The lift stopped, its floor jogging slowly to stillness under foot.

'Will there be someone here?'

'Yes.'

She'd started shivering with nerves and I was suddenly fed up because I'd mucked it. She wouldn't be spending the next five years stitching boots in the strict-regime camps but it had been a hell of a way to pull her out of a snatch. I might have killed her.

In the passage I said: 'Tell them to fix you up with something hot. Vodka grog or something.'

I took my time going down the stairs because she couldn't be sure that someone was there: you could be there one day and the next day you could be in the 5th Precinct Bureau or some other rotten hole. Three short, one long. When I heard the mirror shut I cleared the rest of the stairs a bit quicker because there was a lot to do.

7: CONTACT

Do you know this woman?

Hotel Pulawski. No go.

I'd been working against a deadline and it was already past because they wouldn't wait till they'd dredged the Fiat out of the river: they'd be, on to me before that. We'd started off from the tram-stop at Ulica Solec somewhere between 5.30 and 5.40 and as soon as they'd seen I was going to try giving them a run they'd have radioed the number to their base, we are now in pursuit of dove-grey Fiat 1300, Warsaw-registered, so forth.

Do you know this woman?

Hotel Dworzec. No go.

Give them ten minutes to channel the number into Registrations Control and five minutes for Registration to come up with the answer and fifteen minutes for the first patrol to reach Orbis and get the place opened up and find the relevant documentation: yes, we booked this one out on the 10th to a British visitor, P. K. Longstreet, passport number C-5374441. Give them another fifteen minutes to cover the city with a general alert call by mobile-patrol radios and report-point telephones and that made it a short-limit deadline of 6.15 so at 6.15 the police would have started combing the hotels.

Just as I was doing.

Do you know this woman?

Hotel Francuski. No go.

That was why I'd begun sweating: we were working the same ground. Any time between June and September or anywhere south of Latitude 45 I could have holed-up in the open but this was Warsaw in January and if you didn't get under a decent roof you'd freeze. It didn't matter that by now they might have found the bag with the leather panel coming away from the stitches at one end: they were welcome to what they pulled out of it because if I were still a free agent tomorrow I was going to sting that bloody woman in Accounts for a set of new winter woollies. They wouldn't stop looking for me once they knew I'd left the hotel. They knew I'd have to find another one. I had to have somewhere to live.

'Do you know this woman?'

Hotel Alzacki.

I showed him the dog-eared identity-card.

He looked at it.

I was relying on his impression of events to cover my accent: there's no precise equivalent for the palatals in English and you've got to do it with the tip of the tongue on the lower teeth and the middle pressed towards the alveolar ridge and it takes practice and I hadn't had much. But events were that a man in a black leather coat and fur kepi had come quickly up to the desk and pushed someone's papers in front of his face and shot a terse question, and his impression was predictable and he didn't ask to see my badge. Now I watched for his reaction.

I couldn't hurry him, get it over with and get out if it was no go again. I had to stand there with ice down my spine because if that door opened behind me it could be one of his guests coming in or it could be one of the several hundred police who were now checking the hotels for P. K. Longstreet. The name wasn't here on the books of the Hotel Alzacki but although they didn't know my face except for a vague description by Orbis they wouldn't miss checking my papers and they'd see it there instead.

'I've never seen her before.'

No reaction.

There was a lot of noise like the building coming down. A brass ashtray crept like a crab across the polished top of the counter. He didn't notice anything. I took her card back and spun the register towards me to look at the names but I didn't look at the names yet, I went on looking at him.

Reaction.

Nothing happened to his face. It was big and square with creases weathered into it, a seaman's face that had looked into the eye of the storm and stared it out. Iron-grey Bismarck head and an ear torn at the lobe, boathook or the dying flick of a shark-fin, salt in his soul. Nothing that I could say would change a face like this but the reaction was there all right and it had come when I'd spun the register: he'd drawn a slow breath as he'd straightened up, and shifted his feet a bit to redispose his weight, as a man of his weight does. I've never seen her before, shaking his head. It was just a hundredth of a degree too natural and there was another thing: he'd shifted his weight but it had given an odd slant to his attitude and he stood as a one-legged sailor stands but I didn't think he was one-legged.

Of course he'd never seen her before, it was nothing to do with that: it was the number I'd used to open my act that was all, to show I was the hunter and not the hunted. It hadn't worried him but the register had, the way I'd spun it round to have a look. There wouldn't be anything there, I knew that: if you take a man in and put him in a garret with a wardrobe shoved across the door you don't enter his name in the book. It was just that I was getting warm: a hotel register is a revealing document and the police go for it first and even if there's nothing in it to reveal it's like when you show your visa and wonder for an instant if Credentials have made a mistake and it's out of date: your stomach does a slight skid-turn.

The building fell down again but among all the noise I heard a voice from upstairs, and a door banging.

This place would do me.

'I'd like a room.'

His heavy lids lifted. The police won't ask for a room. If they want to search a hotel they just bring a bulldozer, they don't have to sleep there.

'You won't mind the noise?'

'They don't run all night.'

'What kind of room do you want?' He turned the register with a horny hand. 'I'll need your papers.'

'I've no papers that I can show anyone. That's the kind of room I want.' Nice and high up and out of people's way and with someone down here to press the buzzer with his foot when the police made a visit.

'You can't stay here, without papers.'

I didn't expect him to trust me but there was a way.

'At least we can have a drink.'

In the back room he poured out some Jasne beer and I mentioned Czyn. It wasn't by luck that I'd only had to try four hotels: almost everyone's in the underground, Merrick had said. I gave my accent a lot more rope now as I talked to him, throwing out the palatals and throwing in some rich Somerset r's.

'Have the police been here yet, looking for an Englishman?'

'About fifteen minutes ago.'

'He's wanted for helping Czyn. They were trying to make an arrest and he stopped them. What was his name?'

'They're hard for me, English names.'

'But they wrote it down for you. He's looking for a hotel, so, you were to phone them if he came to yours.' I got out my passport. 'Is this the name?'

'Yes. That one.'

It was a small room on the fifth floor with a decent temperature due to a fat black pipe with convector fins that ran from floor to ceiling: he said it was the actual chimney of the boilerhouse feeding the middle room on all floors this side of the building. The window was frosted up and I had to open it to take bearings: platforms 5 and 6 of the Warszawa Glowna with a signalbox down towards the shuntyards, the street vertically below and with no canopies or jutting roofs. The fire escape was wrought iron and unobstructed.