He nodded, swallowing.
'It gets easier every time. You only had a standard gumshoe this morning and you'd have peeled him off all right if you'd wanted to. Thing is to know they're there.' I folded his report and gave it to him.
'Don't you want it?'
'Hang on to it for the moment' He put it away clumsily, catching a corner aid having to smooth it out and do it again. 'It's on the ball,' I said, 'don't worry. But there's no mention of the U.K. diplomatic support they think they're going to get. Why not?'
His face went blank. 'Support for the revolution?'
And the pattern shifted again and I wasn't ready for it any more than I'd been ready the last time and it took me a couple of seconds to steady up.
'That's right'
'They must be out of their mind. Why should the U.K want to disturb the balance of East-West relations just when there's the hope of — '
'How many people in Czyn have you been in contact with, a rough count?'
'Fifteen or twenty. The Ochota unit near — '
'And none of them have talked about it?'
'Not to me, or I'd have put them right. You remember what Mr Egerton told me about scotching any ideas like — '
'Let it go.'
He shut up and I tried to think of a snap answer because sometimes it'll work if you just let your mind take a jump in the dark before you have to inhibit it with data and do it the hard way, the logical way. Sometimes it works but not always. Not now. The thing was that it would be very important to Czyn if there were even the slightest hope of Great Britain lending support to what they were trying to bring off, and if one unit knew about it they'd pass it on to the whole network, priority flash. And they hadn't.
I finished the hot vodka. It had sped up the circulation and I could feel my fingers again; it had even given a bit of colour to Merrick's face though the effect was macabre, like rouge on a cadaver's cheeks. It'd be interesting to know why he related his bid for freedom from paternal dominance with the Polish people's attempt to get out from under the Muscovite boot to the point where the bare idea of their failing was breaking him up.
'Ile sie nalezy?'
'Dziesiec zfoty.'
Merrick got off the stool. 'Thank you.'
‘Wait five minutes. Be in touch.'
He stopped me halfway to the door. 'Are you going to ask London?'
'Ask them what?'
'To take me out of Warsaw.' His eyes were vulnerable, ready to flinch.
'We'll both be getting out before long. You're here to get info on Czyn so you'll stay till the last train leaves for the camps but I don't give it beyond Tuesday. Till then we'll be treading on egg-shells. If you get caught in a raid don't count on your diplomatic immunity because it doesn't cover your involvement with elements hostile to the state, And don't count on me because you know what I told you in London: I'll throw you to the dogs.'
The street was clear when I went out. The only danger was from the uniformed M.O.s because the secret divisions didn't have anything on me. I turned left, going westwards through the failing light and picking my way over the sooty crusts that still covered most of the pavements.
There hadn't been a thaw to make any slush and they couldn't do much with shovels.
Proposition: an agency was using the U.K. as an infiltration image and promising diplomatic support. Remarks: impossible because no one had any reason to do that. Proposition: the said agency had convinced Polanski and therefore the whole of his unit that the U.K. was in fact allied to their cause and the unit had kept this highly encouraging news to themselves. Remarks: impossible because they would have passed it on. Problem: relate two impossibilities to reality.
Most of the shop windows were lit. There was no real daylight, here: night came at any hour after noon and covered the buildings until late morning. They said that if the wind blew from the south-west there was sunshine here, even in winter, and the forests ringed the city with jewelled ermine. Today the wind sliced through the streets from the north, numbing the bones.
One other question circled my thoughts: it looked as if Czyn was going to have its life-blood drained away before it could spill it at the barricades. If so, why did the Bureau want information on its activities? Why take the pulse of the dying?
Towards the Plac Zawisza I turned right for safety's sake and crossed the railway bridge and went left again along Ulica Vrodz and that was where they got me.
10: FOSTER
It was just bad luck. They came round the corner and we were face to face before I could do anything.
'Dokumenty.'
They were young and their faces weren't quite composed: I think they'd been laughing about something, perhaps girls, and now they'd got their duty to do but the amusement was still in their eyes as they looked at me, waiting. They would check my papers and walk on again. their secretive laughter coming back as they talked.
'I have lost them.'
One of them smiled at my joke. It was almost as good as the one about the girls.
'Dokumenty,' he said, and showed me his police card, tapping it. My Polish had been halting enough to assure them that I couldn't have understood. You do not lose your dokumenty. It is all you are.
'I am trying to find my way to my Embassy, so as to report the matter. The British Embassy. My best way is along Ulica Jerozolimskie, isn't it?'
He put his police card away and tapped the lapel of my coat, his eyes very intent now. The other one, taller, leaned forward to listen. I could smell the damp cloth of their uniforms, the leather of their belts.
'You have no papers?'
'I have lost them. I am on my way to the British Embassy to report it. This is a very serious matter for me.'
Crossroads and two vehicles opposite directions a few people in a queue conditions awkward a clear run fifty yards but their guns: quite often the classic maxims of training duplicate natural instincts but there has to, be brain-think as well as stomach-think and the chances here looked remote and it could be lethal. In the early days it strikes you as clumsy, the idea of making a run for it, inelegant; then you come to know what it's like, their tonelessly barked questions, the clang of a door, the half-lit passages, the grille where they come to watch you, and the moment when you think: my God, I could have run, now it's too late. But you can swing too far the other way and there's a new one to learn: that you mustn't let the thought of interrogation worry you so much that you'll make your run blindly.
'You have no papers?'
'No.'
They leaned close to me, attentively, needing to get it quite right, to believe the incredible, because in a police state if you have no papers you have no face, no name.
You are guilty of not existing.
'Come with us.'
Recheck. No go. The discretion factor was the only advantage, firearms will not be used unless, so forth. The rest was all on the debit side and even if they didn't shoot I could come unstuck and go sliding under one of the vehicles.
'Will you please show me the way to my Embassy?'
The basic rule is to try anything but there's no guarantee it'll work.
They used the telephone-point on the far side of the crossroads and we stamped our feet till the car came, a black Warszawa with M.O. on the side.
It was down in the Ochota precinct, a nineteenth-century building, once a private house but with a portico added on later and the doors doubled. The guard followed us in. Big portrait of the Chairman of the Presidium of the Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respubulik and a smaller steel-engraving of the Chairman of the Council of State of the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, several others, one of them behind the desk, Janusz Moczar, the Minister of the Interior, he was the man I'd want.