'Jolly cold, isn't it?'
He fished out a whisky flask with the ease of habit. He was the one facing me and I thought I'd met him before, as one does when one has seen so many pictures of a face in the newspapers. This one was crumpled rather than lined, as if the tissue paper skin had been crushed into a ball and then smoothed out again; the large eyes were pink-rimmed, their whites laced with red rivulets, and the mouth was long, thin-lipped and set in an expression of irony as distinct from cynicism: it was the mien of a man who had long ago discovered, with secret delight, that the follies of others matched his own. His name was Foster.
He held out the flask. 'Warm the cockles, old boy?'
I shook my head and he made a token gesture towards the man beside me before he unscrewed the top and with studied formality poured a tot and drank it at a gulp. I looked at the man beside me and saw that he was Russian, with the flat heavy features of its eastern peoples, a son of Irkutsk or Krasnoyarsk, more northerly. He sat with a rocklike equilibrium, watching the Englishman.
We drove through deserted streets towards the Vistula. the glass division isolating us from the chauffeur and his uniformed companion.
'How's the old country these days?'
'Keeps going.'
He nodded, putting the flask away, not yet quite ready to meet my eyes. I supposed it was courtesy, to ask about England, not wistfulness, because to do what he'd done must have needed hate of some stamina. Love of country is only love of oneself, a grand form of identification, and that wouldn't have worried him; but to turn his back on the love of friends might have been more difficult.
'Are you here for long?'
'A few days.'
'Picked the wrong time.' His nerves showed behind the faint rueful smile and he looked away again. 'I mean the winter.'
'Which one?'
'Ah,' he said, 'yes.' He stared through the glass at the slow parade of the buildings. 'These people would be all right, you know, if they'd only get down to their work and show a bit of faith in those who are trying to create the new world. But they're too proud of their past, warrior nation and all that, it's old hat these days. Things have changed, and they're going to change a lot more. The past's all right but you won't get far if you spend your life in a museum.' He turned his face to me. 'There's such a lot of good in them, though, just as there is in everyone, and it's a shame to see it go to waste.'
I sensed the unconscious appeal, not for the Poles but for himself: he believed he didn't give a damn whether I thought there was some good in him or not, but he hadn't been long enough away to get a perspective on his convictions, and the shock alone was going to take time to dull off; twenty years in Whitehall with a solid reputation and a circle of friends who'd admired his two conflicting qualities of modesty and brilliance, then he'd been sent out to Port Said on a piddling little extradition job and by sheer chance had got blown, less than six months ago, with just enough time to get aboard the Kovalenko before she sailed for Odessa. And in London the headlines broke the news he'd hoped never to make.
'They give you any grub, old boy?'
'Yes.'
He nodded, satisfied. 'Sorry they kept you hanging about like that. I only got called in a couple of hours ago.' He leaned forward suddenly, his head on one side: 'Thing is, it's quite a chance for us to talk to someone like you.' We watched each other steadily for two or three seconds before an innocent smile touched his eyes — 'I mean someone of intelligence, from the U.K. I dare say you've got a better idea of what's going on than any of these smart-aleck businessmen who think they know all there is. These talks, now — they're just as important to you as they are to us. We all know what they could mean, don't we, if they're given half a chance — virtual end of the Cold War, put it that way, aren't I right?'
The tone was easy, the eyes lit with the warmth of fellow feeling. This was the charm the popular Sundays had plugged, six months ago, when the Kovalenko had been steaming through the Bosphorus, the 'dangerous charm of the arch deceiver'. He was laying it on a bit thick but to a certain degree it was genuine and the real danger was there. At dawn in the capital of a police state east of longitude 20 I was being vetted by two K.G.B. men of the Soviet State Security Service and if one of them happened to look like an amiable bar fly in a London pub it was the more necessary to remember that in fact he was a man who'd sold his country and his friends for a coin he'd valued higher, a man who was going to send me back into the cells when this little ride was over. The van with the meshed windows wasn't keeping escort station fifty yards behind us just because it hadn't got anywhere else to go.
'Of course you know we're having a spot of bother here, these hot-blooded young rowdies. All they want is a bit of excitement now there's a chance, boys ourselves once, weren't we?' He gave a short good-humoured laugh and this too was partly genuine: I remembered reading that thirty years ago he'd been sent down. from Oxford for the traditional prank of sticking a jerry on top of a weathercock. Boys will indeed be boys but I also remembered the silver-haired man they'd half carried out of the airport like a waxwork dolclass="underline" he hadn't been a 'young rowdy'. 'It doesn't add up to more than that,' he said comfortably, 'as I'm sure you realise. That's why we're a spot puzzled by these rumours going around, you know what I mean?'
We were still heading east, nearing the Vistula. There'd been a new prison established some eighteen months ago on the other side, in Grochow.
'No.'
He looked at me steadily for a moment and then sat back with a shrug. 'There are so many rumours, aren't there, at a time like this, journalists in from all over the place, keen to jump the facts.' Without any change in his tone, his eyes still sleepy — 'I mean the one about the U.K. looking kindly on whatever shindy these young asses can kick up, if we let them.'
So I could have wasted my time busting a hole in the ice with the Fiat because the proposition was that Polanski's unit was the only one that had been fed the dope about the U.K. diplomatic-backing thing and now the K.G.B. had picked it up and the K.G.B. picked up most of its stuff by augmented interrogation so who had they grabbed — Polanski? Viktor? Jo? Where was Alinka now? The trains were rolling east. I could have wasted my time.
I said: 'Can you spell it out for me?'
Her lean body, a dark curl creeping in the wing of her arm, all she would ever be, a dream fragment persisting.
'We don't want to tell you things.' His smile was faintly coy. 'We want you to tell us things.'
'If shindy means a full-scale revolution and young asses means half the population of the Polish Republic and looking kindly means the explicit patronage of Great Britain at Foreign Office level I'd say it's worth about as much as any other rumour wouldn't you? I come from a country where — we both do, I was forgetting — where people would get a certain kick out of seeing the Poles chuck the Kremlin off their backs because we've always had a soft spot for the underdog whoever it is, but that's not enough to make us queer the pitch at a time when there's a hope of an East-West detente in the offing. But you ought to know that so why ask me?'