Текст книги "Hope"

Автор книги: Len Deighton

Соавторы: Len Deighton
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For a moment Dicky was frozen. He had his hands clasped tightly together as if holding something that might escape. Or praying. He was looking down at the two unconscious men. 'My God. Are they cops?' he said.

'Who cares?' I said. 'They were going to kill us, or didn't you follow the conversation? This is a killing room. The sandbags make sure the rounds don't end up next door, and the rags on the floor mop up the blood.'

I bent down and started to search the bodies. It was a hasty job. After comparing the two pistols that the men had been using, I took the thin one's Colt revolver, rather than Fatty's Model 35 Browning. The Colt fitted my pocket better.

'This isn't a police station?'

'Are you with me?' I said. 'The room downstairs is a money exchange. Hard currency for local cash. That's what the bars and shutters are for: to protect the money.' Having second thoughts, I picked up the Browning Hi-Power and took that too. It was a pity to leave it behind. He might come after us and shoot me with it. It was then that my fingers encountered a small .22 Ruger pistol in Fatty's inside overcoat pocket. With it, loose in his pocket, there was a screw-on silencer and half a dozen mini-magnum rounds. 'Know what these are, Dicky?' I asked, holding up the gun, the silencer and one of the rounds for him to see.

'Yes,' he said.

'There's only one thing you do with a silenced Ruger twenty-two and a mini-mag round. One shot into the back of the neck is all you need. It's a gun these people keep for executions, and for nothing else.' I had no doubt now about why they'd brought us here.

'What shall we do?' said Dicky plaintively as he looked out of the barred window and down at the empty courtyard. He didn't look round the room or look at me. He didn't want to see the gun and the inert men. He didn't want to even think about it.

'I'll finish searching these bastards and we'll get out of here.' I was bending over them and taking their money and stuffing into my pocket their various identity documents. I got to my feet and sighed. Having Dicky along to help was like being accompanied by a pet goldfish: I had to sprinkle food over him regularly, and check his fins for fungus.

'Are they dead?' He wasn't frightened or sorrowful; he just wanted to know what to write in his report. I would have to find some way of preventing Dicky writing a report. London hated to hear about the grim realities of the job; they believed that firm words and two choruses of 'Rule Britannia' should be enough to bring any recalcitrant foreigner to his knees.

'I don't give a shit, Dicky.' Reluctantly I decided that life in Warsaw was safer without a gun. I pushed all three pistols into the rubbish bin. I could tackle freelance heavies like these, but the resources of the boys from the UB were rather more sophisticated, and I didn't fancy trying to explain away a pocket full of hardware if I was stopped in the street.

'That's not an umbrella,' said Dicky suddenly as he watched me rewrapping tire levers into the umbrella's fabric from which I'd removed the wires and stays.

'No,' I said. 'It's a good thing it didn't rain.'

3

Masuria, Poland.

Dicky was silent for much of the time we were driving north through the wintry Polish countryside to find Stefan Kosinski's country mansion. I could tell he was thinking about the encounter with the two men in the market. It had not been pretty, and Dicky had seldom glimpsed the rotten end of the business. All field agents soon learn that the pen pushers in London don't want to be told about the spilled blood and the nasty treacherous ways that their will is done. With undeniable logic Dicky said, 'We can't be absolutely certain they intended to kill us.'

'To be absolutely certain they were going to kill us,' I said, 'we would have to be dead.'

Three times – in various ways – Dicky had asked me if the two men were dead. I told him that it was a special sort of glancing blow I'd given them, and assured him they would have woken thirty minutes later with no more than a slight headache and a dry feeling in the mouth. Offended by this attempt to comfort him, Dicky went back to staring out of the car window. The dirt road was too bumpy for him to chew on his fingernails.

The roads were bad, pot-holes and ridges jolting the car to the point of damage whenever we were tempted to put on speed. Most of the villages we passed seemed empty and deserted but here and there peasants were to be seen scavenging for overlooked remains of bygone crops. As if in sentry boxes, roadside Holy Virgins stood guard in their wooden shrines, and often rows of dented tins held floral tribute to them.

We headed northeast to the region of the Masurian Lakes. It is a bleak province that nostalgic Germans like to call East Prussia. This low-lying comer of Poland would border on the Baltic Sea, except that the Russians had seized a slice of coast surrounding what once was called Königsberg, to create for themselves a curious little enclave with no other purpose than giving the Baltic Fleet a headquarters, a shipyard and a base for two Soviet air divisions.

The Masurian district, 'the land of a thousand lakes,' is a photographer's paradise. Its takes, forests and primitive villages are charming, the sunrises idyllic, the sunsets sublime. But the camera does not adequately record the hordes of flies, the bites of the mosquitoes, the fetid marshland and dark decaying forests, the smelly squalor of the villages or the icy cold that whitened the land.

For his war against Russia, Hitler built an extensive military headquarters in huts and bunkers here near Ketrzyn in Masuria. Ketrzyn was called Rastenburg in those days, but Hitler preferred to call it 'the Wolfs Lair' and decreed that a monument should be created there to mark the place where he'd created a New World Order. Hitler departed, the monument created itself and real wolves came to live in it. The eight-meter-thick walls are now just chunks of broken masonry, the wooden huts are rotting firewood, the barbed wire has rusted to red powder and a few still-active minefields lurk along the perimeter.

'What a place to be in the middle of winter,' said Dicky suddenly, as if he'd been thinking about it.

'In summer it's worse,' I said.

'Not another road check.'

We were halted on the road, not once but three times. The first time it was cops. Six bored policemen occupying a roadblock, checking everyone's identity and giving special attention to car papers. They inspected our rented Fiat as if they'd never seen one before. I suppose there wasn't a great deal of traffic on that road.

Twenty-five miles onwards we were stopped by three soldiers in combat dress. They were Polish military police standing in the snow outside a large property that in long-ago capitalist days had been a roadside inn. One of them, a senior NCO, was armed with an AK-47, its butt and metal parts shiny with wear. It remained slung over his shoulder while he questioned us. Our foreign passports seemed to satisfy him, although they made us get out of the car and held us for half an hour while the NCO made telephone calls and a procession of horse-drawn carts trundled past, their occupants staring at us with polite curiosity.

A short distance further on we came to the beginning of miles of tall chain-link fencing. Our road ran alongside the fence past a dozen doleful-looking Soviet soldiers guarding six large signs that said 'no photography' in Polish, German and Russian. It was a Soviet army base extending five miles along the road. The wooden barrack huts were unheated, judging by the patches of snow that had collected on the roofs and the men going in and out of them, all of whom were bundled into overcoats and scarfs. Behind the huts I could see long rows of armored personnel carriers, some fitted with bulldozer blades and others with 'barricade remover' grills on the front. There were two tracked missile-launchers and sixteen elderly tanks, some of which were being repaired and maintained by soldiers in greasy black coveralls.

Perhaps, further back in the tank hangars, and out of sight, there were air-launched tactical missiles, attack helicopters or other vehicles and equipment suited for a combat-ready brigade charged to dash westwards through Germany and engage the NATO forces in battle. But I couldn't see any sign of it. And the way in which this amount of antiriot equipment was parked, and arranged so that it could be seen from the road, made me think that these Russian occupiers were troops relegated to internal security operations, and that their presence served no other purpose than being a tacit reminder to the Poles that the brotherly patience of the Soviet Union and its fraternal Leninist rulers should not be tested too hard.

We followed the road and passed the grandiose main entrance of the compound. There was a cinder block guard hut with sentry boxes and sentries in ill-fitting uniforms and moth-eaten fur caps. The main gate was surmounted by an elaborate ceremonial arch, topped with a golden hammer and sickle. Lovingly emblazoned on the arch there were the badges of two Guards and three Pioneer regiments, and lists of their battle honors. But the red paint had faded to a dull pink, and the gold had tarnished to brown. The hammer's paint had cracked and chipped to reveal a green undercoat, the sickle had lost its sharp tip and the crack regiments were no longer living here. Instead the youthful sentries lolling against the fencing were unmistakably draftees, stocky little village boys with spotty faces and wide eyes, with elderly senior NCOs to breathe vodka fumes over them, and not an officer in sight anywhere. I waved at them and they stared back at me with not a flicker of recognition or emotion of any kind.

'It will be dark soon,' said Dicky. 'Perhaps we should look for somewhere to spend the night.'

'Marriott or Hyatt or Holiday Inn?' I asked.

'There must be somewhere.'

'There's that place where we saw the men selling sugar beet.'

Dicky bit his lip and looked worried.

'We'll find the Kosinski place before dark,' I said, more in order to relieve Dicky's evident anxiety than because there was any reason to believe it.

We reached a T-junction devoid of any direction signs. Rather than consult with Dicky, a process which would have made him even more despondent, I swung to the left as if I knew where I was going. Very low on the flat horizon I suddenly saw a blood-red splinter of the dying sun. Then, from below the horizon, it spread blood and gore across the clouds, and the trees veined an ever darkening overcast. The road deteriorated until there was little sign of anything more than a few deep-rutted cart tracks frozen hard enough to jolt us from side to side. It was darker now that the sun had gone and the shadowy spruce and beech joined to become a murky wall.

It was at this time that Dicky broke a long pensive silence. 'I have a feeling,' said Dicky. 'I have a feeling we're very near to the Kosinski place.'

My heart sank. 'That's good, Dicky,' I said.

'They said there was a forest,' said Dicky.

'That's good,' I said again, rather than point out that half the Polish hinterland was forest. As sundown brought a lowering of temperature, icy rain began, speeding up so that it was hitting the windscreen where the wipers whisked it into slush and threw it from one side to the other.

Twice that afternoon we had taken a wrong turning to follow roads that became trails, and then tracks and finally petered out altogether. This path promised to be leading to another such fiasco, with all the worry of turning the car round without getting bogged down and ensnared in tree roots, potholes or ditches.

'Careful. There are men in the road,' said Dicky. In Warsaw we'd been warned that after dark sentries opened fire on vehicles that were slow to respond to halt commands. 'Another road-block.'

This time it was half a dozen civilians who blocked the narrow road in front of our car. There was no avoiding them, the forest was too dense to drive round them. A Volkswagen van was parked under the trees, and more men stood there.

These armed civilians provided a sign of the confusion, bordering on anarchy, that Poland suffered that winter. Out in the rural areas it was clear that men were reverting to some primitive form of post-feudal mercantilism. Goods and services were exchanged in small transactions that did nothing beyond providing for a few days of subsistence at a time. Such societies seldom welcome strangers. I stopped the car.

'Where are you going?' He spoke Polish, his accent so thick that, it took me a moment to understand.

'To the castle,' I said. It was a tourist spot that would account for our foreign passports. I didn't want to say we were looking for the Kosinski house.

'The road is blocked.' He was the leader, a big red-faced man with an unruly black beard, a lumpy overcoat and fur hat; an angry peasant from a Bruegel painting. He carried a shotgun in his hands, a bandolier of cartridges slung across his shoulder. The others held spades and pickaxes.

The clouds were scurrying away to reveal some stars and a moon but the sleet was still falling. It dribbled down his face like snot, but in his fur hat the same icy driblets sparkled like diamonds.

'We're looking for Stefan Kosinski,' said Dicky in English. I'd told him to leave the talking to me, but Dicky was incapable of remaining silent in any kind of confrontation.

Blackbeard replied in German, good fluent German, 'Who are you? What do you want here? Show me on the map where you are headed.'

Dicky pointed a long bony finger at me. 'George Kosinski's brother-in-law,' he explained slowly in his schoolboy German, uttering one word at a time.

'Switch off the engine,' said Blackbeard. I did so. With the headlights extinguished the scene was lit by hazy blue moonlight. He pulled a whistle from his pocket and gave two short blasts on it then turned to watch one of his comrades leaning through the open side door of the VW van. There were faded bouquets painted on its panels, and the name and address of a Hamburg florist shop just discernible. I could see the butts of rifles and assault guns piled inside the van. With our engine switched off all was silent: the forest soaking up every sound of movement. We sat there like that for two or three minutes. Dicky availed himself of the opportunity to chew his fingernail. A man in a short plaid coat and patched jeans appeared from the forest, obviously in response to the signal. He was carrying a pickaxe over his shoulder and now, in a show of anger, he swung it so that its point was buried in the frozen ground. He glowered at everyone, then turned on his heel and was gone again. Suddenly there was the ear-wrenching noise of a two-stroke engine and he reappeared out of the gloomy forest riding a lightweight motorcycle. 'Follow him,' Blackbeard ordered.

The motorcyclist leaned over dangerously as he swung round in front of the car, leaving a trail of black smoke. He roared up the track ahead of us. I started the car engine, the main beams picked him out and I followed him, driving cautiously over the potholed road. Behind us, two youths of indeterminate age followed on bicycles. Perhaps they had never seen a vehicle with lights before; an accessory not deemed indispensable in rural Poland.

The narrow road led over a rise and passed close to a small lake; gray crusts of ice along its rim. A rowing boat had been pulled out of the water on to a pier, and left inverted to drain. Our appearance, and the noise of the motorcycle, sent dozens of birds into the air with a thunderous clattering of wings and shrill cries. They circled low over the water and then came back to earth in a circuit that seemed more like a practiced gesture of protest than a sign of fear.

Immediately beyond the tiny lake there was the Kosinski property. I had seen it in George's family photos. Behind the house, framing it against the dark sky, there was a line of beech trees, giant growths reaching about a hundred feet into the sky. Nicely spaced, their massive boughs stretched out like giants linking hands. The rambling property had once been a grand mansion; a typical dwelling of the minor nobility, the class that the Poles called sz1achta. When George's parents had fled penniless to England, other relatives had tenaciously held on to this mansion and preserved it as a family dwelling while other such houses were seized by socialist reformers. The main building was big and, despite its run-down condition, it retained a certain grandeur. Only a few of the windows were lit. Through the fuzzy glass I saw a shadowy interior and the mellow glow of oil lamps.

Light from the windows made patterns and revealed a path describing a circle round an ornamental stone fountain. The fountain was drained, and the stone maidens standing between two slumbering lions were wrapped in newspapers, and neatly tied with heavy string, to protect them against frost. Two more stone lions stood guard each side of the steps that led up to the front door, while above the entrance a pediment was supported by four columns. The overall mood of dereliction was endorsed by the tattered remains of several storks' nests, abandoned by those free to seek warmer sojourn.

'I was right,' said Dicky triumphantly. 'It's the Kosinski place isn't it?'

'Yes, Dicky. You were right.'

'People are always telling me I have a sixth sense: Fingerspitzgefühl – intuition, eh?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Fingertip sensitivity. It's what safecrackers and pickpockets have too.'

'Very bloody funny,' said Dicky, his usual sense of humor failing him.

We parked our rented Fiat at the side of the house where a long wooden veranda would in summer provide a shelter against the sun. Behind the house there were various coach houses and stables and other outbuildings arranged around a wide cobbled courtyard. By the dim light of the moon a couple of youthful servants could be seen there pumping water from a well and clearing up, having finished washing a horse-drawn carriage that was obviously still in regular use. Horses poked their heads out of stable doors to watch them. Which aspect of this rural scene could have stirred Boris's literary memories – of Chekhovian stage-sets lit by golden spotlights – was not easily recognized in this harsh moonlit winter setting. As a literary reference, Solzhenitsyn's gulag came more readily to mind.

Alerted by the approach of our noisy cavalcade, two women in aprons emerged from a side door and stood on the covered wooden deck that formed one side of the house. The front door also opened. We parked the car, went up the steps and were greeted politely and ushered inside by a seemingly unsurprised man in a dark suit, stiff collar and plain tie, who used accentless, German to announce his name as Karol, and his position as Stefan Kosinski's secretary.

A maid closed the door behind us and the hallway was darkened. I looked around. Glinting in the moonlight that came from an upstairs window, there were on every wall trophies of the hunt; so many furry, feathered, horned and melancholy heads that there was little space between them. A wide staircase gave access to a balcony over the front door and then continued to the upper floor where more inanimate beasts were displayed. From somewhere far away came the sound of a piano playing a simple melody, and the high reedy voice of a young girl singing.

'Herr Samson and Herr Cruyer?' said the secretary, as a maidservant hurried forward with an oil lamp. Now that we were more closely illuminated, the man looked quizzically from one to the other of us. I must have looked just as quizzically at him, for Dicky and I were both traveling on false passports, and had not used our real names anywhere since arriving in Poland.

'I'm Cruyer,' announced Dicky. 'How did you know?' The piano and the singing ended suddenly. Footsteps ran lightly across the upstairs floorboards and a child's head appeared and gazed solemnly down at us for a minute before disappearing again.

'You were expected, sir,' said the secretary, switching to English. 'You both were. Mr. Stefan has been called away – a domestic problem. Madame is with him. They will join you tomorrow evening.'

'We are looking for Mr. George Kosinski,' said Dicky.

'Perhaps Mr. George too. Shall I show you your rooms? May I have your car keys? I will have your bags brought in.' Karol was a thin stiff-backed fellow, with an unnaturally pale face and bloodless lips. His hair was cut short and he wore very functional glasses with gunmetal rims. Adding this Teutonic appearance to his somewhat unconvincing deferential manner left the effect of a German general pretending to be a waiter.

Karol went to the front door, opened it and made a signal with his hand. After spasmodic bursts of engine noise, the motorcyclist lurched forward and made a tight circle around a patch of land that in summer might become a front lawn. Then he roared away in a cloud of foul-smelling exhaust fumes. The two youths on bicycles followed him and were soon swallowed by the gloomy forest.

He closed the door and picked up an oil lamp. We followed him slowly, Karol, and the wooden stairs, both creaky and arthritic. We stepped carefully around a large collection of potted plants which had been brought in from the front balcony for winter, and now occupied most of the staircase. Upstairs he took us to the far end of the corridor and held the light while we looked inside a bathroom. It echoed with the sound of a dripping tap and there were long rust stains patterning its tub. The faint smell of mildew that pervaded the house was at its strongest here, where the warm air from the boiler no doubt promoted its growth. Each side of the bathroom – and with access to it – there were our bedrooms. My window overlooked the forest that came close to the rear of the house. Immediately under this window there was the wooden roof that sheltered the long veranda along the side of the house. Cloud was draped across the vague shape of the moon but there was still enough light to see the veranda steps, and a well-used path led to a woodshed and a fenced space where half a dozen garbage bins were imprisoned. They were tall containers with stout metal clips to hold the lids on tight, the sort of bins needed in regions where wild animals come foraging for food after dark.

Under the supervision of Karol a young manservant came struggling under the weight of our cases. We watched him as he lit all the oil lamps and then arranged our baggage. A long-case clock in the hallway downstairs struck nine. The secretary announced gravely that we should gather in the drawing room in time to go in to dinner at ten o'clock. He looked at me. I looked at Dicky. Dicky said we'd be there.

Once we were alone Dicky said softly, 'So he is here! George Kosinski. You were right, Bernard, you bastard! You were right.' He groaned and sat down on his cotton crochet bedcover, pulled off his cowboy boots and tossed them into the corner.

'We'll see,' I told him. 'We'll see what happens.'

'What a place! Where's Baron Frankenstein, what? There must be fifty rooms in this heap.' The house was big, but fifty rooms was the sort of exaggeration that expressed Dicky's pleasure or excitement; or merely relief at not having to spend the night on the road.

'At least fifty,' I said. It was better not to correct him; Dicky called it nit-picking.

'I wonder if the whole house is as cold as this. I need a hot shower,' said Dicky, rubbing his hair and looking at the dirt on his hand. He went and inspected the bathroom and grabbed the only large towel. Then, with the towel over his arm, he bolted the door that led to my bedroom. 'Driving on those cart-track roads leaves you coated in filth.' He said it as if adding to the world's scientific knowledge; as if I might have arrived at the house aboard a cruise ship.

I went to my room and unpacked. Having taken possession of the bathroom Dicky could be heard whistling and singing above the sounds of fast-running water. I opened the doors of the wardrobe and looked in all the more obvious places in which a microphone might be concealed. As part of this exploratory round I tried the door to the bathroom, and it opened to reveal a second door. In this space, the thickness of the wall, someone had left cleaning things: a mop and a broom, a packet of detergent and tins of floor polish. It was I suppose an obvious place to store such things. Scented steam came from the bathroom and Dicky's voice was louder. I closed the door quietly. The provision of hot water was encouraging, for this seemed to be a mansion without many of those utilities taken for granted in the West. No electricity supply was in evidence. The elaborate brass electric light fittings and parchment shades were dusty and tarnished, and had clearly not worked for many years. The equally ancient paraffin lamps, one each side of my bed, were clean and bright, their carefully trimmed wicks giving a mellow light without smoke.

I looked around my room. There was only one window, the upper part of which consisted of leaded panels of stained glass, artistically depicting some of the more savage episodes of the Old Testament. The room was made more gloomy by the paneling, the heavy carved furniture and an embroidered rug with folk-art designs, that hung against the wall alongside the bed. Arranged facing towards the bed – as if for visitors in a sickroom – were two large armchairs with upholstery from which horsehair stuffing emerged in tufts, like unwanted hair in depilatory advertisements. Upon a glass-fronted bookcase there was an antique clock – silent and still – and an ashtray from the Waldorf in Paris. There was a case of dusty unread travel books dating from the long-ago days when Poles were free to travel, and a threadbare oriental carpet; the sort of once-cherished objects that were relegated to the guest rooms of grand houses. The only picture on the wall was a lithograph, an idealized profile portrait of Lenin, his bearded chin jutting out in what might be construed as a gesture of foolhardy provocation. Directly under the picture, on the chest of drawers, there was a tray covered with a linen cloth. Under the cloth I discovered a china teapot, a tin of Earl Gray tea from Twinings in London and a cup and saucer. Stefan Kosinski was seemingly a man who didn't encourage his guests to join him for breakfast. The large wood-fired white porcelain stove in the comer was warm to the touch. Everything was ready. Who, I wondered, had foreseen our imminent arrival? And what other preparations awaited us?

There was something contrived about the formality with which dinner was served in this remote country house. Poland's sz1achta had always been the bulwark against social changes, both good and bad. No doubt such meals served by maidservants were a way for the Kosinski family to distinguish themselves from villagers, some of whom might in these days of black market boom be making more money than their betters. It was an appropriately formal gathering. Karol presided as if a delegate of his master. Stefan's elderly Uncle Nico and Aunt Mary took their seats either side of him. Aunt Mary was a cheery granny of the sort that the Poles called Babcas. When we first entered the drawing room it was she who got up from the sofa to greet me. Having tucked her needlework into a basket that she carried with her almost everywhere, she smoothed her skirt with both hands and smiled. Karol the secretary introduced me. Aunt Mary said, 'How do you do?' in perfectly accented English. Those were the only perfectly accented English words I ever heard her use.

Her husband Uncle Nico was frail; a thin white-faced man with yellow teeth and a cane to support himself as he walked. He was wearing a hand-knitted shawl over a dark, well-tailored suit that was shiny with wear. 'You've come to visit Stefan?' Uncle Nico asked in good English. He inhaled on a cigarette, having first flicked ash into an ashtray which he carried with him. It was already loaded with ash and butts. His face was chalky white and his eyes large with the stare that comes with old age. I remembered the stories George had told me, and I knew that this was the man who had adopted Stefan when George's parents escaped; his father just a few steps away from arrest and charges of being an agitator and class enemy.

'And to visit Mr. George,' I reminded him. The room was cold, the ceiling too high for the elaborate tiled stove to make much difference, and I looked at Uncle Nico's shawl with ever-increasing envy.

'Oh, dear!' said Uncle Nico. 'Ach Weh!' and from then onwards spoke in German.

Dicky's entrance was more considered than mine. He kissed Aunt. Mary's hand in the approved Polish style. He smiled and, using a low resonant voice, did the warm-and-delightful-.shy-young-man act that he used on anyone influential, infirm and over fifty. Dicky went to the stove and laid both hands on its top hopefully. Disappointed, he patted the sides of the stove and then felt its chimney. Finally he turned to us, smiled again and slapped his hands together, rubbing his arms to encourage circulation.

Through the partly open folding doors I caught sight of the dining room and the polished mahogany table where cut glass, silver and starched linen had been arranged as if for a banquet. It looked promising; I was cold and hungry and the water hadn't warmed enough to provide a hot bath. Karol offered us a drink. It was potato vodka from Danzig or tap water. I decided upon vodka.

'Dinner,' announced Karol suddenly as if to a roomful of strangers.

As we went into the dining room half a dozen more people – mostly young – quietly appeared and sat down at the table with us. Dicky's hot bath and a change of clothes had worked wonders upon him. Even before I had my napkin tucked into my collar, Dicky had found out that Uncle Nico was writing a book. He'd been working on it for more than twenty years, thirty years perhaps. It was a biography of Bishop Stanislaus, the Bishop of Cracow, who had been canonized in 1253 and became the patron saint of Poland.