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  ‘You haven’t met him yet?’

  ‘Not yet. I want you to go and see him first and size him up. He’s been fully screened, of course, and given general briefing on security. Then I’ll arrange for the three of us to talk before you fly out.’

  ‘Where do I find him?’

  ‘Personnel Section, Foreign Office.’ He got up as I took my gloves off the arm of the chair. ‘You don’t want this little chore, I know, but don’t blame Merrick. You’re a veteran and he’s only a raw recruit. Don’t break the poor little devil up.’

  Chapter 2

  MERRICK

  I filled in the green card.

  P. K. Longstreet. To see G. R. Merrick. By appointment.

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Longstreet.’

  The hall had the dusty acoustics of a cathedral. The security doorkeeper at the desk by the stairs watched me, nibbling on a fingernail.

  ‘Mr. Merrick, please.’ The two other girls stared disinterestedly at the doors. ‘Will you try and find him? He’s got a visitor.’

  I went to the doors and came back.

  ‘I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but he doesn’t seem to be in. Are you sure there was -‘

  ‘He’s in. I’ll go on up.’

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t go up without an escort. We have to - ‘

  The doorkeeper was out of his desk as I reached the stairs and I showed him my pass. It took a couple of seconds to register because this one wasn’t seen too often: this was the one that could get you into the Houses of Parliament with a barrel under your arm even if the green card said G. Fawkes.

  I went up the stairs and turned left. Merrick must have been in the lav when she’d rung because he was back in Personnel when I got there. Twenty-four, medium height, brown hair, blue eyes, heavy spectacle frames, recent scar left hand. ‘A slight accident,’ Egerton had told me. There were a few other people in the room and Merrick’s desk was near the door. A girl in a lemon blouse looked in and said:

  ‘Oh there you are. Visitor for you in the hall.’

  He’d seen me and said: ‘Yes, he’s here, thank you.’

  She gave me a pert blink. ‘Well that was quick.’

  Someone on a phone was saying: ‘If I were you I’d put Mrs. Pymm on to it - she’ll sort it out if anyone can.’

  ‘Where do we talk?’ I asked Merrick.

  ‘I’m not quite sure.’ He was standing behind the desk, his long fingers shifting some papers to no purpose, his slightly magnified eyes watching me nervously.

  ‘Come on, then.’

  ‘Yes.’ He followed me out, catching his foot against something. ‘I think there’s one of the under-secretaries at a conference this afternoon, so I suppose we could use his room. It’s just along here.’

  I sensed him watching me obliquely so I said: ‘Worst bloody winter since ‘47.’

  He worked it out as quickly as he could and then took it straight from the book. ‘In my paper it said since 1939.’

  ‘You mean ‘39?’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ By the tone of his voice he was kicking himself.

  It wasn’t important, here and now; but as the years go by you learn to worry less about the mistakes you’ve made and more about what would have happened if the circumstances had made them important. The code introduction for 5th to 12th was to throw in a random two-digit number and listen for one below and two above, the same thing in London, Rio or Hong Kong, wherever you were and whatever you were doing, it made the whole thing simple. He’d put in the circumspect ‘19’ from sheer nerves.

  He tapped on a door and there was no answer so we went in. Very lush carpet and solicitor’s office furniture and a portrait of the Queen and a small photograph suitably half concealed by a filing cabinet, an over-exposed long shot with plenty of camera shake, girl on a horse. Egerton should have a room like this but what would he do with it? Plug in a beat-up 250-watt fire and crouch over it with his miseries.

  ‘How long have you been in Warsaw?’

  ‘Six months.’ It was said quickly. He was going to get everything right from now on. He sat forward in the other chair, watching me very directly and breathing on his nerves. I went out in - ‘

  ‘How long’s your tour?’

  ‘A year.’

  ‘Where were you before?’

  ‘In Prague. Then there was a home posting before I -‘

  ‘You were there during the Prague Spring?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Isn’t it unusual to get posted to another Moscow-controlled country the next time out?’

  ‘I asked for the post.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was very affected by what happened in Prague. I liked the people there - I made a lot of friends.’ He took something out of his pocket. ‘It looks like happening all over again, this time in Warsaw.’ It was an atomiser and he pumped it into his mouth. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

  ‘So you want to be there, all over again?’

  ‘Well yes, I - ‘

  ‘No wonder you’ve got asthma.’

  He stopped pumping and put the thing away and said rather sulkily. ‘If the Poles can win their freedom I’d like to be there. It’d be something to remember, wouldn’t it, a thing like that?’

  ‘Were you born in England?’

  ‘Yes. You can’t enter the Diplomatic Service unless -‘

  ‘Englishmen don’t think much about freedom.’

  ‘Well no. But that’s because they’ve got it, isn’t it?’

  I wondered what sort of freedom Merrick hadn’t got. It was no good asking him: he wouldn’t know; it’d be below the conscious level. But he’d tell me, if I listened. I said: ‘You’ve made friends there too?’ ‘In Warsaw?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A few. A few friends.’

  ‘They in the underground?’

  ‘Well, I mean almost everyone’s in the underground, people of that age. My age.’

  ‘Students?’

  ‘Oh no. Well, a few. But they’re mostly engineers or shop assistants, people like that. You have to work, you see, if you want to eat. Some of them have more than one job, doing night shifts as well, just to get enough money for food and clothes, especially in winter -‘

  ‘What’s the general drift of things out there, Merrick?’

  He leaned forward, his long hands chopping at the air. ‘There’s been tension ever since the Prague Spring - there was a lot of sympathy for the Czechs of course - and now the underground forces are becoming quite organised. This is known, and a few months ago the authorities started trying to soften up the workers by leniency all round - less checking of sickness reports at the factories, smaller fines for indiscipline, lighter sentences for stealing state property, that kind of thing.’ A shade triumphantly he said with another chop of his hands: ‘Well it didn’t work.’

  ‘What’s the aim of these candlelight crusaders you’ve been running with? Wreck the talks?’

  He drew back into his chair. ‘They’re not just a lot of irresponsible students. Their aim is to bring Russia to the brink. That’s quite a - serious intention, don’t you think?’

  ‘Could be serious, yes. For them. The other side of any brink is a long drop and if Russia goes down she’ll take Poland with her, don’t they know that?’

  ‘Their aim,’ he said slowly, reading from the dog-eared manifesto they’d been waving at him in the cellars out there, ‘is to overthrow the present regime and set up a truly national government in time for the East-West talks to take place in a free Poland.’

  ‘They’re cutting it fine.’ The West German delegates were due in Warsaw on the 23rd. Today was the 6th.

  ‘I’d put it a different way. They’re completing their preparations.’

  ‘You said it was “known.” So what chance have they got?’

  On the defensive again he said quickly - ‘It’s one thing for the authorities to know of widespread dissension, and another thing to stop it exploding in their face. They’ve withdrawn the lenient measur
es designed to keep people calm while the talks are on - they’re trying the other tack now. Stronger discipline, heavy sentences, suppressive control of private life.’ In the clear eyes behind the glasses burned the zeal of the convert. ‘And that won’t work either.’

  I got up and looked at the Queen’s rather Mona Lisa smile as a change from looking at Merrick’s face shining with its second-hand ideals. Correction: they weren’t second-hand, no. They were superimposed on someone else’s. If the Poles ever got free, something was going to get free inside Merrick.

  ‘If it doesn’t work,’ I told him over my shoulder, ‘then Moscow will find something that will. Didn’t you say you were in Prague, for God’s sake?’

  ‘This is different’ I heard him get up and start wandering about. ‘There are the talks, this time. Moscow wants them to succeed. I expect you’ve read -‘

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I’ve read.’

  I could hear him pumping the damned thing again. Then he swallowed and said: ‘Well, that’s why there’s a brink. The Action’s been planned for three days before the opening of the talks, and if Moscow orders tanks into the city there won’t be any talks. Russia’s been trying to make the world forget Prague ever since it happened, and she’ll remind us in a big way if she does it again; but if she doesn’t resort to armed force this time it’ll mean a new government, overnight. Whichever way she moves, she’ll lose.’

  When I turned away from the portrait he was staring at me so I told him what he wanted to hear. ‘Hurrah. Poland is saved.!

  ‘Well they’ve got to do something, haven’t -‘

  ‘Christ, they’re not expecting a wave of arrests are they by any chance? How many brave little soldiers of freedom d’you think there’ll be left to start this “action” of theirs? A week before the talks half the population of Warsaw’s going to be in a strict regime camp in the Urals, don’t they realise? What’s it called, this “action,” got a name?’

  Numbly he said: ‘Just “The Action.” Czyn.’

  His long scrubbed schoolboy’s hands hung by his sides, sticking from his sleeves as if he’d not finished growing out of his suit; but the defiance was still there behind the shine on his glasses and I knew that whatever I said it wouldn’t knock the bright god Czyn off his pedestal.

  ‘How did you get into this game, Merrick?’

  ‘I’m not really in it. They’re just friends I’ve made -‘

  ‘I don’t mean their game. Ours.’

  I was watching him and he wasn’t bad: they couldn’t have had time in a crash course to train him to this pitch of instant reaction concealment and ninety per cent of it must have been in his make-up. Perhaps this was one of the things that had appealed to whoever had wished this boy on to Egerton. There’d been the slightest flicker across the eyes, gone now, and it was only experience that had let me sense that my question had opened a wound. I went on watching.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. The tone was all right too, almost steady. But this was why Egerton had told me not to ‘break the poor little devil up’. Because it was easy and you could do it without even trying. ‘I suppose it’s a chance for me to help them, in secret.’ Then he was saying quickly as the thought surfaced from below the conscious level - ‘Even my father doesn’t know.’

  This was the freedom that Merrick hadn’t got,

  I said: ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But I’m not used to - well, privacy.’

  ‘Must find it refreshing.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes.’

  I turned away. ‘What are your orders for this trip?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I know.’

  ‘I’m to find out everything I can about Czyn and pass it to London. Surely you’re meant to be helping me, aren’t you?’ He sounded uneasy.

  ‘How much training did they give you?’

  ‘Two weeks, if you include -‘

  ‘All right.’

  I turned and looked through the window at the trees in the park. Their black lacework of branches between the fog-yellowed lamps half masked the pale reflected face that stared at me and waited. Two weeks. There was time, once, to plan things properly. It’s no go, Egerton, you can’t do it, you can’t send this kid out there in the dark without even a candle, or if you want to do it then I won’t bloody well help you.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said as cheerfully as he could, ‘that doesn’t sound very long. But I took it all in, and they told me I’d done rather well.’ His lips moved on the glass. His voice came from the trees out there, the dark trees. ‘I won’t let you down.’

  Above the haze of the skyline there were vast clouds gathering, coming in from the north. Some people said it could snow tonight.

  ‘There are a few things,’ I said, ‘they won’t have told you.’ I didn’t turn round. His eyes had shifted from me to my reflection. ‘They probably told you that just as a war is an extension of politics, espionage is an extension of diplomacy. The idea is to find out the things you can’t find out by asking someone at a conference table: the things nobody will ever tell you, the things everybody badly needs to know. It’s a means of keeping the peace, like the bomb is. No one can chuck the bomb without getting it back on his head, and no one can start a conventional war because the enemy’s already within his gates, ferreting around and exposing all his plans before he can put them into action. It doesn’t always work, the pressure gets too high now and then, but it works more often than people ever know. The balance has got to be kept between one half of the world and the other, East and West, so that the whole thing doesn’t blow up. That’s what we’re for. We’re the angels of peace, see how we shine. That what they told you?’

  He watched me from the dark.

  I said: ‘It doesn’t matter. What they didn’t tell you is that once you’re in this game you’re on your own. You don’t do what you do for the sake of your country or for peace, though you can kid yourself. You do it to scratch an itch, that’s all. I’m not talking about the ones who do it for the money: they’re just whores. Most of us do it because we don’t get a kick out of watching the telly and pushing a pen and washing the Mini on Sunday mornings: we want to get outside of all that, be on our own so we can work off our scabby neuroses without getting arrested for it. We want to scratch that itch till it bleeds.’

  As I turned away from the window his face opened in surprise. He looked more vulnerable at this moment than I’d ever seen a man, perhaps because in my trade the men I meet have long since grown a shell, the years and the deceits and the betrayals adding to it layer by layer until they want to get out and know they can’t, because it’s themselves they’ve been deceiving and betraying over all those years: the shell grows from the inside outwards, like fingernails.

  ‘The thing is, Merrick, I don’t think you’re the type. You make friends too easily; you like people too much; you don’t want to cross the line and live your life outside society because society’s made of people and you’d have to shut yourself away, cut yourself off. Values are different out there: let a man show friendship for you and you’ve got to deny him, mistrust him, suspect him, and nine times out of ten you’ll be wrong but it’s the tenth time that’ll save you from a dirty death in a cheap hotel because you’d opened the door to a man you thought was a friend. Out there you’ll be alone and you’ll have no one you can trust, not even the people who are running you, not even me: because if you make the wrong kind of mistake at the wrong time in the wrong place and look like fouling up the mission and exposing the network then they’ll throw you to the dogs. And so will I.’

  His hand had moved twice to his pocket while I’d been talking, and twice had stopped; but his breathing was painful now and he swung away and perked the thing out and squeezed it, his back to me.

  It was almost silent, the improved model designed exclusively for people of discretion who prefer not to embarrass their friends.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

 
On my way out I told him: ‘Think it well over. There’s just enough time. We’ve got a rendezvous in the morning, eight o’clock at Clive Steps. I hope you won’t turn up.’

  Chapter 3

  WARSAW

  They looked like this when there’d been a military coup d’état and they’d been hustled out of the cells and stood against a wall, the only concession a handkerchief across their eyes if they wanted one. This was how I remembered him on Clive Steps, standing perfectly still and perfectly straight in his neat dark coat, the first light seeping from a leaky sky and striking across his glasses.

  How long had he been here? His face was white with cold, with nerves. Long enough to make sure I didn’t turn up a minute early and go away again in the hope of getting rid of him by saying look, first he bungled the code-intro and then he missed the rendezvous so I’m not taking him out there, he’s inefficient.

  ‘Well it’s your funeral,’ I said.

  We didn’t talk much along the Mall except when I asked him what his Polish was like.

  ‘I took the advanced exams before I was posted there’

  I suppose he wanted me to throw him a biscuit for that.

  We walked quickly because of the cold and I took him into Piccadilly to use up some of the time. The mist clung to our coats. Just after Hamilton Place a bus went by, pulling away from the kerb, and I nipped on to it, giving him room to follow.

  ‘Are we late?’

  ‘Not really.’

  The conductor was still on the upper deck when we got off, and I took him north and went left along Curzon Street, crossing into the Park. I heard the taxi slowing from behind us before we’d reached Marble Arch; the door came open and I got in first so that he’d have to use the tip-up seat and face the rear, which was what Egerton had wanted.

  ‘You realise,’ he said to Merrick in slow modulated tones, ‘that you are first and foremost a second secretary at the Embassy, just as you were before. This is very important’ He had dark glasses on, which was why he wanted Merrick to face him the whole time. ‘We’ve no concessions on the part of the Embassy enabling you to behave as anyone other than a member of Her Majesty’s Foreign Service, careful in conduct and unimpeachable in character. Let me put it this way: we would rather go short of the information you’ll be seeking than risk upsetting the Ambassador by exposing yourself to criticism on his part or to suspicion on the part of the local authorities.’