'No,' I said. He was looking around in an agitated way that suggested claustrophobia. The interior was gloomy, illuminated only by a tiny yellow bulb in the roof. The main part of the ambulance was occupied by two stretchers locked into wheeled racks. Two gray army blankets were draped over each of them. A respiratory apparatus was in a rack over a hard uncomfortable bench, upon which we were now seated, crushed tightly together. Just inside the door there was a metal wall cabinet marked with a red cross. It was secured by a brass padlock.

'There are no windows.'

'No windows in ambulances; no pockets in shrouds. They don't want us to see where we're going,' I explained. 'It will be okay.'

'I hope so.'

A peep-hole controlled from the driver's compartment snapped back and one of the men up front said, 'We'll bring you back.' Then he closed the shutter without waiting for our reaction.

I could hear the traffic around us but the ventilator in the roof provided no chance of seeing out, not even a glimpse of the sky. I noticed we did not make an excessive number of turns and I guessed that they were going directly to our destination, so I settled back and waited. I decided it came into the category of 'calculated risk,' the sort of hazard I was paid to suffer.

The ambulance journey took only twenty-five minutes. When the doors were opened at the other end we were in a parking bay outside a large ugly building standing in a dozen acres of grass most of which was now hidden under the snow. Regimented trees lined the drive and there was a sign at the gate announcing that this was the Madame Maria Sklodowska-Curie Clinic. The double Nobel Prize-winning Madame Curie was much celebrated in her home town but a large section of the sign's wooden supporting trestle was missing, suggesting that some passerby had wanted to pursue radiation experiments of a domestic nature.

I knew more or less where we were. You can't get lost in Warsaw since the Soviets built the world's ugliest building there and made it so tall you can see it from Vladivostok. We followed the two Poles in through the main entrance of the building. As we entered the lobby they removed their hats and looked around respectfully, as if entering a cathedral. Then a gray-haired woman came striding along and engaged them in rapid Polish. She was dressed in black skirt and blouse. What not so long ago was the uniform for female office workers throughout Europe now made her inadvertently chic.

I raised an eyebrow at Rupert, who explained softly, 'We are about to meet the head administrator of the clinic.'

The long corridor along which we were taken was bare and cold. We passed doors that opened on to small wards with half a dozen beds in each. 'Here,' said the gray-haired woman. From somewhere behind one of the doors a baby began crying and another joined in.

The head administrator's room was slightly larger, warmer and marginally more comfortable than any of the wards we passed on the way to it. He was introduced as Dr. Urban and, despite the white cotton coat, my suspicion that he was not a physician was soon confirmed when he told us that he had previously been managing a printing plant in Lodz. He laughed when he told us this. But his spoken English was fluent, due he said to having spent a year as an exchange student in New Jersey.

'I want to be frank with you. Clear and above board. And that's why it is better that Mr. Copper is here to represent your embassy. I don't want you saying that you were tricked by those crafty Poles.'

'We were expecting George Kosinski,' I said. The gray-haired lady took our overcoats, put them on hangers, hung them in a closet and then departed.

'Your brother-in-law,' said Dr. Urban. 'It's better to do it without him.' He smiled conspiratorially. 'Much better.' Anyone locked into the notion that all Poles were thin reflective and lugubrious had not met Dr. Urban. He was a short restless man with a thick mass of wavy auburn hair, a chubby cheerful face and piercing blue eyes. His time in the United States had obviously had a profound effect upon him, for his informal manner and his style loosened tie and feet resting on a pile of books-was markedly transatlantic.

'Is he all right?' I asked. Dr. Urban waved at a chair and I sat down.

'He is all right. Our friend Mr. George? Yes, but he becomes too anxious. We understand why; he has endured a stressful time.'

'Yes,' I said. After spiraling round like a restless dog Rupert settled into a battered armchair.

Rupert said, 'Mind if I smoke?' Such formality seemed superfluous, since Dr. Urban had filled the air with acrid blue smoke and was still working at it. On the table there was an open packet of Benson and Hedges. He swiveled it round, offering the cigarettes to Rupert, but Rupert took one of his own from his monogrammed silver case. Having blown a little smoke, Rupert said, 'The body is it? The body of the wife?'

'Ah!' said Dr. Urban, opening his eyes wide to look at Rupert as if he'd not expected him to do anything but sit quietly and listen. To counter this unexpected development he said, 'You'll take coffee?'

There was another delay while the coffee was brought to us and poured out. Through the window I could see the car park. There were half a dozen cars there veiled in snow, variously heavy coatings of it according to how long each had remained unused. The two Poles were standing by the ambulance talking together. I had the feeling that they expected to wait a long time.

'Where were we?' said Dr. Urban after he'd put down his cigarette and settled back in his creaky swivel chair with his coffee balanced in his hands.

'Mrs. Kosinski,' supplied Rupert.

'I went to Berlin last week to make the travel arrangements,' said Urban. 'The Germans can be very difficult but in this case everything has gone smoothly. She arrives at the end of the week.' Dr. Urban stopped talking as he found something undesirable floating in his coffee. He bent forward, held his cup above the wastepaper basket, and expertly flipped the foreign body into it using his spoon. I had the feeling that he'd done it before. He looked up. 'An insect,' he said and then drank the coffee with relish.

'Does Mr. George Kosinski know all this?' said Rupert.

'Of course,' said Dr. Urban. He put down his half-empty coffee cup and rummaged around on his desk to find a United Kingdom passport which he held in the air like an author on a TV talk show. 'George Kosinski has become a Polish citizen,' he said. 'This passport is no longer valid.' Rupert stood up and reached for the passport. Urban said, 'Look at it, yes. But you can't keep it. It has to be returned through the official channels.'

'Why are you telling us this?' I asked while Rupert, a broody look on his face, examined George's passport page by page.

'Don't you want your coffee?' He stirred his own coffee zealously, and then set it aside and picked up his cigarette and blew on the end to get it alight.

'It's delicious,' I said. In fact I didn't want it. The look on his face as he evicted the insect from his own cup had quenched my thirst.

'Because they tell me you are going off to Masuria to find him. He's become a Polish citizen with fun rights and privileges. His parents were born here. It was a simple matter once he'd decided. But now he would need permission to leave Poland, even if you persuaded him to go with you.'

'George Kosinski is my brother-in-law,' I said.

'Yes, I know,' said Urban. 'It makes no difference. The wife is Polish too.'

'Are you saying she's alive?' I said.

'Tessa Kosinski?' He put a new cigarette in his mouth and lit it from the butt of the old one. Then he stubbed out the butt in an ashtray made from a brass shell case. Only after all that did he give a brief laugh. 'Very much alive. More alive than most of the people on the District Hospitals Management Board to which I report.'