Now she put her tote bag on the floor and stood there looking at me again. 'Room one one one?' she repeated in English.

'It's me, Sarah.'

'Bernd. I didn't recognize you.' She said it without much excitement, as if recognition would only encumber an already burdensome life.

'Do you want a drink?' I got a glass from the bathroom.

'My God I do.' She pulled off her coat, threw it across the bed, and sat down. As the light of the bedside lamp fell upon her I could see that her hair was graying, and one side of her face was yellow and blue and mauve with bruises that paint and powder could not quite conceal. She poured herself a large measure from the bottle of Johnny Walker I'd picked up at Zurich airport, and drank it swiftly. Poor Sarah. I'd seen a great deal of her after that first meeting. She was studying plant biology and when she went off with her friends, tracking down specimens of rare weeds and wildflowers, I'd sometimes tag along with them. It gave me a chance to get into parts of the East Zone that were forbidden to foreigners. 'Give me a minute,' she said, and slipped off her heavy boots to massage her feet. 'It's been a long time, Bernd.'

'Take your time, Sarah.' She was from the south; a Silesian village in a frontier region that had been under Austro-Hungarian, Czech, Polish, German and Russian army jurisdiction in such rapid succession that none of her family knew what they were, except that they were Jews.

'Boris couldn't come. He's on the early flight to Paris tomorrow.' She was married to a bastard named Boris Zagan who was a flight attendant for LOT, the Polish government airline. He wasn't exactly a British agent but he worked for Frank Harrington, the Berlin Rezident, delivering packets to our Berlin office and sometimes doing jobs for London too. I'd heard from several people that he regularly attacked Sarah during his bouts of drunkenness. 'It's good to see you,' I said. 'Really good.' There had never been any kind of romance between us; I'd liked her too much to want the sort of on-again off-again affairs that, were a necessary part of my life in those roughneck days.

She rummaged through the contents of her patent-leather handbag, found a slip of paper and passed it to me. Penciled on it there were three lines of writing that I guessed to be an address. I studied it and laboriously deciphered the Polish alphabet. 'Can you read it?' she asked. 'I remember you speaking good Polish in the old days.'

'Never,' I said. 'Just a few clichés. And what I learned from you.' Poles liked to encourage with such warm words any foreigner who attempted their language. 'I never was good at the writing; it's the accents.'

'Accent on the penultimate syllable,' she said. 'It's always the same.' She'd told me that rule ten years ago.

'I mean the writing: the "dark L" that sounds like w; the vowels that have the n sound, and the c that sounds like cher.' I looked at the address again.

'It's a big house in the lake country,' she said. 'Stefan, George Kosinski's brother, lives there. It's miles from civilization: even the nearest village is ten miles away. You'll need a good car. The roads are terrible and I don't recommend the bus ride.'

'Or the ten-mile hike from the village,' I said, putting the paper in my pocket. 'I'll find it. Tell me about Stefan.'

'The family are minor aristocracy, but Stefan prospers because Poles are all snobs at heart. He makes money and travels in the West. He even went to America once. He displays great skill at expressing his intellectual pretensions, but not much talent. He writes plays, and all of them conclude with deserving people finding happiness through laboring together. Poems too; long poems. They are even worse.'

'Big house?'

'He married the ugly only daughter of a Party official from Bialystok. Boris said the house is vast and like a museum. I've never been there but Boris has stayed with them many times. They live well. Boris says it's Chekhov's house.'

'Chekbov's house?'

'It's a joke. Boris says Stefan stole all Chekhov's best ideas, and his best jokes and best lines and aphorisms, and then stole his house as well. He's jealous. You know Boris.'

'Yes, I know Boris.'

She finished her whiskey with that determined gulp with which Poles down their vodka, and then studied her glass regretfully. 'Would you like another?' I asked.

She looked at her watch, a tiny gold lady's watch with an ornate gold and platimun band. The sort they sell in the West's airport shops. 'Yes, please,' she said.

I poured another drink for her. If she wanted to sit there and recover, there was little I could do about it, but I wondered why she hadn't just handed me the address and departed. As if reading my mind, she said, 'Another few minutes, Bernard, then I'll leave you in peace.' She fingered her cheek, as if wondering whether the bruises were noticeable.

Of course! She had bribed the desk who let her in as if she was one of the whores who serviced the foreign tourists. It was a cover, and she would have to be with me for long enough to make it convincing. Something to be hidden is always a good cover for something worse, as one of the training manuals deftly explained. She said, 'It's George Kosinski isn't it?'

'What?' I must have looked startled.

'Don't worry about microphones,' she said. 'There are none installed on this floor. The Bezpieca know better than to bug these rooms. These are where the committee big shots bring their fancy women.'

'I still don't know,' I said.

'Don't go cool on me, Bernd. Do you think I can't guess why you are here?'

'Have you seen him?'

'Everyone's seen him. As soon as he arrives he shouts and yells and spends his money and gets drunk in downtown bars where there are too many ears. Boris is worried.'

'Worried?'

'Has George Kosinski gone mad? He's swearing vengeance on someone who killed his wife but he doesn't know who it is. He's violent. He knocked down a man in an argument, in a bar in the Old Town and started kicking him. It was only after he convinced them that he was a tourist that the cops let him go. What's it all about, Bernd? I didn't know funny little George had it in him to do such things.'

I shrugged. 'His wife died. That's what did it. It happened in the DDR. On the Autobahn, the Brandenburg Exit.'

'A collision? A traffic accident?'

'There are a thousand different stories about it,' I said. 'We'll never know what happened.'

'Not political?'

I went and got another tumbler and poured myself a shot of whiskey. At the bar I'd been abstemious but I could smell the whiskey on her and it made me yearn for a taste of it.

'Don't turn your back on me, Bernd. I'll start to think you have something to hide.'

I'd forgotten what she was like: as sharp as a tack. I turned to see her. 'There are political traffic accidents, Sarah. We both know that.'

She stared at me as if her narrowed eyes would find the truth somewhere deep inside my heart. What she finally decided, I don't know, but she swigged her drink, got to her feet and went to the mirror to put her hat on.

'Where is George now?' I asked her. Her back was towards me while she looked in the mirror. She turned her head both ways but spent a fraction of a moment longer when looking at the bruised side of her face.

'I don't know,' she said calmly. 'Neither does Boris. We don't want to know. We've got enough trouble without George Kosinski bringing more upon us.'

'I was hoping Stefan or the family might know.'

'The last I heard, he was scouring through the Rozyckiego Bazaar trying to buy a gun.' She looked at me, but I looked down as I drank my whiskey and didn't react. 'You know where I mean? Targowa in the Praga?'

I nodded. I knew where she meant: a rough neighborhood on the far side of the river. Byelorussians, Ukrainians and Jews lived there in clannish communities where strangers were not welcome. Even the antiriot cops didn't go there after dark without flak jackets and back-up.