The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [3]
“All right.”
“My contract at WRO expires at the end of next month.”
“I know. You told me.”
“I have learned that it may not be renewed.”
“Is that important? It’s a dull job.”
“Important to me. You are an American. Perhaps you won’t understand what I am going to tell you.
“I’ll do my best.”
“It will not be renewed because the ambassador of my country has demanded that it not be renewed.”
“Demanded? He can’t tell WRO what to do.”
“He can tell them that they will lose the goodwill of my country if they do not do as he asks. My well-being is a small thing to WRO. The Organization survives by avoiding trouble. If I am trouble, it will avoid me.”
“How do you know what the Polish ambassador has demanded?”
“I know,” Miernik said.
“All right. Then why should the ambassador care one way or the other about your contract?”
“He does not. The ambassador is a government servant. Perhaps he guesses the reasons behind his instructions. Unless he is very stupid, he guesses.
“Tell me the reason.”
“Warsaw, someone in Warsaw, wants their hands upon me. Or perhaps someone farther east wants that.”
“Miernik!” I put disbelief in my voice, not to encourage him to tell his story, because he was obviously going to do that anyway. I meant to shake his performance, if that’s what it was.
“You scoff,” Miernik said. “They wish to arrest me, to question me, to imprison me. Perhaps more than that.”
“What on earth for?”
Miernik went on as if I hadn’t spoken: he had hit the rhythm of his role. “Arrest, question, imprison, ”he said. “You cannot possibly hear in those words the . . . echoes that a Pole hears.”
“Probably not. But why you? Do you live a secret life you haven’t told me about?”
Miernik grimaced. “A joke to an American. Something else to a secret policeman. Knowing you is enough to convince them that I work for American intelligence.”
(Don’t be startled by this remark. He meant to joke. Maybe he does think that I work for you—it’s probable, even, that he thinks so. But he wasn’t provoking me here. His tone was: That’s how ridiculous they are. He was keeping up the appearance that he does not suspect me by assigning the suspicion to the Polish secret police, who are known idiots.)
“But if you don’t work for the Americans, and I assume you don’t, then why are you worried?”
“To them, innocence is an illusion. They don’t like my nose. That’s enough.”
(Miernik has an unlovable nose: meaty, red, with a tendency to run.)
“If all this is true, then you have a problem,” I said.
“You don’t think that it’s true?”
“Why shouldn’t I? But is Poland really run by lunatics who’d lock you up for no reason at all?”
“You can’t quite conceive of that, can you?”
“I’ve never been to Poland.”
Miernik turned his back again. He blew his nose and cleared his throat into his handkerchief. This is one of his mannerisms when he is under stress.
“My dear friend,” he said, “I do not think that I can go back to Poland.”
“Then don’t go. Ask for asylum here. The Swiss will fix you up. They’ve done it in more doubtful cases than yours.
“I must go back.”
“You just said that you couldn’t.”
“Poland is my country.”
“Which wants to put you in jail for no reason.
“Perhaps not. Once it was suggested to me that I could be useful, in a patriotic way. When I was at the university. Perhaps they want to frighten me into something like that.”
“You won’t know until they try, will you?”
“Perhaps not even after.”
“Intrigue, Miernik. Everywhere intrigue.”
Miernik paid no attention to this remark. “Most of all,” he said, “there is another factor.” He fell into a silence.
(I might say at this point, for the benefit of those who sit inside, reading these reports—there is someone like that, isn’t there?— that there is a certain amount of strain involved in holding conversations with people like Miernik. Two sets of reactions operate at all times. I pretend to like him, for your purposes. I do like him, for reasons