6: ICE
When the colonel comes round you shove some dandelions in a jam-tin and kick the crapboard under the bed and the corporal gets good marks for keeping a tidy billet so tonight the beer's on him and the same principle operates when the capital of any given state receives a foreign delegation: everyone's so busy brushing the worst of it under the rug that you can hardly walk on it for the lumps.
I was in Yugoslavia when Battista Farinelli made a ten-day visit to Belgrade to steer through the U.C.A. Trade Referendum and although I was between missions I chanced to have access to the security service directive that was passed to all units a week prior to the visit and paragraph three stipulated that firearms would not be used unless the life of an officer were 'manifestly in jeopardy' during the execution of his duties. You can put out as many flags as you like but foreign journalists are going to suspect things are a bit untidy if they can't hear the church bells for bangs.
It's standard practice, otherwise they'd have put one into my legs and although you can keep going if it's lodged in the flesh or the bone it's no go if it hits a major nerve. Her arm went out once and I thought she was off her balance but it was all right and by the time I reached there she'd dragged the door open and was hunched on the passenger's seat with her head against the dashboard.
I heard them behind me, the clump of their boots over the snow. She'd left the door hanging wide open and I used it to break my slide, heaving myself in by the wheel-column and punching about for the key. Someone shouted and the voice was close: we were cutting it fine but that was all right because the nearer they were to the Fiat the farther they were from the Warszawa unless one of them had stayed behind.
One of them had stayed behind: I heard the pinion hit the band just before mine did but it couldn't be helped and there was a bit of traffic coming through from the lights and that might baulk them because they were on the tramlines and in any case a standing start on tramlines isn't the best pitch so we still had a chance. The engine of the 1300 was still well into the working-temperature region and fired without any trouble and I botched in and gave it full gun to get the chains chewing down to the tarmac through the snow: it was the only hope because it would have needed anything up to ten seconds using a sensitive rein and I was aware of him now, very close, nothing visual, just the sixth-sense awareness of a dark milling shape.
The rear end was bedding down and crabbing into the camber and there was no certainty of pulling out of here at alclass="underline" it depended on how the equation worked itself out, weight of the mass, speed of the wheels, friction of the chains against the lubric medium. We could sit here at full throttle and do nothing but make a noise until they came for us, taking their time. I'd missed the armrest twice but got a grip on it now and he finished sideways-on to the door as I dragged it towards me but his weight smashed it open again. The chains had found some purchase and the Fiat would have gone forward if he hadn't been clinging to the door so I used an edge-of-the-hand chop downwards against his wrist and got it right and he fell forwards as his support broke. The whole of the rear was vibrating on the springs as the chain cut at the tarmac and the inertia was killed so fast that we slewed half round as the power took up and sent us away from the camber with the door swinging back of its own accord.
'Mind your head.'
The acceleration was shifting the loads rearward but the steering was still wild and we could hit something. She hooked her gloved hands against the edge of the compartment and rested her head against them. I would have told her she could sit upright now so that she could watch for a crash situation but there was just a chance they'd get confused and forget the directive about firearms. Something tore at the rear panel and the mirror had movement in it but it couldn't be the Warszawa because of the distance the leading car in the traffic coming through from the lights had clouted us and in the mirror its shape swung away.
The driving-door had caught at half lock so I hit it open and slammed it as we pulled away in second with someone flashing us from behind and piling up very close because they hadn't left enough time for the braking conditions but this one wasn't a strike and I shaped for a right-angle turn through Centralny Park and suddenly we were in what seemed forest land, the black trees spectral against the snowscape and the lights of other cars moving like slow lanterns between their trunks.
'You might as well sit upright now. They know you're on board.' We were going fast enough to qualify for a high-impact smash if I lost control. 'Clip your seat belt.' Lights swung into the mirror, 'Is Jan your brother?'
'What did you — '
'Is Jan Ludwiczak your brother?'
'Yes.'
'They've got him in the 5th Precinct Bureau.' There might not be another chance to tell her. 'The 5th.'
'Platy.'
The lights were on full head hoping to dazzle and I tipped the glass a fraction. The surface was much better here: rich-lying snow except for the intersections where the double volume of traffic had packed it harder. Our shadow swerved in front of us most of the time, thrown by the Warszawa.
'Who are you, please?'
Visibility was good because of the albescence and the even spacing of the trees and to the right and left of the crossroads there was nothing in sight so I brought the speed up progressively and cleared the harder-packed area with deadpoint momentum between acceleration and deceleration, obliquely aware that if we survived this day I would for long remember her calm and rather formal question as we and our shadow flew in whiteness among the winter trees, who are you please.
'There's nothing in a name.'
I slowed on the engine for a left-hander at the T-section and lost everything in the next two seconds because of the ice patch that hadn't showed until we were on it. Full-circle gyration with the wheel slack in my hands and the background slowly spinning so that for a moment we were sliding backwards and squinting straight into the glare of their lamps and then bucking suddenly with a rear tyre dragging on the buried kerbstone and sending us to the crown before I used the throttle and got some of the traction back and straightened out and kept going.
'Look, I'm trying to make for Sobieski.’
'Very well.'
At the edge of my vision field her white face was turned to watch me. Aleje Sobieski was the street of the older four-storeyed houses where the lift had a mirror and they thought they were safe there, that nobody knew.
'If I can lose them or smash them up I'll drop you off there but I might have to drop you wherever I can if it gets difficult.' A wash of light flooded the interior again and the prismatic colours glowed on the bevelling of the mirror. 'Operate your belt clip a few times, get used to the release.'
We hadn't lost much ground during the spin: the direction and speed had retained most of their values although we'd gyrated through three hundred and sixty degrees but the Warszawa was closer by thirty yards or so and I didn't like it because if we crashed it ought to happen far enough away from them to give us a chance of getting out on foot. Left into Gwafdzislow with a reliable drift across almost virgin snow and we ran now towards Solec again just this side of the Vistula. I didn't know this area so well as the city centre but we'd be all right as soon as we'd cleared the T-section and crossed left on to the main west-bank highway parallel to the river: I'd studied the street complexes in that area while I'd been hanging about at Heathrow and covered the rest of the central districts since I'd landed here, normal routine orientation. Sobieski wasn't far but some of the one-way streets were going to sticky things up if I didn't watch it.