The Warsaw Document q-4

by Adam Hall

'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.

  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 quite 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?

  The cold was depressing. Cold is for the dead.

  In presenting my compliments I request my immediate release from detention in the Ochota Precinct and your personal guarantee that I shall not in future be molested in any way by members of your police services. Their action in questioning the loss of my regular documentation was fully justified, but I wish to avoid similar incidents during my stay in Warsaw, and therefore require the use of a provisional laissez-passer bearing your own signature and seal, which I shall be prepared to surrender on leaving Poland. I have no wish to jeopardise your high position in the Cabinet at a time when critical pressures menace the stability of government, but since I am in possession o certain facts at present unknown to your political opponents I find myself obliged, in my own interests, to ask your immediate attention to those matters stated above.

  A light burned in the corner near the latrine channel, a low-power unshaded bulb that hung within an inch of the wall. Its warmth had been melting the frost on the brickwork since the beginning of the winter and now an icicle clung there, reaching to the concrete floor. In it the bulb glittered, many times reflected, gilding it and giving it the semblance of an ikon, here for the prayers of the wretched.

  Working principle: to the cupboard of every man, a skeleton; and the greater the man, the more need to keep its door locked. In the hierarchy of government this truth has no exclusivity but in the state apparatus of the communist world it has particularity because the discipline of the Party credo leaves scant room for human error, and as the comrades labour their precarious way up the pyramid of power, a thumb in the eye and a boot on the neck of their nearest competitors, they know that a slip will send them pitching down again.

  Tell any man I know what you've done and he'll think at once of his worst indiscretion: fear and guilt will persuade him automatically that if anything is known then it is the worst that is known. I thus exp
ected that if Comrade Janusz Moczar ever received my message he would send for me. 1 might be bluffing but how could he risk that assumption? Once in the privacy of his office all I could do would be to use his face as a guide, making veiled references to black market manipulation if greed showed there, hinting of mistresses if he looked a lecher.

  Comrade Minister, the regulations controlling foreign currency exchange have always, been subject to certain evasions, as I'm sure you'll know, but few people realise that a large part of the profits made by the touts in the big hotels finds it way to the coffers of those empowered to stop these widespread transactions, if they chose.

  Comrade Minister, the private affairs of the members of the Polish Cabinet are of course not my. concern, but the world is sometimes inconveniently small, and a certain lady of my acquaintance — here in Warsaw — recently proved herself regrettably unentitled to the confidences extended to her by others. You know how it is, when an exclusive little party lingers on…

  Delete where inapplicable.

  And use his successive reactions as data feedback to correct my course to the target. It could be done. It has been done. Braithwaite is particularly good at it and whenever he shows up at diplomatic receptions a lot of the guests take out instant insurance by cabling their wives through Interflora. He works, as I would work, by the elementary rule that the surest way of extracting information is to imply that you know it already. Moczar would come out strongly for proof and he wouldn't get it because I hadn't got it but the aim would be to convince him that he couldn't take the "risk by throwing me back into detention: he'd be smart enough to know that even a fragment of evidence against the head of the police power could be worth a lot to the officer responsible for my safekeeping if I took a crack at trading it in for an arranged escape.

  The gilded ikon glowed. Perhaps I was dazzled by its light or by the wishful thoughts that some call prayers. But the throw I'd made could get me out of here and into the open where the clock chimed under the sky: it could at least do that, and give me the chance of a break.