Samson 05 - Hope, page 28
He looked at me without answering. Then he switched on the engine and said, ‘Let’s get you back to that flea-bitten little place you’re staying. Even for workers’ apartments: that’s an unusually grim place. Why do you choose to stay in places like that?’
‘I feel at home there.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You go and find George Kosinski. I’ll take responsibility.’
When we got to where I was staying with an old pal of mine, a man who sold American electric generators on the black market, Rupert stopped me from getting out of his car.
‘But before you go, Samson, tell me one more thing. Why is George Kosinski giving us all this trouble? Why doesn’t he just phone the embassy and ask us what we want from him, and get it over with?’
I looked at Rupert and tried not to sigh audibly. What was wrong with me? I never made sufficient allowances for the slowness of people like Rupert, Dicky and Bret and the rest of them. They never understood what was really happening. Even after I’d drawn them a large-scale street map and made chalk marks on the pavement, they fell into the first manhole they encountered.
‘Look, Rupert,’ I said slowly and pedantically. ‘George went to all kinds of trouble to fake a suicide, hide himself in a disused underground bunker, and God knows what else to avoid us finding him. What reason could he have?’
‘That’s what I’m asking you,’ said Rupert.
‘Because he thinks we are trying to locate him in order to kill him,’ I said.
‘My God!’ said Rupert. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Go and he down in a darkened room with two aspirins, Rupert,’ I said. ‘Your mind is too pure for this kind of work.’
‘Perhaps you are right, Samson,’ he said, and was visibly shaken. ‘I know you’re a loner. But let me know if I can help you: cash, drops, motorcar or help to catch a ship to England. You know the way it works.’ He flipped open his wallet and put on the seat a bundle of Polish money. Alongside it he placed a thick roll of American bills. Beside that he put a roll of plastic gummed parcel tape. And a zip-gun: two smooth steel tubes which could be screwed together to hold a single .22in round. The whole thing was not much larger than a big executive fountain pen, and about as elegant. And about as lethal, at the range that I preferred to do business’ I couldn’t help thinking that the money, the sticky tape and the zip gun represented three methods of getting George out of the country. ‘I was told to bring you this,’ he said regretfully. ‘This’ was wrapped up in ancient newspaper, and turned out to be a VZ 61, a Czechoslovak submachine gun which, despite its tiny 7.65mm rounds, limited accuracy and low muzzle velocity, has a good rate of fire, a very light weight and, stock folded, is less than twelve inches long.
‘Well, well,’ I said. It was a comforting accessory, and almost as useful as the dollar bills.
‘Bret said that would make your eyes light up,’ said Copper. ‘He said get you a Skorpion or an Uzi and I couldn’t get an Uzi. He said to remind you you had diplomatic cover and to only take the gun if there was an emergency. I can keep it for you.’
‘No. I’ll take it with me,’ I said. ‘I’ll think of an emergency later.’ A toy like that goes into a trenchcoat pocket. Copper got an extra magazine and a cardboard box containing fifty rounds from the glove box and gave it to me. I took the money and the tape too. I gave him the zip gun back, in case he got mugged going home with his silver cigarette case.
At last Bret and Copper seemed to be getting the idea.
‘And Bret said I was to alert the Swede,’ said Copper.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Alert the Swede.’
13
Masuria, Potand.
‘Don’t do this to me, Bernard,’ said George.
I hadn’t done anything. We’d scarcely been through the hello-and-how-did-you-find-me routine. I suppose he knew everything I was about to say. Perhaps I should never have come. It might have been better for everyone if I had left everything the way he wanted to keep it.
‘I love her. Do you know, when she’s away I hear her voice every day,’ said George. ‘We don’t have to phone or write.’
‘Fi said more or less the same thing,’ I said. ‘I understand how you feel.’
‘You don’tunderstand how I feel. You’re a loner; you don’t need anyone. I’m different. Without Tessa my life is nothing.’
‘She loved you too,’ I said.
‘You think so? I’m not sure. I’ve thought about it a lot of course, but I’m not sure. No, the way I …’ He looked up and pinned me with his glaring eyes. ‘So why are they saying she’s safe?’
‘She’s dead, George. I was there. I saw it happen.’
George was wearing brightly colored ski clothes. It was a salutary way of countering the cold, but such a fashionable figure was an anachronism in this gloomy timeworn interior. He went and sat down by the fireplace, almost disappearing into the gloom. His voice came from the darkness. ‘She’s coming next week, they said.’
‘She’s dead, George. Face it.’
‘You keep saying she’s dead.’
‘I keep saying it because I want you to get it into your head. You’ve got to carry on with life, and unless you face the truth you’ll not be able to think straight.’
‘John O’Hara … John O’Hara the writer, told about George Gershwin’s death, said I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.’
‘Yes, well he was a writer, and they are full of shit.’
‘Stefan is a writer.’
‘And he’s full of shit too. Yes.’
‘Perhaps I too am full of shit. I know people see me as a ridiculous little man but Tessa never made me feel like that. Even when she was unfaithful to me I never felt really humiliated. Does that sound stupid?’
‘I can’t make it easier for you, George. I wish I could but I can’t.’
‘She thought jumping in and out of bed didn’t matter. She knew I’d give her anything she wanted cars, apartments, jewels so why not the freedom to sleep with men she fancied?’ He got to his feet and went to the window, which was patterned with fern-like patterns of frost. In that sombre region of the Great Masurian lakes, each winter day brings only a couple of hours of real daylight. Today there came news of the sun, a pale yellow egg yolk faintly discerned behind the milky sky. ‘But all that is past, now I am home. It’s snowing again.’ It wasn’t snowing. The flurry of snowflakes fluttering past the window was loose snow dislodged from the roof by the wind. But George was distraught and tormented minds can’t think straight about anything.
‘It’s not snowing and this is not your home, George. It’s not even the real world.’
‘This morning I found the tracks of wolves at the back. They come down to raid the rubbish bins outside the kitchen door.’
‘Foxes; or perhaps wild dogs.’
‘No: wolves. They wake me at night howling. You hear explosions too sometimes. These forests are riddled with minefields left here from the war. Only the big wolves trigger them; the other animals are not heavy enough to detonate the pressure pads.’
‘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 streetcar 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 myvivid 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.’
‘I know. Everyone here was angry. It was my fault. The local Bezpieca people did everything to retrieve it and then went to London after it. I was deeply indebted to them after that. They said I must come here, to my brother’s house, and wait.’
‘Wait?’ I said. ‘Wait for what? They sent you here to wait for Tessa? Alive? How could you have swallowed that fairy story?’
‘She’s alive and she’s pregnant,’ said George, as if this disclosure would catch me off-guard.
‘She’s dead,’ I told him.
‘No. Next week they said.’
‘Because they will invent an emergency. And they will tell you she died in childbirth. Then they will foist off a look-alike body for the burial. And they’ll bring you a smiling baby they will persuade you is yours. The baby will be Polish and they will have locked you up really tight. That’s their plan, George.’
‘You can’t leave anything alone, can you Bernard?’
‘Don’t tell me you never had the thought of such a deception cross your mind?’
‘Next week we’ll see.’
‘You think you’re a big-shot, George, but for the people you deal with here you are a nothing. The first stage of grief is denial. But now it’s time to move on.’
He sank down into a chair. ‘Our delightful father-in-law said more or less the same thing. He doesn’t believe Tessa is still alive. I’m the only one who believes it. I persuaded the old pig to come out here to Warsaw. One of the Polish security men went all through the postmortem and photos of the dissected body with him. I couldn’t bear to look at any of it but they say it’s clearly not Tessa; it was a Stasi lieutenant a woman who was there on the Autobahn that night.’
‘But father-in-law still thinks his daughter is dead?’
‘He’s stubborn,’ said George. ‘He said I’d ruined his holiday in the Caribbean, and that I should refund his air-fare out here. It was a joke of course; but you know his jokes, don’t you?’
‘He’s realistic,’ I said. ‘I saw the same postmortem material; they brought it to London and then killed the man who delivered it so we couldn’t interrogate him. I have the same junk in a file at the office. It’s phoney, George. I’m sorry to say it but it’s an example of the trouble they take faking their disinformation evidence, and getting rid of anyone who knows the truth. Tessa is dead.’
George picked up my map, got up and went to the window to study it by daylight. ‘So this region was part of Hitler’s wartime headquarters? Where did you get this map?’ He took off his glasses and peered at it closely. ‘Look at the size of the place …’ The map was a photocopy of a wartime German one. It showed all the wooden buildings, bunkers, roads, checkpoints, and the railway line and the sidings and the train stations and the airstrips, that comprised the Wolfschanze. ‘They tried to put a bomb under him, didn’t they? Somewhere out there in the forest there’s a rotting splinter of that wooden hut … Have you seen all that broken concrete and the half-buried steps and ventilation shafts …? Dig out the earth from those collapsed tunnels and we’d find the maps and operations rooms and maybe the dead generals too.’
‘I don’t think so, George. Generals are smart; they pack up and go away long before the enemy arrives.’
‘And that’s what I should do? Is that what you mean?’
