'Okay, wolves. And maybe it is snowing. But you are not Polish, George. That's one thing I'm certain about. You are very very English.'

'I speak the language,' said George.

'No, George, you don't speak the language. You speak some old-fashioned heavily accented Polish gobble-degook that leaves a trail behind you that a child could follow.'

'Do I?' He seemed dismayed.

'The crazy man, speaking funny old Polish? That's what they said in the village when I asked about you. Everyone you ever speak with goes telling everyone he meets about a man from England speaking comical old Polish.'

George dismissed this with a wave of the hand. 'How can you understand? It's not just a matter of the local accent; it's in the heart. I discovered how Polish I was back in 1978, when Pope John Paul was elected.'

I knew what was coming. Just as popular legend says that everyone in the West remembers what they were doing when they first heard of the shooting of President Kennedy, so Poles can all remember where they were when Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Krakow, was elected: the first non-Italian Pope for 456 years.

'Warsaw,' said George. 'I was walking down Nowy Swiat after a long service in the Jesuit church. My legs were stiff. There were little groups of people, standing on the street comers, singing. Then down the street there came a tramcar — and all the passengers were singing and shouting. You know Warsaw, Bernard. You know the people. Can you imagine that? A street-car with passengers leaning out shouting and singing? Not easily, eh?'

'Not easily.'

'I waved back at them, and I found myself crying with happiness and a feeling of being present at the most wonderful family celebration. It was then that I knew I was Polish. I watched the TV news that night, and the news announcer — a long-faced fellow who never smiled — was laughing and bouncing around the studio in a performance no one would have thought possible. Yes, I was truly Polish, but at first I didn't fully admit it to myself And I knew it wasn't something I could safely go around confiding to people in England, even Tessa- The English don't hate foreigners, but they draw the line at foreigners who boast of being foreign.'

I smiled to acknowledge his quip, but he scarcely knew I was there. It was a monologue, and it was little more than displacement activity, while his mind tried to deal with the prospect of life without Tessa.

'So in the summer of 1981 1 came back to Warsaw to try and sort my feelings out. I chose the date so I could attend the funeral of Cardinal Wyszynski. I was expecting a crowded church, a solemn eulogy and a respectful burial. You should have been here, Bernard! The first sign of what was going to happen was the way that all the theaters and movie houses closed their doors. Only religious music was transmitted on the radio. People flocked in from all over the country. Crowds gathered in the streets. The funeral became the biggest demonstration of religious faith I've ever seen. When Victory Square was used for communist demonstrations it was only half filled; but on that day I couldn't get within half a mile of the platform. They say a quarter of a million people were packed into that Square for the funeral. At one end of it they'd erected a gigantic cross; well over forty feet tall. And if there was any last doubt that this was some miraculous kind of revolution, that doubt was dispelled when the President arrived. The President of a communist government had come to pay homage at the funeral of Cardinal Wyszynski, his most outspoken critic.'

'Yes, well, before we both fall down and drown in a sea of tears, let me tell you one of my vivid memories of big-city life. If you'd stayed in Warsaw until the December of that same year, you would have seen your jolly Polish family getting their skulls cracked open by gray-uniformed antiriot squads, as they eliminated "troublemakers" and dragged them off to their cozy detention camps. You could have switched on your TV and seen General Jaruzelski on the early-morning program proclaiming not martial law but "a state of war." Solidarity was banned and even its minor rank and file were tossed into prison without trial. Strikes and demonstrations were prohibited, the night curfew was enforced, and the courts were told not to be too fussy about the nicer points of law. Telephone calls and all mail were subject to the censor. Even while the General was telling us all this, the radio and TV stations, and just about every other vital institution, were being taken over by teams of armed soldiers, and his tame "military council" took over the government.'

'That was during the time of military law,' said George.

'Are you blind, George? Ending martial law — and this phoney amnesty — were just deceptions to persuade the foreign bankers not to call in their loans. Martial law hasn't ended. Your precious "family" is in the tight grip of the generals.'

'You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.'

'Can't you, George? I'll write that, down and try and remember it. Is that, your personal political philosophy, or simply a cookery hint to save for a time when eggs are not rationed?' He gave me a sour smile. 'What I need to know is exactly when you decided to work for the Bezpieca. Was that before the omelette-making began, or afterwards?'

His head snapped back as if I'd slapped his face, but then he looked at me and smiled wearily to let me know he wasn't stumbling into my trap: he was marching into it. He was prepared. 'Before, Bernard. I wanted to help Poland.'

'But you didn't stop when the General took command, did you? You reported whatever you could find out about the work that Fiona and I did?'

'I told them nothing important. I never took money from them; I never gave them anything more than gossip.'

'How can you have been so stupid, George? You were moved by the way the Church confronted the communist State; but you went to work for the communist State?'

'I felt those two elements were no longer divided,' said George. 'And they got nothing important out of me.

'Maybe they put you on hold,' I said. 'You move in influential circles, George. What you call your gossip is useful to them.'

'Perhaps. But I'm not a spy, Bernard. I couldn't take the stress of it. That's why I got out and went to Zurich. I told them I had to leave England. I thought they'd stop pestering me after that.'

'But these folk don't take no for an answer, do they? Is that why you hired Tiny Timmermann?'

'I wanted him to find out about Tessa.'

'Tiny was murdered. I found him in Magdeburg; they'd blown the top of his head off.'

'I asked him to talk to them. To act as an intermediary . . . persuade them to let me off the hook. He said he knew everyone. He said he could do it.'

'I bet he did. When Tiny was strapped for money he sold short on promises.'

'I was desperate to know about her.'

'And when you came to Poland, what did they say about Timmermann?'

'I didn't know he'd been killed. They said that Timmermann had talked with them and that they would let me off the hook. But that first they'd show me their good faith. They would start an inquiry into Tessa's disappearance.'

'So Tessa's death became her disappearance, with all the promise that, evokes. So you didn't run back here because the stock market took a dive?'

'No, no, no. That was a coincidence. I wanted to escape, Bernard. I thought I'd managed it at one time.'

'There was a severed hand with your family crest on a signet ring.'

'I thought I was being clever. Stefan helped. He showed it to someone in the British embassy in Warsaw, to convince everyone that I was dead. We never intended that it should go to London.'

'Well, it went to London and one of their people was shot.'