Our man in Wroclaw, the first report

Day 1

The old decaying buildings that lined the streets, an abundance of unlit alleyways, dark concrete entrances to the vast town houses and the dim lamps and cigarette smoke of the old cafe’s, with people leaning over the table to each other, imparting important information in hushed tones. The beautiful square and its multi coloured buildings, the cobbles shining from the rain that was lashing down. All of this evoked the memories in me of the golden age of spying and oh how I missed it.

Today it was all computers, i-pads and satellites, the age of digital information gathering and when it came to all this I was well shall we say a little out of touch. My overall uselessness as a modern espionage agent had garnered me my latest posting, to the capital of lower Silesia Wroclaw, pronounced “wrosssswavvv” or to the average ex spy of a similar age to me Breslau.            

My lack of competence with the new technology that had become essential in the modern age of spying had left my superiors at HQ with little choice other than to find me a posting of no real importance, somewhere they could forget of my existence really and they had deemed wrosssswavvvv to be the perfect place to do this. As I had been leaving HQ to travel to my new posting, the director of operations had called me into his office and given me these paring words “just keep your ear to the ground old boy” he had manage to say this in the same manner that someone may talk to the elderly and clearly senile relative, who had forgotten for the twentieth time that day where they had put the sugar bowl. Oh well at least the weather had been pleasant since my arrival in wrosssswavvv.

Days 2,3 and 4

The man sitting on the table next to me in Literacka (the café in the square), has on the most suspiciously coloured sunglasses I have seen since that summer in Gdansk in 1963, I jotted down in my notebook that he may be a person of interest, but to who and why god knows, he definitely seemed to be a person of interest to the jolly looking group of friends he was sat with and I was sure his wife and family also found him to be very interesting, unfortunately I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. My grasp of the polish language was thus far limited to ordering coffee or buying pol kilo (half a kilo) of fruit, vegetables, meat or anything else I could find at the local market. The upshot of this was that my groceries were of a most uniform manner. In fact a quick sweep of my apartment would reveal that this was the residence of a meticulous man, with a fridge and pantry full of half a kilo of everything. Green beans, Edam cheese, sausages, potatoes, toothpaste, cereal, coffee, chocolates, I was in fact the pol kilo man.

My rudimentary grasp of the Slavic tongue that was spoken in this corner of Europe where I now found myself had made me have misgiving about my suitability for this new role, I had voiced my concerns to my section superior about my ability to succeed in this intelligence gathering lark, in a country where I spoke little to none of the language. He had just waved my concerns away with a gesture and said “Just keep your ear to the ground old boy”.

Well that I had been doing, from the moment I had arrived at the train station two days ago. Unfortunately so far my reports had contained little of what I would call valuable information, I have to say that I had been very pleased with my carefully detailed list of the wild mushrooms that were currently in season and available at the local market. One can never know enough about a countries indigenous mushroom species. I had even drawn a lovely picture of some of the mushrooms as well as small watercolour of the river odra, complete with ducks and herons, which I was sure the folks back at HQ in London would find most informative.

I had also rated all the bars and cafés in the Rynek on a scale of 1 to 10 depending on the quality of their coffee and the view of the fountain. The fountain had seemed to me a likely meeting place for the conducting of espionage activities, my surveillance of it so far had however turned up little evidence of this, though I did seem some suspicious looking children playing in the fountain only yesterday. Of course I had reported this immediately to my superiors at HQ but had yet to receive a response regarding what course of action I should take on this matter.

Day 7

There is a gypsy woman who begs outside the café Literacka, which I had chosen as my base of operations mainly because of its unrestricted view of the fountain and its acceptable quality of coffee.  Anyway everyday she walks around the tables, shaking an old grimy blue bucket begging for money, all the locals at the café seemed to know her and were clearly taken in by her clever disguise. A wily old fellow like myself on the other had quickly saw through this deception and refused to be taken in by her gypsy charade. I was sure that this toothless old lady had ingeniously implanted some form of listening device in the base of that dirty old blue bucket she carried. I was also never foolish enough to drop even a 50 grosz coin into it as she could then take it home to her laboratory get all kinds of genetic information about me and who knows what devilry she would be able to do with that.