'In booze.'

'Red wine is a stain.'

'But Polish vodka is bleach.'

'Comics die younger than straight men. Have you noticed that, Bernard?' He wiped his nose again, and then folded his handkerchief and put it away. 'We'll have to get out of here very soon.'

'How soon is very soon?'

'Maybe tomorrow.'

'You don't want to check out his story about George being murdered?'

'What could we do?'

'Go and ask the cops if they are holding these Russkies. Give the cops some money to get lost, and then grill the Russkies.'

'Is that what you would do if I wasn't with you?'

'Shall I stay on?'

'Better we keep together,' said Dicky. 'You'd bribe the cops?'

'Possibly,' I admitted. I was exaggerating a little. Dicky brought out my desire to push it.

'We'll keep together, Bernard. As soon as Stefan gives me a proper certified copy of the death certificate we can get out of here.'

'I think we should check it out.'

'Do you know what that death certificate will empower me to do? George is a British subject. I'll get court authority to seize all his possessions. We'll go through him with a fine-tooth comb.'

'And is that what you really wanted all along?'

'That's part of what I wanted.'

'I see.'

'Why did Stefan stop playing cards tonight? Did I upset him earlier on when I asked if anyone around here owned an old Bugatti?'

'No. It was nothing to do with that, Dicky.'

'He jumped up suddenly and let the game end. And it was just as I hit a winning streak.'

'You didn't stand a chance, Dicky.'

'What puzzles me — he says he loses all his money on horses but tonight he won and won and won at cards.'

'They don't let him shuffle the horses,' I said.

He gave a pained smile. 'You don't think . . . ?'

'A man who can pull an ace of spades out of your ear is likely to know what you're holding in your hand.'

'No, no, no. Stefan is from a fine old family . . . goes back two hundred years. That old man Nico told me Stefan is a duke, or the Polish equivalent.'

'It's not mutually exclusive, Dicky. Cheating at cards and being a duke.'

'You haven't answered my question. Why did Stefan stop playing cards on the stroke of midnight?'

'Because he's going to Mass in the morning. Playing cards after midnight would have prevented him taking communion.'

'You're a bloody fund of information, Bernard,' he said, as though annoyed at having his question answered. 'Mass. Yes, I suppose that would be it.' Dicky went to his suitcase and got out a heavy roll-neck to wear over his pajamas. 'I'll say good night, Bernard.'

Thus I was dismissed. 'Good night, Dicky.'

It was three-thirty in the morning when I was awakened by a commotion from downstairs. I could hear men's voices shouting and a woman sobbing. I put on my trenchcoat over my pajamas and went downstairs. In the front hall there were two strangers in heavy overcoats, red-faced and radiating cold air. There were servant girls too, standing on the stairs with overcoats buttoned tightly over frilly nightclothes that were evident at throat and legs. Stefan was there too, but he was fully dressed in a three-piece suit complete with collar and tie.

'What's going on?' I asked.

'The alarm. They say the Russians have crossed the border,' said Stefan calmly. 'These two villagers are insisting that I must go with them to a meeting in the village.'

'An invasion?'

At that moment Dicky came down the stairs behind me. 'An invasion?' scoffed Dicky. 'They wouldn't dare . . .'

Stefan said, 'One of the young men has taken the short-wave radio upstairs. He'll connect it to the big antenna on the roof. He'll get the London overseas service. They will probably be the first to announce it if it's true.'

'Have these men seen anything?' Dicky asked.

'I will go with them. You may as well go back to bed and get some rest,' said Stefan. 'It's probably not true. These rumors spread very quickly when the vodka is flowing. Both these fellows stink of booze.' The two villagers smiled, not understanding what Stefan was saying about them in English.

A servant helped Stefan into a magnificent fur coat and he went out to where Karol the secretary was sitting at the wheel of a car, keeping the engine ticking over.

'Go to bed!' Uncle Nico told the servant girls, who had now grown in number, and he clapped his hands and raised his voice as he said it again.

'Could it be true?' Dicky asked Uncle Nico when the young women had hurried off to their beds.

'I doubt it,' said Uncle Nico. He lowered his voice. 'But what he didn't tell you is that two more bodies have been found. That's what the two farmhands came here for. Some drunks coming home through the forest stumbled over two dead bodies late last night. Two full-grown men thrown into the bottom of a ditch. God knows who they can be. It could be something to do with the rumors. In the village they are saying they must be Russian parachute spies.'

'Stefan should have waited for the radio,' said Dicky.

'He'll want to go to Mass,' confided Uncle Nico. 'There is a Mass at 5:50. Stefan likes to go early; he doesn't meet anyone he knows.'

Still not fully awake, I returned to my room, climbed back into bed and went into a deep sleep peopled with marching men and barking dogs, arguments with Dicky and a disinterred corpse. I woke up with a headache as I tried to distinguish dream from reality.

Dicky was already up and dressed. He was standing over me shaking me. 'The Russians are coming. You'd better get up and shave.' I could tell from his jokey voice that it was not true.

I got out of bed very slowly and became aware of the howling wind. When I went to the window I saw that the invasion from Russia had come, but it was in the shape of ice and snow. The blue sky had gone: snow was whipping past, the streaks of it almost horizontal in the fierce wind that was blowing all the way from the Steppes.

'We've got to get out of here right away,' said Dicky. 'The snow is falling heavily. We must get to the main road or we'll be snowed in until they dig us out, and that could take weeks.'

'It's not cold enough for snow to build up. It has to be colder than two degrees centigrade for it to survive and build up on the ground . . .'

'I'm not in the mood for another of your science lectures,' said Dicky with unaccountable fury and stomped out of the room.

'And the ground is still too soft for heavy tanks and artillery,' I called after him.

There was no hot water by the time I got into the bath. The hot tap of the shower produced a blizzard of cold rusty water and then spluttered and stopped altogether. I'd given up on the bath and was starting to shave in cold water when Stefan appeared at the door of the bathroom.

'Did you sleep?'

'Yes, I did,' I said.

'There is no truth in the invasion rumors. We get these crazy panies frequently and we are used to them. One day it will be true, of course, but by that time we will have grown accustomed to the notion and be ready to submit.' He said it with a bitterness that I'd not seen in him before.

Dicky came bearing three cups of hot sweet coffee from the kitchen. I interrupted my shaving to drink a mouthful and used the rest for shaving.

Stefan watched me without commenting. 'Everyone in Warsaw was complaining about the sudden shortage of black-market booze,' he confided. 'There's not a drop of the really good stuff to be had anywhere. You can name your own price for a case of Scotch whiskey or real French cognac. Foreign gangsters are moving in to take over from our own people. Two brothers from Cracow had the monopoly until now, but they have stopped trading. I heard they were enticed up into an apartment in Praga and nearly killed by American gangsters sent here specially to murder them. One of the brothers is in hospital with multiple fractures and the other is back home on crutches, and with his jaw in wires. Meanwhile all the tourist bars and illegal dives in the Old Town are desperate for supplies.'