There was no particular hurry but it shouldn't have taken me so long, you get stale after three months without a mission. The rear panel of the lift was mostly a mirror; damp had got at the silvering over the decades and it looked like scum on a pond but the frame had been reinforced, they'd seen to that. The catch was above and to one side, a flush-fitted knot in the wood with a medium spring, and I pressed it and swung the mirror towards me. The door in the wall behind wasn't easy to see although I knew I must be looking straight at it: the vertical edges were concealed by the rear pair of guide rails and there was no handle, lock or keyhole. He would have knocked at it to the rhythm my ear had detected when I'd climbed the stairs, my mind failing to register it consciously because from two floors up the sound had been too faint, muffled by the confines of the stair well. Beethoven's Fifth, three short and one long: the V-sign they'd used in the war, just as they'd used this door when the Resistance had gone to ground.
There was no oblique-mirrored Judas-hole that I could see; I waited for a minute but there seemed to be no kind of warning device that I could have tripped mechanically or electrically. They didn't know I'd exposed the door.
I came away. This was their base and for the moment it was enough that I'd located it. The sensitive area wasn't here: it was in Alinka Ludwiczak's travel pattern because if she were simply a cutout liaising with two or more of the Czyn units she'd become an immediate danger to them if the secret police decided to pull her in. She looked like a cutout because she'd made contact tonight in a cafe instead of coming here: but if she were more than that — if she were the unnamed woman under threat of imminent arrest — they'd pull her in as soon as the time came when the boy in the 5th Precinct Bureau just couldn't take any more.
In either case she could blow half the network and that would expose Merrick.
A new sound had come to the city: the light crunching of chains as they bit into the snow. The sky was clear by midday but the streets were still covered and along Grojecka the heavier traffic had packed the surface into ice. The Fiat had been fitted up by Orbis and before dark I found a slot within fifty yards of the airline office and stayed in the car because it didn't matter which end of the tag-route I left it and for the next forty-five minutes I wouldn't have to freeze to the pavement like the little man with the ear-muffs who'd taken up station near the delicatessen soon after I'd parked. It was the same one as last evening: this was his shift.
There was no twilight: the night was suddenly switched on with the lamps. Across the darkened sky an aircraft winked lower on its approach path into Okecie.
She came on to the pavement at 1707 and began walking north towards the crossing and the tram stop and he kept pace on the other side of the street. I locked the Fiat and used quick short steps over the cobbled ice to close the gap to fifty yards by the time she crossed to the island and then to the east side. A tram had started moaning behind me but she wouldn't be taking this one if she were going straight home: last night she'd caught a No. 16 on the direct route as far as the stadium on the far side of the Poniatowski Bridge but I closed the distance again and so did he because we weren't certain. The pattern was the same until a four-door Warszawa with smoked rear windows crunched over the ruts alongside the kerb and halted abreast of the little man with ear-muffs. He went up to it and spoke through the open window, turning his head just once towards the tram stop where she was waiting.
It looked like a pickup and I was badly placed but there was a chance so I started back for the Fiat and got there half a minute after the No. 16 ground its way past going north. With the engine running I watched him through the windscreen at a hundred and fifty yards until a snow-caked Mercedes slid against the kerb and I had to pull out and slow again to keep him in view. He was climbing into the Warszawa and beyond it the tram was moving off and they followed, not hurrying. So it was a pickup but they didn't want to do it here in Grojecka because there were too many people about and there was no need for the rush tactics they'd had to use at Okecie because she wasn't trying to get on an aeroplane. They'd do it on the far side of the river where the streets were quiet.
Jan Ludwiczak had held out for, nearly three days but now they'd got the names and the heat was on. I couldn't do anything about the others but there was a thin chance here and the Fiat began sliding a bit as I edged out of the rutted camber and shaped up to overhaul. Two risks, one of them calculated: I might clout someone if I struck a bad patch and that would leave me blocked while they kept on going; or they might pick her up when she changed trams on the other side of the stadium instead of waiting till she got off near Zabkowska and started walking to the house where she lived. I didn't believe they'd do that because there was no need:. her own street was the quietest along the whole of the route and they had her address; they'd follow her there only to make sure she didn't change her direction. So it was stomach-think, not brain-think, that was playing on my nerves: the fear of leaving her for so long unprotected.
Discount and concentrate.
In Zawisza Square there was a snarl-up and the civil police were using an M.O. patrol car to drag a buckled Trabant clear of the tramlines and I lost nearly seven minutes and began sweating because by precise reckoning I had to reach the Poniatowski Bridge and leave the Fiat and walk back to the tram stop at the Ulica Solec intersection before the No. 16 arrived there in fifteen minutes from now at 1732.
Add a third risk: if someone else caused a snarl-up worse than this one along the main Jerozolimskie it would halt the tram and the passengers would get out and walk till they picked up a bus farther on and it was then that the U.B. Warszawa might opt to play safe and take her on board. By now there would be directives in force to minimise public scenes because the international spotlight was finding its focus: journalists were already flying in to set up their coverage of the West German talks and the snatch at the airport would have hit all. the major European editions and the Polish delegates must be getting sensitive.
But there was a limit to what could be done to present this city as the capital of a free people when its citizens were burning to turn it into fact.
Discount the third risk. Somewhere near the Ulica Solec intersection we had a rendezvous, she and I.
The snow had piled drifts along Jerozolimskie where wind had blown from the side streets and their humps were turning black from the city's smoke. The Fiat hit one of them obliquely and was carried across the tramlines before I could bring it back: the traffic was thicker here and the going less easy. When Solec came up I checked the timing at six minutes behind schedule and kept on towards the bridge because there was still a chance. Just this side of the river a trailer truck out of the rail freight yards had got stuck in the ruts where the camber was steep so I passed it and pulled in and backed up and left the Fiat there with its rear image shielded from the east-bound traffic.
The red blob of the tram was already in sight along the street's perspective but I couldn't run because in this city a running man was suspect and two uniformed M.O. police were patrolling towards me on this side: I'd passed them in the Fiat and by now they'd be coming up on the tram stop. At thirty yards I saw them beyond the people waiting there but I walked faster now because it was normal and legitimate to hurry to catch a tram. It had begun slowing and I broke into a trot, slipping on the packed snow and waving to the driver. The people who had been waiting were getting on board. The two policemen were now this side of the stop. I slipped again and found my feet and kept going but they didn't move over to give me room.