by Adam Hall
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 de
ceiver'. 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 detente 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?
Ten minutes but it was a question of chance, not time, hit the door open and pitch out and hope not to break a leg and try to run before the snow was pockmarked around my feet and they corrected the aim and I knew it hadn't been worth it. Smash the glass division with a rising kick and connect with the driver's neck and send the lot of us sliding wild and hope to get clear of the wreckage and use the confusion as flying cover.
Not really. There was too much against it and I was only making sure I could answer. the question that later, days later, would needle me when they got round to the advanced stuff and I'd give my soul to be free: hadn't there been anything at all I could have done? There had been nothing at all.
'Poland,' he said reasonably, 'and Czechoslovakia and the others, all keeping their spiritual independence and living in harmony with their mother country, just like Scotland and Wales. Does it sound so odd? It always takes time, of course — the future never likes being hurried. Think what a fuss there was when the Romans came, but they did a world of good, didn't they, gave us good laws and proper plumbing, don't know what England would have done without them. It's the same here, and you really ought to try taking the long view.' Looking out at the dark figures huddled at a tram stop he said in a quicker tone — 'You know your way, do you, around Warsaw?'
'A few of the main streets.'
'You know roughly where you are now?'
'East of the river.'
He nodded, tapping at the glass division. 'That's right Not far from anywhere, really.'
As the big saloon began slowing I saw the shape of the police van reflected beside him, closing in and then dropping back a little, keeping the distance.
He leaned towards me, his tone intimate now, the whisky on his breath. 'The thing is, old boy, we don't want you to rock the boat. Moczar's got his hands full at present, cleaning things up for the talks, and we'd rather like him to
be left alone.'
He swayed back an inch as the saloon came to a halt by the kerb. The reflection of the van had also stopped, but none of its doors were opening: they were just sitting there, holding off. It could be a trap but if they wanted to rub me out they could do it quietly inside Grochow: the only point in this set-up would be to establish public testimony to the fact that I'd been shot while trying to escape and it didn't seem logical. It looked like a chance and this time a real one and it'd have to be done explosively within the next few seconds, the right elbow driven hard and upwards to paralyse the windpipe of the man beside me and the left foot kicking for the face in front of me as the weight came back, difficult because of the balance factor but only difficult, not impossible, Kimura could have done it without any trouble, this or nothing, this or Grochow.
'So we're hoping you'll be a sport.' He leaned forward, head tilted, the tone engaging. 'We've got your name, and we'll see it's passed around to all the M.O. stations, so if you get picked up again just tell them who you are.' A smile narrowed his eyes. 'Bodkin. So English — and so Russian. Alexandrovich Bodkin, yes. What I mean is, you won't need a pass or anything; we'll tell them to leave you alone.' He pulled at the chrome handle and the door swung open. 'Mind how you go: the streets are so treacherous, aren't they? Because of the snow.'
11: NIGHT
The cups had been specially designed, Bar Kino in white letters on the black ground of some 16 mm negative that went right round the rim.
'Prosze o rachunek.'
Half an hour was fair enough.
She made out the pay check with the indifference of fatigue, her thigh against the edge of the table as she took the weight off one foot. A lot of them took two jobs, Merrick had said, to earn enough to buy clothes.
Western jazz of the Thirties pumped from the walls. It had been a waste of time, the Fiat thing. Someone should have been here at nine and it was half past now and I was going because I didn't want to sit here thinking about what they were doing to her.