well-used railway cars being uncoupled and shunted off to a distant siding.
Inside the express train there was an almost interminable processing of paperwork by Soviet officials whose demeanour ranged from officious to witless. They gave no more than a glance at the paperwork for our party. I got a mocking salute, the girl a leer, and Jim’s inert form a nod. Eventually the train started again. It slid out of the brightly lit frontier area, and, with many stops and starts, we clanked across the frontier to where the Poles – and another checkpoint – awaited us.
Here the lights were less bright, the armed soldiers less threatening. I stood in the corridor watching the whole circus. Fur hats bobbed everywhere. The soldiers climbed aboard first. Then the ticket inspector came, and then the customs officer, and then two immigration inspectors with an army officer in tow, and a security official in civilian clothes. It was a long process.
An elderly English woman came shuffling along the train corridor. She was wearing a raglan style camel-hair coat over a nightdress. Her greying hair was dishevelled, and she clutched a bulging crocodile-skin handbag tightly to her breast. I’d noticed her on the platform at Moscow, where she’d got into an argument with a railway official about the seats assigned to her and the teenage boy with whom she was travelling.
‘The soldiers have arrested my son,’ she told me in a breathless croak. She was distressed, almost hysterical, but controlling her emotions in that way that the English do in the presence of foreigners. ‘He’s such a foolish boy. They discovered a political magazine in his shoulder bag. I want to go with him and sort it out, but they say I must continue my journey to Berlin because I have no Polish visa. What shall I do? Can you help me? I heard you speaking Polish and I know you speak English.’
‘Give the sergeant some Western money,’ I said. ‘Do you have ten pounds in British currency?’
She touched her loosened hair, and a lock of it fell across her face. ‘I didn’t declare it.’ She mouthed the words lest she was overheard. ‘It’s hidden.’ She nervously flicked her hair back, and then with a quick movement of her fingers secured it with a hairclip that seemed to come from nowhere.
‘It’s what they want,’ I said. ‘Give them ten pounds sterling.’
‘Are you sure?’ She didn’t believe me. She had become aware of her unladylike appearance by now. Selfconsciously she fastened the top button of her coat against her neck.
‘Why else would they let you come here and talk with me?’ I said.
She frowned and then smiled sadly. ‘I see.’
‘The sergeant,’ I said. ‘Take the sergeant to one side and give it to him. He will share it with the officer afterwards, so that no one sees it. If things go wrong the sergeant gets all the blame. It’s the way it works.’
‘Thank 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
