The Night Watch

by Julian Dinsell

  Silence in the gallery was absolute. Wolski wanted to shout, to scream, but as in a nightmare, when he opened his mouth no words came. On the floor below, the ball rolled away from the struggling bodies and left a smear of blood on the floor as it came to rest in the far corner of the court.

  The silence broke. There was a voice, high-pitched with tension. “Enough – stop it now!” It was Golkov, who was at the centre of the group of figures by the window.

  “How can we?” Petrovitch protested. “It’s not safe to go in there for at least another twenty minutes.”

  Golkov yelled at the two guards. “Go and open the fire sprinkler valve by the main door – drench the place.”

  They clattered off obediently and Wolski was free. Golkov swung back to the window, pounding his fist on the glass. Wolski could not see his face and could not tell whether the gesture was one of triumph or despair. He seized the moment, stepped quietly into the corridor and on into the labyrinth of passages that he knew so well. Soon he was at the old night porter’s entrance, and then out into the street. He reckoned he had a minute, perhaps less, before the shock wore off and they came after him. A bus drew up at a stop close by and an elderly couple stepped painfully down. He dived behind them, almost knocking them over.

  He heard their shouted protests as he made for the back row and slid down low behind one of the high-backed seats. With agonising slowness the bus pulled away into the stream of traffic. He found a two-day-old newspaper under the seat in front of him and hid behind it. All afternoon, his only impulse was to keep moving. He changed from bus to tram and back to bus again, crossing and re-crossing the city. In deep shock, he sat immobile with the newspaper griped tightly in front of him. It was a wall between him and the rest of the world. Then came the urge to think, the need to blot out what had happened and above all, the reasons why it had happened.

  Piece by piece, he tried to make sense of it.

  Whoever the paymasters were, their timing had changed and what had begun as a textbook research operation had turned into a bloody shambles, probably through a miscalculation of the rate at which the vapour was absorbed through human skin. From the disaster a terrible knowledge had emerged, and the power, however crude, to amplify human aggression to the point of suicidal carnage.

  But what possible use could this bizarre ability have? Sending people mad as a weapon of war or politics appeared to offer no advantage over any other means of destruction. And above all, why risk so much investment for the sake of only a few months more work? He wondered why he had not asked himself any of these questions before. Simple moral cowardice, he told himself, and in that self-arraignment there was a certain kind of strength.

  Eventually, he lowered the newspaper. The private world created by its shelter could be sustained no longer. He felt the tingle of blood returning to his cramped fingers. The bus was passing through an industrial area. Tall chimneys billowed acrid smoke across the setting sun and the air tasted of grit. With unfocused eyes Wolski stared at the decaying landscape.

  He tried to put together some of the things Golkov had said: ‘Locating the volume control’; ‘A world stage – something that nobody will ever forget.’ And the unguarded remark about Geneva. His mind wandered on until he stumbled upon the realisation that they would kill him. The knowledge did not frighten him. Amid so much that was unknowable, this one certainty was oddly comforting.

  “Far as you go,” the tobacco-scarred voice of the driver croaked as the bus reached the end of its route.

  “Yes, yes, that’s exactly it. Thank you,” Wolski said with academic courtesy as he stepped onto the broken pavement.

  The driver was amused by Wolski’s incomprehensible response. “Have a nice day,” he wheezed in parody of one of the American soap operas that had become compulsive nightly viewing.

  Wolski picked his way between sinister-coloured puddles that had collected in the ruts pounded into the road by the daily traffic of heavy chemical-laden trucks. He began to add up his only accessible assets: two thousand euros in cash and his passport, both of which he had risked mailing to Jakob’s flat after the trip to Hamburg.

  *

  He found the green door in the block that backed onto Jakob’s apartment, rang Lotte’s bell and waited. He had almost given up hope when he heard shuffling feet in the hallway.

  “Who is it?”

  “Kloptik.”

  There was no reply, but Wolski heard the rattle of chains and the door slowly opened.

  “You know the way,” was all she said as she shuffled back down the corridor.

  After what had happened at the Institute, Jakob’s flat was like a reintroduction to the human race. Jakob splashed Napoleon Brandy into his prize Czech crystal.

  “Act Two Scene One?” Jakob asked.

  “This is not a game,” Wolski said.

  “Indeed not,” Jakob replied. “Theatre is art; so much more satisfying than a mere game.”

  Wolski wanted to avoid analogies. “You once said that I offered you a new lease of life and I replied that I might be offering you death, do you recall that?”

  Jakob seemed delighted that Wolski had remembered what he had said. “And I said that ‘life and death are sometimes the same thing’. I thought it sounded rather clever at the time, but I’m not sure if I know what I meant by it.” He laughed at his own obtuseness. “But I knew you’d come, it was only a matter of time. Where else could you go?”

  “I am concerned that others might come to the same conclusion.” Wolski wanted to introduce the prospect of danger gently.

  “Perhaps our investment in coffee and caution at Café Mozart was worthwhile,” Jakob said.

  “If, thanks to Lotte, you weren’t seen coming here, it may take your pursuers some time to find this address. They have a lot of money and, it seems, a lot of power. But that’s not the same as being on every street corner like the KGB in the old days.”

  “You know more about that sort of thing than I do,” Wolski said.

  “Yes, I do,” said Jakob, taking the remark as a compliment. “From what you have told me, I think your former friends are more likely to operate like gangsters than a secret police force.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Yes. You could always tell what the KGB would do, unless they were going through one of their less efficient phases. Your people are unpredictable. They present a different kind of danger. They will not attempt to create a bureaucracy of watchers and heavies. They are more imaginative than that. With their money they will have bought their way into corrupt officialdom, the police, the Ministry and so on. But getting those wheels turning takes time, time which we must use well.”

  “I hope you are right,” said Wolski.

  Jakob got up from the sagging armchair with the threadbare William Morris fabric and walked slowly round the room as if measuring the distance. When the circuit was completed, he began another.

  “You look like Joshua circling the walls of Jericho,” Wolski said.

  “And are you the one who sounds the horn which will bring them down?” Jakob asked. He stopped pacing and, towering over Wolski, said, “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  Wolski said firmly, “There is danger in knowing…” He faltered. “And, God help me, there is guilt in it too.”

  “Then why are you here?” Jakob was resentful at being shut out of Wolski’s secret.

  “As you said, Act Two Scene One. You scripted the meeting in Hamburg, you made the audience believe in us, now everything depends on the construction of the second act.”

  “You must remain here until they have exhausted their initial panic in looking for you. Meanwhile, I have things to do and people I must see.”

  *

  For forty-eight hours Wolski sat quietly and alone. The recollection of what had happened shut out the power to think or even to move.

  Eventually, he heard a key in the lock. The door open
ed and Jakob stood staring at him. He advanced across the room and dropped a newspaper into Wolski’s lap. The headline read: Basketball Teams in Ferry Disaster.

  “I take it that it would be prudent for you to be elsewhere than Warsaw?”

  Wolski couldn’t find words. With vacant eyes he scanned the newspaper story. Gas explosion … Sinking … Drowned.

  “My information is that they loaded the bodies onto a ferry across some lake near the Belarus frontier and sank it. It seems that it will be some considerable time before the corpses are all recovered. No doubt the official verdict will be death by drowning.”

  With great effort, Wolski at last spoke. “I need to see Jack Thornhill again – urgently.”

  Jakob thought out loud. “That is a problem that is easily defined and difficult to solve.”

  “Yes,” Wolski said with a hint of impatience at Jakob’s didactic manner.

  “We have to get you from here to London without your being noticed,” Jakob said, as if announcing the answer to a riddle.

  Sensation came flooding back into Wolski’s brain. It would not have mattered to Wolski if Jakob had suggested going via the moon; the relief of hearing the difficulty reduced to a single sentence was enormous.

  Jakob sat down again and the chair creaked a friendly welcome.

  “Since you will not tell me your secrets, perhaps I should tell you mine. I have played other games, usually out of boredom and occasionally for a little profit. I change baubles into things that are useful; my own tiny gesture of welcome to our new free-market economy.” His hands did as much talking as his voice. “But I am still ahead of the times in some respects; the state continues to take an un-reconstructed view of such trade. A little silver, a few paintings, diamonds occasionally, and in return, what people want most – hard currency. I never see most of the goods, you understand. I merely make their arrival possible. A worthy public service, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Wolski was too surprised to respond and Jakob took his silence as a sign of approval.

  “Why do I do it? I am a modest man with a modest ambition. I do not want to die here, not in this country where so many of us have died. I shall go to Israel. I have only remained here because of Anya, but I must leave soon. Another reward is that occasionally, for a short time, I have beautiful things to live with.” He made a gesture that embraced the paintings that lined the walls. “So I am enriched in life by beauty and in death by geography!”

  Wolski could not restrain his curiosity. “How do you do it?”

  “With people I trust. With people who trust me. Everything goes to a gallery on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. None of the items is sufficiently well known, large enough or expensive enough to attract undue attention, but they sell for satisfactory prices. Most of the pieces you see here come from people with an ambition similar to my own. They know that I keep faith with them. My ‘cut’, as I understand it is called, is small.”

  He took a heavy volume of Goethe off one of the bookshelves and from it produced a sheaf of Bank of America statements.

  “These are my clients’ accounts. I distribute them each month, and this is mine.” He handed Wolski a bank statement; it showed a balance of nearly eight hundred thousand dollars.

  “You could get thirty years for this!” Wolski said.

  “At my age that’s an attractive proposition,” Jakob said, and collapsed into convulsing laughter. He cleared his throat, wiped his eyes and spoke again, as if making a carefully calculated decision. “I shall not tell you everything, but I shall tell you two more things that are important for you to know. Natasha, my wife, she had a brother – an interesting man, a sailor, captain of a Lithuanian timber ship, mainly in the Atlantic trade. He comes into Gdansk every two months or so. That’s where I met him. We were on holiday up there on the Baltic, Natasha and me. It was the summer before she died. He surprised me. I always thought sailors were never out of the bar once they came ashore. But he was different; he dragged me all the way out to Oliwa to hear the cathedral organ. Eight thousand pipes – it has an amazing sound. It must be the biggest in the world. That’s when it all began. On the way back, he started talking about the Metropolitan Museum in New York and how he tried to get there every time his ship docked. It was usually only a subway ride away. I was interested, as I had also visited the museum. That was more than half a lifetime ago. I was on an exchange programme with NYU. It is the only time I have been to America. One thing led to another and soon our little scheme was hatched…”

  Jakob’s attention seemed to wander and his eyes turned to a magnificent carriage clock that stood in a place of honour above the fireplace. When he started speaking again, it was as much to himself as to Wolski.

  “He has lusted after that clock for the past two years. I’ve always resisted – it belonged to my grandmother – but perhaps now…” He paused and then, with one of the abrupt gestures with which Wolski was becoming familiar, he clapped his hands as if waking himself from a daydream and became brisk and business-like. “The other thing you should know is that Anya is travelling to London in the next few days, I don’t know exactly when…”

  He paused again, as if there was something he had forgotten; then he stood.

  “Now I must use the telephone.” He dialled a number, waited for a long time, then gave up and dialled another. He began speaking almost immediately.

  Wolski recognised the language as Lithuanian and was surprised by Jakob’s fluency. Without explanation, Jakob tried the original number a second time.

  “Anya?”

  Again he spoke rapidly in Lithuanian, though Wolski noticed occasional English words and place names. Jakob put the phone down triumphantly, reached across to Wolski and clapped him on the shoulders. Wolski flinched under the impact.

  “You are going to America!” Jakob said proudly.

  “America, why America?” Wolski was losing control of developments and wanted to protest.

  “Why? I will tell you why,” Jakob said. “We must assume it is unsafe for you to try and leave by air – airports are easy places to watch.”

  Wolski remembered the ease with which he was taken through customs and immigration on his arrival from Hamburg and did not argue.

  “The same is true of trains, and there are two frontier crossings between here and the West. As for going by road, I have no papers, and in any case, they will be expecting something of that kind, a conventional exit. The script you asked me to write has to be more devious than that.” Jakob was beginning to enjoy himself and Wolski felt helpless. “You are going by sea, and here is your ticket.”

  With a flamboyant gesture, he lifted the carriage clock from the mantelpiece and set it gently on the table in front of Wolski.

  “My brother-in-law shall have what he wants and you shall have eight days of sea air.”

  Wolski shook his head in disbelief.

  Jakob kept talking. “When Anya goes to London, she will contact Thornhill to tell him you are coming and to arrange for someone to meet you. I remember a piece of small talk when he and I met. There’s a concert he goes to sometimes, in the middle of the day; you can hear it on the BBC World Service. I remember him saying that. I’ll try and find out what it’s called and Anya will attempt to contact him there. She’ll be in London for several days, so a number of attempts will be possible. She will keep in touch with me so that I can pass on your sailing date to her. It’s haphazard, but it’s the best we can do.”

  Wolski choked back a lump in his throat. “Why? Why are you doing this?”

  “Why? Revenge, of course.”

  “Revenge?” Wolski had expected some gentler motive, friendship perhaps. “Revenge on who?”

  “Revenge on them all.” Jakob’s outburst was of a kind Wolski had not seen before. “All of them who have taken this country and twisted it into their own detestable image. Polish anti-Semites, Nazi supermen, Communist ideologues and now your friends, whoever they are, with their technology, their money, their arrogance and,
no doubt, their lust for power like all the rest. They carve their murderous ambitions out of the sufferings of ordinary people. I hate them all with a loathing that even you will never understand. Revenge, you see, is the sweetest and most powerful of all motives.”

  With that, Jakob left the room and Wolski sat in a daze. He had not moved by the time Jakob returned from the kitchen with a pile of newspapers, which he dumped beside the clock.

  “Wrap it up. I have to use the phone again.”

  Like a drunk trying to prove himself sober, Wolski began the task with cautious deliberation; he knew that if he moved more quickly, he would not be able to prevent his hands from trembling.

  “Kinski is coming,” Jakob announced as he put the phone down. “He helps with the distribution of our merchandise. He’ll take you to Mlawa, about halfway to Gdansk. You can stay overnight with my cousin Freda; I’ll warn her of your arrival. Remain indoors and wait for a call from my brother-in-law. He’ll fix things at the docks; he also has ‘acquaintances’ at the American end, but you will have to risk the train from Mlawa to Gdansk on your own.”

  Jakob went to the bookshelf and rummaged through an assortment of catalogues and guides; various loose pieces of paper floated unnoticed to the floor. Eventually, he pulled out a faded brochure in blue and white; it showed the bulbous shape of a Pan Am Stratocruiser and carried the slogan ‘Visit New York with the World’s Most Experienced Airline’.

  “I kept it as a souvenir of my visit,” Jakob said. He unfolded it to reveal a map of New York City and the surrounding area. “The ship usually docks somewhere here,” he said, indicating the New Jersey side of the Hudson. “Let’s decide on a rendezvous, somewhere near the docks.”

  Wolski formed a mental picture of long, busy streets ending in a forest of masts. Jakob took a magnifying glass to examine the plan more closely.

  “The map is old, but I don’t suppose things have changed very much,” he said confidently.

  Chapter 14 - The Judgement