Charity. Len Deighton
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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,