by Adam Hall
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 of 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 icon, 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 expected 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 its 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 icon 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.
Keys.
A different man, older and less scruffy, a professional imprisoner, impersonal, his remote eyes playing directly on my face. I have never been taken out of a cell for abortive execution but I thought I recognised the look he gave me. ,Hearing already the predestined crackle of shot among the walls outside he seemed puzzled that I still had movement. Perhaps he looked at us all in that way, his time sense dislocated by monotony.
Two guards. Come with us, they said.
In the room where they’d taken my watch away they now handed it back and I fastened the strap: it was an hour before dawn and the barred window was still dark. There were four of them now, a captain of the M.O. and three sergeants, all in spruce uniform and waiting punctiliously while I fixed the buckle and pulled down the sleeve of my coat.
‘Eskorta!’
Two ahead and two behind as we clumped down the passage and through the office and out by the double doors, salute from a rifle butt and the bang of heels. The air smelt of steel and I saw a star caught in a web of cloud high over the skyline. The tang of low-octane exhaust.
They swung the step down at the back and we climbed in: there was no hustling. One of them put a hand on my arm but only to help me up the narrow steep step, as if I were infirm, or to be valued. We sat in formal rows along the side benches and no one spoke; it was all very official and through the heavy mesh on the windows I sometimes caught the reflection of the amber swivelling lamp on the roof of the van. Beneath us the chains flailed softly at the crusted snow.
Raszynska and a right turn into Ulica Koszykowa, the Czechoslovakian Embassy with its windows dark and the flag still frozen into the folds left by the last wind before winter.
North along Chatubinskiego and in silence something smashed and I knew it was hope because this wasn’t the way to the Najwyzsza lzba Kontroli where the Minister of the Interior was going to give me the freedom of the city in recognition of the fact that I had him across a barrel. He had me in a mobile cage and I was no better off here than where the light of the yellow bulb was turned to false gold and the mind was moved to false hopes.
‘Wolniej!’
‘Tak, Kapitan!’
We swayed sideways as the driver obeyed. The surface was treacherous and it wouldn’t do to have an accident when carrying a prisoner. The street’s jigsaw slowed across my eyes, cut into a matrix of images by the mesh at the windows. It was no good thinking when they take me out because when they took me out they’d be ready for an attempt and if I broke clear they’d shoot and there’d be no point in facing the sky with a hand flung out, no answer to anything.
Then they were moving their positions slightly, straightening up, and the snow at the edge of the roadway crackled under the tyres. I couldn’t see where we were because the name of the street had swung past in parallax behind the stem of a lamp but I knew we’d crossed into the Wola district, north of the railway.
The captain and a sergeant climbed down and turned and I knocked the hand aside as it tried to help me and they closed in quickly as we stood in the rising gas, my arms pinioned now because the sudden movement had worried them. A good escort works like a guide-dog, regarding his charge as an extension of his own body, and there was no chance for me here.
When the prison van backed away I saw the big Moskwicz saloon by the kerb. It was in the Russian style, amorphous and lumpish and with domed hub plates and curved quarter lights at the rear: it stood on the snow like an immense polished beetle and above its roof I saw two men in black astrakhan coats coming down the steps from the pillared entrance to the building, the guards at the top still holding their rifles at the salute. The whole thing went smoothly, as if rehearsed: I was led quickly to the saloon and put inside, my escort shutting the door and standing back to keep orderly station along the flank of the car as the two civilians entered it from the other side, ducking their fur kepis and taking their places, one on the occasional seat and the other beside me. The doors clicked shut and the engine was started and we got under way.
‘Jolly cold, isn’t it?’
He fished out a whisky flask with the ease of habit. He was the one facing me and I thought I’d met him before, as one does when one has seen so many pictures of a face in the newspapers. This one was crumpled rather than lined, as if the tissue paper skin had been crushed into a ball and then smoothed out again; the large eyes were pink-rimmed, their whites laced with red rivulets, and the mouth was long, thin-lipped and set in an expression of irony as distinct from cynicism: it was the mien of a man who had long ago discovered, with secret delight, that the follies of others matched his own. His name was Foster.
He held out the flask. ‘Warm the cockles, old boy?’
I shook my head and he made a token gesture towards the man beside me before he unscrewed the top and with studied formality poured a tot and drank it at a gulp. I looked at the man beside me and saw that he was Russian, with the flat heavy features of its eastern peoples, a son of Irkutsk or Krasnoyarsk, more northerly. He sat with a rocklike equilibrium, watching the Englishman.
We drove through deserted streets towards the Vistula, the glass division isolating us from the chauffeur and his uniformed companion.
‘How’s the old country these days?’
‘Keeps going.’
He nodded, putting the flask away, not yet quite ready to meet my eyes. I supposed it was courtesy, to ask about England, not wistfulness, because to do what he’d done must have needed hate of some stamina. Love of country is only love of oneself, a grand form of identification, and that wouldn’t have worried him; but to turn his back on the love of friends might have been more difficult.
‘Are you here for long?’
‘A few days.’
‘Picked the wrong time.’ His nerves showed behind the faint rueful smile and he looked away again. ‘I mean the winter.’
‘Which one?’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘yes.’ He stared through the glass at the slow parade of the buildings. ‘These people would be all right, you know, if they’d only get down to their work and show a bit of faith in those who are trying to create the new world. But they’re too proud of their past, warrior nation and all that, it’s old hat these days. Things have changed, and they’re going to change a lot more. The past’s all right but you won’t get far if you spend your life in a museum.’ He turned his face to me. ‘There’s such a lot of good in them, though, just as there is in everyone, and it’s a shame to see it go to waste.’
I sensed the unconscious appeal, not for the Poles but for himself: he believed he didn’t give a damn whether I thought there was some good in him or not, but he hadn’t been long enough away to get a perspective on his convictions, and the shock alone was going to take time to dull off; twenty years in Whitehall with a solid reputation and a circle of friends who’d admired his two conflicting qualities of modesty and brilliance, then he’d been sent out to Port Said on a piddling little extradition job and by sheer chance had got blown, less than six months ago, with just enough time to get aboard the Kovalenko before she sailed for Odessa. And in London the headlines broke the news he’d hoped never to make.
‘They give you any grub, old boy?’
‘Yes.’
He nodded, satisfied. ‘Sorry they kept you hanging about like that. I only got called in a couple of hours ago.’ He leaned forward suddenly, his head on one side: ‘Thing is, it’s quite a chance for us to talk to someone like you.’ We watched each other steadily for two or three seconds before an innocent smile touched his eyes - ‘I mean someone of intelligence, from the U.K. I dare say you’ve got a better idea of what’s going on than any of these smart-aleck businessmen who think they know all there is. These talks, now - they’re just as important to you as they are to us. We all know what they could mean, don’t we, if they’re given half a chance - virtual end of the Cold War, put it that way, aren’t I right?’
The tone was easy, the eyes lit with the warmth of fellow feeling. This was the charm the popular Sundays had plugged, six months ago, when the Kovalenko had been steaming through the Bosphorus, the ‘dangerous charm of the arch deceiver’. He was laying it on a bit thick but to a certain degree it was genuine and the real danger was there. At dawn in the capital of a police state east of longitude 20 I was being vetted by two K.G.B. men of the Soviet State Security Service and if one of them happened to look like an amiable bar fly in a London pub it was the more necessary to remember that in fact he was a man who’d sold his country and his friends for a coin he’d valued higher, a man who was going to send me back into the cells when this little ride was over. The van with the meshed windows wasn’t keeping escort station fifty yards behind us just because it hadn’t got anywhere else to go.
‘Of course you know we’re having a spot of bother here, these hot-blooded young rowdies. All they want is a bit of excitement now there’s a chance, boys ourselves once, weren’t we?’ He gave a short good-humoured laugh and this too was partly genuine: I remembered reading that thirty years ago he’d been sent down from Oxford for the traditional prank of sticking a jerry on top of a weathercock. Boys will indeed be boys but I also remembered the silver-haired man they’d half carried out of the airport like a waxwork doll: he hadn’t been a ‘young rowdy’. ‘It doesn’t add up to more than that,’ he said comfortably, ‘as I’m sure you realise. That’s why we’re a spot puzzled by these rumours going around, you know what I mean?’
We were still heading east, nearing the Vistula. There’d been a new prison established some eighteen months ago on the other side, in Grochow.
‘No.’
He looked at me steadily for a moment and then sat back with a shrug. ‘There are so many rumours, aren’t there, at a time like this, journalists in from all over the place, keen to jump the facts.’ Without any change in his tone, his eyes still sleepy - ‘I mean the one about the U.K. looking kindly on whatever shindy these young asses can kick up, if we let them.’
So I could have wasted my time busting a hole in the ice with the Fiat because the proposition was that Polanski’s unit was the only one that had been fed the dope about the U.K. diplomatic-backing thing and now the K.G.B. had picked it up and the K.G.B. picked up most of its stuff by augmented interrogation so who had they grabbed - Polanski? Viktor? Jo? Where was Alinka now? The trains were rolling east. I could have wasted my time.
I said: ‘Can you spell it out for me?’
Her lean body, a dark curl creeping in the wing of her arm, all she would ever be, a dream fragment persisting.
‘We don’t want to tell you things.’ His smile was faintly coy. ‘We want you to tell us things.’
‘If shindy means a full-scale revolution and young asses means half the population of the Polish Republic and looking kindly means the explicit patronage of Great Britain at Foreign Office level I’d say it’s worth about as much as any other rumour wouldn’t you? I come from a country where - we both do, I was forgetting - where people would get a certain kick out of seeing the Poles chuck the Kremlin off their backs because we’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog whoever it is, but that’s not enough to make us queer the pitch at a time when there’s a hope of an East-West détente in the offing. But you ought to know that so why ask me?’
A spark had come under the heavy lids but now the eyes were sleepy again, full marks for that. The Russian hadn’t moved but I sensed a reaction in his total stillness beside me: his grasp of the idiom must be pretty fair.
‘I see, yes. That’s what we thought.’
‘Then I haven’t been much help.’
‘You mustn’t think that, old boy. You’re being most co-operative. Just what we were hoping for, bit of co-operation.’
Lamps swung above us, their glow lingering wanly against the first milky light of the day. The span of the bridge curved upwards across the wastes of ice as we were lifted, losing the skyline, finding it again. In the glass division the sidelamps of the prison van floated higher, two bright bubbles, and floated down.
‘That’s where someone went in.’ He was looking through the side window. ‘Couple of days ago.’
‘Went in?’
‘Down there. In a car.’
‘Bust the ice?’
‘Yes. I think he was trying to get away from the police. They say there was quite a chase. Poor chap, what a way to go. But he shouldn’t have been so silly; the police here are very good. We’ve got to keep order, that’s awfully important.’
We slowed down the long descent towards the Wilenska Station, having to use more of the camber because the first trams had started running.
Of course it could be the other way round: the K.G.B. might not have picked it up - it could be their own man, the one with the borrowed Union Jack poking out of his breast pocket, feeding the stuff in. Why?
‘It’s like Wales,’ he said, turning to look at me, ‘and Scotland. You_ must try seeing it that way. They’ve kept their spiritual independence but they’ve willingly helped England fight her wars. Bit of flag-waving goes on at the Cup Finals but there’s no harm meant, is there? Charles went over pretty big at Caernarvon, proof enough.’
By rough reckoning I had ten minutes. I didn’t know why they’d switched me from the van to the saloon: it wasn’t so that they could vet me because they could have waited until we were inside Grochow, where the grilling was going to start. Perhaps it was caprice on his part and his masters had indulged him: he was a first ranker of high value to them, twenty years’ loyal service on the books.
What then had moved him, in the shadowed psyche below that brilliant mind, to offer me a ride in his comfortable motor car since we were going to the same place? Not his sense of irony: that was too cerebral. Something deeper: they’d said of him, those who’d been his friends, that if he’d ever gone right over the edge he would have been a schizoid, that the strain of his critically balanced double life would have led him sliding into a world of fantasy. But there was no real edge, no borderline: he was the type who would order a cleanly laundered shirt for the condemned on his way to the gallows, to give his death a token dignity; or choose that on my way into Grochow and beyond I should hear the accents of familiar speech, here in a foreign land, and know the comfort of being called ‘old boy’. Or was it something more basic: self-justification on the infantile level - here are you, a captive, and here am I, a free man, so who’s the better?