After lunching at Wertheim he rang Effi from the bank of booths by the Leipziger Strasse exit. There was no answer. A quick stop-over at the Adlon offered reassurance that no major news was breaking – the sundry journalists gathered at the bar were wondering how they could wheedle invitations to one of Goering's hunting extravaganzas.
Back on Leipziger Strasse he collected the last available dress suit in his size from Lehmann Dress Hire. On the last occasion he'd used this particular shop it had been trading under the name Finkelstein.
He tried Effi again when he got back to Neuenburger Strasse, but there was still no answer. He told himself not to worry – she had said she was going shopping, after all. She might still be with Zarah. And he couldn't afford to spend his days wondering what she was up to and worrying whether she was all right. That wasn't who they were.
There was still no sign of Frau Heidegger's sister, but she had stirred herself sufficiently to attach an official notice to the inside of the front door. A city-wide Air Raid Protection exercise was being held on the following Wednesday, and all citizens were obliged to cooperate fully with the relevant authorities. Reading through the small print Russell discovered that a complete black-out would be in operation. Selected buildings would be 'bombed', the resulting 'victims' removed by medical teams.
Where to, Russell wondered. Imaginary hospitals? It might make a good story, though. Frau Heidegger would be in her element.
He collected Effi's presents from upstairs and drove across town to her flat. He half-expected that she'd still be out, but they arrived together, she in a cab full of her purchases. Helping her carry these up, he forgot his own pile of parcels. She looked exhausted, but barely a minute had passed when she sprung back up from the sofa and insisted on their walking down to the Ku'damm for dinner. Russell had a brief memory of himself more than twenty years earlier. On his two home leaves from the trenches he had been utterly unable to sit still.
Over dinner she described her day in fearsome detail – the morning with Zarah, lunch with a make-up artist friend who was also working on More Than Brothers, a shopping spree in the Ka-De-We on Tauenzien-Strasse. She'd even managed a session with the street astrologer she consulted every month or so.
'She told me the next few weeks were a good time for grasping opportunities,' Effi told him. "Aren't they all?" I asked her. "Some more than others," she said. I paid three marks for that.'
Russell shook his head. He was never sure how seriously Effi took her astrological adviser.
Back at the flat he remembered her presents, and went to collect them from the car. She loved them all – the soft leather driving gloves from Macy's, the Billie Holiday records which he'd half-expected customs would confiscate, the French perfume she'd originally discovered on their second trip to Paris, the deep crimson dress from Bergdorf Goodman. The latter looked every bit as good on her as Russell had imagined it would.
'I'll wear it tomorrow,' she said, thanking him with a kiss. Friday evening's premiere was at the Universum, the modernist cinema half-way up the Ku'damm. The stars of the film, along with their escorts, were supposed to arrive between six forty-five and seven, the stars of the Party in the following fifteen minutes. 'This is one time we can't afford to be late,' Effi told Russell the next morning. 'So please be back here by five.'
Getting a lecture from Effi on punctuality was like taking dietary advice from Goering, but he let it go. 'I'll be here. But how are we getting there? A cab?'
'No, no. The studio are sending a car. It'll be here at six-thirty.'
'Right. So what are you doing today?'
'Hairdresser and manicurist this morning. And learning this,' she added, holding up the More Than Brothers script. 'I was hoping you could test me on Sunday.'
'Love to.' She seemed more like her old self, he thought, as he eased the Hanomag out onto the street. Or was she just putting up a better front? He thought about the talk they had planned for the weekend, and wondered just how much it was safe to tell her.
He was intending to do some background reading that morning, but events conspired against him. A major story was breaking, according to the British colleagues who frequented the Cafe Kranzler, and Russell joined the rest of the foreign press corps in pursuit of the pieces. According to 'reliable sources', one Robert Hudson, Secretary of the Department of Overseas Trade in London, had buttonholed the German delegate Herman Wohlthat at – of all things – a recently-opened Whaling Conference, and made him a series of unofficial offers. According to Wohlthat, whose swift report home was now being disseminated through the Berlin rumour mill, Hudson had offered him joint rule of the former German colonies and British economic assistance in return for German disarmament. None of this was in the public sphere as yet, but it soon would be.
First things first, Russell told himself, and called an old contact in the Foreign Ministry. Was it true? he asked. Off the record, yes. Hudson had made the offers all right, but no one in Berlin had any idea what official sanction, if any, he'd had for making them. The smart money in Ribbentrop's entourage was that the man had been drunk.
Possibly, Russell thought, as he headed for the central post office. He'd have put his money on Hudson being just one more defective product of the public schools, with all the confidence in the world and none of the judgement. They seemed drawn to Whitehall's fl ame like dim moths, and particularly to those departments dealing with the wicked outside world.
At the post office he wired a contact in London who was likely to know the score, and hurried down the Wilhelmstrasse for that morning's briefing. The spokesman, an alarmingly thin young man with a swastika-emblazoned tie, refused to answer any questions about 'The Hudson Affair', and looked increasingly annoyed by the foreign press corps' protracted refusal to take no for an answer. Finally getting his own way, he triumphantly produced a statement from the Hungarian Foreign Minister condemning the recent publication of an anti-German book in Budapest. The book in question, as one of the American journalists delighted in repeating, warned of German designs towards Hungary and claimed that Germany was bound to lose a European War. How had the German government pressured the Hungarian government into making this statement?, the journalist wanted to know.
The spokesman sighed, as if the question was beneath contempt. He had some statistics for them, he said, flourishing a piece of paper to prove it. In the previous June the United States had exported $3.4 million worth of arms to Britain in June and $2.5 million worth to France. Germany, by contrast, had received a shipment of ammunition worth $18. He raised indignant eyes to his audience, at least half of whom were rolling with laughter.
'Another day in Looneyland,' Slaney observed as they walked out.
Russell went back to the post office to see if his wire had been answered. It had – Hudson had indeed been freelancing.
And with what looked like catastrophic results, Russell told himself. The Germans might realize that no such offers were really on the table, but they might also be left with the sneaking suspicion that the British still hungered for a way out of their obligations to Poland. As for the Soviets, they'd probably take Hudson's indiscretions as confirmation of what they already suspected, that the British were much more interested in doing a deal with Nazi Germany than in doing a deal with them. 'And so to war,' he murmured to himself.
He had enough for a short commentary piece, he thought, something they could use alongside the agency reports if the story took off. He sequestered a corner table at the Adlon Bar to write it out, then headed back to the post office to wire it off. By then it was almost four o'clock. He turned the Hanomag for home. The studio car was on time, but Effi was not. Russell treated himself and the harassed-looking driver to a small measure of the Bourbon he had brought back from America, and was gratified by the appreciative smile he received in return. 'That's good,' the young man said, just as Effi emerged looking suitably ravishing. Her dark hair fell past her face in sweeping waves, her brown eyes glowed, the clinging red dress was beautifully set off by a lace scarf in deepest violet. She had found a shade of lipstick which perfectly matched the dress.
The young driver let out an involuntary sigh of appreciation. For reasons best known to itself, Russell's mind conjured up the image of Effi in her Gestapo cell, rising from the floor in desperate monochrome. It seemed weeks ago, but it wasn't.
The Universum was at Ku'damm 153, only a few minutes away. A hundred metres short of the cinema they joined a slow-moving queue of cars waiting to unload their celebrity passengers. On the other side of the road a few hundred watchers were held behind temporary barriers by a handful of schutzpolizei.
The long-departed Bauhaus architect Eric Mendelssohn had designed the building, which was one of Russell's favourite Berlin landmarks. On the outside, it looked as if someone had sliced the superstructure off an ocean liner, swung the bridge round ninety degrees, and dropped the whole lot beside the Ku'damm. UNIVERSUM was spelt out in huge, solid letters along the semi-circular prow; a fifty-foot poster above the doors advertised the film currently showing. This particular poster – which featured a futuristic Prussian Army galloping madly along beneath the title Liberation – seemed almost as avant garde as the cinema. Effi Koenen was one of the four names listed below the two stars.
They climbed from the car, Effi drawing appreciative murmurs from the crowd. Russell could imagine the asides: what on earth does she see in him?
Once inside, they were hurried to their seats. The auditorium was virtually full, but three rows in the centre had been reserved for the celebrity guests. The actors and actresses chatted among themselves, apparently oblivious to the unconcealed interest of everyone else.
The Reichsminister for Propaganda arrived about ten minutes later. His wife was expensively dressed but, in Russell's admittedly biased opinion, looked somewhat frumpy. The rest of Goebbels' retinue seemed to have been chosen on grounds of size – the seven dwarves came to mind, though they all seemed too pleased with themselves to be Grumpy. Goebbels acknowledged the rest of the audience with a cavalier wave of the hand, then sat looking round at the sweeping, modernistic lines of the auditorium. There was an almost bemused look on his face, as if he was wondering how a Jew could have designed something so gorgeous.
The film let the cinema down, of course. It was standard Third Reich ho-kum, with the usual tried and trusted ingredients – a misunderstood genius whose iron will saves his people, male underlings who find their true purpose by abandoning mere reason, women who reach beyond kitchen, church and children at their peril. The setting – a much-used one in recent years – was the Prussian War of Liberation against Napoleon.
Christina Bergner, sitting three seats along from Russell, played the tragic heroine. As Countess Marianne, the wife of an imprisoned Prussian general, she goes to plead her husband's case with the French occupation commander and, somewhat predictably, falls in love with him. Effi plays her friend, her confidante and – when the Countess finally sacrifices love, life and everything else for the Fatherland – her teary exculpator. She looked rather good in eighteenth century costume, Russell thought.
She looked good in the red dress too. Goebbels seemed to hold her hand for rather too long as he greeted the cast in the huge foyer. Russell, stationed in the background with the other escorts, found himself praying that Effi would restrain herself, but he needn't have worried. She smiled prettily throughout, and only he seemed to notice how tightly she was holding herself.
'He tried to proposition me,' she hissed a few minutes later. 'With his wife a metre away,' she added angrily.
'I shouldn't take it personally,' Russell said. 'I don't think he can help himself. What did he actually say?'
'Oh, how much prettier I was in modern clothes. How he'd admired my performance in Mother. How he'd like to hear my thoughts on how German cinema was progressing.'
'I don't suppose he knows you've been a recent guest of the Gestapo.'
'Maybe not, but I wouldn't bet on it. I think he expects me to jump at his offer. As if he knows I could do with the protection.'
They moved outside, where some of the Party luminaries were still waiting for their own transport. As they stood there, Russell noticed a woman standing a few metres away. She was fairly tall, about his height, with elaborately coiffured brown hair framing a rather stark face. Her companion, a high-ranking SS officer in uniform, was talking to one of Effi's male co-stars, and she was looking around with the air of someone who could hardly believe where she was. Their glances met for a moment, and her face was suddenly familiar. Where had he seen her before? And then he remembered – it had been at the Wiesners' flat, on the night he had gone to tell Eva that her husband was dead. This woman had answered the door. Curly hair she'd had then. What was her name? He turned to look at her again, and found she was looking straight at him. Before he could say or do anything she gave him an almost imperceptible shake of the head.
He turned away. Sarah Grostein was her name. A Jew, he'd assumed at their first meeting, though she didn't look like one. What the hell was a friend of the Wiesners', Jewish or not, doing on the arms of an SS Gruppenfuhrer? It was an interesting question, but not, he suspected, one that he'd ever know the answer to.
Once they were home he told Effi what had happened, expecting her to share his surprise.
'I'm beginning to think that Berlin is full of people leading double lives,' was all she said. Delightfully languorous Saturday mornings, Russell reminded himself on waking, were one of the perks freelancers received in exchange for their miserable income. Hired hacks, on the other hand, had to keep up with the news, which these days barely slowed on Sundays, let alone Saturdays. He got up, took a bath and brought a sleepy Effi a cup of coffee in bed. She was seeing Zarah for lunch – her sister was eager to hear about the premiere – and thought it better to save a joint outing with Paul for the following weekend. Russell headed downtown to see how the German government was dealing with the Hudson story.
It wasn't, was the short answer. In Britain the News Chronicle had blazed the story across its front page – 'Hudson's Howler' they called it – but there was no Propaganda Ministry press briefing scheduled until Monday morning. Hitler had, as usual, dropped everything for the Bayreuth Festival, and while the cat was away the mice were sleeping in. The German papers had nothing to say about Hudson, and were in surprisingly pacific mood. The more-than-suspicious disappearance of a German customs officer in Danzig – shots were heard minutes after he 'strayed' across the frontier – only warranted the adjective 'regrettable'. The ongoing national convention of the 'Strength Through Joy' organization was turning into 'a festival of joy and peace' according to its official convenor, the loathsome Robert Ley. Foreigners, on the other hand, were prone to unreasoning belligerence, as Ley's description of the recent Bastille Day celebrations in France – 'an atmosphere of warmongering, nervousness and hysteria' – showed only too clearly.
Russell had something to eat at the Zoo Station buffet and drove out to Grunewald to pick up Paul. Ilse asked after Effi, and was obviously curious to know why she had been released. Russell told his ex-wife that it had all been a mistake, that the Gestapo had advised them against mentioning either the release or the original arrest. He thought he could trust Ilse, but he was determined not to compromise her in any way. Paul's safety – not to mention her own – might depend on it.
Over the last couple of years his son had often chosen the Funkturm for their Saturday outings, and on this particular occasion he almost insisted. Revisiting Berlin's version of the Eiffel Tower, Russell came to realize as the afternoon wore on, was an integral part of Paul's coming home. The splendid Funkturm represented a Germany the boy could be proud of, a Germany, moreover, which he could share with his English father. Standing on the viewing platform, staring out in the direction of his beloved Hertha's Gesundbrunnen stadium, was a way for Paul to hold his world together.
His son was all over the place, Russell realized. Though quick to defend his country against any slight, he was still revelling in the wonders of the very different world across the Atlantic. As Paul looked out across Berlin, Russell knew that the boy was also seeing Manhattan. 'You were right about the hot dogs,' he told him. 'I had one at Gerhardt's the other day. They are the best.'
They walked round to the other side. The Havelsee shone piercing blue in the afternoon sunshine, and Russell was just thinking how peaceful Berlin looked from 125 metres up when the swelling whine of police sirens punctured the illusion. Paul raced back to the east-facing windows to see what was happening. 'They're down here!' he shouted.
Russell was walking across to join him when a voice over the loudspeaker announced that the tower was being evacuated. 'Move to the lifts in an orderly manner,' the voice instructed. 'There is no cause for alarm.'