'Yes.’ The wind cut at our faces. 'If Customs decide it's a nice day for a snap check try and distract their attention, shut their arse in a door or something.'

'Will you call for it?'

'No. Keep it on you.'

'All right.' Nearing the end of the bridge he said: 'Are we — '

'Don't look back.'

They'd shut down the diesel. Our feet scuffed over the snow. His breathing was painful and when I finally couldn't stand it and what they were doing to him and what I was doing to him I left him and went down the steps and along the riverbank where it was dark.

Everyone's always complaining at Norfolk that in Weapons Recognition they're sketchy about the head-on image. The artist is fond of a certain forget-me-not blue for the shading and we think he's a poof but the diagrammatic vital statistics are up to scratch and there's a clever system using key colours for giving what amounts to a visual permutation table for the types of ammo interchangeable among the run-of-the-mill international models, but they haven't yet conceded the obvious point that we need a set of oblique head-on pictures at something like ten or twelve degrees from the line of sight and a specially big one from above, because the head's a smaller target and the aim is normally at the stomach or the heart so that you're looking slightly down at the image. The only picture they give us is smack into the line of sight so it looks like an end-on view of a sausage roll with no sausage in it.

But this was an easy one, a Typolt Mk XI short-range sub with sixteen in the drum, and I was looking slightly down at it in the normal way. I couldn't see whether it was at safe or fire but by the look on his face I knew I ought not to move.

He had the intent gaze of a bird, the iris so dark that the eye seemed all pupil; the other one was glass, not too well made. The streaks of white in his ruffled hair, the deep-cut lines in the face, the strong hooked nose, the scratched leather covering of his mechanical hand and his crouched attitude all gave him the look of an eagle mauled in some foray, the plumage torn but the pride fiercer than ever.

The man behind me shut the inner door of the sound-lock,

'Who are you?' In Polish.

The room was big but cluttered with trestle tables and sagging settees and a vast carved Lublin dresser with a G.E.C. transmitter-receiver stuffed into it. Designer's desk covered with papers, bottle of Wyborowka Vodka and three tumblers, some tins of meat, pair of leather gauntlets with the fleece sticking through a gash, packet of Sport. The stacked boxes in the corner farthest from the stove looked like ammo. Thick smell of black leaf.

'It's all right,' she told them. She'd come from behind a baize folding screen. I heard a kettle boiling. 'He's the Englishman.' She came towards me, so that he had to shift his aim.

'Alinka!'

Impatiently she said over her shoulder — 'I've told you he's all right, Viktor.' Black sweater and slacks: she wouldn't be wearing the uniform any more. She was thinner than I remembered, or it was that black accentuated the lean lines of her body as she moved towards me with a controlled rhythm and stopped, facing me, her patent-leather kneeboots neatly together. I know that this was how she moved, and stilled herself: I've learned more about people by their bearing than by anything else, even their eyes, because it has a permanency and expresses what they are and not just what they're feeling.

In English she said: 'I've told them about you.'

'Alinka.' His voice was rough with anger. 'Did you tell him how to get in here?'

She turned away, this time controlling her impatience, and I sensed that it was something they'd all had to learn: to be patient with Viktor. He'd lowered the gun but his bright eye burned at me.

'No,' she said. 'He knew.'

'How did he know?'

'Does it matter?' She held a tumbler to the light and poured some vodka. 'He knew they were going to arrest me but I didn't ask him how he knew. I'm still free, that's what counts.' She brought the vodka to me with quick lithe strides. 'Can I know your name?'

'Longstreet.'

'Drink. I owe you that.'

'Who are you?' It was the other man, the one who'd sat with her in the kawiarnia, his big confident hands clasped on the table and sometimes thumping it gently for emphasis. But he hadn't eased the fright in her. They were all frightened here.

I asked him: 'What did you say?'

'Doesn't he speak Polish?'

'If he did,' she shrugged, 'would he have to speak to you in German?'

He watched me steadily, a good face with the eyes well apart under a wide flat brow, the mouth long and compressed, contemplative. He'd be their mainstay, here, the one who never panicked; but I thought that at this moment his confidence had never been under such a strain. It wasn't because of me, I knew that.

She said to me: 'This is Leo Polanski.'

'My God, do you have to tell him our names?'

'Please, Viktor,' she said quietly.

Polanski inclined his head, still watching me. He said: 'You have helped us — '

'Ich verstehe nicht — '

'You, have helped us,' he said, this time in German, 'but we need to know who you are.'

I turned and put the vodka, untouched, on the corner of the littered desk. There were several versions of who I was but I didn't know which one I ought to give them.

'Is it not all right?' she asked.

'I'm driving.'

There was actual need for me to tell them who I was: it would simply be for the sake of putting them at their ease. If I didn't satisfy them they might stop me coming here again: they could do that easily enough by changing the signal. It might take a little time for them to see that they'd have to co-operate with me, because a changed signal wouldn't stop a police squad if I cared to tip them off: they'd drill right round the door with heavy calibre rapid fire, like opening a tin.

Of course it might take them less time to see that I ought not to be let out of here at all. It made no difference that I'd been of use to them: in the last few days before a city-wide revolution there could be a change of fortune and loyalties and if it suited my book I could have them dragged out of here and slung into the interrogation cells and later packed into the special windowless trains for the camps in the Komi Republic.

Viktor realised that much: it was in the burning dark of his one good eye as it stared at me. He was the only professional here, too young for the war but old enough to have manned the barricades in the '56 Poznan riots: maybe that was where he'd trained.

'I'm an observer. You're going to start a war, aren't you? You'll need Western observers.'

I'd spoken to Polanski but it was Viktor who answered, limping quickly to the desk and ripping open the packet of Sport, holding it against his chest with his mechanical hand. Left leg, left hand, left eye. Grenade or a mine.

'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.