Читать книгу Charity - Len Deighton - Страница 7

January 1988. The Moscow-Paris express train

A bloated vampire moon drained all life and colour from the world. The snow-covered land came speeding past the train. It was grey and ill-defined, marked only by a few livid cottages and limitless black forest grizzled with snow. No roads; the railway did not follow any road, it cut through the land like a knife. I had seen enough of this cheerless country. I tugged the window-blind down, grabbing at a brass rubbish bin to keep my balance as the clattering train argued with a badly maintained section of track.

Sometimes, at night, people also succumbed. Jim Prettyman’s complexion, which had always been pale, was ashen under the dim overhead light. Inert on the top berth, a rosary dangling from his white-skinned hand; on the other a gold wedding ring and a massive gold Rolex wrist-watch indicating nine-thirty in the morning. It wasn’t nine-thirty here for us. His watch had stopped. Or perhaps that was the right time in Moscow. We were a long way from Moscow, and for us it was still night.

Jim stirred, as if my stare had disturbed his sleep. But his eyelids didn’t move. He made a noise; a deep breath and then a stifled groan that ended in a subdued nasal snort as he snatched his arm down under the blanket and resumed his sleep. Jim was tough and wiry but his appearance had never been athletic. Now his white face, with the vestigial eyebrows, made him look like a corpse prettified and readied for the relatives.

Jim had picked up some kind of infection of the liver, or maybe it was the kidneys. The Russian hospital doctors said they could treat it, but, since their diagnosis varied from day to day according to what they were drinking with lunch, no one believed them. Some doctor the American embassy had on call wouldn’t give a diagnosis; he just advised that Jim shouldn’t be subjected to a plane trip. Rather than have him face any more treatment by Moscow’s medics, Jim’s American wife had wired the money for him to be evacuated by train and attended by a nurse. Jim’s wife was a woman with considerable influence. She had arranged that her father in the State Department sent a night-action fax to make sure the embassy people jumped to it. She wasn’t with us; she had to host a Washington dinner party for her father.

Although the paperwork for Jim’s passage was being handled by the Americans, someone in London Central ordered that I should accompany him as far as Berlin. I was in Moscow at the time, and their message said it simply meant delaying my return by twenty-four hours. But going from Moscow to West Berlin by air was quite different to doing the same trip by train. By train I was going to encounter whole armies of nosy customs officials, security men and frontier police. Jim had a US passport nowadays, the nurse was Canadian and I was stuck with the German passport that I had used for my entry. With this cosmopolitan party I would have to cross Poland, and then travel across a large section of the German Democratic Republic, before getting to anywhere I could call home. Perhaps the people in London didn’t appreciate that. There was sometimes good reason to think pen-pushers in the Foreign Office in Whitehall were still using nineteenth-century maps.

I was looking at Jim, trying to decide how ill he really was, when there came a sudden sound, like a shovelful of heavy mud hitting a wall. The compartment rocked slightly. With no lessening of speed, the express thudded the air and sped between some empty loading platforms, leaving behind no more than an echoed gasp and a whiff of burned diesel. The train was packed. You could feel the weight of it as it swayed, and hear the relentless pounding of the bogies. The compartments of the wagon-lit had been booked for weeks. The cheaper coach seats were all filled and there were people sleeping amid the litter on the floor and propped between baggage in the corridors. Five rail cars were reserved for the army: hardy teenagers with cropped heads and pimples. Their kitbags and rifles were under guard in the freight car. Returning to training camps after playing the sort of war games that didn’t include time for sleep. Exhausted draftees. The fighting battalions had forsaken rifles long ago. Rifles were only for clumsy youngsters learning to drill.

Further back in the train there were East European businessmen in plastic suits and clip-on ties; shrivelled old women with baskets heavy with home-made vodka and smoked pork sausage; stubble-chinned black-market dealers with used TV sets crammed into freshly printed cardboard boxes.

Coming half-awake, Jim stretched out a red bony foot so that his toes pressed upon the metal divider that formed the side of a tiny clothes closet. Then he grabbed the edge of the blanket, turned away and curled up small. ‘Don’t you ever sleep?’ he growled drowsily. So he wasn’t asleep and dreaming; he simply had his eyes closed. Perhaps that was the way Jim Prettyman had always fooled me. Long ago we’d been very close friends, one of a foursome made up with his petulant first wife Lucinda and my wife Fiona. We’d all worked for the Department in those days. Then Jim had been selected for special jobs and sent to work in corporate America as a cover for his real tasks. He’d changed jobs and changed wives, changed nationality and changed friends in rapid succession. He was not the sort of wavering wimp who let a good opportunity slip past while worrying who might get hurt.

‘There’s someone standing outside in the corridor,’ I told him.

‘The conductor.’

‘No, not him. Our bad-tempered conductor has assumed tenancy of compartment number fifteen. And he’s stinking fall-down drunk and will soon be unconscious.’

‘Slide open the door and look,’ Jim suggested. ‘Or is that too easy?’ His voice was croaky.

‘You’re the one who’s dying,’ I said. ‘I’m the security expert. Remember?’

‘Was there someone at the railway terminal?’ he asked, before remembering to try and smile at my joke. When I made no move to investigate the corridor noise he repeated the question.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Someone you recognized?’

‘I’m not sure. It could be the same goon I had sitting in the lobby of my hotel.’

‘Go man!’ said Jim wearily. He closed his eyes tight, and, with a practised gesture, bound his rosary round his wrist in some signal of benediction.

I went to the door, undid the catch and slid it open, unprepared for the bright moonlit countryside that was painted like a mural along the uncurtained windows of the corridor. There was a man there, standing a few steps away. He was about five feet six tall, with trimmed beard and neat moustache. His woollen Burberry scarf struck a note of affluence that jarred with the rest of his attire: the trenchcoat old and stained, and a black military-style beret that in Poland had become the badge of the elderly veteran of long-ago wars.

We looked at each other. The man gave no sign of friendliness nor recognition. ‘How far to the frontier?’ I asked him in my halting Polish.

‘Half an hour; perhaps less. It’s always like this. They are taking us on a long detour around the track repairs.’

I nodded my thanks and went back into my compartment. ‘It’s okay,’ I told Jim.

‘Who is it? Someone you know?’

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Go back to sleep.’

‘You may as well get some shut-eye too. Will the Poles come on and question us at the frontier?’

‘No,’ I said. Then, changing my mind: ‘Maybe. It will be all right.’ I wondered if the detour was really because of flood damage the way the press announcement said, or was there something at the frontier that the Soviets didn’t want anyone to see?

I was regretting my ready agreement to take this train from Moscow back to my office in Berlin. I didn’t have diplomatic status; they had wanted to supply me with a letter with the royal coat of arms at the top, asking everyone en route to be kind to us. That too was a legacy of the FO’s nineteenth-century mentality. I had to point out to them that such a missive might look incongruous when carried by someone with a German passport accompanied by an American and a Canadian. I’d not objected to this task of escorting Jim, partly for old times’ sake, partly because I’d heard that Gloria would also be in Moscow at that time and the delay would give me two extra days with her. That was another fiasco. Her schedule was changed; she was leaving as I arrived. I’d only had time for one hurried lunch with Gloria, and that was marred by her interpreter arriving to collect her half an hour early, and standing over us with a watch in one hand, a coffee cup in the other, warning us about the traffic jams on the road to the airport. My brief moment with her was made more painful because she was looking more alluring than ever. Her long blonde hair was tucked up into a spiky fur hat, her complexion pale and perfect, and her large brown eyes full of affection, and devoted to me.

Now I had plenty of time to regret my readiness to return by train. Now came the consequences. We were getting close to the Polish frontier, and I was not well regarded in the Socialist Republic of Poland.

I had recognized the man in the corridor as ‘Sneaky Jack’, one of the hard men employed by our Warsaw embassy. I suppose London had assigned him to keep an eye on Jim. I had reason to believe that Jim’s head was filled with the Department’s darkest secrets, and I wondered what Sneaky had been ordered to do if those secrets were compromised. Was he there to make sure Jim didn’t fall into enemy hands alive?

‘Where’s that bloody nurse?’ said Jim as I locked the sliding door. He turned over to look at me. ‘She should be here holding my hand.’ The nurse was a pretty young woman from Winnipeg, Canada. She was spending six months working in a Moscow hospital on an exchange scheme and had welcomed this opportunity to cut it short. She looked after Jim as if he was her nearest and dearest. Only when she was almost dropping from exhaustion did she retire to her first-class compartment along the corridor.

‘The nurse has had a long day, Jim. Let her sleep.’ I suppose he had sensed my anxiety. Jim had never been a field agent; he’d started out as a mathematician and got to the top floor via Codes and Ciphers. It was better if he didn’t know that Sneaky was one of our people. And it was bad security to tell him. But if Jim ran into trouble and Sneaky had to tell him what to do …? Oh, hell.

‘In the corridor … little fellow with a beard. If we hit problems, and I’m not close by, do as he says.’

‘You’re not scared, are you, Bernard?’

‘Me? Scared? Let me get at them.’

Jim acknowledged my well-rehearsed imitation of my boss Dicky Cruyer by giving a smile that was restrained enough to remind me that he was sick and in pain.

‘It will be all right,’ I told him. ‘With an embassy man outside the door they won’t even come in here.’

‘Let’s play it safe,’ he said. ‘Get that nurse back here and in uniform, waving a thermometer or a fever chart or something. That’s what she’s here for, isn’t it?’

‘Sure. If that’s what you want.’ I felt that a man in Jim’s situation needed reassurance but I was probably wrong about that as I was wrong about everything else that happened on that journey.

I went along to find the nurse. I needn’t have worried about disturbing her sleep. She was up and dressed in her starched white nurse’s uniform, to which was added a smart woollen overcoat and knitted hat to keep her warm. She was drinking hot coffee from a vacuum flask. Bracing herself against the rock and roll of the train, she poured some into a plastic cup for me without asking if I wanted it.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘I must look a sight in this stupid hat. I bought it for my kid brother, but I’m freezing cold. They don’t have much heat on these trains.’

I tasted the coffee. It was made with canned condensed milk and was very sweet. I suppose she liked it like that. I said: ‘I’ve done this lousy journey a million times and I’ve never had the brains to bring a vacuum flask of coffee with me.’

‘I brought six of these flasks,’ she said. ‘Vacuum flasks were about the only thing I could find in the Moscow shops that would make a useful gift for my aunts and uncles back home. And they all expect a souvenir. Can you believe that they don’t even have fridge magnets? I was looking for something with the Kremlin on it.’

‘Moscow is not a great spot for shopping,’ I agreed.

‘It’s a not a great spot for anything,’ she said. ‘Lousy climate, stinking food, surly natives. Getting out of there early was the best thing that happened to me in a long time.’

‘Not everyone likes it,’ I agreed. ‘Personally there are quite a few towns I’d be happy to cross off my itinerary. Washington DC for a start.’

‘Oh, don’t say that. I worked in Washington DC for over a year. What parties they have there! I loved it.’

‘By the way, the comrades who come climbing aboard at the frontier can be difficult about jewellery. I would tuck that sapphire brooch out of sight, if I were you.’

‘Oh, this?’ she said, fingering it on the lapel of her coat. ‘Mr Prettyman gave it to me. I wanted to wear it, to show him I appreciated it.’ Maybe she saw a question in my face, for she quickly added: ‘It was a little present from Mr and Mrs Prettyman. His wife was on the phone. She asked him to give it to me. They are determined to believe I saved his life.’

‘And you didn’t?’

‘I stopped the night-duty man cutting his appendix out, that night when he was admitted. It was a crazy diagnosis but I guess he would have lived.’ She paused. ‘But that night doctor was very crocked. And he was going to try doing it himself. The things I saw in that hospital, you would never believe. When I think about it, maybe I did save his life.’

‘How sick is he?’

‘He’s bad. These kind of infections don’t always respond to drugs … The truth is no one knows too much about them.’ Her voice trailed away as she fiddled with the pin of her brooch, concerned that she had revealed too much about her patient. ‘But don’t worry. If anything happened suddenly I could have him taken off in Berlin. The embassy people said Warsaw was not a good place.’ She held the brooch in the palm of her hand and looked at it. ‘It’s a great keepsake. I like the kooky daisy shape; I’ve always loved daisies. I really appreciate it, but do you really think some Russkie is going to risk his career? He’d look kind of crazy, wouldn’t he: snatching from a tourist like me a little silver-plated brooch with plastic sides and coloured brilliants?’ She grinned mischievously. ‘Want to look closer?’

‘I don’t have to look any closer,’ I said, but I took it from her anyway. ‘It’s not a flower, not a daisy, it’s an antique sunburst pattern. And that’s not black plastic, it’s badly tarnished silver, with yellow gold on the back. The big, luminous, faintly blue stone in the centre is a top-quality sapphire; maybe thirty carats. It’s been neglected: badly rubbed with scratches, but that could all be polished away. All those “coloured brilliants” that punctuate each ray of it are matched diamonds pavé set.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

‘The fastening is a simple pin, without safety catches. It’s antique … well over a hundred years old. It’s worth a pile of money.’

‘Golly. Are you sure? Where did you learn so much about jewellery?’

‘Back in the Sixties, in Berlin, they were tearing down some old houses in Neustadt. The bulldozer pushed a wall down and found a secretly bricked-up part of the cellar. It was full of crates and metal boxes. My father was Berlin security supremo for the British. He had to take charge of it. He tried to get out of it but some of the valuables were marked with labels from the Reichsbank. That opened a whole can of worms …’ I stopped. ‘I’m sorry, I’m being a bore.’ I gave her the brooch.

‘No, you’re not. I want to hear.’ She was examining the brooch carefully. ‘I don’t know anything about the war and the Nazis, apart from what I’ve seen back home in movies.’

‘Gold, silver, coins, foreign paper money including pounds and dollars. And boxes of jewellery and antique cutlery and stuff; most of it solid silver. The Reichsbank labels made it political. The SS had stored their loot in the Reichsbank. So did Göring and some of the others. It could have been the property of the Federal Republic, or it might be claimed by the governments of countries the Nazis took over in the war. Some of the jewellery was thought to be part of the family jewels of the House of Hesse that were stolen by American soldiers in 1945. In other words no one had the slightest idea what it all was. The first job was to have it all listed and itemized, so the descriptions could be circulated. My father had three experienced Berlin jewellers going through it. It was in the old swimming hall in Hauptstrasse in Schöneberg. A big barn of a place, made of shiny white tiles, derelict at that time but still faintly smelling of chlorine and bleach. Folding tables from the army canteen were set up in the drained pool; the jewels and silver and stuff were all arranged on them and there were big printed numbers marking each item. I can see it now. There were cops sitting on the three-metre diving board looking down at us. My Dad told me to keep my eyes open and make sure the jewellers didn’t steal anything.’ I drank some coffee.

‘And did they steal anything?’

‘I was very young. I’m not sure if they did or not, but in those days Germans were scrupulously honest; it was one of the aspects of Berlin I took for granted until I went elsewhere. These old jewellers showed me each piece before they wrote out the description. It went on for four and a half days. For me it was an intensive course in jewellery appraisal. But I’ve forgotten half of it. That stone is cut as der Achteck-Kreuzschliff. I only know the German word for it. I suppose it means an octagonal crosscut. The sapphire is a cushion cut; quite old.’

‘What happened to all the treasure?’

‘I’m not sure. What I remember is having to decipher the handwriting – some of it in old German script – and type it out, with eight carbon copies. It took me a week. And I remember how happy my father was when he finally got a signature for it.’

‘That’s quite a story,’ she said. ‘I’ve never owned real jewellery before. Now if you would kindly turn around and avert your eyes, I shall tuck my valuable brooch into my money belt.’

The express slowed as we neared the frontier, and then, after a lot of hissing and puffing of brakes and machinery, crawled slowly into Soviet Russia’s final western outpost, where floodlamps on tall posts swamped the checkpoint area with dazzling light. Like foamy water, it poured down upon the railway tracks and swamped the land. A freight train, caked in mud, was still and abandoned; a shunting engine was steamy and shiny with oil. At its shadowy edge I could see the barrack blocks of the local frontier battalion and their guard towers. Under the fierce lighting, star-shaped shadows sprang from the feet of the sentries, railway officials, immigration and customs men. The lights illuminated every last splash of icy sludge on the army trucks that were awaiting the Soviet draftees. The soldiers alighted first, in a frenzy of shouting, saluting and stamping of feet. Then there came the noise of the army’s well-used railway cars being uncoupled and shunted off to a distant siding.

Inside the express train there was an almost interminable processing of paperwork by Soviet officials whose demeanour ranged from officious to witless. They gave no more than a glance at the paperwork for our party. I got a mocking salute, the girl a leer, and Jim’s inert form a nod. Eventually the train started again. It slid out of the brightly lit frontier area, and, with many stops and starts, we clanked across the frontier to where the Poles – and another checkpoint – awaited us.

Here the lights were less bright, the armed soldiers less threatening. I stood in the corridor watching the whole circus. Fur hats bobbed everywhere. The soldiers climbed aboard first. Then the ticket inspector came, and then the customs officer, and then two immigration inspectors with an army officer in tow, and a security official in civilian clothes. It was a long process.

An elderly English woman came shuffling along the train corridor. She was wearing a raglan style camel-hair coat over a nightdress. Her greying hair was dishevelled, and she clutched a bulging crocodile-skin handbag tightly to her breast. I’d noticed her on the platform at Moscow, where she’d got into an argument with a railway official about the seats assigned to her and the teenage boy with whom she was travelling.

‘The soldiers have arrested my son,’ she told me in a breathless croak. She was distressed, almost hysterical, but controlling her emotions in that way that the English do in the presence of foreigners. ‘He’s such a foolish boy. They discovered a political magazine in his shoulder bag. I want to go with him and sort it out, but they say I must continue my journey to Berlin because I have no Polish visa. What shall I do? Can you help me? I heard you speaking Polish and I know you speak English.’

‘Give the sergeant some Western money,’ I said. ‘Do you have ten pounds in British currency?’

She touched her loosened hair, and a lock of it fell across her face. ‘I didn’t declare it.’ She mouthed the words lest she was overheard. ‘It’s hidden.’ She nervously flicked her hair back, and then with a quick movement of her fingers secured it with a hairclip that seemed to come from nowhere.

‘It’s what they want,’ I said. ‘Give them ten pounds sterling.’

‘Are you sure?’ She didn’t believe me. She had become aware of her unladylike appearance by now. Selfconsciously she fastened the top button of her coat against her neck.

‘Why else would they let you come here and talk with me?’ I said.

She frowned and then smiled sadly. ‘I see.’

‘The sergeant,’ I said. ‘Take the sergeant to one side and give it to him. He will share it with the officer afterwards, so that no one sees it. If things go wrong the sergeant gets all the blame. It’s the way it works.’

‘Thank you.’ With as much dignity as she could muster in a frilly nightdress and scuffed red velvet slippers, she hurried off back to her compartment. The door was opened for her when she got there and the sergeant poked his head out and looked at me. I smiled. Expressionless he drew his head back in again.

More uniformed officials came crawling along the train; resolute and unfriendly like a column of jungle ants. But the Polish security man who took me into the conductor’s compartment at the end of the carriage was an elderly civilian, a plump man with untidy wavy hair, long and untidy enough to distinguish him from the soldiers. He was wearing a red-striped bow tie and belted brown corduroy overcoat. He scanned my passport with a battery-powered ultra-violet light. There was nothing wrong with my papers – it was a genuine German Federal Republic document but he ignored the name in my passport and said: ‘Welcome to Poland, Mr Samson.’

If they knew who I was, they knew what I did for a living. So they were not to be persuaded that I was an advertising executive from Hamburg.

He didn’t give the passport back: instead he put it in his pocket. That was always a bad sign. He questioned me in German and in English. He told me his name was Reynolds and that his father was English, and born in Manchester. The Poles all had an English relative up their sleeve, just as the English like to keep an Irish grandmother in reserve.

I pretended not to understand English. Reynolds told me all over again in German. He was very patient. He smoked cheroots and kept referring to a bundle of documents that he said were all devoted to me and my activities. It was a thick folder, and once or twice it looked as if the whole lot of loose pages would end up cascading to the floor of the train, but he always managed to save them at the last moment.

I told him that it was a simple case of mistaken identity. Mr Reynolds lit a fresh cheroot from the butt of his old one and sighed. Another ten minutes passed in fruitless questions, and then they escorted me off the train. Sneaky Jack did nothing except stand around in the corridor, getting a glimpse of me through the door now and again, and overhearing as much as he could. I didn’t blame him. He was no doubt assigned to look after Jim. Solving the predicaments of a supernumerary field agent like me was not something upon which his career would hang.

As far as I could see I was the only person being removed from the train. I jumped down and felt the chill of the hard frozen ground through the soles of my shoes. It was darker now; the moon was hiding behind the clouds. They didn’t handcuff me. I followed the two soldiers – a sergeant standard-bearer and a trumpeter, if the badges on their arm were taken seriously. We crossed the tracks, stepping high over the rails and being careful not to stumble as we picked our way through piles of broken sleepers and other debris. Mr Reynolds was breathing heavily by the time we climbed the embankment. We waited for him to catch up.

I looked back at the train. There was lots of noise and steam, and all the squeaky commotion that is the ritual of trains as they prepare to move. The yellow blind of Jim’s compartment went up, and the nurse was framed in the window. There was condensation on the glass and she wiped a clear patch with her hand. She looked this way and that, but it was too dark for her to spot me. She wasn’t a Departmental employee, just a Canadian nurse engaged to accompany a casualty to London. Having a travelling companion suddenly disappear was no doubt disconcerting for her.

I stood shivering alongside Reynolds and his soldiers and we all watched the train pull away slowly. When it had disappeared the night was dark and I felt lonely. I looked the other way: back across the frontier to the Soviet checkpoint half a mile distant. It was still bathed in light but all the frantic activity there had ceased: the army trucks and the officials had disappeared. The lights were still glistening upon the oval of hardened snow, but the only movement was the measured pacing of a single armed sentry. It was like some abandoned ice-hockey stadium from which teams and spectators had unaccountably fled.

‘Let’s go,’ said Reynolds. He flicked the butt of his cheroot so that it went spinning away in red sparks.

Before I could react the sergeant hit me spitefully in the small of the back with the metal butt of his gun. Caught off guard, I lost my balance. At first I slipped and then, as my knees buckled under me, I tumbled down the embankment with arms flailing. At the bottom there was a drainage ditch. The thick ice cracked and my foot went through it into cold muddy water.

When I got back on my feet I was wet and dirty. There was a wind that shook the trees and cut me to the bone. I wished I’d put my overcoat on before leaving the compartment to go and answer their questions. After five minutes stumbling through the dark, there was the sound of a diesel engine starting and then the headlights of a dark green army truck lit up a narrow road and trees.

They didn’t take me to Warsaw or to any other big town. The truck bumped along country roads while the crimson dawn crept out from the woodland. The sky was beginning to lighten as we arrived at the grim-looking castle in Mazury. Without anything much being said they locked me in a room there. It was not a bad room; I had endured worse accommodation in Polish hotels. The worrying thing was our proximity to Rastenburg, where I’d recently shot some Polish UB men and not gone back to feel their pulse. Thinking about that made it a long time before I went to sleep.

The man who liked to be called Reynolds was apparently in charge of me. He came to see me next morning and directly accused me of killing two security officials while evading arrest. Reynolds talked a lot, and continued talking even when I did not respond. He told me I would be held and tried here in the military district headquarters. In the course of the investigation, and subsequent court martial, the army witnesses, prosecutors and judges would go and visit the place where my crime took place. He didn’t mention anything about a defence counsel.

The second day was Wednesday. He questioned me all the morning and into the afternoon, and accused me of not taking the charges seriously. I didn’t admit to any of it. I said I was German but he didn’t believe me.

‘You think your government is now strenuously applying for your release through diplomatic channels, do you not?’

I looked at him and smiled. He didn’t know much about my government, or its diplomatic service, or he would have known that having them do anything strenuously was far beyond reasonable expectations.

‘You’ve nothing to smile about,’ said Reynolds, banging his flattened hand upon a dossier lying on the table.

How right he was. ‘I demand to see the consul from the embassy of the German Federal Republic,’ I said.

I’d made the same demand many times, but on this occasion he became angry and rammed his cheroot down hard so that it split apart in the ashtray. ‘Will you stop repeating that stupid cover story?’ There was real anger in his voice. ‘We know who you are. The Germans have never heard of you.’ Perhaps it was because he’d missed lunch.

They had me in a rambling old fortress that Reynolds called the citadel. It was the sort of fairy castle that Walt Disney would have built on a mountain-top, but this was a region of lakes and marshland and the prominence upon which the castle stood was no more than a hillock.

The buildings that made up the complex provided a compendium of fortification history: twelfth-century dungeons, a keep almost as old, and a seventeenth-century tower. There were three cobbled yards, the one beneath my window crowded with ramshackle wooden huts and other structures that the German army had added when it became a regional school of military hygiene during the Second World War. The walls were thick and castellated, with a forbidding entrance gate that had once housed a drawbridge. The top of the walls provided a path along which armed sentries patrolled as they had no doubt done for centuries. To what extent the poor wretches slapping themselves to keep warm were there because the army thrives on sentry duty and guard changes, or to warn of approaching danger, was hard to decide. But in this eastern frontier region at that time, the prospect of a Soviet invasion was never far from anyone’s mind. Some Moscow hard-liners were proclaiming that the Poles had gone too far with their reforms, and the only way to maintain communist power throughout the Eastern Bloc was by a brotherly show of Soviet military repression.

Whether they were reformers, communists or khaki-clad philanthropists, the military government in Warsaw wouldn’t welcome Soviet spearhead armour lunging across the border. Perhaps that was why this enlarged battalion of Polish infantry was garrisoned here, and why their day began at five-thirty with a flag-hoisting ceremony, accompanied by a drummer and that sort of discordant trumpeting that drives men into battle. And why the congregation that lined up at the subsequent Holy Mass was in full battle-order.

They had brought my suitcase off the train. In my presence they’d unlocked it and searched through its contents and photographed selected items. Now the case was open and placed on a low table in my room. They found nothing incriminating, but I didn’t like this development. The suitcase, the photos, the polite questions, and everything else they did, smelled like preparations for a public trial. Were you ill-treated? No. Were you tortured? No. Were you properly fed? Yes. Were you given a comfortable room? Yes. Were these answers given freely and without coercion? That’s the sort of dialogue I smelled in the air, and I didn’t like the prospect one bit.

My third-floor window looked down upon a small inner yard. Beyond it there was the main courtyard, where the morning and evening parade took place. My room wasn’t a cell. They weren’t giving me the thumbscrews, rack and electric shocks treatment. They didn’t take away my watch and seal off the daylight to disorient me, or try any of the textbook tricks like that. The only torture I suffered was when Reynolds blew cigarette smoke in my face, and that was more because it reminded me of the pleasures of smoking than because I was overcome by the toxic fumes.

The room they’d given me high up in the tower also smelled of ancient tobacco smoke. It smelled of mould and misery too. Its thick masonry was cold like ice, whitewashed and glistening with condensation. On the wall a plastic crucifix was nailed and on the bed there were clean sheets; frayed, patched, hard, grey and wrinkled. A small wooden table had one leg wedged with a wad of toilet paper. On the table half a dozen sheets of notepaper and two pencils had been arranged as if inviting a confession. Fixed to the wall above the table there was a shelf holding a dozen paperbacks; Polish best-sellers, some German classics, and ancient and well-read Tauchnitz editions in English: Thomas Hardy and A. E. W. Mason. I suppose Reynolds was hoping to catch me reading one of the books in English, but he never did. It took too long to get the massive lock turned, and I always heard him coming.

There was a water radiator too: it groaned and rattled a lot, but it never became warmer than blood heat, so I kept a blanket around my shoulders. A great deal of my time was spent staring out of the window.

My small inner yard was cobbled, and in the corner by the well lay a bronze statue. The statue had been cut from its pediment by a torch which had melted its lower legs to prong-like petals. Face down, this prone warrior waved a cutlass in one final despairing gesture. I never discovered the identity of this twice-fallen trooper, but he was clearly considered of enough political significance to make his outdoor display a danger to public order. While only a small section of the main yard was exposed to my view, I could see the rear of the officers’ mess where half a dozen fidgety horses were unceasingly groomed and exercised. Early each morning, fresh from a canter, they were paraded around the yard, snorting and steamy. Once, late at night, I saw two drunken subalterns exchanging blows out there. Thus the limited view of the yard and the exposed secrets of the officers’ mess was like that provided by the cheap fauteuil seats, high up in a theatre balcony, the obstructed view of the stage made up for by the chance to see the backstage activity behind the wings. I saw the padre preparing for Mass in the half-light of early morning. I saw two men plucking countless chickens so that the feathers blew around like smoke, and during meal-times the mess servants would sometimes emerge for a moment to covertly upend a bottle of wine.

The bigger yard was equally active. For most of the daylight hours it was filled with young soldiers who jumped and ran and reached high in the air at the commands of two physical-training instructors. The trainees were dressed in khaki singlets and shorts, and they moved furiously to keep warm in the freezing air. The instructors ran past my line of vision, shadow-boxing as if unable to contain their limitless energy. When in the afternoon the final company of men had completed their physical training, the sun would come out of hiding. Its cruel light showed up the dust and cobwebs on the window glass. It set the forest ablaze and edged the battlements with golden light, leaving the courtyard in cold blue shadow, luminous and shimmering as if it was filled to the brim with clear water.

My room was no less comfortable than those assigned to the junior officers who shared the same landing with me. Often, when I was on my way to the washroom and toilet, or when Reynolds was taking me downstairs to his office, I caught sight of smartly uniformed subalterns. They looked at me with undisguised curiosity. Later I discovered that a security company used part of the ‘citadel’ for training courses, and the officers had been selected for politically sensitive duties supervising municipal authorities. For Poland was a land governed by its soldiers.

I was punched and slapped a few times. Never by Reynolds. Never when Reynolds was present. It happened after he became exasperated by my smartass answers. He would puff at his cheroot, sigh and leave the office for ten minutes or so. One or other of the guards would give me a couple of blows as if on his own account. I never discovered if it was done on Reynolds’s orders, or even with his knowledge. Reynolds was not vicious. He was not a serious interrogator, which was probably why he’d been assigned to this military backwater. He wasn’t expecting me to reveal any secrets that would raise questions in Warsaw, or even raise eyebrows there. Reynolds was content to do his job. He asked me the same questions every day; changing the order and the syntax from time to time but not waiting too long for a reply. Usually the final part of the day’s session would consist of Reynolds telling me about his sister Hania and his lazy good-for-nothing brother-in-law, and the wholesale delicatessen business they owned in Detroit.

On Friday afternoon the wind dropped and the trees were unnaturally still. From under low grey cloud the sun’s long slanting rays hit the battlements. A sentry stepped forward and stood fully in the light to capture the meagre warmth. Watching him I noticed a flickering in the air. Tiny golden pin-pricks, like motes of dust caught in a cathedral interior. Snowflakes: the winter had returned. As if in celebration, from one of the rooms along the corridor Tauber burst into a scratchy tenor rendering of ‘Dein ist mein ganzes Herz’. He sounded terribly old.

By morning the snow was no longer made of gold. It had spread a white sheet across the land, and my bronze warrior was dusted with it. It didn’t stop. By Saturday evening the snow covered everything. I heard the grinding sounds of the trucks that brought sentries back from guard duty at the nearby radar station. They came in low gear, their engines growling and their wheels intermittently spinning on the treacherously smooth section of roadway that was the approach to the main gate. The snow had blown across my yard, to form deep drifts along the wall, and the bronze warrior was entombed in it. I opened the window and put my head out into the stinging cold. The world was unnaturally hushed with that silence that such snow always brings. Then I heard shouting and saw an agitated sentry aiming his gun at me. I pulled my head in and closed the window. Happy to see such a quick response he waved his gun and laughed so that his happiness condensed on the cold air.

On Wednesday night, after five days in custody, a soldier came for me in the middle of the night. I recognized him as one of the PT instructors. He was a wiry fellow with the inscrutable face that seems to go with gymnasts, as if prolonged exercise encourages the contemplative condition. He led me down the back stairs and through a part of the building I’d not seen before. We passed through the muggy kitchens and a succession of storerooms that had once been cellars. Finally he indicated that I should precede him.

As I bent my head under the low doorway, he hit me in the small of the back. He followed that with another punch that found the kidneys and sent a jolt of pain though my body from heel to head. It was like an electric shock and my mind blanked out as I contended with the intense pain. I fell like a tree.

It was dark, but there was another man in the darkness. He came from the shadows and caught me, giving me a couple of hard jabs in the belly that brought my supper up into my mouth. I tucked my head down and tried to cover myself from their blows but they weren’t deterred, nor inconvenienced. These two were experts. They worked on me systematically as if I was a side of beef being readied for the stewpot. After a few minutes one of them was taking my whole weight, holding me up to be punched. When he let go of me I crashed to the stone floor only half-conscious. I couldn’t think straight. Every part of my body was singing with pain. Under me I could feel coarse matting, and, reaching beyond its edge, smooth pavement. I moved enough to press my face against the cold stone. I vomited and tasted blood in my mouth.

The two men stood over me watching; I could see a glint of light, and their shoes. Then they went away, satisfied no doubt with the job they’d done. I heard their footsteps fade but I didn’t try to get up. I pressed my head against a bag of onions. At the bottom of the sack, rotten onions had fermented to become a foul-smelling liquid that oozed through the sacking. I blacked out and then came conscious several times. Despite the stench I remained there full-length for a long time before very very slowly rolling and snaking across the floor, slowly getting my back against the wall and inch by inch sitting up. No bones were broken; no bruises or permanent marks on my face. Theirs was not a spontaneous act of brutality or spite. They had been assigned to hurt me, but not permanently cripple me, and they’d done their job nicely. No hard feelings, chaps, it’s all in a day’s work for a soldier serving in a land ruled by generals. Lucky me that they hadn’t been told to tear me limb from limb, for I’m confident they would have done it with the same inscrutable proficiency. Having decided that, I lost consciousness again.

Someone must have carried me up to the room in the tower. I don’t remember anything of it but I certainly didn’t get there unassisted. But why, after a week of Mister Nice-guy, suddenly take me out of my bed and beat the daylights out of me without interrogation or promises? There was only one explanation and it slowly became clear to me. Some higher authority had ordered my release. This was Mr Reynolds’s tacit way of protesting that decision, and saying farewell to me.

Higher authority was satisfied, I suppose. The generals in Warsaw were not trying to provoke World War Three. They just wanted to show their opposite numbers in London that they didn’t like nosy strangers coming into their territory and doing the sort of things I’d done last Christmas at Rastenburg. They didn’t want me demonstrating short-take-off-and-landing aircraft after dark, and kidnapping useful Polish spies. They didn’t like me torching shiny new government-owned Volvo motor-cars which were in short supply in Poland in 1987. And they didn’t like the way I’d shot and wounded Polish security men who, having failed to stop me, had made sure that arrest-and-detain notices were posted throughout the land.

Well, that was my mistake; I should have killed the bastards.

Reynolds put me on the train the next night. He took me to the station in a car, talking all the time about his sister in America and pretending not to notice that his men had almost beaten the life out of me. It was the same Moscow-to-Paris express train, on the same day of the week. They even put me back into a compartment with the same number. My overcoat – which I’d not seen during my incarceration – was folded and stowed on the rack. Pointedly my passport was balanced on the small basket the railway provides for rubbish. Everything was the same, except that Jim and his nurse were not there.

The train compartment was warm. Outside it was snowing again. Wet dollops of it were sliding down the window glass. I slumped on the berth and stretched out. The pain of my beating had not abated and my clothes still had the sickening odour of putrid onions. My bruises and grazes were at that stage of development when the pain is at its most acute. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t even raise enough strength to get up and slide the door closed. From the compartment next door I heard the raised voices of a young American couple arguing with a soldier. They say it’s a political magazine,’ said the woman. She had a nice voice, with the sort of musical Boston accent that the Kennedy family made patrician.

‘I never saw it before,’ said the man. Then he repeated his denial loudly and in German.

There was a moment of silence, then the woman coughed and the man gave a short angry laugh.

I heard my door slide open. I half-opened my eyes and a Polish officer stepped inside to stare down at me. Then the sergeant joined him and the two of them moved on along the corridor. I suppose the American couple had picked up the local traditions without my assistance.

Some extra railway coaches were shunted and coupled to our train with a rattle and a jarring that shook me to the core. Then, after a great deal of whistling and shouted orders, the train clattered forward. I pulled the pillow over my ears.