by Adam Hall
‘When does the bag come in?’
‘Saturday. Will there be something for you?’
It wasn’t giving them long but it’d shake the dust up, never a bad thing at the Bureau. I didn’t want to turn my head: they’d just started on to the bridge when I’d seen them and we’d been walking faster than they should be but the trouble was that the pressure was getting higher every day: unless you looked like a robot they’d pull you in and if there weren’t any tanks in this city a week from now it’d be because there was nobody left to shoot at.
‘Yes.’ The wind cut at our faces. ‘If Customs decide it’s a nice day for a snap check try and distract their attention, shut their arse in a door or something.’
‘Will you call for it?’
‘No. Keep it on you.’
‘All right.’ Nearing the end of the bridge he said: ‘Are we - ‘
‘Don’t look back.’
They’d shut down the diesel. Our feet scuffed over the snow. His breathing was painful and when I finally couldn’t stand it and what they were doing to him and what I was doing to him I left him and went down the steps and along the riverbank where it was dark.
Chapter 8
CZYN
Everyone’s always complaining at Norfolk that in Weapons Recognition they’re sketchy about the head-on image. The artist is fond of a certain forget-me-not blue for the shading and we think he’s a poof but the diagrammatic vital statistics are up to scratch and there’s a clever system using key colours for giving what amounts to a visual permutation table for the types of ammo interchangeable among the run-of-the-mill international models, but they haven’t yet conceded the obvious point that we need a set of oblique head-on pictures at something like ten or twelve degrees from the line of sight and a specially big one from above, because the head’s a smaller target and the aim is normally at the stomach or the heart so that you’re looking slightly down at the image. The only picture they give us is smack into the line of sight so it looks like an end-on view of a sausage roll with no sausage in it.
But this was an easy one, a Typolt Mk XI short-range sub with sixteen in the drum, and I was looking slightly down at it in the normal way. I couldn’t see whether it was at safe or fire but by the look on his face I knew I ought not to move.
He had the intent gaze of a bird, the iris so dark that the eye seemed all pupil; the other one was glass, not too well made. The streaks of white in his ruffled hair, the deep-cut lines in the face, the strong hooked nose, the scratched leather covering of his mechanical hand and his crouched attitude all gave him the look of an eagle mauled in some foray, the plumage torn but the pride fiercer than ever.
The man behind me shut the inner door of the sound-lock,
‘Who are you?’ In Polish.
The room was big but cluttered with trestle tables and sagging settees and a vast carved Lublin dresser with a G.E.C. transmitter-receiver stuffed into it. Designer’s desk covered with papers, bottle of Wyborowka Vodka and three tumblers, some tins of meat, pair of leather gauntlets with the fleece sticking through a gash, packet of Sport. The stacked boxes in the corner farthest from the stove looked like ammo. Thick smell of black leaf.
‘It’s all right,’ she told them. She’d come from behind a baize folding screen. I heard a kettle boiling. ‘He’s the Englishman.’ She came towards me, so that he had to shift his aim.
‘Alinka!’
Impatiently she said over her shoulder - ‘I’ve told you he’s all right, Viktor.’ Black sweater and slacks: she wouldn’t be wearing the uniform any more. She was thinner than I remembered, or it was that black accentuated the lean lines of her body as she moved towards me with a controlled rhythm and stopped, facing me, her patent-leather kneeboots neatly together. I know that this was how she moved, and stilled herself: I’ve learned more about people by their bearing than by anything else, even their eyes, because it has a permanency and expresses what they are and not just what they’re feeling.
In English she said: ‘I’ve told them about you.’
‘Alinka.’ His voice was rough with anger. ‘Did you tell him how to get in here?’
She turned away, this time controlling her impatience, and I sensed that it was something they’d all had to learn: to be patient with Viktor. He’d lowered the gun but his bright eye burned at me.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He knew.’
‘How did he know?’
‘Does it matter?’ She held a tumbler to the light and poured some vodka. ‘He knew they were going to arrest me but I didn’t ask him how he knew. I’m still free, that’s what counts.’ She brought the vodka to me with quick lithe strides. ‘Can I know your name?’
‘Longstreet.’
‘Drink. I owe you that.’
‘Who are you?’ It was the other man, the one who’d sat with her in the kawiarnia, his big confident hands clasped on the table and sometimes thumping it gently for emphasis. But he hadn’t eased the fright in her. They were all frightened here.
I asked him: ‘What did you say?’
‘Doesn’t he speak Polish?’
‘If he did,’ she shrugged, ‘would he have to speak to you in German?’
He watched me steadily, a good face with the eyes well apart under a wide flat brow, the mouth long and compressed, contemplative. He’d be their mainstay, here, the one who never panicked; but I thought that at this moment his confidence had never been under such a strain. It wasn’t because of me, I knew that.
She said to me: ‘This is Leo Polanski.’
‘My God, do you have to tell him our names?’
‘Please, Viktor,’ she said quietly.
Polanski inclined his head, still watching me. He said: ‘You have helped us -‘
‘Ich verstehe nicht -‘
‘You, have helped us,’ he said, this time in German, ‘but we need to know who you are.’
I turned and put the vodka, untouched, on the corner of the littered desk. There were several versions of who I was but I didn’t know which one I ought to give them.
‘Is it not all right?’ she asked.
‘I’m driving.’
There was actual need for me to tell them who I was: it would simply be for the sake of putting them at their ease. If I didn’t satisfy them they might stop me coming here again: they could do that easily enough by changing the signal. It might take a little time for them to see that they’d have to co-operate with me, because a changed signal wouldn’t stop a police squad if I cared to tip them off: they’d drill right round the door with heavy calibre rapid fire, like opening a tin.
Of course it might take them less time to see that I ought not to be let out of here at all. It made no difference that I’d been of use to them: in the last few days before a city-wide revolution there could be a change of fortune and loyalties and if it suited my book I could have them dragged out of here and slung into the interrogation cells and later packed into the special windowless trains for the camps in the Komi Republic.
Viktor realised that much: it was in the burning dark of his one good eye as it stared at me. He was the only professional here, too young for the war but old enough to have manned the barricades in the ‘56 Poznan riots: maybe that was where he’d trained.
‘I’m an observer. You’re going to start a war, aren’t you? You’ll need Western observers.’
I’d spoken to Polanski but it was Viktor who answered, limping quickly to the desk and ripping open the packet of Sport, holding it against his chest with his mechanical hand. Left leg, left hand, left eye. Grenade or a mine.
‘What’s your paper?’
‘I’m freelance.’
‘Where has your stuff appeared?’
‘Most places.’
‘What byline?’
‘Pseudonymous.’
‘You won’t leave here unless you can do a lot better than that.’ The match flared and then his head jerked and he was staring towards the door of the sound-lock and Polanski said:
&n
bsp; ‘Josef.’
Three short, one long.
Alinka didn’t move. She stood perfectly still, closing her eyes. I could believe she was praying.
Polanski opened the first door, then the second, and Josef came in, stumbling, hitting the acoustic padding with his shoulder and straightening up and looking at no one, a white face bright with sweat and the eyes flickering from shock, his breath coming in gusts as he stood in the middle of the room, a short clownish figure swaying with the uncertain stance of a bear on its hind legs, his thick coat hanging open, blood on the sleeve.
‘It wasn’t any good.’
The neck of a bottle trembled on the rim of a glass. ‘Never mind, Jo,’ Polanski said.
‘Are you hurt?’
‘No.’ He took it and drank and she waited and he let out a long shuddering breath. ‘That’s not my blood. We lost Zygmunt and Jacek.’
He drank again and she tried to make him sit down but he shook her away and told them all of it, all there was, the main doors breached with five stick-bombs according to plan and Jacek and himself in there first with Karol giving them cover and Jerzy standing by with the stolen van but the alarm had gone off and they’d only had time to open up the first three cells and Jan hadn’t been there and they’d had to come away before they were cut off.
She took his empty glass. ‘Thank you for trying, Jo.’
‘Next time,’ Polanski said.
They weren’t frightened anymore because they knew the worst now and it could have been worse than this: Jan wasn’t here but Jo was back.
He nodded quickly, his mood suddenly changing, a wicked smile creasing his clown’s face, the ends of his long mouth turning upwards. ‘Next time, yes. Who’s this?’
The anglik, she told him.
‘So?’ He grasped my hand in both his own and I felt the surprising strength in them. ‘We need people like you! Alinka told us how-‘
‘Sorry?’
‘Huh? She told us how you drove, Jesus!’
‘I drove into the river.’
‘Well anyone c’n make a mistake, no? You did a swell job, no kidd’n.’
‘Jo. Don’t tell him anything!’
‘Don’t what?’ He looked across at Viktor. ‘What like?’
‘We don’t know who he is yet.’
‘We can ask him can’t we?’ He switched so fast that it was like two different people talking. ‘What outfit are you with, pal?’
The lid of the kettle had started rattling minutes ago and Alinka went round the screen.
‘I’m on my own.’
‘He’s on his own.’
‘That isn’t enough.’
‘It’s enough for me.’ He shrugged his coat off and dropped it across a settee and poured some vodka. ‘Viktor’s a wonderful guy, a very wonderful guy, but he took a beating and it was because some bastard put the skids under him, see, someone he trusted, so now when his own mother holds out a cookie he bites her fingers off, you get it? An’ now he’s steamed up because it’s getting close to the big day, we’re all of us kinda jumpy. You know what I’m talkin’ about?’
‘Wednesday.’
The sounds were distant at first: the traffic seemed a little heavier, that was all. ‘Sure. Wednesday.’
He raised his glass, his smile very bright.
‘You think they’ll send tanks in?’
‘They can try. We have the approach routes mined.’
‘What are the chances?’
‘Of what?’
‘For you.’
Doors slamming.
‘Look, this isn’t Prague. They weren’t prepared. We are. We’re taking the initiative, you get it?’ There’s thirty thousand Russian troops in this country and if they’re goin’ to use them, okay, they’re goin’ to use them. But if their tanks get in we’re not goin’ to throw whitewash over them like they did in Prague. We’re goin’ to shoot back. This won’t be a walkover, it’ll be a war. They wouldn’t have dared to go into Prague if there’d been military resistance, how can the U.S.S.R. let itself be seen fighting a war with one of its own loyal satellites? Even if it could win?’ The bright smile was frozen now. ‘We’ve raised an army here. Fifteen units of picked men. Men like Viktor. Okay, men like me. Men who will not have the land of their fathers turned into a penitentiary for state-registered juvenile delinquents. Right? We have stockpiles strategically dispersed - sub-guns, grenades, landmines, you name it. Wednesday morning, 0001 hours, the three main generating stations hit the sky. Will you be here? Don’t be here Wednesday, pal.’
He tossed back the last of his drink.
Alinka was moving across to us. Halfway she stopped, and stood listening. Viktor and Polanski had been talking together and now they were silent.
‘Jo,’ I said. ‘Is it the only way into this place? By the elevator?’
‘Huh? Yep. I guess we just sweat it out.’ He’d heard them.
There was a question I didn’t want to ask him.
Voices now, not coming from any particular direction, just through the walls, through the floor. The building had come alive. Doors slamming again but this time inside the building, the doors of the apartments. The thudding of jackboots.
Alinka was very still. So was Polanski. Viktor had gone for the gun and picked it up and now he sat with it across his knees. Jo hadn’t moved but his eyes had narrowed and they began flickering as if the light was too bright. He had stopped smiling and his face looked as it had when I’d first seen him come lurching in here: blank with shock. He was a man who lived hot and worked best when he was bombing his way into a precinct bureau and now there was nothing he could do but stand here while his nerves drew thin and the blood receded, leaving a mortuary pallor. Perhaps he knew it now, the question I didn’t want to ask him: had he been followed here?
Listening, you would have said there were rats running behind the walls, their sound magnified.
Last night I’d gone half a mile through the shadows of the river-walk before climbing and cutting across the city centre to the hotel, and on the way I’d seen this taking place in a quiet street near Dworzec Srodmiescie. They didn’t hurry - there were no klaxons or shrilling tyres - yet the operation was incredibly fast: three Warszawa saloons pulling up near the middle of the street with an M.O. riot-squad Jeep at each end to block it off. Ten seconds, and five hundred people made captive as if a net had dropped from the night. Most of them hadn’t even known. In the privacy of their apartments, at their ease in the intimate light of the television screens, nothing had told them that for fifteen minutes a paralysis had held them powerless, that there had occurred a visitation of the State.
Some had known. It wasn’t a general search but a raid with specific objectives. You are Franciszek Labedz? You will come with us. Five or six of them guided across the pavement to the waiting saloons, the sharp click of the doors, the jab of starters. A child had run after one group and its mother had pulled it back. I remembered the child’s voice piping across the snow; more than other things I remembered that.
I found Polanski’s eyes on me; we looked at each other without communication; we were looking in our minds at what we heard. This was a general search, noisy and with nothing in the orders about discretion. Most of the sound came to us through a light-proofed ventilator high in the wall above the Lublin dresser: the sound of boots on the stone stairs, the rapping on the doors, music from a radio out of tune with events, voices, surprised.
Co sie stalo?
Policiaf
Far away, under the same sky, the moan of a tram along the Krakowskie Przedmiescie.
There’d been a door here in the wall opposite the stove, and two windows, one each side of the dresser; the edges were still visible but there’d have been a better job done on the other side, the door sealed and plastered over, the windows bricked up.
Teraz-natychmiast!
Iron knuckles in suede gloves: open your door. The State is here and you are State property. I am the State. Open. Boots tramped
along the wall where the door had been and Polanski’s head turned slowly as he listened, as if he saw their coated figures. His eyes were steady. It was Jo who moved, jack-knifing like a puppet with the strings suddenly cut. I was near enough to break his fall and Alinka came and crouched by him, whispering.
‘He’s been giving too much blood. He goes twice every week to the clinic.’
Blood for Wednesday. I’d seen the queues, patient in the snow. Blood for Sroda.
The sudden scream of a woman,
Wladislaw! Uwazaj!
Viktor’s right hand was stroking the submachine gun, his head lifting as he heard the cry.
Jestza pozno!
They’d got a man.
The scream fell to a dying cadence, becoming sobs.
I’d never seen such rage in a face as I saw now in the face of Viktor, his eye the eye of an eagle, caged and goaded. ‘Sroda,’ he said to the wall, to the boots and the belted coats, ‘Sroda,’ he promised the woman who tonight would sleep alone. Polanski heard him.
‘Sroda,’ Polanski said.
Then they left the building, their sound ebbing as when a wave fills a gulley and drains away. Someone had switched off the radio and there was no more music from it. Faint voices called among the corridors, as if people had lost their way. Engines in the street.
We’d got Jo on to one of the settees, legs raised and head down. Droplets of sweat sprang as fast as Alinka wiped them away.
‘If they let me out of here,’ I said to her, ‘they might change the signal. The day -‘
‘I will not let them,’ she said quickly.
‘They might not listen. The day after tomorrow your new karta should be here. If they change the signal you’ll have to get someone to fetch it: I’ll be at the Bar Kino at nine in the evening. Ulica Czackiego. Saturday.’
I had to get clear now. Jo had confirmed the overall situation as reported by Merrick and it was all I needed and I didn’t want to be still here when the rot set in: at any given minute in any given U.B. bureau someone else was going to break under interrogation and this building would be opened up again and sixteen rounds from a Typolt Mk XI wouldn’t do much more than fill the place with smoke - they’d send in riot-squads if they had to.