I said. ‘I’m the security expert. Remember?’
‘Was there someone at the railway terminal?’ he asked, before remembering to try and smile at my joke. When I made no move to investigate the corridor noise he repeated the question.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Someone you recognized?’
‘I’m not sure. It could be the same goon I had sitting in the lobby of my hotel.’
‘Go man!’ said Jim wearily. He closed his eyes tight, and, with a practised gesture, bound his rosary round his wrist in some signal of benediction.
I went to the door, undid the catch and slid it open, unprepared for the bright moonlit countryside that was painted like a mural along the uncurtained windows of the corridor. There was a man there, standing a few steps away. He was about five feet six tall, with trimmed beard and neat moustache. His woollen Burberry scarf struck a note of affluence that jarred with the rest of his attire: the trenchcoat old and stained, and a black military-style beret that in Poland had become the badge of the elderly veteran of long-ago wars.
We looked at each other. The man gave no sign of friendliness nor recognition. ‘How far to the frontier?’ I asked him in my halting Polish.
‘Half an hour; perhaps less. It’s always like this. They are taking us on a long detour around the track repairs.’
I nodded my thanks and went back into my compartment. ‘It’s okay,’ I told Jim.
‘Who is it? Someone you know?’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Go back to sleep.’
‘You may as well get some shut-eye too. Will the Poles come on and question us at the frontier?’
‘No,’ I said. Then, changing my mind: ‘Maybe. It will be all right.’ I wondered if the detour was really because of flood damage the way the press announcement said, or was there something at the frontier that the Soviets didn’t want anyone to see?
I was regretting my ready agreement to take this train from Moscow back to my office in Berlin. I didn’t have diplomatic status; they had wanted to supply me with a letter with the royal coat of arms at the top, asking everyone en route to be kind to us. That too was a legacy of the FO’s nineteenth-century mentality. I had to point out to them that such a missive might look incongruous when carried by someone with a German passport accompanied by an American and a Canadian. I’d not objected to this task of escorting Jim, partly for old times’ sake, partly because I’d heard that Gloria would also be in Moscow at that time and the delay would give me two extra days with her. That was another fiasco. Her schedule was changed; she was leaving as I arrived. I’d only had time for one hurried lunch with Gloria, and that was marred by her interpreter arriving to collect her half an hour early, and standing over us with a watch in one hand, a coffee cup in the other, warning us about the traffic jams on the road to the airport. My brief moment with her was made more painful because she was looking more alluring than ever. Her long blonde hair was tucked up into a spiky fur hat, her complexion pale and perfect, and her large brown eyes full of affection, and devoted to me.
Now I had plenty of time to regret my readiness to return by train. Now came the consequences. We were getting close to the Polish frontier, and I was not well regarded in the Socialist Republic of Poland.
I had recognized the man in the corridor as ‘Sneaky Jack’, one of the hard men employed by our Warsaw embassy. I suppose London had assigned him to keep an eye on Jim. I had reason to believe that Jim’s head was filled with the Department’s darkest secrets, and I wondered what Sneaky had been ordered to do if those secrets were compromised. Was he there to make sure Jim didn’t fall into enemy hands alive?
‘Where’s that bloody nurse?’ said Jim as I locked the sliding door. He turned over to look at me. ‘She should be here holding my hand.’ The nurse was a pretty young woman from Winnipeg, Canada. She was spending six months working in a Moscow hospital on an exchange scheme and had welcomed this opportunity to cut it short. She looked after Jim as if he was her nearest and dearest. Only when she was almost dropping from exhaustion did she retire to her first-class compartment along the corridor.
‘The nurse has had a long day, Jim. Let her sleep.’ I suppose he had sensed my anxiety. Jim had never been a field agent; he’d started out as a mathematician and got to the top floor via Codes and Ciphers. It was better if he didn’t know that Sneaky was one of our people. And it was bad security to tell him. But if Jim ran into trouble and Sneaky had to tell him what to do …? Oh, hell.
‘In the corridor … little fellow with a beard. If we hit problems, and I’m not close by, do as he says.’
‘You’re not scared, are you, Bernard?’
‘Me? Scared? Let me get at them.’
Jim acknowledged my well-rehearsed imitation of my boss Dicky Cruyer by giving a smile that was restrained enough to remind me that he was sick and in pain.
‘It will be all right,’ I told him. ‘With an embassy man outside the door they won’t even come in here.’
‘Let’s play it safe,’ he said. ‘Get that nurse back here and in uniform, waving a thermometer or a fever chart or something. That’s what she’s here for, isn’t it?’
‘Sure. If that’s what you want.’ I felt that a man in Jim’s situation needed reassurance but I was probably wrong about that as I was wrong about everything else that happened on that journey.
I went along to find the nurse. I needn’t have worried about disturbing her sleep. She was up and dressed in her starched white nurse’s uniform, to which was added a smart woollen overcoat and knitted hat to keep her warm. She was drinking hot coffee from a vacuum flask. Bracing herself against the rock and roll of the train, she poured some into a plastic cup for me without asking if I wanted it.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘I must look a sight in this stupid hat. I bought it for my kid brother, but I’m freezing cold. They don’t have much heat on these trains.’
I tasted the coffee. It was made with canned condensed milk and was very sweet. I suppose she liked it like that. I said: ‘I’ve done this lousy journey a million times and I’ve never had the brains to bring a vacuum flask of coffee with me.’
‘I brought six of these flasks,’ she said. ‘Vacuum flasks were about the only thing I could find in the Moscow shops that would make a useful gift for my aunts and uncles back home. And they all expect a souvenir. Can you believe that they don’t even have fridge magnets? I was looking for something with the Kremlin on it.’
‘Moscow is not a great spot for shopping,’ I agreed.
‘It’s a not a great spot for anything,’ she said. ‘Lousy climate, stinking food, surly natives. Getting out of there early was the best thing that happened to me in a long time.’
‘Not everyone likes it,’ I agreed. ‘Personally there are quite a few towns I’d be happy to cross off my itinerary. Washington DC for a start.’
‘Oh, don’t say that. I worked in Washington DC for over a year. What parties they have there! I loved it.’
‘By the way, the comrades who come climbing aboard at the frontier can be difficult about jewellery. I would tuck that sapphire brooch out of sight, if I were you.’
‘Oh, this?’ she said, fingering it on the lapel of her coat. ‘Mr Prettyman gave it to me. I wanted to wear it, to show him I appreciated it.’ Maybe she saw a question in my face, for she quickly added: ‘It was a little present from Mr and Mrs Prettyman. His wife was on the phone. She asked him to give it to me. They are determined to believe I saved his life.’
‘And you didn’t?’
‘I stopped the night-duty man cutting his appendix out, that night when he was admitted. It was a crazy diagnosis but I guess he would have lived.’