The brotherhood, p.23
The Brotherhood, page 23
‘Like kidnapping me at gunpoint over Iceland? Come on, George, let’s get really civilised. Let’s have another bottle.’
Novak opened the door and shouted for the sailor.
CHAPTER 2
The coast of Poland appeared in the late afternoon of the fourth day. A darkening blur between steel-grey sea and sky. Magnus was on deck, freshly shaved, his oilskin fastened to the throat against the bone-freezing Baltic wind. Novak had lent him a grey shirt, together with a safety razor, cake of soap and toothbrush — all the luggage he possessed, now stuffed in the pockets of his rumpled worsted suit. His hair was wild, and he wore no tie, and he felt like a true Comrade.
The only sound above the beat of the engines, was the cry of gulls gliding over the oily water. The smokestack above him gave an ear-cracking groan. When it stopped Novak was beside him, slight and spruce in his polo-necked sweater which was as white as a surplice.
‘Sopot!’ he said, gesturing to starboard. ‘One of our most popular seaside resorts.’ The words had a bogus reverence, like a guide showing tourists round a dull cathedral; then, as though sensing that Magnus was unimpressed, he added: ‘It’s beautiful in the sun. Not flashy like the Riviera. But gay — full of young people — beautiful girls in bikinis — even the daughters of the Party officials who borrow their fathers’ villas for the weekend and play American jazz records and drink scotch whisky.’
‘Swinging Sopot,’ Magnus murmured, looking out at the strip of bleak empty beach. Could this be one of the dens of iniquity that so inflamed Lubian and Cane and the whole mad gang of them? The last of Novak’s tea-time vodka was beginning to die in his belly; and Sopot was past them now, giving way to a fringe of gloomy buildings growing out of the dusk — their last port of call, Gdansk.
There were no red stars, no slogans or banners. A port, like any port. Cranes, funnels, green-black smell of oil and seaweed. The beat of the engines dropped, the bows began to swing.
Magnus felt nothing as he watched — neither fear nor excitement, not even curiosity. He was filled with a strange vacant calm. There were no police on the quayside. A group of sailors stood waiting with ropes. More sailors scuttled about on deck. Novak took his arm: ‘I think it would be better if you stayed down in the cabin while we tie up.’ The words were casual, but definite, as though addressing an unwanted guest.
Magnus nodded, and was just in time to see a long black saloon car swing round the corner of a warehouse and come to a halt on the quay, about fifty yards from where more sailors were rolling up a gangway. He watched the rear door open, and a man in black hat and overcoat climb out. The ship bumped against the quay, and Novak tugged gently at his arm, leading him towards the bulkhead.
Down in the cabin he peeled off his oilskin and sat listening to the grinding of cables. The engines were silent now; he could hear footsteps above, then a long muttered conversation at the top of the steps down to the gangway.
It was twenty minutes before Novak reappeared. He seemed in a hurry, thrusting something into Magnus’ hand and saying, ‘Right, let’s go!’ Magnus opened a passport and stared at his photograph; it was like coming face to face with an almost forgotten friend. He began to turn the pages — the frontier stamps like landmarks in his life. He looked at Novak: ‘I’ve got a visa, I suppose?’
Novak nodded: ‘Twenty-eight days.’ It sounded like a prison sentence. Magnus found it near the end of the passport, covering a whole page under the black spider emblem, issued in London four days earlier.
‘We haven’t much time,’ Novak said, picking up his rucksack. ‘And leave your oilskin here — I’m afraid it’s the property of the Polish Merchant Marine.’
The deck was deserted. There was no sign of the man in hat and overcoat; but the car was still there, fifty yards down the quay.
No one took any notice of them as they walked down the gangway, Magnus shuddering with the cold. Novak stepped up beside him, leading the way towards the car. No Customs or Immigration — Iceland, Poland — it was like bloody Royalty! He caught a glimpse of a crowd of sailors inside a shed waiting to have their papers stamped, and suddenly he wanted to be among them, submitting to the routine bureaucracy. For walking outside with Novak made him feel estranged, detached from reality. ‘Your frontier police are just wonderful, George! Is it always like this?’
‘Your papers are in order,’ Novak said quietly.
‘Do I get the same treatment when I leave?’
No answer. They had reached the car — an ugly luxurious Zim with shaded rear windows. The driver, sitting in front of a glass partition, did not even look at them as they passed him — a big man in black leather cap and gloves. Novak opened the rear door. It was growing dark and Magnus did not see the second passenger until he was half inside: a shadowy figure in an overcoat, sitting back in the corner behind a fog of black tobacco smoke.
At first he thought it was the man he had seen from the deck; then he saw the hair, bronze-red even in the dim light of the windows, and heard her voice as he slumped down beside her: ‘How was the trip?’
‘Oh it was a great trip.’ He felt their thighs pressed together through her overcoat, as Novak sat down on his other side and closed the door.
‘You look tired,’ she said, and touched his hand, her fingers like cool knives in the dark. He began to laugh:
‘Yes, I’m tired. Tired and dirty and far from home.’ He remembered he had not bathed, even taken his clothes off, for nearly five days now, and was grateful for the stench of her cigarette. She passed the packet across to Novak, whose supply of Salems was now exhausted, then said something in Polish, to which he just nodded.
‘Thanks for the passport,’ Magnus said, as the engine purred to life. ‘I must get you a spare key when we get back to London.’ The car did a leisurely U-turn and began to hum back up the cobbled quay. ‘Did you take it that night?’ he added, ‘or break in later?’
‘Next morning — when I heard that Bogdan had been killed.’
He nodded: ‘It didn’t occur to you that I might need it myself?’
‘You’d already left. We knew that.’
‘Of course.’ ‘Course’ was the operative word: every move planned, bearing plotted. What was to follow would be a trial of strength and organisation between Lubian’s Brotherhood and Novak’s Intelligence Service. Magnus was to be a vital agent in that struggle, but one stripped of all free will. Yet he was not frightened. Finding himself in their total power brought a perverse sense of freedom, a release from all responsibility. No luggage, no currency, not the least idea where he was going — just his passport, which he felt now inside his pocket, giving him the illusion of security, in the company of people for whom the word ‘security’ had a somewhat ambivalent worth.
Outside, lamps began to flare on through the twilight. They turned down a broad street, under solemn Prussian architecture that still bore the pockmarks of the war. There were a few people about, and almost no traffic. A row of dim shops; queue in heavy clothes waiting for a tram; man in goggles and crash helmet astride a motorcycle by the kerb. He looked up as they passed and kicked viciously at the starter pedal, no doubt conscious that the only people who rode about in Zims were the Party bosses.
Magnus could feel the pressure of Maya’s thigh again, her fingertips still touching his hand, and his blood quickened, remembering that first time he had seen her — belted raincoat and white luggage on the Red Dragon express, settling down to read Encounter. The image now was less elegant — bulky overcoat, jeans and flat shoes.
‘Am I allowed to know where we’re going?’ Magnus said at last.
‘Warsaw.’ It was Novak who answered.
‘Tonight?’
‘Tomorrow. We’re stopping tonight in the country where you’ll be receiving more instructions.’
He turned back to Maya. ‘How did they get you out of London?’
‘I got myself out. B.E.A. to Paris, then Air France to Warsaw.’
He nodded: girl in jeans, British passport, ticket to Warsaw. Her profile was blurred for a moment through cigarette smoke. She was quite unreal; she had never been real. Appearing from nowhere, picking him up drunk and vanishing after tea, to reappear several weeks later on the floor of his Battersea flat listening to Beethoven sonatas. And now riding with him in a swank Soviet limousine through grim Polish suburbs into the night.
It was all part of their technique, of course: keep him intrigued, baffled, tell him nothing. He tried again though: ‘All right, George, just tell me this. You’re a mixed-up Marxist patriot who doesn’t like Stalinism or the Brotherhood. That explains why you’re doing all this. But how did you get Maya to co-operate?’
‘Better ask her.’
He turned to her: ‘Well?’ But she said nothing, her face turned to the window.
‘Maya has her loyalties,’ said Novak, ‘and that’s all that concerns us.’
‘Loyal enough to get herself trusted by the Brotherhood to do a few dirty jobs for them?’
‘They trusted you,’ he said; ‘and we have not enquired too closely why.’
Magnus began to cough; the fug of smoke in the car was becoming unbearable. ‘Can you open a window?’ he said. Novak rolled his down an inch.
‘Because you’re not really interested why they trust me,’ he went on. ‘You want me for a specific job. When that’s over, you’ll wash your hands of me. All right, I’ve got myself into this mess, and I’ll have to see it through. But I want to know first how you got Maya into it.’
‘That doesn’t concern you.’
‘The hell it doesn’t! She’s a British citizen and she’s either working for a hostile government, or for an organisation engaged in criminal activities in Britain.’ As he spoke, he felt her fingers slip away from his hand. Novak’s voice reached him low and tense above the slipstream from the window:
‘I should be careful what you say.’
He sat back, resigned. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn her in. So you get your Mata Haris cheap and easy, and good luck to you!’ Beside him, Maya sat very still, the cigarette in her hand burning away into a curled finger of ash. She spoke without moving her head from the window:
‘I do it because I hate them. I want to destroy them.’
‘Who? Bogdan Krok?’ he said maliciously, and she swung round in her seat, almost falling into his lap:
‘That’s not true. It was all a mistake, you know that — you were there! I didn’t know they were going to kill him.’
‘Not kill him — just bugger him up on a drunken driving charge, in the hope that he might not get his work permit from the Home Office. And no doubt if that hadn’t worked, they’d have tried something else — perhaps the old queer charge next?’ He laughed spitefully: ‘Although they’d have hardly asked you to help there.’
For a moment he thought she was going to strike him. Her hand jerked forward and the ash dropped messily on to his trousers. Novak interrupted: ‘You’re hardly the one to talk, Magnus. You believed in them. You believed in John Cane. You didn’t come forward when they framed those boys in Cardiff, did you?’
‘I didn’t have any proof.’
‘Oh sure, sure. Except that on your own admission Cane immediately afterwards took you into his confidence. Now I’ll tell you something. Maya’s clean as far as the Brotherhood’s concerned. She’s never had any fancy ideas of cracking down on long-haired pop singers and cranky avant-garde liberals. She’s broadminded — she believes in live-and-let-live.’
Magnus looked at her again. ‘Why do you hate them so much, Maya?’
She was sitting back again in her corner, her eyes huge and hollow in the dark. ‘Because of what they did to my father. They disgraced him, destroyed him.’
Outside, pine trees swept past like giant moths in the headlamps. The road was straight and empty, with no traffic except for a single prick of light through the shaded rear window.
‘What happened?’ he said at last.
‘They had him framed on a rape charge — a disgusting case with a girl in a Warsaw hotel. A cheap little whore they’d bribed to pick him up and get him to buy her some drinks, then take him back to the hotel he used when he was up on visits. It wasn’t very discreet, I know — but he was a colonel in the Army stationed down in Cracow. But my mother was dead — killed in the Uprising — and anyway why shouldn’t he have had an evening out!’ she cried, accusingly. ‘They must have paid that bitch a few thousand zlotys. She ran out into the corridor screaming, with nothing on, and the police were called, and she told them she’d been raped. There were witnesses, and she was very convincing in court. They sent my father to prison for two years.’
She spoke with a strained, hushed anger, not looking at Magnus. ‘And in Poland there’s no reduction of sentence for good behaviour. He served his two years, and when he came out he was disgraced, his career in the Army finished — even after he’d fought the Germans right through the war, including the Uprising!’
‘Why did they do it?’
‘He knew too much. About General Morowski, and his interest in this crazy Fraternitas Virtutis. He’d always hated the Stalinists. When they took over complete power in 1947, they had him arrested, along with hundreds of others, because he’d fought with the Home Army.’
‘But you got out?’
‘I was only a baby. My mother was dead, and in 1946 my father was sent to the American Zone of Germany as part of the Polish Mission, and he took me with him. Then, when the Communists started taking over, he was recalled, and he went — he wasn’t afraid of them! But he left me with some Polish friends in Germany, and just before he was arrested he managed to get a message out, and the family adopted me. A year later they moved to England, and after five years I got my passport — all nice and legal, don’t worry! Except, as you said, I’m now working for a hostile government.’ She fell silent, the corner of her eye flashing suddenly in the single light that still peered at them through the rear window.
‘What happened to your father then?’ he asked.
‘He was amnestied after Stalin’s death. And in 1956, when Gomulka came to power, they gave him back his old job in the Army — as a full colonel in the Cracow area. He was a very respected soldier.’
‘But he supported the regime?’
‘Father was never a Party member,’ she said staunchly. ‘He was a Polish patriot doing his duty, not running away. And I’ll tell you something to prove it.’ She was sitting on the edge of her seat now, facing him, with the light from behind still flashing in her eyes.
‘Only four days before he was reinstated, the Hungarian revolution began. And on the third day of his command, Warsaw tried to send a hospital train with medical supplies to Budapest. The train went through Cracow on its way to the Czechoslovak border. But the Czechs stopped it. They said they wouldn’t allow any supplies to go through to help the Hungarian counter-revolutionary Fascists. Can you believe it? Students and workers and schoolchildren fighting tanks in the streets, and those Czech pigs sent back our bandages and penicillin!’ She laughed: ‘But when the train got back to Cracow, and my father heard what had happened, he put it in a siding and called up a battalion of his crack paratroops who were doing ski-training in the Tatra Mountains. He put a man on every footplate armed with a sub-machine gun, and ordered them to ride down to the Czech frontier. The Czechs didn’t stop it a second time. It went straight through to Hungary, delivered the supplies in Budapest, and returned to Poland without a shot fired.’
Magnus noticed that Novak had remained very quiet through all this. ‘So how did you get involved with the Brotherhood, Maya?’
‘I came over to Poland last year to see my father just after he’d been let out of prison. And he told me everything — how this Fraternitas was discrediting anyone associated with the new liberal movements. He’d collected a lot of evidence about their activities in the Army and their connection with General Morowski, but before he could act against them, they got at him first — they broke him.
‘They’re very clever, you see. They knew that some trumped-up political charge would get him an audience. People would have listened to him in court, and the rumours would have spread. They couldn’t risk that, so they decided to disgrace him morally. Who’d listen to an officer accusing his superiors after he’d been found guilty of rape?’
‘So you agreed to help by acting as an agent provocateur for the Brotherhood inside Britain? How did you manage to contact them?’
Novak snapped something in Polish and she fell silent. Magnus sighed: ‘All right, I can guess. You used the East-West Cultural Association. Old-style Communist front organisation pretending to further coexistence. Steiner was your contact? It was he, I suppose, who arranged the stunt in Cardiff against the B.B.C. — and later against Krok?’
‘It wasn’t difficult to join,’ she murmured, ‘if you knew the right slogans.’
‘Like preferring the Red Army choir to the Rolling Stones?’ He detected a tiny smile beside him in the darkness, as he added: ‘How did you get on to me?’
‘Through The Paper,’ and Novak sprang forward in his seat, shouting at her in Polish.
‘Oh to hell with you, George!’ Magnus said, ‘I’m not going to shop her to Scotland Yard or this General Morowski. You’ve been playing the old Secret Service spook for four days now. Why don’t you give me a break? Maya’s not going to tell me anything that’s going to damage you.’
Novak relaxed a little and muttered, ‘So you know now — it was someone who works for The Paper.’
‘Hugh Rissell, eh? So my sardonic old News Editor turns out to be a double agent for a foreign power?’ He shook his head and began to laugh: ‘Hugh Rissell and Maya! It’s too damn ridiculous.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Novak said. ‘And since there’s nothing to be gained by making false accusations, I’ll tell you. It was a man called Poole.’
‘Poole?’ For a moment he was at a loss; then he remembered that wall eye glaring at him among the alleys of filing cabinets, imagined the computer-like memory clicking up the names he’d asked for: Cane, Hilder, Pym. ‘So the old fox suspected I was spying on them?’
