‘Where is my husband now? His life is his work. I don’t know. Wherever. Why is he there? I’m not included. He’ll come back, wash his own clothes and probably iron them, and he’ll tell me nothing. He’s not a crusader, doesn’t wear patriotism or ideology on his sleeve, but I don’t believe it’s acceptable to him to fail. Those stupid little word puzzles, the teasers in the paper, if he can’t do them he’s coldly furious but he doesn’t come to me for help. To fail is not on his agenda, and it was certainly not on the agenda of Clipper Reade — I curse him — and he doesn’t believe anyone else should contemplate failure. For that he lost the love of his son, and stretched me near to snapping-point. He wouldn’t recognize the cost of the agenda.
‘Heavens, the time. I’ve kept you. I’ve not talked about Christopher like that to anybody before. Should you have given that name, put that policeman into my husband’s clutches? I can’t say. Have I been of any use to you? I can’t see how I have been. I don’t know where he is, or what danger he faces. My dear, he won’t back off, or allow those with him to back off. Do you recognize what I’ve said of Christopher? Did you like him?’
The liaison officer, Alison, stood. ‘You’ve been very helpful, and I apologize for the intrusion. No, I’m not with the big battalions — I liked him very much. Whatever is happening is close, I think, and for all involved these are desperate times. I’m grateful to you.’
The Crow, that afternoon, had taken the bus from the airport into the city.
At the terminus he had been met. The contact had been good. He had been barely aware of the man coming up fast behind him but he had felt the slip of paper wedged into his palm and snapped his fist shut on it. He could not recall the man’s face.
He stood on a pavement in a narrow street of shops, apartments and a hotel. The wealth with which he was familiar in the Gulf was not here. Drab grey concrete walls pierced by drab windows of sparse goods for sale seemed to close around him. The paper had been the section of a map that covered this street. There was a drab light over the desk inside the hotel lobby. He gave a name, false, filled in his passport details, false, in the register, and paid cash for one night in advance. He was handed a room key, then a sealed envelope with the number of the room written on it in pencil. The Crow tore open a corner of the envelope, enough for him to see that it held the onward flight ticket he would use the following day.
Did he want anything? An explanation: did he want a woman for the evening? The Crow shook his head, smiled at the drab face behind the reception desk of a back-street Belgrade hotel. He didn’t want a woman, not then and not ever.
On the platform at Wolverhampton, Sak waited for the train to Birmingham New Street. For the schedule he must keep, he could have gone an hour later, even two. The atmosphere in his home had suffocated him, and each time he’d emerged from his room there had been more questions. When would he be back? Was he certain there was no contact number should they need to reach him in an emergency? Had he enough money — cash and cards? So he had gone early.
At New Street station, it had been decided for him that he should change, then take a later train directly to London. He would cross London and reach the Eurostar terminus. He would travel by night, would be at his destination by dawn.
He felt excitement and believed himself valued.
He had been shown monuments and plaques.
Carrick had stood in front of a montage of double-life-size figures, sculpted in bronze, who wore uniforms and army helmets, carried rifles, machine-guns and hand grenades and seemed to run from one point of cover to the next. Reuven Weissberg had told him it was the commemoration tableau for the rising by the Catholic Christian Poles against the Germans, and it had happened a year after the fall of that bunker, and that it was done by men who had not lifted a weapon to help the Jews. He had seen, against an old wall of red brick, a statue of a child who carried an automatic weapon and whose helmet dwarfed a little head. A wreath of flowers was tucked under the statue’s arm, and Reuven Weissberg had said that the Catholic Christian Poles helped themselves but had not supported the Jews. Plaques had been pointed to and Carrick had not the language but realized they marked the streets where captured men had been shot by firing squad, and where units had made their command posts, but it had been a year after the Jews in the bunker had killed themselves rather than surrender. His feet had been on old manhole covers and below had been the sewers through which the uprising had been resupplied and, at the end, a few had escaped. He must not show feelings — he was a bodyguard, a cipher, a servant — but the relentless criticism of those who had died fighting for themselves, and had not risen in defence of the city’s Jews, disturbed him. The bitterness confused him. Here, there was defeat, and the bitterness could flourish. Images seemed to bounce towards him that he had not known before — the scale of a slaughter beyond his comprehension.
‘You want to know how many died in the uprising, Johnny? They say twenty thousand of the Christian Poles who were fighters died — and two hundred and twenty-five thousand of the Christian Poles who were not fighters died … but more Jews died, Johnny.’
The light was failing as Reuven Weissberg led Carrick across a wide square, past shops that were closing for the evening. He heard the scrape of steel shutters falling. There were horses between the shafts of the open carriages, but the tourists and visitors had gone, the rain dripped and they were idle. Ahead of them was the Old City, and he followed Reuven Weissberg, and did not know the purpose of it.
Chapter 14
Now Carrick understood. He knew what was done, and why.
Reuven Weissberg had brought him to the main square of the Stare Miasto. They had passed the Royal Castle and the cathedral and had cut down a street where shop staff were removing trays of amber jewellery from the windows. The square was long, broad, and in front of them was a black statue, in bronze, of a rampant woman, naked, protected by a circular shield and holding up a short-bladed battle sword, and all around him were the old town houses, four storeys high, and faced in plaster that was painted in ochre shades, pink and dull yellows. It didn’t matter what colour the buildings were because now he understood.
It was an exercise in counter-surveillance, and he remembered a long-ago pub evening off the long main drag in Colchester. Carrick and other recruits to Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, had listened in hanging silence to a veteran sergeant whose star turn was to tell the stories of the Province postings he had survived, and had a Distinguished Conduct Medal to prove his knowledge of what he talked about. He thought of himself, part of an exercise in counter-surveillance and not able to influence its outcome, as bait. The sergeant had been big on bait. He, Carrick, was bait and it was difficult for bait to survive.
They crossed the square. Waiters were lowering the big parasols over the outside tables and chairs of the restaurants, and dusk was falling. He had no option but to follow Reuven Weissberg — freedom to help himself did not exist.
Carrick imagined that out of his sight and hearing, there had been one last dispute between Reuven Weissberg and the hoods — it would not have involved Josef Goldmann. Of course he would be followed. He did not know how many of them trailed him. They had been at the Glienicker bridge, and on the street at night in the rain, and had led Lawson to the kiosk round the corner from the hotel. They would be tracking him.
What did his life depend on? On how damn good they were.
They stopped in front of windows and Reuven Weissberg professed to study the last trays of amber items, watches, pendants, necklaces and bracelets, and in front of restaurants where the menu boards were going inside, and by a church door through which a few of the faithful — men, women and children — scurried to catch a late Mass.