Hope. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ her whisky with that determined gulp with which Poles down their vodka, and then studied her glass regretfully. ‘Would you like another?’ I asked.

      She looked at her watch, a tiny gold lady’s watch with an ornate gold and platinum band. The sort they sell in the West’s airport shops. ‘Yes, please,’ she said.

      I poured another drink for her. If she wanted to sit there and recover, there was little I could do about it, but I wondered why she hadn’t just handed me the address and departed. As if reading my mind, she said: ‘Another few minutes, Bernard, then I’ll leave you in peace.’ She fingered her cheek, as if wondering whether the bruises were noticeable.

      Of course! She had bribed the desk who let her in as if she was one of the whores who serviced the foreign tourists. It was a cover, and she would have to be with me for long enough to make it convincing. Something to be hidden is always a good cover for something worse, as one of the training manuals deftly explained. She said: ‘It’s George Kosinski isn’t it?’

      ‘What?’ I must have looked startled.

      ‘Don’t worry about microphones,’ she said. ‘There are none installed on this floor. The Bezpieca know better than to bug these rooms. These are where the committee big-shots bring their fancy women.’

      ‘I still don’t know,’ I said.

      ‘Don’t go cool on me, Bernd. Do you think I can’t guess why you are here?’

      ‘Have you seen him?’

      ‘Everyone’s seen him. As soon as he arrives he shouts and yells and spends his money and gets drunk in downtown bars where there are too many ears. Boris is worried.’

      ‘Worried?’

      ‘Has George Kosinski gone mad? He’s swearing vengeance on someone who killed his wife but he doesn’t know who it is. He’s violent. He knocked down a man in an argument in a bar in the Old Town and started kicking him. It was only after he convinced them that he was a tourist that the cops let him go. What’s it all about, Bernd? I didn’t know funny little George had it in him to do such things.’

      I shrugged. ‘His wife died. That’s what did it. It happened in the DDR. On the Autobahn, the Brandenburg Exit.’

      ‘A collision? A traffic accident?’

      ‘There are a thousand different stories about it,’ I said. ‘We’ll never know what happened.’

      ‘Not political?’

      I went and got another tumbler and poured myself a shot of whisky. At the bar I’d been abstemious but I could smell the whisky on her and it made me yearn for a taste of it.

      ‘Don’t turn your back on me, Bernd. I’ll start to think you have something to hide.’

      I’d forgotten what she was like: as sharp as a tack. I turned to see her. ‘There are political traffic accidents, Sarah. We both know that.’

      She stared at me as if her narrowed eyes would find the truth somewhere deep inside my heart. What she finally decided, I don’t know, but she swigged her drink, got to her feet and went to the mirror to put her hat on.

      ‘Where is George now?’ I asked her. Her back was towards me while she looked in the mirror. She turned her head both ways but spent a fraction of a moment longer when looking at the bruised side of her face.

      ‘I don’t know,’ she said calmly. ‘Neither does Boris. We don’t want to know. We’ve got enough trouble without George Kosinski bringing more upon us.’

      ‘I was hoping Stefan or the family might know.’

      ‘The last I heard, he was scouring through the Rozyckiego Bazaar trying to buy a gun.’ She looked at me, but I looked down as I drank my whisky and didn’t react. ‘You know where I mean? Targowa in the Praga?’

      I nodded. I knew where she meant: a rough neighbourhood on the far side of the river. Byelorussians, Ukrainians and Jews lived there in clannish communities where strangers were not welcome. Even the anti-riot cops didn’t go there after dark without flak jackets and back-up.

      ‘Boris said this is what you wanted,’ she said, bringing a brown paper parcel from her tote-bag and putting it on the table.

      ‘Have you got far to go?’ I asked.

      ‘I’m being met,’ she said to the mirror in a voice that didn’t encourage further questions.

      I let her out and watched her walk down the long cream-painted corridor. The communist management showed the usual obsession with fire-fighting equipment: buckets of sand and tall extinguishers were arranged along the corridor like sentinels. When she reached the ornate circular staircase she turned and said ‘Wiedersehen’, and gave a wan smile, as if saying a final cheerless farewell to those two young kids we’d been long ago.

      After she had gone I thought about her and her bruised face. I thought about the way they had allowed her into the hotel, and let her come up to my room. That wasn’t the way it used to work in Warsaw; they checked and double-checked, and the only kind of girl you could get into your room was a genuine registered whore who was working with the secret police.

      And eventually I even began wondering if perhaps Sarah had got past the desk so easily because she was just such a person.

      I opened the brown paper parcel. Inside it Boris had put two tyre levers and a looped throttling wire. So he hadn’t been able to get a gun for me; or maybe it was too much trouble. Boris was not the most energetic of our contacts.

      ‘What did she say?’ It was eleven o’clock in the morning. I’d been out and about. I’d avoided Dicky by missing breakfast, and I could see he was not pleased to be abandoned.

      For a moment I didn’t answer him. Just to be back in the heated hotel lobby, where the warmth might get my blood circulating again, was a luxury beyond compare after tramping the streets of the city looking for George and his bloody relatives.

      The old place didn’t look so forbidding in daytime. It had been a fine old hotel in its day. A fin-de-siècle pleasure palace built at a time when every grand hotel wanted to look like a railway terminal. Crudely modernized from the empty shell that remained after the war, it wasn’t the sort of hotel that Dicky sought. Dicky was unprepared for the austerity of Poland, no doubt expecting that the best hotels in Warsaw would resemble those plush modern luxury blocks that the East Germans had got the Swedes to build, and Western firms to manage for them. But the Poles were different to the Germans; they did everything their own way.

      ‘Come along, Bernard. What did she say?’

      ‘What did who say?’

      ‘The woman who went up to your room last night.’

      I’d avoided him at breakfast, guessing that he wanted me to be his interpreter to interrogate the hotel management. It was not a confrontation I relished, for the interpreters are always the ones left covered in excrement, but what I hadn’t anticipated was that he’d be able to prise from the staff the secret of my nocturnal visitor.

      ‘It was one of those things, Dicky,’ I said, hoping he would drop it but knowing that he wouldn’t.

      ‘You СКАЧАТЬ