The Warsaw Document

by Adam Hall

‘I haven’t got a license, only for station runs.’

  ‘You can check in at intervals. Your friends’ll cover you.’

  He twisted in the seat and looked at me. ‘There’s rules and I’m not breaking them.’

  ‘You’ll be breaking a few on Wednesday.’

  His young mouth tightened. We listened to the ragged beat of the engine. He didn’t look away. I said: ‘Put it this way: if you’ll keep your car at my disposal you’ll be helping things along, firing the first shot. You shouldn’t miss a chance like that.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’

  ‘You see that big Moskwicz over there? I want you to keep it in sight when it leaves the Commissariat. I want to know where it goes, that’s all. You’re lucky, you know, got a chance of being a hero of the revolution. But you’ll have to do what I tell you. Go on past the Kuznia and make a turn before the bridge and come back and stop when I say the word.’

  He licked his thin lips, looking away, looking back at me. ‘Show me your papers.’

  They didn’t mean anything except that I wasn’t a Russian but that was enough. He took his time, just for the look of the thing, and I knew he was hooked. They were dreaming of Sroda, those who were left, and I was bringing it closer for him.

  I put my passport away. ‘When you can do it without anyone seeing, break another hole in the front of your driving-seat and put the gun in there. If you leave it where it is now they’ll find it without even trying, and you haven’t got a license for that either.’

  He stuffed the yellow duster on top of the bulge in the side-pocket and his quick eyes flicked to the mirror. ‘You don’t miss much.’

  ‘You’re up against people a lot smarter than I am so you’d better watch it, that’s all.’

  The smell of the clutch rose again. There weren’t any chains on but we wouldn’t need any. The filthy snow was permanently rutted now along the major streets and the trick was to settle into them and find traction on the bare tarmac in the troughs. He turned at the bridge and came back.

  ‘Pull in here.’

  We waited nearly an hour. They came down the steps together, Foster empty-handed, the agent with a full briefcase. I couldn’t see the guard at the entrance from here but I knew all I needed to know about him: he was civil police, not military, revolver, not rifle, and his post was inside the main doors on the left-hand side going up. There wouldn’t be any trouble with him because when I went in there I wouldn’t be alone

  At this time, 15:40, I didn’t have an alternative operation worked out but there’d have to be one because the thing was so sticky with risks.

  ‘Not yet. Give them a minute.’

  It really was the most disgusting design, the rear windows like nostrils and domed hubcaps protruding like warts.

  ‘Now.’

  East and north at the first lights and then left again, back towards the Slasko-Dabrowski Bridge. There was more traffic than usual towards the city centre: a lot of the people here for the talks were using their first Sunday for sightseeing in taxis and Orbis cars.

  ‘Don’t get too close.’

  ‘I don’t want to lose it.’

  ‘You won’t lose it. It’s like a bloody elephant.’

  Orbis was no use to me. You’d got to present your papers and let them record the details and that was how I’d blown the Longstreet cover. Blow the Dollinger and there wouldn’t be time to get another one before Sroda and Sroda was the deadline, three days from now. Fast driving didn’t figure in the operation I was now setting up but if something came unstuck and I had to do some it would have to be in a private banger, whatever I could pinch.

  The Bureau wouldn’t like that. You were aware of the. strict standing orders that in all circumstances the property of private citizens must be considered inviolable.

  Memo to Control: Since the private citizens of Warsaw were filling the detention cells at the rate of a hundred per day a fair percentage of motor vehicles parked in the streets were going to stay there until their blocks froze so I respectfully suggest you go and commit a nuisance.

  ‘Hotel Cracow.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Go on past.’

  It was an old building in the grand style not far from the river and the Moskwicz had turned through massive gates into a courtyard. As we came abreast I took a look and told him to pull in.

  After the fumes inside the Wolga the air was fresh. The gates hadn’t been shut for a long time: the traffic going through had gradually spread the tarmac to the sides and against their rusted bolts. Half a dozen cars in the courtyard, one of them abandoned, the marks of birds’ feet across the thick snow on its roof and bonnet, the block presumably frozen. No one about, no one on foot. The hotel took up one entire wing of the building, mullioned lattices and a hewn portico, griffons rampant, part of the fifteen per cent of the city that didn’t have to be rebuilt after the bomb doors had closed again.

  Foster and the agent were going up the steps and the driver and escort were sitting behind the windscreen with nothing to do but watch people and in a routine situation I would have spent an hour doing this, hanging about for cover and using the rules, but there wasn’t enough time and I had to rely on risky premises: that the driver and escort were a relief shift or if they were the two who had driven me across the Slasko-Dabrowski yesterday morning that they hadn’t got a good look at me. They were taking a good look at me now but they could have seen me actually coming through the gates and that had been the point beyond which I couldn’t have turned and gone back so I kept on and made for the entrance with the image rearranged, shoulders a little hunched and the pace shortened, head down in thought, one of the habitual clientele with no more interest in the aspect of the place.

  They were going into one of the lifts and I turned to stamp the snow off my shoes and then went to the desk.

  ‘Would you have a private suite for one week beginning next Wednesday? For two people.’

  A quick glance down. It didn’t matter how well trained they were: mention that day and there was a reaction. He was wondering how I’d manage to reach here through the barricades.

  Reading upside down is a fraction easier than mirror-reading because you don’t have to dissociate from the familiar and the brain recognises that if you turn through a hundred and eighty degrees you’ll be out of the wood, whereas mirror-writing remains gibberish until you’ve done a mental switch. All I could see was that his name wasn’t among the thirty or so on the one and a half filled pages of the register unless of course he was now A. Voshyov or K. Voskarev, the two possibles among the several Russian entries. He was on one of these open pages if he’d booked in officially because they went back to January 14 and he’d been flown in to vet me on a night flight of the 15th.

  ‘On the third floor, sir, overlooking the court.’ He added without any expression: ‘It will be quieter there.’

  It wasn’t important: I hadn’t come to look at the register; it’s just that the eye of a seasoned ferret notes the lie of every grassroot on its way through the warren. Voshyov or Voskarev could be the agent and Foster’s base somewhere else. The important thing was to expose as much data as possible in the short time left and my real concern was the obscene-looking Moskwicz outside: the courtyard was the area we could possibly work in, facts needed collecting.

  He hit the bell but I told him I didn’t want to see the rooms now: I would return and confirm.

  The pivotal fact was that when the Moskwicz dropped its passengers at the Commissariat and at this hotel the driver and escort remained on board. They were there when I walked down the steps, backed up to the wall between the end window and one of the griffons, the engine shut off and the louvres closed and their faces watching me from behind the reflected light on the windscreen.

  On the way back to the Hotel Kuznia I stopped the taxi at a telephone kiosk and spoke to Merrick.

  By nightfall I’d gone over the whole thing again and it looked all right: risky but all right. Most of
it stood up so well that the one critically weak point seemed less of a hazard. It was to do with the guard. There was a single police guard on the Commissariat but today was Niedziela, Sunday. and it could be that on weekdays when every department was functioning and there were more visitors it carried the normal double guard I’d seen on other official buildings. If tomorrow they doubled the guard it’d be no go.

  Chapter 13

  SIGNAL

  Poniedzialek: Monday.

  They doubled the guard.

  It was getting too close to the limit now to do anything except hack out a last-ditch alternative operation and it took till midday to do it and when I’d done it I knew it would only work if the opposition movement patterns remained constant. And if it worked at all the main objective would be gained: but nothing more. I would blow up their programme by springing the trap but there’d be no hope of survival.

  I don’t like suicide missions. They’re for the angels.

  Rethink.

  Findings: the only other thing to do was to let the time run out to Sroda and get a plane when the heat came off and take Merrick back to London where he’d be safe and let them put it in the mission report at the Bureau: objective unaccomplished.

  So out of sheer stinking pride I set the thing running.

  One hour’s wait. A lot of the major planning overlapped instead of throwing out the whole of the original operation I’d lopped the dead limbs and done some grafting.

  When the hour was up I telephoned Merrick and made an immediate rendezvous and then went down to the street where the taxi was parked. I’d paid him a day in advance and he was filling the Wolga with cheap Russian tobacco smoke.

  ‘When they come back keep an eye open and follow them when they leave again, find out where they go. Does that gauge work?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ He tapped it.

  ‘Fill up the first chance you get. You can lose people that way.’

  I walked on towards Wilenska against a low wind; the sky was blue-black in the north and they said there was heavy snow falling across the forestland and that the city would get it before morning.

  He was late of course.

  Trucks banged and the echoes rang under the great sooty roof. A mail van was parked on the slip-road that ran parallel with this platform and they were slinging the bags in; on the far side a short-haul tender was butting at a line of freight. A dozen people waiting, their backs turned to the M.O. patrol. No one else.

  After twenty minutes he came in from the street and began looking for me among the group of people because the poor little bastard had only had two weeks’ training and he didn’t know that when you make a protected rdv you don’t use cover: it wastes time. When he finally saw me he started a half-run towards me and the M.O. patrol turned their heads so I called out to him in Polish: ‘It’s all right, it hasn’t come in yet. They say there’s snow on the line.’

  I waited till he got his breath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He was always having to say that.

  I took him into the buffet. Three men, four women, a kid with a red plastic guitar, his fur hat over his eyes. Steaming urns, a door to the street, telephone. I asked for czosnek soup.

  ‘What happened?’

  He sat opposite me at the table, pulling his gloves off and blowing into his hands. ‘Someone tried to get asylum, just when I was leaving the Embassy.’ His eyes were in a stare behind the glasses, still bright with shock. ‘They followed him up the steps and tried to drag him away but he got free and came inside. There wasn’t anything I could do; none of us could help him. But he didn’t seem to believe it. We just had to - to kick him out.’ He fished the thing from his pocket and covered it as best he could with his cold long-fingered hands. ‘Excuse me.’

  I gave him a minute because he wouldn’t even know what I was saying.

  ‘Listen, Merrick. They didn’t turn up.’

  When I’d phoned him last evening on the way back from the Hotel Cracow it was to ask for three men, part of the original plan and still part of the new one. I still had to have them.

  ‘They didn’t?’ He frightened so easily.

  ‘I waited for another hour.’

  ‘They were properly briefed. I told them -‘

  ‘They’ve been picked up. That was the risk we took.’

  ‘I’ll recruit another three. The Ochota unit’s still -‘

  ‘No. There isn’t the time.’

  Looking down at his hands he said numbly: ‘I did my best -‘

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’ Because he was doing it again, with his numbed words and his raw schoolboy hands and his pathetic eagerness to please and his utter inability ever to manage it, uncovering something again that I thought had been long ago buried in me: a sense of compassion.

  He looked up with a slow blink and stared at me as if I’d surprised him and maybe I had; I suppose it was the first civil thing I’d ever said to him.

  ‘What about the cypher-room staff, you got any leads?’

  ‘Not yet, but I -‘

  ‘Anything positive, anything negative? Come on.’

  He drew back on his chair, tender as a sea-anemone. ‘I haven’t been given much time, and they’re making it very difficult. I think they’ve taken offence.’

  Christ, the world was full of them.

  Then he was pulling something else, out of his coat and I knew instinctively that he’d forgotten it until now and was hoping I wouldn’t realise.

  ‘This is from London.’

  I didn’t open it straight away. ‘You told London to give you a hand?’

  ‘Well yes, you said I must.’

  ‘They given you any leads?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Because I’ve got to send signals and if you think the cypher-room’s monitoring your stuff then I’ll have to risk a direct line.’

  Carefully he said ‘There’s nothing positive. That’s all I can tell you.’

  I ripped the envelope.

  It was fourth series with first-digit dupes. P.K.L. was instructed to furnish full interim report and itemise all info on opposition activities.

  I read it twice.

  It’s always useful and sometimes essential to control nervous reaction when the mind, within a hundredth of a second, is galvanised; but it’s difficult not to let something show, just a fraction of the shock that has suddenly taken over while the eyes must remain contemplative and the hands perfectly steady and the voice expressionless. It’s hard not to blink when lightning strikes close.

  I didn’t want to. scare Merrick. He had enough to deal with.

  ‘London wants a report.’ I put the signal away.

  ‘Yes?’ His hands cupped the bowl of garlic soup and he finished it; he looked less chilled now, less frightened by what he’d seen at the Embassy.

  ‘They’ll be lucky to get it. Don’t they know we’ve enough to do?’ I thought I’d better put something on record. ‘Look, don’t worry about the Czyn people I asked for.’

  ‘I can try -‘

  ‘Won’t you ever bloody well listen?’ He flinched, his hands pulling away from the empty bowl, but I didn’t care, I was fed up with them, Egerton and the others who’d been scraping away at this poor little bastard’s nerves till I couldn’t even tick him off without shocking him. ‘I said don’t worry about it. They were to give me support while I tried to break out of Warsaw but there’s no need now.’

  He nodded contritely. ‘I see.’

  Looking at him across the table, at his pale boy’s face, at the misery that dulled the eyes and turned the ends of the mouth, at the pain that held him still in case movement would aggravate it, I decided to use his innocence for my own ends. ‘I might as well tell you, so that you can stop worrying, that I’m now in direct touch with London. You know why.’

  He stared at me for a long time, wanting to find the right answer because if he got it wrong I might hit him again.

  ‘You think the cypher-room isn’t safe.’
/>   ‘That’s right.’

  He blinked slowly, thankful. ‘I suppose you - you’ve got a kind of instinct about these things.!

  ‘I’m a ferret. I’ve learned to see in the dark.’

  He smiled faintly at my little joke.

  I said: ‘Listen to me, Merrick, I’m telling London to pull you out. Till you get their signal, keep away from Czyn. They’re done for and there’s nothing more we need to know. I’ve had new orders and as soon as I’ve cleared the pitch I’ll be pulling out too. At the moment you’re all right, you can sign off at the Embassy and get on a plane, just another second secretary being recalled for reasons of diplomatic expedience, but if you go near Czyn again and get caught in a raid by the Polish secret police they’ll make a fuss and you’ll be kicked out publicly for inadmissible conduct and it’ll look messy.’

  ‘I see, yes.’ He was sitting very still.

  I got a pencil and made out a slip. Fleou qoanptn skkmao plqcv mzoplexk. ‘Put this last signal through for me.’

  He took it and folded it. ‘Through the cypher-room?’

  ‘I’ve switched the code.’

  ‘I see.’

  First series, prefix and transposed dupes. Now going into red sector. It was one of their bloody rules: when you found a hole you’d got to go into without any chance of getting out again they wanted to know. Among the riff-raff rank and file of the shadow executives it’s known as the clammy handshake and we call it that to make fun of it because it scares us to death.

  ‘Make sure it goes out.’

  With that fledgling courage of his he said: ‘You can rely on me.’

  I got up and paid for the soup and he followed me to the door. ‘We shan’t be in contact again.’ I told him. ‘See you in London some time.’

  When we came on to the platform I saw four of them, K.G.B. types in civilian clothes, standing in pairs, two on the left and two on the right, their hands in the pockets of their black coats, facing towards me. Along the platform, parked behind the mail van, was a dark-windowed saloon.

  I looked back through the glass doors of the buffet and saw that two other men had come in through the other door, from the street. Then I looked at Merrick.