They went towards the buses and he went to the bar, then as he reached it he swerved away, towards the toilets, then behind a post then he turned around and watched. He saw me following him. I'd done some pretty blatant things to upset them, they were starting to drift together. He'd started talking to the Budapest girls, thug was talking to the American with the pad (who had a money belt like mine which is not supposed to be warn outside the clothes but he did), and they were still after John's money. We delayed getting on the coach until the very last minute. John said the fake American was worried that we weren't boarding or something. On the coach fake American showed a message to thug, the groups sat together. Hairy legs finally managed to strike up a conversation. She talked to the wife of the American who'd bailed her out (who found this particular conversation very boring). They talked about America. Each time legs would say 'I've been there, it was really beautiful' or wonderful, she had a few superlatives but not many. American woman would say 'what did you do there?' and she'd say 'we just wandered around, it was really nice' and then they'd have the same conversation about the next place. She'd never been to any of the places. All the groups lost interest in us. John said they'd finished. Done all their stealing for the day. I thought they were getting ready to jump us when we got off the coach. I gave John my old university library card and explained to him that a credit card was the most dangerous legal and commonly carried weapon for self-defence and that its edge should be used like a knife. As we pulled up to the stop we ran to the front of the coach to get off first. I ran from the coach, but John wouldn't as his shoes were full. We hobbled a bit. Apart from the pair that we thought were together and left separately I don't know if anyone else got off the coach. The coach pulled alongside us. We pretended to go one way then went the other after it left. After walking a couple of miles we came across the Scandinavians. John said they couldn't have got there as they didn't get off the bus and the next stop was miles away.
It was only 15:30. We'd got back an hour early. Prob- ably neurosis but I thought this might be another ploy to make people hang around the dropping off place waiting to be met. We'd got 11 hours to wait until our train. We bought me a new glasses case and cloth. We didn't really have enough money, and the cloth wasn't really good enough quality not to scratch the lenses but its all there was. No-one would accept credit cards, despite lots of signs in the windows.
We went to our hotel, that we'd already checked out of. There was just the porter and receptionist who didn't speak English, at least not to us. They were quite nice. They let us sit there for an hour or so. It rained hard. We saw an English woman arranging to eat in the restau- rant at 6 o'clock. We wanted a meal. We went into the hotel restaurant and got guided through to a different restaurant with an entrance off the main street. The meal cost 207000 zl. There were two people sitting in there. The typical mob casual dress, 35 yr olds. They were slowly drinking beer. For the 90 mins or something we were there they never ate anything. I had sort of steak and chips but the steak was horrible and the chips were overcooked. My stomach had shrunk too so I ate very slowly. John drank beer. First Belgian then a native one I think, I couldn't really drink mine. I wanted to stay on good form. John got neurotic about the two blokes. He was looking at them. They were looking at him. My back was to them so I couldn't see them, but they could probably see me adjusting my money belt. Now and again thugs came in and used the toilet and left. At exactly 6 o'clock a party of about 40 people came in. All ages. All dressed like tourists. One had a three foot high blue cuddly toy in a polythene bag. They all had lots of bags bulging with boxes which must have been empty judging by the ease with which they carried them. A short man with a moustache stood in the middle and talked briefly in Polish and then they all sat separately hardly interacting between tables. They all had beer or coke, then soup. They were very slow.
We paid the bill by credit card and left. We didn't go out the street door. We went straight through the hotel and up the stairs to the toilet. We considered going out through the window but it was too high. After waiting 10 minutes we went out of the front door of the hotel. As we walked up the street a man was waiting on a corner. I can't really remember him. Late 30s, brown jacket, white beard carrying a bag. It was very wet from the rain. As we passed him he came to life and started walking. We slowed down. He stopped and read a sign on the car that he'd been standing next to. It was probably a for-sale sign. After we'd gone a few feet he started following. We got to a junction and hesitated. So did he. We looked at he hut selling papers etc. We talked about how to get rid of him. John was worried we were too loud as another guy was standing by us. We pointed in various directions, we walked slightly in various directions then went straight across the road and over the barrier. As we walked up the next road a man carrying a leather attache case (age approx 55) in trousers and a white shirt came to life on the other side of the road. He started walking in the same direction as us at the same speed. We turned around and walked back. So did he. We went back again, so did he. We'd decided that everywhere was too dangerous to wait for the next 8 hours so we looked for the police station. We believed there was one at the railway station. Maybe John had seen it on the map. Quite a lot of people watched us in the area outside the railway station. We saw a policeman walking into a dark no-through road. It was too risky to try to follow him. We walked around the area outside the station. We walked behind three girls who were dressed immaculately in really nice western clothes, carrying rucksacks. They were walking barefoot through the puddles. They didn't seem to notice. We stopped and waited for a guy to walk past. I pretended to point out some graffiti to John. The guy paused and looked at it too. We completed our circle and I said there was a police station on the other side of the railway station so we went around it. At the next junction we were going to cross the road. Someone who'd been going to catch a bus there started to cross the road. We stopped, talked, and walked on a bit. He went back to his bus stop. We crossed the road. He didn't. We walked on, back across the road over a bridge, under the railway bridge. We saw a sign saying police parking. We looked around for a police station but we couldn't see one. There was a phone there. John wanted to see if the lady who was hanging around really was going to use the phone so we waited. Eventually she did use it. I wanted to use it to call the police and find out where they were. She took at least 15 mins. In that time a police van pulled up. We followed them into the building. It was a police station. I was determined that I wasn't going to leave this place and go back out there again. I'd found sanc- tuary. They weren't very keen on talking to us. When they eventually came over to the desk we said 'do you speak English?' The guy said 'No I'm sorry I don't speak English' and went and sat down again. I was stunned. As John says he said this in perfect English. I hassled him more. I was angry, scared and desperate. He refused to understand what we were saying. I showed him our paper with Tomasz's name on it. He said that this was a dif- ferent police station. I asked him to ring Tomasz. He wouldn't. I asked him for Tomasz's number. He wouldn't give it to us. He just told us to take a tram to Tomasz's office. I didn't want to do this as the streets were dodgy, the office was a long way away and Tomasz had finished work 3 hrs earlier. People had come in behind us. John was scared and wanted to get away and the police obviously wouldn't help us.
We got a tram to Tomasz's place. The guy on the gate stopped us but we we shouted 'urgent, emergency' and may have shown him Tomasz's name, and he let us in. We got to the desk and they gestured for us to go straight in. They may have had word from the front gate or they may have recognised us from the previous time. Anyway they were watching telly. We went up to Tomasz's office. Of course he wasn't in. At some point a guy appeared who didn't speak any English. He told us Tomasz was gone and expected us to leave. We didn't. Eventually he rang Tomasz's home but he wasn't in. I gave him our receipt from the Skawinie police station. I thought this would be a good opener. They could explain to him all about our experiences on the train and we could take it from there, saying that we were still in danger on the street and wanted to get out of this place, either by police car or an escort onto the train. The guy got the wrong end of the stick, as all the sheet said was that our baggage had been stolen. John got very annoyed with me for sending the guy down the wrong path. Numerous futile telephone conversations took place. They were all in Polish so we don't know much about them. We didn't appreciate at the time how few telephone numbers they had. We tried ringing the a hotel which John mistakenly believed was the one that he'd spoken to before. We rang a few useless numbers from the map. John spoke to someone who said they spoke English and would help. John told his story and they then passed him onto someone else. He told his story and they passed him onto someone else. Each person he spoke to spoke better English but was less helpful than the previous one. He wanted them to act as a translator. The final one said they wouldn't help. John said that it was the police asking for help. They said why don't the police ring then, he said this is the police and they said that they still wouldn't help. We gave up in despair. Another guy came in and left with reports a few times. They talked for a while and we were passed onto him. He took us to his office. It was next door to Tomasz's. There were loads of pictures of naked women, a poster of the film 'Millers Crossing' depicting the mafia shooting someone in the head in the woods, and a Julia Roberts film poster. I thought it was 'Sleeping with the Enemy' but now I think it was that one about dying. We sat there for a while with him and his uni- formed mate, who spoke better English but had nothing to say. We tried to write them messages but none of the pens worked. Suddenly they jumped up and took us out to their unmarked police car. They drove us away from the town, very fast, screeching around corners, through red lights (but apparently you're supposed to do that when turning right), past a cemetery, towards Warsaw. We ended up at the one of the hotels that we were warned about. He didn't pay the guy to watch his car, he told him he was with the police. There were crooks and prostitutes all over the foyer. We met the woman on the travel desk and went and sat with her in a hallway sepa- rated by glass from the swimming pool. She was one of the ones John had spoken to on the phone. I told John to tell the true story, rather than the toned down one and he agreed but it was difficult. We started at the begin- ning with the journey from Warsaw and we stayed there for most of the time. She got angry and said we were making it up. That she'd been in the tourist industry for 26 years, since she was 18 and that she travels all the time. She's totally safe. There's never any trouble on the trains. We said that she was Polish so in less danger and that anyway things were getting worse. She said we were offending her, by criticising her country. We said we loved her country and all the people we'd met except for one or two. She said we'd walked off and left our luggage behind and that in 80% of cases the luggage would now be at a left luggage office. She didn't accept it when we said that we'd checked and it wasn't. The whole idea was that she would translate for us but I don't think that she told the police much of what we said. The three of them spent most of the time laughing at us. I remembered that Tomasz had said not to trust this hotel so I didn't. |
