Samson 05 - Hope, page 26
I didn’t respond.
‘A yawn,’ said Copper, answering his own question. ‘And have you properly considered Fiona’s position?’
‘In respect of what?’
‘In respect of those Stasi bastards. Remember that poor little Simakaitis? The Lithuanian KGB captain who came over to us with all the wavelengths? A bright fellow who got sick of seeing the rough stuff going on over there. Eight years ago next month, if my memory serves me. We brought all his family out too. It was a textbook operation. Warsaw office handled the children.’
‘I remember the case,’ I said.
‘Normannenstrasse was determined to destroy him. The Stasi lost their Berlin codes and ciphers and wavelengths.’
‘Yes, but that was a different generation of Stasi in those days. Those gorillas were the last remnants of the Stalinists.’
‘The same sort of vindictive crew are holding the reins again now. Anyone less than fanatical finds himself shunted off to a frontier job, to be replaced by a dedicated Marxist. Every day in my office I see the results of what they’re doing. These people are fueled by hatred. They see Gorbachev’s concessions as a threat to their sacred creed, and they have dug their heels in.’
‘Well, they didn’t get Simakaitis,’ I said. ‘I heard that someone went over to Florida last summer to get his opinion on some new radio material.’
‘They didn’t get Sim because the Yanks took him into one of those elaborate witness protection programs they designed for Mafia informants: a completely new life.’
‘So what did they do?’
‘The KGB let Sim live. Sim’s elderly parents were killed in a shooting in a filling station hold-up in Brussels. The killers didn’t stop to steal any money. His wife died six months later. She went overboard from the Flushing ferryboat, and the Scheldt estuary is very cold in January. No one saw her go over. That happened one year, to the very day, after he defected. Washed up a week later. No water in the lungs. Unconscious before she went in, the coroner said. Then Sim’s sister took a big overdose one summer night when she was on holiday in Spain, and in the best of spirits. His brother died in France. That happened the same day Sim went to Washington: fell from the Paris-Lyon express. His four children were all swimming together …’
‘Okay, that’s enough,’ I said.
‘Sim is in a nursing home in Orlando. I was the person who went to see him. They did for him all right. He sits and looks at the wall all day. It’s just as well he doesn’t want to go anywhere or do anything, because he can’t even go to the toilet on his own.’
‘Fiona are you thinking about?’
‘Of course I’m thinking about Fiona. Sim did nothing compared to what she did. No matter about the exact circumstances of her departure, her subsequent treachery is unforgivable in their eyes. They trusted her; she betrayed them. They did everything for her, a decent place to live, a car and driver, they even gave her a department and authority. You know what those things mean in the East. She spat in their eye.’
‘You think Fiona might be targeted in that same way?’
‘How can you rule it out? Perhaps the wheels are. already turning. Her only sister is dead. Her brother-in-law has been forced into taking a trip to Poland, for reasons we can only puzzle about. The boy was killed, perhaps because they mistook him for you. You are on your way there, and we both know how exposed you’ll be out there in the sticks.’
‘It would have happened by now,’ I said.
‘That’s what Sim thought. But they don’t hurry their retributions. They like their victims to think about what’s coming. You know what they are like; how can you be so blind?’
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.
‘He said he would come,’ said Rupert, ‘but that doesn’t mean he will come. You know what Poles are like.’
‘No. What are they like?’ I took my hands from my pockets and blew on them to restore circulation. I vowed to buy gloves: big fur gloves.
‘Secretive. Clannish. Do you know about the unknown warrior?’
‘What about him?’
‘The tomb of Poland’s unknown warrior in Pilsudski Square is where every foreign dignitary comes to lay a big floral wreath, and make a solemn speech about peace. The Soviets are all very keen on peace and very keen on speeches about it. And Moscow to Warsaw is the right distance. It makes a perfect weekend of banquets, sightseeing and vodka. So each and every year Moscow’s leaders, generals and senior apparatchiks vie to attend this solemn ceremony, where bands play suitable music, generals wear acres of shiny medals, and the wives get a chance to show off their new outfits.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. He tended to go on a bit, I’d forgotten that.
‘Very big crowds always gather at the ceremony. The Poles look on with an unusually smug satisfaction. Because it hasn’t yet dawned upon the Russkies that the unknown Polish soldier’s body, over which they like to pontificate about the peace-loving Red Army’s advance to Berlin, was not recovered from some Second World War battlefield. It contains the body of one of Pilsudski’s men, who fell in the 1920 fighting outside Warsaw when the angry Poles kicked the mighty Red Army back where it had come from.’
‘I see,’ I said.
‘Not even the most resolute Polish communist has ever revealed that secret to the Soviet comrades. That’s what the Poles are like: clannish.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, the impossible bloody language helps them there.’
‘And the religion,’ said Rupert. ‘Lutheran Germans to the west of them, Protestants to the north, Orthodox to the east. The Poles are Catholic, and devout ones too. Take a look around; the churches are full and a Polish Pope sits in Rome.’
‘Are you a Catholic, Rupert?’
‘No. Well, sort of,’ he said. ‘I was once.’ I didn’t take too much notice of that denial; every dedicated Catholic I know says he’s lapsed.
‘So is George Kosinsid,’ I said. ‘A very serious believer. Is this him now?’
A VW Beetle came bouncing along across the ice and snow, snorting and sliding, its rear wheels spinning so that the car was skating around perilously. But I learned that this was the way many Poles drive in winter; they like to feel the car sliding around, and they get good at controlling the skids;. ‘I don’t think so,’ said Rupert.
Two men climbed out of the car and then leaned inside to pull the seat backs forward, so that two teenage boys could extricate themselves from the confined interior. The icy wind blew the big hat from one of them, and he had to chase it to get it back. As he ran, the skirt of his heavy coat was whirled up by an especially violent gust of wind that created a twister of dirty powdery snow. ‘It’s not him,’ said Rupert.
When the wind died down it would snow again, at least that was what the locals were saying. The driver of the VW scowled and pulled his hat down tight upon his head before getting back into the car and driving away. The other three marched off in the direction of the Russian War Memorial without looking back. Now there was no one in sight over the wide flat expanse of the old railway station. George still had not come.
‘What motivates the bugger?’ said Rupert.
‘Love,’ I said. ‘He’s in love, desperately and hopelessly in love.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘In love with his wife. Some say it accounts for almost everything he does.’
‘You’re a cryptic sod, Samson.’
‘I don’t mean to be.’
‘I know. That’s what makes it so irritating. You still don’t believe it, do you? You just can’t bring yourself to believe that Tessa Kosinski is still alive, can you?’
‘I never said that.’
‘They don’t go to all this trouble for nothing. Not those Stasi bastards.’ He was getting more and more bad-tempered as the cold wind chewed into him.
‘Maybe.’
‘Well, you would know. But in my experience they know exactly what they are doing, and why.’ He didn’t pursue it. He hadn’t had a great deal of experience with the day-to-day cloak-and-dagger side of the Department’s work. He was a money man, getting the right sort of currency to the right people at the right time. It was a hazardous task and I didn’t envy him. He had carried a lot of money over the years sovereigns and thalers and dollar bills; diamonds and rare stamps too, when that was what they stipulated. Twice he’d been attacked and badly hurt. It wasn’t easy and you had to be at the top of the reliable list. It wasn’t a job where you could get a signed and dated receipt.
He said, ‘We’re sitting ducks out here on this railway station. A man with a sniperscope … did you think of that?’
‘It did cross my mind,’ I admitted. I was surprised he’d not notice me nervously surveying all the likely spots, and squinting at every approaching pedestrian.
‘Do you ever get frightened, Samson?’
‘Fast heart rate, rapid breathing, measured basal metabolic rate and galvanic skin response? Is that what you mean?’
‘Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood … Lend the eye a terrible aspect. That sort of thing.’
‘No. Only public schoolboys get frightened like Shakespeare. Kids like me shit ourselves.’
‘I was only asking.’ He looked around and then looked at me. ‘We should have remained in the car. How much longer should we wait?’
I could understand his concern, if my face was as chilled as his appeared to be. His lips looked sore and cracked, and the frosty wind had rouged his cheeks and nose like the face of a clown. ‘In the car we wouldn’t have been able to spot him. Give him another five minutes,’ I suggested.
‘The Rozycki flea market is just along the street. Ever been there?’
‘Not for ten years or more.’
‘You didn’t take Cruyer along there on your last visit? To show him the lower depths of life in the big city?’
‘Dicky isn’t into open-air flea markets, especially not markets like the Rozycki. He likes first-class restaurants.’
‘This is not his sort of town then?’
‘No.’
‘Two Polish traders were badly injured in the Rozycki. They are still in hospital. Beaten up by two foreigners. The police asked if we knew of any British criminals in town. It exactly coincided with the time you and Cruyer arrived.’
