by Adam Hall
Ten minutes but it was a question of chance, not time, hit the door open and pitch out and hope not to break a leg and try to run before the snow was pockmarked around my feet and they corrected the aim and I knew it hadn’t been worth it. Smash the glass division with a rising kick and connect with the driver’s neck and send the lot of us sliding wild and hope to get clear of the wreckage and use the confusion as flying cover.
Not really. There was too much against it and I was only making sure I could answer the question that later, days later, would needle me when they got round to the advanced stuff and I’d give my soul to be free: hadn’t there been anything at all I could have done? There had been nothing at all.
‘Poland,’ he said reasonably, ‘and Czechoslovakia and the others, all keeping their spiritual independence and living in harmony with their mother country, just like Scotland and Wales. Does it sound so odd? It always takes time, of course - the future never likes being hurried. Think what a fuss there was when the Romans came, but they did a world of good, didn’t they, gave us good laws and proper plumbing, don’t know what England would have done without them. It’s the same here, and you really ought to try taking the long view.’ Looking out at the dark figures huddled at a tram stop he said in a quicker tone - ‘You know your way, do you, around Warsaw?’
‘A few of the main streets.’
‘You know roughly where you are now?’
‘East of the river.’
He nodded, tapping at the glass division. ‘That’s right not far from anywhere, really.’
As the big saloon began slowing I saw the shape of the police van reflected beside him, closing in and then dropping back a little, keeping the distance.
He leaned towards me, his tone intimate now, the whisky on his breath. ‘The thing is, old boy, we don’t want you to rock the boat. Moczar’s got his hands full at present, cleaning things up for the talks, and we’d rather like him to be left alone.’
He swayed back an inch as the saloon came to a halt by the kerb. The reflection of the van had also stopped, but none of its doors were opening: they were just sitting there, holding off. It could be a trap but if they wanted to rub me out they could do it quietly inside Grochow: the only point in this set-up would be to establish public testimony to the fact that I’d been shot while trying to escape and it didn’t seem logical. It looked like a chance and this time a real one and it’d have to be done explosively within the next few seconds, the right elbow driven hard and upwards to paralyse the windpipe of the man beside me and the left foot kicking for the face in front of me as the weight came back, difficult because of the balance factor but only difficult, not impossible, Kimura could have done it without any trouble, this or nothing, this or Grochow.
‘So we’re hoping you’ll be a sport.’ He leaned forward, head tilted, the tone engaging. ‘We’ve got your name, and we’ll see it’s passed around to all the M.O. stations, so if you get picked up again just tell them who you are.’ A smile narrowed his eyes. ‘Bodkin. So English - and so Russian. Alexandrovich Bodkin, yes. What I mean is, you won’t need a pass or anything; we’ll tell them to leave you alone.’ He pulled at the chrome handle and the door swung open. ‘Mind how you go: the streets are so treacherous, aren’t they? Because of the snow.’
Chapter 11
NIGHT
The cups had been specially designed, Bar Kino in white letters on the black ground of some 16 mm negative that went right round the rim.
‘Prosze o rachunek.’
Half an hour was fair enough.
She made out the pay check with the indifference of fatigue, her thigh against the edge of the table as she took the weight off one foot. A lot of them took two jobs, Merrick had said, to earn enough to buy clothes.
Western jazz of the Thirties pumped from the walls. It had been a waste of time, the Fiat thing. Someone should have been here at nine and it was half past now and I was going because I didn’t want to sit here thinking about what they were doing to her.
‘Dziekuje.’
Or what they were doing to me. They had me in a bottle.
I’ll see you in my dreams. One of the big bands, New Orleans, another world and another time. But you won’t get far if you spend your life in a museum.
The thing was to avoid the attractions of the idee fixe; it can throw you. So we’re hoping you’ll be a sport. He needn’t have said that. It had been quite enough to name the deal: they’d leave me alone if I’d leave Moczar alone. That was all I’d asked for and I’d got it and Alexandrovich Bodkin was now persona grata. And I’d been so glad to get off the hook that I’d fallen for an idee fixe: that my threat to the Minister of the Interior had worked, and worked even better than I’d expected. They’d not only given me the freedom of the city but , had shown concern that I’d be unsporting enough to tread on his face just for a giggle.
Another thing to avoid is low blood sugar: a bowl of stew won’t last you twelve hours and you can get light-headed and it wasn’t until I’d had some food that I’d seen the bottle they had me in.
He’d never received my note. They’d opened it and turned it over to the K.G.B. when they saw what it said. A foreign national gets picked up and says he’s lost his papers and instead of answering questions he threatens to kick the head of the police department off his perch if they won’t play it his way. An interesting case for investigation and they’d started to investigate it and they hadn’t finished yet. It had been for the Englishman to make the decision: they could transfer me to a top security prison and take me slowly to pieces and see what was left or they could let me go and let me run and see where I went. Classical Russian thinking and often highly effective and that was why I didn’t like it.
It had been unnerving, getting out of the car and walking away, remembering it could be a trap and even believing it was a trap, the nape of the neck going cold, Western secret agent shot down in street, the crusts of snow skittering in front of my shoes like sooty sugar, the tram queue and the throb of the big saloon moving away, the higher noted gear whine of the van. Standing under the open sky where I’d prayed to the icon to let me be, free and alone, the long night gone and the day beginning.
Later I’d done some brain think. The city was mine and I could go where I liked but if I tried to get on a plane or a train or an Orbis coach or took a car too far I’d find out how free I was. As free as a fly in a bottle.
We’ve got your name.
Also my photograph but he hadn’t mentioned that. Pictures like those are normally useful only when they’ve pulled you in and start hunting you in the files instead of the streets but this was a special case and by now they’d have been processed, life-sized blow-ups with a superior, posed kepi, pride of place on the notice boards in every M.O. station, subject: image assimilation by all, patrols going on duty, remarks: report on movements and whereabouts, do not question or ask to see papers.
The only point they hadn’t covered was too clear to miss and this afternoon I’d started research on it. Because they couldn’t have just left the cork out.
I put down three zlotys and edged between the small round tables to the swing doors, then came back.
‘Christ, I told you to send someone, didn’t I?’
It was over a mile from there and if they’d picked her up they’d have booked her for the trains.
My cup was still there but it wasn’t the same place.
‘There wasn’t anyone else.’
‘You could have sent - ‘ then I shut up. She sat very still, her dark eyes not really seeing me, a nerve alive at the corner of her mouth. I went over and said I wanted a cognac, meaning I wanted it now. She hadn’t moved.
‘When did it happen, Alinka?’
‘An hour ago. Viktor is dead. I don’t know where the others are -‘
‘How did they blow you? How did they find out?’
‘He said he would never let them take him -‘
‘How did they find out?’
She began
shaking and I shut up again, pushing the glass against her hand where it lay like a dropped white glove. It was a pointless bloody question. anyway: they’d been wiped out and that was that, boots on the steps and the mirror smashed and the Typolt giving shot for shot, the dead eye of an eagle with the rage still in it, trust an amateur to make a mess of things: he’d looked like a professional but he’d been a professional suicide, that was all, the city was full of them.
‘I was afraid you would have gone,’ she said.
‘You were actually there, were you?’
‘No. I had gone for a walk, and Leo was with me; ho wouldn’t let me go alone, even in the little streets. There were cars there when we went back, and Josef was running. We all ran, then, and Leo said we must separate.’
She drank some of the cognac, both her hands round the glass, her eyes closing as she put it to her mouth.
‘He wouldn’t have lived longer than Wednesday. He was going to do it then. He was a born martyr.’
‘I know,’ she said.
I gave her the folded green card. ‘Don’t look at it now. Look at it later.’
She put it into the side pocket of her coat.
They’d been a bit pressed but it looked all right, thin cheap pasteboard and feint print, the photograph peeled and backed and stuck on slightly off-centre, not difficult but give them credit: it’s the ageing process that takes most of the time because if you hurry the machine it’ll just shred the thing up instead of reproducing the right degree of wear and tear. They’d even got cocky and put a lipstick smudge.
I’d told Merrick to send out one of the female clerks with the package from London in case he was tagged again. That was the reason I’d given him and it was partly true but more important than that was the danger of my exposing him to the K.G.B. I was contagious now. I’d used the girl as a cutout for protected contact: if an M.O. patrol or a U.B. agent had seen us meet it wouldn’t get them anywhere useful; they’d know I’d made contact with the Embassy and that was all: it wouldn’t expose Merrick. And they’d expect me to trade with the Embassy because that was where they’d left the cork out.
The line had been safe so I’d told him to start the research for me: ‘I want you to vet the cypher room staff. Get the Ambassador to give you plausible facilities and tell London what you’re doing so they can lend a hand. If you turn anything up you can hold it ready for me.’
He said he wasn’t quite sure what I wanted him to do.
‘You assume that the cypher room staff has been infiltrated and that incoming and outgoing signals are being copied and passed to the opposition either as a routine measure or as a special surveillance operation. If you tell London to cover dossiers they’ll turn up the last screening programmes and they’ll automatically monitor all signals for evidence of tampering. At this end you can give them the idea that you’re in trouble because one of your signals was inaccurate or that you broke a security regulation and you want to check what you sent. Make it a recent one and give the impression that you know you’ve dropped a brick and that it’s not their fault, in other words that they didn’t make a duff transmission. What’s your code?’
He said it was fourth series with first-digit dupes.
‘All right, send off a couple of signals using the ignore key and tell them they’re fully urgent and that they’ve got to send them while you’re there. If they kick up rough because the tea’s getting cold tell them it’s on H.E.‘s orders. Ask them to give you back your own originals and tell them you want their recorded originals and copies as well. If they let you have them, send another signal informing London they’ve done that and for Christ’s sake leave out the ignore key this time. Watch their reactions at every stage and see if they fit your idea of people who’ve got nothing to hide.’
He said he understood. He also asked what he should put in the ignore signals: I suppose the poor little tick had never had to send one before.
‘Tell them you’ve caught it in the zip again.’
The frightening thing was that it could be important: I wanted to know why they’d bottled me up in Warsaw but hadn’t cut my line of communication through the Embassy. I didn’t need to go there if I wanted to send anything out: within fifteen minutes of picking up the telephone in the Bar Kino the clerk in London could be decyphering. And they wouldn’t want me to do that. Correction: they’d want me to do it but only if they could know what I was sending,
So I’d moved an untrained recruit into a highly sensitive area and it had felt like putting a match to a fuse because if Merrick exposed an opposition agent actually installed in the cypher room of the British Embassy it was going to make a nasty bang at a time when the East-West delegates were sending each other roses. Merrick would be all right but I’d get the chopper: I was out here to local control his mission and his mission was circumscribed and didn’t provide for my pitching him into an area with this much potential for blast.
There’d been no choice. The Bureau doesn’t like commandeering facilities in Her Majesty’s embassies unless there’s something big in progress and even if London sent me a ticket for the Warsaw cypher room I couldn’t go in as young Merrick could, the image already established and the cover story dependent on it: I’d have to go, in as a stranger with inspectorate powers and if in fact the opposition had planted someone among the staff he’d scare so fast that the next morning his desk would be empty and so would the filing cabinets.
I had to know their minds, to know if they’d said: Let him run and we’ll watch where he goes, let him signal and we’ll read what he sends. The fifth series comes fairly high among the international unbreakables but a code only stays locked till someone finds the key.
Her glass was empty and she was watching me, the shock still dull in her stone blue eyes, their quickness blunted.
‘Are we useful to you?’
She wanted to know why I’d gone to the trouble of getting her a new karta.
‘Not really.’
‘If we can be useful, tell us.’
‘All right.’
She gave a little nod and was still again. I could have learned something from this woman, from her ability to sit like this, her calm containing her anguish, a brother for the camps and a friend for the grave and the known world falling away like a city going down.
I got the girl over and paid.
‘You’ve got somewhere safe you can go?’
‘Oh yes.’ But she looked at me blankly because she hadn’t thought of it yet: that there had to be somewhere safe she could go.
Perhaps there was nowhere now. The people who had rebuilt this capital from the ruins of the war were being smoked out of it like rats.
‘Don’t take any risks. Keep low for a few days.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Go to your parents. They in Warsaw?’
She answered in Polish because it was all she still remembered of them, the language they’d spoken together.
‘There are friends you can go to?’ She nodded and I said: ‘I don’t mean People in Czyn. Forget Wednesday, it’s been called off. Forget the barricades, there won’t be any. Just save yourself, Alinka.’
I got up and she lifted her head, watching me, as I sensed she’d go on watching me when I left here, until the door blotted me out and another bit of her known world broke away.
‘You’ll be all right now. You’ve got your papers.’
She nodded again. Standing over her I noticed her hand sliding towards the empty glass. the palm flat on the table and the fingers parting and covering the round glass base as if to hold it down so that no one could knock it away and send its fragments dropping among all the other fragments of once familiar things.
Papers weren’t any use to her now. Even her name had been taken away for pulping in a destruction machine. Wanda Rek was no one, meant nothing.
I got a pencil. ‘If you need me you can phone this number. Just leave the message they’ll know who it’s for.’ Then I left her and went through
the swing door and crossed the street. The wind blew from the north and the tall lamps swayed at the top of their stems, sending shadows on the move. I thought it would have been possible to keep on walking, then I had to find a doorway and shelter there, not from the wind, from the idea of going on. There weren’t any people about: they didn’t fancy being out in this killing cold. The windows of the state supermarkets were bright with cheap goods to impress the visitors with the wealth of Polish production; the lamps kept the dark sky hidden and made it look as if the city were still alive or at least had once contained life, but from here it seemed more like a fairground hit by plague, a lone tram running blindly on its tracks into the distance as if there hadn’t been time to switch it off, the perspective of neon signs winking for no one, for nothing. What a bloody silly time, I’d told Merrick, to open talks here, but he’d said they were expected to last for a good six months, well into the summer.
Then the movement, quite a long way off, of the only living thing that seemed to be left. Coming out of the bar she put her gloved hands to her face as she felt the cut of the wind, at first moving away from me and then coming back, not sure where to go in a world she no longer knew.
From where I lay the window made a blank parallelogram, a screen where light came as a train went by, fading in the intervals to the background glow of the city. The glass had frosted over again, covering the clear patch I’d scraped with my nails, but it wasn’t symbolic: I could see even farther now than I’d seen then. And I didn’t like it.
There wasn’t any light from the freight trucks, only their noise and the shake of the building; the light came from the passenger trains, though not from all of them because some had their blinds down, those for the east.
