'What is your business in Warsaw?'

'I cannot tell you that. I require some paper and an envelope, please. I wish to send a message to Comrade Janusz Moczar immediately.'

The first thing was to get into the open. There'd be an armed escort but a chance could come up. In here there was no chance at all.

He looked at the dark-suited man and one of the pale hands lifted and fell by a fraction. He didn't speak.

'You wish to approach the Minister?'

'Yes. To demand my immediate release.’

'On what grounds?'

He was writing a kind of shorthand. The atmosphere had changed: it was bound to. In a closed society with strictly ordered disciplines there's always fear present: particularly fear of those in power because they don't need evidence or warrants or public acquiescence to proceedings before they can act. They'll slam a man in and throw the key away, even if he's a major-general with a brother the chairman of the National Assembly: onset of acute paranoid manifestations, a signed certificate, all quite circumspect. Fat chance for a police lieutenant if he didn't notice the soap.

'My reasons are private. They concern the Minister of the Interior and no one else.'

Meaning that he was already on dangerous ground.

A pale hand lifted and fell but I only saw it at the edge of the vision field and I couldn't tell if the signal differed from the earlier ones. The man I was really talking to was that one, in the black suit: the other was only a voice.

'You are personally acquainted with the Minister?'

'Of course.'

If it wasn't going to work it was at least keeping his mind from the standard questions and that was a help because I couldn't answer them. P. K. Longstreet was floating under the ice of the Vistula and he'd have to stay there. I'd given them a name but it didn't make any difference: when did you arrive in Warsaw? By what flight? Where are you staying? He'd check and draw blank and they'd know I couldn't tell them my business so the best thing was to point that out before they'd got round to it.

His belt squeaked as he reached for the cheap wooden letter rack and tugged out a sheet of sepia-coloured paper with the police crest in the top left comer and a smudge near the edge.

'You may write.’

'That piece is not clean enough. This is for the Minister, I have told you.'

He got another piece and turned it to the light and laid it flat on the desk and I nodded and got my pen. They were going to steam open the envelope somewhere along the line but they wouldn't expect me to know that so I said

'Please place yourself where you cannot read what I shall write. I must remind you again: this is for the eyes only of the Minister.'

He turned his head and the hand instructed him. As I reversed the pen top and stuck it on he got up and paced towards the doors, his jackboots creaking.

Go outside and blow your nose and come back.

As I began writing I heard one of the doors open and the guard go out; and even after these few minutes I sensed the street and the sky with the hunger of the trapped animal, because it might be months or even years before such a door would open for me.

At midnight I used three asanas to combat the cold: uddhiyana, jalandhara and vajroli mudra. They'd taken my watch but the chiming of a town clock came hourly through the high ventilation grille, and the acoustic effect had a freak quality because the space was small: it sounded as if the clock were in here with me, its volume diminished, or that I was listening to it in the open.

It was only the watch they'd taken. The rest had been checked and handed back: wallet, pen, money, where are your keys? I do not have any. Why not? My room key is at the hotel and I have no car here and I do not require the keys that I use in my home country. Handkerchief, Angielski-Polsko pocket dictionary, penknife, nothing else: the poor little devil had thought he'd got his sums wrong when I'd given him back his report but it was just that between blowing your cover and getting a new one you've got to watch what you carry.

The search had surprised me. They ought not to search a personal acquaintance of Comrade Moczar and they ought not to take his hat off and shoot a full face and profile against the white board but they'd done that too. It was all right because those pictures are useful only when they've got you inside, and if you can get out again they're no good as an image to work with when they're looking for you. in the street especially Warsaw in winter when everyone's identical in a fur kepi but all the same they ought not to have done it.

The lieutenant had given me an envelope and I'd sealed it myself. I must tell you that if this message is not delivered immediately by hand you will invite serious trouble for yourself. If it is intercepted or opened before it reaches the Minister he will learn shortly from my associates that I have been apprehended, and will know that my first action would have been to contact him and demand my release.

He'd gone off with it himself, cap, greatcoat and gloves and a salute for the wax-faced man in the black suit. Then I was taken to a smaller room with barred windows for the search and the photographs. That was nine hours ago.

From here to the Najwyzsza lzba Kontroli it was twenty minutes by car but of course he could be absent or busy supervising the clearance of the underground forces from the city. But it didn't look good.

Some hot stew and black bread at half past eight, then I’d spent a few minutes facing the possibilities: a full-scale interrogation and the subsequent workout when I wouldn't talk. Solitary detention, sleep and sensory deprivation, stress imposition and the ordering of painful postures, sudden switches of attitude from the accusatory to the benign, physical strictures: and they wouldn't be the worst. Within a few hours you can turn any man into a mad animal, but there's a break-off point because the object is to get information and they can't get it if they've gone too far and wrecked the personality. It's up to that point where the suffix-9 has a value: beyond it you're lost and so are they and they know that, the good ones. And that's your only hope.

But nobody likes the dentist.

Keys again. He was a big man but thin about the face and his eyes were never still, showing their whites like a kicked dog, watchful for a boot.

'Dobrze?'

'Dobrze.'

He took the tin bowl and the spoon away, snatching them suddenly and hurrying out, frightened that someone might have heard him offer a word to me out of his inborn peasant courtesy. His hands should be on a plough as his father's had been: what was he doing here among bricks and bars?

The cold was depressing. Cold is for the dead.

In presenting my compliments I request my immediate release from detention in the Ochota Precinct and your personal guarantee that I shall not in future be molested in any way by members of your police services. Their action in questioning the loss of my regular documentation was fully justified, but I wish to avoid similar incidents during my stay in Warsaw, and therefore require the use of a provisional laissez-passer bearing your own signature and seal, which I shall be prepared to surrender on leaving Poland. I have no wish to jeopardise your high position in the Cabinet at a time when critical pressures menace the stability of government, but since I am in possession o certain facts at present unknown to your political opponents I find myself obliged, in my own interests, to ask your immediate attention to those matters stated above.

A light burned in the corner near the latrine channel, a low-power unshaded bulb that hung within an inch of the wall. Its warmth had been melting the frost on the brickwork since the beginning of the winter and now an icicle clung there, reaching to the concrete floor. In it the bulb glittered, many times reflected, gilding it and giving it the semblance of an ikon, here for the prayers of the wretched.