Hope - Len Deighton

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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 think I’m a bloody fool, don’t you? You don’t send out for whores in the middle of the night; that’s not your style. But you are so devious that you’d let me believe you did, rather than confide in me. That’s what makes me so bloody angry. You work for me but you think you can twist me around your finger. Well, you listen to me, Bernard, you devious bastard: I know she was here to talk with you. Now who was she?’

      ‘A contact. I got the address of George Kosinski’s brother,’ I said. ‘It’s in the north-west and it’s a lousy journey on terrible roads. I thought I’d double-check that George was there before dragging you out into the sticks.’

      Dicky evidently decided not to press me about the identity of my lady visitor. He must have guessed it was one of my contacts, and it was definitely out of line to ask an agent’s identity. ‘That’s a natty little umbrella you’re wielding, Bernard.’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I bought it this morning.’

      ‘A folding umbrella: telescopic. Wow! Is this a power bid for Whitehall? I mean, it’s not really you, an umbrella. Too sissie for you, Bernard. It’s just desk wallahs who come into town on a commuter train from the suburbs who flourish umbrellas.’

      ‘It keeps the snow off,’ I said. Dicky was of course merely showing me that he didn’t like being deserted without permission, but that didn’t make being the butt of his tiresome sense of humour any more tolerable.

      ‘An umbrella like that is not something I’d recommend to the uninitiated, Bernard. A fierce gust of wind will snatch you away like Mary Poppins, and carry you all the way to the Urals.’

      ‘But the desk didn’t tell you anything about our pal Kosinski?’ I asked, to bring him back to earth.

      ‘I left that to you,’ said Dicky.

      ‘George knows his way around this town. He speaks Polish. He might lead us a dance before we get a definite fix on him.’

      ‘And by that time he could be on a plane and in Moscow.’

      ‘No, no, no. He won’t leave until he’s done what he has to do. With luck we’ll get to him before that.’

      ‘Very philosophical, Bernard. Abstract reasoning of the finest sort, but can you tell me what the hell it means?’

      ‘It means we can’t find him, Dicky. And there are no short cuts except miraculous good luck. It means that you have to be patient while we plod along doing the things that a village policeman does when looking for a lost poodle.’

      This wasn’t what Dicky wanted to hear. As if in reproach he said: ‘Last night, when we first arrived, the reception people admitted that George Kosinski had been here in this hotel. So why won’t they tell us where he’s gone?’

      ‘No, they didn’t say he had been in this hotel, Dicky. They suggested

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