Cover designer’s note

Wishing to continue the notion of Bernard Samson spying through windows or doors, I took the author’s very good suggestion of having the book’s protagonist peering through a glass public house window. I found a perfect example among my collection of photographs that I had taken of windows, this one from a London pub. Combined with the title of this book, Hope, it conjures up the saying “last chance saloon”, in which there is always hope, even for an ageing spy who is on the ropes in both his career and his love life!

For the back cover, I placed a china souvenir of London’s Tower Bridge on a map of divided Berlin and straddled it across the Berlin Wall, which I likened to the River Thames. As readers of this series will by now know, London has exported something – or rather someone – more precious than a souvenir to the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall, and our Bernard still lives in hope of returning them to the West.

At the heart of every one of the nine books in this triple trilogy is Bernard Samson, so I wanted to come up with a neat way of visually linking them all. When the reader has collected all nine books and displays them together in sequential order, the books’ spines will spell out Samson’s name in the form of a blackmail note made up of airline baggage tags. The tags were drawn from my personal collection, and are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.

Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

Len Deighton
Hope

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2011

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 1995

HOPE. Copyright © Len Deighton 1995.

Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2011.

Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2011. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9780007395750

EBook Edition © MAY 2011 ISBN: 9780007395798

Version: 2017-08-10

Contents

Cover designer’s note

Copyright

Introduction

1

A caller who wakes you in the small dark silent…

2

September is the time many visitors choose to visit Poland.

3

Dicky was silent for much of the time we were…

4

The following day brought no further news of either George…

5

‘You haven’t told me what it’s like in Warsaw these…

6

‘What a lovely idea – to take the children to see…

7

‘Your wife loathes me,’ said Gloria. ‘She won’t be happy…

8

‘Hold on, Bernard, hold on. I’m just a simple old…

9

After my bruising encounter with Theo’s son I went to…

10

I awoke in the middle of the night, bathed in…

11

What Lisl called ‘the flashy new American hotel’ was really…

12

Now Poland was truly in the grip of winter. My…

13

‘Don’t do this to me, Bernard,’ said George.

About the Author

Other Books by Len Deighton

About the Publisher

Introduction

In 1945 Europe was devastated. Food was scarce and bitter hatred was in the air. Parts of France, Belgium, Holland and the western half of Germany was battered but the vast area of land over which the Red Army had advanced was now largely rubble, a barren wasteland where millions of ‘displaced persons’, undernourished, infirm and undocumented, wandered in confusion.

Stalin ordered his Red Army to cling tight to all their gains. His promises made to Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt, that the people of Eastern Europe would be allowed free elections, were ignored. The nations of Eastern Europe became satellites of Russia, ruled by expatriates who had been tutored in Moscow. Red Army soldiers complete with tanks and artillery remained in evidence everywhere.

With American generosity, programs such as the ‘Marshall Plan’ slowly revived the countries of Western Europe. But American hopes for a revised and truly democratic Russian political system faded as Moscow exerted its brutal power at home and abroad. An Iron Curtain had come down between the nations of the West and those in the East, and there was no reconciliation. Russia’s military occupation zone was the eastern half of Germany and its heartless rule was fuelled by memories of the barbaric German violation of the Russian Motherland.

In the summer of 1961 the communists built a wall to surround the Western Sector of Berlin. It was, said Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian Premier, ‘a barrier to Western Imperialism’. Anyone in the East trying to take a closer look at Western Imperialism was likely to be shot. Hundreds were killed in attempts to get to the West and the East German border guards were given commendations and bonus payments for killing escapers.

Situated amid this ocean of repression called the Soviet Zone of Germany there was a small island of capitalism. This was the sector of Berlin that had been assigned to British, American and French control. These three sectors of Berlin covered about 185 square miles and about two million people lived there. Technically it remained a ‘military occupation zone’ where soldiers still made all the important decisions. To get from this British-American-French ‘island’ to ‘West Germany’ traffic was confined to three specific highways, all of them over 100 miles long. Wandering off the approved roads could lead to difficulties. On a journey from Prague to Berlin, I was detained in a Russian Army barrack complex until, in the small hours of morning and with a help of an amiable Russian colonel and my bottle of duty-free cognac, I was released to continue my journey.

Any writer who pins his story to fixed dates had better hold on to his hat for it is likely to be a rough and rocky ride. My whole Bernard Samson series was based upon the belief that the Berlin Wall would fall before the end of the century. There were many times when I went to bed convinced that this assumption had been a reckless gamble, and there were many people asking me where the plot was going. Sometimes I thought I heard a measure of Schadenfreude. More than one expert advised me to forget the Wall, tear my plan down, and radically change its direction. I didn’t yield to my fears. I stuck to my lonely task and to the original scenario and eventually was vindicated.

It is unlikely that the true and complete story of the collapse of the Wall and the whole communist system will ever be told. But the overall pattern is now fairly clear and the signs were there long before the newspapers and the TV camera crews arrived for the finale. The election of Karol Wojtyla to be John Paul II, a Polish Pope, changed the world’s history. Here was a fearless man not afraid to declare that communism was a vile and repressive tyranny that denied the freedom that everyone deserved. His outspoken challenge, unlike those of most politicians, did not vary from time to time and place to place, no matter how unwelcome it was to some of his audiences. His words frightened the dictators, disturbed the apparatchiks, and made Poland’s Catholics into a network of frontline activists. The Polish-American Catholics of Chicago provided a great deal of the money; the CIA added more and worked with the Vatican to route it to Poland’s anti-communist networks. George Kosinski personifies the muddled, almost schizophrenic, mindset of many Poles. His fears and double-dealing provide us with a glimpse of the struggle, and Hope depicts the vital days when the USSR was deciding whether to move with military force against its recalcitrant ally or hold still and hope for the best. Warsaw was deeply in debt to Western banks and Moscow was in no position to pick up the bill. Bernard Samson is in Poland and near the frontier when the Soviet Union was poised and ready to occupy its politically unreliable but strategically essential neighbour. The events depicted here reflect the tension as the Poles waited for the tanks to come rolling westwards.

As Poland’s communist regime was being undermined by the bravery of the Polish Pope, the Lutheran Church in communist Germany became more and more important in the struggle against Moscow. In Hope Bernard’s journeys to the East record the fierce repressive measures the German regime resorted to when it became the final outpost of the communist empire.

Tying a story to events is not something to be undertaken lightly. But having a timescale for the stories provided some benefits. Hope was bountiful: with the astonishing Hurricane that tore a path through London, minor asides such as the Swiss elections and the devastating collapse of the world’s stock exchanges. At the end of the year the Pope and Gorbachev met in the Vatican. What more eventful background could any writer wish for?

I was lucky to find so much of my story in Poland where communism collapsed so suddenly. The attractions of Warsaw are there for anyone to inspect but I was lucky to find the hideous Rozyckiego market so perfect for my purpose. Explorations into the countryside brought me to the Kosinki’s grand old family mansion, a place even more mysterious than I had envisioned. Both places are faithfully described here in the book; there was no need to change a thing. As with many of the research trips I have made for my books I found it very beneficial to return to the location at the season it was to be depicted in my story. The Polish countryside in winter is not to be found in the tourist brochures but despite the discomfort and inconvenience I liked this strange fairy-tale mix of dreams and nightmares.

Every writer has different priorities, which makes reading fiction so rewarding. After the basic idea, my own priority has always been dialogue. From dialogue characterization must follow and from characterization comes motivation and plot. For all of the above reasons I try to inform the reader by dialogue and, when I read and reread the drafts of my books prior to publication, I search for ways of transforming authorial comment and description into dialogue.

At a creative writing school in California the students read (and enjoyed) studying the Bernard Samson books in reverse order. They noted and analyzed the changing character of Bernard and were kind enough to show me some of the results. By assigning various specific fictional characters to student teams the class unravelled the complex weave of the plot. Even without such close examination most readers immediately see that Bernard – without telling outright lies – is inclined to bend the truth to his own advantage.

But dialogue and characterization is more important than truth and plot. The purpose of characterization is to demonstrate the changes that take place as the story proceeds. I consider this process vital. Whether the time span is short as it is in Bomber (when there is only 24 hours from cover to cover) or long as in Winter (a family story lasting half a century) the characters must be seen to change, and that means to change in response to the events of the story. The Bernard Samson books take the characters through several years and the man we join in the first chapter of this book, Hope, is older, wiser and more psychologically battered than the man in the first book, Berlin Game. But Bernard, whatever his shortcomings, is always a loyal friend to us.

Len Deighton, 2011

1

Mayfair, London. October 1987.

A caller who wakes you in the small dark silent hours is unlikely to be a bringer of good news.

When the buzzer sounded a second time I reluctantly climbed out of bed. I was at home alone. My wife was at her parents’ with our children.

‘Kosinski?’

‘No,’ I said.

The overhead light of the hallway shone down upon a thin, haggard man in a short waterproof flight-jacket and a navy-blue knitted hat. In one hand he was carrying a cheap briefcase of the sort that every office worker in Eastern Europe flaunts as a status symbol. The front of his denim shirt was bloody and so was his stubbly face, and the outstretched hand in which he held the key to my apartment. ‘No,’ I said again.

‘Please help me,’ he said. I guessed his command of English was limited. I couldn’t place the accent but his voice was muffled and distorted by the loss of some teeth. That he’d been badly hurt was evident from his hunched posture and the expression on his face.

I opened the door. As he tottered in he rested his weight against me, as if he’d expended every last atom of energy in getting to the doorbell and pressing it.

He only got a few more steps before twisting round to slump on to the low hall table. There was blood everywhere now. He must have read my mind for he said: ‘No. No blood on the stairs.’

He’d taken the stairs rather than the lift. It was the choice of experienced fugitives. Lifts in the small hours make the sort of sound that wakens janitors and arouses security men. ‘Kosinski,’ he said anxiously. ‘Who are you? This is Kosinski’s place.’ If he had been a bit stronger he might have been angry.

‘I’m just a friendly burglar,’ I explained.

I got him back on his feet and dragged him to the bathroom and to the tub. He rolled over the edge of it until he was full length in the empty bath. It was better that he bled there. ‘I’m Kosinski’s partner,’ he said.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Sure.’ It was a preposterous claim.

I got his jacket off and pushed him flat to open his shirt. I could see no arterial bleeding and most of the blood was in that tacky congealed state. There were a dozen or more deep cuts on his hands and arms where he had deflected the attack, but it was the small stab wounds on his body that were the life-threatening ones. Under his clothes he was wearing a moneybelt. It had saved him from the initial attack. It wasn’t the sort of belt worn by tourists and backpackers, but the heavy-duty type used by professional smugglers. Almost six inches wide, it was made of strong canvas that from many years of use was now frayed and stained and bleached to a light grey colour. The whole belt was constructed of pockets that would hold ingots of the size and shape of small chocolate bars. Now it was entirely empty. Loaded it would have weighed a ton, for which reason there were two straps that went over the shoulders. It was one of these shoulder straps that had no doubt saved this man’s life, for there was a fresh and bloody cut in it. A knife-thrust had narrowly missed the place where a twisted blade floods the lungs with blood and brings death within sixty seconds.

‘Just a scratch,’ I said. He smiled. He knew how bad it was.

To my astonishment George Kosinski, my brother-in-law, arrived five minutes later. George who had left England never to return was back! I suppose he’d been trying to head off my visitor, for he showed little surprise to find him there. George was nearly forty years old, his wavy hair greying at the temples. He took off his glasses. ‘I came by cab, Bernard. A car will arrive any minute and I’ll take this fellow off your hands.’ He said it as casually as if he were the owner of a limousine service. Then he took out a handkerchief and began rubbing the condensation from his thick-rimmed glasses.

‘He loses consciousness and then comes back to life,’ I said. ‘He urgently needs attention. He’s lost a lot of blood; he could die any time.’

‘And you don’t want him to die here,’ said George, putting his glasses on and looking at the comatose man in the bathtub. His eyes were tightly closed and his breathing slow, and with the sort of snoring noise that sometimes denotes impending death. George looked at me and said: ‘I’m taking him to a Polish doctor in Kensington. He’s expected there. He’ll relax and trust someone who can talk his language.’ George moved into the drawing-room, as if he didn’t want to think about the man expiring in my bathtub.

‘It’s internal bleeding, George. I think he’s dying.’

This prognosis showed no effect on George. He went to the window and looked down at the street as if hoping to see the car arrive. I think it was done to reassure me rather than because he really thought he’d see the promised car. George was Polish by extraction and a Londoner by birth. He was not handsome or charming but he was direct in manner and unstinting in his generosity. Like most self-made men he was intuitive, and like most rich ones, cynical. Many of the men he did deals with, and the ones who sat alongside him on his charity committees, were Poles, or considered themselves as such. George went out of his way to be sociable with Poles, but he was a man of many moods. Where his supporters found a cheerful self-confidence others encountered a stubborn ego. And when his mask slipped a little, his energetic impatience could become raging bad temper.

Now I watched him marching backwards and forwards and around the room, flapping the long vicuna overcoat, or cracking the bones of his knuckles, and displaying that kind of restless energy that some claim is part of the process of reasoning. His face was clenched in anger. You wouldn’t have recognized him as a man grieving for his desperately loved wife. Neither would you have thought that this apartment had been until recently his own home, for he blundered against the chairs, kicked his polished brogues at the carpets and fumed like a teetotaller held on a drunk-driving charge.

‘He had nowhere to go,’ said George.

‘You’re wrong,’ I said, waving the key at him. ‘He had a key to this apartment. He tried the doorbell only to discover if it was clear.’

George scowled. ‘I thought I’d called in all the keys. But perhaps you’d better have the locks changed, just to be on the safe side.’ He lifted his eyes quickly, caught the full force of the annoyance on my face and added: ‘They can’t just walk the streets, Bernard.’

‘Why not? Because they’re illegals? Because they don’t have papers or passports or visas? Is that what you mean?’ I put the key in my pocket and resolved to change the locks just as soon as I could get someone along here to do it. ‘Damn you, George, don’t you have any consideration for me or Fiona? She’ll be furious if she hears about this.’

‘Must you tell her?’

‘She’ll see the blood on the mat in the hall.’

‘I’ll send someone round to clean up.’

‘I’m the world’s foremost expert on cleaning blood marks off the floor,’ I said.

‘Then get a new mat,’ he said with exasperation, as if I was capriciously making problems for him.

‘I can’t think of anything more likely to excite Fiona’s suspicions than me going out to buy a new mat.’

‘So confide in her. Ask her to keep it to herself.’

‘It wouldn’t be fair to ask her. Fiona is big brass in the Department nowadays. And anyway she wouldn’t agree. She’d report it. She prefers doing things by the book, that’s how she got to the top.’

George stopped pacing and went to take a brief look at the man in the bath, who was even paler than before, although his breathing was marginally easier. ‘Don’t make problems for me, Bernard,’ he said in an offhand manner that angered me.

‘My employers…’ I stopped, counted to ten and started again. More calmly I said: ‘The sort of people who run the Secret Service have old-fashioned ideas about East European escapers having the doorkey to their employees’ homes.’

George put on his conciliatory hat. ‘I can see that. It was a terrible mistake. I’m truly sorry, Bernard.’ He patted my shoulder. ‘That means you will have to report it, eh?’

‘You’re playing with fire, George.’ I wondered if perhaps the death of his wife, Tessa, had turned his brain.

‘It’s simply that I’m not supposed to be in this jurisdiction: tax-wise. I’m in the process of losing residence. Just putting it around that I’ve been in England could cause me a lot of trouble, Bernard.’

I noted the words – jurisdiction, tax-wise. Only men like George had a call on words like that. ‘I know what you’re doing, George. You’re asking some of these roughnecks to investigate the death of your wife. That could lead to trouble.’

‘They are Poles – my people. I have to do what I can for them.’ His claim sounded hollow when pitched in that unmistakable East London accent.

‘These people can’t bring her back, George. No one can.’

‘Stop preaching at me, Bernard, please.’

‘Listen, George,’ I said, ‘your friend next door isn’t just a run-of-the-mill victim of a street mugging or a fracas in a pub. He was attacked by a professional killer. Whoever came after him was aiming his blade for an artery and knew exactly where to find the place he wanted. Only the canvas moneybelt saved him, and that was probably because it was twisted across his body at the time. I think he’s dying. He should be in an intensive-care ward, not on his way to a cosy old family doctor in Kensington. Believe me, these are rough playmates. Next time it could be you.’

I had rather hoped that this revelation might bring George to his senses, but he seemed quite unperturbed. ‘Many of these poor wretches are on the run, Bernard,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Nothing in the belt, was there? And yes, you’re right. It’s inevitable that the regime infiltrates their own spies. Black-market gangsters and other violent riffraff use our escape line. We screen them all but it takes time. This one was doubly unlucky; a really nice youngster, he wanted to help. If you could see some of the deserving cases. The youngsters… It’s heart-breaking.’

‘I can’t tell you how to run your life, George. I know you’ve always contributed generously to Polish funds and good causes for these dissidents and political refugees. But the communist government in Warsaw sees such overseas organizations as subversive. You must know that. And there is a big chance that you are being exploited by political elements without understanding what you’re doing.’

George rubbed his face. ‘He’s hurt bad, you think?’ He stroked the telephone.

‘Yes, George, bad.’

His face stiffened and he picked up the phone and called some unknown person, presumably to hurry things along. When there was no answer to his call he looked at me and said: ‘This won’t happen again, Bernard. I promise you that.’ He waited only a few minutes before trying his number again and got the busy signal. He crashed the phone down with such force that it broke. I had been crashing phones down into their cradles for years but I’d never broken one. Was it a measure of his anger, his grief, his embarrassment, or something else? He held up his hands in supplication, looked at me and smiled.

I sighed. No man chooses his brother-in-law. They are strangers society thrusts upon us to test the limits of our compassion and forbearance. I was lucky, I liked my brother-in-law; more perhaps than he liked me. That was the trouble; I liked George.

‘Look, George,’ I said in one final attempt to make him see sense. ‘To you it’s obvious that you’re not an enemy agent – just a well-meaning philanthropist – but don’t rely upon others being so perceptive. The sort of people I work for think that there is no smoke without fire. Cool it. Or you are likely to find a fire-extinguisher up your arse.’

‘I live in Switzerland,’ said George.

‘So a Swiss fire-extinguisher.’

‘I told you I’m sorry, Bernard. You know I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world. I can’t blame you for being angry. In your place I would be angry too.’ Both his arms were clasped round the cheap briefcase as if it was a baby. I suddenly guessed that it was stuffed with money; money that had come from the exchange of the gold.

At that I gave up. There are some people who won’t learn by good advice, only by experience. George Kosinski was that sort of person.

Soon after that a man I recognized as George’s driver and handyman arrived. He brought a car rug to wrap around the injured man and lifted him with effortless ease. George watched as if it was his own sick child. Perhaps it was pain that caused the injured man’s eyes to flicker. His lips moved but he didn’t speak. Then he was carried down to the car.

‘I’m sorry, Bernard,’ said George, standing at the door as if trying to be contrite. ‘If you have to report it, you have to. I understand. You can’t risk your job.’

I cleaned the mat as well as possible, got rid of the worst marks in the bathroom and soaked a bloody towel in cold water before sending it to the laundry. In my usual infantile fashion, I decided to wait and see if Fiona noticed any of the marks. As a way of making an important decision it was about as good as spinning a coin in the air, but Fiona had eyes for little beyond the mountains of work she brought home every evening, so I didn’t mention my uninvited visitors to anyone. But my hopes that George and his antics were finished and forgotten did not last beyond the following week, when I returned from a meeting and found a message on my desk summoning me to the presence of my boss Dicky Cruyer, newly appointed European Controller.

I opened the office door. Dicky was standing behind his desk, twisting a white starched handkerchief tight around his wounded fingers, while half a dozen tiny drips of blood patterned the report he had brought back from his meeting.

There was no need for him to explain. I’d been on the top floor and heard the sudden snarling and baritone growls. The only beast permitted through the guarded front entrance of London Central was the Director-General’s venerable black Labrador, and it only came when accompanied by its master.

‘Berne,’ said Dicky, indicating the papers freshly arrived in his tray. ‘The Berne office again.’

I put on a blank expression. ‘Berne?’ I said. ‘Berne, Switzerland?’

‘Don’t act the bloody innocent, Bernard. Your brother-in-law lives in Switzerland, doesn’t he?’ Dicky was trembling. His sanguinary encounter with the Director-General and his canine companion had left him wounded in both body and spirit. It made me wonder what condition the other two were in.

‘I’ve never denied it,’ I said.

The door to the adjoining office opened. Jennifer, the youngest, most devoted and attentive of Dicky’s female assistants, put her head round the door and said: ‘Shall I get antiseptic from the first-aid box, Mr Cruyer?’

‘No,’ said Dicky in a stagy whisper over his shoulder, vexed that word of his misfortune had spread so quickly. ‘Well?’ he said, turning to me again.

I shrugged. ‘We all have to live somewhere.’

‘Four Stasi agents pass through in seven days? Are you telling me that’s just a coincidence?’ A pensive pause. ‘They went to see your brother-in-law in Zurich.’

‘How do you know where they went?’

‘They all went to Zurich. It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know what you’re implying,’ I said. ‘If the Stasi want to talk to George Kosinski they don’t have to send four men to Zurich; roughnecks that even our pen-pushers in Berne can recognize. I mean, it’s a bit high-profile, isn’t it?’

Dicky looked round to see if Jennifer was still standing in the doorway looking worried. She was. ‘Very well, then,’ he said, sitting down suddenly as if surrendering to his pain. ‘Get the antiseptic.’ The door closed and, as he tightened the handkerchief round his fingers, he noticed the bloodstains on his papers.

‘You should have an anti-tetanus shot,’ I advised. ‘That dog is full of fleas and mange.’

Dicky said: ‘Never mind the dog. Let’s keep to the business in hand. Your brother-in-law is in contact with East German intelligence, and I’m going over there to face him with it.’

‘When?’

‘This weekend. And you are coming with me.’

‘I have to finish all that material you gave me yesterday. You said the D-G wanted the report on his desk on Monday.’

Dicky eyed me suspiciously. We both knew that he recklessly used the name of the Director-General when he wanted work done hurriedly or late at night. ‘He’s changed his mind about the report. He told me to take you to Switzerland with me.’

Now it was possible to see a little deeper into Dicky’s state of mind. The questions he had just put to me were questions he’d failed to answer to the D-G’s satisfaction. The Director had then told Dicky to take me along with him, and it was that that had dented Dicky’s ego. The nip from the dog was extracurricular. ‘Because it’s your brother-in-law,’ he added, lest I began to think myself indispensable.

Using his uninjured hand Dicky picked up his phone and called Fiona, who worked in the next office. ‘Fiona, darling,’ he said in his jokey drawl. ‘Hubby is with me. Could you join us for a moment?’

I went and looked out of the window and tried to forget I had a crackpot brother-in-law in whom Dicky was taking a sudden and unsympathetic interest. Summer had passed; we had winter to endure before it came again but this was a glorious golden day, and from this top-floor room I could see across the London basin to the high ground at Hampstead. The clouds, gauzy and grey like a bundle of discarded bandages, were fixed to the ground by shiny brass pins pretending to be sunbeams.

My wife came in, her face darkened with the stern expression that I’d learned to recognize as one she wore when wrenched away from something that needed uninterrupted concentration. Fiona’s work load had become the talk of the top floor. And she handled the political decisions with consummate skill. But I saw in her eyes that bright gleam a light bulb provides just before going ping.

‘Yes, Dicky?’ she said.

‘I’m enticing your hubby away for a brief fling in Zurich, Fiona my dearest. We must leave Sunday morning. Can you endure a weekend without him?’

Fiona looked at me sternly. I winked at her but she didn’t react. ‘Must he go?’ she said.

‘Duty calls,’ said Dicky.

‘What did you do to your hand, Dicky?’

As if in response, Jennifer arrived with antiseptic, cotton wool and a packet of Band-Aids. Dicky held his hand out like some potentate accepting a vow of fidelity. Jennifer crouched and began work on his wound.

‘The children were coming home on Sunday,’ Fiona told Dicky. ‘But if Bernard is going to be on a trip, I’ll lock myself away and work on those wretched figures you need for the Minister.’

‘Splendid,’ said Dicky. ‘Ouch, that hurts,’ he told Jennifer.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Cruyer.’

To me Fiona said: ‘Daddy suggests keeping the children with him a little longer.’ Perhaps she saw the quizzical look in my face for, in explanation, she added: ‘I phoned them this morning. It’s their wedding anniversary.’

‘We’ll talk about it,’ I said.

‘I’ve told Daddy to reserve places for them at the school next term, just in case.’ She clasped her hands together as if praying that I would not explode. ‘If we lose the deposit, so be it.’

For a moment I was speechless. Her father was doing everything he could to keep my children with him, and I wanted them home with us.

Dicky, feeling left out of this conversation, said: ‘Has Daphne been in touch, by any chance?’

This question about his wife was addressed to Fiona, who looked at him and said: ‘Not since I called and thanked her for that divine dinner party.’

‘I just wondered,’ said Dicky lamely. With Fiona looking at him and waiting for more, he added: ‘Daph’s been a bit low lately; and there are no friends like old friends. I told her that.’

‘Shall I call her?’

‘No,’ said Dicky hurriedly. ‘She’ll be all right. I think she’s going through the change of life.’

Fiona grinned. ‘You say that every time you have a tiff with her, Dicky.’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Dicky crossly. ‘Daphne needs counselling. She’s making life damned difficult right now. And with all the work piled up here I don’t need any distractions.’

‘No,’ said Fiona, backing down and becoming the loyal assistant. Now that Dicky had manoeuvred himself into being the European Controller, while still holding on to the German Desk, no one in the Department was safe from his whims and fancies.

Dicky said: ‘Work is the best medicine. I’ve always been a workaholic; it’s too late to change now.’

Fiona nodded and I looked out of the window. There was really no way to respond to this amazing claim by the Rip Van Winkle of London Central, and if I’d caught her eye we might both have rolled around on the floor with merriment.

We stayed at home that evening, eating dinner I’d fetched from a Chinese take-away. Fulham was too far to go for shrivelled duck and plastic pancakes but Fiona had read about it in a magazine at the hairdresser’s. That restaurant critic must have led the dullest of lives to have found the black bean spare-ribs ‘memorable’. The bill might have proved even more memorable for him, had restaurant critics been given bills.

‘You don’t like it?’ Fiona said.

‘I’m full.’

‘You’ve eaten hardly anything.’

‘I’m thinking about my trip to Zurich.’

‘It won’t be so bad.’

‘With Dicky?’

‘Dicky depends upon you, he really does,’ she said, her feminine reasoning making her think that this dependence would encourage me to overlook his faults for the sake of the Department.

‘No more rice, no more fish and no more pancakes,’ I said as she pushed the serving plates towards me. ‘And certainly no more spare-ribs.’

Fiona switched on the TV to catch the evening news. There was a discussion between four people best known for their availability to appear on TV discussion programmes. A college professor was holding forth on the latest news from Poland. ‘…Historically the Poles lack a consciousness of their own position in the European dimension. For hundreds of years they have acted out a totemic role that they lack the capacity to sustain. Now I think the Poles are about to get a rude awakening.’ The professor touched his beard reflectively. ‘They have pushed and provoked the Soviet Union… The Warsaw Pact autumn exercises are taking place along the border. Any time now the Russian tanks will roll across it.’

‘Literally?’ asked the TV anchor man.

‘It is time the West acted,’ said a woman with a Polish Solidarity badge pinned to her Chanel suit.

‘Yes, literally,’ said the professor with that determined solemnity with which those past military age discuss war. ‘The Soviets will use it as a way of cautioning the hotheads in the Baltic States. We must make it absolutely clear to Chairman Gorbachev that any action, I do mean any action, he takes against the Poles will not be permitted to provoke a major East–West conflict.’

‘Who will rid me of these troublesome Poles? Is that how the Americans see it?’ the Solidarity woman asked bitterly. ‘Best abandon the Poles to their fate?’

‘When?’ said the TV anchor man. Already the camera was tracking back to show that the programme was ending. A gigantic Polish eagle of polystyrene on a red and white flag formed the backdrop to the studio.

‘When the winter hardens the ground enough for their modern heavy armour to go in,’ answered the professor, who clearly knew that a note of terror heard on the box in the evening was a newspaper headline by morning. ‘They’ll crush the Poles in forty-eight hours. The Russian army has one or two special Spetsnaz brigades that have been trained to suppress unruly satellites. One of them, stationed at Maryinagorko in the Byelorussian Military District, was put on alert two days ago. Yes, Polish blood will flow. But quite frankly, if a few thousand Polish casualties are the price we pay to avoid World War Three, we must thank our lucky stars and pay up.’

Loud stirring music increased in volume to eventually drown his voice and, while the panel sat in silhouette, a roller provided details of about one hundred and fifty people who had worked on this thirty-minute unscripted discussion programme.

The end roller was still going when the phone rang. It was my son Billy calling from my father-in-law’s home where he was staying. ‘Dad? Is that you, Dad? Did Mum tell you about the weekend?’

‘What about the weekend?’ I saw Fiona frowning as she watched me.

‘It’s going to be super. Grandad is taking us to France,’ said Billy, almost bursting with excitement. ‘To France! Just for one night. A private plane to Dinard. Can we go, Dad? Say yes, Dad. Please.’

‘Of course you can, Billy. Is Sally keen to go?’

‘Of course she is,’ said Billy, as if the question was absurd. ‘We are going to stay in a château.’

‘I’ll see you the following weekend then,’ I said as cheerfully as I could manage. ‘And you can tell me all about it.’

‘Grandad’s bought a video camera. He’s going to take pictures of us. You’ll be able to see us. On the TV!’

‘That’s wonderful,’ I said.

‘He’s already taken videos of his best horses. Of course I’d rather be with you, Dad,’ said Billy, desperately trying to mend his fences. Perhaps he heard the disappointment.

‘All the world’s a video,’ I improvised. ‘And all the men and women merely directors. They have their zooms and their pans, and one man in his time plays back the results too many times. Is Sally there?’

‘That’s a good joke,’ said Billy with measured reserve. ‘Sally’s in bed. Grandad is letting me stay up to see the TV news.’ Fiona had quietened our TV, but over the phone from Grandad’s I could hear the orchestrated fanfares and drumrolls that introduce the TV news bulletins; a presentational style that Dr Goebbels created for the Nazis. I visualized Grandad fingering the volume control and urging our conversation to a close.

‘Sleep well, Billy. Give my love to Sally. And to Grandad and Grandma.’ I held up the phone, offering it, but Fiona shook her head. ‘And love from Mummy too,’ I said. Then I hung up.

‘It’s not my doing,’ said Fiona defensively.

‘Who said it was?’

‘I can see it on your face.’

‘Why can’t your father ask me?’

‘It will be lovely for them,’ said Fiona. ‘And anyway you couldn’t have gone on Sunday.’

‘I could have gone on Saturday.’ The silent TV pictures changed rapidly as the news flashed quickly from one calamity to another.

‘It wasn’t my idea,’ she snapped.

‘I don’t see why I should be the focus of your anger,’ I said mildly. ‘I’m the victim.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re always the victim, Bernard. That’s what makes you so hard to live with.’

‘What then?’

She got up and said: ‘Let’s not argue, darling. I love the children just as much as you do. Don’t keep putting me in the middle.’

‘But why didn’t you tell me?’ I said.

‘Daddy is so worried. The stock-market has become unpredictable, he says. He doesn’t know what he’ll be worth next week.’

‘For him that’s new? For me it’s always been like that.’

This aggravated her. ‘With you on one side and my father on the other, sometimes I just want to scream.’

‘Scream away,’ I said.

‘I’m tired. I’ll clean my teeth.’ She rose to her feet and put everything she had into a smile. ‘Tomorrow we’ll have lunch, and fight all you want.’

‘Lovely! And I’ll arm-wrestle the waiter to settle the bill,’ I said. ‘Switch off that bloody TV, will you?’

She switched it off and went to bed leaving the desolation of our meal still on the table. Sitting there staring at the blank screen of the TV I found myself simmering with anger at the way my father-in-law was holding on to my children. But was Fiona fit and well enough to be a proper mother to them? Perhaps Fiona would remain incapable of looking after them. Perhaps she knew that. And perhaps my awful father-in-law knew it. Perhaps I was the only one who couldn’t see the tragic situation for what it really was.

I woke up in the middle of the night. The windows shook and the wind was howling and screaming as I’d never heard it shriek before in England. It was like a nightmare from which there was no escape, and I was an expert in nightmares. From somewhere down below in the street I heard a loud crash of glass and then another and another, resounding like surf upon a rocky shore.

‘My God!’ said Fiona sleepily. ‘What on earth…?’

I switched on the bedside light but there was no electricity. I heard clicking as Fiona tried her light-switch too. The electric bedside clock was dark. I threw back the bedclothes and, stepping carefully in the darkness, went to the window. The street lighting had failed and everything was gloomy. Two police cars were stopped close together behind a fire engine, and a group of men were conferring outside the smashed windows of the bank on the corner. They ducked their heads as a great roar of wind brought the sound of more breaking glass, and debris – newspapers and the lids of rubbish bins – came bowling along the street. I heard the distant sirens of police cars and fire engines going down Park Lane at high speed.

‘Phone the office,’ I told Fiona, handing her the flashlight that I keep in the first-aid box. ‘Use the Night Duty Officer’s direct line. Ask them what the hell’s going on. I’ll try to see what’s happening in the street.’

With the window open I could lean out and look along the street. The garbage bins had been blown over, shop-windows broken, and merchandise of all kinds was distributed everywhere: high-fashion shoes mixed with groceries and rubbish, with fragments of paper and packets being whirled high into the air by the wind. There were tree branches too: thousands of twigs as well as huge boughs of leafy timber that must have flown over the rooftops from the park. Some of them were heaving convulsively in the continuing windstorm, like exhausted birds resting after a long flight. Fragmented glass was dashed across the road, glittering like diamonds in the beams of the policemen’s flashlights.

I could hear Fiona moving around in the kitchen, then the gush of running water and the plop of igniting gas as she boiled a kettle for tea.

When she came back into the room she came to the window, putting a hand on my arm as she peered over my shoulder. She said: ‘The office says there are freak windstorms gusting over 100 miles an hour. It’s a disaster. The whole Continent is affected. The forecasters in France and Holland gave out warnings but our weather people said it wasn’t going to happen. Heavens, look at the broken shop-windows.’

‘This might be your big chance for a new Chanel suit.’

‘Will there be looting?’ she asked, as if I was some all-knowing prophet.

‘Not too much at this time of night. Black up your face and put on your gloves.’

‘It’s not funny, darling. Shall I phone Daddy?’

‘It will only alarm them more. Let’s hope they sleep through it.’

She poured tea for us both and we sat there, with only a glimmer of light from the window, drinking strong Assam tea and listening to the noise of the storm. Fiona was very English. The English met every kind of disaster, from sudden death to threatened invasions, by making tea. Growing up in Berlin I had never acquired the habit. Perhaps that was at the root of our differences. Fiona had a devout faith in England, a legacy of her middle-class upbringing. Its rulers and administration, its history and even its cooking was accepted without question. No matter how much I tried to share such deeply held allegiances I was always an outsider looking in.

‘I’ve got a long day tomorrow, so I’m going right back to bed.’ She lifted her cup and drained the last of her tea. I noticed the cup she was using was from a set I’d bought when I set up house with Gloria. I’d tried to dispose of everything that would bring back memories of those days, but I’d forgotten about the big floral-pattern cups.

Gloria’s name was never mentioned but her presence was permanent and all-pervading. Would Fiona ever forgive me for falling in love with that glamorous child? And would I ever be able to forgive Fiona for deserting me without warning or trust? Our marriage had survived by postponing such questions, but eventually it must be tested by them.

‘Me too,’ I said.

Fiona put her empty cup on the tray and reached for mine. ‘You haven’t touched your tea,’ she said. She knew about the cups of course. Women instinctively know everything about other women.

‘It keeps me awake.’ Not that there was much of the night remaining to us.

‘You’re not easy to live with, Bernard,’ she said, with a formality that revealed that this was something she’d told herself many times.

‘I was thinking about something else,’ I confessed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You can’t wait to get away,’ she said, as if taking note of something beyond her control, like the storm outside the window.

‘It’s Dicky’s idea.’

‘I didn’t say it wasn’t.’ She stood up and gathered the sugar and milk jug, and put them on the tray.

‘I’d rather stay with you,’ I said.

She smiled a lonely distant smile. Her sadness almost broke my heart. I was going to stand up and embrace her, but while I was still thinking about it she had picked up the tray and walked away. In such instants are our lives changed; or not changed.

With characteristic gravity the news men made the high winds of October 1987 into a hurricane. But it was a newsworthy event nevertheless. Homes were wrecked and ships sank. Cameras turned. The insured sweated; underwriters faltered; glaziers rejoiced. Hundreds and thousands of trees were ripped out of the English earth. So widespread was the devastation that even the meteorological gurus were moved to admit that they had perhaps erred in their predictions for a calm night.

I contrive, as far as is possible considering our relative ranking in the Department, to make my travel arrangements so that they exclude Dicky Cruyer. Several times during our trip to Mexico City a few years ago, I had vowed to resign rather than share another expedition with him. It was not that he made a boring travelling companion, or that he was incapable, cowardly, taciturn or shy. At this moment, he was practising his boyish charm on the Swiss Air stewardess in a demonstration of social skill far beyond anything that I might accomplish. But Dicky’s intrepid behaviour and reckless assumptions brought dangers of a sort I was not trained to endure. And I was tired of his ongoing joke that he was the brains and I was the brawn of the combination.

It was a Monday morning in October in Switzerland. Birds sang to keep warm, and the leaves were turning to rust on dry and brittle branches. The undeclared reason for my part in this excursion was that I knew the location of George Kosinski’s lakeside hideaway near Zurich. It was a secluded spot, and George had an obsession about keeping his name out of phone books and directories.

It was a severely modern house. Designed with obvious deference to the work of Corbusier, it exploited a dozen different woods to emphasize a panelled mahogany front door and carved surround. There was no reply to repeated ringing, and Dicky said flippantly: ‘Well, let’s see how you knock down the door, Bernard… Or do you pick the lock with your hairpin?’

Across the road a man in coveralls was painstakingly removing election posters from a wall. The national elections had taken place the previous day but already the Swiss were clearing away the untidy-looking posters. I smiled at Dicky. I wasn’t going to smash down a door in full view of a local municipal employee, and certainly not the sort of local municipal employee found in law-abiding Switzerland. ‘George might be having an afternoon nap,’ I said. ‘He’s retired; he takes life slowly these days. Give him another minute.’ I pressed the bell push again.

‘Yes,’ said Dicky knowingly. ‘There are few worse beginnings to an interview than smashing down someone’s front door.’

‘That’s it, Dicky,’ I said in my usual obsequious way, although I knew many worse beginnings to interviews, and I had the scars and stiff joints to prove it. But this wasn’t the time to burden Dicky with the adversities of being a field agent.

‘Our powwow might be more private if we all take a short voyage around the lake in his power boat,’ said Dicky.

I nodded. I’d noted that Dicky was nautically attired with a navy pea-jacket and a soft-topped yachtsman’s cap. I wondered what other aspects of George’s lifestyle had come to his attention.

‘And before we start, Bernard,’ he said, putting a hand on my arm, ‘leave the questioning to me. We’ve not come here for a cosy family gathering, and the sooner he knows that the better.’ Dicky stood with both hands thrust deep into the slash pockets of his pea-jacket and his feet well apart, the way sailors do in rough seas.

‘Whatever you say, Dicky,’ I told him, but I felt sure that if Dicky went roaring in with bayonets fixed and sirens screaming, George would display a terrible anger. His Polish parents had provided him with that prickly pride that is a national characteristic and I knew from personal experience how obstinate he could be. George had started as a dealer in unreliable motor cars and derelict property. Having contended with the ferocious dissatisfied customers found in run-down neighbourhoods of London, he was unlikely to yield to Dicky’s refined style of Whitehall bullying.

Again I pressed the bell push.

‘I can hear it ringing,’ said Dicky. There was a brass horseshoe door-knocker. Dicky gave it a quick rat-a-tat.

When there was still no response I strolled around the back of the house, its shiny tiles and heavy glass well suited to the unpredictable winds and weather that came from the lake. From the house well-kept grounds stretched down to the lakeside and the pier where George’s powerful cabin cruiser was tied up. Summer had ended, but today the sun was bright as it darted in and out of granite-coloured clouds that stooped earthward and became the Alps. The air was whirling with dead leaves that settled on the grass to make a scaly bronze carpet. There was a young woman standing on the lawn, ankle-deep in dead leaves. She was hanging out clothes to dry in the cold blustery wind off the lake.

‘Ursi!’ I called. I recognized her as my brother-in-law’s housekeeper. Her hair was straw-coloured and drawn back into a tight bun; her face, reddened by the wind, was that of a child. Standing there, arms upstretched with the laundry, she looked like the sort of fresh peasant girl you see only in pre-Raphaelite paintings and light opera. She looked at me solemnly for a moment before smiling and saying: ‘Mr Samson. How good to see you.’ She was dressed in a plain dark blue bib-front dress, with white blouse and floppy collar. Her frumpy low-heel shoes completed the sort of ensemble in which Switzerland’s wealthy immigrants dress their domestic servants.

‘I’m looking for Mr Kosinski,’ I said. ‘Is he at home?’

‘Do you know, I have no idea where he has gone,’ she said in her beguiling accent. Her English was uncertain and she picked her words with a slow deliberate pace that deprived them of accent and emotion.

‘When did he leave?’

‘Again, I cannot tell you for sure. The morning of the day before yesterday – Saturday – I drove the car for him; to take him on visits in town.’ Self-consciously she tucked an errant strand of hair back into place.

‘You drove the car?’ I said. ‘The Rolls?’ I had seen Ursi drive a car. She was either very short-sighted or reckless or both.

‘The Rolls-Royce. Yes. Twice I was stopped by the police; they could not believe I was allowed to drive it.’

‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t see any too clearly. George had always been very strict about allowing people to drive his precious Rolls-Royce.

‘In downtown Zurich, Mr Kosinski asks me to drive him round. It is very difficult to park the cars.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I hadn’t realized how difficult.

‘Finally I left him at the airport. He was meeting friends there. Mr Kosinski told me to take… to bring…’ She gave a quick breathless smile. ‘…the car back here, lock it in the garage, and then go home.’

‘The airport?’ said Dicky. He whisked off his sun-glasses to see Ursi better.

‘Yes, the airport,’ she said, looking at Dicky as if noticing him for the first time. ‘He said he was meeting friends and taking them to lunch. He would be drinking wine and didn’t want to drive.’

‘What errands?’ I said.

‘What time did you arrive at the airport?’ Dicky asked her.

‘This is Mr Cruyer,’ I said. ‘I work for him.’

She looked at Dicky and then back at me. Without changing her blank expression she said: ‘Then I arrived here at the house this morning at my usual hour; eight-thirty.’

‘Yes, yes, yes. And bingo – he was gone,’ added Dicky.

‘And bingo – he was gone,’ she repeated in that way that students of foreign languages pounce upon such phrases and make them their own. ‘And he was gone. Yes. His bed not slept upon.’

‘Did he say when he was coming back?’ I asked her.

A look of disquiet crossed her face: ‘Do you think he goes back to his wife?’

Do I think he goes back to his wife! Wait a minute! My respect for George Kosinski’s ability to keep a secret went sky-high at that moment. George was in mourning for his wife. George had come here, to live full-time in this luxurious holiday home of his, only because his wife had been murdered in a shoot-out in East Germany. And his pretty housekeeper doesn’t know that?

I looked at her. On my previous visit here the nasty suspicions to which every investigative agent is heir had persuaded me that the relationship between George and his attractive young ‘housekeeper’ had gone a steamy step or two beyond pressing his pants before he took them off. Now I was no longer so sure. This girl was either too artless, or a wonderful actress. And surely any close relationship between them would have been built upon George being a sorrowing widower?

While I was letting the girl have a moment to rethink the situation, Dicky stepped in, believing perhaps that I was at a loss for words. ‘I’d better tell you,’ he said, in a voice airline captains assume when confiding to their passengers that the last remaining engine has fallen off, ‘that this is an official inquiry. Withholding information could result in serious consequences for you.’

‘What has happened?’ said the girl. ‘Mr Kosinski? Has he been injured?’

‘Where did you take him downtown on Saturday?’ said Dicky harshly.

‘Only to the bank – for money; to the jeweller – they cleaned and repaired his wrist-watch; to church – to say a prayer. And then to the airport to meet his friends,’ she ended defiantly.

‘It’s all right, Ursi,’ I said pleasantly, as if we were playing bad cop, good cop. ‘Mr Kosinski was supposed to meet us here,’ I improvised. ‘So of course we are a little surprised to hear he’s gone away.’

‘I want to know everyone who’s visited him here during the last four weeks,’ said Dicky. ‘A complete list. Understand?’

The girl looked at me and said: ‘No one visits him. Only you. He is so lonely. I told my mother and we pray for him.’ She confessed this softly, as if such prayers would humiliate George if he ever learned of them.

‘We haven’t got time for all this claptrap,’ Dicky told her. ‘I’m getting cold out here. I’ll take a quick look round inside the house, and I want you to tell me the exact time you left him at the airport.’

‘Twelve noon,’ she said promptly. ‘I remember it. I looked at the clock there to know the time. I arranged to visit my neighbour for her to fix my hair in the afternoon. Three o’clock. I didn’t want to be late.’

While Dicky was writing about this in his notebook, she started to pick up the big plastic basket, still half-filled with damp laundry that she had not put on the line. I took it from her: ‘Maybe you could leave the laundry for a moment and make us some coffee, Ursi,’ I said. ‘Have you got that big espresso machine working?’

‘Yes, Mr Samson.’ She gave a big smile.

‘I’ll look round the house and find a recent photo of him. And I’ll take the car,’ Dicky told me. ‘I haven’t got time to sit round guzzling coffee. I’m going to grill all those airport security people. Someone must have seen him go through the security checks. I need the car; you get a taxi. I’ll see you back at the hotel for dinner. Or I’ll leave a message.’

‘Whatever you say, master.’

Dicky smiled dutifully and marched off across the lawn and disappeared inside the house through the back door Ursi had used.

I was glad to get rid of Dicky, if only for the afternoon. Being away from home seemed to generate in him a restless disquiet, and his displays of nervous energy sometimes brought me close to screaming. Also his departure gave me a chance to talk to the girl in Schweitzerdeutsch. I spoke it only marginally better than she spoke English, but she was more responsive in her own language.

‘There’s a beauty shop in town that Mrs Kosinski used to say did the best facials in the whole world,’ I told her. ‘You help me look round the house and we’ll still have time for me to take you there, fix an appointment for you, and pay for it. I’ll charge it to Mr Cruyer.’

She looked at me, smiled artfully, and said: ‘Thank you, Mr Samson.’

After looking out of the window to be quite certain Dicky had departed, I went through the house methodically. She showed me into the master bedroom. There was a photograph of Tessa in a silver frame at his bedside and another photo of her on the chest of drawers. I went into an adjacent room which seemed to have started as a dressing-room but which now had become an office and den. It revealed a secret side of George. Here, in a glass case, there was an exquisite model of a Spanish galleon in full sail. A brightly coloured lithograph of the Virgin Mary stared down from the wall.

‘What are those hooks on the wall for?’ I asked Ursi while I continued my search: riffling through the closets to discover packets of socks, shirts and underclothes still in their original wrappings, and a drawer in which a dozen valuable watches and some gold pens and pencils were carelessly scattered among the silk handkerchiefs.

‘He has taken the rosary with him,’ she said, looking at the hooks on the wall. ‘It was his mother’s. He always took it to church.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I noticed that he’d left Nice Guys Finish Dead beside his bed with a marker in the last chapter. It looked like he planned to return. On the large dressing-room table there were half a dozen leather-bound photograph albums. I flipped through them to see various pictures of George and Tessa. I’d not before realized that George was an obsessional, if often inexpert, photographer who’d kept a record of their travels and all sorts of events, such as Tessa blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, and countless flashlight pictures of their party guests. Many of the photos had been captioned in George’s neat handwriting, and there were empty spaces on some pages showing where photos had been removed.

I opened the door of a big closet beside his cedar-lined wardrobe, and half a dozen expensive items of luggage tumbled out. ‘These cases. Do they all belong to Mr Kosinski?’

‘No. His cases are not there,’ she said, determined to practise her English. ‘But he took no baggage with him to the airport. I know this for sure. I always pack for him when he goes tripping.’

‘These are not his?’ I looked at the collection of expensive baggage. Many of the bags were matching ones embroidered with flower patterns, but there was nothing there to fit with George’s taste.

‘No. I think those all belong to Mrs Kosinski. Mr Kosinski always uses big metal cases and a brown leather shoulder-bag.’

‘Have you ever met Mrs Kosinski?’ I held up a photo of Tessa just in case George had brought some woman here and pretended she was his wife.

‘I have only worked here eight weeks. No, I have not met her.’ She watched me as I looked at the large framed photo hanging over George’s dressing-table. It was a formal group taken at his wedding. ‘Is that you?’ She pointed a finger. It was no use denying that the tall man with glasses looming over the bridegroom’s shoulder, and looking absurd in his rented morning suit and top-hat, was me. ‘And that is your wife?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘She is beautiful,’ said Ursi in an awed voice.

‘Yes,’ I said. Fiona was at her most lovely that day when her sister was married in the little country church and the sun shone and even my father-in-law was on his best behaviour. It seemed a long time ago. In the frame with the colour photo, a horseshoe decoration from the wedding cake had been preserved, and so had a carefully arranged handful of confetti.

George was a Roman Catholic. No matter that Tessa was the most unfaithful of wives, he would never divorce or marry again. He had told me that more than once. ‘For better or worse,’ he’d repeated a dozen times since, and I was never quite sure whether it was to confirm his own vows or remind me of mine. But George was a man of contradictions: of impoverished parents but from a noble family, honest by nature but Jesuitical in method. He drove around a lake in a motor boat while dreaming of Spanish galleons, he prayed to God but supplicated to Mammon; carried his rosary to church, while adorning his house with lucky horseshoes. George was a man ready to risk everything on the movements of the market, but hanging inside his wardrobe there were as many belts as there were braces.

Downstairs again, sitting with Ursi on the imitation zebra-skin sofas in George’s drawing-room, with bands of sunlight across the floor, I was reminded of my previous visit. This large room had modern furniture and rugs that suited the architecture. Its huge glass window today gave a view of the grey water of the lake and of George’s boat swaying with the wake of a passing ferry.

The room reminded me that, despite my protestations to Dicky, George had been in a highly excited state when I was last in this room with him. He’d threatened all kinds of revenge upon the unknown people who might have killed his wife, and even admitted to engaging someone to go into communist East Germany to ferret out the truth about that night when Tessa was shot.

‘We’ll take a taxi,’ I promised Ursi. ‘And we’ll visit every place you went on the afternoon you took him to the airport. Perhaps when we’re driving you’ll remember something else, something that might help us find him.’

‘He’s in danger, isn’t he?’

‘It’s too early to say. Tell me about the bank. Did he get foreign currency? German marks? French francs?’

‘No. I heard him phoning the bank. He asked them to prepare one thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills – American money.’

‘Traveller’s cheques?’

‘Cash.’

‘Mr Kosinski is my brother-in-law; you know that?’

‘He hasn’t gone back to his wife then?’ she said. She obviously thought that George’s wife was my sister. Perhaps it was better to leave it that way. It was a natural mistake; no one could have mistaken me for George Kosinski’s kin. I was tall, overweight and untidy. George was a small, neat, grey-haired man who had grown used to enjoying the best of everything, except perhaps of wives, for Tessa had found her marriage vows intolerable.

‘He’s in mourning for his wife,’ I said.

She crossed herself. ‘I did not know.’

‘She was killed in Germany. When I was last here he talked about finding his wife’s killer. That could be very dangerous for him.’

She looked at me and nodded like a child being warned about speaking to strangers.

‘What did you think this morning, Ursi?’ I asked her. ‘What did you think when you arrived and found he had gone?’

‘I was worried.’

‘You weren’t so worried that you called the police,’ I pointed out. ‘You went on working; doing the laundry as if nothing was amiss.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and looked over her shoulder as if she thought Dicky might be about to climb through the window and pounce on her. Then she smiled, and in an entirely new and relaxed voice said: ‘I think perhaps he has gone skiing.’

‘Skiing? In October?’

‘On the glacier.’ She was anxious to persuade me. ‘Last week he spent a lot of money on winter sport clothes. He bought silk underwear, silk socks, some cashmere roll-necks and a dark brown fur-lined ski jacket.’

I said: ‘I need to use the phone for long distance.’ She nodded. I called London and told them to dig out George’s passport application and leave a full account of its entries on the hotel fax.

‘Let’s get a cab and go to town, Ursi,’ I said.

We went to the jeweller’s first. Not even Forest Lawn can equal the atmosphere of silent foreboding that you find in those grand jewellery shops on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse. The glass show-cases were ablaze with diamonds and pearls. Necklaces and brooches; chokers and tiaras; gold wrist-watches and rings glittered under carefully placed spotlights. The manager wore a dark suit and stiff collar, gold cuff-links and a diamond stud in his sober striped tie. His face was politely blank as I walked with Ursi to the counter upon which three black velvet pads were arranged at precisely equal intervals.

‘Yes, sir?’ said the manager in English. He had categorized us already; middle-aged foreigner accompanied by young girl. What could they be here for, except to exchange those vows of carnal sin at which only a jeweller can officiate?

‘Mr George Kosinski is a customer of yours?’

‘I cannot say, sir.’

‘This is Miss Maurer. She works for Mr Kosinski. I am Mr Kosinski’s brother-in-law.’

‘Indeed.’

‘He came to your shop the day before yesterday. He disappeared immediately afterwards. I mean he didn’t come home. We don’t want to go to the police – not yet, at any rate – but we are concerned about him.’

‘Of course, sir,’ he said sympathetically and adjusted the velvet pad on the counter, pulling it a fraction of an inch towards him as if lining it up more precisely with the other velvet pads.

‘We thought he might have said something to you that would help us find him. He has a medical record of memory loss, and he has been under a severe domestic strain.’

The man took a deep breath, as if coming to an important decision. ‘I know Mr Kosinski. And your sister, too. Mrs Kosinski is an old and valued customer.’

Here was another one who didn’t know that Tessa was dead. So that was how George preferred it. Perhaps he felt he could keep out of trouble more easily if everyone thought there was a Mrs Kosinski who might descend upon them any minute. I let the jeweller think Tessa was my sister; it was better that way. ‘Did he purchase something here?’

‘No, sir.’ For one terrible moment I thought he’d changed his mind about helping me. He looked as if he was having second thoughts about revealing details of his customers. But then he continued: ‘No, he brought something to me, an item of jewellery for cleaning. He said nothing that would help you find him. He seemed very relaxed and in good health.’

‘That’s encouraging,’ I said. ‘Was it a wrist-watch?’

‘For cleaning? No, we don’t service watches; they have to go back to the factory. No, it was a ring he brought for cleaning.’

‘May we see it?’

‘I’ll enquire if it is on the premises. Some items have to go to specialists.’

He went through a door in the back of the shop and came back after a few minutes using a smooth white cloth to hold an elaborate diamond ring. ‘It’s a lovely piece; not at all the modern fashion, but I like it. A heart-shaped diamond mounted in platinum with four smaller baguette diamonds. Quite old. You can see how worn it is.’ He held it up, gripping it by means of the towel. The ring was dripping wet with some sort of cleaning fluid which had an acrid smell. ‘It was encrusted with mud and dirt when he brought it in. In twenty years I have never seen a piece of jewellery treated in such fashion. A ring like this has to be cleaned very carefully.’

‘He didn’t say he was going abroad? His next call was the airport.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid he gave no indication… it seemed as if he was on a shopping trip, doing everyday chores.’

We exchanged business cards. I gave him one of Dicky’s, an anonymous one with one of our London-based outside phone lines on it. I scribbled my name on the back of it. ‘If you remember anything else at all I’d be obliged.’

He took the card and read it carefully before putting it into his waistcoat pocket. ‘I will, sir.’

‘While you’ve been wasting your time, talking to the maid and looking at wrist-watches, I have been thinking,’ said Dicky after I told him what I had been doing that afternoon, omitting the bit about paying for Ursi’s alarmingly expensive facial and manicure.

‘That’s good, Dicky,’ I said.

‘I suppose that analytical thinking has always been my strong point,’ Dicky mused. ‘Sometimes I think I’m wasting my time at London Central.’

‘Perhaps you are,’ I said.

‘Reports and statistics. Those Tuesday morning conferences… trying to brief the old man.’ As if remembering the last time he briefed the old man, he looked at red marks on his fingers which had not completely healed over. ‘He’s here,’ said Dicky like a conjuror.

‘The old man?’

‘The old man!’ said Dicky scornfully. ‘Will you wake up, Bernard. George Kosinski. George Kosinski is here.’

‘In the hotel? You’ve seen him?’

‘No, I haven’t seen him,’ said Dicky irritably. ‘But it’s obvious when you sit and concentrate on the facts as I have been doing. Think it over, Bernard. Kosinski left home without even packing a bag. No one came to visit him; he just up and left the house. No cash, no clothes. How would he manage?’

‘What’s your theory then?’ I asked with genuine interest.

‘It’s obvious.’ He chuckled. ‘Obvious. That bastard Kosinski is right here in Zurich, laughing at us. He’s checked into one of these big luxury hotels, and he’s biding his time until we depart again.’ I said nothing; I knew what was coming; I could read Dicky’s mind when his eyes glittered that way. ‘Our visit here was leaked, Bernard old son.’

‘Not by me, Dicky.’ The reality behind Dicky’s new theory was that his experimental dalliance with investigative enquiries at the airport had been met by airport security men as boorish, obstinate and status-conscious as Dicky could be. Having failed at the airport he’d come back to the hotel to evolve a more convenient theory.

‘By someone. We won’t argue,’ he said generously. ‘Who knows? It could have been some careless remark by one of the secretaries. The Berne office knew we were coming here. They have local staff.’

I nodded. Of course, local staff. No one British must be suspected of such a thing.

‘Tomorrow you can start checking the hotels. Big and small; near and far; cheap and flashy. You can take this photo of him – I pinched it from the drawing-room – and go round and show it to them. We’ll soon find him if we’re systematic.’

‘And which hotels will you be doing?’

‘I will have to go to Berne. It’s tiresome but I must keep the ambassador in the picture or the embassy people will feel neglected.’

‘Dicky, I’m not a field agent any longer.’

‘London staff.’

‘No, I’m not London staff either. I’m on a five-year contract that can be terminated any time that someone on the top floor sends me for a medical check-up having told their tame quack to give me a thumbs-down.’

‘That’s a bloody disloyal thing to say,’ said Dicky, always ready to speak on behalf of the top-floor staff. ‘No one gets treated like that. No one! We are a family. It doesn’t serve your cause to become paranoid.’

I’d heard all that before. ‘If I’m to go schlepping around these hotels for you, I must go back on to my proper field agent per diem, with expenses and allowances.’

‘Don’t moan, Bernard. You are an awfully nice chap until you start moaning.’

‘What I’m saying…’

He waved his injured hand airily above his head. ‘I’ll see to it, I’ll see to it. If you’d rather be a field agent than wait for a proper senior staff position in London.’ I never knew how to deal with Dicky’s bland reassurances. I felt unable to pursue my argument, despite knowing that he had no intention of doing anything about it.

‘You want me to go chasing rainbows,’ I said. ‘This is Switzerland, it will cost a fortune. I must have an advance. Otherwise I’ll be spending my own money and waiting six months while London processes the expenses.’

‘Chasing rainbows?’

‘Look, Dicky. George Kosinski isn’t skulking around in some local hotel here; he’s gone.’

‘The girl told you?’

‘She thinks he’s gone skiing on the glacier.’

‘Why?’ Dicky chewed on his fingernail, anxious that he’d missed an opportunity. ‘Did Kosinski tell her that?’

‘He bought silk underwear and a ski jacket last week.’

‘That settles it then.’

‘George hates skiing,’ I explained. ‘He’s hopeless on skis and hates ski resorts.’

‘What then?’ said Dicky.

‘For one thing his bags have gone. It looks like he went to the airport in secret, and left them there ahead of time. He obviously wanted to get away without attracting attention; but who was he trying to avoid? And why?’

‘And where?’ added Dicky. ‘Where has he gone?’

‘Somewhere that gets damned cold; hence the silk underwear. My guess is Poland. He has a lot of relatives there: brothers, uncles, aunts and maybe a still-living grandfather. If he was in trouble, that’s where he might well go.’

‘We can’t depend on a few odds and ends of guesswork, Bernard.’

‘George has been raiding his old photo albums for snapshots to take along. He also took the rosary his mother gave him. It’s a trip to his family. Perhaps that’s all it is. Maybe someone is sick.’

‘That’s not all it is. Someone came here and talked to him. We know the Stasi people came through here.’

‘The girl said no one came to visit,’ I countered. I didn’t want Dicky to condemn George and then start collecting evidence.

Even Dicky could answer that one: ‘So Kosinski went out and met them somewhere else.’

‘It’s possible,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t prove that there is anything sinister about his disappearance.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said Dicky. ‘It smells like trouble… with all that Tessa business, we can’t afford to just shrug it off. We must know for certain where he’s gone.’

‘He’s gone home to Poland,’ I said again. ‘It’s only a guess, but I know him well enough to make that kind of guess.’

‘No zlotys from the bank?’

It was a joke but I answered anyway. ‘They are not legally sold; he’d be better off with US dollar bills.’

A long silence. ‘You’re not just a pretty face, Bernard,’ he said, as if it was a joke I’d never heard before.

‘I may be wrong.’

‘Where in Poland?’

‘I got the office to sort out his passport application. His parents were from a village in Masuria, in the north-east. His brother Stefan lives in that same neighbourhood.’

‘What are you holding back, old bean?’ Dicky asked.

‘The Poles in London are a small community. I made a couple of calls from my room… a chap who runs a little chess club knows George well. He says George goes back sometimes and sends his family money on a regular basis.’

‘And?’ he persisted.

‘I can’t think of anything else,’ I said.

‘You’re holding back something.’

‘No, Dicky. Not this time.’

‘Very well then. But if this is simply your devious way of avoiding schlepping round these bloody hotels I’ll kill you, Bernard.’ He looked at me, his brow furrowed with suspicion at the thought I was withholding something. Then with that remarkable intuition that had so often come to his aid, he had it. ‘The wrist-watch,’ said Dicky. ‘Why did he take the wrist-watch for cleaning? And why would you bother to follow it up by going to the jeweller?’

‘A man like George has dozens of flashy watches. He doesn’t take them for cleaning, not when he has other things on his mind.’

‘So why follow it up? Why go to the jeweller then?’

I rubbed my face. I would have to tell him. I said: ‘It was his wife’s engagement ring.’

‘Tessa Kosinski’s engagement ring? Jesus Christ! She’s dead. In the East. You bastard, Bernard. Why didn’t you tell me right away?’

‘It was dirty, muddy, the jeweller said.’

He shook his head, and heaved a sigh that combined anger and content. ‘Never mind whether it was dirty or not. My God, Bernard, you do spring them. You mean some Stasi bastards came here with his wife’s engagement ring? They’re talking to him? Pushing him? Leading him on? Is it something about the burial?’

‘My guess is they are saying she’s still alive.’

‘Alive? Why? What would they want in exchange?’

‘I wish I knew, Dicky.’ Dicky’s phone rang. I looked at my watch, got to my feet and waved goodnight. ‘Shall I see you at breakfast downstairs?’

Dicky, bending low over the phone, twisted his head to scowl at me and held up a warning finger. I waited. ‘Hold it, Bernard,’ he said. ‘It’s London on the line. This is something you might want to stay awake thinking about.’

I waited while Dicky took his call, nodding and grunting as if someone at the other end was reading something out to him. It took a long time, with Dicky doing little but register pained surprise. Then he hung up and turned to me and gave me a canny smile.

‘What is it?’ I asked when it looked as if he would go on smiling all night.

‘The whole bloody stock-market collapsed today. In New York the Dow crashed 508 points, the biggest slump on record. By the time the New York market closed it was 22.6 per cent down. Twenty-two point bloody six! The first day of the ’29 crash only went down 12.8 per cent. This is it, Bernard.’

‘London too?’

‘Tokyo opened first, of course. Selling began with the opening bell. When London opened, everyone began unloading dollar stocks. By the end of the day, London was down more than 10 per cent, the 100-share index dropped 249.6 points.’

‘I don’t follow all that financial mumbo-jumbo,’ I said.

‘It dropped 249.6 to 2,053.3! You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to see what manner of fall that is,’ said Dicky, who was a well-known mathematical genius.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Here in Zurich it fell too. Milan, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt… it’s a massacre. When New York opened the blood was already running over the floor.’

‘Did they suspend trading?’ I asked in a desperate attempt to sound astute and knowledgeable.

‘The Hong Kong market ceased trading,’ said Dicky, who now seemed to be in his element. ‘There’s panic everywhere tonight. The City is getting ready for another onslaught tomorrow. Last Thursday’s hurricane buggered up the computer and prevented some people getting to work. An upset of this magnitude will spill over into politics, Bernard. It’s impossible to guess the implications. Mrs Thatcher has made a pacifying statement about the strength of the economy, and so has Reagan. Bret Rensselaer is sleeping in the Night Duty Officer’s room. The lights are on in every office in Whitehall they tell me. They are on a war footing. My pal Henry, in the embassy here, says the Americans will declare martial law tomorrow, in case of widespread rioting and runs on the banks.’

‘Did he really?’ I said, knowing that Henry Tiptree, an employee of the Department, a man with whom I’d crossed swords more than once, was even more excitable and unreliable than Dicky. ‘But what’s this got to do with George Kosinski? He left on Saturday.’

‘Yes, Kosinski saw it coming. He sold out everything before coming to live here.’

‘He said he had to do that. It was a necessary part of his changing his tax residence.’

‘He cleared out and gave you his London apartment.’

‘That was in Tessa’s Will; a gift to Fiona,’ I protested. I didn’t like the way that Dicky was implicating me in his theories about George. ‘But why would he run away? These money men like George have all their assets in companies. And George has companies that are registered all over the world. What would he run away from? No one is going to knock on the door and arrest him.’

‘It’s a well-known fact that severe psychological stress often provokes people into physical action. Spontaneous physical action.’

‘Not George,’ I said.

‘He’s a dark horse,’ said Dicky with cautious admiration. ‘And you thought he came here as a reaction to his wife’s death? But he started to sell off his companies two months back. He must have seen this crash coming for ages. Didn’t he warn you about it?’

‘He doesn’t confide in me,’ I said. ‘George is his own man.’

‘I’d love to know what he’s up to,’ said Dicky, and stared at the phone. ‘I’m running a credit check on him but this stock-market thrashing is going to delay things like that.’

‘What about his lovely house on the lake?’

‘Rented on a monthly basis. I checked that before we came. He never owned it. Not even the furniture.’

‘And you think he ran because he’s deep in debt?’ It seemed more likely that George had found some artful advantage in having corporations own his house and contents.

‘Now you see it, do you?’ said Dicky, treating my question like an endorsement. ‘It fits together doesn’t it? You’ve got to know how these financial wizards think. He’s bust. Now you see why he would clear off without notice and leave no forwarding address.’

‘Poor George.’

‘Yes, poor George,’ said Dicky in a voice not entirely devoid of satisfaction. Dicky loved dramas, especially tragedies: and especially ones that brought disaster to people he envied. He relished reciting it all, and now his tone reproved me for not mirroring his delight. ‘Are you listening, Bernard?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Well, don’t sit there with your head in your hands, as if you’re about to break down and weep.’

‘No, Dicky.’ But the truth was that I did feel concerned about George. It wasn’t just a matter of money – George would probably find money from somewhere, he always had done. But George had enough worries already. The news of Tessa’s death had made him talk of revenge, and disturbed him in a way I would never have thought possible. All that, and a financial crisis too, might be more than he could handle.

‘So you want to go to Warsaw?’ said Dicky.

‘Not particularly. But if you want me to go and find him, that’s where I would start.’

‘You have contacts there?’

‘Yes, but I’m not much good with the language.’ I didn’t want Dicky expecting miracles. If George had fled to Poland it was because Poland’s state of chaos provided a promising place in which to hide. Finding him would not be easy.

‘Who is good with the language?’ said Dicky blithely.

‘It makes it difficult to work on an investigation if you can’t understand what anyone is saying,’ I said. ‘Polish is not like Italian or Portuguese, where you grab at the root of a couple of words and guess the rest. Polish is impenetrable.’

‘We’ll manage,’ said Dicky. ‘I know you; you can always manage in any language. You’ve got a knack for languages.’

‘We?’

‘I’d better come with you. Two can always do better than one… on a job like this.’

‘Yes,’ I said. He was right: unless of course the other one is Dicky. He looked at me and then, after catching my eyes, looked away again. I said: ‘Is this something to do with Daphne?’

‘No. Well, yes. In a way. She has a very nervous disposition,’ said Dicky, his eyes narrowing as if suspecting me of being in league with his wife. ‘Edgy. Bitter. Full of wild talk. She keeps digging up silly things that are ancient history. It’s better if she’s on her own for a week or so.’

So that was it. We weren’t going to Warsaw to hunt down George Kosinski, we were going there to provide a divertissement that might smooth over some domestic rift between Dicky and his long-suffering wife. I had other worries too. Ursi’s facial was going to cost ten times as much as I’d anticipated; I wondered if I could persuade the hotel cashier to pay it, and charge it somewhere deep in Dicky’s room-service bills.

2

Warsaw.

September is the time many visitors choose to visit Poland. It was during September half a century ago that German visitors, with Stukas, Panzers and artillery, came. So devoted were they to this ancient kingdom that they wanted to own it. They chose September because the heavy summer rains had passed by then and the land was firm; the skies were clear enough for the bombers, and the working days were long enough for them to fight their way deep into Poland’s heartland.

But once September is gone, the days shorten suddenly and the temperature drops. This year, like an omen, the first snow had come unusually early. As the thermometers hovered at zero, the moist air produced the heavy wet snowstorms that come only at the very beginning of the bad weather. The snow and sleet would eventually disappear, of course, as snow, visitors and invaders had always eventually done, but that did not make such chronic afflictions easier to suffer.

Warsaw is not an old city, it only looks like one. In beauty it is eclipsed by its rival Cracow; its lop-sided high position on the west bank of the Vistula exposes it to the harsh east winds, and it has no backdrop of hills or mountains or attractive coastline. But for Poles, Warsaw has a significance that is not explained in either political or cultural terms but is inextricably linked to Polish nationalism. Perhaps the Germans knew this, for when the German army retreated from Warsaw they destroyed it in a way they did no other capital city. They razed it not by haphazard bombings or shellings but stone by stone, as an act of deliberate and vindictive devastation. The steel street-car tracks, the drains and even the sewers were ripped from the cobbled streets like the guts from a plucked chicken.

But with the same sort of determination, the Poles built it up again stone by stone. With the fastidious zeal that only hatred can feed, they scoured the museums and the archives to look at old paintings and drawings, and they copied the nineteenth-century plans of Corazzi. And using the skills of architects and historians, carpenters and artists and masons and labourers, and the contributions and good will of Polish men and women throughout the world, they built Warsaw again the way they remembered it.

It was October when we arrived. Generals loyal to communism had appointed themselves to government, the nation was deeply in debt, virtually everything was in short supply, and Warsaw’s streets were grizzled by snow that, despite being unseasonably early, fell without respite. Dimly lit windows of shops on the Nowy Swiat were displaying a final few miserable heirlooms, and there were people huddled on every corner accosting any well-dressed passers-by and trying to swap their last treasures for anything edible or combustible.

In the gloomy entrance hall of the Europejski Hotel there was less evidence of such deprivation. Crowding around the bar at the side of the lobby – their waist-belts straining, and faces flushed – black-marketeers were mingling in noisy accord with army officers and surviving elders of the Party faithful. Behind the bar at busy times like this there was the regular barman. He’d been there for years: a jovial retired member of the ZOMO, the widely feared anti-riot police. Stuffed behind the vodka bottles, and in plain view, he always kept a copy of Trybuna Ludu, Warsaw’s Communist Party daily paper; it was in effect a proclamation warning one and all of the political climate to be found there. But that didn’t preclude jokes, and this evening he was getting anticipatory grins while telling a long involved story about how scientists in the government laboratories were working hard to transform the nation’s vodka supplies back into potatoes. The same joke was being repeated everywhere, but outside in the streets it was received with laughter less hearty.

It was late that evening, and the crowd at the bar were at their noisiest, as I pushed my way through the crowded lobby of the Europejski Hotel for a second time. Dicky was sitting on a leather sofa facing the reception counter. I had been back to the airport on a mission to find Dicky’s extra suitcase, which had lost its label and gone astray in the baggage room. As Dicky explained, it was better that I went because I could speak the language. Now it was almost midnight and I wiped the wet snow crystals from my face and polished them from my glasses with a handkerchief. One of the two solemn-faced young women behind the hotel desk reached behind her for my room key without looking to see where it was. It was the sort of practised gesture that made Western visitors to Poland uneasy. ‘Well?’ said Dicky.

‘I found your suitcase. But those bastards in customs took their time. It was all those fragile labels you stuck on it that had them worried. They probably thought you were smuggling bombs for Solidarity.’

‘They didn’t hold on to it?’

‘It’s here, and it’s gone up to your room.’ We both turned our heads to watch six tall girls in bright green tartan skirts and tam-o’-shanter hats walk across the lobby. They stopped at the door of the restaurant and blew softly into the bagpipes they carried before proceeding inside. After a moment of silence there was the sudden explosion of massed drums, soon joined by the skirl of the pipes. Then the sound of the music was muffled by the closing doors.

‘There’s only cold food,’ said Dicky. ‘I argued, but you know how they are; they stare at you blankly and pretend they don’t understand.’

‘What was all that about?’ I asked him.

‘It’s a girls’ pipe band from Chicago. All from Polish neighbourhoods. They’re here for three nights. They go to Cracow tomorrow. I was talking to one of them; a blonde eighteen-year-old drum majorette. She’s never been away from home before.’

‘I’d watch your step, Dicky,’ I advised. ‘Her father is likely to be a 200-pound butcher in a canning plant, and very protective.’

‘I’m going to bed,’ said Dicky, chewing a fingernail. ‘I’m getting a cheese sandwich from room service and hitting the sack. You’ll do the same if you’ve got any sense.’

‘I’ve got phone calls to make, but first I must have a drink at the bar.’

‘I’m bushed,’ said Dicky. ‘I thought you were never coming back. I would have gone to bed but my pyjamas are in that case.’ He thought about what I’d said. ‘Telephoning? Your contacts must be insomniacs. I’d leave it until the morning.’ He yawned.

‘Goodnight, Dicky.’ It was useless trying to explain to him that my sort of contacts are working people who get out of bed at five in the morning, and slave all day.

I watched Dicky walking across the lobby to the main staircase. He cut a slim long-legged elegant figure in a way that I would never again become. One hand was in the pocket of his tight-fitting jeans, the other brought a chunky gold Rolex into view as he flicked his long bony fingers through his curly hair. He was studied with anthropological detachment by the two girls behind the reception desk. When his decorative cowboy boots had disappeared up the stairs, they looked at each other and sniggered.

I crossed the lobby and edged my way through the noisy drinkers at the bar. Here was the essence of Poland in 1987, a nation commandeered by its army. I recognized the pale faces of an army captain I’d met in Berlin, and a pimply lieutenant who was an aide to a general in the Ministry of the Interior. The young officers, both dressed in mufti, watched the Party officials with superior and impartial amusement. As part of the settlement with the army, the Party had promised to reform Poland’s system of government while the most active Solidarity protesters were locked away. But socialist theoreticians are not noted for their zeal in self-reform, and debt-ridden Poland was sinking deeper and deeper into economic ruin. Rumours said the Russians would take control of the country within a week or so, and that the Polish army had already agreed to let them do it unopposed. But tonight the nation’s misery was temporarily forgotten as the revellers celebrated the end of capitalism that they proclaimed the West’s stock-market crash heralded.

Among the celebrants there were university lecturers, a diplomat, some journalists, and assorted writers and film-makers. These were the intellectuals, the nomenklatura, the establishment. These were the people who knew how to read the signs that pointed to shifts of power. To them it was obvious that Lech Walesa, and his fellow workers in the Lenin shipyard, had failed in their bid for power. This was a time for the establishment to close its ranks, to find a modus vivendi with the nation’s military rulers; and with the Russians too if that was what Moscow demanded. Meanwhile they would indulge in long, jargon-loaded discussions with the Party’s reformers, watch the Polish generals for danger signals, and down another double-vodka before going back to their warm apartments.

From the restaurant the girls’ pipe band started playing ‘My Wild Irish Rose’. The music was greeted with heady applause and shouts of appreciation from an audience fired by enthusiasm for things American, or Polish, or Irish. Or perhaps just overcome with vodka.

I alternated mouthfuls of strong Tatra Pils with sips of Zubrowka bison-grass vodka. With both drinks in my hands I moved around, keeping my eyes and ears open. The UB men were here too. The ears of the Urzad Bezpieczenstwa were everywhere. I counted six of them but there were undoubtedly more. These security policemen were another sort of élite, their services needed by the Party and by the military rulers too. The UB thugs enjoyed their own private shops and housing and schools, and their own prisons into which their enemies disappeared without the formalities of arrest and charge. Such secret policemen were not new to Poland. Dzierzynski, the founder of Russia’s secret police, was a Pole. His statue stood outside KGB headquarters in a square named after him in Moscow. While here in Warsaw another Dzierzynski Square celebrated his widespread fame and power.

I saw no one I both knew and trusted. Eventually I grew tired of listening to the chatter and watching the deals, and went up to my room on the first floor where, after making my phone calls, I stretched out on the bed and waited. It was two-thirty in the morning when a knock came. A woman pushed at the door and came in without waiting for an invitation. ‘Zimmer hundert-elf?’ she said in heavy and precise German.

‘Ja. Herein!’ She was wearing too much make-up. At her throat an expensive Hermes silk scarf looked incongruous with the cheap fur-trimmed overcoat and well-worn white leather high-boots. Snow crystals sparkled on her face, in her dark hair, and on her fur-trimmed hat. She snatched the hat off and, as she shook it, beads of icy water flashed in the light. Noticing that the curtains weren’t closed, she went and tugged them together. She moved across the room with that haughty tottering step that is the mark of the young whore, but she must have been all of thirty-five, perhaps forty, and no longer thin.

For a long time she stood there – her back to the window – peering around the dingy hotel-room as if imprinting it on her memory. Or as if trying to manage without her glasses. She was no longer the Sarah I remembered: one of a crowd of exuberant young students bursting out through the gates of Humboldt University into the Linden after morning lectures. Now all the mischievous joy had disappeared, and it was hard to find the fragile bright-eyed girl I’d known. That was twelve, maybe fifteen years, ago; a hot dusty day of a sweltering Berlin summer. She was wearing a home-made pink dress with large white polka dots, I was a few yards behind her and she’d turned and called to me, asking me something in Polish, mistaking me for a student from some village near her home.

Now she put her tote-bag on the floor and stood there looking at me again: ‘Room one one one?’ she repeated in English.

‘It’s me, Sarah.’

‘Bernd. I didn’t recognize you.’ She said it without much excitement, as if recognition would only encumber an already burdensome life.

‘Do you want a drink?’ I got a glass from the bathroom.

‘My God I do.’ She pulled off her coat, threw it across the bed, and sat down. As the light of the bedside lamp fell upon her I could see that her hair was greying, and one side of her face was yellow and blue and mauve with bruises that paint and powder could not quite conceal. She poured herself a large measure from the bottle of Johnny Walker I’d picked up at Zurich airport, and drank it swiftly. Poor Sarah. I’d seen a great deal of her after that first meeting. She was studying plant biology and when she went off with her friends, tracking down specimens of rare weeds and wild flowers, I’d sometimes tag along with them. It gave me a chance to get into parts of the East Zone that were forbidden to foreigners. ‘Give me a minute,’ she said, and slipped off her heavy boots to massage her feet. ‘It’s been a long time, Bernd.’

‘Take your time, Sarah.’ She was from the south; a Silesian village in a frontier region that had been under Austro-Hungarian, Czech, Polish, German and Russian army jurisdiction in such rapid succession that none of her family knew what they were, except that they were Jews.

‘Boris couldn’t come. He’s on the early flight to Paris tomorrow.’ She was married to a bastard named Boris Zagan who was a flight attendant for LOT, the Polish government airline. He wasn’t exactly a British agent but he worked for Frank Harrington, the Berlin Rezident, delivering packets to our Berlin office and sometimes doing jobs for London too. I’d heard from several people that he regularly attacked Sarah during his bouts of drunkenness.

‘It’s good to see you,’ I said. ‘Really good.’ There had never been any kind of romance between us; I’d liked her too much to want the sort of on-again off-again affairs that were a necessary part of my life in those roughneck days.

She rummaged through the contents of her patent-leather handbag, found a slip of paper and passed it to me. Pencilled on it there were three lines of writing that I guessed to be an address. I studied it and laboriously deciphered the Polish alphabet. ‘Can you read it?’ she asked. ‘I remember you speaking good Polish in the old days.’

‘Never,’ I said. ‘Just a few clichés. And what I learned from you.’ Poles liked to encourage with such warm words any foreigner who attempted their language. ‘I never was good at the writing; it’s the accents.’

‘Accent on the penultimate syllable,’ she said. ‘It’s always the same.’ She’d told me that rule ten years ago.

‘I mean the writing: the “dark L” that sounds like w; the vowels that have the n sound, and the c that sounds like cher.’ I looked at the address again.

‘It’s a big house in the lake country,’ she said. ‘Stefan, George Kosinski’s brother, lives there. It’s miles from civilization: even the nearest village is ten miles away. You’ll need a good car. The roads are terrible and I don’t recommend the bus ride.’

‘Or the ten-mile hike from the village,’ I said, putting the paper in my pocket. ‘I’ll find it. Tell me about Stefan.’

‘The family are minor aristocracy, but Stefan prospers because Poles are all snobs at heart. He makes money and travels in the West. He even went to America once. He displays great skill at expressing his intellectual pretensions, but not much talent. He writes plays, and all of them conclude with deserving people finding happiness through labouring together. Poems too; long poems. They are even worse.’

‘Big house?’

‘He married the ugly only daughter of a Party official from Bialystok. Boris said the house is vast and like a museum. I’ve never been there but Boris has stayed with them many times. They live well. Boris says it’s Chekhov’s house.’

‘Chekhov’s house?’

‘It’s a joke. Boris says Stefan stole all Chekhov’s best ideas, and his best jokes and best lines and aphorisms, and then stole his house as well. He’s jealous. You know Boris.’

‘Yes, I know Boris.’

She finished her whisky with that determined gulp with which Poles down their vodka, and then studied her glass regretfully. ‘Would you like another?’ I asked.

She looked at her watch, a tiny gold lady’s watch with an ornate gold and platinum band. The sort they sell in the West’s airport shops. ‘Yes, please,’ she said.

I poured another drink for her. If she wanted to sit there and recover, there was little I could do about it, but I wondered why she hadn’t just handed me the address and departed. As if reading my mind, she said: ‘Another few minutes, Bernard, then I’ll leave you in peace.’ She fingered her cheek, as if wondering whether the bruises were noticeable.

Of course! She had bribed the desk who let her in as if she was one of the whores who serviced the foreign tourists. It was a cover, and she would have to be with me for long enough to make it convincing. Something to be hidden is always a good cover for something worse, as one of the training manuals deftly explained. She said: ‘It’s George Kosinski isn’t it?’

‘What?’ I must have looked startled.

‘Don’t worry about microphones,’ she said. ‘There are none installed on this floor. The Bezpieca know better than to bug these rooms. These are where the committee big-shots bring their fancy women.’

‘I still don’t know,’ I said.

‘Don’t go cool on me, Bernd. Do you think I can’t guess why you are here?’

‘Have you seen him?’

‘Everyone’s seen him. As soon as he arrives he shouts and yells and spends his money and gets drunk in downtown bars where there are too many ears. Boris is worried.’

‘Worried?’

‘Has George Kosinski gone mad? He’s swearing vengeance on someone who killed his wife but he doesn’t know who it is. He’s violent. He knocked down a man in an argument in a bar in the Old Town and started kicking him. It was only after he convinced them that he was a tourist that the cops let him go. What’s it all about, Bernd? I didn’t know funny little George had it in him to do such things.’

I shrugged. ‘His wife died. That’s what did it. It happened in the DDR. On the Autobahn, the Brandenburg Exit.’

‘A collision? A traffic accident?’

‘There are a thousand different stories about it,’ I said. ‘We’ll never know what happened.’

‘Not political?’

I went and got another tumbler and poured myself a shot of whisky. At the bar I’d been abstemious but I could smell the whisky on her and it made me yearn for a taste of it.

‘Don’t turn your back on me, Bernd. I’ll start to think you have something to hide.’

I’d forgotten what she was like: as sharp as a tack. I turned to see her. ‘There are political traffic accidents, Sarah. We both know that.’

She stared at me as if her narrowed eyes would find the truth somewhere deep inside my heart. What she finally decided, I don’t know, but she swigged her drink, got to her feet and went to the mirror to put her hat on.

‘Where is George now?’ I asked her. Her back was towards me while she looked in the mirror. She turned her head both ways but spent a fraction of a moment longer when looking at the bruised side of her face.

‘I don’t know,’ she said calmly. ‘Neither does Boris. We don’t want to know. We’ve got enough trouble without George Kosinski bringing more upon us.’

‘I was hoping Stefan or the family might know.’

‘The last I heard, he was scouring through the Rozyckiego Bazaar trying to buy a gun.’ She looked at me, but I looked down as I drank my whisky and didn’t react. ‘You know where I mean? Targowa in the Praga?’

I nodded. I knew where she meant: a rough neighbourhood on the far side of the river. Byelorussians, Ukrainians and Jews lived there in clannish communities where strangers were not welcome. Even the anti-riot cops didn’t go there after dark without flak jackets and back-up.

‘Boris said this is what you wanted,’ she said, bringing a brown paper parcel from her tote-bag and putting it on the table.

‘Have you got far to go?’ I asked.

‘I’m being met,’ she said to the mirror in a voice that didn’t encourage further questions.

I let her out and watched her walk down the long cream-painted corridor. The communist management showed the usual obsession with fire-fighting equipment: buckets of sand and tall extinguishers were arranged along the corridor like sentinels. When she reached the ornate circular staircase she turned and said ‘Wiedersehen’, and gave a wan smile, as if saying a final cheerless farewell to those two young kids we’d been long ago.

After she had gone I thought about her and her bruised face. I thought about the way they had allowed her into the hotel, and let her come up to my room. That wasn’t the way it used to work in Warsaw; they checked and double-checked, and the only kind of girl you could get into your room was a genuine registered whore who was working with the secret police.

And eventually I even began wondering if perhaps Sarah had got past the desk so easily because she was just such a person.

I opened the brown paper parcel. Inside it Boris had put two tyre levers and a looped throttling wire. So he hadn’t been able to get a gun for me; or maybe it was too much trouble. Boris was not the most energetic of our contacts.

‘What did she say?’ It was eleven o’clock in the morning. I’d been out and about. I’d avoided Dicky by missing breakfast, and I could see he was not pleased to be abandoned.

For a moment I didn’t answer him. Just to be back in the heated hotel lobby, where the warmth might get my blood circulating again, was a luxury beyond compare after tramping the streets of the city looking for George and his bloody relatives.

The old place didn’t look so forbidding in daytime. It had been a fine old hotel in its day. A fin-de-siècle pleasure palace built at a time when every grand hotel wanted to look like a railway terminal. Crudely modernized from the empty shell that remained after the war, it wasn’t the sort of hotel that Dicky sought. Dicky was unprepared for the austerity of Poland, no doubt expecting that the best hotels in Warsaw would resemble those plush modern luxury blocks that the East Germans had got the Swedes to build, and Western firms to manage for them. But the Poles were different to the Germans; they did everything their own way.

‘Come along, Bernard. What did she say?’

‘What did who say?’

‘The woman who went up to your room last night.’

I’d avoided him at breakfast, guessing that he wanted me to be his interpreter to interrogate the hotel management. It was not a confrontation I relished, for the interpreters are always the ones left covered in excrement, but what I hadn’t anticipated was that he’d be able to prise from the staff the secret of my nocturnal visitor.

‘It was one of those things, Dicky,’ I said, hoping he would drop it but knowing that he wouldn’t.

‘You think I’m a bloody fool, don’t you? You don’t send out for whores in the middle of the night; that’s not your style. But you are so devious that you’d let me believe you did, rather than confide in me. That’s what makes me so bloody angry. You work for me but you think you can twist me around your finger. Well, you listen to me, Bernard, you devious bastard: I know she was here to talk with you. Now who was she?’

‘A contact. I got the address of George Kosinski’s brother,’ I said. ‘It’s in the north-west and it’s a lousy journey on terrible roads. I thought I’d double-check that George was there before dragging you out into the sticks.’

Dicky evidently decided not to press me about the identity of my lady visitor. He must have guessed it was one of my contacts, and it was definitely out of line to ask an agent’s identity. ‘That’s a natty little umbrella you’re wielding, Bernard.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I bought it this morning.’

‘A folding umbrella: telescopic. Wow! Is this a power bid for Whitehall? I mean, it’s not really you, an umbrella. Too sissie for you, Bernard. It’s just desk wallahs who come into town on a commuter train from the suburbs who flourish umbrellas.’

‘It keeps the snow off,’ I said. Dicky was of course merely showing me that he didn’t like being deserted without permission, but that didn’t make being the butt of his tiresome sense of humour any more tolerable.

‘An umbrella like that is not something I’d recommend to the uninitiated, Bernard. A fierce gust of wind will snatch you away like Mary Poppins, and carry you all the way to the Urals.’

‘But the desk didn’t tell you anything about our pal Kosinski?’ I asked, to bring him back to earth.

‘I left that to you,’ said Dicky.

‘George knows his way around this town. He speaks Polish. He might lead us a dance before we get a definite fix on him.’

‘And by that time he could be on a plane and in Moscow.’

‘No, no, no. He won’t leave until he’s done what he has to do. With luck we’ll get to him before that.’

‘Very philosophical, Bernard. Abstract reasoning of the finest sort, but can you tell me what the hell it means?’

‘It means we can’t find him, Dicky. And there are no short cuts except miraculous good luck. It means that you have to be patient while we plod along doing the things that a village policeman does when looking for a lost poodle.’

This wasn’t what Dicky wanted to hear. As if in reproach he said: ‘Last night, when we first arrived, the reception people admitted that George Kosinski had been here in this hotel. So why won’t they tell us where he’s gone?’

‘No, they didn’t say he had been in this hotel, Dicky. They suggested that we try to find him in another hotel with a similar name. It’s on the other side of the airport. It’s a sleazy dump for overnight stays. He won’t be there. It was just a polite way of telling us to drop dead.’

‘I’ll never get the hang of this bloody language,’ said Dicky. He smiled and slapped his hands together in the forceful way he started his Tuesday morning ‘get-together meetings’ when he had something unpleasant to announce. ‘Well, let’s go there. Anything is better than sitting round in this mausoleum.’ He produced his room key from his pocket and shook it so it jangled.

I was tired after doing the rounds of the city. The official line was that the last of the political prisoners had been released the previous year, but for some unexplained reason all the people given to airing political views the government didn’t like were still serving indefinite detention in a labour camp near Gdansk which had been doubled in size to accommodate a couple of hundred extra detainees. Most of my other old contacts had moved away after the big crack-down, leaving no forwarding address, and my enquiries about them had not been met by neighbourly smiles or friendly enthusiasm.

Now I wanted to have a drink and then sit down to a leisurely lunch, but Dicky was a restless personality, ill-suited to the slow-paced austerity of communist society. I followed his gaze as he looked around with pent-up hostility at everything in the hotel lobby. Its institutional atmosphere was like that of a hundred other lobbies in such gloomy communist-run hotels. The same typography on the signs, and the same graceless furniture, the dim bulbs in the same dusty chandeliers reflecting in the polished stone floor, the same musty smell and the same surly staff.

The skittish way in which Dicky nagged his Department into doing his will was less effective when pitted against the ponderous systems of socialist omnipotence. And so Dicky had found that morning, as he tried to press the hotel manager – and individual members of the staff – into providing him with a chance to search the hotel register for George Kosinski’s name. I knew all this because a full description of Dicky’s activities had been provided to me by a querulous German-speaking assistant manager who was placated only after I gave him a carton of Benson and Hedges cigarettes.

‘I’ll have a quick drink, Dicky, and I’ll be with you,’ I said.

‘Good grief, Bernard, it’s eleven o’clock in the morning. What do you need a drink for at this hour?’

‘I’ve been outside in sub-zero weather, Dicky. When you’ve been outside for an hour or two you might find out why.’

‘Thank God I’m not dependent upon alcohol. Last night I saw you heading for the bar and now, next morning, you are heading that way again. It’s a disease.’

‘I know.’

‘And the stuff they call brandy here is rot-gut.’

‘I can’t buy you one then? The barman is called “Mouse”. Pay him in hard currency and you’ll get any fancy Western tipple you name.’

He disregarded my flippant invitation. ‘Make it snappy. I’ll go and get my coat. I didn’t bring an umbrella but perhaps I can shelter under yours.’

When we emerged on to the street Dicky seemed prepared to yield to my judgement in the matter of avoiding a senseless trek to the hotel’s inferior namesake on the other side of town. ‘Where shall we go first?’ he offered tentatively.

‘I heard George was trying to buy a gun,’ I said.

‘Are you serious?’

‘In the Rozyckiego Bazaar in the Praga. It’s a black-market paradise; the clearing house for stolen goods and furs and contraband from Russia.’

‘And guns?’

‘Gangs of deserters from all the Eastern European armies run things over there and fight for territory. It may look law-abiding but so did Al Capone’s Chicago. Keep your hands in your pockets and watch out for pickpockets and muggers.’

‘Why don’t the authorities clear it out?’

‘It’s not so easy,’ I said. ‘It’s the oldest flea-market in Poland. The currency dealers and black-marketeers all know each other very well. Infiltrating a plain-clothes cop is tricky, but they try from time to time. They might think that’s what we are, so watch your step.’

‘I can handle myself,’ said Dicky. ‘I don’t scare easily.’

‘I know,’ I said. It was true and it was what made Dicky such a liability. Werner and me, we both scared very easily, and we were proud of it.

The Praga is the run-down mainly residential section of Warsaw that sprawls along the eastern side of the river. Most of its old buildings survived the war but few visitors venture here. Running parallel with the river, Targowa is the Praga’s wide main street, the widest street in all the city. Long ago, as its name records, it had been Warsaw’s horse market. Now dented motors and mud-encrusted street-cars rattled along its median, past solid old houses that, in the 1920s, had been luxury apartments occupied by Warsaw’s merchants and professional classes.

Now the wide Targowa was patched with drifting snow and, behind it – its entrance in a narrow sidestreet – we suddenly came to the Rozyckiego market. Overlooked on every side by tenements, there was something medieval about the open space filled with all shapes and sizes of rickety stalls and huts, piled high with merchandise, and jammed with people. This notorious Bazaar had been unchanged ever since I could remember. It had drawn traders and their customers from far and wide. Gypsies and deserters, thieves and gangsters, farmers and legitimate traders had made it a vital part of the city’s black economy, so that the open space was never rebuilt.

‘And are you going to buy a gun too, Bernard?’

‘No, Dicky,’ I said as we went through the gates of the market. ‘I’m just going to find George.’

The ponderous sobriety that descends upon Eastern European towns in winter was shattered as we stepped into the active confusion of the market. Women wept, men argued to the point of violence, whole families conferred, children bickered. And scurrying to and fro there were men and women – many bent under heavy loads – shouting loudly to call their wares.

‘Those communist old clothes smell worse than capitalist ones,’ said Dicky as we made our way through the crowds. Noisy bargainers alleviated the bizarre variety of deprivation that communism, with its corruption, caprices and chronic shortages, endemically inflicts. Here, on display, there were such coveted items as toilet paper and powdered coffee, used jeans in varying stages of wear, plastic hair-clips and Western brands of cigarettes (both genuine and fake). Women’s shoes from neighbouring Czechoslovakia were hung above our heads like bright-coloured garlands, while exotic sable, fox and mink furs from far-off regions of Asia were guarded behind a strong wire fence. Elderly farmers and their womenfolk, enjoying a measure of private enterprise, offered their piles of potatoes, beets and cabbages. A solemn young man sat on the ground before a prayer-rug, as if about to bow his forehead upon the rows of used spark plugs that were arrayed before him.

A tall man in a green trenchcoat stopped me, waved a cigarette, and asked for a light. I tucked my umbrella under my arm, held up my lighter, and he cupped his hands and bent his head to it. ‘I thought you were on the flight to Paris,’ I said.

‘They’ve killed George Kosinski,’ he said hoarsely. ‘They lured him out to his brother’s house, slit his throat like a slaughtered hog and buried him in the forest. You’ll be next. I’d scram if I was you.’

‘You are not me, Boris,’ I said. Tiny sparks hit my hand as he inhaled on his cigarette. He threw his head back, his eyes searching my face, and blew smoke at me. Then with an appreciative smile he tipped his grey felt hat in mocking salute and went on his way.

‘Come along!’ said Dicky when I had caught up with him again. ‘They just want to talk to foreigners. We can’t be delayed by every bum who wants a light.’

‘Sorry, Dicky,’ I said.

By this time Dicky had eased his way into a small group of men who were passing booklets from hand to hand. Two of the men were dressed in Russian army greatcoats and boots; the civilian caps they wore did not disguise them. One was about forty, with a face like polished red ebony. The other man was younger, with a lop-sided face, half-dosed eyes and the frazzled expression that afflicts prematurely aged pugilists.

‘Look at this,’ said Dicky, showing me the book that had been passed to him. It had a brown cover, its text was in Russian with illustrations depicting various parts of an internal combustion engine. Another similar book was passed to him. He looked at me quizzically. ‘You can read this stuff. What’s it all about?’

I translated the title for him: ‘BG-15 40mm grenade-launcher – Tishina. It’s an instruction manual. They all are.’ The booklets were each devoted to military equipment of wide appeal: portable field kitchens, rocket projectors, sniperscopes, nightsights, radio transmitters and chemical protection suits. ‘They’re Russian soldiers. They’re selling in advance equipment they are prepared to steal.’

Dicky passed the booklets to the man standing next to him. The man took them and, seeing Dicky’s dismay, he looked around the group and snickered, exposing many gold teeth. He liked gold: he was wearing an assortment of rings and two gold watches on each wrist, their straps loosened enough for them to clatter and dangle like bracelets.

The hands of the two soldiers were callused and scarred, and covered from wrist to fingertip in a meticulous pattern of tattoos like blue lace gloves. I recognized the dragon designs that distinguished criminal soldiers who’d served time in a ‘disbat’ punishment battalion. Until very recently, to suffer such a sentence had been universally regarded as shameful, and kept secret from family and even comrades. But now men like these preferred to identify themselves as military misfits, defiant of authority. Such men liked to use their tattoos to parade their violent nature, to exploit frightened young conscripts and sometimes their officers too.

‘Let’s move on,’ I said.

‘What were they saying?’

‘Gold-teeth seems to be the black-market king. You heard the soldiers say tak tochno – exactly so – to him instead of “yes”. It’s the way Soviet soldiers have to answer their officers.’

My whispered aside to Dicky attracted the attention of the soldiers. The limited linguistic skills of all concerned were clearly hampering the transaction, and I didn’t want to wind up as the interpreter for these Russian hoodlums and their Polish customers. ‘Move on,’ I said.

Dicky got the idea. He moved away and the black-marketeers closed in upon the soldiers again. At the next stall Dicky hunkered down to feign interest in piles of old brass and copper oddments piled up for sale. I took the opportunity to look around. There was no sign of George anywhere.

‘Look – umbrellas!’ said Dicky, standing up and rubbing his knees, and then pointing to an old woman carrying dozens of them, of all shapes and sizes and colours. ‘What did you pay for yours?’ When I didn’t reply, he said: ‘Can you imagine those bloody soldiers selling their weapons! That’s what comes of having all those races and nations mixed together. Thank God the British army could never sink to that.’

‘The elder of them had four small kids, and his unit hasn’t been paid for three months,’ I said.

‘I knew you’d find some excuse for them,’ said Dicky in a voice that mixed jokiness with sincerity. ‘Where do you draw the line, Bernard? If you hadn’t been paid for three months, would you simply sell off anything you could lay your hands on?’

Knowing that a flippant answer would be stored up in Dicky’s memory and used when I least expected it, I found something to occupy his mind: ‘I think I see one of George’s relatives,’ I said.

‘Where? Where?’

‘Take it easy, Dicky. Or we’ll start a stampede.’

‘Selling the beads?’

‘It’s amber,’ I said, ‘and that can be expensive. But the leather bag round his neck almost certainly contains diamonds. He’s a well-known dealer.’

‘You know him?’ Dicky slowed, as if intending to stride across the aisle to confront the old man, but I took his arm and kept him going.

‘I saw him in London at one of George’s cocktail parties. But I didn’t speak with him; he arrived as I was leaving. He’s rich; leave him for another time. Appearances are deceptive in Poland; there are probably quite a few rich people in this market today.’

‘And are George Kosinski’s family all rich?’ Dicky stopped at a stall piled high with sports shoes: Nike, Reebok and all the famous brands in cardboard boxes. It was hard to know whether they were counterfeit or imports. Dicky picked up a pair of running shoes and fiddled with the laces while trying to decide.

‘I don’t know, but names ending in ski denote the old Polish gentry. It’s especially so in the country areas, where everyone knows everyone and you can’t get away with adding a ski ending to your name, the way so many of the townspeople have.’

‘I like the padded ankle collar… What have you seen?’ He started to replace the shoes he was inspecting.

‘Keep hold of that pair of shoes, Dicky. Bring them up before your face and admire them.’ I was moving round to the other side of the market stall to see better.

‘Look, Bernard…’

‘Do as I say, Dicky. Just keep talking and holding up the shoes.’ He held them up for me and provided an excuse for a good look at the far side of the market.

‘What’s happening?’

‘Three of them; at least three. With maybe two or three more watching from other top-storey windows. They’ve marked us, and two of them are coming this way.’

‘Who?’

‘Hoodlums. Just take it easy. Stay stumm; let me talk to them.’

‘Where?’

‘The fat fellow in the fur coat signalled to someone at an upstairs window. Bodyguards. Minders. Stay cool.’

‘Your papers?’ demanded the first of the men to arrive, and announced himself: ‘Inspector Was of the UB.’ He spoke in English while showing me a card with his photo on it. He snapped the card closed and put it away. His eyes were jet-black, his face thin and drawn. He wore a woollen hat and a short leather jacket. I held out to him the West German passport that carried the business visa permitting repeated entries into Poland. He passed it to a fat man in a dark fur coat who had by this time arrived slightly flushed and out of breath. The fat one pushed his steel-rimmed glasses tighter on to his ears before reading it. He was red-faced and sweating. I guessed he had impetuously descended too many flights of steps after watching our arrival from his vantage-point in the nearby tenements.

‘Him?’ said the wiry Inspector Was, pointing at Dicky.

‘Him?’ I echoed, pointing a finger at the fat man and gently prising from his fingers my bogus passport.

‘Search them,’ Was told the fat man. I held up my arms and he frisked me, and then Dicky, to see if we were carrying guns.

‘Come with me,’ said Was when the fat man gave him the okay. ‘Both of you.’ He unbuttoned his jacket as if he might be making ready to reach for a pistol.

‘We have to go with them, Dicky,’ I said.

The somewhat Laurel-and-Hardyish pair pushed us ahead of them through the crowds, which parted readily to allow us to pass. As we got into Targowa, our two guards closed in tightly upon us. The streets were crowded with beggars and pedlars and people going about their business. At the kerb, two men were changing the wheel of a truck heavily laden with beets, while a man with a shotgun sat atop them balanced on a bundle of sacks. No one gave us more than a glance. It was too cold to enquire too deeply into the misfortunes of others, and too dangerous. There were no cops in sight and no one showed concern as we were escorted along the street. We had gone no more than fifty yards before the thin one signalled to an entrance that led into one of the open courtyards that were a feature of these buildings.

The cobbled yard, littered with rusty junk and rubbish that could not be burned for fuel, held a couple of cars and a line of large garbage bins. It was difficult to decide if the cars were in use or had been dumped here, for many of the trucks and cars on the street were even more rusty and dented than these ancient vehicles.

‘Here,’ said Was and prodded me with his finger. The fabric of the building was in a startling state of neglect, with gaping holes and broken brickwork and windows that were held in position by improvised patchworks of timber and tin. The only fitments in good order were the bars and grilles that fitted over half a dozen of the lower windows, and the ancient steel door through which we were ushered.

There were more grilles inside. They were made from steel and fitted from floor to ceiling. Along this ‘wall’ there was a long table, like the lunch counter of a roadside cafe. Behind the counter there was a heavy safe and some filing cabinets. The other half of the room – the part where we were standing – was windowless and empty of furnishings except for a calendar advertising canned milk.

The man who called himself Was closed the steel door that led to the yard. With only a couple of fluorescent tubes to illuminate the room it became stark and shadowless. ‘Through here and upstairs,’ said Was. He opened a door and pushed us into a smaller room. ‘Upstairs,’ said Was again, and we went through a narrow door that opened on to the lobby of a grand old apartment house. I led the way up the wide marble staircase. On the landing wall hung two grey racks of dented mail-boxes. Some of the flaps were hanging open; it would need a great deal of confidence to put mail into them. Perhaps the whole building was owned by these men. At the top of the second flight of steps we came upon a silent tableau. Two flashy young women were propping a plump well-dressed man against the wall. He was white-faced and very drunk, his tie loosened and wine stains down his crisp white shirt. The trio watched us as we passed, as curious about us as we were about them, but the three of them remained very still at the sight of our escorts and no one spoke.

‘In here.’ There were two doors on the top landing. They were freshly painted light brown. They’d been repainted so many times that the decorations in the woodwork, the peep-hole and the bell push were all clogged with paint. There was a surfeit of wiring too: phone and electricity wires had been added and none ever removed, so that there were dozens of wires twisted and drooping and sometimes hanging to show where a section of them had been chopped away to make room for more. He unlocked one of the doors. ‘In here,’ he said again and pushed Dicky, who fell against me. And we stumbled into the darkness.

‘Stand against the wall,’ said Was. He switched on the light. It was a low-wattage bulb but it gave enough light to see that one side of the room had sandbags piled up to a height of six feet or more. Was slipped out of his pea-jacket and hung it on the door. This revealed him to be wearing a dark blue sweater and a military-style leather belt with a pistol in a leather holster. It was a Colt ‘Official Police .38’, something of a museum piece but no less lethal for that. ‘Hand over your wallets, both of you bastards,’ he said. The fat one stood by and grinned.

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