Some hot stew and black bread at half past eight, then I’d spent a few minutes facing the possibilities: a full-scale interrogation and the subsequent workout when I wouldn't talk. Solitary detention, sleep and sensory deprivation, stress imposition and the ordering of painful postures, sudden switches of attitude from the accusatory to the benign, physical strictures: and they wouldn't be the worst. Within a few hours you can turn any man into a mad animal, but there's a break-off point because the object is to get information and they can't get it if they've gone too far and wrecked the personality. It's up to that point where the suffix-9 has a value: beyond it you're lost and so are they and they know that, the good ones. And that's your only hope.
But nobody likes the dentist.
Keys again. He was a big man but thin about the face and his eyes were never still, showing their whites like a kicked dog, watchful for a boot.
'Dobrze?'
'Dobrze.'
He took the tin bowl and the spoon away, snatching them suddenly and hurrying out, frightened that someone might have heard him offer a word to me out of his inborn peasant courtesy. His hands should be on a plough as his father's had been: what was he doing here among bricks and bars?
The cold was depressing. Cold is for the dead.
In presenting my compliments I request my immediate release from detention in the Ochota Precinct and your personal guarantee that I shall not in future be molested in any way by members of your police services. Their action in questioning the loss of my regular documentation was fully justified, but I wish to avoid similar incidents during my stay in Warsaw, and therefore require the use of a provisional laissez-passer bearing your own signature and seal, which I shall be prepared to surrender on leaving Poland. I have no wish to jeopardise your high position in the Cabinet at a time when critical pressures menace the stability of government, but since I am in possession o certain facts at present unknown to your political opponents I find myself obliged, in my own interests, to ask your immediate attention to those matters stated above.
A light burned in the corner near the latrine channel, a low-power unshaded bulb that hung within an inch of the wall. Its warmth had been melting the frost on the brickwork since the beginning of the winter and now an icicle clung there, reaching to the concrete floor. In it the bulb glittered, many times reflected, gilding it and giving it the semblance of an ikon, here for the prayers of the wretched.
Working principle: to the cupboard of every man, a skeleton; and the greater the man, the more need to keep its door locked. In the hierarchy of government this truth has no exclusivity but in the state apparatus of the communist world it has particularity because the discipline of the Party credo leaves scant room for human error, and as the comrades labour their precarious way up the pyramid of power, a thumb in the eye and a boot on the neck of their nearest competitors, they know that a slip will send them pitching down again.
Tell any man I know what you've done and he'll think at once of his worst indiscretion: fear and guilt will persuade him automatically that if anything is known then it is the worst that is known. I thus expected that if Comrade Janusz Moczar ever received my message he would send for me. 1 might be bluffing but how could he risk that assumption? Once in the privacy of his office all I could do would be to use his face as a guide, making veiled references to black market manipulation if greed showed there, hinting of mistresses if he looked a lecher.
Comrade Minister, the regulations controlling foreign currency exchange have always, been subject to certain evasions, as I'm sure you'll know, but few people realise that a large part of the profits made by the touts in the big hotels finds it way to the coffers of those empowered to stop these widespread transactions, if they chose.
Comrade Minister, the private affairs of the members of the Polish Cabinet are of course not my. concern, but the world is sometimes inconveniently small, and a certain lady of my acquaintance — here in Warsaw — recently proved herself regrettably unentitled to the confidences extended to her by others. You know how it is, when an exclusive little party lingers on…
Delete where inapplicable.
And use his successive reactions as data feedback to correct my course to the target. It could be done. It has been done. Braithwaite is particularly good at it and whenever he shows up at diplomatic receptions a lot of the guests take out instant insurance by cabling their wives through Interflora. He works, as I would work, by the elementary rule that the surest way of extracting information is to imply that you know it already. Moczar would come out strongly for proof and he wouldn't get it because I hadn't got it but the aim would be to convince him that he couldn't take the "risk by throwing me back into detention: he'd be smart enough to know that even a fragment of evidence against the head of the police power could be worth a lot to the officer responsible for my safekeeping if I took a crack at trading it in for an arranged escape.
The gilded ikon glowed. Perhaps I was dazzled by its light or by the wishful thoughts that some call prayers. But the throw I'd made could get me out of here and into the open where the clock chimed under the sky: it could at least do that, and give me the chance of a break.
Keys.
A different man, older and less scruffy, a professional imprisoner, impersonal, his remote eyes playing directly on my face. I have never been taken out of a cell for abortive execution but I thought I recognised the look he gave me.,Hearing already the predestined crackle of shot among the walls outside he seemed puzzled that I still had movement. Perhaps he looked at us all in that way, his time sense dislocated by monotony.
Two guards. Come with us, they said.
In the room where they'd taken my watch away they now handed it back and I fastened the strap: it was an hour before dawn and the barred window was still dark. There were four of them now, a captain of the M.O. and three sergeants, all in spruce uniform and waiting punctiliously while I fixed the buckle and pulled down the sleeve of my coat.
'Eskorta!'
Two ahead and two behind as we clumped down the passage and through the office and out by the double doors, salute from a rifle butt and the bang of heels. The air smelt of steel and I saw a star caught in a web of cloud high over the skyline. The tang of low-octane exhaust.
They swung the step down at the back and we climbed in: there was no hustling. One of them put a hand on my arm but only to help me up the narrow steep step, as if I were infirm, or to be valued. We sat in formal rows along the side benches and no one spoke; it was all very official and through the heavy mesh on the windows I sometimes caught the reflection of the amber swivelling lamp on the roof of the van. Beneath us the chains flailed softly at the crusted snow.
Raszynska and a right turn into Ulica Koszykowa, the Czechoslovakian Embassy with its windows dark and the flag still frozen into the folds left by the last wind before winter.
North along Chatubinskiego and in silence something smashed and I knew it was hope because this wasn't the way to the Najwyzsza lzba Kontroli where the Minister of the Interior was going to give me the freedom of the city in recognition of the fact that I had him across a barrel. He had me in a mobile cage and I was no better off here than where the light of the yellow bulb was turned to false gold and the mind was moved to false hopes.
‘Wolniej!'