'I'll let you know,' Russell promised. The Berlin train left on time, and much to Russell's relief suffered only a few minor delays. It pulled into Silesian Station a few minutes short of midnight, and he stopped at the first public telephone to call Effi. She answered immediately, sounding excited. 'What's happened?' he asked.
'I'll tell you when you get here.'
A Stadtbahn train arrived within minutes. It was full of citizens ignoring the government's ongoing anti-alcohol campaign, one of whom held the train up for five minutes at Friedrichstrasse by jumping in and out of the door like a demented rabbit. The train eventually reached Zoo Station, where an even rowdier Friday night crowd was waiting to get on. Russell alighted with some relief, and walked down the steps to street level. In the space in front of the station, two uniformed cops were asking a boy of about four where his mother was. He looked around as if searching for her, then screamed a simple 'I don't know!' at his questioners.
Russell walked under the Hardenberg Strasse bridge and crossed the road. Three minutes later he was approaching the flat. There were no suspiciously loitering cars, no leather coats clogging up the entrance.
Effi was in her dressing-gown. Her excitement turned to horror when she saw his face.
'It's much worse than it looks,' he said.
'But how…'
'One of the local lads in Wartha didn't like my attitude. Don't worry about it.'
They hugged and kissed until Russell reached for the cord.
'No, no, no,' she said. 'First we must talk.'
He grinned. 'Okay. How did your meeting go?'
'Oh that.' She dismissed it with a wave of a hand. 'I went to the station to meet you,' she said. 'I thought you'd be on Miriam's train, and…'
'I missed it.'
'I know. But I saw him. The man with the dark eyebrows. And he tried to pick up a young girl.' The Wave of the Past 'Tell me,' Russell said, somewhat unnecessarily.
'He was just the way your detective described him. A dark blue uniform with a peaked cap, and when he took it off I saw his grey hair. And the eyebrows, much darker, black I think. A slight beer belly, but not really overweight. He just stood there watching the bottom of the staircase. You know the smoker's kiosk? He was standing right next to it.'
She paced to and fro. 'I watched him, but not all the time. You know they say that people have a sixth sense that they're being watched, and I didn't want him to notice me. And of course I was also watching for you, so I had to take my eyes off him every now and then. Anyway the train arrived and the people started coming down the steps – quite a few of them, but not really a crowd – you could see each person. And he was looking at this one girl. She looked about twenty, and she was quite smartly dressed. Dark hair and one of those little felt hats that were fashionable about three years ago. She put her suitcase down and she was digging around in her bag for something. A little book – an address book perhaps. And he walked towards her, a big smile on his face. He said something to her, and she looked relieved. He went to pick up her suitcase, but at that moment she caught sight of someone she knew over his shoulder – a young man in a Wehrmacht uniform. She said something to Eyebrows and he smiled back at her, but the moment her back was turned his face seemed to curdle. He was really angry. He walked back to his place by the kiosk and watched the last few people come down the stairs, but he didn't approach anyone else. There were other single women, but they all looked like they knew where they were going.'
She paused for breath. 'When everyone had come through he lit a cigarette and walked out through the main entrance. I followed him – don't worry, I kept a good distance and there were lots of people around and he never looked back. His car was parked at the end of the cab rank, and there were cops around – you'd have thought they'd have had a word with him…'
'It says something that he still has use of a car,' Russell added.
'I suppose it does. It was a Mercedes Cabriolet, by the way – my father used to have one.'
'Did you get the number?'
'I memorized it as I walked past,' she said. 'I ran for the cab at the head of the line, almost knocking over a pair of old ladies in the process, and jumped in the back. I asked the driver for a pencil, but he didn't have one, and then I realized I'd forgotten the number. I looked round just as he drove past us and what do you think I said?'
'Follow that cab?'
'More or less.'
'The cabbie was a Bavarian, so I had to say it twice, but we caught him up at the Michael Kirche-Strasse lights.' Effi lifted the hem of her dressing-gown halfway up her right thigh to reveal a red scrawl. 'I wrote the number down with my lipstick.'
'That must have made the cabbie's evening,' Russell said, noticing the two threes which ended the registration number.
'He was watching the lights. I told him to hang back a bit in case Eyebrows noticed he was being followed, and we sort of played hide and seek behind a Wehrmacht lorry all the way to Alexanderplatz. We all followed the Stadtbahn for a couple of blocks and then he turned up towards Schonhauser Platz and stopped outside that line of shops at the bottom of Dragoner-Strasse. We stopped about fifty metres short of him but the traffic had thinned right out, and when he came out of the shop with his bag of groceries he looked right at us. He got back in his car and moved off, and I told myself I had his number and it would be better if he didn't know he'd been followed. I told the cabbie to let him go, and was still wondering whether I'd done the right thing when he turned off the street about two hundred metres further up. We gave him a couple of minutes and drove slowly by. His car was parked beside an apartment block – one of those old three-storey ones at the top of the street. There was no sign of him.
'I was just about to tell the cabbie to take me home when I thought – oh my God, what if Eyebrows got the taxi number and tracks down the driver and asks him where he took me. So I got him to drop me at Friedrichstrasse Station, and took the Stadtbahn home. And there I was, basking in my untrackability when two young soldiers came up and loudly asked me for my autograph. The whole carriage watched me get off at Zoo Station.'
Russell smiled, but Effi's story had left him feeling more than a little anxious. He wondered why. She might have been a byword for recklessness in the past, but in this instance she seemed to have acted with commendable caution. Was he underestimating her again?
'Well?' she asked.
'You did brilliantly,' he said.
'I thought so.'
'I could do with a drink,' Russell said.
She poured them both one.
'The girl he approached,' Russell asked. 'Did she look Jewish?'
'She was dark, and she looked sort of lost – haunted even – at first. But you don't see many Jews smiling the way she did when her soldier boy appeared. Not in public anyway.'
'But she looked distressed enough to be Jewish before that,' Russell said dryly.
'Yes.' Effi sat down beside him on the sofa. 'Do you think it's possible he's holding Miriam prisoner in his apartment?'
'If so, he doesn't seem satisfied with just her,' Russell said. Unless, he thought, the man was abducting girls to rape and kill them. Or eat them, like Kuzorra's famous cannibal, whose name he'd already forgotten.
'So what are we going to do?' Effi asked, putting her head on his shoulder.
'I'm damned if I know,' Russell said. 'There's no point in going to the police – it might even be dangerous. We have to find out more about Eyebrows, I suppose. Watch his apartment, see where he goes. Talk to his neighbours, if we can do it without giving ourselves away. Hope he leads us to Miriam.' He found himself yawning and looked at his watch – it was almost two o'clock. 'We can draw up a plan of action over coffee in the park.'
'That sounds good.'
'It does. How did your meeting go, by the way?'
'Don't ask. I don't think I've ever met so many brilliant people in one room, and every last one of them with a death wish. They cracked jokes about all the Nazi leaders, and were practically praying for someone to kill Hitler. They're organising discussion groups on the possibilities of sabotage. The possibility that one of them might be a Gestapo informer doesn't seem to have occurred to them. I think they'll talk themselves into their graves. I came out of there feeling quite frightened, because by law I should have reported every last one of them to the Gestapo. I decided my defence would be that I hadn't taken them seriously, which at least had the virtue of being probable. I certainly won't be going back.'
'And what about Madame Voodoo?'
'She seemed a bit surprised too. I think she'll be sticking to the stars from now on.'
He wasn't at all sure why, but he had rarely found Effi more desirable. He slipped the dressing gown off her thigh, revealing the lipstick number. 'I hope you've copied that down,' he said, 'because it's likely to get smudged.' Next morning the sky over the Tiergarten was a disappointing grey, and they had the cafe almost to themselves. Russell divided the newspaper between them, but it only took Effi a few moments to throw her pages down in disgust. 'It's that day again,' she said, pointing out a headline.
It was Hitler's mother's birthday, and thousands of German women would be receiving their Honour Crosses from local Party leaders for providing the Reich with extra children.
'If only she'd come back and give him a slap round the head,' Effi muttered.
Russell laughed.