Again, the policeman shrugged. “You may represent it where you wish. We merely carry out orders, Mr Cane.” He gave a formal bow, turned, and left the room, shutting the door behind him.
His face hard, Shaw dressed.
All the others had had precisely the same treatment. At dinner that night — a delayed dinner — feeling was high, and afterwards, over coffee in the lounge, Shaw and Hartley Henderson did what they could to help Pope ride the protest meeting and soothe ruffled dignities. Pope himself was getting nowhere at all. Even Miss Absolom was upset; never, she said loudly and positively, had she been subjected to such an ordeal on either of her two previous trips behind the Curtain. The fact that women police had been used to search the women made no difference; Mr Krushchev would never have allowed it.
Shaw found himself in an equivocal position. The members of the party appeared to be looking to himself and Henderson for a lead, rather than to the courier. The last thing Shaw wanted was to draw any attention towards himself, least of all to be regarded as the spokesman for malcontents who were being British about their rights. So far as possible he withdrew himself from the conversation and let Hartley Henderson take up the cudgels. Henderson was making much of his pull in the Moscow Embassy and was promising to talk to his friend Worth-Butters about what had happened and to have a few choice words sent through to the Russian satellite authorities. Shaw’s gaze flickered over the various expressions. He fancied there was a touch of relief in the expostulations of Wicks and Fawcett. Those two were interesting… and meanwhile Henderson was gravely assuring Miss Absolom that he would make a special point of mentioning her name to Sir Hubert Worth-Butters. Miss Absolom’s contact with Krushchev had, it seemed, given her semi-diplomatic status — at least in her own eyes.
When the rest of the party had gone off to bed, Shaw stayed on in the lounge. He had found that day’s Pravda lying around; it made very interesting reading. Much was in the air, much that was pleasantly optimistic for East-West relations. Long negotiations on the supply of oil-refinery equipment, once almost abandoned in despair by London, were coming to their fruition — and from that, hinted Pravda, much else might be expected to follow. One thing, it seemed, had already followed. The Russian leadership had thrown out a surprise suggestion that a high-level study group from Washington, London, Bonn, and Paris would be welcomed by the Kremlin for full and frank discussions directed towards a workable and permanent disarmament commission — the only dissentient voice being, so it was rumored, that of General Kosyenko.
Shaw laid down the paper, frowning. He was still worried by that Cabinet Office query: Why should dog kill dog when by its action it was likely to overturn the communal kennel? From such scanty information as was available, it was a fair bet that Conroy would also have raised a dissentient voice along with Kosyenko.
Shaw got up and went into the bar for a final brandy by way of a nightcap. The time for action hadn’t come yet; it wouldn’t come until the coach reached Moscow unless he uncovered Conroy en route. In the meantime, he could at least relax and get a good night’s sleep. As he left the bar, he saw Virginia MacKinlay coming out of the lift into the foyer. He called out “good night” to her as she went towards the reception desk; her response was friendly enough but he got the idea that for once the girl wasn’t especially pleased to see him… As he entered the lift, he glanced back and saw her making for the hotel entrance. Curious that she should go out at this hour of the night… or was it? Virginia had more life and spirit about her than the rest of the party, and maybe there was some night life in Poznan that she wanted to see. And yet — on her own? In a strange and to some extent hostile country? Back in Berlin, she’d told Shaw she’d never been out of the States before and had no languages…
Shaw had had hunches in the past and they had paid off. The girl might be worth following. He stopped the lift at the first floor and took it down again. Reaching the foyer, he crossed it with long, rapid strides, and then from the steps of the hotel, he saw the girl getting into a long black car with a uniformed man holding the door for her. The car was an official one belonging to the Polish Security Police, and the man in uniform, though too far off to be identified positively, looked curiously like Major Loga… as Shaw watched, the car pulled away fast and a moment later was lost in the traffic.
His thoughts racing, Shaw went back inside.
Five
Next day was bright and sunny, with a light breeze streaming over the open top of the coach as the party drove through Poznan towards the main highway for Warsaw, to head deeper and deeper into Soviet satellite territory. Most of the men had shed their coats, exposing gaily colored sports shirts. The ordeal of the evening before seemed already to have been, if not forgotten, at least largely relegated to the backs of the passenger’s minds; there was security in being one of a body of Westerners in a great, glittering road-monster, sweeping along the highway behind the broad back of driver Tanner. The Superluxury coach was a little piece of England, autonomous, isolated, solid, safe. It was part of comfortable English things like Bank Holiday and Margate and trips out to country pubs from summer promenades. Yet even so, the gilt had worn off the gingerbread of the tour to a small extent, the holiday spirit tending to fade a little as the men and women had come so suddenly right up against the facts of life behind the Curtain.
On this occasion, Shaw had Virginia MacKinlay as his companion. He’d had a sleepless night, turning over in his mind the implications of her meeting with the uniformed man the night before. He had to find out all he could about that; it was fairly obvious now — short of some sleazy and suddenly-arranged assignation with the security man, which on the face of it was most unlikely — that Miss MacKinlay was no plain tourist. So what was she? Shaw was determined to find that out; and he’d had a private word in Pope’s ear telling the courier he would like to sit next to the girl that day if possible; and Pope, who was an accommodating man, had simply assumed Shaw was anxious to get a line aboard as early in the tour as he could, and had promptly fixed it for him with the utmost discretion…
Across the gangway from Shaw and the girl were Hartley Henderson and a little man named Rumbold, managing clerk for a firm of solicitors in Portsmouth. They made an odd pair, but they were chatting together amicably, and Rumbold was laughing heartily at some story Henderson was telling. Henderson was the kind of man who would get along with almost anybody; he had that rare quality of charm to which, few people would fail to succumb, and he was an easy and entertaining conversationalist. Shaw had a feeling the man had missed his vocation, that he should have been a diplomat like his friend Worth-Butters — and would probably have like to have been. In point of fact, Shaw had gathered, Henderson was a professor of Modern History at a red-brick university in the Midlands.
Half listening now to Henderson, Shaw looked sideways at Virginia. Smiling down at her, he asked, “Feeling tired?”
Her eyes widened and she sat up straighter. “Should I be?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “But when I saw you last night you were going out and it was already latish… but forgive me if I’m talking out of turn.”
“Oh, that.” She looked away for a moment, out of the window at the crowded city streets through which they were passing on the route east. “I just felt like a breath of air, I guess, after all that business with the police — you know? I just took a stroll around town.”
“I see.” Shaw yawned, leaned against the girl as the coach took a sharp turn. “I wondered if you’d decided to sample the night life, that’s all.”