So I hadn't unfortunately done it on Egerton's doorstep. He'd known I'd get the point before long: he'd wanted a particular type of agent to work with Merrick, the type who could do it best by working alone.
The bit of paper that had been waiting for me in the bar bad told me 29 Mica Zawidzka. It was in the Praga district on the cast side of the river and I took up station there in the Fiat an hour before dawn. It had begun snowing and I used the wipers at intervals. She came into the street at half-past eight and turned left, away from me, and for a minute I sat watching the flakes drifting across her dark blue greatcoat, then got out and locked the car and began following.
5: ALINKA
Her name was in small gold letters on the triangular block but I needed to know more about her than that.
'You speak English?'
'Yes I do.'
She was in uniform, the tunic dark blue like the greatcoat had been, a very white collar below the dense black hair. Clear stone-blue eyes that glanced behind me through the windows and flickered back to my face when I spoke.
'All I'd like are the London schedules.'
'B.E.A.?'
'And your own.'
A. Ludwiczak in small gold letters.
'B.E.A. operate direct flights to London on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays… '
I'm never good at telling their age. Say between twenty-five and thirty and divorced, too efficient to have lost it through carelessness and quite a few years to leave a mark as deep as that: married too young then and the break quite recent or the mark would have gone; with this straight nose and decisive mouth she'd probably got it off with one irrevocable tug and hurled it as far as she could. Not Jan, now being worked over in the glare of the lamps in the 5th Precinct Bureau: he was only twenty-one. He would be her brother.
'Alinka!'
'Excuse me please.' She turned away, taking the form from the girl and signing it, swinging her head up as she turned back, her eyes focusing on someone behind me: ten seconds ago there'd been the thump of the door and a wave of cold air from the street. It was a quick questioning glance, the kind I was getting used to seeing: sometimes there was defiance in it and sometimes fear; I'd seen it on my way here in the tram along Jerozolimskie — they'd made a spot-check on identity cards, the snow on their padded shoulders as they pushed between the seats, and at Zawiszy Square they'd taken someone off, his patient Jewish eyes downcast as he passed me, the blue-veined hand uncertain as it touched the rail, as if doubtful of even this much support.
Apparently it was all right because she looked at me again, though it was an effort to remember what I'd been asking. Three other men and a woman, it had said, adding that their arrest was imminent.
'We operate on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays.'
'If I need to know anything else, when do you — '
'We are open until five o'clock.'
The main meal, obiad, was from four onwards and she went home for it soon after five. He just kept on past the house without turning his head and I waited till he'd gone before I unlocked the Fiat and got in. It was normal routine surveillance between where she lived and where she worked — it had been a different man this morning — and I wasn't worried: I'd have been worried if they hadn't put a tag on a relative of someone they were grilling in the 5th Precinct because that would have been inconsistent with the situation and I'd have had to start beating the air for the answer instead of concentrating on the way in to Czyn. She was the way in, the thread in my hand, and I didn't want anything to snap it.
Not long after seven there was a tug on it and I waited outside the place so that I could go in immediately behind a group of youths carrying a hollow-ribbed mongrel they'd found in the snow. It wasn't far from where she lived and my shoes had covered some of the traces left by her own.
She'd been expected and he'd ordered coffee for them both: he sat tall in his chair and his wide confident hands were clasped on the table; now and then he thumped it gently to emphasise a point and she watched him with steady attentive eyes as she tore up, with unconscious efficiency, the blue hand-out advertising the Hungarian troupe at the Cristal-Budapest: the one on my own table was soaking up some coffee the girl had slopped over when she'd brought it but Alinka was tearing hers into small neat squares as she listened to him but refused to accept that it would be all right, that they wouldn't be too rough with Jan because he was young and he'd only been printing the stuff for students anyway and as soon as they could find out where, he was being held they could go there and try to see him for a few minutes.
I could hear nothing from where I sat, on the dais opposite the bar, and my interpretation of their attitudes could be wrong because in the past two days I'd already learned how difficult it was to judge people from their behaviour or even their expression: in this city the winter was not only in the streets and they were living on their nerves, the fierce vitality they'd put into their music and their wars now thrust inwards on themselves; and it was worse because the surface of their daily lives seemed still intact: they could sit here and order coffee and complain if it didn't come, and dance at the Cristal-Budapest and walk with their children in the park on Sundays. All they couldn't do was call their country their own and for these people their country was their soul.
His big confident hands thumped the table again and anger quickened suddenly on her face as if she needed to defend her right to feel afraid, but he understood and his quiet answer softened her eyes and she shut them for a moment, her dark head going down, and only then could he look away from her, hopelessness dulling his profile, his clasped hands falling open to rest slackly beside the heap of torn blue paper. Then suddenly — and although it was difficult to judge these people by their behaviour I sensed that for him it was an almost violent thing to do — his hand swept out and the paper whirled like confetti on to the floor. They didn't speak again until they left. For half a minute I watched them through the window where the neon sign flashed, bathing them in its intermittent light. He wanted to see her home but she shook her head, walking away alone.
I switched and he took me north-west and then west across the Slasko-Dabrowski Bridge, walking fast and with long strides, the snow heaped thickly along the boughs in the public gardens, the frozen jet of a fountain curving in an arch of ice, bells tolling somewhere along the remote reaches of the skyline. Left and then left again under the deathly blue of the lamps in Krakowskie Przedmiescie, a tram with a snow-plough attachment nosing along the rails, sparks sizzling from the boom. He'd gone.
These were older houses, four-storeyed, one of them with dark smoke creeping in a downdraught like hair across a face. The lift was still moving when I went into the hall and stood listening, watching for the counterweight to come into view. Small yellow lamps burned, shining on the snow that had dropped from his shoes. The weight stopped at the first floor so I took the stairs to the third, Beethoven in my head suddenly, the theme rhythm, a trick of the memory.
On the third floor I had to push the time-switch. The doors of the lift were narrow panels, swing-opening outwards and with glazed apertures. I couldn't see any snow on the floor of the passage here.
A cable still quivered in the silence, tapping against one of the guide rails. The fanlights of all four apartments were dark. The floor was composition flint with a buffed surface and even after climbing the stairs my shoes had left moisture but his hadn't. I checked the floor above and the one below and came back; he'd left no traces. In the lift was a puddle fringed with slush where he'd been standing.