and it was then that the U.B. Warszawa might opt to play safe and take her on board. By now there would be directives in force to minimise public scenes because the international spotlight was finding its focus: journalists were already flying in to set up their coverage of the West German talks and the snatch at the airport would have hit all the major European editions and the Polish delegates must be getting sensitive.
But there was a limit to what could be done to present this city as the capital of a free people when its citizens were burning to turn it into fact.
Discount the third risk. Somewhere near the Ulica Solec intersection we had a rendezvous, she and I.
The snow had piled drifts along Jerozolimskie where wind had blown from the side streets and their humps were turning black from the city’s smoke. The Fiat hit one of them obliquely and was carried across the tramlines before I could bring it back: the traffic was thicker here and the going less easy. When Solec came up I checked the timing at six minutes behind schedule and kept on towards the bridge because there was still a chance. Just this side of the river a trailer truck out of the rail freight yards had got stuck in the ruts where the camber was steep so I passed it and pulled in and backed up and left the Fiat there with its rear image shielded from the east-bound traffic.
The red blob of the tram was already in sight along the street’s perspective but I couldn’t run because in this city a running man was suspect and two uniformed M.O. police were patrolling towards me on this side: I’d passed them in the Fiat and by now they’d be coming up on the tram stop. At thirty yards I saw them beyond the people waiting there but I walked faster now because it was normal and legitimate to hurry to catch a tram. It had begun slowing and I broke into a trot, slipping on the packed snow and waving to the driver. The people who had been waiting were getting on board. The two policemen were now this side of the stop. I slipped again and found my feet and kept going but they didn’t move over to give me room.
‘Your papers.’
In German I said: ‘If I miss this tram -‘ but he wagged a gloved finger.
Passport. Visa. The last of them was getting on board.
‘Why do you speak in German?’ From inside the tram the buzzer sounded. In thick accents: ‘You think we not understand English?’ He turned aside to study the visa in a better light, the shadow from the cap peak masking his eyes. The other watched me. Beyond them I could see the Warszawa: it had pulled over to halt on the tramline that traffic could pass. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To Praga.’ I shrugged. ‘If I can get the tram.’
None of the three risks had come off but it didn’t matter now; the whole thing had become academic. There’d been a chance and it had died on me and it was the last one I’d get because it was no good going back to the Fiat and overtaking the train again: for one thing there wasn’t enough distance left in which to overhaul and establish a lead sufficient to let me walk back one stop and try to get on again - we were too near 29 Ulica Zawidska by now - and for another thing they’d start wondering why a dove-grey Fiat 1300 kept overhauling them like a pilot-fish round a shark. No go.
‘Where, in Praga?’
Sparks cracked from the boom and the iron wheels rolled. No go. She was for the labour camps.
‘My hotel. The Dubienski Hotel.’
A Volkswagen was coming up, not too fast for the conditions but steadily, its chains thumping. It would pass between the tram and where we stood.
‘Very well.’ He put the visa inside the passport and gave them to me. In English: ‘Goodnight.’ Then suddenly in his own tongue - ‘Uwazaj!’
He may have tried to grab me because of the danger but it would be dangerous only if I slipped: the twin horns of the Volkswagen were blaring and I knew it wouldn’t be able to pull up if I fell in front of it.
The rear doors of the tram were abreast of me and I ran at an angle to allow for the acceleration: the doors weren’t closed yet because they weren’t automatic-hydraulic. At the end of my run they began sliding together and then I suppose the conductor saw me because they opened again and someone gave me a hand, pulling me in. I heard the Volkswagen slithering past, a shout coming, yes, if you wish, I am a bloody lunatic, yes, but the point is that I have made some progress.
On the condensation of the rear glass the sidelights of the Warszawa shifted a bit as its wheels were deflected by the tramlines, then it steadied and followed. There wasn’t a lot of time left now: the next stop was only three hundred yards from here, just this side of the stuck trailer truck, say forty-five seconds. I couldn’t see her uniform; it was the same as the hostesses wore, with a dark blue military-style forage cap, easy to identify among all the black fur képis, but I couldn’t see it. People were standing in the gangway, blocking my view of the forward seats, and I started easing my way through them. One of them was the conductor.
Where to?
Ulica Solec.
But that’s the next stop, didn’t you know?
Yes, never mind.
So forth. A handful of coins, most of them 1-zlotys, take your pick, change can be expensive, cost you ten seconds, twenty, depended.
We’ll forget it, he said. It made them feel better, robbing the state, a zloty’s-worth of revenge, not much but a gesture. You can use the rear doors, there’s no need to -
Someone I know, the girl from the airline, I think she’s up here somewhere. Edging through the heavy leather coats, not easy, they were helpful but there just wasn’t much room, swaying together, say twenty-five seconds now, twenty-four, three. I couldn’t see her. Sorry, did I tread on your - ? Sorry, przepraszam. We all lurched, grabbing at the seat-backs, varnish cracked, a lot of it chipped off. The wheels moaned iron on iron. She couldn’t have got off earlier because they’d have seen her and taken her slamming the doors but they were still following, I knew that.
