I tore up the receipt and dropped it into a pan and flushed it and waited and flushed it again because one of the pieces was still floating. Principle: don't carry items of identification even if they tally with your passport. As a mental exercise I could have worked out more than one situation involving a search of the person in circumstances where it would be acceptable to be Karl Dollinger but not to someone who'd passed through Warsaw Central between noon and one o'clock today.
The mirror showed the eyes still flickering a bit from. the reaction, otherwise fresh. The fur kepi had come off when I'd cleared the stairs and they would have found it and reported the new image. I'd have to get another one because on this day in this city there wouldn't be a single man bare-headed.
The ballcock was shutting off and there was quiet here. The train hadn't moved: I would have heard it rumbling. I would give them an hour, an hour and a half at the most; then I'd have to get clear because there was a lot of work to do before I called on Foster this evening.
A freight went through at 13:20 on the line directly overhead and the vibration set up noise from the handle of the metal bucket. Two other trains had come in and when the passengers had filled the subway I went into a cubicle and shut the door and waited until there was quiet again. The risk-pattern was formaclass="underline" the cleaner must arrive and it could happen at any time and if he found the cupboard locked and the key gone from the outside of the door he would report it at once, knowing the police were looking for someone. Therefore I had to be in a cubicle, not the cupboard, when he came. But the second wave of the search must also arrive and similarly it could happen at any time and I would have to be in the cupboard with the door locked and the key on the inside, because they would search the cubicles.
But I couldn't distinguish between the footsteps of the cleaner and the footsteps of a single police patrol and a decision would have to be made: cubicle or cupboard. There was nothing to be done about this until the time came. The low-risk periods were when a train arrived and the passengers came through the subway: the police wouldn't make a search for one man with the field confused.
I had spent a fair amount of thought on Merrick. Some of it was constructive: at a convenient moment, before the normal life of the city was disturbed, by action in the streets, I would have to deal with him. Some of it was retrospective, the hindsight clarification of points that had foxed me before I'd known what he was; but despite the attitudes I'd learned and come to recognise as valid I couldn't think about him impersonally as just another component of the East-West Intelligence machine: his face kept coming in front of me, pale, nervy, vulnerable, his eyes incapable of hiding the misery that was breaking him down.
Double agents don't last long: the strain is killing. The exceptions are people like Sorge, Foster, Obermann, but the strain on them is no less killing: it's just that they're harder to kill. For a boy like Merrick to go double was simply an elaborate attempt at suicide.
It was irrelevant that he'd tried to take me with him.
Other thoughts: intensive attempt to work out how to get the maximum amount of information into Egerton's hands before the possibility of my non-survival. Foster wanted me alive but captive and the risk lay in the actions I'd have to take to remain free. Intensive thinking on this too. Intervals of free-ranging images, disjointed, unimportant.
Cannot locate references in mission report to actual train journey Bydgoszcz-Warsaw therefore question amount of 130 zlotys paid at Dworzec Warszawa Glowna 12:50 hours Tuesday 19. Silly bitch.
I heard them coming.
At first one man, and I listened for clues: the cleaner might be a woman, her steps lighter, but this was a man; the cleaner would be older, possibly, than an M.O. officer, thus might shuffle, could detect no shuffle. Then suddenly there were the others and within a minute the confines were sharp with echoes: they came from all directions, down the double staircases and from each end of the subway in a blanket operation designed to remove the risk inherent in a simple wave motion: a wave coverage moving from one end of the subway to the other could drive the quarry in front of it and allow him a chance of finding an exit.
All the exits were simultaneously blocked.
They were civil police in uniform, their boots metalled and their pace regular. None of them spoke. Their sound filled the passage.
I had to be quick getting into the cupboard because some of them were coming down the twin staircases close to the washroom and they would be here in a few seconds. The metal bucket was a hazard, its sound alien to the background, and I was careful. The locking of the door gave no trouble since the tumblers came within the same aural range as footsteps on stonework.
The earlier patrol had smashed the hinges of three cubicle doors in kicking them open but I'd left the other five closed so that these people would find something to do that would take their attention from the cupboard. The mind of one policeman becomes much like another's: they're trained to work as a group and their imagination is corporate. The earlier patrol had gone for the obvious — the cubicles — and had given the cupboard only token attention. It was possible that these would do the same.
Two of them came into the washroom. The others went past.
One began on the cubicles, his boot crashing at the doors. He would be standing back as he kicked, his gun out of its holster and prepared to shoot and to shoot first. The aim would be low: Foster would have given orders that I was to be taken alive. The other had noticed the cupboard.
He wrenched three times at the handle. I felt its movement against my sleeve. Then he crossed to the cubicles and used his boot. The noise of the doors crashing open was very loud, overwhelming the sounds coming from the subway. The smell of the cleansing fluid had become stronger because my sense of sight was frustrated and the others were compensating, stimulated by a crisis situation.
They finished with the cubicles and turned and came past the cupboard on their way out.
'What about that?'
'I've tried it.'
'Is it locked?'
'Yes'
The handle moved again.
'We'll have to make sure.'
The explosion made me think he was firing at the lock but it was his boot against the panels.
'That's no good, it opens outwards, look.'
'Have to force it, then.'
'What with?'
'We'll have to find something.!
'Shoot round it?'
'Round what?'
'The lock.'
'We'd bring the others.’
'What about it?'
'They'll think we've got him. Finish up looking silly.'
'How can anyone be in there if the door's locked?'
'We've got to make sure. You know what the Captain said, turn every stone.'
'Ask someone where the key is, then.'
'Take all day. You stay here and I'll fetch an axe or something.'
The sound of his boots faded.
So there was only one of them but the conditions were zero because the instant I turned the key he'd hear it and get ready and I'd run into close-range shots.
He crossed to the far side and urinated at the stalls.
The main groups were leaving the subway and when the last of the echoes died they left total silence. He moved again, passing the cupboard, his feet idling, going through the entrance and then halting, looking along the subway.