Hope

by Len Deighton

  ‘Stand against the wall,’ said Was. He switched on the light. It was a low-wattage bulb but it gave enough light to see that one side of the room had sandbags piled up to a height of six feet or more. Was slipped out of his pea-jacket and hung it on the door. This revealed him to be wearing a dark blue sweater and a military-style leather belt with a pistol in a leather holster. It was a Colt ‘Official Police .38’, something of a museum piece but no less lethal for that. ‘Hand over your wallets, both of you bastards,’ he said. The fat one stood by and grinned.

  ‘I don’t think you are police,’ said Dicky. ‘And you can go to hell.’

  ‘What you think doesn’t concern me, shitface,’ said Was, leaning forward and putting his face close to Dicky. ‘Get out your wallet before I break you in two.’

  It was now or never, I decided.

  Hampered by my back-against-the-wall position, I put both hands high in the air and, so that the men were not frightened by this sudden movement, I said: ‘Please don’t hurt us. You can have all my money but please don’t hurt us.’

  Was began to reply as I brought my umbrella down to hit him on the side of the head. It landed with a terrible crunch and he slid to the floor with no more than a short choking sound and a guttural groan that ended as he lost consciousness.

  I swung round but the fat man already had his fur coat open wide and was tugging at an automatic pistol that was tucked into his waistband. I watched the gun coming up to point at me as I brought my umbrella round to hit him. It was like one of those agonizingly slow nightmares from which you awaken in a body-drenching sweat. Inch by inch our arms moved in balletic slow motion until his gun fired, making a deafening cannon’s roar in the tiny room. As the flash of the gun came, my arm brought the umbrella up under the fat man’s jaw. His jawbone snapped and his glasses jumped off his face and flew across the room, spinning and flashing with reflected light.

  The fat man dropped his gun and slumped back against the wall. Both his hands clasped his face as he supported his jaw, and I could see him screaming soundlessly as my ears still rang with the sound of the gun. I hit him a second blow, and this time he toppled to the floor with his eyes closed. His cheeks bulged and a tiny drip of blood came from the corner of his tightly closed mouth.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Dicky from behind me, but then I saw that Fatty was not out of play. He was scrabbling around on the floor reaching for his gun. I kicked him and then kicked him again, but my kicking had little effect on him through his thick fur coat, so that I had to use the umbrella to hit him again. I was only just in time. His fingers were touching the gun as my blow landed. Perhaps I hit him too hard: his head slumped sideways, his mouth opened and a torrent of bright red blood spilled over the rag-strewn floor.

  For a moment Dicky was frozen. He had his hands clasped tightly together as if holding something that might escape. Or praying. He was looking down at the two unconscious men. ‘My God. Are they cops?’ he said.

  ‘Who cares?’ I said. ‘They were going to kill us, or didn’t you follow the conversation? This is a killing room. The sandbags make sure the rounds don’t end up next door, and the rags on the floor mop up the blood.’

  I bent down and started to search the bodies. It was a hasty job. After comparing the two pistols that the men had been using, I took the thin one’s Colt revolver, rather than Fatty’s Model 35 Browning. The Colt fitted my pocket better.

  ‘This isn’t a police station?’

  ‘Are you with me?’ I said. ‘The room downstairs is a money exchange. Hard currency for local cash. That’s what the bars and shutters are for: to protect the money.’ Having second thoughts, I picked up the Browning Hi-Power and took that too. It was a pity to leave it behind. He might come after us and shoot me with it. It was then that my fingers encountered a small .22 Ruger pistol in Fatty’s inside overcoat pocket. With it, loose in his pocket, there was a screw-on silencer and half a dozen mini-magnum rounds. ‘Know what these are, Dicky?’ I asked, holding up the gun, the silencer and one of the rounds for him to see.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘There’s only one thing you do with a silenced Ruger twenty-two and a mini-mag round. One shot into the back of the neck is all you need. It’s a gun these people keep for executions, and for nothing else.’ I had no doubt now about why they’d brought us here.

  ‘What shall we do?’ said Dicky plaintively as he looked out of the barred window and down at the empty courtyard. He didn’t look round the room or look at me. He didn’t want to see the gun and the inert men. He didn’t want to even think about it.

  ‘I’ll finish searching these bastards and we’ll get out of here.’ I was bending over them and taking their money and stuffing into my pocket their various identity documents. I got to my feet and sighed. Having Dicky along to help was like being accompanied by a pet goldfish: I had to sprinkle food over him regularly, and check his fins for fungus.

  ‘Are they dead?’ He wasn’t frightened or sorrowful; he just wanted to know what to write in his report. I would have to find some way of preventing Dicky writing a report. London hated to hear about the grim realities of the job; they believed that firm words and two choruses of ‘Rule Britannia’ should be enough to bring any recalcitrant foreigner to his knees.

  ‘I don’t give a shit, Dicky.’ Reluctantly I decided that life in Warsaw was safer without a gun. I pushed all three pistols into the rubbish bin. I could tackle freelance heavies like these, but the resources of the boys from the UB were rather more sophisticated, and I didn’t fancy trying to explain away a pocket full of hardware if I was stopped in the street.

  ‘That’s not an umbrella,’ said Dicky suddenly as he watched me rewrapping tyre levers into the umbrella’s fabric from which I’d removed the wires and stays.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s a good thing it didn’t rain.’

  3

  Masuria, Poland.

  Dicky was silent for much of the time we were driving north through the wintry Polish countryside to find Stefan Kosinski’s country mansion. I could tell he was thinking about the encounter with the two men in the market. It had not been pretty, and Dicky had seldom glimpsed the rotten end of the business. All field agents soon learn that the pen-pushers in London don’t want to be told about the spilled blood and the nasty treacherous ways that their will is done. With undeniable logic Dicky said: ‘We can’t be absolutely certain they intended to kill us.’

  ‘To be absolutely certain they were going to kill us,’ I said, ‘we would have to be dead.’

  Three times – in various ways – Dicky had asked me if the two men were dead. I told him that it was a special sort of glancing blow I’d given them, and assured him they would have woken thirty minutes later with no more than a slight headache and a dry feeling in the mouth. Offended by this attempt to comfort him, Dicky went back to staring out of the car window. The dirt road was too bumpy for him to chew on his fingernails.

  The roads were bad, pot-holes and ridges jolting the car to the point of damage whenever we were tempted to put on speed. Most of the villages we passed seemed empty and deserted but here and there peasants were to be seen scavenging for overlooked remains of bygone crops. As if in sentry boxes, roadside Holy Virgins stood guard in their wooden shrines, and often rows of dented tins held floral tribute to them.

  We headed north-east to the region of the Masurian Lakes. It is a bleak province that nostalgic Germans like to call East Prussia. This low-lying corner of Poland would border on the Baltic Sea, except that the Russians had seized a slice of coast surrounding what once was called Königsberg, to create for themselves a curious little enclave with no other purpose than giving the Baltic Fleet a headquarters, a shipyard and a base for two Soviet air divisions.

  The Masurian district, ‘the land of a thousand lakes’, is a photographer’s paradise. Its lakes, forests and primitive villages are charming, the sunrises idyllic, the sunsets sublime. But the camera does not adequately record the hordes of flies
, the bites of the mosquitoes, the fetid marshland and dark decaying forests, the smelly squalor of the villages or the icy cold that whitened the land.

  For his war against Russia, Hitler built an extensive military headquarters in huts and bunkers here near Ketrzyn in Masuria. Ketrzyn was called Rastenburg in those days, but Hitler preferred to call it ‘the Wolf’s Lair’ and decreed that a monument should be created there to mark the place where he’d created a New World Order. Hitler departed, the monument created itself and real wolves came to live in it. The eight-metre-thick walls are now just chunks of broken masonry, the wooden huts are rotting firewood, the barbed wire has rusted to red powder and a few still-active minefields lurk along the perimeter.

  ‘What a place to be in the middle of winter,’ said Dicky suddenly, as if he’d been thinking about it.

  ‘In summer it’s worse,’ I said.

  ‘Not another road check.’

  We were halted on the road, not once but three times. The first time it was cops. Six bored policemen occupying a road-block, checking everyone’s identity and giving special attention to car papers. They inspected our rented Fiat as if they’d never seen one before. I suppose there wasn’t a great deal of traffic on that road.

  Twenty-five miles onwards we were stopped by three soldiers in combat dress. They were Polish military police standing in the snow outside a large property that in long-ago capitalist days had been a roadside inn. One of them, a senior NCO, was armed with an AK-47, its butt and metal parts shiny with wear. It remained slung over his shoulder while he questioned us. Our foreign passports seemed to satisfy him, although they made us get out of the car and held us for half an hour while the NCO made telephone calls and a procession of horse-drawn carts trundled past, their occupants staring at us with polite curiosity.

  A short distance further on we came to the beginning of miles of tall chain-link fencing. Our road ran alongside the fence past a dozen doleful-looking Soviet soldiers guarding six large signs that said ‘no photography’ in Polish, German and Russian. It was a Soviet army base extending five miles along the road. The wooden barrack huts were unheated, judging by the patches of snow that had collected on the roofs and the men going in and out of them, all of whom were bundled into overcoats and scarfs. Behind the huts I could see long rows of armoured personnel carriers, some fitted with bulldozer blades and others with ‘barricade remover’ grilles on the front. There were two tracked missile-launchers and sixteen elderly tanks, some of which were being repaired and maintained by soldiers in greasy black coveralls.

  Perhaps, further back in the tank hangars, and out of sight, there were air-launched tactical missiles, attack helicopters or other vehicles and equipment suited for a combat-ready brigade charged to dash westwards through Germany and engage the NATO forces in battle. But I couldn’t see any sign of it. And the way in which this amount of anti-riot equipment was parked, and arranged so that it could be seen from the road, made me think that these Russian occupiers were troops relegated to internal security operations, and that their presence served no other purpose than being a tacit reminder to the Poles that the brotherly patience of the Soviet Union and its fraternal Leninist rulers should not be tested too hard.

  We followed the road and passed the grandiose main entrance of the compound. There was a cinder-block guard-hut with sentry boxes and sentries in ill-fitting uniforms and moth-eaten fur caps. The main gate was surmounted by an elaborate ceremonial arch, topped with a golden hammer and sickle. Lovingly emblazoned on the arch there were the badges of two Guards and three Pioneer regiments, and lists of their battle honours. But the red paint had faded to a dull pink, and the gold had tarnished to brown. The hammer’s paint had cracked and chipped to reveal a green undercoat, the sickle had lost its sharp tip and the crack regiments were no longer living here. Instead the youthful sentries lolling against the fencing were unmistakably draftees, stocky little village boys with spotty faces and wide eyes, with elderly senior NCOs to breathe vodka fumes over them, and not an officer in sight anywhere. I waved at them and they stared back at me with not a flicker of recognition or emotion of any kind.

  ‘It will be dark soon,’ said Dicky. ‘Perhaps we should look for somewhere to spend the night.’

  ‘Marriott or Hyatt or Holiday Inn?’ I asked.

  ‘There must be somewhere.’

  ‘There’s that place where we saw the men selling sugar-beet.’

  Dicky bit his lip and looked worried.

  ‘We’ll find the Kosinski place before dark,’ I said, more in order to relieve Dicky’s evident anxiety than because there was any reason to believe it.

  We reached a T-junction devoid of any direction signs. Rather than consult with Dicky, a process which would have made him even more despondent, I swung to the left as if I knew where I was going. Very low on the flat horizon I suddenly saw a blood-red splinter of the dying sun. Then, from below the horizon, it spread blood and gore across the clouds, and the trees veined an ever darkening overcast. The road deteriorated until there was little sign of anything more than a few deep-rutted cart-tracks frozen hard enough to jolt us from side to side. It was darker now that the sun had gone and the shadowy spruce and beech joined to become a murky wall.

  It was at this time that Dicky broke a long pensive silence. ‘I have a feeling,’ said Dicky. ‘I have a feeling we’re very near to the Kosinski place.’

  My heart sank. ‘That’s good, Dicky,’ I said.

  ‘They said there was a forest,’ said Dicky.

  ‘That’s good,’ I said again, rather than point out that half the Polish hinterland was forest. As sundown brought a lowering of temperature, icy rain began, speeding up so that it was hitting the windscreen where the wipers whisked it into slush and threw it from one side to the other.

  Twice that afternoon we had taken a wrong turning to follow roads that became trails, and then tracks and finally petered out altogether. This path promised to be leading to another such fiasco, with all the worry of turning the car round without getting bogged down and ensnared in tree roots, pot-holes or ditches.

  ‘Careful. There are men in the road,’ said Dicky. In Warsaw we’d been warned that after dark sentries opened fire on vehicles that were slow to respond to halt commands. ‘Another road-block.’

  This time it was half a dozen civilians who blocked the narrow road in front of our car. There was no avoiding them, the forest was too dense to drive round them. A Volkswagen van was parked under the trees, and more men stood there.

  These armed civilians provided a sign of the confusion, bordering on anarchy, that Poland suffered that winter. Out in the rural areas it was clear that men were reverting to some primitive form of post-feudal mercantilism. Goods and services were exchanged in small transactions that did nothing beyond providing for a few days of subsistence at a time. Such societies seldom welcome strangers. I stopped the car.

  ‘Where are you going?’ He spoke Polish, his accent so thick that it took me a moment to understand.

  ‘To the castle,’ I said. It was a tourist spot that would account for our foreign passports. I didn’t want to say we were looking for the Kosinski house.

  ‘The road is blocked.’ He was the leader, a big red-faced man with an unruly black beard, a lumpy overcoat and fur hat; an angry peasant from a Brueghel painting. He carried a shotgun in his hands, a bandolier of cartridges slung across his shoulder. The others held spades and pickaxes.

  The clouds were scurrying away to reveal some stars and a moon but the sleet was still falling. It dribbled down his face like snot, but in his fur hat the same icy driblets sparkled like diamonds.

  ‘We’re looking for Stefan Kosinski,’ said Dicky in English. I’d told him to leave the talking to me, but Dicky was incapable of remaining silent in any kind of confrontation.

  Blackbeard replied in German, good fluent German: ‘Who are you? What do you want here? Show me on the map where you are headed.’

  Dicky pointed a long bony finger a
t me. ‘George Kosinski’s brother-in-law,’ he explained slowly in his schoolboy German, uttering one word at a time.

  ‘Switch off the engine,’ said Blackbeard. I did so. With the headlights extinguished the scene was lit by hazy blue moonlight. He pulled a whistle from his pocket and gave two short blasts on it then turned to watch one of his comrades leaning through the open side-door of the VW van. There were faded bouquets painted on its panels, and the name and address of a Hamburg florist shop just discernible. I could see the butts of rifles and assault guns piled inside the van. With our engine switched off all was silent: the forest soaking up every sound of movement. We sat there like that for two or three minutes. Dicky availed himself of the opportunity to chew his fingernail. A man in a short plaid coat and patched jeans appeared from the forest, obviously in response to the signal. He was carrying a pickaxe over his shoulder and now, in a show of anger, he swung it so that its point was buried in the frozen ground. He glowered at everyone, then turned on his heel and was gone again. Suddenly there was the ear-wrenching noise of a two-stroke engine and he reappeared out of the gloomy forest riding a lightweight motor cycle. ‘Follow him,’ Blackbeard ordered.

  The motor-cyclist leaned over dangerously as he swung round in front of the car, leaving a trail of black smoke. He roared up the track ahead of us. I started the car engine, the main beams picked him out and I followed him, driving cautiously over the pot-holed road. Behind us, two youths of indeterminate age followed on bicycles. Perhaps they had never seen a vehicle with lights before; an accessory not deemed indispensable in rural Poland.