He got out his cigarettes and offered me one. It was a slim silver case with his initials engraved on it. I declined. 'I'm trying to give up,' I said.

He lit up using his slim Dunhill lighter and puffed smoke, savoring its taste. Then he wiped the condensation from the windshield with the edge of his hand. 'Forget it,' he said suddenly. 'I spoke out of turn.'

'No,' I said, and I took up the little flashlight again and studied the photos for a final check. 'Thanks,' I said as I handed the pictures back to him.

'Is there anything wrong? Is it not him?' said Rupert.

'Difficult to say with that big fur hat he's wearing. But it looks like George.'

'They haven't told us anything,' said Rupert. It wasn't a complaint. Rupert had never been the whining kind, but he wanted me to know that he thought the Warsaw SIS office was being deliberately kept out of the George Kosinski business.

'Thanks again for the ride home,' I said, 'Thanks for everything.'

Rupert was hunched over the steering wheel, cigarette drooping from his fingers, looking closely at the pictures with the aid of his flashlight. 'You saw something else, didn't you?' he said without looking up. Rupert was quick and I was tired, otherwise he'd never have detected the surprise I'd registered when looking at the pictures. 'Is one of those people in the photo Thurkettle?'

'I've never heard of Thurkettle.'

'No? Bret thought you had. Before you arrived tonight he was telling Cruyer that, in your debriefing in California, you described how Thurkettle shot and killed Tessa Kosinski. You were there; and you said you saw it.'

'I seem to remember Dicky saying tonight that I thought Tessa was still alive.'

'Dicky always likes to look before he leaps,' said Rupert. 'He doesn't express his own thoughts, he puts them into the mouths of other people to see what happens.'

'Tessa Kosinski? Still alive?'

'I can see why they are puzzled. Bret is worried that your uncorroborated evidence, about a confused exchange of shots on a dark night, is the only thing they have to say that Tessa Kosinski is dead. Nothing else. In fact everyone else denies it.'

'What about Fiona? She was there too. What did she tell Bret at her debriefing?'

'Don't get angry with me, Bernard, I'm just putting you in the picture.'

'Can you still find your way to Fulham?' I said.

But Rupert wasn't going to stop now. 'Bret said Fiona won't talk about that night. He says that Fiona is struck dumb when Tessa's name is mentioned, that she has totally repressed any idea that her sister might be dead. By never admitting she is dead she'll keep her sister alive.'

'Yes, well Bret would say that. Bret was a psychology major at high school.'

Rupert looked at me, nodded solemnly, and said, 'No one else you recognize in the photos then?'

'I'm afraid not, Rupert.'

Still holding the pictures, he lifted his hand in a despondent gesture of farewell and said, 'See you in Warsaw, Comrade.'

He knew I was dissembling, but I certainly didn't intend to tell Rupert, or any of the other Departmental diehards, that, behind George Kosinski on that busy Warsaw pavement, I'd spotted my father-in-law. What was he doing in Warsaw, I wondered. He was supposed to be with Fiona and my kids, basking in the Jamaica sunshine.

12

Warsaw.

Now Poland was truly in the grip of winter. My plane cautiously descended through the wet gray clouds that provided snapshot views of the sunless landscape below. Only here and there did roads, tracks or trees hint at the rectangular shapes of fields. For the most part the snow had made a fearsome great gray world without end.

I had not heeded Bret's hurry-ups to leave London. I had retired to bed with whiskey and hot milk, enjoyed Mozart CDs, an assortment of books that I had put aside for reading some day, and assuaged my hunger with binges of fried eggs and fried smoky bacon with Heinz beans.

As on other occasions, unlimited indulgence proved a sure-fire cure for my ills. And so I was completely restored. Euphoria — the effect of favorite nourishment, heady music and guilt — soon gave way to unendurable languor. By the morning of the third day I jumped out of bed before it was light, sang while I was shaving and then booked a ticket on the first flight to Warsaw.

From the air you see only the new snow, but in the streets you saw it in layers. Like antediluvian faults the strata were of many colors, the layers dating back through blizzards and snowstorms, freezes and sleet, to the first fluttering snowflakes that long ago proclaimed the coming of winter.

Overflowing gutters contributed a delicate frieze along the roofs. Polski-Fiats splashed into the slush and sprayed it over the slow-moving pedestrians. In the street there were oozing streams, half-frozen rivers of brown and gray. Within a moment of falling, the snow was patterned by the gray residue of the exhausts of passing cars. While rattling half-frozen from the roofs, down through the giant drainpipes, the discharge had spread everywhere underfoot a lace-like bas-relief of ice that made the pavements uneven and slippery so that every step was uncertain. How well I knew these European winters, and how I hated them. I wondered what the surfing was like in Jamaica.

'Do you hate it, Rupert?' I said. We were sheltering from the wind in a doorway on Warsaw's Vilnius Station, and the whole place was virtually deserted.

'Hate it? Hate what?' I suppose his mind had been on other matters, like not freezing to death.

'All this. The snow and the filth. Poland in winter.'

'How could I hate it? I live here.'

I nodded and pulled up my collar. Rupert was different from the other Brits with whom he worked. He really believed he belonged here. He refused to see himself the way we all really were: awkward, ugly, inconvenient aliens, suspect to the authorities and a burden to our friends. He felt at one with the landscape and the people, but he never tried to be a Pole. He had the sort of self-righteous confidence that armed nineteenth-century missionaries.

As an afterthought Rupert added, 'These dark winter days . . . sometimes I pray for a snatch of sunlight.'

'Yes,' I said. The sky was as dark as granite, it pressed down upon the city like a weight.

'The snow is not usually as early as this,' he said. Visible above the collar of Rupert's oversize Burberry trenchcoat there was one of those quilted Barbour linings. Worn with his checked cloth cap it was the sort of outfit that I would expect an English gentleman farmer to wear on market day. It looked out of place here in the middle of nowhere. He pulled his scarf tighter around his throat, and stamped his feet.

'Are you sure he said Vilnius Station?'

'Yes, I'm sure,' said Rupert.

'And he promised he would come?'

It was hard to believe that this desolate open space was so near to the center of Warsaw, or any large European capital city. It was even harder to believe that where we stood had once been a busy rail terminal, a place the wealthy holidaymakers, the revered scholars and the business tycoons came to board the night express — with its bars, diner and sleeping compartments — to travel to the ancient city of Vilna (or Vilno or Vilnius according to which language you spoke). All the nations coveted that medieval showplace, a center of Jewish learning and the site of one of Europe's oldest universities. Poland wanted it, the USSR grabbed it, the German invaders razed it and massacred its largest Jewish population. Now Vilnius was the capital of Lithuania. But no longer did any trains leave this station and get to Vilnius. The platforms had been leveled, the old waiting rooms and baggage rooms demolished. Now it was just the spot where two railway lines ended. Now and again an austere little train departed to take commuters to nearby destinations. Beyond that the track had been uprooted, the sleepers burned as fuel, and the way to get to Vilnius was to go to the Central Station and travel via Moscow. And that was the way Poland's Soviet masters preferred it to be.