Working principle: to the cupboard of every man, a skeleton; and the greater the man, the more need to keep its door locked. In the hierarchy of government this truth has no exclusivity but in the state apparatus of the communist world it has particularity because the discipline of the Party credo leaves scant room for human error, and as the comrades labour their precarious way up the pyramid of power, a thumb in the eye and a boot on the neck of their nearest competitors, they know that a slip will send them pitching down again.

Tell any man I know what you've done and he'll think at once of his worst indiscretion: fear and guilt will persuade him automatically that if anything is known then it is the worst that is known. I thus expected that if Comrade Janusz Moczar ever received my message he would send for me. 1 might be bluffing but how could he risk that assumption? Once in the privacy of his office all I could do would be to use his face as a guide, making veiled references to black market manipulation if greed showed there, hinting of mistresses if he looked a lecher.

Comrade Minister, the regulations controlling foreign currency exchange have always, been subject to certain evasions, as I'm sure you'll know, but few people realise that a large part of the profits made by the touts in the big hotels finds it way to the coffers of those empowered to stop these widespread transactions, if they chose.

Comrade Minister, the private affairs of the members of the Polish Cabinet are of course not my. concern, but the world is sometimes inconveniently small, and a certain lady of my acquaintance — here in Warsaw — recently proved herself regrettably unentitled to the confidences extended to her by others. You know how it is, when an exclusive little party lingers on…

Delete where inapplicable.

And use his successive reactions as data feedback to correct my course to the target. It could be done. It has been done. Braithwaite is particularly good at it and whenever he shows up at diplomatic receptions a lot of the guests take out instant insurance by cabling their wives through Interflora. He works, as I would work, by the elementary rule that the surest way of extracting information is to imply that you know it already. Moczar would come out strongly for proof and he wouldn't get it because I hadn't got it but the aim would be to convince him that he couldn't take the "risk by throwing me back into detention: he'd be smart enough to know that even a fragment of evidence against the head of the police power could be worth a lot to the officer responsible for my safekeeping if I took a crack at trading it in for an arranged escape.

The gilded ikon glowed. Perhaps I was dazzled by its light or by the wishful thoughts that some call prayers. But the throw I'd made could get me out of here and into the open where the clock chimed under the sky: it could at least do that, and give me the chance of a break.

Keys.

A different man, older and less scruffy, a professional imprisoner, impersonal, his remote eyes playing directly on my face. I have never been taken out of a cell for abortive execution but I thought I recognised the look he gave me.,Hearing already the predestined crackle of shot among the walls outside he seemed puzzled that I still had movement. Perhaps he looked at us all in that way, his time sense dislocated by monotony.

Two guards. Come with us, they said.

In the room where they'd taken my watch away they now handed it back and I fastened the strap: it was an hour before dawn and the barred window was still dark. There were four of them now, a captain of the M.O. and three sergeants, all in spruce uniform and waiting punctiliously while I fixed the buckle and pulled down the sleeve of my coat.

'Eskorta!'

Two ahead and two behind as we clumped down the passage and through the office and out by the double doors, salute from a rifle butt and the bang of heels. The air smelt of steel and I saw a star caught in a web of cloud high over the skyline. The tang of low-octane exhaust.

They swung the step down at the back and we climbed in: there was no hustling. One of them put a hand on my arm but only to help me up the narrow steep step, as if I were infirm, or to be valued. We sat in formal rows along the side benches and no one spoke; it was all very official and through the heavy mesh on the windows I sometimes caught the reflection of the amber swivelling lamp on the roof of the van. Beneath us the chains flailed softly at the crusted snow.

Raszynska and a right turn into Ulica Koszykowa, the Czechoslovakian Embassy with its windows dark and the flag still frozen into the folds left by the last wind before winter.

North along Chatubinskiego and in silence something smashed and I knew it was hope because this wasn't the way to the Najwyzsza lzba Kontroli where the Minister of the Interior was going to give me the freedom of the city in recognition of the fact that I had him across a barrel. He had me in a mobile cage and I was no better off here than where the light of the yellow bulb was turned to false gold and the mind was moved to false hopes.

‘Wolniej!'

'Tak, Kapitan!'

We swayed sideways as the driver obeyed. The surface was treacherous and it wouldn't do to have an accident when carrying a prisoner. The street's jigsaw slowed across my eyes, cut into a matrix of images by the mesh at the windows. It was no good thinking when they take me out because when they took me out they'd be ready for an attempt and if I broke clear they'd shoot and there'd be no point in facing the sky with a hand flung out, no answer to anything.

Then they were moving their positions slightly, straightening up, and the snow at the edge of the roadway crackled under the tyres. I couldn't see where we were because the name of the street had swung past in parallax behind the stem of a lamp but I knew we'd crossed into the Wola district, north of the railway.

The captain and a sergeant climbed down and turned and I knocked the hand aside as it tried to help me and they closed in quickly as we stood in the rising gas, my arms pinioned now because the sudden movement had worried them. A good escort works like a guide-dog, regarding his charge as an extension of his own body, and there was no chance for me here.

When the prison van backed away I saw the big Moskwicz saloon by the kerb. It was in the Russian style, amorphous and lumpish and with domed hub plates and curved quarter lights at the rear: it stood on the snow like an immense polished beetle and above its roof I saw two men in black astrakhan coats coming down the steps from the pillared entrance to the building, the guards at the top still holding their rifles at the salute. The whole thing went smoothly, as if rehearsed: I was led quickly to the saloon and put inside, my escort shutting the door and standing back to keep orderly station along the flank of the car as the two civilians entered it from the other side, ducking their fur kepis and taking their places, one on the occasional seat and the other beside me. The doors clicked shut and the engine was started and we got under way.

'Jolly cold, isn't it?'

He fished out a whisky flask with the ease of habit. He was the one facing me and I thought I'd met him before, as one does when one has seen so many pictures of a face in the newspapers. This one was crumpled rather than lined, as if the tissue paper skin had been crushed into a ball and then smoothed out again; the large eyes were pink-rimmed, their whites laced with red rivulets, and the mouth was long, thin-lipped and set in an expression of irony as distinct from cynicism: it was the mien of a man who had long ago discovered, with secret delight, that the follies of others matched his own. His name was Foster.

He held out the flask. 'Warm the cockles, old boy?'