by Adam Hall
She’d do well to be here somewhere because as I’d told him half the population of Warsaw’s going to be in a strict-régime camp in the Urals. Or the Komi Republic or Murmansk, the schizoheterodoxy political cases in the special mental hospitals of Chita Province, the Potma complex, the sawmills or making heavy boots till your fingers bleed, a bit of barbed wire but no guards because it’s too far across the snow, you’d never make it alive. Sorry, przepraszam. Dzeikuje. Another lurch then I saw her but it was an inside seat, bad luck, have to be very quick now, very quick indeed because if we overran this stop at Solec the Fiat wouldn’t be there and the whole thing depended on that, Slowing.
We were slowing;
Ulica Solec, he called out.
A plump surprised man looking up, a wieprzowina sausage in greaseproof paper on his lap, looking up with a jerk and the fear coming at once into the eyes, who was I, what did I want, he had done nothing against the state, as I leaned over him towards the inside seat and spoke close to the dark head as it turned.
‘Alinka.’ To show that I knew her and might therefore know other things, could perhaps be trusted to know them. ‘We’ll speak in English. Police want you. Police. Come with me and you’ll be safe. Be quick.’
The wheels had stopped rolling.
Her eyes wide, staring into my face, the pupils enlarged. ‘I understand.’
The doors thudded open against the rubber shock-stops. ‘Utica Solec!’
Yes, I called to him, I was getting off here.
The man with the sausage was twisting sideways to let her, pass and then she was in the gangway and as we went to the forward doors I told her to take her cap off and she did it with a natural gesture, shaking her hair free. Two other people had left their seats and I took her arm, holding her still so that they could go first, and while we waited I gave her as much as I could: the U.B. car was behind the tram and they’d be watching for her; the grey Fiat was parked in front of the trailer truck and she must get into it without losing time and then crouch low; she should be ready for any word I threw at her and if we had to run she must take care not to slip. All right, she said.
I held her gloved hand so that I could guide her, taking her forward to follow the two people closely; the man got out first and helped the woman down and I drew Alinka past me - ‘Keep on that side of them and hold your head low.’ I let her hand go but followed close to make additional cover, trying to judge their angle of view and blocking it, gripping her hand again and forcing her across the packed snow, keeping exact pace with the man and the woman and listening now, listening. We reached the pavement, the four of us, breaking the crests of the ruts, our breath steaming under the tall lamps. Stefan might not be home yet, the man was saying to the woman, and they had no key. Why must he always forget, she asked him, to bring the key? A red lantern stood on the snow not far from the rear of the truck, to warn traffic. It looked as if they’d decided to abandon it for the night. The tram moved away and I held my head turned to that one ear could hope to catch the sound I was listening for, against the noise of the tram. The air froze against our faces. Then the woman slipped.
Her hand was flung out and the man tried to save her and nearly managed it, at least breaking her fall, but she went down, squealing unnecessarily like a pig. The cover was gone and I said run just before the sound came, the click of a door opening but no shout yet, they weren’t certain, just alerted by the colour of her coat but fractionally thrown by the altered image, her cap being off. I kept to a steady walk but couldn’t hope to judge their angle of view at this distance, an aching temptation to look behind me but not possible and then a second click and a voice calling a sharp order to the one who’d got out. This was the break-off point and I began running too.
Chapter 6
ICE
When the colonel comes round you shove some dandelions in a jam-tin and kick the crapboard under the bed and the corporal gets good marks for keeping a tidy billet so tonight the beer’s on him and the same principle operates when the capital of any given state receives a foreign delegation: everyone’s so busy brushing the worst of it under the rug that you can hardly walk on it for the lumps.
I was in Yugoslavia when Battista Farinelli made a ten-day visit to Belgrade to steer through the U.C.A. Trade Referendum and although I was between missions I chanced to have access to the security service directive that was passed to all units a week prior to the visit and paragraph three stipulated that firearms would not be used unless the life of an officer were ‘manifestly in jeopardy’ during the execution of his duties. You can put out as many flags as you like but foreign journalists are going to suspect things are a bit untidy if they can’t hear the church bells for bangs.
It’s standard practice, otherwise they’d have put one into my legs and although you can keep going if it’s lodged in the flesh or the bone it’s no go if it hits a major nerve. Her arm went out once and I thought she was off her balance but it was all right and by the time I reached there she’d dragged the door open and was hunched on the passenger’s seat with her head against the dashboard.
I heard them behind me, the clump of their boots over the snow. She’d left the door hanging wide open and I used it to break my slide, heaving myself in by the wheel-column and punching about for the key. Someone shouted and the voice was close: we were cutting it fine but that was all right because the nearer they were to the Fiat the farther they were from the Warszawa unless one of them had stayed behind.
One of them had stayed behind: I heard the pinion hit the band just before mine did but it couldn’t be helped and there was a bit of traffic coming through from the lights and that might baulk them because they were on the tramlines and in any case a standing start on tramlines isn’t the best pitch so we still had a chance. The engine of the 1300 was still well into the working-temperature region and fired without any trouble and I botched in and gave it full gun to get the chains chewing down to the tarmac through the snow: it was the only hope because it would have needed anything up to ten seconds using a sensitive rein and I was aware of him now, very close, nothing visual, just the sixth-sense awareness of a dark milling shape.
The rear end was bedding down and crabbing into the camber and there was no certainty of pulling out of here at all: it depended on how the equation worked itself out, weight of the mass, speed of the wheels, friction of the chains against the lubric medium. We could sit here at full throttle and do nothing but make a noise until they came for us, taking their time. I’d missed the armrest twice but got a grip on it now and he finished sideways-on to the door as I dragged it towards me but his weight smashed it open again. The chains had found some purchase and the Fiat would have gone forward if he hadn’t been clinging to the door so I used an edge-of-the-hand chop downwards against his wrist and got it right and he fell forwards as his support broke. The whole of the rear was vibrating on the springs as the chain cut at the tarmac and the inertia was killed so fast that we slewed half round as the power took up and sent us away from the camber with the door swinging back of its own accord.
‘Mind your head.’
The acceleration was shifting the loads rearward but the steering was still wild and we could hit something. She hooked her gloved hands against the edge of the compartment and rested her head against them., I would have told her she could sit upright now so that she could watch for a crash situation but there was just a chance they’d get confused and forget the directive about firearms. Something tore at the rear panel and the mirror had movement in it but it couldn’t be the Warszawa because of the distance the leading car in the traffic coming through from the lights had clouted us and in the mirror its shape swung away.
The driving-door had caught at half lock so I hit it open and slammed it as we pulled away in second with someone flashing us from behind and piling up very close because they hadn’t left enough time for the braking conditions but this one wasn’t a strike and I shaped for a right-angle turn through Centralny Park and sudden
ly we were in what seemed forest land, the black trees spectral against the snowscape and the lights of other cars moving like slow lanterns between their trunks.
‘You might as well sit upright now. They know you’re on board.’ We were going fast enough to qualify for a high-impact smash if I lost control. ‘Clip your seat belt.’ Lights swung into the mirror,. ‘Is Jan your brother?’
‘What did you - ‘
‘Is Jan Ludwiczak your brother?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’ve got him in the 5th Precinct Bureau.’ There might not be another chance to tell her. ‘The 5th.’
‘Platy.’
The lights were on full head hoping to dazzle and I tipped the glass a fraction. The surface was much better here: rich-lying snow except for the intersections where the double volume of traffic had packed it harder. Our shadow swerved in front of us most of the time, thrown by the Warszawa.
‘Who are you, please?’
Visibility was good because of the albescence and the even spacing of the trees and to the right and left of the crossroads there was nothing in sight so I brought the speed up progressively and cleared the harder-packed area with deadpoint momentum between acceleration and deceleration, obliquely aware that if we survived this day I would for long remember her calm and rather formal question as we and our shadow flew in whiteness among the winter trees, who are you please.
‘There’s nothing in a name.’
I slowed on the engine for a left-hander at the T-section and lost everything in the next two seconds because of the ice patch that hadn’t showed until we were on it. Full-circle gyration with the wheel slack in my hands and the background slowly spinning so that for a moment we were sliding backwards and squinting straight into the glare of their lamps and then bucking suddenly with a rear tyre dragging on the buried kerbstone and sending us to the crown before I used the throttle and got some of the traction back and straightened out and kept going.
‘Look, I’m trying to make for Sobieski.’
‘Very well.’
At the edge of my vision field her white face was turned to watch me. Aleje Sobieski was the street of the older four-storeyed houses where the lift had a mirror and they thought they were safe there, that nobody knew.
‘If I can lose them or smash them up I’ll drop you off there but I might have to drop you wherever I can if it gets difficult.’ A wash of light flooded the interior again and the prismatic colours glowed on the bevelling of the mirror. ‘Operate your belt clip a few times, get used to the release.’
We hadn’t lost much ground during the spin: the direction and speed had retained most of their values although we’d gyrated through three hundred and sixty degrees but the Warszawa was closer by thirty yards or so and I didn’t like it because if we crashed it ought to happen far enough away from them to give us a chance of getting out on foot. Left into Gwafdzislow with a reliable drift across almost virgin snow and we ran now towards Solec again just this side of the Vistula. I didn’t know this area so well as the city centre but we’d be all right as soon as we’d cleared the T-section and crossed left on to the main west-bank highway parallel to the river: I’d studied the street complexes in that area while I’d been hanging about at Heathrow and covered the rest of the central districts since I’d landed here, normal routine orientation. Sobieski wasn’t far but some of the one-way streets were going to sticky things up if I didn’t watch it.
She was clicking her release, not looking down at it, doing it blind, and it occurred to me that she might have been a hostess on the planes before they grounded her for some reason or she’d got bored with handing out sweets because she was behaving very well considering the odds were that we’d finish up by wiping the Fiat all over a tram. Or worse of course: if they could pick us alive out of a wreck they’d have us under the lamps for what the K.G.B. called implemented interrogation. She knew that.
‘You all right, Alinka?’
‘Yes thank you.’
She looked behind her sometimes and I asked her what the distance was and she said about fifty metres and then we couldn’t talk anymore because the T-section was coming up and a red oblong was sliding across the end of the perspective, but, not a tram, there’d be no tramlines along the river stretch until we reached Generala Swierczewskiego and doubled back and tried to get near Sobieski. There was an antenna on their roof and they’d have begun fidgeting with it long before now but there wasn’t much point in their calling on base to deploy support patrols because they didn’t know where to send them: if we’d been taking a direct route out of the city they could have set up roadblocks but we’d been doubling a lot of the time and all they could do was keep us in sight till we smashed.
It wasn’t very good at the T-section. We had to cross Ulica Solec to get on to the Wybrzeze Kosciuszkowskie along the Vistula and there was some traffic piled up at the major fork: we took the first set of lights on the green but had to brake the next on the red and I lost most of the front end trying to clear a pharmaceutical van and not successfully, swinging it half round and hitting a drift that the river wind had swept against the centre bollards so that we slewed twice and skinned the long scarlet flank of a bus as the Warszawa closed fast with its lights full on and its klaxon sounding. A couple of M.O. police had a go at waving me in and their whistles were shrilling but there wasn’t anything they could do and I was worried more by some nasty spin from the rear wheels as we crossed the packed ice of a bus stop; the Warszawa couldn’t make progress either and we were both shaped up for the long straight haul down the river stretch with the gap drawing open slightly as I flicked into third and settled for the odd chance of piling up enough speed to try slotting some of the slower traffic between us and baulk them before we had to go left towards Sobieski. I didn’t think we could lose them now.
It was instinctive to think in terms of overall speed but in these conditions it was traction that counted and I levelled off at fifty k.p.h. and even then we were well beyond the hope of slowing in time if anything crossed our bows: the steering kept going slack and for periods we were skating across the surface without any real kind of control and then two things happened in close succession. A black stunted Moskwicz pulled away from the kerb and ahead of us I saw a truck.
The surface along here was mostly ice-ruts with patches of thin hard snow towards the crown: there was no point in trying to plan anything because action designed to cope with the conditions lying ahead would be right or wrong according to what they turned out to be when we got there. The little Moskwicz wasn’t a hazard: we were already in the fast lane and I didn’t even have to touch the wheel but I could see that the Warszawa needed to take avoiding action and had started to do it: our shadow, thrown by its lights against the back of the truck, was shifting to the right.
Then something else happened and at first I thought it was gunfire because the effect followed the sound in logical sequence: it was as if they’d shot one of our tyres flat. Chain. One of the chains had gone, its straps half-severed when we’d dragged a rear wheel along the buried kerbstone in the park: it had hammered under the body-shell and been flung aside and now the Fiat was in a slow ten-degree pivoting attitude and for the last time the wheel went slack in my hands.
‘Good luck.’
She answered with something in Polish. Then we heard the Warszawa, metal on metal and the explosive pop of safety-glass; the light swept away from the truck and across to the buildings on the other side and went out. It wasn’t important now.
I cut the ignition. There wasn’t much noise, just the long hushed skittering of the tyres over the ice as we waited. The pivoting attitude was increasing and periodicity had set in and I knew that nothing could break it: there must come the point where mass dominated momentum and then the Fiat would automatically spin. Left, and right, wider to the left, and wider ‘to the right in a slow swinging action with the brittle whisper of the tyres across the ruts and she spun, breaking wild and closing on the truck in a serie
s of loops that took her down the camber to hit the kerb and rebound and spin again and strike it this time front end on with the wheels rolling so that she mounted and ran straight for a while with the springs hammering at the limit-blocks, thick snow along the pavement now but the speed too high and the balustrade coming and the swirl of the east-bank lights tiding across the windscreen and then the balustrade and the impact and the drag on the seat belt and a period of weightlessness as we tilted nose-down and struck and shook and struck again and rolled half over, the roof sliding, the speed dying, lights in the sky, inverted, reflected in the sheen of the ice, the thought coming, black water below.
Glass shattered.
I kicked at the screen. She was already on her feet as I slithered from under the front end: she’d used the side window, breaking it. A faint sound had begun, the crackling strain of the ice-crust between here and the bank. She was moving at an angle, loping forward not far from me; the surface was blackish here and we made for the nearest patch of white but the crackling became loud and we couldn’t run without slipping and falling. She turned once and I told her to get on. Then the crust shivered and broke in a long crescent and I heard the Fiat strike water, a gigantic bubbling behind us.
Sand, a sandbank, the thin ice breaking as we trod its edges, then stones, the ankles freezing. Quite a long way off the high alternating notes of an emergency vehicle.
‘Keep moving.’
There were steps going upwards.
‘They’ll see us,’ she said.
‘No they won’t.’
There was snow on the steps and we went up slowly. A frieze of icicles along the higher plinth flashed diamond colours as the first lamp showed; I told her to wait, and climbed the last three steps ahead of her, checking the street. Small group round the hole in the balustrade where we’d gone through, well over a hundred yards from here; we’d breached it at an angle and the Fiat had slid quite a long way down-river before we’d got out. Bigger group half a mile distant on the roadway, a lot of people and vehicles. The ambulance klaxon had stopped.
