'Ile sie nalezy?'

'Dziesiec zfoty.'

Merrick got off the stool. 'Thank you.'

‘Wait five minutes. Be in touch.'

He stopped me halfway to the door. 'Are you going to ask London?'

'Ask them what?'

'To take me out of Warsaw.' His eyes were vulnerable, ready to flinch.

'We'll both be getting out before long. You're here to get info on Czyn so you'll stay till the last train leaves for the camps but I don't give it beyond Tuesday. Till then we'll be treading on egg-shells. If you get caught in a raid don't count on your diplomatic immunity because it doesn't cover your involvement with elements hostile to the state, And don't count on me because you know what I told you in London: I'll throw you to the dogs.'

The street was clear when I went out. The only danger was from the uniformed M.O.s because the secret divisions didn't have anything on me. I turned left, going westwards through the failing light and picking my way over the sooty crusts that still covered most of the pavements.

There hadn't been a thaw to make any slush and they couldn't do much with shovels.

Proposition: an agency was using the U.K. as an infiltration image and promising diplomatic support. Remarks: impossible because no one had any reason to do that. Proposition: the said agency had convinced Polanski and therefore the whole of his unit that the U.K. was in fact allied to their cause and the unit had kept this highly encouraging news to themselves. Remarks: impossible because they would have passed it on. Problem: relate two impossibilities to reality.

Most of the shop windows were lit. There was no real daylight, here: night came at any hour after noon and covered the buildings until late morning. They said that if the wind blew from the south-west there was sunshine here, even in winter, and the forests ringed the city with jewelled ermine. Today the wind sliced through the streets from the north, numbing the bones.

One other question circled my thoughts: it looked as if Czyn was going to have its life-blood drained away before it could spill it at the barricades. If so, why did the Bureau want information on its activities? Why take the pulse of the dying?

Towards the Plac Zawisza I turned right for safety's sake and crossed the railway bridge and went left again along Ulica Vrodz and that was where they got me.

It was just bad luck. They came round the corner and we were face to face before I could do anything.

'Dokumenty.'

They were young and their faces weren't quite composed: I think they'd been laughing about something, perhaps girls, and now they'd got their duty to do but the amusement was still in their eyes as they looked at me, waiting. They would check my papers and walk on again. their secretive laughter coming back as they talked.

'I have lost them.'

One of them smiled at my joke. It was almost as good as the one about the girls.

'Dokumenty,' he said, and showed me his police card, tapping it. My Polish had been halting enough to assure them that I couldn't have understood. You do not lose your dokumenty. It is all you are.

'I am trying to find my way to my Embassy, so as to report the matter. The British Embassy. My best way is along Ulica Jerozolimskie, isn't it?'

He put his police card away and tapped the lapel of my coat, his eyes very intent now. The other one, taller, leaned forward to listen. I could smell the damp cloth of their uniforms, the leather of their belts.

'You have no papers?'

'I have lost them. I am on my way to the British Embassy to report it. This is a very serious matter for me.'

Crossroads and two vehicles opposite directions a few people in a queue conditions awkward a clear run fifty yards but their guns: quite often the classic maxims of training duplicate natural instincts but there has to, be brain-think as well as stomach-think and the chances here looked remote and it could be lethal. In the early days it strikes you as clumsy, the idea of making a run for it, inelegant; then you come to know what it's like, their tonelessly barked questions, the clang of a door, the half-lit passages, the grille where they come to watch you, and the moment when you think: my God, I could have run, now it's too late. But you can swing too far the other way and there's a new one to learn: that you mustn't let the thought of interrogation worry you so much that you'll make your run blindly.

'You have no papers?'

'No.'

They leaned close to me, attentively, needing to get it quite right, to believe the incredible, because in a police state if you have no papers you have no face, no name.

You are guilty of not existing.

'Come with us.'

Recheck. No go. The discretion factor was the only advantage, firearms will not be used unless, so forth. The rest was all on the debit side and even if they didn't shoot I could come unstuck and go sliding under one of the vehicles.

'Will you please show me the way to my Embassy?'

The basic rule is to try anything but there's no guarantee it'll work.

They used the telephone-point on the far side of the crossroads and we stamped our feet till the car came, a black Warszawa with M.O. on the side.

It was down in the Ochota precinct, a nineteenth-century building, once a private house but with a portico added on later and the doors doubled. The guard followed us in. Big portrait of the Chairman of the Presidium of the Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respubulik and a smaller steel-engraving of the Chairman of the Council of State of the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, several others, one of them behind the desk, Janusz Moczar, the Minister of the Interior, he was the man I'd want.

There was a stove in the corner and the dry air was opening up the guard's sinuses: his post was outside in the raw sooty wind. Long bubbly sniff and mouth exhalation, long bubbly sniff, five-second frequency.

'What is your name?'

'Bodkin.'

'Other names?'

'John.'

In the old days it was easy. You'd say your name was Need Help and when they rang the Embassy for information on a British national who'd lost his passport the clerk would twig it and send a secretary along and you'd all go home and have tea. These days the intelligence services had so much on that they kept most of the embassies in a state of quiet hysteria and if an agent got copped they just sent out for champagne.

'You have lost your papers?'

'Yes'

He was a police lieutenant in uniform but not an M.O. and I couldn't quite place him. In the Eastern Bloc states the uniformed branches are the Civil Police, Civil Police Volunteer Reserve and People's Militia, but the secret divisions can add up to a dozen or more, each with its specific interests: surveillance of political factions, infiltration of foreign missions, active suppression of Church influence, monitoring of the state apparatus, maintenance of files on the population, with a few top-level divisions directly responsible to Moscow. In some cases there's considerable overlap and you can be trundled from one detention centre to the next while they try to work out who's job it is to give you the chopper.

The other man didn't say anything. He sat near the stove with his pale hands dangling over the ends of the chair arms, a secret-division executive in a black suit and pointed shirt collar and his tie in a very small knot: a dough-faced middle-aged Party official with eyes like a fish that watched me all the time but never looked at me. He would be a Moczar man but that didn't tell me anything because the Minister of the Interior was the head of the police power and he could be in any one of its divisions, but he worried me because they're always on the lookout for exchange material and this was a suitable time: an international conference tends to cosy up the atmosphere and that's when people like fringe syndicate journalists step out of line and get hooked, in addition to which we had Blok and Shelepov in the Scrubs and they were both valuable enough for Moscow to try setting up arrangements.