by Adam Hall
‘No.’
‘Then why - ‘
‘Because I’d like to see them do it and I know they can’t.’
The tension went out of him and he looked down. ‘But they ought to try.’
He said it very quietly and not really to me. And I knew he was saying it about himself, no one else.
‘They’ll try all right. Christ, so would I. It’s just that we’re not going to get much of a kick out of watching them fail.’
Two men came in and I checked them in the mirror.
It was routine but I did it a fraction quicker than usual because until tomorrow it was important that nobody asked to see my papers.
‘Did that stuff go off?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘To London.’
‘Oh yes!
‘What time does the Queen’s Messenger get in?’
‘He’ll be on the three-fifty plane.’
‘Cleared by four-thirty, Customs and entries, all that?’
‘A little sooner, unless there’s more snow and the roads get -‘
‘Look, just keep it on you and leave at the normal time, about six. Make for the Residence and if there’s a tag you’ll have to flush him.’
He nodded, swallowing.
‘It gets easier every time. You only had a standard gumshoe this morning and you’d have peeled him off all right if you’d wanted to. Thing is to know they’re there.’ I folded his report and gave it to him.
‘Don’t you want it?’
‘Hang on to it for the moment’ He put it away clumsily, catching a corner aid having to smooth it out and do it again. ‘It’s on the ball,’ I said, ‘don’t worry. But there’s no mention of the U.K. diplomatic support they think they’re going to get. Why not?’
His face went blank. ‘Support for the revolution?’
And the pattern shifted again and I wasn’t ready for it any more than I’d been ready the last time and it took me a couple of seconds to steady up.
‘That’s right’
‘They must be out of their mind. Why should the U.K want to disturb the balance of East-West relations just when there’s the hope of - ‘
‘How many people in Czyn have you been in contact with, a rough count?’
‘Fifteen or twenty. The Ochota unit near -‘
‘And none of them have talked about it?’
‘Not to me, or I’d have put them right. You remember what Mr. Egerton told me about scotching any ideas like -‘
‘Let it go.’
He shut up and I tried to think of a snap answer because sometimes it’ll work if you just let your mind take a jump in the dark before you have to inhibit it with data and do it the hard way, the logical way. Sometimes it works but not always. Not now. The thing was that it would be very important to Czyn if there were even the slightest hope of Great Britain lending support to what they were trying to bring off, and if one unit knew about it they’d pass it on to the whole network, priority flash. And they hadn’t.
I finished the hot vodka. It had sped up the circulation and I could feel my fingers again; it had even given a bit of colour to Merrick’s face though the effect was macabre, like rouge on a cadaver’s cheeks. It’d be interesting to know why he related his bid for freedom from paternal dominance with the Polish people’s attempt to get out from under the Muscovite boot to the point where the bare idea of their failing was breaking him up.
‘Ile sie nalezy?’
‘Dziesiec zfoty.’
Merrick got off the stool. ‘Thank you.’
‘Wait five minutes. Be in touch.’
He stopped me halfway to the door. ‘Are you going to ask London?’
‘Ask them what?’
‘To take me out of Warsaw.’ His eyes were vulnerable, ready to flinch.
‘We’ll both be getting out before long. You’re here to get info on Czyn so you’ll stay till the last train leaves for the camps but I don’t give it beyond Tuesday. Till then we’ll be treading on egg-shells. If you get caught in a raid don’t count on your diplomatic immunity because it doesn’t cover your involvement with elements hostile to the state, And don’t count on me because you know what I told you in London: I’ll throw you to the dogs.’
The street was clear when I went out. The only danger was from the uniformed M.O.s because the secret divisions didn’t have anything on me. I turned left, going westwards through the failing light and picking my way over the sooty crusts that still covered most of the pavements.
There hadn’t been a thaw to make any slush and they couldn’t do much with shovels.
Proposition: an agency was using the U.K. as an infiltration image and promising diplomatic support. Remarks: impossible because no one had any reason to do that. Proposition: the said agency had convinced Polanski and therefore the whole of his unit that the U.K. was in fact allied to their cause and the unit had kept this highly encouraging news to themselves. Remarks: impossible because they would have passed it on. Problem: relate two impossibilities to reality.
Most of the shop windows were lit. There was no real daylight, here: night came at any hour after noon and covered the buildings until late morning. They said that if the wind blew from the south-west there was sunshine here, even in winter, and the forests ringed the city with jewelled ermine. Today the wind sliced through the streets from the north, numbing the bones.
One other question circled my thoughts: it looked as if Czyn was going to have its life-blood drained away before it could spill it at the barricades. If so, why did the Bureau want information on its activities? Why take the pulse of the dying?
Towards the Plac Zawisza I turned right for safety’s sake and crossed the railway bridge and went left again along Ulica Vrodz and that was where they got me.
Chapter 10
FOSTER
It was just bad luck. They came round the corner and we were face to face before I could do anything.
‘Dokumenty.’
They were young and their faces weren’t quite composed: I think they’d been laughing about something, perhaps girls, and now they’d got their duty to do but the amusement was still in their eyes as they looked at me, waiting. They would check my papers and walk on again, their secretive laughter coming back as they talked.
‘I have lost them.’
One of them smiled at my joke. It was almost as good as the one about the girls.
‘Dokumenty,’ he said, and showed me his police card, tapping it. My Polish had been halting enough to assure them that I couldn’t have understood. You do not lose your dokumenty. It is all you are.
‘I am trying to find my way to my Embassy, so as to report the matter. The British Embassy. My best way is along Ulica Jerozolimskie, isn’t it?’
He put his police card away and tapped the lapel of my coat, his eyes very intent now. The other one, taller, leaned forward to listen. I could smell the damp cloth of their uniforms, the leather of their belts.
‘You have no papers?’
‘I have lost them. I am on my way to the British Embassy to report it. This is a very serious matter for me.’
Crossroads and two vehicles opposite directions a few people in a queue conditions awkward a clear run fifty yards but their guns: quite often the classic maxims of training duplicate natural instincts but there has to, be brain-think as well as stomach-think and the chances here looked remote and it could be lethal. In the early days it strikes you as clumsy, the idea of making a run for it, inelegant; then you come to know what it’s like, their tonelessly barked questions, the clang of a door, the half-lit passages, the grille where they come to watch you, and the moment when you think: my God, I could have run, now it’s too late. But you can swing too far the other way and there’s a new one to learn: that you mustn’t let the thought of interrogation worry you so much that you’ll make your run blindly.
‘You have no papers?’
‘No.’
They leaned close to me, attentively, needing to get it qui
te right, to believe the incredible, because in a police state if you have no papers you have no face, no name.
You are guilty of not existing.
‘Come with us.’
Recheck. No go. The discretion factor was the only advantage, firearms will not be used unless, so forth. The rest was all on the debit side and even if they didn’t shoot I could come unstuck and go sliding under one of the vehicles.
‘Will you please show me the way to my Embassy?’
The basic rule is to try anything but there’s no guarantee it’ll work.
They used the telephone-point on the far side of the crossroads and we stamped our feet till the car came, a black Warszawa with M.O. on the side.
It was down in the Ochota precinct, a nineteenth-century building, once a private house but with a portico added on later and the doors doubled. The guard followed us in. Big portrait of the Chairman of the Presidium of the Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respubulik and a smaller steel-engraving of the Chairman of the Council of State of the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, several others, one of them behind the desk, Janusz Moczar, the Minister of the Interior, he was the man I’d want.
There was a stove in the corner and the dry air was opening up the guard’s sinuses: his post was outside in the raw sooty wind. Long bubbly sniff and mouth exhalation, long bubbly sniff, five-second frequency.
‘What is your name?’
‘Bodkin.’
‘Other names?’
‘John.’
In the old days it was easy. You’d say your name was Need Help and when they rang the Embassy for information on a British national who’d lost his passport the clerk would twig it and send a secretary along and you’d all go home and have tea. These days the intelligence services had so much on that they kept most of the embassies in a state of quiet hysteria and if an agent got copped they just sent out for champagne.
‘You have lost your papers?’
‘Yes’
He was a police lieutenant in uniform but not an M.O. and I couldn’t quite place him. In the Eastern Bloc states the uniformed branches are the Civil Police, Civil Police Volunteer Reserve and People’s Militia, but the secret divisions can add up to a dozen or more, each with its specific interests: surveillance of political factions, infiltration of foreign missions, active suppression of Church influence, monitoring of the state apparatus, maintenance of files on the population, with a few top-level divisions directly responsible to Moscow. In some cases there’s considerable overlap and you can be trundled from one detention centre to the next while they try to work out who’s job it is to give you the chopper.
The other man didn’t say anything. He sat near the stove with his pale hands dangling over the ends of the chair arms, a secret-division executive in a black suit and pointed shirt collar and his tie in a very small knot: a dough-faced middle-aged Party official with eyes like a fish that watched me all the time but never looked at me. He would be a Moczar man but that didn’t tell me anything because the Minister of the Interior was the head of the police power and he could be in any one of its divisions, but he worried me because they’re always on the lookout for exchange material and this was a suitable time: an international conference tends to cosy up the atmosphere and that’s when people like fringe syndicate journalists step out of line and get hooked, in addition to which we had Blok and Shelepov in the Scrubs and they were both valuable enough for Moscow to try setting up arrangements.
‘What is your business in Warsaw?’
‘I cannot tell you that. I require some paper and an envelope, please. I wish to send a message to Comrade Janusz Moczar immediately.’
The first thing was to get into the open. There’d be an armed escort but a chance could come up. In here there was no chance at all.
He looked at the dark-suited man and one of the pale hands lifted and fell by a fraction. He didn’t speak.
‘You wish to approach the Minister?’
‘Yes. To demand my immediate release.’
‘On what grounds?’
He was writing a kind of shorthand. The atmosphere had changed: it was bound to. In a closed society with strictly ordered disciplines there’s always fear present: particularly fear of those in power because they don’t need evidence or warrants or public acquiescence to proceedings before they can act. They’ll slam a man in and throw the key away, even if he’s a major-general with a brother the chairman of the National Assembly: onset of acute paranoid manifestations, a signed certificate, all quite circumspect. Fat chance for a police lieutenant if he didn’t notice the soap.
‘My reasons are private. They concern the Minister of the Interior and no one else.’
Meaning that he was already on dangerous ground.
A pale hand lifted and fell but I only saw it at the edge of the vision field and I couldn’t tell if the signal differed from the earlier ones. The man I was really talking to was that one, in the black suit: the other was only a voice.
‘You are personally acquainted with the Minister?’
‘Of course.’
If it wasn’t going to work it was at least keeping his mind from the standard questions and that was a help because I couldn’t answer them. P. K. Longstreet was floating under the ice of the Vistula and he’d have to stay there. I’d given them a name but it didn’t make any difference: when did you arrive in Warsaw? By what flight? Where are you staying? He’d check and draw blank and they’d know I couldn’t tell them my business so the best thing was to point that out before they’d got round to it.
His belt squeaked as he reached for the cheap wooden letter rack and tugged out a sheet of sepia-coloured paper with the police crest in the top left comer and a smudge near the edge.
‘You may write.’
‘That piece is not clean enough. This is for the Minister, I have told you.’
He got another piece and turned it to the light and laid it flat on the desk and I nodded and got my pen. They were going to steam open the envelope somewhere along the line but they wouldn’t expect me to know that so I said
‘Please place yourself where you cannot read what I shall write. I must remind you again: this is for the eyes only of the Minister.’
He turned his head and the hand instructed him. As I reversed the pen top and stuck it on he got up and paced towards the doors, his jackboots creaking.
Go outside and blow your nose and come back.
As I began writing I heard one of the doors open and the guard go out; and even after these few minutes I sensed the street and the sky with the hunger of the trapped animal, because it might be months or even years before such a door would open for me.
At midnight I used three asanas to combat the cold: uddhiyana, jalandhara and vajroli mudra. They’d taken my watch but the chiming of a town clock came hourly through the high ventilation grille, and the acoustic effect had a freak quality because the space was small: it sounded as if the clock were in here with me, its volume diminished, or that I was listening to it in the open.
It was only the watch they’d taken. The rest had been checked and handed back: wallet, pen, money, where are your keys? I do not have any. Why not? My room key is at the hotel and I have no car here and I do not require the keys that I use in my home country. Handkerchief, Angielski-Polsko pocket dictionary, penknife, nothing else: the poor little devil had thought he’d got his sums wrong when I’d given him back his report but it was just that between blowing your cover and getting a new one you’ve got to watch what you carry.
The search had surprised me. They ought not to search a personal acquaintance of Comrade Moczar and they ought not to take his hat off and shoot a full face and profile against the white board but they’d done that too. It was all right because those pictures are useful only when they’ve got you inside, and if you can get out again they’re no good as an image to work with when they’re looking for you in the street especially Warsaw in winter when .everyone’s identical in a fur kepi but all the same
they ought not to have done it.
The lieutenant had given me an envelope and I’d sealed it myself. I must tell you that if this message is not delivered immediately by hand you will invite serious trouble for yourself. If it is intercepted or opened before it reaches the Minister he will learn shortly from my associates that I have been apprehended, and will know that my first action would have been to contact him and demand my release.
He’d gone off with it himself, cap, greatcoat and gloves and a salute for the wax-faced man in the black suit. Then I was taken to a smaller room with barred windows for the search and the photographs. That was nine hours ago.
From here to the Najwyzsza lzba Kontroli it was twenty minutes by car but of course he could be absent or busy supervising the clearance of the underground forces from the city. But it didn’t look good.
Some hot stew and black bread at half past eight, then I’d spent a few minutes facing the possibilities: a full-scale interrogation and the subsequent workout when I wouldn’t talk. Solitary detention, sleep and sensory deprivation, stress imposition and the ordering of painful postures, sudden switches of attitude from the accusatory to the benign, physical strictures: and they wouldn’t be the worst. Within a few hours you can turn any man into a mad animal, but there’s a break-off point because the object is to get information and they can’t get it if they’ve gone too far and wrecked the personality. It’s up to that point where the suffix-9 has a value: beyond it you’re lost and so are they and they know that, the good ones. And that’s your only hope.
But nobody likes the dentist.
Keys again. He was a big man but thin about the face and his eyes were never still, showing their whites like a kicked dog, watchful for a boot.
‘Dobrze?’
‘Dobrze.’
He took the tin bowl and the spoon away, snatching them suddenly and hurrying out, frightened that someone might have heard him offer a word to me out of his inborn peasant courtesy. His hands should be on a plough as his father’s had been: what was he doing here among bricks and bars?
