The Miernik Dossier (33 page)

The others tried for a while to keep up their friendship, but it didn’t work. In the old days they were held together by humor and good times. They all realized, after we came back from Sudan, that they’d have to look elsewhere for those things; they couldn’t give them to each other any longer.

Of all those who were involved, I think Ilona suffered most. She lost Nigel completely. What happened between them I don’t know. It was almost as if Nigel blamed Ilona for all that had happened. He was brutal toward her—if she came into a café to meet us, Nigel would simply get up from the table and leave. For weeks Ilona was absolutely haggard. She’d come to see me in the middle of the night, and then just sit in a chair with her eyes closed, saying nothing. She told me she had begun to dream of Belsen for the first time since her childhood. I see her sometimes in the city. She always has someone with her—she can’t be alone, and she’s lucky to have such looks so she doesn’t have to be without a man.

Nigel rings me up sometimes and takes me to dinner. He has been awfully kind. Once in a while I see Kalash, always with a different little female. He wears these girls like scarves—they flutter around his neck till his mood changes, and then he puts on another.

For a time I saw Paul constantly. When we got back to Geneva, it seemed natural to stay at his flat. I didn’t want to be alone, and I didn’t know anyone here. Even if I’d been a native
genevoise
I would have found a way to live with Paul. I love him. When we found my brother’s body in the desert, I took about fifteen minutes off to mourn Tadeusz. Then all I thought about or felt had to do with Paul. I could have sung, to be beside him under that awful sun, alive in that awful dead place with Tadeusz’s corpse behind us in the Land Rover.

While we were living together I tried to create an atmosphere of happiness. It lasted for forty-three days. Paul did his best, really he did. I bought cookbooks, and tended his clothes, and kept the flat neat because he hates clutter, and made him drinks at the end of the day. I really wasn’t very good at any of that, but he has a gentle way about him and I thought for a while that all those things didn’t matter so long as we had the other thing. As time went on, Paul became more and more quiet. I took his loss of gaiety for a sign of love.

Then, on a Saturday afternoon in September, I coaxed him into bed. It was a lovely day; we’d had lunch on the terrace and drunk a lot of wine in the sun. It was wonderful for me to be with Paul. I used to cry afterward, foolish with happiness. On this particular afternoon I noticed his body more than I usually did. For the first time I was aware of something I suppose had only registered on my subconscious all the other times. When pleasure runs through the body of a lover, you can feel it. I felt nothing like that in Paul.

I opened my eyes and saw his face above me. It was the first time we had done it in the daylight. In his eyes I saw the truth. I guess he had drunk too much wine or was too tired to save me from it. Paul did not like to make love to me. I waited until he went to sleep, and then I left. Paul never tried to find me.

So what I have is Sasha’s money and Tadeusz’s ashes, and the absolute conviction that I am going to live to be an old, old woman.

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This message was intercepted on 11 July in Buenos Aires in a routine check on correspondence addressed to a box number known to be used by Sasha Kirnov. After Christopher delivered his report in Khartoum (6 July) a round-robin cable was sent to all stations in the world, instructing them to give priority to intercepted letters bearing Egyptian postmarks. Christopher provided certain other helpful details, e.g., that the envelope was addressed in green ink in a large hand. It is conceded that the interception of this message was more a matter of luck than of efficiency. Once it was in our hands, decoding presented no problem because we knew, as a result of our agents alert work, the title of the book used to write the code. Without this information, a book code is, of course, indecipherable.

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The sources referred to here are Christopher’s reporting, particularly his discovery that Miernik was communicating with a third person through use of a book code; the reports by a Polish agent that a Pole was being sent into Africa under Soviet control; and the account by the Czech frontier guards officer relating the peculiar circumstances surrounding the border crossing by Zofia Miernik. Other scraps of information, seemingly minor, also aided in fastening suspicion on Miernik. In regard to Bentley, her correspondence with Soviet letter-drops under a cover name and her meeting in Cairo with a Russian intelligence officer were sufficient to remove any but the most marginal doubts about her role. Miernik’s presence in Vienna, and in West Germany at the time of the cyanide murders in Munich and Berlin, was given some weight, but we regarded it as unlikely that he had been used as an assassin.

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”Do you know the country where the lemon trees bloom?” (Goethe)

*
intercepted radio traffic contained no reference to Miernik or the route of the Cadillac. It is assumed that Ahmed mounted the attack on his own initiative, possibly with the idea of kidnapping Prince Kalash, possibly as a means of demonstrating to Miernik the ALF’s capacity to carry out independent operations. All indications are that Ahmed was a somewhat dashing figure, intelligent and courageous, but difficult to control.

*
The chief of the American station in Khartoum.