by Adam Hall
I didn’t like it because most of what I could see was based on mission-feel and I couldn’t discount it. Assumptions were unreliable: I assumed that there was an adverse party working the same field as Merrick and I and feeding the Polanski unit with doped info until its turn came to be wiped out and I assumed that the KG.B. had chosen to vet me and let me run and both these assumptions could be wrong. Mission-feel is never wrong: it’s the specialised instinct you develop as you go forward into the dark like an old dog fox sniffing the wind and catching the scent of things it has smelled before and learned to distrust; and in the concealing darkness the forefoot is sensitive, poised and held still above the patch of unknown ground where in the next movement the trap can spring shut.
The feeling I had was close to that; but a man, being a more sophisticated beast, is caught with traps of greater complexity, and what I sensed was that behind all the logic I was trying to bring to the few facts available and all the attempts to make a pattern from random pieces, the opposition had a programme running, its engineering as smooth and massive as the iron wheels that rolled past here on their predestined rails; and that I was in its path.
Egerton didn’t know what it was but he knew it was there and he’d sent me to find it and blow it up.
‘Is it morning?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t want morning to come.’
She’d told me before in a different way, saying she didn’t want the night to end, crying for a long time naked against me, the saltiness on my face, asking me to hurt her, as if the mind’s hurt wasn’t enough: guilt for the dead, the abandoned, her leanness quivering and her mouth avid but far from love. Later she forgot and the body was enough, her skin burning under my hands and her thighs alive: she made love as if time was running out. Later still she told me about herself, speaking in Polish and half to someone else: to the person who must one day find again and recognise these pieces of identity and try to make them whole.
‘They wanted Jan and me to go with them but Israel was only a place on the map and we had all Poland, where we were born. They sent long letters at first, saying what a solid future there was for us if we’d go out there, and how kind the people were, and finally we got sick of reading their letters and just tore them up, still in the envelopes. To me it was a kind of - not disloyalty exactly - a rejection of all we’d been as a family; they’d turned their backs on everything we’d known and loved and grown up with, the music and the forests and the fires in winter, and our friends. But I missed them, so did Jan, and when I got married it was partly to make a new home for him, though I think I was in love for a time. But Michal’ - she paused on the name, finding an odd-shaped piece that she knew would never fit - ‘Michal started getting letters from my father, the same kind my brother and I used to get, and he said we were obviously missing a big chance, and tried to convince me, and couldn’t. So he went out there to join them.’
Thus it is in events that thy tribe shall forever wander, finding in the shade of each tree a seeming haven till it be shown that as the sun moves, the shadow moves, leaving thee unsheltered.
‘He said that since the Russians had taken over our country a Pole couldn’t be a Pole so he was going where at least a Jew could be a Jew. I think he was sure I’d follow him, but I threw his ring from the Slasko-Dabrowski Bridge.’
Then for a time she slept and so did I, and when I woke towards dawn she’d moved away a little and leaned watching me in the grey light from the city, her face still stained from the tears that had dried, her eyes dark in thought as she asked me again who I was, who are you please.
‘No one you’ll remember.’
I left her warmth, breaking the thin film of ice in the big copper pan. Putting my things into the airline bag I remembered thinking, somewhere in the night, that she’d have to stay here if she were to survive the next few days because the only friends she could go to were at. risk themselves.
‘I need a contact in Czyn. Someone I can phone any time between now and Sroda. This is a safe place. You told me to let you know if I wanted any help.’
‘You would like me to stay here?’
‘Yes.’
‘I will stay.’
‘Have you got any money?’
‘Some.’
‘You’ll have to buy a few things. Ask the man to get them for you. Take a walk when you need some air but don’t go far.’ I zipped the bag shut. ‘I’ll phone always at an even hour, eight ten twelve, so be here then. If I don’t phone, don’t worry, I’m not sure how things will go.’
I went to the bed and she raised herself, kneeling and twisting against me, biting gently at the pad of my hand. her black hair hiding her face from me till I left her and looked back once at her stillness, her arms crossed against her breasts and her hands clasping her shoulders, head on one side as she said:
‘I shall see you again.’
‘Yes.’ The first lie of Sunday.
Chapter 12
TRAP
The few people in the street wore black and bells tolled, hurrying them across the rutted snow to where a spire poked at the low grey sky. The wind had died in the night, leaving calm. I walked south-east towards the river.
I’d given him some money.
‘Let her have my room. Her papers are in order and you can put her name in the register. Give her what’s left of this when she leaves.’ She wouldn’t find work again until there was an amnesty.
Three patrols in two miles but they didn’t stop me.
Karl Dollinger journalist born Stuttgart 1929. The immigration franking tallied with my actual arrival on L.O.T. 504 and they’d put in a slip showing booking-confirmation West Berlin January 6. Reason for visit to cover talks for Der Urheber, left-wing weekly. Various letters and memos, editorial recaps, Telex facilities, press-club card, so forth. nothing to fault
Security was important now but that wasn’t why I was switching base: if I’d needed to stay on at the Alzacki I wouldn’t have taken her there. A new cover required a new address and the hotel I wanted now was the big state-owned Kuznia, nearly opposite the Commissariat in the Praga district. That was where they’d been going yesterday morning: from the distance I’d seen the security van keep up speed towards the next traffic lights but the big black Moskwicz had pulled in again soon after dropping me, off. They’d gone into the building on the south side, Foster and the man from Irkutsk. I hadn’t gone back because they could have slapped a tag on me but the map in the City Library showed what the building was. It might not be their base but if it wasn’t I’d have to start my search from there.
I’d known yesterday what I’d got to do but I suppose I’d baulked it because it wasn’t a thing you could do in a hurry and I’d have to hurry: we stood three days from Sroda and Sroda was the deadline for Czyn, for the opposition and for me. I knew now what Egerton wanted and his tacit signal was clear: define, infiltrate and destroy. And I couldn’t do it by standing in the way of the programme they were running: I’d have to get inside and blow it up from there.
A hundred and fifty rooms, fifty with private bath and outside telephone connection via the desk. This one had two windows facing the Commissariat at something like thirty-five degrees oblique, good enough and close enough to observe without binoculars. There was a spillover from the other big hotels nearer the hall where the talks were going to be held but I managed to get a second-floor single and the timing estimate from the room to the street was fifteen seconds at a pace that wouldn’t look hurried.
For three hours I drew blank. Some of the Commissariat staff showed up before noon and lights were switched on, so I began filling in the front-elevation sketch I’d made: records, general admin., public interview, M.O. liaison, so forth. Not many of the public went in, perhaps half a dozen, most of them lost-looking, one of them frightened; they were given an upright chair, fourth window left of central staircase, third floor, and a big fur-coated woman spoke to them without a pause and they didn’t interrupt; her mouth
was rectangular like a ventriloquist’s dummy, opening and shutting at irregular intervals while they sat watching, sometimes giving a nod. There were two clerks in Records, both girls, one of them slightly lame; they plied between the desks and the filing cabinets, stopping sometimes to laugh together, their work routine and their thoughts on personal things. Six uniformed M.O.s reported to the second room right of staircase first floor, handing some papers to a civilian who sent them out with a messenger to a room at the back of the building. The work of these people, routine or not, was important enough to bring them here on a Sunday and it looked reasonably clear that the pressures driving towards Sroda had opened the doors of every Commissariat in the city.
I had the impression that if I could have persuaded the two girls to leave the room with the crowded shelves while I lobbed an incendiary bomb through the doorway a few hundred thousand citizens of Warsaw would be better off. It might even be worth doing once I was in there.
13:05 seventh M.O. reporting. 13:12 ninth interview. 13:24 lights out fourth right third floor and the corollary: two clerks down the steps. 13:30 guard on the entrance relieved. 13:41 Moskwicz.
It came in from the west, from across the Vistula. Foster and another man, not the man from Irkutsk but the political agent who’d conducted the interrogation in the Ochota precinct, his pale hands lifting and dropping on the arms of the chair. They got out and climbed the steps and this was very interesting because he must be high in echelon to travel with a top kick like Foster in his turd-shaped deluxe saloon. I couldn’t think about it now because I had to see where they went and they went to the doubled-windowed room at the left end of the third floor, when I’d seen the lights go on I began thinking about it.
Findings: a routine M.O. patrol had picked up an unremarkable foreign visitor in the street and pulled him in for not ,having any papers but by the time he was inside the precinct bureau there was a high-echelon agent sitting-in to conduct the interrogation and by dawn the next day he was under discreet vetting by the K.G.B.
They took off their coats and fur hats and Foster sat down and the agent took a folder from a cupboard, dark green folder, cupboard not locked.
Working backwards: I’d realised I was being vetted in the Moskwicz and they hadn’t tried to cover it. The new material now coming in and making me sweat concerned the events that had led up to that: at some time between being picked up as a routine measure by the M.O. patrol and my arrival at the Ochota precinct fifteen minutes later there’d been an alert situation. Someone had known, without seeing me, that I wasn’t just one of the hundreds of foreign visitors in Warsaw on private business or with an interest in the forthcoming talks.
They’d known who I was.
The Moskwicz was still at the kerb and the driver and escort were still on board, black leather coats and civilian kepis. Note this. Note everything and think fast in the intervals.
They couldn’t have known who I was.
And make corrections. The wire had burned out and I’d have to twist the ends together till it glowed again and the analogy came to mind because the mission was suddenly electrified and Egerton was close to me, Egerton and his bloody lies, everyone else has refused, I’m really most grateful to you for helping me out.
Foster. Christ, had he sent me to bring in Foster?
Turn the coin. Foster had been sent to bring me in.
Because he’d been flown from Moscow, part of the alert situation. That was why they’d kept me caged, to give him time to get here. He lived in Moscow, the Sundays said, ‘a modest existence in a flat not far from the domes of the Kremlin, once an Old Etonian and now a hero of the Soviet Republic with an alloy medal somewhere in the top drawer with his handkerchiefs and cuff-links’, a rumour about a Hungarian woman, ‘a simple daughter of the proletariat content to share his uneventful life’.
Until less than forty-eight hours ago he’d been given the signal: Contact established Warsaw please proceed.
The fly had hit the web and the web trembled.
They hadn’t needed full-face and profile blow-ups for the patrols. They’d known where to find me at any time. That was why they could afford to let me go.
Brain think. Stay on brain think because there’s a lot coming up and it’s got to be looked at and there’s not much time left now.
Let him run and we’ll see where he goes. It still stood up: it was based on mission-feel and mission-feel is never wrong. But I could extend the certainty now: they already knew where I was going to run because I was in Warsaw to find things out and the .only way to do it was to close in, get near them, as near as I was now, just across the street, observing and surveying and trying to work out how to
close the gap and get right inside, into the double-windowed room over there where they were quietly running their programme. Let him run and he’ll run to us.
Into the trap.
I came away from the window. The light in the room was winter dim but there was nothing here I wanted to see the moves had to be made in the mind, the next in my own because they’d already made theirs and they were waiting.
It didn’t matter that at this moment, at 14:05, my security was total. No one in Warsaw knew that a British agent from a non-existent bureau in London was at this tick of the clock holed up in Room 54 at the Hotel Kuznia under the cover of Karl Dollinger journalist born Stuttgart, 1929. No one. Not even the two men over there with the dark green folder on the desk between them. But it didn’t matter because they weren’t trying to find me; they were prepared to wait for me. They could have left me to rot m the Ochota precinct or thrown me into Grochow and left me to rot there instead or they could have put me under the lights and broken me open to see what was inside but the time hadn’t been right.
They hadn’t known enough. They wanted to know more.
In any capital where international talks are being convened there’s always a fierce light focused on the central assembly of delegates and the plenipotentiaries and secretaries and interpreters and in the peripheral glow there are shadows and in the shadows there are always the nameless, the faceless, the eyes and ears of the intelligence networks whose job is to peel away the laminations of diplomacy and protocol and deceit and counter-deceit until they can form a picture of the realities beneath the maquillage and pass it back to Control for data-processing and onward transmission to the overt departments of government where policy is formed. There is nothing adventurous about this: it’s an art becoming so fine that a great deal of what is said at the conference table is indirectly dictated by those unseen in the shadows; and in some countries the liaison between statesmanship and political intelligence is so closely linked that the first would fail operate without recourse to the second. This was exemplified in a coded cable from the Elysee to Whitehall during the Fourth Summit of 1970 and the decoded version is framed on the washroom wall at the Bureau. Spent an hour in private discussion last night with the Persian Minister for Foreign Affairs. Please let me know what he said.
Here in Warsaw the talks were to be staged between the two halves of a divided world and the spotlights were thus blinding and the shadows, by contrast, darker. The area, by this situation rendered highly sensitive, was charged with the explosive element of Polish dissension. In these circumstances Moscow had been driven to devise two programmes aimed at the protection of its own interests and of the talks themselves. One of these programmes was already running: the streets were being cleared and the trains were moving east. The other was also under way.
This was the one that Egerton wanted me to destroy and I hoped to God he knew what he was doing because the talks were as vital to the West as to the East.
Not my concern. Discount the shivering fit of the nerves, the gooseflesh fear that somewhere I’d wandered into a minefield that even the Bureau didn’t know was there. Discount every consideration that had nothing to do with the mission itself, to do with the implicit instructions: define, infiltrate and destroy. Do what you’re bloody well told.
Or at least try.
They didn’t know enough about me but they’d know enough to damn me, to kill me, once I’d found my way inside. All they’d need to know was that I was trying to blow up their programme, the second one, the silent one. Then they’d knock me off. They’d set the trap and that was all they’d had to do: they knew, as I knew now, that I’d have to spring it myself, and hope to survive.
The main line station was three blocks from the hotel and I walked there. I’d had to get free of the claustrophobic confines of Room 54 and I’d had to take a first step towards their base and this was it.
He was a thin quick-eyed boy with a lot on his nerves and I’d have preferred an older man but there was only one rank and his beaten-up two-door Wolga stood at the head of it and I didn’t want to waste any time.
‘Hotel Kuznia.’
The smell of burnt clutch linings filtered through the ripped carpet. After two blocks I told him to pull in.
‘This isn’t the Kuznia. It’s farther on.’
He watched me in the cracked mirror.
‘You can leave your engine running.’ We spoke in Polish and I let my accent show. ‘How much would it cost to hire you for the rest of the day?’ It didn’t matter how much it would cost because that bloody woman was going to pay the bill anyway but I didn’t want him to think I was a madman. Only a madman would commit himself too this kind of expense without asking how many noughts there were: that would be his point of view because he was half starved and I wanted to keep him with me.
‘I’m on the station run. You’ll have to get one from Orbis.’
‘They’re shut today.’
It was still there so we were all right.
‘I can’t help that.’
‘Five hundred zlotys. That’s fair.’