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of furze, and opened out onto a patch of turf the size of a small room. There we were safe from observation, and overlooked the lower road that wound along the stream, past Blossom’s farm, from village to village.
    “Who are you?” I asked again.
    “To hell with it!” he answered as if taking a sudden decision. “General of Cavalry Peter Sandorski of the Polish Army.”
    “You’re in one of these resettlement camps?”
    “Resettle my backside!” he replied.
    “I was only wondering where you picked up English,” I explained.
    “English governess.”
    “She must have been an exceptional woman.”
    “We had English grooms, too. Pay your penny, and take your choice.”
    “Whom did you fight for?”
    “Poland,” he answered drily.
    “I meant–with what army after the defeat?”
    “The partition,” he corrected me. “Oh, first the Russians, then the Germans. No other way of killing both, was there?”
    “And you live in England?”
    “Under the sky, my sympathetic colonel. Under the sky.”
    Then he told me as much of his story as he thought fit for me to hear. I don’t know how many secret organizations he served when it suited him–indeed I doubt if he knew himself–but one was his own, formed by him and led by him. This private intelligence unit of his had picked up in the Western Zone of Germany an S.S. man with whom they had a seven-year-old account to settle.
    Now, the real reason why Sandorski’s people–who, he insisted, were plain nonparty Polish officers and good Europeans–had kidnapped this brute was punishment, revenge, whatever you like to call it; and in due season they quietly dropped his weighted body into the Danube.
    “I am a Pole, not a judge at Nuremberg,” Sandorski said to me sharply, noticing my shocked and–now I come to think of it–hypocritical expression.
    Before they disposed of him, however, they interrogated him. He talked quite freely. Being a foolish and sentimental German, he didn’t think anybody would bother to kidnap and punish him for crimes he had committed seven years earlier. He assumed that these free-lance Poles had picked him up because they wanted to question him about his recent doings, and he was ready enough to answer. He probably hoped they might employ him as a professional thug. And so he confessed a story that no one had ever suspected.
    He had just returned, he said, from England.
    What had he been up to there? He had been flown over, he replied, for a special job, landing he didn’t know where; nor did he know–for plans had been changed–what the job was to be. Immediately after his arrival he had been given a temporary assignment–and that was to catch Sandorski with the body of a man he had murdered the previous night.
    The S.S. man was asked who told him that the killer was Sandorski. He replied that the dead man had had a companion who escaped, and that the companion had said it was Sandorski. He didn’t know the name of either the dead man or his companion.
    From whom, then, did he take his orders, the interrogator asked. From an Englishman, he replied, with the cover name of Pink. A former naval officer, he believed. Pink was his contact, and Pink and he had gone out together to discover what Sandorski had been doing, and to catch him if they got a chance.
    Had they seen him? Yes, and chased him. But Pink had been very doubtful if it was Sandorski at all. They had only got a glimpse of his back, once bent down as he ran and once leaning over the handlebars of a bicycle. He had wrecked their motor bike and sidecar, and vanished.
    “Now then,” said Peter Sandorski, cutting short his narrative, “I have friends everywhere. Even in your British Intelligence Services, when I behave myself. I asked them where, on the nineteenth of October, a motorcycle was abandoned. No driver. No claim. The answer was precise. Of military exactitude, with a map reference. So here I am. I have watched. I have listened. I think I have identified the