The Warsaw Document

'What's your paper?'

'I'm freelance.'

'Where has your stuff appeared?'

'Most places.'

'What byline?'

'Pseudonymous.'

'You won't leave here unless you can do a lot better than that.' The match flared and then his head jerked and he was staring towards the door of the sound-lock and Polanski said:

'Josef.'

Three short, one long.

Alinka didn't move. She stood perfectly still, closing her eyes. I could believe she was praying.

Polanski opened the first door, then the second, and Josef came in, stumbling, hitting the acoustic padding with his shoulder and straightening up and looking at no one, a white face bright with sweat and the eyes flickering from shock, his breath coming in gusts as he stood in the middle of the room, a short clownish figure swaying with the uncertain stance of a bear on its hind legs, his thick coat hanging open, blood on the sleeve.

'It wasn't any good.'

The neck of a bottle trembled on the rim of a glass. 'Never mind, Jo,' Polanski said.

'Are you hurt?'

'No.' He took it and drank and she waited and he let out a long shuddering breath. 'That's not my blood. We lost Zygmunt and Jacek.'

He drank again and she tried to make him sit down but he shook her away and told them all of it, all there was, the main doors breached with five stick-bombs according to plan and Jacek and himself in there first with Karol giving them cover and Jerzy standing by with the stolen van but the alarm had gone off and they'd only had time to open up the first three cells and Jan hadn't been there and they'd had to come away before they were cut off.

She took his empty glass. 'Thank you for trying, Jo.'

'Next time,' Polanski said.

They weren't frightened any more because they knew the worst now and it could have been worse than this: Jan wasn't here but Jo was back.

He nodded quickly, his mood suddenly changing, a wicked smile creasing his clown's face, the ends of his long mouth turning upwards. 'Next time, yes. Who's this?'

The anglik, she told him.

'So?' He grasped my hand in both his own and I felt the surprising strength in them. 'We need people like you! Alinka told us how-'

'Sorry?'

'Huh? She told us how you drove, Jesus!'

'I drove into the river.'

'Well anyone c'n make a mistake, no? You did a swell job, no kidd'n.'

'Jo. Don't tell him anything!’

'Don't what?' He looked across at Viktor. 'What like?'

'We don't know who he is yet.'

'We can ask him can't we?' He switched so fast that it was like two different people talking. 'What outfit are you with, pal?'

The lid of the kettle had started rattling minutes ago and Alinka went round the screen.

'I'm on my own.'

'He's on his own.'

'That isn't enough.'

'It's enough for me.' He shrugged his coat off and dropped it across a settee and poured some vodka. 'Viktor's a wonderful guy, a very wonderful guy, but he took a beating and it was because some bastard put the skids under him, see, someone he trusted, so now when his own mother holds out a cookie he bites her fingers off, you get it? An' now he's steamed up because it's getting close to the big day, we're all of us kinda jumpy. You know what I'm talkin' about?'

'Wednesday.'

The sounds were distant at first: the traffic seemed a little heavier, that was all. 'Sure. Wednesday.'

He raised his glass, his smile very bright.

'You think they'll send tanks in?'

'They can try. We have the approach routes mined.'

'What are the chances?'

'Of what?'

'For you.'

Doors slamming.

'Look, this isn't Prague. They weren't prepared. We are. We're taking the initiative, you get it?' There's thirty thousand Russian troops in this country and if they're goin' to use them, okay, they're goin' to use them. But if their tanks get in we're not goin' to throw whitewash over them like they did in Prague. We're goin' to shoot back. This won't be a walkover, it'll be a war. They wouldn't have dared to go into Prague if there'd been military resistance, How can the U.S.S.R. let itself be seen fighting a war with one of its own loyal satellites? Even if it could win?' The bright smile was frozen now. 'We've raised an army here. Fifteen units of picked men. Men like Viktor. Okay, men like me. Men who will not have the land of their fathers turned into a penitentiary for state-registered juvenile delinquents. Right? We have stockpiles strategically dispersed — sub-guns, grenades, landmines, you name it. Wednesday morning, 0001 hours, the three main generating stations hit the sky. Will you be here? Don't be here Wednesday, pal.'

He tossed back the last of his drink.

Alinka was moving across to us. Halfway she stopped, and stood listening. Viktor and Polanski had been talking together and now they were silent.

'Jo,' I said. 'Is it the only way into this place? By the elevator?'

'Huh? Yep. I guess we just sweat it out.' He'd heard them.

There was a question I didn't want to ask him.

Voices now, not coming from any particular direction, just through the walls, through the floor. The building had come alive. Doors slamming again but this time inside the building, the doors of the apartments. The thudding of jackboots.

Alinka was very still. So was Polanski. Viktor had gone for the gun and picked it up and now he sat with it across his knees. Jo hadn't moved but his eyes had narrowed and they began flickering as if the light was too bright. He had stopped smiling and his face looked as it had when I'd first seen him come lurching in here: blank with shock. He was a man who lived hot and worked best when he, was bombing his way into a precinct bureau and now there was nothing he could do but stand here while his nerves drew thin and the blood receded, leaving a mortuary pallor. Perhaps he knew it now, the question I didn't want to ask him: had he been followed here?

Listening, you would have said there were rats running behind the walls, their sound magnified.

Last night I'd gone half a mile through the shadows of the river-walk before climbing and cutting across the city centre to the hotel, and on the way I'd seen this taking place in a quiet street near Dworzec Srodmiescie. They didn't hurry — there were no klaxons or shrilling tyres — yet the operation was incredibly fast: three Warszawa saloons pulling up near the middle of the street with an M.O. riot-squad Jeep at each end to block it off. Ten seconds, and five hundred people made captive as if a net had dropped from the night. Most of them hadn't even known. In the privacy of their apartments, at their ease in the intimate light of the television screens, nothing had told them that for fifteen minutes a paralysis had held them powerless, that there had occurred a visitation of the State.

Some had known. It wasn't a general search but a raid with specific objectives. You are Franciszek Labedz? You will come with us. Five or six of them guided across the pavement to the waiting saloons, the sharp click of the doors, the jab of starters. A child had run after one group and its mother had pulled it back. I remembered the child's voice piping across the snow; more than other things I remembered that.

I found Polanski's eyes on me; we looked at each other without communication; we were looking in our minds at what we heard. This was a general search, noisy and with nothing in the orders about discretion. Most of the sound came to us through a light-proofed ventilator high in the wall above the Lublin dresser: the sound of boots on the stone stairs, the rapping on the doors, music from a radio out of tune with events, voices, surprised.

Co sie stalo?