Hope

My whispered aside to Dicky attracted the attention of the soldiers. The limited linguistic skills of all concerned were clearly hampering the transaction, and I didn’t want to wind up as the interpreter for these Russian hoodlums and their Polish customers. ‘Move on,’ I said.

Dicky got the idea. He moved away and the black-marketeers closed in upon the soldiers again. At the next stall Dicky hunkered down to feign interest in piles of old brass and copper oddments piled up for sale. I took the opportunity to look around. There was no sign of George anywhere.

‘Look – umbrellas!’ said Dicky, standing up and rubbing his knees, and then pointing to an old woman carrying dozens of them, of all shapes and sizes and colours. ‘What did you pay for yours?’ When I didn’t reply, he said: ‘Can you imagine those bloody soldiers selling their weapons! That’s what comes of having all those races and nations mixed together. Thank God the British army could never sink to that.’

‘The elder of them had four small kids, and his unit hasn’t been paid for three months,’ I said.

‘I knew you’d find some excuse for them,’ said Dicky in a voice that mixed jokiness with sincerity. ‘Where do you draw the line, Bernard? If you hadn’t been paid for three months, would you simply sell off anything you could lay your hands on?’

Knowing that a flippant answer would be stored up in Dicky’s memory and used when I least expected it, I found something to occupy his mind: ‘I think I see one of George’s relatives,’ I said.

‘Where? Where?’

‘Take it easy, Dicky. Or we’ll start a stampede.’

‘Selling the beads?’

‘It’s amber,’ I said, ‘and that can be expensive. But the leather bag round his neck almost certainly contains diamonds. He’s a well-known dealer.’

‘You know him?’ Dicky slowed, as if intending to stride across the aisle to confront the old man, but I took his arm and kept him going.

‘I saw him in London at one of George’s cocktail parties. But I didn’t speak with him; he arrived as I was leaving. He’s rich; leave him for another time. Appearances are deceptive in Poland; there are probably quite a few rich people in this market today.’

‘And are George Kosinski’s family all rich?’ Dicky stopped at a stall piled high with sports shoes: Nike, Reebok and all the famous brands in cardboard boxes. It was hard to know whether they were counterfeit or imports. Dicky picked up a pair of running shoes and fiddled with the laces while trying to decide.

‘I don’t know, but names ending in ski denote the old Polish gentry. It’s especially so in the country areas, where everyone knows everyone and you can’t get away with adding a ski ending to your name, the way so many of the townspeople have.’

‘I like the padded ankle collar… What have you seen?’ He started to replace the shoes he was inspecting.

‘Keep hold of that pair of shoes, Dicky. Bring them up before your face and admire them.’ I was moving round to the other side of the market stall to see better.

‘Look, Bernard…’

‘Do as I say, Dicky. Just keep talking and holding up the shoes.’ He held them up for me and provided an excuse for a good look at the far side of the market.

‘What’s happening?’

‘Three of them; at least three. With maybe two or three more watching from other top-storey windows. They’ve marked us, and two of them are coming this way.’

‘Who?’

‘Hoodlums. Just take it easy. Stay stumm; let me talk to them.’

‘Where?’

‘The fat fellow in the fur coat signalled to someone at an upstairs window. Bodyguards. Minders. Stay cool.’

‘Your papers?’ demanded the first of the men to arrive, and announced himself: ‘Inspector Was of the UB.’ He spoke in English while showing me a card with his photo on it. He snapped the card closed and put it away. His eyes were jet-black, his face thin and drawn. He wore a woollen hat and a short leather jacket. I held out to him the West German passport that carried the business visa permitting repeated entries into Poland. He passed it to a fat man in a dark fur coat who had by this time arrived slightly flushed and out of breath. The fat one pushed his steel-rimmed glasses tighter on to his ears before reading it. He was red-faced and sweating. I guessed he had impetuously descended too many flights of steps after watching our arrival from his vantage-point in the nearby tenements.

‘Him?’ said the wiry Inspector Was, pointing at Dicky.

‘Him?’ I echoed, pointing a finger at the fat man and gently prising from his fingers my bogus passport.

‘Search them,’ Was told the fat man. I held up my arms and he frisked me, and then Dicky, to see if we were carrying guns.

‘Come with me,’ said Was when the fat man gave him the okay. ‘Both of you.’ He unbuttoned his jacket as if he might be making ready to reach for a pistol.

‘We have to go with them, Dicky,’ I said.

The somewhat Laurel-and-Hardyish pair pushed us ahead of them through the crowds, which parted readily to allow us to pass. As we got into Targowa, our two guards closed in tightly upon us. The streets were crowded with beggars and pedlars and people going about their business. At the kerb, two men were changing the wheel of a truck heavily laden with beets, while a man with a shotgun sat atop them balanced on a bundle of sacks. No one gave us more than a glance. It was too cold to enquire too deeply into the misfortunes of others, and too dangerous. There were no cops in sight and no one showed concern as we were escorted along the street. We had gone no more than fifty yards before the thin one signalled to an entrance that led into one of the open courtyards that were a feature of these buildings.

The cobbled yard, littered with rusty junk and rubbish that could not be burned for fuel, held a couple of cars and a line of large garbage bins. It was difficult to decide if the cars were in use or had been dumped here, for many of the trucks and cars on the street were even more rusty and dented than these ancient vehicles.

‘Here,’ said Was and prodded me with his finger. The fabric of the building was in a startling state of neglect, with gaping holes and broken brickwork and windows that were held in position by improvised patchworks of timber and tin. The only fitments in good order were the bars and grilles that fitted over half a dozen of the lower windows, and the ancient steel door through which we were ushered.

There were more grilles inside. They were made from steel and fitted from floor to ceiling. Along this ‘wall’ there was a long table, like the lunch counter of a roadside cafe. Behind the counter there was a heavy safe and some filing cabinets. The other half of the room – the part where we were standing – was windowless and empty of furnishings except for a calendar advertising canned milk.

The man who called himself Was closed the steel door that led to the yard. With only a couple of fluorescent tubes to illuminate the room it became stark and shadowless. ‘Through here and upstairs,’ said Was. He opened a door and pushed us into a smaller room. ‘Upstairs,’ said Was again, and we went through a narrow door that opened on to the lobby of a grand old apartment house. I led the way up the wide marble staircase. On the landing wall hung two grey racks of dented mail-boxes. Some of the flaps were hanging open; it would need a great deal of confidence to put mail into them. Perhaps the whole building was owned by these men. At the top of the second flight of steps we came upon a silent tableau. Two flashy young women were propping a plump well-dressed man against the wall. He was white-faced and very drunk, his tie loosened and wine stains down his crisp white shirt. The trio watched us as we passed, as curious about us as we were about them, but the three of them remained very still at the sight of our escorts and no one spoke.

‘In here.’ There were two doors on the top landing. They were freshly painted light brown. They’d been repainted so many times that the decorations in the woodwork, the peep-hole and the bell push were all clogged with paint. There was a surfeit of wiring too: phone and electricity wires had been added and none ever removed, so that there were dozens of wires twisted and drooping and sometimes hanging to show where a section of them had been chopped away to make room for more. He unlocked one of the doors. ‘In here,’ he said again and pushed Dicky, who fell against me. And we stumbled into the darkness.

‘Stand against the wall,’ said Was. He switched on the light. It was a low-wattage bulb but it gave enough light to see that one side of the room had sandbags piled up to a height of six feet or more. Was slipped out of his pea-jacket and hung it on the door. This revealed him to be wearing a dark blue sweater and a military-style leather belt with a pistol in a leather holster. It was a Colt ‘Official Police .38’, something of a museum piece but no less lethal for that. ‘Hand over your wallets, both of you bastards,’ he said. The fat one stood by and grinned.

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