While Still We Live (8 page)

Sheila roused herself. She said tonelessly, “But I didn’t seek out any member of a Polish family. He had a letter of introduction to my uncle. He was invited to our house.”

“That will be checked.”

“That’s all I want.” But, she wondered, would things be checked quickly in a time of national emergency? Andrew had left Warsaw with his regiment that morning. Professor Korytowski could only say that he had met her as a friend of his nephew’s.

“Look here,” she said in desperation. “Why don’t you take me back to Mr. Hofmeyer’s place? That girl at the desk told a lie when she identified me as this Koch woman. The other employees there could tell you I am a complete stranger to them all.” The conviction that she had at last given them an unassailable piece of proof added confidence to the last sentence. She was almost cheerful again, as she ended the little speech.

“Either you are very innocent, or very clever,” the black moustache said with a peculiar smile. “You know, or didn’t you, that the present secretary whom you saw today has only been recently employed by Hofmeyer? That the rest of the staff are now discharged, or have scattered? Some are innocent. Others are in hiding. When they are found they will be shot as spies.”

Sheila made her last attempt. “If I were as clever and mysterious as you think, why should I have walked into such a trap this afternoon? Surely Hofmeyer would have warned me, if I were his accomplice?”

“He would have warned you, I am sure, if there had been time. We heard the Lowicz German’s confession at four o’clock, implicating Hofmeyer. When our men arrived to arrest him, Hofmeyer was gone. If you, yourself, had arrived at the appointed time for your envelope, we would have been too late to find you. But you were the one who was too late. By these little mistakes, even the best spy walks into the net, Miss Koch.”

“I am
not
Koch. I am Sheila Matthews.” Her Scots temper flared.

“Now we are back where we started,” the man murmured. He looked over her shoulder, behind her. She suddenly remembered that someone had been standing there all this time.

“Do you want to continue the interrogation, Mr. Commissioner?” the man at the desk was asking the unknown. Sheila turned her head, her eyes widened. But only the small, thin man, who was now advancing towards the desk, could see them. He looked at her without any sign of recognition, but there was almost a warning in the blankness of his eyes. He held her stare so coldly that her “Mr. Olszak!” froze on her tongue and remained unspoken.

“No thank you, Colonel Bolt,” Mr. Olszak said crisply. “I think you have handled it as fully as possible at this stage, and you have treated it with your usual thoroughness and brilliance. The case of Margareta Koch is on the files of my little department and I think it would probably clarify matters if this young woman were to be put under our care, until a full check can be made of several interesting points which she has raised.”

Colonel Bolt, obviously pleased with the beginning of that speech, seemed somewhat ruffled by the time it approached its end.

“We are handling Hofmeyer, and it would seem that this case is linked with his.”

“Hofmeyer was never under suspicion until four o’clock this afternoon. The files on him have only been opened. Koch, on the other hand, has been one of our subjects for the last six months, and the files on her past activities have grown in that time. In any case, Colonel, you have more important business at the moment than the tedious verification or disproval of this young woman’s statement. How’s that Gottlieb case coming along? My dear fellow, I thought your analysis of his reasons was really brilliant if I may say so.” Mr. Olszak had seated himself casually on the corner of the desk. He picked up Sheila’s
handbag. “Examined these papers in here yet?” he asked as he opened the bag to show it stuffed with a woman’s usual concentration of odds and ends. “Of course not,” he added quickly, “it takes time to examine all these innocent-looking little scraps of paper and letters.”

“There was no gun, no weapon,” Sheila’s first escort volunteered from the background.

“Good,” Mr. Olszak said. “And now—”

“We’ve wasted considerable time on this Koch-Matthews possibility,” Colonel Bolt said quickly. He was still inclined to be difficult.

“Not wasted, I assure you,” Olszak said equally quickly. “And my department is in your debt, Colonel.”

“For the matter of our records—” Colonel Bolt continued, but Mr. Olszak interrupted him with polite magnanimity.

“The records, of course. By all means, Colonel, have it placed on your files that a young woman calling herself Sheila Matthews, but possibly Koch, was apprehended by your department at Hofmeyer’s shop in suspicious circumstances. That the said young woman, having failed to satisfy your department that she had no connection with Koch, was transferred to the care of my department because of our special interest in that case. Now, I think I’ll take Miss Matthews or Koch along with me. I think I can find a quick method of verifying certain necessary points in her statement. I shall let you know at once, of course, so that your records on this case may be completed.”

Sheila, her arm grasped by a thin, surprisingly strong hand, found herself being led determinedly from the room. In his other hand, Mr. Olszak had an equally determined grip of her handbag.

MR. OLSZAK

“Well, young lady,” Mr. Olszak said at last, when they had reached a small room of indescribable confusion, “you do make life very complicated for yourself.” He pushed aside two wire trays filled with papers, and perched himself on the corner of his desk to face Sheila, seated in his only chair. Now her back was to the light and it was Mr. Olszak who faced it. Sheila felt as if he had reversed the positions deliberately. She suddenly relaxed for the first time in the last two hours. Her hands trembled slightly as she smoothed her linen skirt over her knees. But she managed to smile.

“That’s better,” Mr. Olszak said in his crisp way. “Much better.” He removed his rimless glasses, and fingered the thin bridge of his nose where they had pinched it into a red groove. His greying hair had receded so deeply from the temples that what was left of it formed an exaggerated widow’s peak, making the high brow still higher. His face had the white look
of a man who worked too much, slept too little, and cared about neither regular meals nor exercise. His clothes and his manner of wearing them were quiet and neat, but nondescript. He was completely undistinguished to look at, except for his eyes and his hands. Both of these, Sheila thought, were unexpectedly powerful, once he let you look at them. It wasn’t the colour of the eyes so much—a strange mixture of grey and green—as the expression they held. Behind his glasses, they had been quick and intelligent. Now, as he looked past Sheila to the tree branches which brushed the window, there was a brooding quality which combined thoughtfulness with decision. This man, Sheila realised, did not know fear. He believed in something so far apart from himself that he had left no place in his mind for selfish emotions. Nothing that happened to him personally would seem important enough to be terrifying. She envied him at this moment.

“And what do you think of our policemen?” he asked, still watching the tree, still smiling in that sardonic way of his.

“I’d think you were wonderful,” quoted Sheila with some bitterness, “if I weren’t in my position. For a moment or two, they had me almost convinced that I didn’t exist.”

Mr. Olszak didn’t bother to answer. He was looking through the contents of her handbag now. “Where did you find this?” With a movement as sudden as his question he had extracted Hofmeyer’s leaflet. He watched her closely as she explained it all, beginning with Hofmeyer’s visit to Korytów yesterday evening.

“You believe me, don’t you? You know I
am
Sheila Matthews,” she ended desperately, as Mr. Olszak remained silent.

“Why else should I have rescued you from the efficient logic of Colonel Bolt?” He smiled without any sarcasm this time,
and added, “But my belief didn’t come from anything you contributed to the discussion in Bolt’s office, Miss Matthews.”

“What do you mean?”

“I met you through Professor Korytowski. He met you, like Barbara and her mother, through Andrew. Andrew met you in London through some letter or other from his aunt. But if he or she cannot be found to substantiate your story—if, for instance, a German bomb or bullet took care of them within the next few days—well, then! What’s more, you had a strange reluctance to leave Poland. Edward Korytowski told me about the station incident last night. Of course, we could have checked with the British Embassy to find out why you were staying. I presume you informed them?”

Sheila’s face was answer enough. She said, at last, to end his obvious amusement, “I went this afternoon. That was why I was late for Hofmeyer’s. But everything, everyone was so busy... Really, I didn’t think I mattered so much just then.”

“I see.” It was an encouraging rather than a polite remark. Sheila felt that not one of her most hidden emotions could escape these sharp eyes.

“Why do you believe me, then?” she asked.

“Because,” and he paused and his voice was very quiet, “I knew your father. You are very like him. The resemblance is extraordinary. Except that your eyebrows and eyelashes are darker, but perhaps that isn’t nature’s fault.”

“You knew him?”

“Yes, I was at the last meeting he and Madalinski attended. I had just left. It was raided by the Germans. They were shot.” He looked at the girl almost gently. “When you get angry, and push your hair back from your face, and lift that chin and your
eyebrows, I can see enough of Charles Matthews to please me.”

“Then why didn’t you tell Colonel Bolt? Why didn’t you? He would have believed you.”

“Yes. I’ll explain that later, once you have answered a few questions. Now, quietly, Miss Matthews. Please be patient. The questions are important to me. First, what did you know about your father? What did your uncle tell you?”

“Only that my father was killed in the war.”

“Did you never ask for more information than that?”

“Of course. But you don’t know Uncle Matthews. He isn’t very communicative. There wasn’t even a photograph of my father. And it was only last winter, when Andrew Aleksander came to London, that I found out that my father had died in Poland. I had always thought it was France.”

“Men like your father, Miss Matthews, don’t go about being photographed, and don’t have medals pinned on their chests. When they are wounded, it must be explained by the word ‘accident’. When they are killed, there is no military funeral, no name on a Roll of Honour. Their families can’t talk about their deeds, for their families even don’t know about them.”

“My father was a spy?” Sheila asked haltingly.

“A spy, to me, is someone who finds out information for a certain amount of money. The money smothers his conscience if he is a traitor. If he is a patriot, the money softens the lack of public recognition. But there is another word which I prefer to give to men who care neither for the money nor for any recognition. Their lives are often ruined; they may meet an unpleasant death; but they fight in their own way—with their brains, secretly, courageously—because all that matters to them is what they are fighting for. I think it is only fair to give them full
credit for that. Shall we say that your father was a secret agent?”

Sheila didn’t answer.

“Now tell me another thing... Why did you come to Poland this summer?”

Sheila said with some difficulty, “Partly because I wanted to see the Aleksanders. Partly because I wanted to see where my father had died.”

“I want you to be frank, for I have been frank with you. You came to see the Aleksanders?”

Sheila’s colour deepened. “Andrew wanted to marry me. I wasn’t quite sure. I...”

Olszak seemed pleased. “That’s better,” he said. “Now you are being as frank as I am. Good. And when you came to Poland, you intended to leave before any trouble started?”

Sheila’s face was scarlet. “Yes. It sounds mean and callous now. But I never thought of it that way then, somehow.”

“Why didn’t you keep your intentions?”

“I’ve been trying to find out the reasons for myself. Perhaps I stayed so long because Poland was so like, and yet so unlike, anything I had expected. We, the people at home I mean, don’t know so very much about Poland. And when I stayed here, I found a lot of answers which I hadn’t found in books. You can’t capture the spirit of a people by just studying facts. You’ve got to live with people, and talk and argue and laugh with them and see their worries, before you begin to understand why they believe certain things, do certain things. I felt I was beginning to understand a little. And it was important to me that I should at least begin to understand. For although I never knew much about my father, I’ve thought of him...a good deal. When I learned he had died in Poland, I wanted to know why. I mean,
I wanted to find out what he believed in so strongly that he was willing to risk his life here. I felt if I learned about Poland, I might learn something about my father.”

“That’s one reason. Any other?”

Sheila hesitated. She was embarrassed that Mr. Olszak should be playing father confessor, embarrassed in case she bored him. But he didn’t seem impatient or bored.

He was saying, “Yes?” very quietly.

That gave her courage. “Another reason, a lesser one but still another reason, was the fact that I have never known much about what we call ‘family life’. I got plenty of it with the Aleksanders. I liked it. I wanted to hang onto it as long as I could. That was how the weeks vanished.”

“Yes?”

“And then, I just lost my temper at the station last night, I think.”

“Why?”

“Because... Oh, just because.”

“Because?” Sheila had a feeling that Mr. Olszak was waiting eagerly for the answer, as if much depended on it.

“Well, I felt—perhaps I’m wrong—I felt that the people at the station weren’t leaving Poland so that they could join the fight in their own countries, or because they wanted to go on fighting in other places. I felt all they wanted was to get away from the fight. And do you know what I wanted? I wanted just one bomb, only one, to be dropped right on top of them. That’s how they made me feel.”