Samson 05 hope, p.27
Samson 05 - Hope, page 27
‘Did it? Well, I’m certainly glad I didn’t go along there. That could have happened to me and Dicky.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Rupert.
‘Ambulance approaching,’ I said. ‘This will be it.’ I don’t know why I said it but I just knew that vehicle was something to do with George.
The ambulance was not one of the shiny new Russian ones I’d seen on the streets. Or the Polish army’s camouflaged trucks with red crosses on the side. This was a lovely old slab-sided ‘Star’ from the FSC factory in Starachowice. Two men, equally old, got out and one of them opened the door at the rear.
‘We’ve come to collect you,’ said the other man in passable English. ‘Mr. George sent us.’ The men were not threatening; they didn’t have the build to be threatening. ‘Thirty minutes,’ promised the man as he opened the back doors.
I wasn’t inclined to go along with them until Rupert climbed into the back of the ambulance. It was only after we were inside, and bumping along over the corrugated ice, that I began to suspect that Rupert was so cold he would have jumped into almost anything to escape the cold wind. But at the time, I reasoned that Rupert was almost a local, and he had the diplomatic passport that would probably get both of us out of trouble with the law.
‘Are you armed?’ Rupert asked suddenly, as if regretting his action.
‘No,’ I said. He was looking around in an agitated way that suggested claustrophobia. The interior was gloomy, illuminated only by a tiny yellow bulb in the roof. The main part of the ambulance was occupied by two stretchers locked into wheeled racks. Two gray army blankets were draped over each of them. A respiratory apparatus was in a rack over a hard uncomfortable bench, upon which we were now seated, crushed tightly together. Just inside the door there was a metal wall cabinet marked with a red cross. It was secured by a brass padlock.
‘There are no windows.’
‘No windows in ambulances; no pockets in shrouds. They don’t want us to see where we’re going,’ I explained. ‘It will be okay.’
‘I hope so.’
A peephole controlled from the driver’s compartment snapped back and one of the men up front said, ‘We’ll bring you back.’ Then he closed the shutter without waiting for our reaction.
I could hear the traffic around us but the ventilator in the roof provided no chance of seeing out, not even a glimpse of the sky. I noticed we did not make an excessive number of turns and I guessed that they were going directly to our destination, so I settled back and waited. I decided it came into the category of ‘calculated risk,’ the sort of hazard I was paid to suffer.
The ambulance journey took only twenty-five minutes. When the doors were opened at the other end we were in a parking bay outside a large ugly building standing in a dozen acres of grass most of which was now hidden under the snow. Regimented trees lined the drive and there was a sign at the gate announcing that this was the Madame Maria Sklodowska-Curie Clinic. The double Nobel Prize-winning Madame Curie was much celebrated in her home town but a large section of the sign’s wooden supporting trestle was missing, suggesting that some passerby had wanted to pursue radiation experiments of a domestic nature.
I knew more or less where we were. You can’t get lost in Warsaw since the Soviets built the world’s ugliest building there and made it so tall you can see it from Vladivostok. We followed the two Poles in through the main entrance of the building. As we entered the lobby they removed their hats and looked around respectfully, as if entering a cathedral. Then a gray-haired woman came striding along and engaged them in rapid Polish. She was dressed in black skirt and blouse. What not so long ago was the uniform for female office workers throughout Europe now made her inadvertently chic.
I raised an eyebrow at Rupert, who explained softly, ‘We are about to meet the head administrator of the clinic.’
The long corridor along which we were taken was bare and cold. We passed doors that opened on to small wards with half a dozen beds in each. ‘Here,’ said the gray-haired woman. From somewhere behind one of the doors a baby began crying and another joined in.
The head administrator’s room was slightly larger, warmer and marginally more comfortable than any of the wards we passed on the way to it. He was introduced as Dr. Urban and, despite the white cotton coat, my suspicion that he was not a physician was soon confirmed when he told us that he had previously been managing a printing plant in Lodz. He laughed when he told us this. But his spoken English was fluent, due he said to having spent a year as an exchange student in New Jersey.
‘I want to be frank with you. Clear and above board. And that’s why it is better that Mr. Copper is here to represent your embassy. I don’t want you saying that you were tricked by those crafty Poles.’
‘We were expecting George Kosinski,’ I said. The gray-haired lady took our overcoats, put them on hangers, hung them in a closet and then departed.
‘Your brother-in-law,’ said Dr. Urban. ‘It’s better to do it without him.’ He smiled conspiratorially. ‘Much better.’ Anyone locked into the notion that all Poles were thin reflective and lugubrious had not met Dr. Urban. He was a short restless man with a thick mass of wavy auburn hair, a chubby cheerful face and piercing blue eyes. His time in the United States had obviously had a profound effect upon him, for his informal manner and his style loosened tie and feet resting on a pile of books-was markedly transatlantic.
‘Is he all right?’ I asked. Dr. Urban waved at a chair and I sat down.
‘He is all right. Our friend Mr. George? Yes, but he becomes too anxious. We understand why; he has endured a stressful time.’
‘Yes,’ I said. After spiraling round like a restless dog Rupert settled into a battered armchair.
Rupert said, ‘Mind if I smoke?’ Such formality seemed superfluous, since Dr. Urban had filled the air with acrid blue smoke and was still working at it. On the table there was an open packet of Benson and Hedges. He swiveled it round, offering the cigarettes to Rupert, but Rupert took one of his own from his monogrammed silver case. Having blown a little smoke, Rupert said, ‘The body is it? The body of the wife?’
‘Ah!’ said Dr. Urban, opening his eyes wide to look at Rupert as if he’d not expected him to do anything but sit quietly and listen. To counter this unexpected development he said, ‘You’ll take coffee?’
There was another delay while the coffee was brought to us and poured out. Through the window I could see the car park. There were half a dozen cars there veiled in snow, variously heavy coatings of it according to how long each had remained unused. The two Poles were standing by the ambulance talking together. I had the feeling that they expected to wait a long time.
‘Where were we?’ said Dr. Urban after he’d put down his cigarette and settled back in his creaky swivel chair with his coffee balanced in his hands.
‘Mrs. Kosinski,’ supplied Rupert.
‘I went to Berlin last week to make the travel arrangements,’ said Urban. ‘The Germans can be very difficult but in this case everything has gone smoothly. She arrives at the end of the week.’ Dr. Urban stopped talking as he found something undesirable floating in his coffee. He bent forward, held his cup above the wastepaper basket, and expertly flipped the foreign body into it using his spoon. I had the feeling that he’d done it before. He looked up. ‘An insect,’ he said and then drank the coffee with relish.
‘Does Mr. George Kosinski know all this?’ said Rupert.
‘Of course,’ said Dr. Urban. He put down his half-empty coffee cup and rummaged around on his desk to find a United Kingdom passport which he held in the air like an author on a TV talk show. ‘George Kosinski has become a Polish citizen,’ he said. ‘This passport is no longer valid.’ Rupert stood up and reached for the passport. Urban said, ‘Look at it, yes. But you can’t keep it. It has to be returned through the official channels.’
‘Why are you telling us this?’ I asked while Rupert, a broody look on his face, examined George’s passport page by page.
‘Don’t you want your coffee?’ He stirred his own coffee zealously, and then set it aside and picked up his cigarette and blew on the end to get it alight.
‘It’s delicious,’ I said. In fact I didn’t want it. The look on his face as he evicted the insect from his own cup had quenched my thirst.
‘Because they tell me you are going off to Masuria to find him. He’s become a Polish citizen with fun rights and privileges. His parents were born here. It was a simple matter once he’d decided. But now he would need permission to leave Poland, even if you persuaded him to go with you.’
‘George Kosinski is my brother-in-law,’ I said.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Urban. ‘It makes no difference. The wife is Polish too.’
‘Are you saying she’s alive?’ I said.
‘Tessa Kosinski?’ He put a new cigarette in his mouth and lit it from the butt of the old one. Then he stubbed out the butt in an ashtray made from a brass shell case. Only after all that did he give a brief laugh. ‘Very much alive. More alive than most of the people on the District Hospitals Management Board to which I report.’
‘You spoke with her?’ I said.
‘I’ve just told you; I went to Berlin to see her and make the travel arrangements.’
‘She wanted to come to Poland?’ asked Rupert.
‘Yes.’
‘And the Germans are letting her go?’
‘She wasn’t a prisoner,’ said Urban. ‘She was just a patient in the Charité hospital in Berlin. Making her a Polish citizen simplified the paperwork for everyone: here and there too. Technically she is being repatriated.’ He smiled and then explained the joke. ‘She’s never been to Poland before, but technically she’s being repatriated.’
‘In hospital?’ I said.
‘Don’t try to make a fool of me, Mr. Samson,’ said the cheerful doctor, becoming a trifle less cheerful. ‘You know the score. So do we all. You know why she’s coming back here.’
‘No, I don’t,’ I said.
‘You’re talking in riddles,’ Rupert told him, closing the passport and putting it on Urban’s desk amid the other clutter.
Dr. Urban looked from one to the other of us, a smile trying to get out of the comers of his tightly closed mouth. ‘You English,’ he said in grudging admiration. ‘You’re the best actors in the world. Not only Shakespeare, Bacon and all the way to Pinter. And Noel Coward, Lord Olivier and the Rolling Stones and the rest of them. I love them all, but acting is a talent flowing through the veins of each and every one of you. You don’t even realize you are doing it, do you?’
‘Acting apart,’ said Rupert patiently. ‘Why is she in hospital?’
Again the smile came. ‘You’ve come here today and you still pretend you don’t know. You come to the best maternity hospital in the sub-district in the whole of Warsaw perhaps and you say is the mother-to-be still alive? Really, gentlemen. It is time now to wipe off the greasepaint, I think.’
‘Pregnant?’ said Rupert.
‘That is the whole point of it all. Why do you think that the Kosinskis wanted to become citizens? Why was the father so keen that his wife should be here in the homeland at this crucial time?’
‘So that the child will be Polish,’ said Rupert.
‘We Poles are a sentimental people,’ said Dr. Urban proudly. ‘He wants a Polish son; yes.’
‘And you will control the parents through the child?’ said Rupert,. ‘Your jurisdiction will enable you to manipulate the parents and have them say and do anything you wish.’ Rupert looked at me. He was alarmed as he thought of what it all meant. And how he would explain this bizarre Polishfait accomplito London.
. ‘No, no, no,’ said Dr. Urban, without putting his heart and soul into the denial. He got to his feet and said, ‘This is a fine hospital. Let me show you around. We can do as well as the Germans in maternity care. Our only concern with the Kosinski woman was whether a mother should travel at such a late state of pregnancy. Some can, some can’t, it’s a matter of stamina … of constitution. That’s why I took our resident obstetrician with me. I don’t want an emergency on the train next week. In any case there will be a doctor and a nurse with her. There is nothing to worry about.’ A quick look from one to the other of us. ‘But they are Poles. If the worst came to worst, at least I would not be facing a political dimension.’
Rupert was furious, but he kept his anger under tight control. He saw it all as solely a device to render the embassy people powerless. He said: ‘You don’t have to explain it in even greater detail, Doctor. We see the point of the naturalization procedure.’
‘And George Kosinski goes along with all this?’ I asked.
‘Mr. Kosinski is a deeply religious man. He has always prayed for a child; they both have.’
‘And now their prayers have come true?’ I said.
He looked at me with narrowed eyes. ‘Not quite yet,’ he said. ‘But they enjoy something for which to light a candle or two.’ He buttoned his shirt collar and tightened the knot of his brown tie. ‘You’ll see.’ From behind the door he took his jacket from a hanger and put it on. I should have guessed all along I suppose. Poland was still under de factomartial law, no matter what soothing noises were coming from the government.
Dr. Urban’s jacket was khaki and complete with campaign medals and badges of rank. A major in the supply services. Every institution was under the direct control of the army, so why not the finest maternity home in the sub-district? ‘We have only a few days to wait,’ said Urban, looking at me. ‘I would dearly like to get this absurd misunderstanding settled once and for all. So can I have your assurance that when you speak with Mrs. Kosinski, and hear her say that she prefers to be a Polish citizen, you will report in those terms to your masters in London?’
‘Tell me, Major Urban,’ I said politely. ‘Exactly what are the full rights and privileges that come with becoming a Polish citizen?’
‘You will have your little jokes, you Englishmen,’ he said, and laughed as he strapped on his leather pistol belt.
It was only after we were back at Vilnius Station and in the car that Rupert had left there, that Rupert gave vent to his frustration and rage.
‘The little bastard. Bezpieca! I could see that from the start.’
‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘I can recognize a secret policeman when I see one.’
‘You mean he was a secret policeman wearing a uniform as a disguise?’
‘Why are you always so damned argumentative?’
‘I was just asking.’
He shuddered. ‘When we were in that stinking old ambulance I thought they were going to slit our throats.’
‘They wouldn’t want to mess up their nice clean blankets,’ I said. ‘They wanted to make us a little nervous.’
‘Well, with me they succeeded,’ said Rupert. ‘Can you imagine what London is going to say when I tell them how we’ve been outmaneuvred? It’s not even worth your chasing after George Kosinski anymore. You can see how they’ve twisted him round their finger.’
‘Poor George.’
‘And the child will be Polish. As two Polish nationals there can be no question of the baby getting a UK passport.’
‘No,’ I said. It was typical of Rupert and all his clan that every situation was rendered down into its relevant paperwork. These are the sort of bureaucratic pen pushers who think a peace treaty is more important than a peace.
We sat there in the car with neither of us speaking. Vilnius Station was even bleaker now that evening was approaching. The sky was almost black and the sodium lamps on the station were orbs of orange-colored light made fuzzy by the condensation on the car’s windows.
‘The Poles are not bad people,’ said Rupert, as if to himself. I could see that he was trying to think of some way of presenting the bad news he would be sending to London. ‘The regime is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea-Between Moscow’s tanks and Wall Street.’
‘Tanks and banks,’ I said. ‘It’s a predicament.’
‘You’re a lot of bloody help aren’t you?’ he complained. ‘Yes. No. I suppose so. What the hell’s wrong with you?’
‘You’re preparing a message for tonight?’
‘They’ll need something more than a message,’ he said. ‘This development will have them climbing the walls.’
‘So why not hang on for a day or so?’ I suggested.
‘Can’t.’
‘That wasn’t an official meeting. Who was there? You, me and his nibs. If we forget that it happened, Dr. Urban might as well have been talking to himself.’
‘Probably tape-recorded.’
‘I doubt it. He was too relaxed.’
‘I’ll have to tell London sooner or later.’
‘Later.’
‘It’s all very well for you to say later. You won’t get the rocket when suddenly they hear that Tessa Kosinski is in Warsaw and having the baby.’
‘Write a memo to yourself about the meeting. Say I didn’t believe a word of it, and neither did you.’
‘That won’t cover me, Samson, and you know it.’
‘Say in the memo that you immediately sent me off to check the story.’
‘Check it with George Kosinski? Is that what you mean?’
‘That would be one way of doing it,’ I agreed.
‘You’re a devious bastard, Samson.’
‘It was just an idea.’
He looked at me and wet his lips nervously. He didn’t like the idea of conspiring with me. I was not one of his intimates, and deceiving authority was in any case distasteful to him. ‘You don’t give a damn, do you. I sup pose you falsify your reports whenever it suits you to do so.’
‘Of course not,’ I said.
‘Sometimes I wish I could be like you, Samson. Life is so much easier if you bend the rules to your own convenience.’
‘Are we going to sit here all night while you sing my praises? Or are you going to summon up the guts to do what you know has to be done?’
