by Adam Hall
I nodded to her and she came up into the lamplight, dark I eyes glowing in a bloodless face, the blue greatcoat ripped at the shoulder, the patent-leather kneeboots neatly together on the snow as she stood with her head turned to look along the street.
‘They’re too busy,’ I said, ‘for us.’
She faced me without expression as if she didn’t quite understand. It was shock, that was all, shock setting in. It hadn’t been much of an impact because we’d hit the iron balustrade obliquely and the stanchions had broken away the edge of the stonework, the thing was only meant for leaning on while you had a sandwich, and the belts had kept us back; it was listening to the crackling of the ice that had worried us most. I put my arm round her shoulders and we started off, crossing over and going down Ulica Lipowa away from the river.
Nobody noticed us: the few people we passed were watching where they put their feet; but we had to turn back twice along the Krakowskie Przedmiescie to avoid M.O. patrols. I didn’t know what the situation was, down by the river: the Warszawa had made a lot of noise but there could be survivors and their radio might not have been bust up.
Sobieski was a quiet narrow street, more like a mews, and we got into the building without needing to check. In the lift I said
‘Have you got a source for papers?’
‘What did you say?’
She leaned against the mirror, her dark eyes vague and her gloved hands pressed to her face; she had more to deal with than the physical shock of the Fiat thing: we hadn’t talked much on the way here and she’d had time to think and what she’d probably thought was that, if the Policia Ubespieczenia had decided to pull her in it was because Jan hadn’t managed to hold out.
‘Identity papers. Can you get a new one easily?’
The cable tapped against one of the guide rails.
‘No. We made some, but they were not good. People were caught with them.’
‘Give me yours. It’s no more use to you.’
It was a recent photograph, not much like her, they never are. When I looked up she was watching me, uneasy. They are like that, or they become like that, the people of the police states. They mean so much to them, these dog-eared little cards with their creased folds and their grandiloquent crests. Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa. Take them away and you take away their identity, leaving them nameless. I knew what was in her mind as she watched me put the card into my pocket: tonight I’d blown my cover and that was just as bad.
The lift stopped, its floor jogging slowly to stillness under foot.
‘Will there be someone here?’
‘Yes.’
She’d started shivering with nerves and I was suddenly fed up because I’d mucked it. She wouldn’t be spending the next five years stitching boots in the strict-regime camps but it had been a hell of a way to pull her out of a snatch. I might have killed her.
In the passage I said: ‘Tell them to fix you up with something hot. Vodka grog or something.’
I took my time going down the stairs because she couldn’t be sure that someone was there: you could be there one day and the next day you could be in the 5th Precinct Bureau or some other rotten hole. Three short, one long. When I heard the mirror shut I cleared the rest of the stairs a bit quicker because there was a lot to do.
Chapter 7
CONTACT
Do you know this woman?
Hotel Pulawski. No go.
I’d been working against a deadline and it was already past because they wouldn’t wait till they’d dredged the Fiat out of the river: they’d be, on to me before that. We’d started off from the tram-stop at Ulica Solec somewhere between 5.30 and 5.40 and as soon as they’d seen I was going to try giving them a run they’d have radioed the number to their base, we are now in pursuit of dove-grey Fiat 1300, Warsaw-registered, so forth.
Do you know this woman?
Hotel Dworzec. No go.
Give them ten minutes to channel the number into Registrations Control and five minutes for Registration to come up with the answer and fifteen minutes for the first patrol to reach Orbis and get the place opened up and find the relevant documentation: yes, we booked this one out on the 10th to a British visitor, P. K. Longstreet, passport number C-5374441. Give them another fifteen minutes to cover the city with a general alert call by mobile-patrol radios and report-point telephones and that made it a short-limit deadline of 6.15 so at 6.15 the police would have started combing the hotels.
Just as I was doing.
Do you know this woman?
Hotel Francuski. No go.
That was why I’d begun sweating: we were working the same ground. Any time between June and September or anywhere south of Latitude 45 I could have holed-up in the open but this was Warsaw in January and if you didn’t get under a decent roof you’d freeze. It didn’t matter that by now they might have found the bag with the leather panel coming away from the stitches at one end: they were welcome to what they pulled out of it because if I were still a free agent tomorrow I was going to sting that bloody woman in Accounts for a set of new winter woollies. They wouldn’t stop looking for me once they knew I’d left the hotel. They knew I’d have to find another one. I had to have somewhere to live.
‘Do you know this woman?’
Hotel Alzacki.
I showed him the dog-eared identity-card.
He looked at it.
I was relying on his impression of events to cover my accent: there’s no precise equivalent for the palatals in English and you’ve got to do it with the tip of the tongue on the lower teeth and the middle pressed towards the alveolar ridge and it takes practice and I hadn’t had much. But events were that a man in a black leather coat and fur kepi had come quickly up to the desk and pushed someone’s papers in front of his face and shot a terse question, and his impression was predictable and he didn’t ask to see my badge. Now I watched for his reaction.
I couldn’t hurry him, get it over with and get out if it was no go again. I had to stand there with ice down my spine because if that door opened behind me it could be one of his guests coming in or it could be one of the several hundred police who were now checking the hotels for P. K. Longstreet. The name wasn’t here on the books of the Hotel Alzacki but although they didn’t know my face except for a vague description by Orbis they wouldn’t miss checking my papers and they’d see it there instead.
‘I’ve never seen her before.’
No reaction.
There was a lot of noise like the building coming down. A brass ashtray crept like a crab across the polished top of the counter. He didn’t notice anything. I took her card back and spun the register towards me to look at the names but I didn’t look at the names yet, I went on looking at him.
Reaction.
Nothing happened to his face. It was big and square with creases weathered into it, a seaman’s face that had looked into the eye of the storm and stared it out. Iron-grey Bismarck head and an ear torn at the lobe, boathook or the dying flick of a shark-fin, salt in his soul. Nothing that I could say would change a face like this but the reaction was there all right and it had come when I’d spun the register: he’d drawn a slow breath as he’d straightened up, and shifted his feet a bit to redispose his weight, as a man of his weight does. I’ve never seen her before, shaking his head. It was just a hundredth of a degree too natural and there was another thing: he’d shifted his weight but it had given an odd slant to his attitude and he stood as a one-legged sailor stands but I didn’t think he was one-legged.
Of course he’d never seen her before, it was nothing to do with that: it was the number I’d used to open my act that was all, to show I was the hunter and not the hunted. It hadn’t worried him but the register had, the way I’d spun it round to have a look. There wouldn’t be anything there, I knew that: if you take a man in and put him in a garret with a wardrobe shoved across the door you don’t enter his name in the book. It was just that I was getting warm: a hotel register is a revealing document and the police g
o for it first and even if there’s nothing in it to reveal it’s like when you show your visa and wonder for an instant if Credentials have made a mistake and it’s out of date: your stomach does a slight skid-turn.
The building fell down again but among all the noise I heard a voice from upstairs, and a door banging.
This place would do me.
‘I’d like a room.’
His heavy lids lifted. The police won’t ask for a room. If they want to search a hotel they just bring a bulldozer, they don’t have to sleep there.
‘You won’t mind the noise?’
‘They don’t run all night.’
‘What kind of room do you want?’ He turned the register with a horny hand. ‘I’ll need your papers.’
‘I’ve no papers that I can show anyone. That’s the kind of room I want.’ Nice and high up and out of people’s way and with someone down here to press the buzzer with his foot when the police made a visit.
‘You can’t stay here, without papers.’
I didn’t expect him to trust me but there was a way.
‘At least we can have a drink.’
In the back room he poured out some Jasne beer and I mentioned Czyn. It wasn’t by luck that I’d only had to try four hotels: almost everyone’s in the underground, Merrick had said. I gave my accent a lot more rope now as I talked to him, throwing out the palatals and throwing in some rich Somerset r’s.
‘Have the police been here yet, looking for an Englishman?’
‘About fifteen minutes ago.’
‘He’s wanted for helping Czyn. They were trying to make an arrest and he stopped them. What was his name?’
‘They’re hard for me, English names.’
‘But they wrote it down for you. He’s looking for a hotel, so, you were to phone them if he came to yours.’ I got out my passport. ‘Is this the name?’
‘Yes. That one.’
It was a small room on the fifth floor with a decent temperature due to a fat black pipe with convector fins that ran from floor to ceiling: he said it was the actual chimney of the boilerhouse feeding the middle room on all floors this side of the building. The window was frosted up and I had to open it to take bearings: platforms 5 and 6 of the Warszawa Glowna with a signalbox down towards the shuntyards, the street vertically below and with no canopies or jutting roofs. The fire escape was wrought iron and unobstructed.
I didn’t ask, when he left me, who the other man was, the one he’d buzzed. It wasn’t my business.
He caught his breath but I said it was all right and he fell into step, quickening his to mine: I’d been hanging about for nearly an hour and I needed some circulation. We walked by the Vistula, along Kosciszkowskie, because it was mainly for traffic and there wouldn’t be so many M.O. patrols.
Shakily he said: ‘I thought you’d been arrested.’
‘What for?’ It had checked me for an instant because I didn’t think his communications could be as fast as that; then I realised what the poor little devil meant.
‘Well I mean I’ve been expecting you to contact me.’
‘I have.’
The snow was brittle, charcoal grey from the smoke of the factories, and above us the sodium lamps cast a pallor rather than light; objects and their shadows looked derelict, destroyed, as if we picked our way through the ashen afterglow of the city that not long before had burned under the droning sky. In a different way it was dying now, with less dignity, less rage.
This morning they’d done for Horodecki, a major-general at the military academy, not a headline, just a couple of column-inches on page three, a man of honour and high purposes, his brother the chairman of the National Assembly and a leading delegate for the East-West talks. No trial - he was too popular for dangerous publicity but summary medical certification by a psychiatric board: onset of acute paranoid manifestations with earlier developed symptoms of atherosclerosis. Put him away. No dignity in that, no rage.
And widespread dissension among the proletariat, page six, with absenteeism at the factories up by thirty per cent. Pilfering of state property, minor sabotage and slogans across the walls, the city dying again but in a different way, no mourners but the dead themselves.
‘Have you got anything for me?’
He fumbled for an envelope, dropping it because of his stiff gloves, and I stood looking down at him as he picked it off the snow. He never got anything right, tripping on things and dropping things, his hands never steady, his nerves in his eyes. Had he been any better than this before Egerton had reached for him out of the dark and infected him with the spirit of subterfuge and sent him out here to forage for scraps among the dustbins of a sick society? Had he been all right, once, all of a piece and uncontaminated, busy with his own little schoolboy dreams of lighting a candle for the oppressed? Not Egerton’s responsibility, of course: ‘he was rather wished on to me’. But Egerton could have refused to direct him if he’d chosen, instead of which he’d been party to the decision to use an innocent for their own ends: for the ends of the Bureau, a sacrifice to the sacred bull. So here was their key man in Warsaw, wiping the wet soot off an envelope before holding it out to me, his eyes wide with worry behind the glasses, his face deathly under the sodium lamps.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
It had been such a nice clean envelope, his very first report for London, and as I took it I cursed him for uncovering something that I’d thought had been long ago buried under all those years of deceit and betrayal: a sense of compassion.
As my thumb ripped along the fold I wondered by how much Herrick himself had been party to that decision: because he could have refused, too. But like the people of this city he’d been driven to pilfering a bit of freedom for himself, half-frightened and half-defiant, by taking on an enterprise so secret that despite the official sanction of strangers his own father couldn’t be told. That was the only kick he was getting out of this: he was striking a petty blow against tyranny, and the deceit in it was prescribed by others, leaving his conscience clear.
‘This all?’
‘There’s quite a lot. It’s closely typed.’
I read bits of it as we neared the bridge. Fifteen autonomous units dispersed topographically about the city at what appeared to be strategic points, liaison by cutouts, fully completed arrangements for street barricades, sniper-posts, and grenade areas, the three main power stations already rigged for blasting by radio-controlled detonators. Initial stages marked Sroda minus 10, Sroda minus 9, so forth, final stages just marked Sroda. Wednesday. Wednesday 20th, three days before the opening of the talks. Seven days from now.
‘Sailing a bit near the wind, aren’t they?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘They’re giving themselves three days to blow this thing open and clear up all the blood and brickdust before the delegates arrive. If any delegates arrive at all I’d say most of them’ll be crouching in doorways counting their rosaries, wouldn’t you?’
‘The whole idea is to mount a threat, not an action.’ Excitement came into his tone. ‘There’ll be action all right if they’re driven to it, but the aim is to bring off a bloodless coup d’état by showing their strength at a. time when it’ll be too late for the Warsaw Pact troops to retaliate. The talks are very important to Moscow - you’ll find a summary on page five of the public references to the Russian hopes of their success - and no one in Czyn believes they’ll risk sending tanks into the city at a time like this. How could they?’
A light wind blew across the bridge and I folded the sheets and put them away and we walked faster again. ‘Who’s the “Leader?” Several mentions.’
‘They never use his name. I think he’s a deputy in the Party Committee, quite high up - that’s why they’re confident that there’ll be no tanks sent in, you see, because someone in his position would know what Moscow’s intentions would be, at a confrontation.’
‘Get his name.’
In the distance we heard a stationary diesel throbbing, an
d people shouting. Half a mile upriver there was a ring of floodlights with figures moving about; the boom of a crane stuck out from the bank across the break in the ice, with a dark oblong turning slowly at the end of the cable.
‘What’s happening down there?’ Merrick stopped, looking across the balustrade of the bridge.
Water poured from the oblong shape as it was swung towards the bank. The shouting died away and the figures were still now, watching. It had been a cold job: they must have been hours at it.
‘How many copies,’ I asked him when he’d caught me up, ‘have you got of this report?’
‘I’ve got the only carbon, and you’ve got the original.’
‘In future I want the carbon. I won’t be adding anything, you’re doing this job, not me. How many people at the Embassy know?’
‘Only H. E.’
I saw them and turned round. ‘Come on, Merrick.’ He came trotting after me. ‘When’s bag day?’
‘Tomorrow.’ His breath wheezed. ‘Eleven-thirty.’
‘Put this in.’
C-537441 plus visa plus identity card and a short encoded note that ought to take Egerton’s mind off his chilblains for a bit: Blown cover. Send new one. West German image. Also new i.c. as per example enclosed for Wanda Rek, 121 Ulica Niska, profession journalist, other details same, same photo. 10 below, you’re cushy.
He took the packet.
‘And don’t drop the bloody thing.’
Third series, fifth-digit duplications. There was no point in using the Telex or dip. radio because all I wanted out of Egerton were some papers to show so that I didn’t have to keep spinning round like a ferret when it sees a fox, it was inconvenient. Merrick had a job getting his breath and I didn’t think he even knew what the hurry was but he’d cotton on, give him a hundred years and he’d cotton on.