Policiaf
Far away, under the same sky, the moan of a tram along the Krakowskie Przedmiescie.
There'd been a door here in the wall opposite the stove, and two windows, one each side of the dresser; the edges were still visible but there'd have been a better job done on the other side, the door sealed and plastered over, the windows bricked up.
Teraz-natychmiast!
Iron knuckles in suede gloves: open your door. The State is here and you are State property. I am the State. Open. Boots tramped along the wall where the door had been and Polanski's head turned slowly as he listened, as if he saw their coated figures. His eyes were steady. It was Jo who moved, jack-knifing like a puppet with the strings suddenly cut. I was near enough to break his fall and Alinka came and crouched by him, whispering.
'He's been giving too much blood. He goes twice every week to the clinic.'
Blood for Wednesday. I'd seen the queues, patient in the snow. Blood for Sroda.
The sudden scream of a woman,
Wladislaw! Uwazaj!
Viktor's right hand was stroking the submachinegun, his head lifting as he heard the cry.
Jestza pozno!
They'd got a man.
The scream fell to a dying cadence, becoming sobs.
I'd never seen such rage in a face as I saw now in the face of Viktor, his eye the eye of an eagle, caged and goaded. 'Sroda,' he said to the wall, to the boots and the belted coats, 'Sroda,' he promised the woman who tonight would sleep alone. Polanski heard him.
'Sroda,' Polanski said.
Then they left the building, their sound ebbing as when a wave fills a gulley and drains away. Someone had switched off the radio and there was no more music from it. Faint voices called among the corridors, as if people had lost their way. Engines in the street.
We'd got Jo on to one of the settees, legs raised and head down. Droplets of sweat sprang as fast as Alinka wiped them away.
'If they let me out of here,' I said to her, 'they might change the signal. The day — '
'I will not let them,' she said quickly.
'They might not listen. The day after tomorrow your new karta should be here. If they change the signal you'll have to get someone to fetch it: I'll be at the Bar Kino at nine in the evening. Ulica Czackiego. Saturday.'
I had to get clear now. Jo had confirmed the overall situation as reported by Merrick and it was all I needed and I didn't want to be still here when the rot set in: at any given minute in any given U.B. bureau someone else was going to break under interrogation and this building would be opened up again and sixteen rounds from a Typolt Mk XI wouldn't do much more than fill the place with smoke — they'd send in riot-squads if they had to.
'The Kino,' she said. Then Jo began lolling his head from side to side and we sat him up. It was no good telling them to get out of here with me because there wasn't anywhere they could go: wherever they went they'd risk exposure. Jan Ludwiczak hadn't been told where this safehouse was located or they'd have smashed the mirror by now, but every time one of them left here the rest were at risk. It would be the same anywhere else.
Polanski stood looking down at Jo. Viktor hadn't moved; the gun was still across his knees. He seemed lost in some other time and some other place, maybe the barricades of Sroda.
'All right, Jo?' Polanski said.
'I don't know why it happens.'
'It happens because you keep going to the clinic. From now onwards you'll keep away.'
I began moving to the door. Halfway across the room I heard the slight clink of a sling-buckle as Viktor swung the gun but I went on moving because this side of a verbal warning I thought I was probably safe. I didn't know how stable he was but I'd seen they had to handle him with patience.
'Stoj.'
I turned around.
In German Polanski said quietly: 'All we want to know is who you are.'
Jo was trying to get off the settee but Alinka stopped him: it looked as if you didn't go too near Viktor when he had his finger inside the guard. But she was angry, brittle of speech.
'Vikki. You know what he did for me.'
Polanski said to me: 'We don't want to make any conditions.' He wet his lips, compressing them. 'You'd be free to go, if…' he moved a loose hand, the one nearer to Viktor. 'We trust you, but we want to feel safe here, and you knew how to find us. Who told you? That's really what worries us. We know the British are on our side to the point of actual diplomatic backing and we know what you've done for us personally, so it must seem we're being mean with our thanks. But if you'll just give us — '
'Vikki,' Jo said with his eyes squeezed into bright slits, 'you've got ten seconds to put that damn' thing down and then I'm coming to get it.'
Alinka murmured something to him. Polanski watched me with worried eyes. I didn't know how much logic Viktor was capable of following but it had to be tried.
'One of you led me here.'
I looked away from Polanski and down the length of the room at the ravaged untrusting face above the snout of the Typolt.
'That's how I knew. Nobody told me. You exposed your safe-house because you're amateurs: you don't know when you're being followed or when the police are moving in to pick you up, and when one of you gets pulled in you don't know where he is till somebody tells you and then you go in with bombs instead of a blueprint so you never get near enough to spring him. You've no source of counterfeit papers so the minute you're on the wanted list you've got to get off the streets and where do you go? To a refuge with only one exit and not even a Judas-hole and my name for that is a trap. The day I arrived in this city I didn't know you existed: I'd only been told. But my job was to locate you and within forty-eight hours I'd done that. I'm a professional and for me it was routine but for you it could have been fataclass="underline" none of you would be here now if my interests didn't coincide with yours. But it happens that they do, so let's put that thing back in the toy-cupboard and go through our twice-times again. You've struck some luck when you need it most: I've been useful to you and I can be useful again. But not on your terms. On mine.'
Viktor hadn't moved. I met the fixed black stare of his eye but learned nothing from it; there was courage in this face, and suffering, but no sign that it could recognise an appeal to reason.
I said: 'I'm going now. If you shoot, remember you'll be shooting away one of your own barricades.'
As I turned my back on him I heard someone move behind me but it was too late to do anything except keep on going and it wasn't until I was through the sound-lock and shutting the outer door that I saw her lean black figure standing across his line of fire.
It took nearly fifteen minutes to check and recheck for surveillance because of the light-conditions and wall-angles and the lack of effective cover. They'd only raided one side of the building and they could have posted some people m the area to observe later movements. The damned place was a trap.
Then I was filtering through the network of narrow streets where the snow was thick and the lamps few and the night quiet, encoding in my mind a fully urgent signal to Egerton telling him that tonight the whole pattern had shifted and that something was wrong, hellishly wrong.
9: RENDEZVOUS
Steam burst across the red lamp and left its bloodied plumes blowing in the dark, and wheels rolled, iron on iron. No one was there, it had gone, and he crouched in front of the ammo-boxes, rubbing his cobbled fingers, and steel rang, dull as a cracked bell.
See him and pull him out it was getting too close, they wouldn't like that, but he was no better off than I was. He couldn't even take care of himself: they'd only got to bust open one of the Czyn places while he was there doing his homework like a good boy and they'd clink the poor little sod for aiding and abetting dissident factions clandestinely engaged in activities against the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, so forth. Make His Excellency the British Ambassador look a right lemon.