It was late that evening, and the crowd at the bar were at their noisiest, as I pushed my way through the crowded lobby of the Europejski Hotel for a second time. Dicky was sitting on a leather sofa facing the reception counter. I had been back to the airport on a mission to find Dicky's extra suitcase, which had lost its label and gone astray in the baggage room. As Dicky explained, it was better that I went because I could speak the language. Now it was almost midnight and I wiped the wet snow crystals from my face and polished them from my glasses with a handkerchief. One of the two solemn-faced young women behind the hotel desk reached behind her for my room key without looking to see where it was. It was the sort of practiced gesture that made Western visitors to Poland uneasy. 'Well?' said Dicky.

'I found your suitcase. But those bastards in customs took their time. It was all those fragile labels you stuck on it that had them worried. They probably thought you were smuggling bombs for Solidarity.'

'They didn't hold on to it?'

'Ifs here, and it's gone up to your room.' We both turned our heads to watch six tall girls in bright green tartan skirts and tam-o'-shanter hats walk across the lobby. They stopped at the door of the restaurant and blew softly into the bagpipes they carried before proceeding inside. After a moment of silence there was the sudden explosion of massed drums, soon joined by the skirl of the pipes. Then the sound of the music was muffled by the closing doors.

'There's only cold food,' said Dicky. 'I argued, but you know how they are; they stare at you blankly and pretend they don't understand.'

'What was all that about?' I asked him.

'It's a girls' pipe band from Chicago. All from Polish neighborhoods. They're here for three nights. They go to Cracow tomorrow. I was talking to one of them; a blonde eighteen-year-old drum majorette. She's never been away from home before.'

'I'd watch your step, Dicky,' I advised. 'Her father is likely to be a 200-pound butcher in a canning plant, and very protective.'

'I'm going to bed,' said Dicky, chewing a fingernail. 'I'm getting a cheese sandwich from room service and hitting the sack. You'll do the same if you've got any sense.'

'I've got phone calls to make, but first I must have a drink at the bar.'

'I'm bushed,' said Dicky. 'I thought you were never coming back. I would have gone to bed but my pajamas are in that case.' He thought about what I'd said. 'Telephoning? Your contacts must be insomniacs. I'd leave it until the morning.' He yawned.

'Goodnight, Dicky.' It was useless trying to explain to him that my sort of contacts are working people who get out of bed at five in the morning, and slave all day.

I watched Dicky walking across the lobby to the main staircase. He cut a slim long-legged elegant figure in a way that I would never again become. One hand was in the pocket of his tight-fitting jeans, the other brought a chunky gold Rolex into view as he flicked his long bony fingers through his curly hair. He was studied with anthropological detachment by the two girls behind the reception desk. When his decorative cowboy boots had disappeared up the stairs, they looked at each other and sniggered.

I crossed the lobby and edged my way through the noisy drinkers at the bar. Here was the essence of Poland in 1987, a nation commandeered by its army. I recognized the pale faces of an army captain I'd met in Berlin, and a pimply lieutenant who was an aide to a general in the Ministry of the Interior. The young officers, both dressed in mufti, watched the Party officials with superior and impartial amusement. As part of the settlement with the army, the Party had promised to reform Poland's system of government while the most active Solidarity protesters were locked away. But socialist theoreticians are not noted for their zeal in self-reform, and debt-ridden Poland was sinking deeper and deeper into economic ruin. Rumors said the Russians would take control of the country within a week or so, and that the Polish army had already agreed to let them do it unopposed. But tonight the nation's misery was temporarily forgotten as the revellers celebrated the end of capitalism that they proclaimed the West's stock market crash heralded.

Among the celebrants there were university lecturers, a diplomat, some journalists, and assorted writers and filmmakers. These were the intellectuals, the nomenklatura, the establishment. These were the people who knew how to read the signs that pointed to shifts of power. To them it was obvious that Lech Walesa, and his fellow workers in the benin shipyard, had failed in their bid for power. This was a time for the establishment to close its ranks, to find a modus vivendi with the nation's military rulers; and with the Russians too if that was what Moscow demanded. Meanwhile they would indulge in long, jargon-loaded discussions with the Party's reformers, watch the Polish generals for danger signals, and down another double vodka before going back to their warm apartments.

From the restaurant the girls' pipe band started playing 'My Wild Irish Rose.' The music was greeted with heady applause and shouts of appreciation from an audience fired by enthusiasm for things American, or Polish, or Irish. Or perhaps just overcome with vodka.

I alternated mouthfuls of strong Tatra Pils with sips of Zubrowka bison-grass vodka. With both drinks in my hands I moved around, keeping my eyes and ears open. The UB men were here too. The ears of the Urzad Bezpieczenstwa were everywhere. I counted six of them but there were undoubtedly more. These security policemen were another sort of elite, their services needed by the Party and by the military rulers too. The UB thugs enjoyed their own private shops and housing and schools, and their own prisons into which their enemies disappeared without the formalities of arrest and charge. Such secret policemen were not new to Poland. Dzierzynski, the founder of Russia's secret police, was a Pole. His statue stood outside KGB headquarters in a square named after him in Moscow. While here in Warsaw another Dzierzynski Square celebrated his widespread fame and power.

I saw no one I both knew and trusted. Eventually I grew tired of listening to the chatter and watching the deals, and went up to my room on the first floor where, after making my phone calls, I stretched out on the bed and waited. It was two-thirty in the morning when a knock carne. A woman pushed at the door and came in without waiting for an invitation. 'Zimmer hundert-elf?' she said in heavy and precise German.

'Ja. Herein!' She was wearing too much make-up. At her throat an expensive Hermès silk scarf looked incongruous with the cheap fur-trimmed overcoat and well-worn white leather high boots. Snow crystals sparkled on her face, in her dark hair, and on her fur-trimmed hat. She snatched the hat off and, as she shook it, beads of icy water flashed in the light. Noticing that the curtains weren't closed, she went and tugged them together. She moved across the room with that haughty tottering step that is the mark of the young whore, but she must have been all of thirty-five, perhaps forty, and no longer thin.

For a long time she stood there — her back to the window — peering around the dingy hotel room as if imprinting it on her memory. Or as if trying to manage without her glasses. She was no longer the Sarah I remembered: one of a crowd of exuberant young students bursting out through the gates of Humboldt University into the Linden after morning lectures. Now all the mischievous joy had disappeared, and it was hard to find the fragile bright-eyed girl I'd known. That was twelve, maybe fifteen years, ago; a hot dusty day of a sweltering Berlin summer. She was wearing a homemade pink dress with large white polka dots, I was a few yards behind her and she'd turned and called to me, asking me something in Polish, mistaking me for a student from some village near her home.