Berlin was gray and overcast. As his train drew into Friedrichstrasse Station, Russell thought about taking the Stadtbahn another couple of stops and surprising Effi in bed, but decided against it. She was rarely at her best this early in the morning.
Having breakfasted on the train, he skipped coffee in the buffet and headed straight for his bank on Behrenstrasse, where he deposited Shchepkin’s banker’s draft. As he headed for Franzцsischestrasse in search of a tram home Russell felt an almost dizzying sense of solvency. Presents for everybody, he thought. Including himself.
The sense of well-being evaporated the moment he saw Frau Heidegger’s face. “Oh Herr Russell,” she said, grabbing his left arm with both hands. “Thank God you’re back. I…”
“What’s happened?”
“Herr McKinley-he’s dead. He committed suicide-can you believe it? The poor boy… And he seemed so happy these last few weeks. I can’t…”
“How?” Russell asked. He felt cold all over, and slightly nauseous. “How did he kill himself?” He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t believe it.
Frau Heidegger mopped up a tear. “He threw himself in front of a train. At Zoo Station. There were lots of witnesses.”
“When?”
“Late on Saturday. The police came just before midnight and locked his room. Then they came back yesterday. They were up there for hours.”
“The Kripo?”
She looked bewildered for a second. “Yes, yes, I think so. There were so many of them. They must have been looking for a suicide note, I think. Or something to tell them why he did it.”
Or a letter, Russell thought.
“But I don’t think they found anything,” Frau Heidegger went on. “They seemed very frustrated when they went. I suppose they’re worried that the Americans won’t believe he killed himself.”
“Perhaps,” Russell said. He still felt stunned.
“They left the room very tidy,” Frau Heidegger said inconsequentially. “And they want to talk to you,” she added. “‘As soon as he gets back’ they said. And they put a note under your door saying the same thing. I have the telephone number.” She disappeared back into her apartment for a few seconds and re-emerged with what looked like a torn-off page from a police notebook. There was a number and a name-Kriminalinspektor Oehm.
“I’ll ring him now,” Russell said.
“Yes, please,” Frau Heidegger said, as if it would take a huge weight off her mind.
The underling who answered knew who Russell was. “The Kriminalinspektor would like to see you immediately,” he said, with the stress on the last word. “At the Alex. Room 456.”
“I’m on my way,” Russell said. It seemed the politic thing to do.
“I’ll look after your bag,” Frau Heidegger said, picking it up and moving toward her door. “You can collect it when you get back.”
He started walking toward the U-bahn, thinking it would be quicker, but changed his mind once he reached Lindenstrasse. Why was he hurrying? And a tram ride would give him time to think.
He climbed aboard the first Alexanderplatz-bound tram and stared blankly out of the window. If there was one thing he knew, it was that McKinley hadn’t killed himself. In fact, he could hardly think of anyone less likely to do so. He supposed it could have been an accident-the platforms got pretty crowded at Zoo Station after theatre-closing time-but if so, why the rush to a suicide verdict? Frau Heidegger had mentioned witnesses-lots of them. An apparent suicide, Russell realized, offered stronger grounds for a police investigation than a simple accident. They’d spent most of yesterday in McKinley’s room, and they must have been looking for something. Theresa Jьrissen’s letter was an obvious candidate, but who knew what other pieces of paper McKinley had collected in support of his story. And it looked as though they hadn’t found what they were looking for. Russell wasn’t sure how reliable a judge of Kripo moods Frau Heidegger was, but the urgency of his summons certainly suggested they were missing something.
If they hadn’t found the letter then where the hell was it? Six days had passed since he and McKinley had visited Theresa Jьrissen and McKinley had been in a hurry; it didn’t seem likely that he’d taken his time sending her the money. Unless, of course, he’d had trouble raising it. And she might have had trouble getting down to the poste restante to pick up the money. The letter could still be in the post. Or in her possession. He’d have to warn her, for his own sake as well as hers. If she was arrested, his own involvement would come out, and even if the Kripo accepted that he’d only been along as an interpreter, he’d still failed to report a possible crime against the state. At the very least, grounds for deportation. At worst… It didn’t bear thinking about.
If McKinley had received the letter and they hadn’t found it, then what had he done with it? He might have risked posting it off to the States, but Russell didn’t think so. If they’d been watching him-and it seemed likely that they had-then any outgoing mail would have been intercepted. Russell remembered McKinley’s reluctant admission that he thought he was being followed, and his own scarcely concealed derision. “Sorry, Tyler,” he murmured out loud, drawing a stare from a woman opposite him.
Of course, McKinley’s suspicions would have made him doubly careful. Which meant there was a good chance he had hidden the letter. But where? If he hadn’t stashed it in his room, where could he have hidden it? Just about anywhere in Berlin, Russell thought, looking out at the Konigstrasse. McKinley had probably stolen an idea from one of the detective novels he read endlessly.
He got off outside the Alexanderplatz branch of Wertheim and walked under the railway bridge and into the square itself. The station and another department store, Tietz, occupied the northern side, the huge drab mass of the police praesidium-the Alex, as all Berliners called it-the southern side. Russell walked past entrances 4, 3, and 2-the latter housing the morgue where McKinley’s body was presumably residing-and in through the doors of 1, the all-purpose entrance.
The whole Berlin detective force, around 1,800 strong, worked out of this building, and Russell imagined some of them were still waiting for their offices to be discovered. He was gestured toward one of several staircases, and then spent about ten minutes pacing down a succession of identical-looking corridors in search of Room 456. The windows overlooking the inner courtyard were all barred, suggesting a penchant on the part of guests for throwing themselves out, which Russell found less than comforting. Eventually he was intercepted by a surprisingly helpful detective, who took him down the right flight of stairs and turned him into the right corridor.
Kriminalinspektor Oehm’s office looked like a work in progress. There were files everywhere-piled on the desk, floor, windowsill, and filing cabinets. Oehm, a chubby man with a florid face, abundant fair hair and sharp-looking blue eyes, seemed unconcerned by the chaos, but his companion, a redhead with unusually pale skin, kept looking around himself in apparent disbelief. He was not introduced, but even without the telltale leather coat Russell would have assumed Gestapo.
Oehm invited him to sit down. “We’ve been trying to contact you since yesterday morning,” he said.
“I’ve been out of town,” Russell said.
“So your fiancйe told us.”
Russell said nothing. He hoped Effi had behaved herself.
“Where exactly were you?” the Gestapo man asked.
“Poland. Cracow to be precise. I’m working on a series of articles on Germany’s neighbors,” he volunteered.
“You know why we wish to talk to you?” Oehm said.
“I assume it’s about Tyler McKinley.”
“Correct. You were surprised by the news?”
“That he committed suicide. Yes, I was.”
Oehm shrugged. “He must have had his reasons.”
“Perhaps. Are you certain he killed himself?”
“Absolutely. There is no doubt. We have several witnesses. Reliable witnesses. A police officer, for one.”
“Then he must have,” Russell agreed. He still couldn’t see why they-whoever, exactly, they were-had needed to kill McKinley, and he didn’t suppose he would ever find out. It didn’t much matter, really. His knowing certainly wouldn’t help McKinley.
“There is one possible reason for his action,” Oehm said. “I do not wish to speak ill of the dead, but… well, we have good reason to believe that your friend had become involved with political elements hostile to the state, that he may have become part of a plot against the state involving forged official documents-documents, that is to say, which have been fabricated to create a misleading and slanderous impression of activities inside the Reich.”
“What sort of activities?” Russell asked innocently.
“That is not your concern,” the Gestapo man said.
“And he wasn’t my friend,” Russell added. “I liked him, but we hardly ever saw each other for more than a chat on the stairs. A drink every month or so, perhaps. Nothing more.”
“Ah…”
“And if he was involved in this plot, why would that lead him to kill himself?” Russell asked.
“Perhaps it all got to be too much for him, and he couldn’t think of any other way out,” Oehm suggested.
“He didn’t give you anything to keep for him?” the Gestapo man asked.
“No, he didn’t.”
“You are sure about that.”
“One hundred percent.”
The Gestapo man looked skeptical, but said nothing.
“One more thing,” Oehm said. “Herr McKinley’s sister will be arriving in Berlin on Wednesday. To take the body home…”
“How’s she getting here so quickly?” Russell asked.
“She is apparently flying across the Atlantic. The Americans have these new flying-boats-Clippers I believe they’re called-and though they’re not yet in public service, there are frequent trials. Proving flights, they call them…”
“Yes, yes,” the Gestapo man murmured, but Oehm ignored him.
“I am a flyer myself,” he told Russell. “Weekends only, of course.”
“We all need hobbies,” Russell agreed. “But how has McKinley’s sister wangled a flight on one these…”
“Clippers. I imagine Senator McKinley used his influence to get his niece a place on one of them.”
“Senator McKinley?”
“Tyler McKinley’s uncle.” Oehm noticed the surprise in Russell’s face. “You did not know his uncle was a US Senator?”
“Like I said, we weren’t exactly friends.” He could understand why McKinley had kept quiet about it-the boy would have hated anyone thinking he owed anything to family connections. But he was amazed that none of his fellow American journalists had spilled the beans. They must have assumed Russell knew.
“As I was saying,” Oehm continued, “his sister will arrange for the body to be sent home and collect her brother’s effects. I was hoping you could be here when we talk to her, as an interpreter and someone who knew her brother.”
“I can do that.”
“Her plane from Lisbon arrives around eleven. So, if you could be here at one?”
“I will be. Is that all?”
“Yes, Herr Russell, that is all.” Oehm smiled at him. The Gestapo man gave him the merest of nods.
Russell retraced his steps to the main entrance. As he emerged into the open air he took a deep breath in and blew it out again. One thing was certain-they hadn’t found the letter.
He crossed the square and walked into a cafй underneath the Stadtbahn tracks which he occasionally patronized. After ordering a couple of frankfurters and a kartoffelsalad he perched on a stool by the window, cleared a hole in the condensation, and looked out. No one had followed him in, but was anyone loitering outside? He couldn’t see anyone obvious, but that didn’t mean much. He would have to make sure by going through Tietz, pulling a variation of the same trick he and McKinley had pulled in the Neukцlln KaDeWe. But it would have to look like an accident. He didn’t want them thinking he’d lost them on purpose.
The food tasted bad, which was unusual. It was the taste in his mouth, Russell thought. Fear.
He crossed the road and walked into Tietz, heading for the rank of telephone booths that he remembered outside the store’s ground floor tea room. Ensconced in the first booth, he looked back along the aisle he had just walked. No one looked furtive. He dialed Effi’s number.
She answered on the second ring. “You’re back. I had the police…”
“I know. I’ve just come from the Alex. I’m sorry you got…”
“Oh, it was no problem. They didn’t break anything. I was just worried about you. Are you really upset? You didn’t know him that well, did you?”
“No, I didn’t. I feel sad, though. He was a nice enough man.”
“Are you coming over?”
“Yes, but it’ll be a few hours. Say around six. I have to see someone.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you then.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
He replaced the receiver and scanned the aisle again. Still nothing. A taxi, he decided. From this side of the station, where there were often only two or three waiting.
He was in luck-there was only one. “Friedrichstrasse Station,” he told the driver, and watched through the rear window as they swung round beneath the railway and headed down Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse. There was no sign of pursuit. At Friedrichstrasse he hurried down the steps to the U-bahn platform, reaching it as a Grenzallee train pulled in. He stepped aboard, standing beside the doors until they closed, but no one else emerged through the platform gates.
The train pulled out and he sunk into the nearest seat. Should he be waiting for darkness? he wondered. Or would that be even riskier? He had no real idea, and felt shaken by how important such a decision could be.
Neukцlln was the line’s penultimate stop. Russell climbed up to the street, where the loudspeakers were broadcasting Hitler’s long-awaited speech to the Reichstag. A small crowd had gathered around the one outside KaDeWe, faces overcast as the sky. The Fьhrer’s tone was calm and reasonable, which suggested he was just warming up.
Russell walked on, following a trail of street names familiar from the week before. It was a good thing he recognized these, because the area seemed utterly different by daylight, its workshops and factories bursting with noisy activity, its cobbled streets full of rumbling lorries. Most of the workplaces were broadcasting the speech to their employees, and Hitler’s words seeped out through doors and over walls, a promise here, a threat there, a piece of self-congratulation sandwiched in between. Stopping for a moment on a bridge across the Neukollner-Schiffahrtkanal, Russell heard fragments of the speech tossed around on the breeze, like the puffs of windstrewn smoke belching from the myriad chimneys.
Schцnlankerstrasse was empty, the block door wide open. He walked in and knocked on Theresa Jьrissen’s door. There was no answer. He knocked again with the same result, and was wondering what to do when footsteps sounded on the stairs. It was her.
Her face registered alarm, and then anger. Without speaking, she opened her door and gestured him in. Marietta was sitting exactly where she had been on his last visit, still drawing, still oblivious. “What do you want?” Theresa asked, the moment the door was closed behind her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know this is dangerous for you, but not coming might have been more dangerous.” He told her about McKinley’s death. “Could the police connect you?” he asked. “Did you ever write to him?”
“No,” she said. “Never.”
“What about the document you told us about?”
“I sent it, but that’s all. I gave no name or address.”
Russell sighed in relief. “When did you send it?”
“Last week. Thursday afternoon.”
McKinley had received it. He must have. Russell explained why he had asked. “They haven’t found it,” he told her. “He must have hidden it somewhere.”
“There’s nothing to connect me,” she said. “Except you,” she added, the look of alarm back on her face.
“They won’t hear about you from me,” Russell promised her, hoping he could live up to such an assurance.
“Thank you,” she said doubtfully, as if she wasn’t that sure either. “And their secret will stay secret,” she added, as much to herself as to him.
“Looks like it.”
She nodded, her view of the world confirmed.
“I’ll be going,” he said.
“Let me make sure there’s no one about,” she cautioned him. A few moments later she returned. “It’s all clear.”
Russell smiled goodbye at a closing door and began the long walk back to the center of Neukцlln. The Fьhrer was well into his stride now, each torrent of words reinforced by the sound of his fist hammering at the lectern. By the time Russell reached KaDeWe the listening crowd had spilled into the street, all eyes raised to the crackling loudspeaker, as if Hitler would emerge genie-like from the mesh, a head spouting venom on a shimmering tail.
It was dark by the time he reached Effi’s flat. She was wearing a dress he hadn’t seen before, deep red with a black lace collar. And she wanted to eat out, at a Chinese restaurant which had opened a few weeks earlier at the Halensee end of the Ku’damm.
“I’ve been learning my lines,” she announced as they walked downstairs. “Would you hear me later?”
It was a peace offering, Russell realized. “Love to,” he told her.
They walked through to the Ku’damm and took a westbound tram. The wide pavements were crowded with home-going workers, the restaurants and cinemas gearing up for the evening as the shops closed down. Alighting at Lehninerplatz they found the Chinese restaurant already filling up. “Goering eats here,” Effi said, as if in explanation.
“He eats everywhere,” Russell said. “And this is on me,” he added.
Effi gave him a look.
“I’ve sold a lot of work lately,” he explained.
They were shown to their table, which stood beneath a huge scroll of dragons. Russell picked up the menu, hoping it was in German, but needn’t have bothered.
“Let me order,” Effi said.
“Include beer,” Russell insisted. He was still feeling tense, he realized. And maybe still a little in shock. Sitting there, half-listening as Effi questioned the waiter, he found himself imagining McKinley’s death-the moment of falling, of realization. Of terror. “How was your weekend?” he asked.
“Miserable. You know I hate going to parties on my own. All the women I know were lining up to ask if you’d left me-none of them asked whether I’d left you-and all the men were trying to work out how available I was, without actually asking. Every conversation was fraught with significance. Every dance was a means to an end. I couldn’t just be for a single moment. When I go to something like that with you, I can just enjoy myself.” She sighed. “Anyway, the party went to about six, so I got to bed about seven, and the Kripo started hammering on the door at about nine. So I wasn’t in a good mood. And I was upset for you too. I know you liked him, even if he was a bit Rin Tin Tin-like. And I could just see it too. Zoo Station gets so crowded on a Saturday evening.” She watched a tray of food go by, and sniffed at the passing aroma. “And Zarah’s such a misery as well. She’s convinced there’s something wrong with Lothar. I tell her she’s jumping to conclusions, that he’s probably just a slow learner. She was herself, according to Muti. But she’s convinced there’s something wrong. She’s made an appointment with a specialist.”
“When for?” Russell asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Next week sometime. I think she said Monday. Why?”
“Just wondered.” The arrival of their drinks gave Russell a few seconds to think. He couldn’t say anything, he realized. And he probably didn’t need to. Zarah’s husband Jens was a Party official, and Russell couldn’t believe the Nazis would start killing their own children. And if he did say anything to Effi, and she said something to Zarah, then he might end up in a Gestapo cellar trying to explain where he’d gotten his information from.
“You look worried,” Effi said.
“I’ve heard a few rumors, that’s all. Just journalist talk probably. The word is that the government’s thinking of tightening up the Law on the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases. Sanctioning mercy killing when the parents agree.”
She gave him an angry look. “There’s nothing wrong with Lothar,” she said. “And even if there was, Zarah would never agree to… I can’t believe you think…”
“I don’t. But Jens is a Nazi, after all. He believes in all this purification of the race nonsense.”
Effi snorted. “Maybe he does. But if he tried to take Lothar away from Zarah she’d never forgive him. And he knows it.”
“Okay.”
“And there’s nothing wrong with Lothar,” she insisted once more.
He read the Fuhrer’s speech next morning on his way home for a change of clothes. The editorials were calling it “a major contribution to world peace,” and the speech certainly seemed accommodating by Hitler’s standards. There were friendly references to Poland and the non-aggression pact between the two countries. There was a marked absence of attacks on the Soviet Union. Only one passage chilled Russell to the bone, and that concerned the Jews, who were only likely to start a war in Hitler’s frenzied imagination. If they did, “the result would not be the Bolshevization of the earth and victory for the Jews but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Russell wondered how the Wiesners felt reading that, even if Hitler was not speaking about physical annihilation. At least he hoped he wasn’t. He remembered Albert’s words in the Friedrichshain park: “They’ll just kill us… Who’s going to stop them?”
Frau Heidegger had listened to the speech and found only grounds for optimism. “There’ll be an agreement with the Poles,” she said. “Like the one with the Czechs at Munich. And then there’ll be nothing more to fight over.”
Russell said he hoped she was right.
“The police were back yesterday,” she went on. “Herr McKinley’s sister will be here on Wednesday or Thursday to collect his things.”
“I know,” Russell told her. “They want me to interpret for them.”
“That’s nice,” Frau Heidegger said.
Once upstairs, Russell bathed, changed, and worked for a couple of hours planning his transport piece for Pravda. Autobahns and the peoples’ car, streamlined trains and new U-bahn lines, the latest Dornier flying boats. Perhaps a hint of regret for the passing of the Zeppelins, he thought, but absolutely no mention of the Hindenburg.
He fried up a potato omelette for lunch, found a dusty bottle of beer to accompany it, and reluctantly considered the prospect of interviewing Hitler’s armament workers for Stalin. It could be done, he supposed, but he’d have to be damn careful. Start off by talking to the Party people in the factory, the managers and Labor Front officials. Only move out onto the metaphorical lake if the ice feels really solid. Don’t do a McKinley.
He thought about the missing letter. If he was going to take a look around the American’s room it had to be today.
He walked down to the ground floor, and tapped on Frau Heidegger’s open door. “Have you still got a spare key for Tyler’s room?” he asked. “I loaned him some books, and it would be awkward searching for them when his sister’s here, so I thought I could slip in and get them today. You don’t need to come up,” he added quickly, hoping that Frau Heidegger’s bad knees would triumph over her curiosity.
They did. “Make sure you bring it back,” she told him.
McKinley’s room was still suffused with the faint odor of his Balkan tobacco. As Frau Heidegger had intimated, the room was almost preternaturally tidy, and now he knew why the Kripo had refrained from leaving their usual mess. A senator’s nephew! No wonder they were on their best behavior.
The clothes were neatly put away: shirts, jacket and suit in the wardrobe, socks and underwear in drawers. There was a small pile of papers on the desk-left for show, Russell guessed. He remembered two great towers of paper on his last visit. The desk, too, had been mostly emptied. One drawer contained a single eraser, another, three pencils. It was as if the Kripo had decided to spread things out.
There was no obvious reduction in the number of books, but the lines on the shelves seemed anything but neat. Each had been taken out and checked for insertions, Russell assumed. Well, at least that meant he didn’t have to.
The same applied to the floorboards. The Kripo weren’t amateurs. Far from it.
He sat on McKinley’s bed, wondering why he’d imagined he could find something which they couldn’t. The shelf above the headboard was full of crime novels, all in English. More than fifty, Russell guessed: Dashiell Hammett, Edgar Wallace, Dorothy L. Sayers, several authors he hadn’t heard of. There were around a dozen Agatha Christies, and a similar number of Saint books. Russell’s earlier notion that McKinley had stolen an idea from one of these stories still seemed a good one, but the only way of finding out for certain was to go through them all, and that would take forever.
And what would he do with the letter if he found it? He had no proof of its authenticity, and without such proof there was little chance of anonymously arranging its publication outside Germany. He would have to guarantee it with what was left of his own reputation, either risking arrest by doing so inside Germany or forfeiting his residence by doing so from the safety of England. Neither course appealed to him. “And their secret will stay secret,” he murmured to himself. He took one last look around the room and took the key back to Frau Heidegger.
Early that evening he telephoned Paul. The conversation seemed unusually awkward at first. His son seemed happy to talk, but there was something in his voice which worried Russell, some faint edge of resentment that was quite possibly unconscious. His Jungvolk group had spent much of Saturday making model gliders out of balsa wood and glue, something which Paul had obviously enjoyed, and on the coming Saturday they were visiting an airfield to examine the real thing. At school a new music teacher had given them a talk on the different types of music, and how some of them-jazz for example-were fatally tainted by their racial origins. He had even played several pieces on the school gramophone, pointing out what he called “animal rhythms.” “I suppose he’s right,” Paul said. “I mean, jazz was invented by negroes, wasn’t it? But most of my friends thought the records he played were really good,” he admitted.
Russell searched in vain for an adequate response.
“What are you doing?” Paul asked, somewhat unusually.
“This and that,” Russell said. Paul was probably too old to have nightmares about falling under trains, but it wasn’t worth the risk. “Actually I’m looking for something that someone hid,” he said. “If the Saint wants to hide something, how does he do it?” he asked, not really expecting an answer.
“What sort of thing?”
“Oh, money, a letter…”
“That’s easy. He sends it to himself. At a-what do you call it?”
“Poste restante.”
“That’s it. He sends diamonds to himself in Getaway and The High Fence. And he does it in another story, I think. I can’t remember which, though…”
Russell was no longer listening. Of course. If McKinley had forgotten the Saint’s trick, then Theresa’s use of the poste restante would have reminded him. His heart sank. There was no way of collecting anything from a poste restante without identification. McKinley’s sister could probably get access, but only by asking permission from the police.
“Dad, are you listening?”
“Yes, sorry-I think you’ve solved it for me.”
“Oh.”
“And I’m reading the book you loaned me,” he added, eager to please his son.
“Isn’t it great?”
“It’s pretty good,” Russell agreed, though he’d only read thirty pages. “I haven’t got far,” he admitted, hoping to ward off a cross-examination. “I’ll talk to you about it on Saturday.”
“Okay. On Sunday are we getting the train from Anhalter Bahnhof?”
“I expect so. I’ll let you know.” Actually, a different means of transport was suggesting itself.
The first day of February was as gray as nature intended. His Wednesday morning lesson with Ruth and Marthe was enjoyable as ever, but there was no sign of their brother or parents. Arriving back at Alexanderplatz with twenty minutes to spare he stopped for a coffee in Wertheim and ran into Doug Conway. They chatted for a few minutes, until Russell realized he was late for his appointment. The search for Oehm’s office made him even later, and McKinley’s sister was looking none-too-happy when he finally arrived.
“We were talking about Fraulein McKinley’s flying boat,” Oehm said, which further explained her look of irritation.
She was almost as tall as her brother-about five-foot-eleven, he guessed-and even thinner. Severely cut brunette hair framed a face that might have been pretty if the already-thin lips had not been half-pursed in disapproval, but Russell sensed that her current expression was the one she most usually presented to the world. She was wearing a cream blouse and smart, deep blue suit. There was no hint of black and no obvious sign of grief in her face. He told himself that she’d had several days to take it all in.
He introduced himself and offered his condolences.
“Eleanor McKinley,” she responded. “Tyler never mentioned you.”
“We weren’t close friends, just neighbors. I’m here because the police thought an interpreter would make things easier for everyone. Have they told you what happened?”
“Oh, we got all the details from the Germany Embassy in Washington. A man came out to the house and explained everything.”
Russell wondered what to say next. He found it hard to credit that the family believed Tyler had committed suicide, but it was hardly his place to question it, particularly with Oehm trying to follow their conversation.
The German interrupted. “There are papers to sign.” He passed them to Russell. “If you could…”
Russell looked through them, and then explained the gist to Eleanor McKinley. “There are two things here. One is an account of the investigation, complete with witness statements and the police conclusion that Tyler committed suicide. They need your signature to sign off on the case. The other form waives your family’s right to an inquest. This is because you’re taking him home with you.”
“I understand,” she said.
“I’ll read it through, then.”
“No, no, don’t bother,” she said, extracting a pack of Chesterfields from her handbag. “You won’t mind if I smoke?” she asked Oehm, holding up a cigarette in explanation.
Russell was taken aback. “You understand that you’re accepting their version of events, that this exempts them from any further investigation?” he asked.
“Are there any other versions?” she asked.
“No. I just wanted to be sure you knew that this puts an end to any…”
“Good,” she interrupted. She made a writing mime at Oehm, who handed her his pen.
“Here and here,” Russell said, placing the papers in front of her. She signed both, writing Eleanor V. McKinley in a large looping hand.
“Is that it?” she asked.
“That’s it.”
“What about Tyler’s… what about the body?”
Russell asked Oehm. It was still in the morgue, he thought, reaching for the phone.
It was. “They need her for a formal identification before they can release it,” Oehm told Russell in German. “But not now-they’re still trying to repair his face. If she comes at eleven in the morning they’ll have plenty of time to seal it for transport and get it across to Lehrter.”
Russell relayed the salient points.
“Can’t we do it now?” she asked.
“No, I’m afraid not.”
She made a face, but didn’t press the issue. “All right. Well, let’s get out of this dreadful place.” She offered Oehm her hand and the briefest of smiles, and headed for the door. “I suppose I can get the apartment over with instead,” she said as they walked back to the entrance. “You’ll come with me,” she added. It was more of an assumption than a question.
They took a taxi. She said nothing as they drove through the old city, just stared out of the window. As they swung through Spittelmarkt toward Dцnhoffplatz and the bottom of Lindenstrasse she murmured something to herself, then turned to Russell and said: “I’ve never seen such a gray city.”
“The weather doesn’t help,” he said.
She was even less impressed with Neuenburgerstrasse. Frau Heidegger climbed the stairs to let them in, and insisted that Russell pass on her deepest condolences. “And tell Fraulein McKinley how much I liked her brother,” she added. “How much we all did.”
Russell did as he was bid, and McKinley’s sister flashed another of her brief smiles in Frau Heidegger’s direction. “Tell her we’d like to be alone,” she said in English.
Russell passed on the message. Frau Heidegger looked slightly hurt, but disappeared down the stairs.
Eleanor sat down on the bed looking, for the first time, as if her brother’s death meant something to her.
Now was the moment, Russell thought. He had to say something. “I find it hard to believe that your brother killed himself,” he said tentatively.
She sighed. “Well, he did. One way or another.”
“I’m sorry…”
She got up and walked to the window. “I don’t know how much you knew about Tyler’s work…”
“I knew he was working on something important.”
“Exposing some terrible Nazi plot?” she asked.
“Maybe.” She was angry, he realized. Furious.
“Well, that was a pretty effective way of committing suicide, wouldn’t you say?”
Russell bit back an answer. He’d said much the same thing to McKinley himself.
“Look at this,” she said, surveying the room. “The life he chose,” she said bitterly.
That you couldn’t, Russell thought. He silently abandoned the idea of asking for her help in checking out the poste restante.
She picked up McKinley’s pipe, looked around, and took one of his socks to wrap it in. “I’ll take this,” she said. “Can you get rid of the rest?”
“Yes, but…”
“I can’t imagine it would be much use to anyone else.”
“Okay.”
He accompanied her downstairs and out to the waiting taxi.
“Thank you for your help,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’re free tomorrow morning? I could use some help at the morgue. My train leaves at three and I can’t afford any hold-ups. And some moral support would be nice,” she added, as if it had just occurred to her that identifying her brother might involve an emotional toll. “I’ll buy you lunch.”
Russell felt like refusing, but he had no other appointments. Be generous, he told himself. “It’s a deal,” he said.
“Pick me up at the Adlon,” she told him. “Around ten-thirty.”
He watched the cab turn the corner onto Lindenstrasse and disappear. He felt sorry for McKinley, and perhaps even sorrier for his sister.
He arrived at the Adlon just before 10:00, and found Jack Slaney sitting behind a newspaper in the tea room. “I’ve got something for you,” Russell said, sitting down and counting out the ninety Reichsmarks he owed from their last poker game.
“A sudden inheritance?” Slaney asked.
“Something like that.”
“What are you doing here?” the American asked, as he gestured the waiter over to order coffees.
Russell told him.
“He was a nice kid,” Slaney said. “Shame about his family.”
“The uncle’s not one of your favorite senators?”
Slaney laughed. “He’s a big friend of the Nazis. Anti-Semitic through and through-the usual broken record. On the one hand, we should be leaving Europe alone, on the other, we should be realizing that Britain and France are on their last legs and Germany’s a progressive power-house, our natural ally. Bottom line-it’s just business as usual. The Senator’s brother-McKinley’s dad-has a lot of money invested here. One plant in Dusseldorf, another in Stuttgart. They’ll do well out of a war, as long as we stay out of it.”
“The daughter’s not exactly soft and cuddly,” Russell admitted.
“I know. Hey!” Slaney interrupted himself. “Have you heard the latest? Over the weekend some Swedish member of Parliament nominated Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize. Wrote a letter of recommendation and everything.” Slaney flipped back the pages of his notebook. “He praised ‘Hitler’s glowing love of peace, heretofore best documented in his famous book Mein Kampf.’”
“A spoof, right?”
“Of course. But at least one German paper missed that bit. They printed the whole thing as if it was completely kosher.” He threw back his head and laughed out loud, drawing stares from across the room.
At 10:30 Russell asked the receptionist to let Eleanor know he was in the lobby. She appeared a couple of minutes later. The suit was a deep crimson this time, and she was wearing a silk scarf that was a shimmering gold. Her heels were higher than on the previous day, the seams of her stockings straight as arrows. The fur coat looked expensive. “It doesn’t look like they’re getting ready for a war,” she said, as their cab motored down Unter den Linden.
The morgue was ready for them. McKinley’s body was laid out on a stretcher in the middle of the spacious cold storeroom. She marched confidently forward, heels clicking on the polished floor, then suddenly faltered and looked back at Russell. He came forward, took her arm, and together they advanced on the stretcher.
A white sheet concealed whatever injuries her brother had suffered below the neck. The familiar shock of dark hair had been burned away at the front, and the entire left side of his face looked blackened beneath the mortician’s make-up. The eyes looked as though they’d been re-inserted in their sockets; one was not quite closed, and presumably never would be again. The bottom lip had been sewn back on, probably after McKinley had bitten clean through it. An angry red-brown wound extended around the American’s neck above the uppermost edge of sheet, causing Russell to wonder whether he had been decapitated.
“It’s him,” Eleanor said in a voice quivering with control. She signed the necessary documentation on the small table by the door and left the room without a backward glance. During the first part of their ride back to the Adlon she sat in silence, staring out of the window, an angry expression on her face. As they crossed over Friedrichstrasse she asked Russell how long he’d lived in Berlin, but hardly listened to his answer.
“Come up,” she said when they reached the lobby, and gave him a quick glance to make sure he hadn’t read anything into the invitation.
Her suite was modest, but a suite just the same. An open suitcase sat on the bed, half-filled with clothes, surrounded by bits and pieces. “I’ll only be a minute,” she said, and disappeared into the bathroom.
An item on the bed had already caught Russell’s eye-one of the small gray canvas bags that the Kripo used for storing personal effects.
There was no sound from the bathroom. Now or never, he told himself.
He took one stride to the bed, loosened the string, and looked inside the bag. It was almost empty. He poured the contents onto the bed and sorted through them with his fingers. A reporter’s notebook-almost empty. German notes-almost 300 Reichsmarks’ worth. McKinley’s press accreditation. His passport.
The toilet flushed.
Russell slipped the passport into his pocket, rammed the rest back into the bag, tightened the string, and stepped hastily away from the bed.
She came out of the bathroom, looked at the mess on the bed, staring, or so it seemed to Russell, straight at the bag. She reached down, picked it up… and placed it in the suitcase. “I thought we’d eat here,” she said.
Five minutes later, they were being seated in the hotel restaurant. Having locked her brother away in some sort of emotional box, she chatted happily about America, her dog, the casting of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in the new film of Gone with the Wind. It was all very brittle, but brittle was what she was.
After they had eaten he watched her look around the room, and tried to see it through her eyes: a crowd of smart people, most of the women fashionably dressed, many of the men in perfectly tailored uniforms. Eating good food, drinking fine wines. Just like home.
“Do you think there’ll be a war?” she asked abruptly.
“Probably,” he said.
“But what could they gain from one?” she asked, genuinely puzzled. “I mean, you can see how prosperous the country is, how content. Why risk all that?”
Russell had no wish to talk politics with her. He shrugged agreement with her bewilderment and asked how the flight across the Atlantic had been.
“Awful,” she said. “So noisy, though I got used to that after a while. But it’s a horrible feeling, being over the middle of the ocean and knowing that there’s no help for thousands of miles.”
“Are you going back the same way?”
“Oh no. It was Daddy who insisted I come that way. He thought it was important that I got here quickly, though I can’t imagine why. No, I’m going back by ship. From Hamburg. My train leaves at three,” she added, checking her watch. “Will you take me to the station?”
“Of course.”
Upstairs he watched her cram her remaining possessions into the suitcase, and breathed a silent sigh of relief when she asked him to close it for her. A taxi took them to the Lehrter Bahnhof, where the D-Zug express was already waiting in its platform, car attendants hovering at each door.
“Thank you for your help,” she said, holding out a hand.
“I’m sorry about the circumstances,” Russell said.
“Yes,” she agreed, but more in exasperation than sadness. As he turned away she was reaching for her cigarettes.
Near the front of the train three porters were manhandling a coffin into the baggage car. Russell paused in his stride, and watched as they set it down with a thump by the far wall. Show some respect, he felt like saying, but what was the point? He walked on, climbing the steps to the Stadtbahn platforms which hung above the mainline station’s throat. A train rattled in almost instantly, and three minutes later he was burrowing down to the U-bahn platforms at Friedrichstrasse. He read an abandoned Volkischer Beobachter on the journey to Neukцlln, but the only item of interest concerned the Party student leader in Heidelberg. He had forbidden his students from dancing the Lambeth Walk-a jaunty Cockney dance, recently popularized on the London stage-on the grounds that it was foreign to the German way of life, and incompatible with National Socialist behavior.
How many Germans, Russell wondered, were itching to dance the Lambeth Walk?
Not the family in Zembski’s studio, that was certain. They were there to have their portrait taken, the father in SA uniform, the wife in her church best, the three blond daughters all in pigtails, wearing freshly ironed BdM uniforms. Nazi heaven.
Russell watched as the big Silesian lumbered around, checking the lighting and the arrangement of the fake living room setting. Finally he was satisfied. “Smile,” he said, and clicked the shutter. “One more,” he said, “and smile this time.” The wife did; the girls tried, but the father was committed to looking stern.
Russell wondered what was going through Zembski’s mind at moments like this. He had only known the Silesian for a few years, but he’d heard of him long before that. In the German communist circles which he and Ilse had once frequented, Zembski had been known as a reliable source for all sorts of photographic services, and strongly rumored to be a key member of the Pass-Apparat, the Berlin-based Comintern factory for forged passports and other documents. Russell had never admitted his knowledge of Zembski’s past. But it was one of the reasons why he used him for his photographic needs. That and the fact that he liked the man. And his low prices.
He watched as Zembski ushered the family out into the street with promises of prints by the weekend. Closing the door behind them he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Is smiling so hard?” he asked rhetorically. “But of course, he’ll love it. I only hope the wife doesn’t get beaten to a pulp for looking happy.” He walked across to the arc lights and turned them off. “And what can I do for you, Mister Russell?”
Russell nodded toward the small office which adjoined the studio.
Zembski looked at him, shrugged, and gestured him in. Two chairs were squeezed in on either side of a desk. “I hope it’s pornography rather than politics,” he said once they were inside. “Though these days it’s hard to tell the difference.”
Russell showed him McKinley’s passport. “I need my photograph in this. I was hoping you’d either do it for me or teach me how to do it myself.”
Zembski looked less than happy. “What makes you think I’d know?”
“I was in the Party myself once.”
Zembski’s eyebrows shot up. “Ah. A lot’s changed since then, my friend.”
“Yes, but they’re probably still using the same glue on passports. And you probably remember which remover to use.”
Zembski nodded. “Not the sort of thing you forget.” He studied McKinley’s passport. “Who is he?”
“Was. He’s the American journalist who jumped in front of a train at Zoo Station last weekend. Allegedly jumped.”
“Better and better,” the Silesian said dryly. He opened a drawer, pulled out a magnifying glass, and studied the photograph. “Looks simple enough.”
“You’ll do it?”
Zembski leaned back in his chair, causing it to squeak with apprehension. “Why not?”
“How much?”
“Ah. That depends. What’s it for? I don’t want details,” he added hurriedly, “just some assurance that it won’t end up on a Gestapo desk.”
“I need it to recover some papers. For a story.”
“Not a Fьhrer-friendly story?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll give you a discount for meaning well. But it’ll still cost you a hundred Reichsmarks.”
“Fair enough.”
“Cash.”
“Right.”
“I’ll take the picture now then,” Zembski said, maneuvering his bulk out of the confined space and through the door into the studio. “A plain background,” he muttered out loud as he studied the original photograph. “This’ll do,” he said, pushing a screen against a wall and placing a stool in front of it.
Russell sat on it.
Zembski lifted his camera, tripod and all, and placed it in position. After feeding in a new film, he squinted through the lens. “Try and look like an American,” he ordered.
“How the hell do I do that?” Russell asked.
“Look optimistic.”
“I’ll try.” He did.
“I said optimistic, not doe-eyed.”
Russell grinned, and the shutter clicked.
“Let’s try a serious one,” Zembski ordered.
Russell pursed his lips.
The shutter clicked again. And again. And several more times. “That’ll do,” the Silesian said at last. “I’ll have it for you on Monday.”
“Thanks.” Russell stood up. “One other thing. You don’t by any chance know of a good place to pick up a secondhand car?”
Zembski did-a cousin in Wedding owned a garage which often had cars to sell. “Tell him I sent you,” he said, after giving Russell directions, “and you may get another discount. We Silesians are all heart,” he added, chins wobbling with merriment.
Russell walked the short distance back to the U-bahn, then changed his mind and took a seat in the shelter by the tram stop. Gazing back down the brightly lit Berlinerstrasse toward Zembski’s studio, he wondered whether he’d just crossed a very dangerous line. No, he reassured himself, all he’d done was commission a false passport. He would cross the line when he made use of it.
After teaching the wiesner girls the next morning, Russell headed across town in search of Zembski’s cousin. He found the garage on one of Wedding’s back streets, sandwiched between a brewery and the back wall of a locomotive depot, about half a kilometer from the Lehrter Station. Zembski’s cousin Hunder was also a large man, and looked a lot fitter than Zembski. He seemed to have half a dozen young men working for him, most of them barely beyond school age.
The cars for sale were lined around the back. There were four of them: a Hanomag, an Opel, a Hansa-Lloyd, and another Opel. “Any color you want as long as it’s black,” Russell murmured.
“We can re-spray,” Hunder told him.
“No, black’s good,” Russell said. The more anonymous the better, he thought. “How much are they?” he asked.
Hunder listed the prices. “Plus a ten percent discount for a friend of my cousin,” he added. “And a full tank. And a month’s guarantee.”
The larger Hansa-Lloyd looked elegant, but was way out of Russell’s monetary reach. And he had never liked the look of Opels.
“Can I take the Hanomag out for a drive?” he asked.
“You do know how?” Hunder inquired.
“Yes.” He had driven lorries in the War, and much later he and Ilse had actually owned a car, an early Ford, which had died ignominiously on the road to Potsdam soon after their marriage met a similar fate.
He climbed into the driving-seat, waved the nervous-looking Hunder a cheerful goodbye, and turned out of the garage yard. It felt strange after all those years, but straightforward enough. He drove up past the sprawling Lehrter goods yards, back through the center of Moabit, and up Invalidenstrasse. The car was a bit shabby inside, but it handled well, and the engine sounded smooth enough.
He stopped by the side of the Humboldt canal basin and wormed his way under the chassis. There was a bit of rust, but not too much. No sign of leakages, and nothing seemed about to fall off. Brushing himself down, he walked around the vehicle. The engine compartment looked efficient enough. The tires would need replacing, but not immediately. The lights worked. It wasn’t exactly an Austro-Daimler, but it would have to do.
He drove back to the garage and told Hunder he’d take it. As he wrote out the check, he reminded himself how much he’d be saving on tram and train tickets.
It was still early afternoon as he drove home, and the streets, with the exception of Potsdamerplatz, were relatively quiet. He parked in the courtyard, and borrowed a bucket, sponge, and brush from an excited Frau Heidegger. She watched from the step as he washed the outside and cleaned the inside, her face full of anticipation. “A quick drive,” he offered, and she needed no second bidding. He took them through Hallesches Tor and up to Viktoria Park, listening carefully for any sign that the engine was bothered by the gradient. There was none. “I haven’t been up here for years,” Frau Heidegger exclaimed, peering through the windshield at the Berlin panorama as they coasted back down the hill.
Effi was just as excited a couple of hours later. Her anger at his late arrival evaporated the moment she saw the car. “Teach me to drive,” she insisted.
Russell knew that both her father and ex-husband had refused to teach her, the first because he feared for his car, the second because he feared for his social reputation. Women were not encouraged to drive in the new Germany. “Okay,” he agreed, “but not tonight,” he added, as she made for the driver’s seat.
It was a ten-minute drive to the Conways’ modern apartment block in Wilmersdorf, and the Hanomag looked somewhat overawed by the other cars parked outside. “Don’t worry,” Effi said, patting its hood. “We need a name,” she told Russell. “Something old and reliable. How about Hindenburg?”
“He’s dead,” Russell objected.
“I suppose so. How about Mother?”
“Mine isn’t reliable.”
“Oh all right. I’ll think about it.”
They were the last to arrive. Phyllis Conway was still putting the children to bed, leaving Doug to dispense the drinks. He introduced Russell and Effi to the other three couples, two of whom-the Neumaiers and the Auers-were German. Hans Neumaier worked in banking, and his wife looked after their children. Rolf and Freya Auer owned an art gallery. Conway’s replacement, Martin Unsworth, and his wife Fay made up the third couple. Everyone present, Russell reckoned, either was approaching, was enjoying or had recently departed their thirties. Hans Neumaier was probably the oldest, Fay Unsworth the youngest.
Effi disappeared to read the children a bedtime story, leaving Russell and Doug Conway alone by the drinks table. “I asked the Wiesners,” Conway told him. “I went out to see them.” He shook his head. “They were pleased to be asked, I think, but they wouldn’t come. Don’t want to risk drawing attention to themselves while they’re waiting for their visas, I suppose. They speak highly of you, by the way.”
“Is there nothing you can do to speed up their visas?”
“Nothing. I’ve tried, believe me. I’m beginning to think that someone in the system doesn’t like them.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
“I don’t know. I’ll keep trying, but…” He let the word hang. “Oh,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out two tickets. “I was given these today. Brahms and something else, at the Philharmonie, tomorrow evening. Would you like them? We can’t go.”
“Thanks. Effi’ll be pleased.”
“What’s she doing now? Barbarossa has finished, hasn’t it?”
“Yes. But you’d better ask her about the next project.”
Conway grinned. “I will. Come on, we’d better join the others.”
The evening went well. The conversation flowed through dinner and beyond, almost wholly in German, the two Conways taking turns at providing translation for Fay Unsworth. The two German men were of a type: scions of upper middle class families who still prospered under the Nazis but who, in foreign company especially, were eager to demonstrate how embarrassed they were by their government. They and Freya Auer lapped up Effi’s account of the Mother storyline, bursting into ironic applause when she described the hospital bed denouement. Only Ute Neumaier looked uncomfortable. Among her fellow housewives in Grunewald she would probably give the story a very different slant.
Rolf Auer was encouraged to recount some news he’d heard that afternoon. Five of Germany’s most famous cabaret comedians-Werner Finck, Peter Sachse, and the Three Rulands-had been expelled from the Reich Cultural Chamber by Goebbels. They wouldn’t be able to work in Germany again.
“When was this announced?” Russell asked.
“It hasn’t been yet. Goebbels has a big piece in the Beobachter tomorrow morning. It’s in there.”
“Last time I saw Finck at the Kabarett,” Russell said, “he announced that the old German fairytale section had been removed from the program, but that there’d be a political lecture later.”
Everyone laughed.
“It’ll be hard for any of them to get work elsewhere,” Effi said. “Their sort of comedy’s all about language.”
“They’ll have to go into hibernation until it’s all over,” Phyllis said.
“Like so much else,” her husband agreed.
“Where has all the modern art gone?” Effi asked the Auers. “Six years ago there must have thousands of modern paintings in Germany-the Blau Reiter group, the Expressionists before them, the Cubists. Where are they all?”
“A lot of them are boxed up in cellars,” Rolf Auer admitted. “A lot were taken abroad in the first year or so, but since then… A lot were owned by Jews, and most of those have been sold, usually at knockdown prices. Mostly by people who think they’ll make a good profit one day, sometimes by people who really care about them as art and want to preserve them for the future.”
It sounded as if the Auers had a few in their cellar. “I’ve heard Hermann’s building up his collection,” Russell observed.
“He has good taste,” Auer conceded with only the faintest hint of sarcasm.
The conversation moved on to architecture and Speer’s plans for the new Berlin. Russell watched and listened. It was a civilized conversation, he thought. But the civilization concerned was treading water. There was an implied acceptance that things had slipped out of joint, that some sort of correction was needed, and that until that correction came along, and normal service was resumed, they were stuck in a state of suspended animation. The Conways, he saw, were only too glad to be out of it; America would be a paradise after this. The Unsworths didn’t have a clue what they were getting into and, unless they were much more perceptive than they seemed, would draw all the wrong conclusions from gatherings like this one. But the three German couples-he included himself and Effi-were just waiting for the world to move on, waiting at the Fьhrer’s pleasure.
“What’ll happen to you if there’s a war?” Unsworth was asking him.
“I’ll be on the same train as you, I expect,” Russell told him. Across the table, Effi made a face.
“That’ll be hard, after living here for so long.”
“It will. I have a son here, too.” Russell shrugged. “But it’ll be that or internment.”
In the way home, sitting in a line of traffic at the eastern end of the Ku’damm, Effi suddenly turned to him and said: “I don’t want to lose you.”
“I don’t want to lose you either.”
She slipped an arm through his. “How long do you think a war will last?”
“I’ve no idea. Years, at least.”
“Maybe we should think about leaving. I know,” she added quickly, “that you don’t want to leave Paul. But if there’s a war and they lock you up you’ll be leaving him anyway. And we… oh I don’t know. It’s all so ridiculous.”
Russell moved the car forward a few meters. “It’s something to think about.” And it was. She was right-he’d lose Paul anyway. And he couldn’t spend the rest of his life clinging to the boy. It wasn’t fair to her. It probably wasn’t fair to Paul.
“I don’t want to go either, but…”
“I know. I think we’ve got a few months at least.” He leaned over and kissed her, which drew an angry blow of the horn from the car behind them. “And I can’t let Paul run my whole life,” he said, testing the thought out loud as he released the clutch.
“Not forever, anyway. Has he seen the car yet?”
“No. Tomorrow.”
There was sunshine on saturday, the first in a week. He arrived at the Gehrts household soon after two, and felt somewhat deflated by the sight of Matthias’s Horch. How had he expected Paul to get excited by a 1928 Hanomag?
He needn’t have worried. His son, happily changed out of his Jungvolk uniform, was thrilled by the car, and thrilled by their exhilarating 100kph dash down the new Avus Speedway, which connected the eastern end of the Ku’damm to the first completed stretch of the Berlin orbital outside Potsdam. On their way back they stopped for ice cream at a cafй overlooking the Wannsee, and Russell allowed his son to work the petrol pump at the adjoining garage. “Father-I mean Matthias-wouldn’t let me do this,” Paul said, anxiously scanning Russell’s face for signs of hurt or anger at his slip.
“It’s okay. You can call him father,” Russell said. “Short for stepfather.”
“All right,” Paul agreed.
During their four hours together, his son showed none of the reticence he’d displayed on the phone. Just a passing something, Russell hoped. He had a wonderful afternoon.
The evening wasn’t bad either. Effi looked stunning in another new dress-Mother was certainly paying well-and three members of the Philharmonie audience came up and asked for her autograph, which pleased her no end. Unlike Russell she had been brought up on a diet of classical music, and sat in rapt attention while his wandered. Looking round the auditorium, it occurred to him that this was one of the places where nothing much had changed. The music was judenfrei, of course, and Hitler’s picture dominated the lobby, but the same stiff-necked, overdressed people were filling the seats, wafting their fans, and rustling their programs. It could have been 1928. Or even 1908. All across Germany there were people living in time bubbles like this one. That was the way it was, and would be, until Hitler marched across one border too many and burst them all.
Russell couldn’t complain about the effect the music had on Effi-she insisted on their going straight home to make love. Afterward, lying in an exhausted heap among the tangled sheets, they laughed at the trail of clothes disappearing into the living room. “Like our first time, remember?” Effi said.
Russell couldn’t remember a better day, and hated to spoil it. “I’ve got something to tell you,” he said, propping himself up against the headboard. “You know I said I’d heard rumors that they were planning to change the Law on the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases?”
“Yes.” She sat up too.
“I didn’t.”
“Then why…?”
“Tyler McKinley was working on a story about it. He got me to go with him when he interviewed this woman in Neukцlln.” Russell told her about Theresa Jьrissen, about Marietta, about the KdF letter to clinic heads and what she had claimed was in it.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Effi asked, more surprised than angry.
“Because you’d have to tell Zarah, and Zarah would have to tell Jens, and I’d have to explain where I got the information from.” He looked her in the face. “McKinley’s dead, Effi. And he didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”
She took that in, looking, Russell thought, extraordinarily beautiful.
“So why are you telling me now?” she asked calmly.
He sighed. “Because I hate keeping things from you. Because I owe it to Zarah. I don’t know. Could you swear Zarah to secrecy, do you think?”
“Maybe. But in any case I don’t think Jens would turn you in. Zarah would certainly kill him if he did. For my sake, of course, not yours.”
“Of course.”
“But-and I hate to say this-given how Zarah feels about you, she’ll want more than your word. So will he. They’ll want some sort of proof.”
“I don’t blame them. When’s that appointment you mentioned?”
“Monday.”
“She should put it off.”
“How will that help?”
He explained about McKinley’s passport and Zembski’s commission. “On Tuesday I can pick up the letter and whatever else McKinley had.”
“You’re going to claim it using a bogus passport? Isn’t that risky? What if they remember McKinley from when he handed it in?”
“He wouldn’t have handed it in-he’d have posted it. It’ll be okay.”
“Are you sure?”
He laughed. “No, of course not.”
Sunday was another cold bright day. Russell picked his son up in Grunewald soon after 10:00, and headed for Potsdam on the Avus Speedway. From there they took the Leipzig road, driving southwest through Treuenbrietzen and over the hills to Wittenberg, stopping for an early lunch by the bridge across the Elbe. They reached Leipzig ninety minutes ahead of kickoff and did a quick spin round the town center, with its imposing eighteenth-century residences, myriad publishing houses, and enormous Hauptbahnhof. Paul, though, was eager to reach the field, and seemed somewhat lacking in faith that his father would find it in time.
He found it with twenty minutes to spare. They followed another father-son couple wearing Hertha colors through the turnstiles, and worked their way around to where the hundred or so others who’d made the trip from Berlin were standing, behind one of the goals. The stadium was bigger than the Plumpe, and seemed almost full for this cup tie. Standing there waiting for the teams to come out, watching the flicker of matches being struck in the shadowed grandstand, Russell felt a sudden surge of sadness. Another time bubble, he thought.
The home crowd greeted their team with a hearty roar, but that was almost the last thing they had to cheer. The home team had one of those afternoons, doing everything but score on numerous occasions, before making one fatal mistake at the end. Paul was ecstatic, and quite unwilling to admit there was anything undeserved in Hertha’s victory. “It’s about goals, Dad,” he said trenchantly, before Russell could suggest anything to the contrary. On the way out, Paul scanned the ground for a discarded program and finally found one. “For Joachim,” he said triumphantly.
Russell had thought about inviting Thomas and Joachim to join them, but had decided he wanted the time alone with his son. If Paul wanted to get something off his chest, he wouldn’t do it with Thomas and Joachim in the car.
The decision bore fruit, though hardly in the way Russell had expected. It was dark by the time they left Leipzig, the road lit only by their own lights and the occasional passage of a vehicle in the opposite direction. On either side the darkness was only relieved by the dim lights of an occasional farm.
They had been driving about ten minutes when Paul broke the silence. “Dad, I think you should move to England,” he blurted out, as if he couldn’t hold the thought in any longer.
“Why?” Russell asked, though he could guess the answer.
“Well, you can’t help being English, can you?”
“No, I can’t.”
“But that won’t help. I mean it doesn’t help the Jews, does it?”
“No,” Russell agreed. “What made you think about this?” he asked. “Has something happened? Has someone said something?” He half-expected to find that Paul had overheard a conversation between his mother and stepfather.
“Not exactly,” Paul replied. “At the Jungvolk… no one has actually said anything, but they know I’m half-English, and when they look at me it’s like they’re not sure whose side I’m on. I’m not saying it’s bad being half-English-it’s not like being half-Jewish or half-Polish or anything like that-and if there’s a war with England I can tell everyone I’m loyal to the Fьhrer, but you won’t be able to do that. I don’t think you’ll be safe in Germany. You’ll be much safer in England.”
“Maybe,” Russell said, for want of something better.
“Wouldn’t Effi go with you?”
“She might.”
“I really like her, you know.”
“I know you do. And I’m glad.”
“I don’t want you to go. I just…”
“What?”
“I just don’t want you to stay for my sake. I mean, I’m twelve next month. It’s not like I’ll be a child for much longer.”
“I think you have a few more years yet.”
“Okay, but…”
“I understand what you’re saying. And I appreciate it. But I don’t want you to worry about this. If a war comes I’ll probably have to leave-there won’t be any choice. But until then, well, I can’t leave while we’re still in the Cup, can I?”
After dropping Paul off, Russell found a bar off Hochmeisterplatz and sat for almost an hour nursing an expensive double whisky. His life seemed to be breaking up in slow motion, with no clear indication of where any of the pieces might land. Moving to England might seem like a sensible move, but it was sensible moves which had landed him in his current predicament. The peculiarity of his situation, he thought, might be a double-edged sword. It could be the death of him, or at least the death of those relationships which had made his life worth living for the last few years. There was no doubt about that. But was there also a chance that he could exploit that situation to save himself, and those relationships? Shchepkin, Kleist, and Trelawney-Smythe had no compunction about making use of him, and he felt none about making use of them. But could he pull it off? Was he still quick enough on his feet? And was he brave enough to find out?
Driving east along the Ku’damm toward Effi’s, he realized he didn’t know. But that, he told himself, the Wiesners uppermost in his mind, was another sign of the times. When the time bubbles burst, you got to find out all sorts of things about yourself that you probably didn’t want to know. And maybe, if you were lucky, a few things that you did.
Arriving at Effi’s flat, he was almost bundled into the kitchen by Effi herself. “Zarah’s here,” she whispered. “I’ve told her about the letter to the asylum directors, but nothing about you knowing where it is now. Or the passport. Okay?”
“Okay,” Russell agreed.
Lothar was there too, sitting on the sofa with his mother and a picture book.
“You remember Uncle John?” Effi asked him.
“No,” he said authoritatively, looking up briefly and deciding that Russell was less interesting than his book. If there was anything wrong with him, it wasn’t the same thing that afflicted Marietta.
Russell leaned down to kiss Zarah’s upturned cheek. Effi’s older sister was an attractive woman of 35, taller and bigger-boned than Effi, with larger breasts and wider hips. Her wavy chestnut hair, which usually fell to her shoulders, was tonight constrained in a tight bun, and there were dark circles of either tiredness or sadness around her brown eyes. Russell had never disliked Zarah, but he had never felt any real connection either. She had none of her younger sister’s fearless appetite for life: Zarah was the careful, responsible one, the one who had always sought safety in conventionality, whether of ideas or husbands. Her only redeeming feature, as far as Russell was concerned, was her obvious devotion to Effi.
“Effi told me what you told her,” she said, “but I want to hear it from you.”
Russell retold the story of his and McKinley’s visit to Theresa Jьrissen, omitting her name.
“She stole this letter?” Zarah asked, as if she couldn’t believe people did things like that.
“She was desperate.”
“That I can understand,” Zarah said, glancing sideways at the happily engaged Lothar. “But are you sure she was telling the truth?”
“As sure as I can be.”
“But you don’t know any of the details of this new law those doctors were talking about? What it will say. Who it will affect.”
“No. But whatever it says, the first thing they’ll need is a register of all those suffering from the various conditions. All the institutions and doctors will be asked to submit lists, so that they know exactly what they’re dealing with. And any child on that list will be subject to the new law, whatever it is. That’s why I think you should cancel your appointment. Wait until I can tell you more.”
“But when will that be?”
“Soon, I hope.”
“But what if it isn’t?” She was, Russell realized, on the verge of tears. “I have to talk to someone about him.”
Russell had an idea. “How about abroad? Go to Holland or France. Or England even. See a specialist there. No one here will know.”
He watched her eyes harden as she remembered the aborted abortion, then soften again as the idea impressed itself. “I could, couldn’t I?” she said, half to herself, half to Effi. “Thank you, John,” she said to him.
“Will Jens agree to that?” Effi asked.
“Yes, I think so.”
“You do understand how dangerous this will be for John if anyone finds out he knows about this law?” Effi insisted.
“Oh yes.”
“And you’ll make sure Jens understands it too.”
“Yes, yes. I know you disagree about politics,” she told Russell, “but Jens is as crazy about Lothar as I am. Believe me, even the Fьhrer comes a long way second. Jens will do anything for his son.”
Russell hoped she was right. After driving Zarah and Lothar home to Grunewald he watched Jens in the lighted doorway, picking up his son with every sign of fatherly devotion, and felt somewhat reassured. In the seat next to him, Effi sighed. “Did you see anything wrong with Lothar?” she asked.
“No,” Russell said, “but Zarah sees more of him than anyone else.”
“I hope she’s wrong.”
“Of course.”
“How was your day with Paul?”
“Good. He’s away again next weekend.”
“Then let’s go away,” Effi said. “I start filming on the Monday after, and I’ll hardly see you for two weeks after that. Let’s go somewhere.”
“How about Rьgen Island?”
“That’d be lovely.”
“We can drive up on Friday afternoon, come back Sunday. I’ll teach you to drive.”
Russell woke early, with an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach which toast and coffee did nothing to dispel. “Are you going to get the passport today?” Effi asked, brushing hair out of her eyes to receive the coffee he’d brought her in bed.
“I hope so.”
“Do you want me to come with you? As cover or something?”
“No thanks. You’d make me even more anxious.” He kissed her, promised to ring the moment he had something to tell, and walked out to the car. There was no sign of the weekend sunshine; a thick blanket of almost motionless cloud hung over the city, low enough to brush the spires of the Memorial Church. As he drove on down Tauenzienstrasse, Russell decided to leave the car at home-the Ubahn seemed more anonymous. On arrival, he steeled himself to refuse a coffee from Frau Heidegger, but she was nowhere to be seen. Freshly attired, he was soon on the train to Neukцlln.
Zembski had the passport waiting in a desk drawer. “A nice job, if I say so myself,” he muttered, using a photographer’s dark-sack to pick it up and hand it over. “You should keep your own fingerprints off it,” he advised. “And please-burn it the moment you’re finished with it. I’ve already burned the negatives.”
“I will,” Russell said, examining the photograph inside. It looked as though it had always been there.
He walked back to the U-bahn station, hyper-conscious of the passport in his pocket. Pretending to be McKinley might get him through a spot check, but anything more rigorous and he’d be in real, real trouble. The passport was far too big to eat, though he supposed he could just tear the picture out and eat that. Explaining why he’d done so might prove difficult, though.
He reminded himself that he was only guessing about the poste restante, but it didn’t feel like guessing: He knew it was there. Once on a train, he decided on another change of plan. The U-bahn might be anonymous, but he would need somewhere to read whatever it was McKinley had accumulated. He couldn’t take it to his own flat or Effi’s, and he had no desire to sit in a park or on a train with a pile of stolen documents on his knee. In the car, on the other hand, he could drive himself somewhere secluded and take his time. This sounded like such a good idea that he wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him earlier. How many other obvious possibilities had he failed to notice?
Frau Heidegger was still out. He backed the Hanomag out of the courtyard, accelerated down Neuenburgerstrasse, and almost broad-sided a tram turning into Lindenstrasse. Calm down, he told himself.
On the way to the old town his head raced with ideas for foiling discovery and capture. If he checked who was on normal duty in the poste restante, and then waited till whoever it was went to lunch, he’d probably be seen by someone less liable to go over the passport with a magnifying glass. Or would the lunchtime stand-in, being less used to the work, be more careful? A crowded post office would give more people the chance of remembering him; an empty one would make him stand out.
He parked the car on Heiligegeiststrasse, a hundred meters north of the block which housed the huge post office, and walked down to the main entrance. The poste restante section was on the second floor, a large high-ceilinged room with high windows. A line of upright chairs for waiting customers faced the two service windows. There was a customer at one window, but the other was free.
Heart thumping, Russell walked up to the available clerk and placed McKinley’s passport on the counter. “Anything for McKinley?” he asked, in a voice which seemed to belong to someone else.
The clerk took the briefest of looks at the passport and disappeared without a word. Would he come back with a sheaf of papers or a squad of Gestapo? Russell wondered. He stole a look at the other customer, a woman in her thirties who was just signing for a parcel. The clerk serving her was now looking at Russell. He looked away, and wondered whether to put the passport back in his pocket. He could feel the man still looking at him. Don’t do anything memorable, he told himself.
His own clerk returned, more quickly than Russell had dared to hope, with a thick manila envelope. Letting this drop onto the counter with a thump, he reached underneath for a form. A couple of indecipherable squiggles later he pushed the form across for signing. Russell searched in vain for his pen, accepted the one offered with a superior smirk, and almost signed his own name. A cold sweat seemed to wash across his chest and down his legs as he scrawled an approximation of McKinley’s signature, accepted his copy of the receipt, and picked up the proffered envelope. The five yards to the door seemed endless, the stairs an echo chamber of Wagnerian proportions.
On the street outside a tram disgorging passengers was holding up traffic. Fighting the ludicrous temptation to run, Russell walked back toward his car, scanning the opposite pavement for possible watchers. As he waited to cross Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse he snuck a look back. There was no one there. If there had been, he told himself, they’d have seen the envelope and arrested him by now. He’d gotten away with it. For the moment, anyway.
Much to his relief the car started without protest. He turned onto Konigstrasse and headed up toward the railway bridge, chafing at the slow pace of the tram in front of him. As he rounded Alexanderplatz he decided, at the last moment, that Landsbergerstrasse offered the quickest route out of the city, and almost collided with another car. Away to his right the gray bulk of the Alex leered down at him.
He slowed the Hanomag and concentrated on driving the three kilometers to the city’s ragged edge without getting arrested. As he swung round Bьschingplatz he thought for one dreadful moment that a traffic cop was flagging him down, and the beads of sweat were still clinging to his brow as he drove past the huge state hospital on the southern edge of the Friedrichshain. Another kilometer and he could smell the vast complex of cattle markets and slaughterhouses that sprawled alongside the Ringbahn. As he reached the top of the bridge which carried the road over the railway by Landsbergerallee Station he had a brief panoramic view of the countryside to the east: two small hills rising, almost apologetically, from the vast expanse of the Prussian plains.
Earlier, mentally searching for a safe place to study McKinley’s material, he had recalled a picnic with Thomas’s family on one of those hills. As he remembered it, a road ran south from Marzahn between them, and a winding access road led up to a picnic area on the one nearest the city.
His memory served him well. The road wound up through dark dripping trees to the bald brow of the hill, where picnic tables had been arranged to take advantage of the view across the city. There was no one there. Russell parked in the allotted space behind the tables and gazed out through the windshield at the distant city. The nearest clump of large buildings, which Thomas had pointed out on their previous visit, made up Berlin’s principal home for the mentally ill, the Herzberge Asylum. Which was highly apt, given the probable content of the reading matter on the seat beside him.
He reached for the envelope and carefully prized it open. There were about fifty sheets of paper in all, a few in McKinley’s writing, most of them typed or printed. Russell skipped through them in search of Theresa Jьrissen’s letter. He found it at the bottom of the pile, with a date-the date it had been written-scrawled in pencil across the right-hand corner. Going back through the other papers, Russell found other dates: McKinley had arranged his story in chronological order.
The first document was a 1934 article from the Mьnchner Zeitung, a journalist’s eyewitness report of life in an asylum entitled “Alive Yet Dead.” McKinley had underlined two sentences-“They vegetate in twilight throughout the day and night. What do time and space mean to them?”-and added in the margin: “or life and death?” The second document was a story from the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps, about a farmer who had shot his mentally handicapped son and the “sensitive” judges who had all but let him off. A reader’s letter from the same magazine begged the authorities to find a legal and humane way of killing “defective” infants.
Russell skipped through several other letters in the same vein and numerous pages of unattributed statistics which demonstrated a marked decline in the space and resources devoted to each mental patient since 1933. So far, so predictable, Russell thought.
The next item was an article by Karl Knab in the Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift journal. Again, McKinley had underlined one passage: “We have before us in these asylums, spiritual ruins, whose number is not insignificant, notwithstanding all our therapeutic endeavours, in addition to idiots on the lowest level, patient material which, as simply cost-occasioning ballast, should be eradicated by being killed in a painless fashion, which is justifiable in terms of the self-preservatory finance policy of a nation fighting for its existence, without shaking the cultural foundations of its cultural values.” This was chilling enough, Russell thought, but who was Knab? He was obviously far from a lone voice in the wilderness, but that didn’t make him a spokesman for the government.
There was a lot of stuff on the Knauer boy, but most of it was in McKinley’s writing-guesses, suppositions, holes to be filled. It was the last few sheets of paper which really caught Russell’s attention. Most were from a memorandum by Doctor Theodore Morell, best known to the foreign press community as Hitler’s Quack. He had been given the task of gathering together everything written in favor of euthanasia over the last fifty years, with a view to formulating a draft law on “The Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life.” Those eligible included anyone suffering from mental or physical “malformation,” anyone requiring long-term care, anyone arousing “horror” in other people or anyone situated on “the lowest animal level.” The Nazis qualified on at least two counts, Russell thought.
As Theresa Jьrissen had said, the main area of controversy among those who favored such a law was the openness or not of its administration. In this memorandum Morell concluded that secrecy was best: that parents would be much happier thinking that their child had simply succumbed to some illness or other. He hadn’t yet decided whether doctors should be involved in the actual killing of their patients, but he insisted on their compulsory registration of all congenitally ill patients.
The final item was the letter, and Russell now realized why McKinley had been so excited by it. Theodore Morell might be Hitler’s doctor, but he was a private citizen, entitled to his own ideas, no matter how psychopathic they might be. The letter, though, was something else. It confirmed the gist of Morell’s memorandum under the imprint of the KdF, the Kanzlei des Fьhrers. It tied Hitler to child-killing.
Russell shook the papers together and stuffed them back into the envelope. After sliding the whole package under the passenger seat he got out of the car and walked across the damp grass to the lip of the slope. A small convoy of military trucks was driving east down Landsbergerallee, a solitary car headed in the opposite direction. A dense layer of cloud still hung over the city.
McKinley had had his story, Russell thought. The sort of story that young journalists dreamed of-one that saved lives and made you famous.
But what was he going to do with it? Get rid of it, was the obvious answer. Along with the passport.
He watched a distant Ringbahn train slide slowly out of sight near the slaughterhouses. It was the obvious answer, but he knew he couldn’t do it. He owed it to McKinley, and probably to himself. He owed it to all those thousands of children-tens of thousands, for all he knew-that a creep like Morell found “unworthy of life.”
McKinley had probably thought his story would save them all. Russell had rather less faith in the power of the press, but having everything out in the open would at least make it more difficult for the bastards.
How could he get the stuff to McKinley’s paper? Not by post, that was for sure. He’d have to carry it out himself, which would hardly be a barrel of laughs.
How had McKinley planned to file the story? Or had he been just as stuck? That would explain why he’d put it in the poste restante.
Which had been a good idea. And still was, Russell decided. Under his own name this time. The passport would have to go.
But how could he get rid of it? Immolation seemed the obvious answer, but flames tended to be conspicuous, particularly on a day as dark as this one, and in any case he had no means of creating any. He could burn the damn thing in his apartment, but felt reluctant to carry it a moment longer than he had to, and particularly reluctant to bring it home, where the Gestapo might be waiting on his sofa. Somewhere on the open road, he thought, with a good view in either direction. Back in the car, he slid it under his seat. Driving back down the hill he felt a strange urge to sing. Hysteria, he told himself.
At the post office in Marzahn he bought a book of matches and-since it seemed less suspicious-a packet of cigarettes to go with them. He also purchased a large envelope which he addressed to himself, care of the poste restante in Potsdam; he had no ambition to revisit the counter at Heiligegeiststrasse under a different name. He then used the public telephone to call Effi.
“Is everything all right?” she asked anxiously.
“Too wonderful to talk about,” he said pointedly. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to memorize my part.”
“Can you meet me in the Zoo Station buffet?” he asked. “At four o’clock,” he added, checking his watch.
“I’ll be there.”
Once back on the Landsberg road Russell started looking for a suitable place to burn the passport. A mile or so short of the Ringbahn bridge he found a wide entranceway to a farm track and pulled over. Retrieving the passport from under his seat he ripped it into separate pages and set light to the first one, holding it down between his knees until it was too hot to hold, then shifting it to and fro with his feet until all that remained were black flakes. With his other hand he wafted the resulting smoke out through the open windows.
In the time it took him to burn the remaining five sheets only two trucks went by, and their drivers showed no interest in Russell’s slightly smoking car. He gathered the blackened remains in his handkerchief, which he knotted and placed in his pocket before resuming his journey. Twenty minutes later he consigned both handkerchief and contents to a lonely stretch of the scum-covered Luisenstrassekanal. The final remains of Zembski’s handiwork disappeared with a dull plop, leaving Russell with several burned fingers to remember them by.
It was almost 3:15. He went back to the Hanomag, and started working his way west toward Potsdamerplatz. The traffic around the southern edge of the Tiergarten was busy for the time of day, but he reached his destination-a street halfway between Effi’s flat and Zoo Station-with five minutes to spare. He parked facing the direction she would come from, assuming she hadn’t picked this day of all days to change her usual route.
Ten minutes later she came into view, walking quickly in her high heels, a few wisps of dark hair floating free of the scarf and hat.
She didn’t see him, and jumped with surprise when he told her to get in. “You said Zoo Station,” she said angrily, as he moved the car down the road. As far as he could see no one had been following her.
“That was for the benefit of anyone listening. I’ve got something to show you. In private.”
“Why didn’t you just come to the flat then?
“Because,” he explained patiently, “anyone caught with this lot in their flat is likely to end up like McKinley.”
“Oh.” She was taken aback, but only for a second. “So where are we going?”
“Along the canal, I thought, opposite the Zoo restaurant. There’s always people parked there.”
“Mostly kissing and cuddling.”
“We can always pretend.”
Once they were there, Russell reached down for the manila envelope under Effi’s seat. Even with the assistance of the nearby streetlamp, reading was difficult, but he didn’t dare turn on the car’s internal light. “Look,” he said, “you don’t need to read all of this. These last few pages”-he handed her Morell’s memo and Theresa’s letter-“should be enough to convince Zarah.”
“You want me to show them to her?”
“God, no. I want you to tell her what they are and what’s in them. She’ll believe you. If you tell her, she won’t need to see them.”
“Okay.” Effi started to read, her face increasingly frozen in an expression of utter disgust. Russell stared out of the window, watching the last of the daylight fade. A coal barge puttered by on the canal, the owner’s dog howling his response to an unknown animal’s cry emanating from deep within the zoo. “My country,” Effi murmured, as she moved on to the next sheet.
She read the whole memorandum, and then the KdF letter. “You were right,” she said. “If she’d kept that appointment Lothar would be on a list by now.”
“And it won’t be an easy list to get off,” Russell said.
They sat there in silence as another barge went by. In the Zoo restaurant across the water someone was stacking dishes.
“What can we do?” Effi wanted to know.
“I don’t know. But you can tell Zarah you’re convinced. And tell her I’m destroying the papers.”
“You’re not going to?”
“I don’t know. Not yet, anyway. I’m going to put them somewhere safe for a while.”
She gave him a searching look, as if she wanted to reassure herself of who he was. “All those children,” she said.
“Achievements of the Third Reich”
After the excitement of the previous day, Russell spent Tuesday trying to work. The third article for Pravda was due by the end of the week, and one of the Fleet Street heavies wanted a second “Ordinary Germans” piece before committing itself to a series. It was write-by-numbers stuff, but he kept finding his mind drifting away from the subjects at hand, usually in the direction of potential threats to his liberty.
If the SD had the same bright idea about the poste restante that he had had, and checked through the records, they’d discover that McKinley had collected something nine days after his death. Everyone knew that Himmler was prone to strange flights of dark fantasy-rumor had it that SS agents were searching for the elixir of eternal life in Tibet-but he’d probably draw the line at mail-collecting ghosts. A light bulb would go on over his head, complete with the thought-bubble “it must have been someone else!” And no prizes for guessing who he and his minions would think of first.
There’d be no point in denying it-they’d just drag him down to Heiligegeist and have him identified. He’d have to blame Eleanor McKinley, who was now beyond their reach. She’d given him the passport, he’d say. Asked him to pick up the papers, and he’d sent them on to her. Simple as that. What was in the envelope? He hadn’t opened it. A different photograph in the passport? The clerk must have imagined it. The passport? He’d sent that on as well.
It was about as convincing as one of Goering’s economic forecasts. And if some bright spark of Heydrich’s decided to find out if there was anything under his name in any German poste restante, he’d be left without a prayer. He’d just have to hope that no one in the SD had read Getaway or The High Fence, which was at least possible-The Saint seemed far too irreverent a hero for Nazis.
Such hopes notwithstanding, every sound of a car in the street, every ring of footsteps in the courtyard below, produced a momentary sinking of the stomach, and later that evening, over at Effi’s, a sharp rat-a-tat on the door almost sent it through the floor. When Effi ushered a man in uniform through the door it took him several seconds to realize it was only Zarah’s husband.
Jens Biesinger worked for some government inspectorate or other-Russell had never bothered to find out exactly which-and was on his way home. He accepted Effi’s offer of coffee, shook Russell’s hand, and took a seat, boots and belt creaking as he leaned back with a tired sigh. “How is your work?” he asked Russell politely.
Russell made appropriate noises, his mind working furiously on what the man could want. His only real conversation with Jens, almost three years earlier, had escalated into a serious argument almost immediately, and Effi of all people had been forced to adopt the role of peacemaker. They had rarely been in the same room since, and on those occasions had treated each other with the sort of icy politeness reserved for loathed relations.
Jens waited until Effi was with them before he stated the object of his visit. “John,” he began, “I have a large favor I would like to ask you. Zarah wishes to take Lothar to England, for reasons that you are aware of. I cannot go with her, for reasons that I’m sure you will understand. And Effi starts work on her film on Monday. Zarah doesn’t want to wait, so… would you escort them? Someone has to, and as an English-speaker-and, of course, someone who is almost part of the family-you would be the ideal person. Naturally, I would pay all the expenses-the flights, the hotel, whatever else is necessary.”
Recovering from his surprise, Russell considered the idea. And had another.
“I’d feel happier if you went with them, John,” Effi interjected.
“When are you thinking of?” Russell asked Jens. “We’re going away this weekend, and I’ll be in Hamburg on Monday and Tuesday-the Bismarck launch. So it couldn’t be until the middle of next week-Thursday perhaps?”
“That sounds reasonable.”
Russell brought up his other idea. “I’d like to take my son too. I’ll pay for him, naturally, but if you could arrange the trip for four… I’ll need his mother’s agreement, of course,” he added.
Jens smiled. “An excellent plan. It will look more… natural. I’ll arrange things for four. If your son can’t go we can always amend the reservations.” He placed the cup of coffee on the side table and got up, looking pleased with himself. “Zarah will be relieved,” he said. “She was not looking forward to making such a journey alone.”
“I’m sure she’d have managed,” Effi said with a slight edge, “but this will be better.”
“This is my number at the ministry,” Jens said, handing Russell a card.
“This is mine at home,” Russell replied, tearing a sheet from his notebook and penciling out the Neuenburgerstrasse number. England with Paul, he thought, and he was still reveling in the notion when Effi returned from seeing Jens out.
“You’re not to fall in love with my sister,” she told him.
He phoned ilse from Effi’s flat early the next morning and arranged to have coffee at a cafй in Halensee which they knew from their earlier life together. Russell wanted to ask her in person rather than over the phone, and she sounded more than willing-eager, in fact-to get out of the house for a couple of hours.
The cafй looked more run-down than Russell remembered it, a consequence, perhaps, of the fact that a large proportion of its former clientele had been Jewish. Ilse was already there, looking less severe than usual. Her shoulder-length blonde hair, which over the last few years had invariably been tied back in a knot, hung loose, softening the stretched lines of her face. She still seemed painfully thin to Russell, and her blue eyes never seemed to soften as once they had, but she seemed genuinely pleased to see him.
He told her what he wanted, at worst expecting a flat refusal, at best a painful argument.
“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” she said. “We’ll have to inform the school of course, and his Jungvolk leader, but I don’t see how either of them could object. It’ll be an educational experience, won’t it?”
“I hope so. Matthias won’t object?”
“Why should he?”
“No reason at all. Well, that’s good. I expected more of an argument,” he admitted.
“Why, for heaven’s sake? When have I ever tried to come between you and Paul?”
He smiled. “You haven’t.”
She smiled back. “You must be getting lots of work,” she said. “Paul’s very impressed with the car.”
They talked about Paul, his interests and anxieties, for more than half an hour. Afterward, driving back across the city for his Wednesday appointment at the Wiesners, Russell found it hard to remember a warmer conversation with his ex-wife. He was still bathing in its glow when he rapped on the door of the apartment in Friedrichshain.
There was no answer for several moments, then an anxious voice called out, “Who is it?”
“It’s John Russell,” he shouted back.
The door opened to reveal a haggard-looking Frau Wiesner. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking down the stairs behind him. “Come in, please.”
There was no sign of the girls.
“I’m afraid there will be no lesson today,” she said. “And perhaps no more lessons for a while. My husband has been arrested. They have taken him to a camp. Sachsenhausen, we think. A friend of a friend saw him there.”
“When? When was he arrested? What was he arrested for?”
“They came here on Monday. The middle of the night, so it was really Tuesday.” She sat down abruptly, as if she needed all her strength to tell the story. “They kept hitting him,” she almost whispered, a solitary tear running down her right cheek. “He wasn’t resisting. He kept saying, ‘I’m coming with you-why are you hitting me?’ They just laughed, called him names. Called the children names. I only thank God that Albert wasn’t here when they came.”
Russell sat down on the settee beside her and put an arm around her shoulder. “Frau…” he started to say. “I should know your name by now.”
“Eva.”
“Did they give a reason for his arrest?”
“Not to me. Our friends are trying to find out whether there was a reason… not a real reason, of course… but surely they have to say something, write something down in their record books.” She looked at him almost imploringly, as if their having a reason would make a difference.
“Where are the girls?” he asked. “And where’s Albert?”
“The girls are with friends down the road. They love your lessons, but today… they couldn’t…”
“Of course not.”
“And Albert… He came back on Tuesday morning, heard what had happened, and ran straight out again. I haven’t seen him since.”
“The Gestapo haven’t been back?”
“No. If they came back, I could ask them about Felix. I don’t know what to do. Some friends say kick up a fuss, or you’ll never be told anything. Others say that if you do it makes matters worse, and that Felix will be released eventually, like Albert was. And I wouldn’t know where to go if I wanted to make a fuss. The Alex? If I go there and demand to know where Felix is and why they’ve arrested him they might arrest me, and then who’ll look after Albert and the girls?”
“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” Russell agreed. He wondered what would be.
“Have the Conways gone?” she asked.
“I’m afraid they have.” They’d been at sea for at least 36 hours. “But I can try talking to someone at the Embassy. I doubt whether they’ll be able to do anything, but it’s worth a try.”
“They’re not allowed visitors in Sachsenhausen,” she said. ‘We found that out when Albert was there. Not family or friends that is. But perhaps they’d let you visit him. You could say he owed you money for the girls’ lessons, and you need his signature for something-a check on a foreign bank account or something like that.”
“You have a foreign bank account?”
“No, of course not, but they think we have-they think we all have them.”
Russell winced. What could he do? The embassy certainly, but how much would a Jewish doctor’s kindness to a now-departed colleague count for in the grand scheme of things? Not much. He could go to the Alex-or, more worryingly, the Gestapo HQ on Prinz Albrechtstrasse-and make some polite inquiries. Not as a journalist, of course. In fact, Eva Wiesner’s suggestion was a good one. He could say that Wiesner owed him for the girls’ lessons, and that the Jewish swine wasn’t going to get out of it by running away to a Kz. That should give the bastards a good laugh.
And then there was Jens, who now owed him a favor. A last resort, Russell decided. That was one favor he wanted to keep in reserve.
“I’ll make some inquiries,” he told her. “Tactfully. I won’t stir up any resentment. I’ll try and find out where he is and why he’s been arrested. And if there’s any chance of arranging a visit.”
She gave him a despairing look. “Why is it that you can see how wrong this is, and so many people can’t?”
“I like to think most people can,” he said. “And that they’re just too afraid to speak up. But lately…” He spread his hands. “If I find out anything definite I’ll be back to let you know. Otherwise I’ll come on Friday at the usual time.”
“Thank you, Mr. Russell. You are a real friend.” Another solitary tear crawled down her cheek, as if her body were conserving the supply for future contingencies.
As he walked back to the car Russell found himself hoping he was the friend she thought he was. He had considered giving her his address, but there was no way he could keep one or more of the Wiesners in his apartment. If Frau Heidegger didn’t report it, one of his neighbors would.
Driving down Neue Konigstrasse he decided on visiting the Gestapo first. Another voluntary encounter with the Nazi authorities, he told himself, would weaken any suspicions they might hold with regard to McKinley’s missing papers. And if they handed out prizes for wishful thinking…
He parked behind a shiny, swastika-embossed limousine on Prinz Albrecht Strasse, and approached the impressive portals of the State Police HQ. Taking a deep breath, he walked up the steps and in through the revolving door. As usual, the Fьhrer was up there in his frame, beady eyes tracking Russell round the room like some scary inversion of the Mona Lisa-you knew what he was thinking.
Russell explained his plight to the receptionist: the Jew, the debt, the joke about Wiesner running away to a Kz. She laughed, and directed him to the appropriate office for Ongoing Cases. Another receptionist, another laugh, and he was on his way to Completed Cases, which sounded bad for Felix Wiesner.
The officer in charge was in a good mood. It took him less than a minute to find the file on Felix Wiesner, and less than that to read it. “You’re out of luck,” he said. “The kike’s in Sachsenhausen, and he won’t be back. Your money’s gone.”
“What did the bastard do?” Russell asked.
“Gave a German girl an abortion. That’s twenty-five years, if he lasts that long.”
Russell felt his heart sink, but managed not to show it. “Win some, lose some,” he said. “Thanks for your help.”
He made his way back to the entrance, half-expecting to hear muffled screams from the rumored torture chambers in the basement, but, as in the SD HQ around the corner, there was only the whisper of typewriters to break the silence.
He left the car where it was, walked up Wilhelmstrasse to the British Embassy, and sat beneath the picture of the latest King-the third in two years-while he waited for Martin Unsworth to see him. It proved a waste of time. Unsworth had heard about the Wiesners from Doug Conway, but felt no dramatic compulsion to risk his career on their behalf. He pointed out, reasonably enough, that a British Embassy could hardly involve itself in the domestic criminal matters of a host nation. He added, just as reasonably, that the host nation would, at best, ignore any request in such a matter and, at worst, make use of it for propaganda purposes. Russell hid his fury, elicited a promise from Unsworth to investigate the Wiesners’ visa applications, and then thumped the wooden banister so hard on his way down that he feared for a moment he’d broken his hand. Walking back down Wilhelmstrasse, surrounded by billowing swastikas, he simmered with useless rage.
Back at Effi’s-he seemed to be living there at the moment-he told her what had happened. She advised him to ring Jens-“There’s a human being in there somewhere,” she said. “Though you have to dig a bit.”
Why not, he thought. Cash in the favor owed while it was still fresh in the memory.
After talking his way past two secretaries, Russell was finally put through to Jens. “I haven’t managed to arrange anything yet,” Zarah’s husband said, trying and failing to conceal his irritation.
“This is about something else,” Russell told him. “I need a favor from you this time.”
Something between a groan and a grunt greeted this statement.
Russell plowed on. “Someone I know has been arrested and taken to a camp. A Jew.”
“I-”
“Please, hear me out. This is nothing to do with politics-it’s a matter of honor. This man’s a doctor and back in 1933, before the Jews were forbidden to practice, he saved the life of my friend’s child.” He went on to explain who Conway was, how he’d involved Russell in teaching Wiesner’s daughters, and his current unreachability in mid-Atlantic. “This is not about helping the Jews; it’s about repaying a debt.”
“I understand what you-” Jens began, his tone now mixing sympathy with the reluctance.
“I don’t want you to do anything,” Russell insisted, somewhat disingenuously. “I just need to know the details of why he’s been arrested, and what the chances of a visit are. A visit from me, I mean-I know there’s no chance of a family visit. At the moment, his wife and children are in limbo. They can’t do anything but wait. I think the wife needs his blessing to do what’s best for the children.”
There was a moment’s silence at the other end. “I’ll find out what I can,” Jens said eventually.
“Thank you,” Russell said. He put down the phone. “I’ll drive over to the Wiesners and tell them,” he told Effi.
She went with him. Frau Wiesner seemed calmer, or perhaps just more resigned. When Russell reported the Gestapo claim about an abortion she seemed torn between derision and despair. “Felix would never-never-do anything so foolish,” she said. As for Albert, he’d returned the day before, but had soon gone out again. “I can’t lock him in,” she said. “He’s a man now.”
Initially, she looked somewhat askance at Russell’s glamorous-looking companion, but Effi’s obvious empathy quickly won her over. The girls were there, and both insisted on getting the visiting film star’s autograph. Marthe produced her movie scrapbook and the three of them took over the sofa. Watching their dark heads together, poring over the neatly arranged photographs of German and Hollywood stars, Russell found he was fighting back tears.
He spent thursday immersed in work, his apartment door open to catch the sound of the ground floor telephone. It was late afternoon when Frau Heidegger shouted up the stairs that the call was for him.
“I have the tickets and reservations,” Jens told him. “We were lucky: There were four seats left on next Thursday’s London flight. It leaves at two, but you should be there half an hour earlier. The return flight is on Sunday, at eleven. I have booked two rooms at the Savoy Hotel-have you heard of it?-on a road called Strand. And a car to take you from the airport in Croydon to the hotel and back again. And of course the appointment. I hope that covers everything.”
Russell almost asked where the appointment was, but presumed Jens was being cagey for a reason. “It sounds, perfect,” he said. The Savoy! he thought.
“Good. Now, this other business.” He paused for a moment and Russell could imagine him checking that his office door was shut. “Your friend’s Jewish doctor has been arrested for conducting an abortion on a girl of seventeen. Her name is Erna Marohn, from a good German family. Her father is an officer in the Kriegsmarine.”
“Who made the complaint?”
“The mother. The father is away at sea. There is no doubt the girl had an abortion: She was examined by a police doctor. And there is little doubt that Wiesner carried it out. She was seen entering the clinic he runs in Friedrichshain for other Jews.”
“That sounds bad.”
“It is. A German doctor caught performing an abortion can expect a lengthy term of imprisonment. A Jewish doctor caught performing one on a German girl, well…”
“Yes.”
“But there is some good news. I have managed to arrange a pass for you to visit him in Sachsenhausen. Next Wednesday, the day before you go to England. A courier will bring the pass to your house. You should be at the camp by 11:00 AM. But you will not be able to take anything in or out. And you must not report anything you see or hear. They are letting you in as a favor to me, but not as a journalist. You do understand that?”
“Absolutely.”
“If anything appears in print, in England or anywhere else, describing the conditions there, they will assume that you have broken your word, and, at the very least, you will lose your journalistic accreditation. I was asked to tell you this.”
“I understand. And thank you, Jens.”
“You are welcome.”
Friday dawned clear and cold. Russell packed a bag for the weekend, and headed toward Friedrichshain, stopping for a newspaper and coffee at Alexanderplatz Station. The only interesting piece of news concerned a train: In Westphalia a 37-ton excavating machine had run amok on a night freight. Whatever it was that pin-ioned the steel arms in an upright position had come undone, dropping them into their working position over one side of the wagon. A mile’s worth of telegraph poles, signals, and huts had been demolished, and a station reduced to rubble when the canopy supports were swept away. The train had only been stopped when a witness phoned ahead to a signal box. The guard hadn’t noticed anything was amiss. Hitler’s Germany in microcosm-flailing away in the darkness, ruins piling up behind.
At the apartment in Friedrichshain he told Frau Wiesner what Jens had told him. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Felix will tell you what really happened.” He gave the two girls a lesson, and promised to come by on the following Tuesday when he returned from Hamburg. Driving back across town to pick up Effi, he wondered how to dispel the sense of gloom that seemed to be enveloping him.
He needn’t have worried. It was about 200 kilometers to Stralsund, and by the time they reached it Effi’s defiant mood of romantic adventure had overtaken him. After crossing the narrow sound on the steam ferry, they drove the last 40 kilometers to Sassnitz in gathering darkness. On one forest stretch their headlights caught two deer hurrying each other across the road.
As Russell had expected the small resort was virtually empty, and they had their pick of those hotels not closed for the winter break. They chose the Am Meer, right on the promenade, and were given a room with views across the darkened Baltic. With the dining room closed for refurbishing, dinner was served in the lounge, in front of a dancing fire, by a girl of about fourteen. Happy and full, they walked out across the promenade and listened to the comforting caress of the tide. Above the sea the sky was bursting with stars, and over the hills behind them a thin crescent moon was rising. As they clung together for warmth, and kissed on the stony beach, it crossed Russell’s mind that this was as perfect as life ever got.
Back in their room they discovered, much to Effi’s amusement, that the bed squeaked and creaked at their slightest movement, and midway through making love she got the giggles so badly that they had to take a break before resuming.
The good weather continued, sunlight advancing across their bed the following morning. After wrapping up warmly they set out for the famous Stubbenkammer cliffs, a ten-kilometer drive through the Stubnitz beech woods. After gingerly looking over the 140-meter precipice, Russell gave Effi her first driving lesson on the large expanse of tarmac laid out for the summer sightseeing coaches. Clanking the gears atrociously, she jerked her way through several circuits before pronouncing: “This is easy!”
They had lunch in a restaurant they had noticed on the drive up, a sprawling wooden building with intricately carved faзades which nestled among the beeches, and then spent a couple of hours walking along the well-tended paths of the sun-dappled forest. The only other signs of human life were various fragments of a Hitler Youth group on a weekend trip from Rostock: groups of two or three boys, their eyes flickering from compass to path and back again. Their leaders, who brought up the rear, claimed to have seen a bear, but the beer on their breath suggested otherwise.
It got dark too early, but there was always the creaking bed. Afterward, they drank, ate, and sat in front of the same fire, hardly speaking, and not needing to. The bed was uncomfortable as well as noisy, but Russell slept better than he had for weeks.
On their final morning he drove them northwest toward the long sandspit which connected the Jasmund and Wittow peninsulas. Seeing that the road along the spit was empty he relinquished the wheel to Effi, and she drove the next twenty kilometers, far too fast, with a huge smile lighting up her face. At the end of the spit they took to the sandy beach, walking a kilometer or more and back again, watching the wind raising whitecaps on the water and the clouds scudding eastward across the blue-gray Baltic. No cars went by, no walkers. No ships appeared on the horizon. The earth was theirs.
But not for long. Effi’s train back to Berlin left Stralsund at three, and as they made their way back across the island the sunshine became increasingly intermittent, finally disappearing beneath a looming wall of cloud. The short ferry ride was choppy, the railway carriages clanking ominously in their chains, and rain was falling by the time they reached the Hauptbahnhof.
“This is really sad,” Effi said. “You’ll only be back for a day or so, and you’ll be gone again. And I’ve no idea what the filming schedule’s going to be.”
“It’s only a couple of weeks,” he told her.
“Of course,” she smiled, but he knew he’d said the wrong thing.
“Let’s do this again,” he said. “Soon.”
“Please.” A whistle sounded, and she leaned out of the window to kiss him. “Are you sure we have this the right way round?” she asked. “You should be on a train to Hamburg and I should be driving back to Berlin.”
“Sometimes other people want to use the road,” he told her as the train jerked into motion.
She made a face, and blew him a kiss. He stood there watching the train’s red taillight recede into the distance, then strode back down the platform and out of the station. The car seemed colder without her.
The road across the northern heathlands was mostly empty, the rain persistent and occasionally heavy. He drove west at a steady fifty kilometers an hour, half-hypnotized by the steady slap of the windshield wiper as his eyes struggled to pierce the gloom ahead. Darkness had fallen by the time he left Lubeck, and on the last stretch across southern Holstein a stream of trucks did their best to blind him with their headlights. The dimly lit suburbs of eastern Hamburg came as a blessed relief.
He had already booked himself a room with bath at the Kronprinz Hotel on Kirchenallee. This was one of the Hamburg establishments favored by journalists on an expense account. It was expensive, but not that expensive-the journalists concerned could always produce proof that other hotels were more so. The receptionist confirmed what he already expected, that he was a day ahead of the crowd. With the launch set for lunchtime Tuesday, most of the press would be arriving late on Monday.
After examining his room and eating dinner in the hotel restaurant he went out. The Kronprinz was just across from the main station, which lay at the eastern end of the old town. Russell walked through the station and down Monckebergstrasse toward the looming tower of the Rathaus, turning right before he reached it, and headed for the Alsterbassin, the large square of water which lay at the city’s heart. He had visited Hamburg many times over the last fifteen years, and walking the mile-long, tree-lined perimeter of the Alsterbassin had become almost a ritual.
Despite the damp cold, many others were doing the same. On summer days the water was usually busy with rowing, sailing, and steamboats, but on this winter evening the seagulls had it to themselves. Russell stopped for a beer at a cafй on one of the quays, and thought about Effi. She was wonderful with children, but he couldn’t remember her ever saying she wanted them. Did he want another one, with her? Despite the fact that the world was about to collapse around them, he rather thought he did. Far across the water a seagull squawked in derision.
He slept well, ate a large breakfast, and drove across the city to St. Pauli, the suburb between Hamburg and Altona which housed a high proportion of the city’s seafaring population. His British agent had particularly liked the idea of including sailors among his “Ordinary Germans,” and this was an obvious place to find them. Interviewing men past active service seemed like a good way of deflecting any suspicion that he was collecting intelligence rather than human interest news, and his first port of call was one of several homes for retired seamen close to the waterfront.
Over the next couple of hours he talked to several delightful pensioners, all eager to share the sources of alcohol concealed on their persons. They had all fought in the war: one, a rare survivor from the Battle of the Falklands; two others, participants in the Battle of Jutland. Both of the latter offered broad hints that they’d taken part in the High Seas Mutiny of 1918, but they clearly hadn’t suffered for it, either then or under the Nazis. Their retirement home seemed comfortable, efficient, and friendly.
All the residents he talked to admired the new ships, but none were impressed by the current standards of gunnery. Not, they admitted, that this mattered that much. Ships like the new Bismarck looked good-and were good-but the money and labor would be better spent on U-Boats. That, unfortunately, was where future naval wars would be won or lost.
Russell had less success with working sailors. Trawling the waterfront bars he found some amiable seamen, but rather more who treated his questions with suspicion verging on hostility. Some were clearly supporters of the regime. One young officer, pacified by a brief perusal of Sturmbannfьhrer Kleist’s letter, was particularly optimistic about Germany’s naval prospects: He saw the Bismarck, in particular, as symbolic of a burgeoning renaissance. “In five years time,” he promised, “we’ll have the British hiding in their harbors.” Others, Russell guessed, would once have been open opponents of the regime- Hamburg, after all, had been a KPD stronghold, and a key center of the Comintern’s maritime organization. As far as these men were concerned he was, at best, a naпve English journalist, at worst, an agent provocateur.
That afternoon Russell spent a few marks on the circular tour of Hamburg harbor, an hour and a half of channels, shipyards, quays, and towering cranes in dizzying profusion. Colored bunting was going up everywhere, and the Blohm and Voss slipway, which housed the future Bismarck, was a ferocious hive of activity as last-minute preparations were made for the launching ceremony. The ship itself was disappointing. Still lacking a superstructure, it looked more like a gigantic canoe than the future of naval warfare. The overall impression Russell carried back to the hotel, however, was of power and energy, of a nation with a long and lengthening reach.
He ate dinner at a small restaurant on the Jungfernstieg which he’d been to before-the oysters were as good as he remembered-and made his way back across town to the Klosterburg, the beer restaurant near his hotel where journalists usually gathered. Hal Manning and Jack Slaney were sitting at the bar, staring across the room at a particularly boisterous table of SA men. One man, beer slopping from a raised glass, was outlining what he’d do to Marlene Dietrich if she ever dared set foot in Germany again. His proposal made up in violence what it lacked in imagination.
Russell hoisted himself onto the vacant stool next to Slaney’s and bought a round of drinks.
“She’s making a film with Jimmy Stewart at the moment,” Slaney said. “And her character’s called Frenchie. I guess that shows which side she’s on.” He carried on staring at the SA table, whisky chaser poised in his hand. “We should think up a new collective noun for these people-you know, like a gaggle of geese. A crassness of stormtroopers. No, that’s much too kind.” He threw his head back and tipped in the chaser.
“A void,” Manning suggested.
“Too intellectual.”
“A deposit,” Russell offered.
“Mmm, not bad. A passing, perhaps.” He reached for his beer. “If only they would,” he added sourly.
At 11:00 the next morning, two buses organized by the Ministry of Propaganda arrived at the forecourt of the Reichshof, just up the road from the Kronprinz, to collect the assembled foreign press corps. “We’ll be hanging around for hours,” Slaney complained, as their bus headed south toward a bridge across the Norder Elbe, but he had reckoned without the traffic. There was only one road through the docks to the Blohm and Voss shipyard, and forward movement was soon reduced to a crawl.
“Adolf won’t like sitting in a jam,” Russell said.
“He’s coming by yacht,” Manning told him. “The Grille. A little journalistic detail for you.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
They reached Slipway 9 at quarter past 12:00, and were dragooned, rather like schoolboys, into an enclosed area behind and slightly to the right of the ship’s towering bow. From here a flight of steps led up to a platform around ten meters square, and from that a smaller flight of steps to the actual launching platform, right up against the bow.
It wasn’t “Hitler weather,” but at least it was dry, with a few desultory streaks of blue amid the gray. Several thousand people were present, lining the sides of the slipway and the area behind the platforms. Some shipyard workers were leaning over the ship’s rail, others perched precariously on the vast scaffolding of girders which rose above the ship. The larger platform was full of city and state officials, naval brass and Party hacks.
The first of several loud booms silenced the crowd.
“Naval salutes,” Slaney murmured. “Unless they’re firing on Hitler’s yacht.”
“No such luck,” Russell said, indicating the man in question, who had just appeared at the bottom of the steps leading to the first platform. Bismarck’s elderly granddaughter was climbing the steps ahead of him, and Hitler was visibly chafing at the delay, casting frequent glances at her progress as he talked to the portly Goering.
Once the Fьhrer, Dorothea von Bismarck, and the three service chiefs were all gathered on the higher platform, the former gave, by his own standards, a remarkably brief speech extolling the virtues of Germany’s last Navy-scuttled to spite the British in 1919-and the Iron Chancellor himself, “a true knight without fear or reproach.” Bismarck’s granddaughter then named the ship-her querulous voice barely audible above the raucous shouts of the seagulls-and broke the traditional bottle of champagne on the bow.
There was a sound of blocks being knocked away, and then… nothing. The ship failed to move. Hitler continued staring at the bow, like a cat facing a door which refused to open. One of the service chiefs looked around, as if he were asking “what do we do now?” A couple of seagulls hovered above the upper platform, as if intent on mischief.
“If this goes on much longer,” Slaney said, watching them, “the Limeys’ll be running a book on who gets crapped on first.”
There were more knocking noises from below, but still no sign of movement. Russell looked at his watch-two minutes and counting. Hitler was still staring rigidly ahead, but what else could he do? It was hardly the place for a major tantrum.
One of the service chiefs leaned over to say something, and stiffened as if he’d been slapped. And then a cheer burst forth from those lining the slipway-at last the ship was inching forward. The figures on the platform visibly relaxed, and as the stern slid into the river, Hitler, turning slightly to one side, smiled and brought a clenched fist sharply down on the railing.
“They must have sent Goering down to give it a push,” Slaney said. “Anyway,” he added, “the good news is that it won’t be ready for sea until 1941.”
The American’s train wasn’t until nine that evening, and he jumped at the offer of a lift back to Berlin in the car. There was little conversation-Slaney slept for most of the journey, despite snorting himself awake on several occasions-and Russell was left to brood on his visit to Sachsenhausen the following day. At least he’d have no trouble getting there. Come to think of it, that was what made car ownership in Germany special-the concentration camps became so accessible.
After dropping Slaney off in the city center he drove up Neue Konigstrasse to see if the Wiesners had any news, or any last-minute instructions for his visit. There was none of the former, but Frau Wiesner had written a short letter to her husband.
“They won’t allow…” Russell started to say, but then relented. “I’ll try,” he promised.
“Please read it,” she said, “and if they take it then you can tell him what’s in it.”
“Tell Daddy we love him,” Ruth said, her head suddenly appearing around the door to the other room. The voice was brittle, the smile almost unbearable.
“I will.”
He drove back down Neue Konigstrasse, and stopped at the Alexanderplatz station to call Effi. The phone just rang, so he drove home to Neuenburgerstrasse. Frau Heidegger’s skat evening was in boisterous swing, but she’d pinned a message for him beside the phone: “Herr Russell! Your fiancйe is working late tonight and early tomorrow morning. She finishes work at six tomorrow evening!”
Russell went upstairs and ran a bath. The water was almost scalding, the pain of immersion almost pleasurable.
Wednesday was a nice day for any drive but this one. Berlin looked its best under a pale sun: The Spree sparkled, the windows glittered, the brightly colored trams shone in the graystone streets. While walkers huddled against the brisk cold wind, mouths and ears swathed in wool, the Hanomag proved remarkably snug for a ten-year-old car. As he drove up Brunnenstrasse toward Gesundbrunnen he thanked his lucky stars for the Zembski cousins. More than a thousand kilometers in twelve days, and no sign of a problem.
As he drove over the Ringbahn bridge he could see the Hertha flag flying from the Plumpe grandstand. This was the way he and Effi had come on the previous Friday, but the feeling on that day had been one of leaving Hitler’s world behind. Today he was journeying into its heart, or the space where a heart might have been.
Sachsenhausen was only an hour’s drive from Berlin, a reasonable commute for the Gestapo interrogators who had previously plied their trade in the modern dungeons of Columbia Haus. According to Slaney, the new camp was a lot bigger, but neither he nor any other member of the foreign press corps had ever visited it. They had been shown around a sanitized Dachau in the early days, but that was it.
Ten kilometers short of his destination, Russell pulled into a small town garage for gas and used the stop to read Eva Wiesner’s letter to her husband. It was simple, touching, to the point. Heartbreaking.
Back on the Stralsund road, a neat sign announced the turnoff to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and Re-Educational Facility. Two or three kilometers of newly laid road led through a flat land of pastures and small woods to the gates of the camp. Parallel wire fences ran off to both left and right, one of which was clearly electrified. The gates themselves were flanked by a concrete watchtower and gatehouse.
Russell pulled up beside the latter as a man in Totenkopfverbдnde uniform emerged with palm raised and a submachine gun cradled in the other arm. Russell wound down the window and handed over his documents. The guard read through them twice, said “wait here,” and walked back inside the gatehouse. Russell heard him talking, presumably on the telephone, and a few moments later he reemerged with another guard. “Get out,” he said.
Russell obliged.
“Raise your arms.”
He did as he was told. As one guard checked his clothes and body for weapons, the other went over the car.
“What is this?” the first guard asked, taking the letter from Russell’s coat pocket.
“It’s letter for the man I’ve come to see. From his wife.”
“Not permitted,” the guard said, without apparent emotion. He crumpled the letter in his fist.
Russell opened his mouth to protest but thought better of it.
“The car’s clean,” the other guard reported.
“Turn left inside the gate, and report to the Kommandantura,” the first guard said. “It’s the second building on the left.” He handed back the documents and gestured to the guard who had now appeared inside the gates to open them. Russell thanked him with a smile-which was not returned-and drove carefully through the now-opened gates, conscious that they would soon be closing behind him. Turning left, he could see, in a wide space some distance ahead, several hundred prisoners standing in formation. Most had bare arms and heads, and must have been freezing in the cold wind. Two Totenkopfverbдnde officers were ambling along the front rank, shouting something indecipherable. One had a muzzled Alsatian on a lead.
He stopped outside the two-storey concrete building which bore the signpost KOMMANDANTURA, took one last look at the apparent roll-call, and headed for the door. On either side of the entrance two large pots held the withered remains of what might have been geraniums.
Inside, a middle-aged Gestapo officer looked up from his desk, wordlessly extended a hand for Russell’s documentation, and gestured him to a chair. As the officer examined the pass and accompanying letter he repeatedly ran his right hand through his thinning hair, as if intent on wearing out what little remained. Picking up the phone with that hand, he switched to using the other on his head. “You are needed here,” he told someone, and hung up.
A minute later the someone-a younger man with a remarkably unintelligent face-arrived. “Hauptscharfьhrer Grьndel will take you to your meeting,” the adjutant announced.
Russell stood up. “This way,” the Hauptscharfьhrer barked, leading him through a door, down a short corridor, and out through another door into the open air. A short walk down a gravel path brought them to another, larger two-storey building, and a small windowless room on the ground floor. Several chairs and a table were arranged around the walls, leaving the center of the room empty. The floor had a thin covering of sawdust.
“Why are you so interested in this Jew?” the Hauptscharfьhrer asked, sounding almost bewildered beneath the bluster.
“He helped a friend of mine-years ago,” Russell said shortly.
The Hauptscharfьhrer thought about that, and shook his head. “Wait here,” he said.
Russell waited, pacing to and fro across the room. There was a dark residue in the center of the floor which could have been dried blood. He squatted on his haunches for a better look, but admitted to himself that he didn’t really know what dried blood looked like. It was the sort of thing you needed to know in Hitler’s realm, he thought. If the Eskimos had fifty words for snow, the Nazis probably had fifty for dried blood.
The minutes stretched out. At one point a frenzied burst of barking erupted in the distance, and died out with equal abruptness. Almost twenty minutes had gone by when the door opened and Felix Wiesner was pushed inside, the Hauptscharfьhrer close behind him. Russell had expected cuts and bruises, and there were lots of them: One of Wiesner’s eyes was swollen shut, there were dark bruises on his neck, throat, and cheeks, and there was blood in his hair. But that was just the superficial damage. His right hand was encased in a bloody bandage, concealing God knew what injuries, and the doctor was hunched over, apparently unable to walk upright. He looked, Russell thought, like a man who’d just been kicked in the genitals. Many, many times.
He was obviously surprised to see someone he knew. “Come,” Russell said, helping Wiesner into a chair and feeling the pain it cost him.
The Hauptscharfьhrer, who had taken a chair by the door, watched with contempt.
“Can we speak in private?” Russell asked, knowing what the answer would be.
“No. This bastard has forfeited any right to privacy. You have ten minutes,” he added, looking at his watch.
Russell turned to Wiesner. “Your wife wrote you a letter, but they confiscated it. She told me to read it in case that happened. She wrote that she and the children love you and are dreaming of the day when you come home.”
Wiesner sighed, then made a visible effort to gather himself. “Thank you,” he said quietly, moving his mouth with obvious difficulty. “Why are you here?” he asked, as if there had to be more.
“To help, if I can,” Russell said. “You know what they accuse you of?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see this girl?”
Wiesner shifted his body in a vain search for comfort. “She came to the clinic. Wanted an abortion. Abused me when I said no.”
“You don’t know who gave her the abortion?”
“No. But look,” he said, speaking slowly, making sure the words came out right, “that doesn’t matter. That’s over. We are all guilty here.” He reached out his good hand and laid it on Russell’s arm. “You must tell my wife to go if she can. To save the girls. And Albert if he’s willing to be saved. And herself. She mustn’t count on my getting out of here. In fact, she must act as if I was already dead. Do you understand? Can you tell her that? Can you make her believe it?”
“I can tell her.”
“She knows where my stamp collection”-he used the English phrase-“is. It would be worth a lot to Stanley Gibbons. And I would be greatly in your debt.”
“No you wouldn’t,” Russell said, glancing across at the Hauptscharfьhrer, who was looking at his watch.
“I am ashamed to say it,” Wiesner continued, still struggling with every word, “but I thought Albert was exaggerating about this place-that he had been less than a mensch. Tell him I am sorry, that now I know.”
“One minute,” the Hauptscharfьhrer said.
“Don’t tell my wife how bad it is,” Wiesner said. “Tell her I’m all right. There’s nothing she can do.”
Russell looked at him. “I feel like I want to apologize” he said.
“Why? You have done nothing.”
Russell grimaced. “Maybe that’s why. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to help you, but I’ll move heaven and earth to get your family out. I promise you that.”
Wiesner nodded, as if that were a deal worth having. “Thank you,” he whispered as the Hauptscharfьhrer got to his feet.
“Time,” the man shouted with evident satisfaction. “You wait here,” he told Russell, shoving Wiesner in the direction of the door. Russell watched the doctor shuffle painfully out, arms folded against the wind, the Hauptscharfьhrer demanding greater speed. The door slammed shut behind them.
Russell sat and waited, staring numbly into space, until the Hauptscharfьhrer returned. Back at the Kommandantura he insisted on asking the Gestapo officer whether the doctor’s account of events had been checked out. The man hesitated, as if wondering whether the offer of an answer could be justified, and decided it could. “Our interrogations are not yet complete,” he said dismissively.
“You mean he’s not dead yet,” Russell said.
The Gestapo man gave him a thin smile. “What happens here is no concern of foreigners,” he said.
Several retorts sprang to mind, but silence seemed wiser. “I can leave?” he asked.
“You can leave.”
Russell walked outside to the car. The prisoners were still lined up in the distance, the icy wind still blowing. He reversed the car, drove back to the gates, and waited for them to be opened. As he motored out past the gatehouse he saw the crumpled ball of Eva Wiesner’s letter lying where the wind had blown it, up against the concrete wall. A kilometer or so down the access road he pulled to a stop, slumped forward with his head against the wheel, and let the waves of rage wash over him.
A little over an hour later he was pulling up outside the Wiesners’ apartment block in Friedrichshain. He sat in the car for a while, reluctant to go up, as if bringing the bad news would make it real. Many of the people walking by looked Jewish, and most of them looked as if they’d seen better times. Did the faces look haunted, or was he just thinking that they should? Could they see the fists coming? The coshes, the belts, the whips?
Russell wearily climbed the stairs and knocked on the familiar door. It opened immediately, as if Frau Wiesner had been waiting behind it. “He’s all right,” Russell said, the lie sour on his tongue.
The girls’ faces filled with hope, but Frau Wiesner searched his face, and saw a different truth. “They are not treating him badly?” she asked, almost incredulously.
“Not too badly,” Russell said, glancing pointedly at the girls.
Her face sank with the knowledge that he needed to talk to her alone, but she managed a smile as she shooed the girls back into the other room. “Tell me how bad it is,” she asked, once the door had closed behind them.
“He’s been beaten. But not too badly,” Russell lied. “He has cuts and bruises. What you’d expect from those animals.”
“God save us,” she said, her legs buckling.
Russell helped her into a seat, and steeled himself to pass on her husband’s words. “He gave me a message for you,” he began. “You must leave the country if you can, you and the children. He hopes he will be released eventually, but for the moment-for the moment,” he emphasized-“he says you must act as if he were dead.”
He expected tears, but she gave him a look full of defiance. “The children, yes,” she said. “But I will not go.”
“The children will need you,” Russell said. And your husband will not be coming back, he thought.
“They will be all right,” she said firmly, as if trying to convince herself. “In a decent country, they will be all right. Albert is old enough to look after the girls.”
“Where is Albert?”
“Out somewhere. But I will make sure that he looks after the girls.”
“Your husband sent him a message too,” Russell said. “He says he understands now what Albert must have been through in the camp. He wants Albert to know he’s sorry for doubting him.”
“Oh, God,” she said, burying her face in her hands.
Russell pulled her to him, feeling her silent, racking sobs against his shoulder. “One other thing,” he said when she was finally still. “I am going to England tomorrow. For a few days, taking Effi’s sister to see an English doctor. Your husband asked if I could get his stamps out of Germany, and this seems like an ideal opportunity. If you agree, I can put them in a safety deposit box in London, and leave the key with my agent. He’s trustworthy.”
“You are sure?”
“That he’s trustworthy? Yes. That I can get them past customs? Not completely, but I’m traveling with the wife of a Nazi and two children. It seems like the best chance we’re likely to get.”
She got up and disappeared into the other room, returning a few moments later with a large, soft-covered book called Achievements of the Third Reich: The First Five Years. “COLLECT ALL FIFTY FULL-COLOR STICKERS!” a splash in the corner announced, and Felix Wiesner obviously had. Stickers displaying busy factories, the People’s car, Strength through Joy cruise ships and 47 other bounties of Hitler’s reign were neatly affixed to their appropriate squares.
“The pictures are only stuck around the edges,” she explained. “There’s a stamp behind each one.”
Effi seemed happy enough to see him, but was, to most intents and purposes, still on the film-set. Russell could have shocked her out of her absorption with an account of his visit to Sachsenhausen, but there didn’t seem any point. He gave her a sanitized version of the visit, more sanitized indeed than the one he’d given Frau Wiesner. They made love that night in a friendly, somewhat desultory fashion, rather in the way, Russell imagined, that “Mother” made love to her over-sensitive SA husband.
The dawn was only breaking over the mist-shrouded Havelsee location when he dropped her off, and he arrived outside the British Embassy almost an hour before it opened. The line of Jews seeking visas was already stretching around the corner into Pariserplatz.
Coffee and hot rolls in the Cafй Kranzler restored his body, but the morning’s Beobachter further sunk his spirits. An editorial congratulated the British on their obvious willingness to give up their Empire-sarcasm was the highest form of wit in Goebbelsland-before condemning that same willingness as a clear sign of weakness and decadence. The British had succumbed to humanitдtsduselei, humanitarian nonsense. This was not something the Reich would ever countenance.
The line of people eager to escape Hitler’s paradise was receding around another corner when Russell got back to the Embassy. Martin Unsworth was in a meeting, and had nothing good to tell him when he eventually came out of it. Someone had stuck a “to be refused” note on Frau Wiesner’s file, but he didn’t know when or why. He was still working on it but, as Russell could see, they were pretty busy. Russell’s graphic account of his visit to Sachsenhausen elicited sympathy but little else. He had telegraphed the Washington Embassy with a message for Conway, Unsworth said, but had not had a reply. For all he knew, Conway was taking a few days’ holiday in New York. And in any case, he didn’t see what Conway or anyone else could do about one Jew in a concentration camp, no matter how innocent he was, or how badly he was being treated.
More resigned than raging, Russell left without hitting the banister and drove home to Neuenburgerstrasse. Frau Heidegger’s door was open, his Sudeten neighbor sitting helplessly in the chair she reserved for the sacrificial coffee-drinker. Russell flashed him a sympathetic smile and ran upstairs to pack the larger of his two worn-out suitcases with three changes of clothes, a toothbrush, and several books. The latter included Achievements of the Third Reich and the 1937 Coronation edition of the A1 Guide and Atlas of London, which he’d discovered the previous year in a secondhand bookshop on the Ku’damm. Miniatures of their majesties sat side by side over a scrolled “Long May They Reign.”
The aerodrome at Tempelhof Field was on the other side of the Kreuzberg, about three kilometers away. As they lived fairly close together, Jens had agreed to pick up Paul for a noon arrival at the aerodrome, and Russell arrived with some twenty minutes to spare. The parking lot was small, but the quality of cars-his Hanomag excepted-made up for the lack of quantity. Flying was not for the poor.
The others arrived five minutes later, Paul with a Jungvolk rucksack on his back, his face a study in repressed excitement. The fur-coated Zarah looked anxious, Lothar like a normal four-year-old. Jens ushered them into the one-storey terminal building, clearly intent on smoothing their path. As Zarah disappeared in the direction of the ladies room, he took Russell aside.
“It went well yesterday?” he asked.
Russell nodded.
“And you understand that you must not talk or write about your visit?”
Russell nodded again.
“For everyone’s sake,” Jens added pointedly.
“Look!” Paul called out from a window. “It’s our aeroplane.”
Russell joined him.
“It’s a Ju 52/3m,” Paul said knowledgeably, pointing at the plane being fueled out on the tarmac. “It has a cruising ceiling of 6,000 meters. It can go 264 kilometers an hour.”
Russell looked up. The sky was clearer than it had been. “We should see a lot,” he said.
“We’ll be over the Reich for two hours,” Paul said, as if nothing else was worth seeing.
Zarah had returned. “Time to go through customs,” Russell told his son, feeling a flutter of nerves run down his spine.
Jens led the way, chatting and laughing with the officials as if they were old friends. Zarah’s large suitcase was waved through unopened, as was Paul’s rucksack. Russell’s suitcase, however, they wanted to inspect.
He opened it up and watched, heart in mouth, while the customs official ran his hands through the clothes and came to the books. He looked at these one by one, ignoring those in English and settling on Achievements of the Third Reich. He skipped through a few pages, and gave its owner a quizzical look.
“It’s for a nephew in England,” Russell explained, suddenly conscious that Paul was looking at the book with some surprise. Don’t say anything, he silently pleaded, and Paul, catching his eye, seemed to understand.
The man put it back with the others and closed the suitcase. “Enjoy your journey,” he said.
Once Jens and Zarah had said their goodbyes, the four of them walked out across the tarmac to the silver aeroplane. It had a stubby nose, three engines-one at the front, one on either wing-and windows like rectangular portholes. LUFTHANSA was stenciled on the side, a large swastika painted on the tailfin. A short flight of steps took them up to the door, and into a vestibule behind the passenger cabin, where their cases were stowed. In the cabin itself there were five leather-covered seats on each side of the carpeted aisle, each with a high headrest. Theirs were the four at the rear, Russell sitting behind Paul, Zarah behind Lothar.
The other passengers came aboard: a youngish English couple whom Russell had never seen before and four single men, all of whom looked like wealthy businessmen of one sort or another. Judging from their clothes one was English, three German.
A mail truck drew up beside the aeroplane. The driver jumped down, opened the rear door, and dragged three sacks marked DEUTSCHESPOST to the bottom of the steps. A man in a Lufthansa uniform carried them aboard.
“We used these against the communists in Spain,” Paul said, leaning across the gangway to make himself heard above the rising roar of the engines. “They were one of the reasons we won.”
Russell nodded. A discussion with his son about the Spanish Civil War seemed overdue, but this was hardly the place. He wondered if Paul had forgotten that his parents had both been communists, or just assumed that they’d seen the error of their ways.
The pilot and co-pilot appeared, introducing themselves with bows and handshakes as they walked down the aisle to their cabin. The stewardess followed in their tracks, making sure that everyone had fastened their leather safety belts. She was a tall, handsome-looking blond of about nineteen with a marked Bavarian accent. A predictable ambassador for Hitler’s Germany.
Out on the tarmac a man began waving the plane forward, and the pilot set them in motion, bumping across the concrete surface toward the end of the runway. There was no pause when they reached it, just a surge of the engines and a swift acceleration. Through the gap between seat and wall, Russell could see Paul’s ecstatic face pressed to the window. On the other side of the aisle, Zarah’s eyes were closed in fright.
Seconds later, Berlin was spreading out below them: the tangle of lines leading south from Anhalter and Potsdamer stations, the suburbs of Schonefeld, Wilmersdorf, Grunewald. “There’s my school!” Paul almost shouted. “And there’s the Funkturm, and the Olympic Stadium!”
Soon the wide sheet of the Havelsee was receding behind them, the villages, fields, and forests of the northern plain laid out below. They were about a mile up, Russell reckoned, high enough to make anything look beautiful. From this sort of height a Judenfrei village looked much like one that wasn’t.
They flew west, over the wide traffic-filled Elbe and the sprawling city of Hannover, crossing into Dutch airspace soon after three o’clock. Rotterdam appeared beneath the starboard wing, the channels of the sea-bound Rhine-or whatever the Dutch called it-beneath the other. As they crossed the North Sea coast the plane was rocked by turbulence, causing Zarah to clutch the handrests and Paul to give his father a worried look. Russell gave him a reassuring smile. Lothar, he noticed, seemed unconcerned.
The turbulence lasted through most of the sea crossing, and the serene sea below them seemed almost an insult. Looking down at one Hook of Holland-bound steamer Russell felt a hint of regret that they’d traveled by air-not for the lack of comfort, but for the lack of romance. He remembered his first peacetime trip to the Continent-the first few had been on troopships during the War-the train journey through Kent’s greenery, the Ostend ferry with its bright red funnels, the strange train waiting in the foreign station, the sense of striking out into the unknown. He hadn’t been on a plane for the better part of ten years, but he hadn’t missed them.
But Paul was having the time of his life. “Can you see England yet?” he asked his father.
“Yes,” Russell realized. The Thanet coast was below him. A large town. Margate probably, or Ramsgate. Places he’d never been. And within minutes, or so it seemed, the southeastern suburbs of London were stretching beneath them in the afternoon sun, mile upon mile of neat little houses in a random mesh of roads and railways.
The pilot brought the plane down on the Croydon runway with only the slightest of jolts. The entry formalities were just that, and the car Jens had ordered was waiting at the terminal doors. They drove up the Brighton road, slowed by the busy late afternoon traffic. Paul marveled at the double-decker buses, but was more astonished by the paucity of buildings reaching above two storeys. It was only after Brixton that third, fourth, and fifth floors were grudgingly added.
Russell asked the driver to take them across Westminster Bridge, and was rewarded by the singular sight of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament aglow in the light of the setting sun. As they drove up Whitehall he pointed out Downing Street and the Horseguards; as they swung round Trafalgar Square, Nelson on his lonely column. The Strand seemed choked with buses, but they finally arrived at the Savoy to find that their fifth-floor rooms overlooked the Thames.
They must have cost a fortune, Russell thought. He and Paul looked out of the window at the barges on the tide-swollen river, the electric trains of the Southern Railway moving in and out of Charing Cross Station. Away to their left the piles of the new Waterloo Bridge stuck out of the water like temple remains. “This is good,” Paul said, with the air of someone truly satisfied.
Russell got an outside line and phoned his London agent Solly Bernstein, hoping to catch him before he went home. “I’m just on my way out of the door,” Bernstein told him. “What the hell are you doing in London?”
“Hoping to see you. Can you squeeze me in tomorrow afternoon?”
“Ah, just this once. Four o’clock?”
“Fine.”
Russell hung up and explained the call to Paul. “I’m hungry,” was the response.
They ate with Zarah and Lothar in the hotel restaurant. The food was excellent, but Zarah, clearly anxious about the next morning, just picked at her plate. When she and Lothar wished them goodnight and retired to their room, Russell and his son took a stroll down to the river, and along the Embankment toward the Houses of Parliament. Opposite County Hall they stopped and leaned against the parapet, the high tide slurping against the wall below. Pedestrians and buses were still crowding Westminster Bridge, long chains of lighted carriages rumbling out of Charing Cross. A line of laden coal barges headed downstream, dark silhouettes against the glittering water. Some lines of Eliot slipped across his brain:
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs
He had hated The Waste Land when it came out-its elegant despair had felt like defeatism. But the words had stuck. Or some of them at least.
“It’s been a long day,” he told Paul. “Time for bed.”
Zarah looked exhausted over breakfast next morning, as if she’d hardly slept. Lothar, by contrast, seemed more animated than usual. Paul, asked by his father for an opinion of Zarah’s son, had shrugged and said “He’s just a bit quiet, that’s all.”
Reception suggested a bank on the Strand which offered currency exchange and a probable safety deposit service, and Russell left Paul examining the huge model of the Queen Mary in the hotel lobby while he swapped his and Zarah’s Reichsmarks for pounds. Safety deposit boxes were available, the cashier informed him proudly. The bank was open until three.
Their appointment in Harley Street was at 11:00, and Zarah had booked a taxi for 10:00. Trafalgar Square was busy, but the cab then raced around Piccadilly and up Regent Street, delivering them to the doctor’s door with forty-five minutes to spare. A stern-looking receptionist showed them into the waiting room, which was full of highly polished wooden chairs. Paul found a few children’s comics among the society magazines, and went through one with Lothar, pointing out what was happening in the various pictures.
“How did you find this doctor?” Russell asked.
“A friend of Jens at the Embassy here,” she replied. “He said this man was highly thought of. And he speaks a little German.”
“Little,” as they eventually discovered, was the operative word, and Russell had to function as a full-time interpreter. Doctor Gordon McAllister was a tall ginger-haired man in his forties, with a rather gaunt face, a slight Scottish accent, and an almost apologetic smile. He seemed a nice man, and one who clearly liked children. Effi always claimed that doctors who specialized in women’s problems were usually women-haters, but apparently the same logic did not apply to pediatricians.
His office was a bright, spacious room with windows overlooking the street. In addition to his desk, there were several comfortable chairs and a large wooden box full of children’s toys and books. “So tell me about Lothar,” he asked Zarah through Russell.
She started off nervously but grew more confident as she went on, thanks in large part to the doctor’s obvious involvement. She said that Lothar sometimes seemed uninterested in everything, that he didn’t respond when people talked to him, that at other times he would seem to suddenly lose interest in whatever it was he was doing, and just stop. “He’ll be in the middle of eating,” she said, “and just leave the table and go and do something else. And he doesn’t always seem to understand what I’m telling him to do,” she added.
“He’s four, yes?” the doctor asked.
“And three months.”
“Can he recognize different animals?” He walked over to the box and took out a tiger and a rabbit. “Lothar, what’s this?” he asked in German, holding out the tiger.
“A tiger.”
“And this?”
“A rabbit.”
“No problems there, then. How about colors? Can he recognize them?”
He could. A red balloon, a blue sky, a yellow canary. Having done so, without warning, he walked across to the window and looked out.
The doctor asked Zarah about the birth, about Lothar’s eating habits, whether there was any history of problems in her or her husband’s family. She answered each question, and, in a halting voice, volunteered the information that she had considered aborting Lothar before he was born. “I can’t help thinking there’s a connection,” she said, clearly close to tears.
“You’re completely wrong about that,” the doctor insisted, the moment Russell had translated her words. “There is no possible connection.”
“Then what is it?” she asked, wiping a tear away.
“Does he get tired easily? Does he seem weak-physically weak, I mean? Can he lift things.”
She thought about that. “Jens-my husband-he sometimes says that Lothar lacks strength in his fingers. He doesn’t like carrying things. And yes, he does get tired.”
The doctor leaned forward on his desk, fingers intertwined beneath his chin. “I don’t think there is anything seriously wrong with Lothar,” he said. “Or at least, nothing that cannot be corrected. There is no name for this, but it isn’t uncommon. Essentially, he has a weaker link with the rest of the world than most people do, but everyone is different in this respect-he’s just a bit more different than the norm. And his link can be strengthened. What Lothar needs”-he ticked them off on his fingers-“is fresh air and exercise, really good, nutrient-rich food-fresh eggs, fresh fruit, fresh everything-and physical stimulation. Regular massages would help. Give and take games-the sort that involve instant physical reactions. And music. All these things stimulate the body, make it more responsive.”
“But there’s nothing seriously wrong?” Zarah asked.
“Not in my judgment. No.”
“And he doesn’t need any tests?”
“No.”
She took a deep breath. “Thank you, doctor.” She reached inside her handbag for the neat package of pound notes.
“You pay the receptionist,” he said with a smile.
But not usually with cash, Russell thought, as they waited for the taxi which the receptionist had ordered. Zarah, who looked as if a huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders, was eager to get back to the Savoy, where she could telephone Jens. “It’s wonderful news,” Russell told her, and received the warmest of smiles in return.
Once back at the hotel, they agreed to meet for lunch in an hour. Leaving Paul exploring the lobby, Russell retrieved Achievements of the Third Reich from their room, and came back down.
“Here’s the room key,” he told Paul. “I’ll be back in half an hour or so.”
Paul was looking at the book. “Where are you taking that?” he asked. “I didn’t know you had a nephew in England,” he added suspiciously.
“I don’t,” Russell admitted. “I’ll explain it all this afternoon.”
He walked down to the Continental Bank, paid a year’s rent in cash for the safety deposit box, and was shown into a small room with a single upright chair and table. A clerk bought him a rectangular metal box and two keys, and told him to press the buzzer when he was finished. “I already am,” Russell said, placing Achievements of the Third Reich inside and locking the box shut. If the clerk was surprised by the nature of the deposit he didn’t show it.
“There’s more to the Nazis than meets the eye,” Russell said.
“I don’t doubt it,” the clerk replied gloomily.
Lunch was an altogether more cheerful affair than breakfast or the previous night’s dinner, but 24 largely sleepless hours had taken their toll on Zarah. “I’m going to take a nap,” she said. “We’ll see you this evening.”
Asked if there was anything he wanted to do, Paul suggested a walk down to Big Ben. “I didn’t see it properly in the dark,” he explained.
They set off down the Strand, stopping in at Charing Cross to see the Southern trains and admire the Cross itself. After circling the Trafalgar Square ponds and climbing on a lion they marched down the Mall toward Buckingham Palace. “The King’s out,” Russell said, pointing out the lowered flag.
“Kings are outdated,” Paul told him.
They cut through to Parliament Square and ventured out onto Westminster Bridge, stopping in the middle to turn and admire Big Ben. “You were going to tell me about that book,” Paul said rather hesitantly, as if unsure how much he wanted to know.
A small voice in Russell’s head reminded him how many children had already denounced their parents to the authorities in Germany, and a whole host of other voices laughed out loud. And if he was so wrong about his own son, he told himself, then he probably deserved to be denounced.
He told Paul about the Wiesners: the family’s need to emigrate, the father’s arrest, the certain confiscation of their savings-the savings they would need to start a new life somewhere else.
“The savings are in that book?” Paul asked incredulously.
“Valuable stamps,” Russell told him. “Hidden behind the stickers.”
Paul looked surprised, impressed, and finally dubious. “They collected the stamps? Like ordinary Germans?”
“They are ordinary Germans, Paul. Or they were. How else do you imagine they would get hold of them?”
Paul opened his mouth, then obviously thought better of whatever it was he was going to say. “They paid you to bring them?” he asked, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.
“No. I did it because I like them. They’re nice people.”
“I see,” Paul said, though he clearly didn’t.
It was almost 3:30. Back in Parliament Square they joined the queue for a 24 bus, and managed to find seats upstairs for the short ride up Whitehall and Charing Cross Road. Solly Bernstein’s office was two storeys above a steam laundry in Shaftsbury Avenue and accustomed, as he frequently observed, to hot air. A bulky, middle-aged man with gold-rimmed glasses, a notable nose and longish black hair, Russell’s agent seemed unchanged by the last three years.
“This is my son, Solly,” Russell said.
“My, he’s bigger than I imagined. Welcome to England, young man.”
“Thank you,” Paul said in English.
“Ah, a linguist. I have just the book for him.” He searched through the piles on the floor and extracted a large picture book of world aeroplanes. “Have a look at that and tell me what you think,” he said, handing it over. “Throw those books on the floor,” he added, indicating a loaded seat in the corner.
He turned back to Russell’s grinning face. “It’s good to see you in the flesh. Three years, isn’t it? A long time in today’s world.”
“Something like that,” Russell agreed, taking a seat.
“You haven’t come to tell me you’ve found a better agent?”
“Good God, no.”
“Well then, I can tell you we’ve sold the “Germany’s Neighbours” series in both Canada and Australia. And here”-he rummaged in a drawer-“is a check to prove it.”
Russell took it, and passed a sheaf of papers in the opposite direction. “One for each series,” he said. “I thought I’d save the postage.”
“An expensive way to do it. You came by train, I take it?”
“Nope. We flew.”
Bernstein’s eyebrows rose. “Even more expensive. My percentage is obviously too low.”
“I came for another reason. Two, actually. And one was to ask you a favor.” Russell outlined the Wiesners’ circumstances, his hope that at least some members of the family would be given exit visas before a war broke out. Paul, he noticed, was listening with great interest to his recital. “I’ve just put the family wealth in a safety deposit box,” he told the unusually sober Bernstein. “There are two keys, and I was hoping you’d hang on to one of them. They’ll have the other, but there’s a good chance it would be confiscated at the border.”
“Why, in heaven’s name?”
“Simple spite. If Jews are caught carrying a key out, the Nazis will guess it’s for something like this.”
“I’d be happy to keep one of them.”
“Thanks,” Russell said, handing the key over. “That’s a weight off my mind.” He stole a glance at Paul, who looked more confused than anything else.
“How long are you here for?” Bernstein asked.
“Oh, only till Sunday. I came with my girlfriend’s sister-that was the other reason. She wanted to have her son examined by an English doctor. A long story. But if there’s a war, well, I guess I’ll be back for the duration.”
“Without him?” Bernstein asked, nodding in Paul’s direction.
“Without him.”
Bernstein made a sympathetic face. “Anyway, at least you’ve got a lot of work at the moment. No other ideas you want to talk about?”
“Not at the moment.” He looked at his watch. “We’d better go. Paul?”
His son closed the book and brought it over. “You can keep it,” Bernstein said. “Practice your English on the captions.”
“Thank you,” Paul said. “Very much,” he added carefully.
“It’s working already.” He offered Paul his hand, then did the same to Russell.
“He was a nice man,” Paul said, as they made their way down through the steamy stairwell.
“He is,” Russell agreed, as they reached the pavement. “And he’s Jewish,” he added, hoping that Paul was not going to wipe the handshake off on his coat.
He didn’t, but he did look upset.
“They’re wrong about the Jews,” Russell said firmly. “They may be right about many things, but they’re wrong about the Jews.”
“But everyone says…”
“Not everyone. I don’t. Your mother doesn’t. Your Uncle Thomas doesn’t. Effi doesn’t.”
“But the government says…”
“Governments can be wrong. They’re just people. Like you and me. Look what foreign governments did to Germany in 1918. They were wrong. It happens, Paul. They get things wrong.”
Paul looked torn between anger and tears.
“Look. Let’s not spoil the trip arguing about politics. We’re in London-let’s enjoy it.” They were walking down Charing Cross Road by this time. “I know where we can get a cup of tea and a cake,” he said, steering Paul off to the left. A few minutes later they were on the edge of Covent Garden market, dodging trucks piled high with crates of fruit and vegetables. Russell led them into one of the cafйs.
It was full of men sawing at rashers of bacon and dribbling egg down their chins. Fried grease in its gaseous, liquid, and solid forms filled the air, lay congealing on the tables and covered the walls. England, Russell thought. He had a sudden memory of a similar cafй just outside Victoria Station, where he’d eaten his last meal before service in France. Twenty-one years ago.
Russell bought two large cups of tea and two aptly named rock cakes. Paul nibbled at the edges of his, rightfully fearing for his teeth, but liked the tea once he’d added four teaspoons of sugar. “The cake is terrible,” he told his father in German, causing several sets of less-than-friendly eyes to swivel their way.
“Do you know anything about football?” Russell asked the nearest man in English.
“Maybe.”
“Are there any games on in London tomorrow?”
“Arsenal are playing Chelsea,” another man volunteered.
“At Highbury?”
“Of course.”
“And the games still kick off at three? I’ve been working abroad for a while,” he added in explanation.
“So we see,” the first man said with a leer. “Yeah, they still kick off at three.”
“Thanks. Would you like to see a game tomorrow?” he asked Paul. “Arsenal are playing Chelsea.”
His son’s eyes lit up. “Arsenal are the best!”
They finished their teas, abandoned the half-excavated rock cakes, and picked their way through the vegetable market, taking particular care outside the peel-strewn frontage of a banana wholesaler. It was getting dark now, and Russell wasn’t sure where he was. Looking for a street sign they found one for Bow Street.
“Bow Street,” Paul echoed. “This is where Chief Inspector Teal brings the men he’s arrested.”
Away to their left a blue light was shining. They walked up the street and stood across from the forbidding-looking police station, half-expecting the fictional inspector to emerge through the double doors, busily chewing on a wad of Wrigley’s as he adjusted his bowler hat.
Back on the Strand they found the Stanley Gibbons stamp shop was still open, and Paul spent a happy twenty minutes deciding which packets of cheap assorted stamps he most wanted. Russell looked in the catalogue for the ones Wiesner had given him in payment and was surprised to find how valuable they were. He wondered how many pounds-worth were nestling behind the stickers in their safety deposit box.
Zarah was more talkative at dinner than he ever remembered, and seemed newly determined to encourage the idea of his marrying her sister. She and Lothar accompanied them on their after-dinner walk this time, and Lothar, like Paul, seemed enthralled by the huge glittering river and its never-ending procession of barges and other boats. Russell and Zarah agreed upon their plans for Saturday: shopping in the morning, football for him and Paul in the afternoon, dinner with Jens’s embassy friend for her and Lothar in the evening. When they said goodnight outside her and Lothar’s room, she thanked him warmly for his help. They’d almost become friends, Russell thought. Effi would be amazed.
Paul was yawning, but Russell felt far too restless for sleep. “Bedtime for you,” he told his son. “I’m going back downstairs for a drink. I won’t be long.”
“You’re just going downstairs?”
“Yes. No stamp-smuggling tonight. Just a drink.”
Paul grinned. “All right.”
For a Friday night, the cocktail lounge seemed unusually empty. Russell bought a pint of bitter, parked himself on a stool at the end of the bar, and played with a beer mat. The taste of the English beer made him feel nostalgic. He had thought about taking Paul out to Guildford, to show him the house where he’d spent most of his own boyhood, but there wouldn’t be time. The next trip perhaps, if there was one.
He pictured the house, the large garden, the steeply sloping street he’d walked to school each day. He couldn’t say he’d had a happy childhood, but it hadn’t been particularly unhappy either. He hadn’t appreciated it at the time, but his mother had never really settled in England, despite almost thirty years of trying. His father’s inability or unwillingness to recognize that fact had undermined everything else. There had been a lot of silence in that house.
He should write to her, he thought. A quick trip to reception provided him with a few sheets of beautifully embossed Savoy writing paper, and he ordered another pint. But after telling her where he was and why, and sketching out the plot of Effi’s new film, he could think of nothing else to say. She hadn’t seen Paul since he was four, and it would take a book to explain him and their relationship.
He comforted himself with the knowledge that her letters to him were equally inadequate. On those rare occasions when, as adults, they’d been together, they had both enjoyed the experience-he was sure of that-but even then they’d hardly said anything to each other. His mother wasn’t much of a talker or a thinker, which was why she had never liked Ilse. She and Effi, on the other hand, would probably get on like a house on fire. They were doers.
A shadow crossed the paper as a man slid onto the stool next to his. He had short, dark, brilliantined hair, a sharpish face with a small moustache, and skin that looked unusually pink. He looked about twenty, but was probably older.
“John Russell?” he asked.
Oh God, Russell thought. Here we go again. “I think you’re mistaking me for someone else,” he said. “I’m Douglas Fairbanks Jr.”
“Very good,” the man said admiringly. “Can I get you another drink?”
“No thanks.”
“Well, I think I’ll have one,” he said, raising a finger to the distant barman.
“Are you old enough?” Russell asked.
His new companion looked hurt. “Look, there’s no need to be offensive. I’m just…” He paused to order a Manhattan. “Look, I think you know Trelawney-Smythe in Berlin.”
“We’ve met.”
“Well, he passed your name on to us, and…”
“Who might you be?”
“War Office. A department of the War Office. My name’s Simpson. Arnold Simpson.”
“Right,” Russell said.
Simpson took an appreciative sip of his Manhattan. “We checked up on you-we have to do that, you understand-and it looks as if Trelawney-Smythe was right. You are a perfect fit. You speak German like a native, you have family and friends there, you even have Nazi connections. You’re ideally placed to work for us.”
Russell smiled. “You may be right about means and opportunity, but where’s the motive. Why would I want to work for you?”
Simpson looked taken aback. “How about patriotism?” he asked.
“I’m as patriotic as the next businessman,” Russell said wryly.
“Ah. Very good. But seriously.”
“I was being serious.”
Simpson took a larger sip of the Manhattan. “Mr. Russell, we know your political history. We know you’ve been badgering the Berlin Embassy about a Jewish family. Whatever you write for the Soviets, we know you don’t like the Nazis. And there’s a war coming, for God’s sake. Don’t you want to do your bit to defeat them?”
“Mr. Simpson, can’t you people take no for an answer?”
Now the young man looked affronted. “Of course,” he said. “But…”
“Goodnight, Mr. Simpson.”
They spent the first part of Saturday morning following Zarah in and out of clothes stores on Bond Street, the second scouring Hamleys for the stimulating toys which Dr. McAllister had recommended. They found nothing which Zarah considered suitable in either. “German toys are much better,” she announced with a satisfied air on the Regents Street pavement, and Paul agreed with her. There had been no dead soldiers, and those still breathing had been markedly inferior to the ones back home.
They parted at midday, Russell and Paul wending their way through the streets beyond Oxford Street to the trolleybus terminus at Howland Street. The 627 took them up the Hampstead, Camden, and Seven Sisters Roads to Finsbury Park, where the pubs were already overflowing with men en route to the match. It was a cold afternoon, the would-be spectators exhaling clouds of breath and clapping their gloved hands together as they threaded their way down the back streets to the field. A rosette seller offered red and white for Arsenal, blue and white for Chelsea, and Paul wanted both. “Covering the field, eh?” the man asked with a grin. He had a red and white scarf wrapped around his head, and a flat cap rammed on top of it.
The match itself was a disappointment-another point in Germany’s column as far as Paul was concerned. It was hard to argue with him: If this was the best football in the world, then the world of football was in trouble. There was none of the magic England had shown in Berlin nine months earlier. In fact, both teams seemed markedly less endowed with basic skills than poor old Hertha.
What Paul did find fascinating was the crowd. He had no way of appreciating the wit, but he reveled in the sheer volume of noise, and the swirling currents of emotion which rose and fell all around him. “It’s so…” he began, as they crunched their way out across the carpet of roasted peanut shells, but an end to the sentence eluded him.
At the Arsenal station they shared a seemingly endless tunnel to the platform with several thousand others, and their Piccadilly Line train was full to bursting until it reached King’s Cross. After the relative spaciousness of the U-bahn, the train itself seemed ancient, airless, and claustrophobic-another point in the German column.
They walked back to the Strand through Covent Garden Market, and ate another delicious dinner in the Savoy restaurant. Paul was quiet, as if busy absorbing his impressions of the last two days. He seemed, Russell thought, more German somehow. But that, he supposed, was only to be expected in England. He hadn’t expected it, though.
On the way to breakfast next morning he stopped off at reception to consult the hotel’s ABC Railway Guide, and after they’d eaten he told Paul there was something he wanted to show him. They took a bus up Kingsway and Southampton Row to Euston, and walked through the giant archway to the platforms. The object of their visit was already sitting in Platform 12-the blue and silver Coronation Scot. They bought platform tickets and walked up to where a dozen youngsters were paying court to the gleaming, hissing, streamlined Princess Alice.
“It’s beautiful,” Paul said, and Russell felt a ridiculous surge of pride in his native country. Paul was right. The German streamliners reeked of speed and power, but this train had a grace they lacked. One mark at least for England.
Back at the Savoy they packed, took a last look at the Thames, and joined Zarah and Lothar in the lobby. The car was on time, the Sunday roads empty, and they arrived almost two hours early. While Paul stood with his face glued to the window, Russell scanned the News of the World for a clue to British concerns. He discovered that a vicar had been assaulted by a young woman in a village street, and that now was the time to protect your crocuses from sparrows. A half page-ad for constipation relief featured a wonderful photograph-the man really did look constipated. And much to Russell’s relief, the game they’d seen the previous afternoon got a highly critical write-up-so at least it wasn’t the norm.
It was the same aeroplane and crew which had brought them over. This time though, the clouds were lower, the flight rockier, the view more restricted. Jens, waiting for them at Tempelhof, hugged Zarah and Lothar as if they’d been away for weeks and thanked Russell profusely. He also offered to take Paul home, but Russell demurred, unwilling to sacrifice half an hour of his son’s company.
As it was, Paul sat mostly in silence as they drove west, gazing out of the window at his home city. “It seems… well, strange,” he said, as they turned into his road. “After being there, the idea of a war against England seems… it seems silly.”
‘It is,” Russell agreed. But coming nevertheless. And, in one way, the sooner the better. Say it lasted four years, like the last one. Assuming they stuck to the current call-up at eighteen, Paul would be drafted in March 1945. For the war to be over by then, it had to get started early in 1941.
No need to worry, Russell told himself. Hitler wouldn’t be able to wait that long.
Blue Scarf
After spending the night with Effi, Russell drove her out to the studio for an early start. She was pleased but not surprised by Dr. McAllister’s diagnosis-“I said there was nothing wrong with him!”-but despondent about Mother. The director was a mechanic; her co-stars all thought, wrongly, that they were God’s gift to acting; the on-set adviser from the Propaganda Ministry kept trying to clarify the film’s “social role” by inserting lines that even a baboon would have trouble misunderstanding. “I suppose I should be grateful,” she said, as they drove in through the studio gates: “I’ll probably go down in history as one of Germany’s great comediennes.”
Afterward, Russell drove to Zoo Station, where he bought breakfast and a paper. Nothing unusual seemed to have happened during his time in England. The widening of the Kiel Canal had been decreed: It obviously wasn’t big enough for the Bismarck. Hitler had opened the International Motor Show just down the road, and unveiled a model of the new people’s car. For 950 marks-about 50 British pounds-the average German would get a small five-seater, with deliveries to begin in about fifteen months time. Having made an appearance at this birth, the Fьhrer had proceeded to the funeral of some obscure Carinthian Gauleiter-the man had probably held his hand when the bullets started flying in 1923. He’d certainly been given all the Nazi trimmings: swastikas everywhere, black banners with runic emblems, lines of flaming pylons to light his way across the Hesperus.
Back at Neuenburgerstrasse, Frau Heidegger was waiting to ply Russell with coffee. She was elated by his impression of British unreadiness for war, which she thought, rather perceptively, both lessened the chance of war and increased the chance of German success if there was one. Before retiring upstairs to work, Russell phoned Unsworth at the British Embassy. He was told that Conway had been in touch, and that representations were being made in the appropriate quarters. Russell thought about visiting the Wiesners but decided against it. He had nothing really to tell them, and instinctively felt that it was safer to limit his visits to the scheduled lessons.
He spent most of the next 48 hours working in his room, writing the fourth Pravda article, which he planned to deliver in Posen that weekend, and sketching out a piece on artists and entertainers for the “Ordinary Germans” series. His only trip out was to the Greiner Works in Wedding, one of the Reich’s major production centers for military vehicles. Expecting suspicion and probable refusals, he went straight to the Labor Front office, and was almost laughably surprised by the warm welcome he received. Yes, of course the German worker was torn between his love of peace and his desire to arm the Fatherland against its foes. What human being would not be? And of course Herr Russell could talk to the workers about their feelings. The rest of the world should be given every chance to understand both the German hunger for peace and the nation’s determination to defend its rights and its people.
After this, talking to several groups of workers in the canteen proved something of an anti-climax. Most were understandably reticent, and those prepared to speak their minds had nothing surprising to say. It was a job, that was all. As usual, the pay was bad, the hours too long, management more of a hindrance than a help. The Labor Front at least listened, if only to ward off potential trouble. Open discussions were infinitely preferable to either noncooperation-slow working, mostly-or the sort of covert resistance that could lead to sabotage. Reading between the lines and facial expressions of the men to whom he spoke, Russell decided that the level of noncooperation was probably significant without seriously affecting production levels or quality, and that the amount of real resistance was negligible. And when war came, he guessed, both would decrease.
Wednesday morning, he called in at the embassy on his way to the Wiesners’. The moment he saw Unsworth’s face he knew what had happened. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“The official line is that he hanged himself,” Unsworth said. “I’m sorry.”
Russell sat down. A wave of sadness-of utterly useless sadness-seemed to wash over him. “When?” he asked. “Has the family been told?”
Unsworth shrugged. “We received this note from the Foreign Ministry this morning.” He passed it over. “A reply to our representations on Friday.”
The message comprised one sentence: “In response to your enquiries of 18 February, we regret to inform you that the prisoner Wiesner has taken his own life, presumably out of guilt for his crime.”
Wiesner had been dead within two days of his visit, Russell thought. Beaten to death, most probably. A blessed release, perhaps. But not for his family.
“We assume the family has been informed,” Unsworth was saying.
“Why?” Russell asked, handing back the note. “Because it’s the decent thing to do?”
Unsworth nodded, as if taking the point.
“What about the visa situation?” Russell wanted to know. “There’s nothing to keep them here now. And surely…”
“I’m told the decisions on the next batch are being taken tomorrow afternoon. If you come back Friday morning I hope I’ll have some good news for you.”
Russell walked down the stairs and out past the line of visa-seekers on Unter den Linden. Once behind the Hanomag’s steering wheel he just sat there, staring down toward the Brandenburg Gate and the distant trees of the Tiergarten.
Eventually, almost somnambulantly, he put the car into gear and moved off, circling Pariserplatz and heading back up Unter den Linden toward Alexanderplatz and Neue Konigstrasse. What did you say to someone whose husband or father has just been murdered for the sin of being born to a particular race? What could you say? All around him the people of Berlin were going about their usual business, walking and driving and shopping and talking, laughing at jokes and smiling in friendship. If they’d heard of Sachsenhausen, they no doubt imagined neat rows of barracks, and some well-merited hard labor for the criminals and perverts residing there at the state’s pleasure. They hadn’t seen a man they knew and liked twisted and torn out of human shape for the pleasure of others.
He couldn’t even tell the story, not without Jens suffering for it. And even if he could, he had no evidence to back up his suppositions. The Nazis would claim that a crime like Wiesner’s was bound to provoke an angry reaction from his Aryan guards, and that the wretched Jew had simply taken the easy way out when he received a few well-deserved bruises. What, they would say, was the problem? Everyone had behaved in a racially appropriate manner, and the world had one less Jew to worry about.
On the Wiesners’ street he sat in the car, putting off the moment of truth. There was another car parked on the other side of the road, its windows open, with two bored-looking men smoking in the front seat. They looked like Kripo, Russell thought, and they were probably on loan to the Gestapo, which was notorious for believing itself above the more mundane aspects of police work.
Well, there was no law against teaching Jewish children English. He got out, walked up the familiar steps, rapped on the familiar door. An unfamiliar face appeared in the opening. A rather attractive woman, with a mass of curly brown hair and suspicious eyes. In her late thirties, Russell guessed.
He introduced himself, and her face changed. “Come in,” she said. “You’ve heard?” she added.
“About Dr. Wiesner’s death? Yes. Half an hour ago, at the British Embassy.”
As he spoke, Marthe Wiesner emerged from the other room, closing the door behind her. “Herr Russell…” she began.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am to hear about your father,” he said. There were two broken table lamps on the wooden chest, he noticed, and the curtain rail was hanging at an awkward angle.
“Thank you,” she said stiffly. She seemed calm-almost overly so-but for the moment at least the light in her eyes had gone out. “This is Sarah Grostein,” she said, introducing the other woman. “She’s an old friend of the family. Mother is… well, you can imagine. The shock was terrible. For all of us, of course. Mother and Ruth are sleeping at the moment.”
“Please give her my condolences,” Russell said, the hollow words tripping off his tongue like… He wondered whether to leave the safety deposit box key with Marthe, especially in the presence of a stranger. He decided against. “I need to talk to your mother,” he said. “Not now, of course,” he added quickly. “I’ll come at the usual time on Friday.”
Marthe nodded, just as the sound of wailing erupted in the other room. A few second later Eva Wiesner called her elder daughter’s name. “I must go…”
“Of course.” He waited until the door had closed before asking Sarah Grostein when the family had heard of Felix Wiesner’s death.
“Saturday evening,” she said. “I wasn’t here of course, but the police behaved abominably. I can understand why Albert lost his head.”
Russell’s heart sunk. “What did he do?”
“Oh, don’t you know? He attacked the Gestapo bastard, hit him with one of these table lamps. The man’s in the hospital. They said he might die, but Marthe says it didn’t look that bad. I think they were just trying to scare Eva.”
“Where have they taken Albert?” he asked. The wailing was quieter, but just as insistent.
She gave a bitter laugh. “They haven’t. He got away. Pushed the other bastard over the sofa and ran for it. He got out the back-there’s a maze of alleys out there-and the conscious one knew better than to follow him. He wouldn’t have found Albert, and he knew damn well he might not come out again.
“Where’s Albert now?”
“No one knows,” she said, leaving Russell with the distinct impression that she was lying. “They came back yesterday,” she went on. “Shouted at Eva to tell them where he was, which she couldn’t have told them if she’d wanted to. But they didn’t arrest her. Maybe they realized that there was no one else to look after the girls, that they’d be up to their eyes in paperwork if they tried to send them away somewhere.”
“Maybe,” Russell agreed. He thought it more likely that the British expression of interest in Wiesner’s fate had kept the Gestapo in check. “Can you pass on a message to Frau Wiesner? Tell her…” He paused. “I was going to say that it looks like the children will get British visas in the next week or so, but it doesn’t seem as though Albert will have any use for his. If he goes to the Germans for an exit visa, they’ll just arrest him. Still, the girls should be able to go. And maybe their mother, too.”
“She won’t leave Albert.”
“Perhaps he can persuade her.”
“Perhaps. But the Gestapo are parked outside, which makes arranging meetings rather difficult.”
He looked at her, standing there with arms crossed and anger simmering behind her eyes. “Are you trying to get out?” he asked.
“Not at present,” she said, in a tone that didn’t invite questioning.
“I’ll get going,” he said. “I’ll be back on Friday morning.”
She nodded, opened the door, and closed it behind him. He walked out to the car, ignoring the watching police, and drove it slowly down Neue Konigstrasse toward the city center. He knew there was nothing more he could do, but that knowledge did nothing to diminish the feelings of anger and helplessness which dogged him through the rest of that day and the next. By the time he entered the British Embassy on Friday morning he felt ready to explode, but equally certain that murdering anyone other than Hitler would only make matters worse.
British entry visas for the three Wiesner children were waiting on Unsworth’s desk, but Unsworth had the decency not to be too pleased with himself. “I’ve found out why the mother’s been refused,” he told Russell. “The intelligence people have quite a dossier on her. She was a Spartacist-you know what they were? Of course you do. Apparently they grade communists out of ten, and anyone scoring over seven is refused immigration. Eva Wiesner’s an eight.”
Russell was astonished. “How recent is this information?”
“It isn’t. The dossier has nothing later than 1919, so she probably gave up politics when she got married. But that won’t help her. An eight’s an eight-that’s what their man told me…”
“Trelawney-Smythe?”
“You’ve met him. No exceptions, he said.”
Russell didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I don’t suppose it matters,” he said, before explaining about Albert.
Half an hour later he was back in Friedrichshain. This time Frau Wiesner opened the door, and managed a slight smile as she let him in. After brushing aside his condolences, she sat him down and made them both coffee. “He was a wonderful man,” she said. “And nothing can take that away from him, or from me.”
He gave her the British entry visas for the three children, and explained why she was being refused.
She smiled sadly at that. “I thought that must be the reason,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter now. Take this back,” she added, handing over Albert’s visa. “Someone else can take his place.”
He also gave her the safety deposit box key, and a piece of paper containing two names and addresses. “This is the bank where the box is, and this is my agent in London, Solly Bernstein. Get the girls to memorize it all, and then burn it,” he said. “And I think it would probably be safer for you to keep the key yourself. Solly has another one, and they can use that when they get to London.”
She stared at the writing, as if it were in a foreign language.
“Have you seen Albert?” he asked.
She shook her head. “But he’s all right.”
After leaving effi at the studio early the next morning, he took the car back to her street and walked to Zoo Station. With an hour to wait for the Warsaw train, he had breakfast in the buffet before climbing up to the eastbound platforms. It was the first time, he realized, that he’d been up there since McKinley’s death. He had no idea where the American had gone under his train, and a morbid search for telltale signs came up empty. If there was one thing at which the Germans were good, it was cleaning up after themselves.
He put five pfennigs in a toasted almond machine, and walked down the platform eating from his cupped hand. It was a misty morning, the trees in the Tiergarten fading by stages into nothing. Some geese flew across the glass dome of the station, squawking noisily, heading God-knew-where for late February. There were few finer sights, Russell thought, as their V-formation curled and furled like a banner in the wind. He remembered the seagulls at the Bismarck launching, and laughed out loud.
The Warsaw train arrived, empty save for the few who had boarded at Charlottenburg. Russell found his seat by the time it reached Friedrichstrasse, and dropped off to sleep as the last of the southeastern suburbs slid past his window. Dimly aware of the stop at Frankfurt-am-Oder, he was roused by officialdom for the customs stops on either side of the Polish border, and spent the rest of the journey staring out of the restaurant car window. A wintry sun had finally burned off the mists, and the rye and potato fields of Prussia’s lost province stretched away into the distance, interrupted only by the occasional dirt-track or farm, the odd meandering stream.
The train rolled into Posen-or Pozna?, as the plethora of signs proclaimed-a few minutes early. Russell took a taxi from the forecourt to the Bazar Hotel, where he’d booked a room. “Just the one night?” the receptionist asked incredulously, as if the charms of Posen required weeks to appreciate. “Just the one,” Russell agreed, and was shown rather begrudgingly to an adequate first-floor room. There were only a few hours of light remaining, so he went straight back out again, pausing only to examine the display in the lobby, which documented the hotel’s pre-war role as a hotbed of Polish nationalism.
The town, though pleasant enough, suffered in comparison to Cracow. Its churches were not quite as beautiful, its streets not quite as charming, its square-the Stary Rynek-not quite as grand. As he wandered somewhat aimlessly around the city center he noticed several faded German names on streets and buildings, but the German language was still audible on those same streets, along with Polish and Yiddish. It would take another war, Russell thought, before the winners could take it all.
He dined in the hotel restaurant. The veal escalopes-zrazikis-were excellent, the wine surprisingly good, but neither could dispel his deepening depression. It wasn’t just McKinley and Wiesner; he had hardly spent two waking hours with Effi since Rьgen Island, and his contact with Paul since returning from England had consisted of two friendly, but brief, telephone conversations. And here he was in darkest Posen, waiting for Shchepkin to go through one of his cloak-and-dagger mating rituals.
He went back to his room, hoping against hope for a simple knock on the door. An hour or so later he got one, but it wasn’t Shchepkin. A short woman in a long skirt and blouse brushed past him and into the room before he could say anything.
“Close the door, Mr. Russell,” she said. The language was definitely German, but not a sort that Russell had ever heard before.
The woman had roughly parted blond hair which just failed to reach her shoulders, blue eyes, thin lips, and heavily accented cheekbones. In another life she might have been attractive, Russell thought, but in this one she wasn’t really trying. She wore no make-up, and her cream-colored blouse badly needed a wash. He now remembered seeing her on the other side of the dining-room, arguing with one of the waiters.
“John Russell,” she said, as much to herself as him. “I am your new contact.”
“Contact with whom?” he asked. It was hard to imagine her as a Gestapo agent provocateur, but how would he know?
“My name is Irina Borskaya,” she said patiently. “I am here in place of Comrade Shchepkin,” she added, glancing around the room and finding a chair.
“Has something happened to Comrade Shchepkin?” Russell asked.
“He has been reassigned. Now, please sit down Mr. Russell. And let us get down to business.”
Russell did as he was told, feeling a pang of sorrow for Shchepkin. He could see him on the Cracow citadel-“You really should wear a hat!” But why assume the worst? Perhaps he really had been reassigned. Stalin couldn’t kill everyone who’d ever worked for him.
He pulled the latest article out of his briefcase and handed it over. She took a cursory glance at the first page and placed it in her lap. “You were asked to talk to armament workers.”
He recounted his visit to the Greiner Works, the conversations he had had with Labor Front officials and ordinary workers. She listened intently but took no notes. “Is that all?” she said when he was finished.
“For the moment,” Russell said. “Where is your accent from?” he asked, partly out of curiosity, partly to take her mind off his skimpy research.
“I was born in Saratov,” she said. “In the Volga region. Now, we have another job for you.”
Here it comes, Russell thought-the point of the whole exercise.
“We need you to collect some papers from one of our people and bring them out of Germany.”
Not a chance, Russell thought. But refuse nicely, he told himself. “What sort of papers?” he asked.
“That doesn’t concern you.”
“It does if you expect me to bring them out.”
“They are naval plans,” she said grudgingly.
Russell burst out laughing.
“What is so amusing?” she asked angrily.
He told her about Shchepkin’s comment in Danzig-“none of those naval plans Sherlock Holmes is always having to recover.”
She wasn’t amused. “This is not a Sherlock Holmes story-the comrade in Kiel has risked his life to get a copy of the German fleet dispositions for the Baltic.”
“Then why not risk it again to bring them out?” Russell argued.
“His life is worth something,” she said tartly, and quickly realized that she had gone too far. “He is too valuable to risk,” she amended, as if he might have mistaken her meaning.
“Then why not send someone else in to get them?”
“Because we have you,” she said. “And we have already established that you can come and go without arousing suspicion. Were you searched on your way here, or on your way to Cracow?”
“No, but I wasn’t carrying anything.”
She put the article on the carpet beside her chair, crossed her legs and smoothed out the skirt on her thigh with her left hand. “Mr. Russell, are you refusing to help us with this?”
“I’m a journalist, Comrade Borskaya. Not a secret agent.”
She gave him an exasperated look, delved into her skirt pocket, and brought out a rather crumpled black and white photograph. It was of him and Shchepkin, emerging from the Wawel Cathedral.
Russell looked at it and laughed.
“You are easily amused,” she said.
“So they tell me. If you send that to the Gestapo I might get thrown out of Germany. If I get caught with your naval plans it’ll be the axe. Which do you think worries me more?”
“If we send this to the Gestapo you are certain to be deported, certain to lose your son and your beautiful bourgeois girlfriend. If you do this job for us, the chances of your being caught are almost nonexistent. You will be well-paid, and you will have the satisfaction of supporting world socialism in its struggle against fascism. According to Comrade Shchepkin, that was once important to you.”
“Once.” The clumsiness of the approach angered him more than the blackmail itself. He got up off the bed and walked across to the window, telling himself to calm down. As he did so, an idea came to him. An idea that seemed as crazy as it was inevitable.
He turned to her. “Let me sleep on this,” he said. “Think about it overnight,” he explained, in response to her blank expression.
She nodded. “Two PM in the Stary Rynek,” she said, as if she’d had the time and place reserved.
“It’s a big square,” Russell said.
“I’ll find you.”
Sunday was overcast but dry. Russell had coffee in one of the many Stary Rynek cafйs, walked up past Garbary station to the Citadel, and found a bench overlooking the city. For several minutes he just sat there enjoying the view: the multiplicity of spires, the Warta River and its receding bridges, the smoke rising from several thousand chimneys. “See how much peace the earth can give,” he murmured to himself. A comforting thought, provided you ignored the source. It was a line from Mayakovsky’s suicide note.
Was his own plan a roundabout way of committing suicide?
Paul and Effi would miss him. In fact, he liked to think they’d both be heartbroken, at least for a while. But he was neither indispensable nor irreplaceable. Paul had other people who loved him, and so did Effi.
All of which would only matter if he got caught. The odds, he thought, were probably on his side. The Soviets would have no compunction about risking him, but their precious naval plans were another matter-they wouldn’t risk those on a no-hope adventure. They had to believe it would work.
But what did he know? There could be ruses within ruses; this could be some ludicrously Machiavellian plot the NKVD had thought up on some drunken weekend and set in motion before they sobered up. Or everyone concerned could be an incompetent. Or just having a bad day.
“Shit,” he muttered to himself. He liked the idea of the Soviets having the German fleet dispositions for the Baltic. He liked the idea of doing something, no matter how small, to put a spoke in the bastards’ wheels. And he really wanted the favors he intended to ask in return.
But was he fooling himself? Falling for all the usual nonsense, playing boys’ games with real ammunition. When did self-sacrifice become a warped form of selfishness?
There were no answers to any of this, he realized. It was like jumping through an open window with a fuzzy memory of which floor you were on. If it turned out to be the ground floor, you bounced to your feet with an heroic grin. The fifth, and you were jam on the pavement. Or, more likely, a Gestapo courtyard.
A life concerned only with survival was a thin life. He needed to jump. For all sorts of reasons, he needed to jump.
He took a long last look at the view and started back down the slope, imagining the details of his plan as he did so. A restaurant close to the Stary Rynek provided him with a plate of meat turnovers, a large glass of Silesian beer, and ample time to imagine the worst. By two o’clock he was slowly circling the large and well-populated square, and manfully repressing the periodic impulse to simply disappear into one of the adjoining streets.
She appeared at his shoulder halfway through his second circuit, her ankle-length coat unbuttoned to reveal the same skirt and blouse. This time, he thought, there was worry in the eyes.
She managed to leave the question unspoken for about thirty meters, and then asked it with almost angry abruptness: “So, will you do this job for us?”
“With one condition,” Russell told her. “I have a friend, a Jewish friend, in Berlin. The police are looking for him, and he needs to get out of the country. You get him across the border, and I will do the job for you.”
“And how are we supposed to get him across the border?” she asked, suspicion in her tone.
“The same way you always have,” Russell said. “I was in the Party myself once-remember? I knew people in the Pass-Apparat,” he added, stretching the truth somewhat. “Everyone knew about the escape routes into Belgium and Czechoslovakia.”
“That was many years ago.”
“Not according to my information,” Russell bluffed.
She was silent for about fifty meters. “There are a few such routes,” she admitted. “But they are not safe. If they were, we would not be asking you to bring out these papers. Maybe one person in three gets caught.”
“In Berlin it’s more like three out of three.”
She sighed. “I can’t give you an answer now.”
“I understand that. Someone will have to contact me in Berlin to make the arrangements for my friend’s journey, and to give me the details of the job you want me to do. Tell your bosses that the moment my friend calls me from outside the Reich, I will collect your papers from wherever they are and bring them out.”
“Very well,” she said after a moment’s thought. “You had better choose a point of contact in Berlin.”
“The buffet at Zoo Station. I shall be there every morning this week. Between nine and ten.”
She nodded approvingly. “And a mark of identification. A particular book works well.”
“Storms of Steel? No, half the customers could be reading that. Something English.” He mentally pictured his bookshelves at Neuenburgerstrasse. “Dickens. Martin Chuzzlewit.”
“A good choice,” she agreed, though whether for literary or other reasons she didn’t say. “Your contact will say that he’s been meaning to read it, and will ask you if it’s any good.”
“He?” Russell asked.
“Or she,” she conceded.
Nine o’clock on monday morning found him in the Zoo Station buffet, his dog-eared copy of Martin Chuzzlewit prominently displayed on the counter beside his cup of mocha. He wasn’t expecting the Soviets to respond that quickly, and he wasn’t disappointed-10:00 came and went with no sign of any contact. He collected the car from outside the zoo and drove across town to the Wiesners. There was no obvious police presence outside, which probably meant that they’d recruited some local busybody for their observation chores. A curtain twitched as he walked up the outside steps, but that could have been coincidence.
The sense of raw pain had gone from the Wiesners’ flat-replaced by a grim busyness, a determination to do whatever needed doing. There was grief to spare, the faces seemed to say-no need to spend it all at once.
And there was good news, Frau Wiesner told him. They had old friends in England, she said, in Manchester. The Doctor had written to them several weeks ago, and a reply had finally arrived, offering a temporary home for the girls. They had tickets to travel a week from Thursday.
“I may have more good news,” Russell told her. “I have friends who may be willing to smuggle Albert across the border.”
Mother and daughters all stared at him in amazement. “What friends?” Frau Wiesner asked.
“The comrades,” he said simply. The comrades they had both abandoned, he thought.
“But I had no idea you were…”
“Like you, I left a long time ago. And I can’t go into details about the arrangements. But if I can fix things, can you get in touch with Albert at short notice?”
“Yes.” The hope in her eyes was painful to see.
“And will he trust me, do you think?
She smiled at that. “Yes, he likes you.”
“And if we can get him out, there is nothing to keep you here?”
“The lack of a visa. Nothing else.”
“I’m still working on that.”
He tried to write that afternoon, but the words refused to matter. As evening fell he took himself off to the Alhambra and sat through an overblown Hollywood musical, murmuring sour asides to himself in the dark. The film had been made on the sort of budget which would feed a small country, but was mercifully devoid of consciousness-raising pretensions. The consciousness-lowering effect was presumably accidental.
The Ku’damm was gearing up for the night as he emerged, thick with human and motorized traffic. He walked slowly westward with no real destination in mind, looking in windows, studying faces, wondering if the Soviets would agree to his terms. People lined up outside the theaters and cinemas, streamed in and out of the restaurants, most of them laughing or happily talking, living the moment as best they could. A police car careened up the center of the wide road, its siren parting the traffic like waves, but the visible signs of a police state were thin on the ground. In fact, Russell thought, it was the absence of violence which told the real story. The blood and the broken glass, the groups of men on corners, clutching their razors and itching for a brawl-they were all gone. The only violent lawbreakers left on the streets of Berlin were the authorities.
He walked back down the opposite pavement, picked up the car, and drove home.
Tuesday offered more of the same: waiting in vain at the buffet counter, working with words like a juggler in mittens. Frau Heidegger seemed irritating rather than quirky, Paul almost provokingly gung-ho in his description of the previous Saturday’s Jungvolk outing. Even the weather was bad: A cold rain fell throughout the day and into the evening, creating lake-size puddles in many of the streets. The Hanomag, as Russell discovered on his way to collect Effi, had a less-than-waterproof floor.
At least her film was finished. “I have seen the error of my ways, and a good wife is all I want to be!” she exclaimed as they left the studio. “But only,” she added as they reached the car, “after I’ve slept for at least a week. In the meantime you may wait on me hand and foot.”
Later, he was still working up to telling her about his weekend in Posen when he realized she’d fallen asleep. Which was all for the best, he decided. There’d be time enough for explanations if and when the Soviets said yes. Looking down at her sleeping face, the familiar lips ever-so-slightly curled in a sleeper’s smile, the whole business seemed utterly absurd.
Contact was made on thursday. The buffet clock was reaching toward ten when a man loomed over Russell’s shoulder and almost whispered the prearranged sentence. “Let’s walk,” he added, before Russell had time to declaim on the virtues or otherwise of Martin Chuzzlewit.
The man made for the door with what seemed unnecessary haste, leaving Russell floundering in his wake. He seemed very young, Russell thought, but he looked anonymous enough: average height and build, tidy hair and a typical German face. His suit was wearing at the elbows, his shoes at the heels.
At the station exit the man turned toward the nearest Tiergarten entrance, pausing for a nervous look back as they reached it. Russell glanced back himself: The street was empty. Ahead of them, a few solitary walkers were visible among the leafless trees.
“It’s not a bad day,” the young man said, looking up at the mostly gray sky. “We will walk to Bellevue Station, like friends enjoying a morning stroll in the park.”
They set off through the trees.
“I am Gert,” the young man said. “And it is agreed. We will take your friend across the Czech border, and you will bring the papers to us in Prague.” He fell silent as a steady stream of walkers passed them in the opposite direction-a middle-aged couple and their poodles, a younger couple arm in arm, an older man with a muzzled Doberman-and paused to offer Russell a cigarette on the Lichtenstein Bridge across the Landwehrkanal. His hand, Russell noticed reluctantly, was shaking slightly.
The paths around the Neuersee were mostly deserted, just a couple of women with small children happily feeding the ducks. “You must memorize the arrangements,” Gert said, with the air of someone reading from a script. “Your friend must be in the station buffet at Gцrlitz at five o’clock on Monday afternoon. He must wear workingmen’s clothes, with a blue scarf around his neck. He must not have a suitcase or bag of any kind. When a man asks him if he knows where the left luggage is he should say, ‘Yes, but it’s easier to show you than explain,’ and walk out with that man. Understood?”
“Yes.”
“Then repeat what I’ve just told you.”
Russell did so.
“Good. Now for your part. Your contact is in Kiel. Or in Gaarden, to be precise. You must be in the Germania Bar-it’s on the tram route to Wellingdorf, just outside the main entrance to the Deutsche Werke shipyards-at eight PM on Friday the tenth. With your Martin Chuzzlewit.”
“I made it clear to the comrade in Posen that I wouldn’t collect your papers until I knew my friend was safe.”
Gert gave an exasperated sigh. “He will be in Czechoslovakia by Tuesday morning, Prague by the afternoon. You should hear from him that day. Either that, or some of our people have been captured or killed with him. And if that happens, we hope you will honor their memory by honoring the bargain.”
Russell gave him a look. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“Of course. Now, you will bring the papers back to Berlin, and then take them on to Prague as quickly as possible-”
“I have to be in Berlin on that Sunday,” Russell said.
“It would be better if you traveled before that. The border guards tend to be less vigilant on a Saturday night.”
“Sorry, it’ll have to be Monday,” Russell said. The Sunday was Paul’s birthday.
Gert controlled himself with a visible effort. “Very well,” he agreed, as if he’d made a huge concession.
“And how do you suggest I carry them?”
This was clearly in the script. “We do not know how many papers there are. If it is a matter of a few sheets, they can be sewn into the lining of your coat or your jacket. If there are a lot, then that will not be possible. If they search you and your luggage they will probably find them. The best thing is not to be searched.”
“And how do I manage that?”
“You probably won’t have to. They only search about one in ten, and foreigners very rarely. As long as you don’t draw attention to yourself, everything should be fine. Now, once you reach Prague, you must check in to the Grand Hotel on Wenceslas Square. You will be contacted there. Is that clear? Now please repeat the details of your treff in Kiel.”
Russell repeated them. “What if no one approaches me on that day?” he asked.
“Then you return to Berlin. Any other questions?” Gert’s hands seemed to be writhing in his coat pockets.
He had none, or none that could be answered. At Bellevue Station they went their separate ways, Gert bounding up the stairs to the eastbound Stadtbahn platform, Russell ambling along the bank of the Spree to the kiosk beneath the Bellevue Schloss. He bought a cup of hot chocolate, took it to a riverside table, and watched a long train rumbling across the bridge to his left. “Everything should be fine,” he told himself in Gert’s Bavarian accent. It was the should which worried him.
His next stop was the British Embassy. Rather than return for the car, he walked down the river to Kurfьrstenplatz, and then along Zellenallee to the Brandenburg Gate and the western end of Unter den Linden. The queue outside the Embassy seemed longer than ever, the atmosphere inside the usual mix of irritation and self-righteousness. He asked to see Unsworth, and was shown up to his office. Once there, he admitted it was Trelawney-Smythe that he really wanted to see. “But I didn’t want to announce the fact in reception,” he explained to Unsworth. “I wouldn’t put it past the Nazis to include an informer or two among the Jews.”
Unsworth looked slightly shocked at the thought, but agreed to escort Russell to the MI6 man’s door. Trelawney-Smythe looked startled to see him, and somewhat put out. “I know why you’re here, and the answer is no. We cannot make exceptions.”
Russell sat himself down. “I take it this room’s secure,” he said.
“We went over the whole building with a fine-tooth comb a few months ago,” Trelawney-Smythe said proudly.
Russell looked up, half expecting to see a microphone hanging from the ceiling. “How interested would the Admiralty be in the German Navy’s Baltic Fleet dispositions?” he asked.
To his credit, Trelawney-Smythe didn’t jump out of his seat. Instead, he reached for his pipe. “Very, I should imagine. After all, if a ship’s in the Baltic it won’t be in the North Sea.”
“That’s the conclusion I came to,” Russell said. He smiled at the other man. “Don’t ask me how, but at some point in the next two weeks I should have my hands on those dispositions. Not to keep, mind you, and not for long. But long enough to copy them out.”
Trelawney-Smythe lit his pipe, puffing vigorously out of the corner of his mouth.
A technique learned in spy school, Russell thought.
“You would be doing a tremendous service to your country,” the other man said in an almost torpid tone.
“But not only for my country. There’s a price.”
“Ah.” Trelawney-Smythe’s eyes narrowed. “You want money,” he said, with the air of a disappointed vicar.
“I want you to make an exception, and come up with a visa for Eva Wiesner. And while you’re at it, I’d like an American passport.”
That surprised the MI6 man. “How on earth do you expect us to get you one of those?”
“I’m sure you’ll have no trouble if you set your mind to it. I do have an American mother, you know, so it’s hardly a huge stretch.”
“Why do you want one?”
“I’d have thought that was obvious. If there’s a war in Europe, anyone with a British passport will be sent home. With an American passport I can stay.”
Trelawney-Smythe puffed at his pipe, digesting the idea, and Russell watched the slight widening of the eyes as he appreciated the possibilities-MI 6 would have a man in Germany once the war started!
Not that Russell had any intention of doing anything more for them, but they weren’t to know that.
“In the next two weeks, you said.”
“Yes. But I want the visa for Eva Wiesner by Monday. That should give her time to arrange her exit visa, and she can travel with her daughters on Thursday. There’s no hurry about the passport,” he added. “So long as I have it before a war breaks out.”
“You must like this family,” Trelawney-Smythe said, sounding almost human.
“I do. The girls have only just lost their father, and there’s no good reason why they should lose their mother as well. She left the communists twenty years ago, for God’s sake. She’s not going to start a revolution in Golders Green.”
“I hope not,” Trelawney-Smythe said wryly. “All right. I can get her a visa by Monday. The passport… I can’t promise anything-the Yanks dig their heels in about the silliest things-but we’ll do our best. You weren’t born in America, were you?”
“I was born in mid-Atlantic, if that helps. But on a British ship.”
“Probably not, then.” He was sounding almost chummy now. “If you come in on Monday morning I’ll have the visa for you.”
“I’ll see you then,” Russell said, resisting the temptation to be churlish. On his way out he noticed that the reading room was empty, and took time to consult the Embassy atlas. Gцrlitz was about two hundred kilometers southeast of Berlin, and about twenty from the Czech border. There were direct trains from Berlin, but they took most of the day and were probably checked as they neared the border area. If Albert got safely through the ticket barrier at this end he’d probably be picked up at the other. Russell was going to have to take him in the car.
There were two obvious routes: He could stick to the old road or take the Silesian autobahn to just south of Kottbus, and join it there. He liked the idea of escaping Hitler’s Germany by autobahn, but the old road, for reasons he couldn’t explain, felt safer.
So, two hundred kilometers-say, three hours. Stick in an extra half-hour in case he had a puncture. If the car broke down they were sunk, but spending more than a few minutes in Gцrlitz, with Albert eye-wrestling anyone in uniform, seemed like an excellent way of committing suicide. When it came down to it, the car seemed worthier of trust than Albert’s temperament.
Russell walked out to Unter den Linden, climbed into the Hanomag and headed east. If only Albert didn’t look so damned Jewish! The boy could hardly wear a mask, though the lifelike Goebbels mask which one of the American correspondents had made for last year’s Halloween party would have been singularly appropriate. How could he hide the boy’s face? A cap over the eyes, perhaps. Collar turned up and the required blue scarf. A pair of glasses? None of it would help if Albert insisted on vibrating with rage.
And where was he going to pick him up? Not at the flat, that was for sure. Somewhere crowded? Only if it was somewhere a Jew didn’t stick out like a sore thumb, and places like that were thin on the ground. And the police would be looking for him-a Jew who knocked down a Gestapo officer with a table lamp was going to be high on their wanted list. They’d probably taken his picture in Sachsenhausen, and now all the Orpo stations would have copies hanging on their walls.
He parked the car in the Wiesners’ street and went up. The girls were out-“starting to say their goodbyes”-and their mother seemed exhausted by grief and worry. Russell told her about Albert’s Monday appointment in Gцrlitz, and his own role as chauffeur. “Tell him to join the visa queue outside the British Embassy between twelve and one-as one Jew among several hundred he should be invisible. I’ll walk by and collect him soon after one. He should be wearing workingmen’s clothes, nothing too smart. But a decent coat on top of them for the queue. People try to look their best for the Embassy.”
“I will tell him.”
“He must be there,” Russell insisted. “If he’s not, that’s it. We won’t be given a second chance.”
“He’ll be there.”
“And I think I’ve got you a visa. You should be able to go with the girls next Thursday.”
She looked as though she was having trouble believing it all. “We’ll know by then? About Albert?”
“We should,” he said. One way or the other.
Russell’s weekend followed the familiar pattern, but thoughts of the week ahead kept hitting him from behind, sending his stomach into momentary freefall. It wasn’t every week he delivered a fugitive from the Gestapo to the communist underground, went looking for military secrets in a dockside bar, and played some lethal form of hunt the parcel with the border police. The only time he could remember feeling like this was in the trenches, on those few occasions when he’d been ordered over the top. What had he gotten himself into?
Paul was too distracted himself to notice his father’s distraction. On Saturday they did the rounds of Berlin’s best toy shops, so that Paul could provide Russell with some useful hints on which birthday presents to surprise him with. On Sunday they went to another away game, at Viktoria Berlin’s stadium in Steglitz, and came away delighted with a fortunate draw. Paul was still full of the trip to London, and eager to know when they could visit his grandmother in New York. “Maybe this summer,” Russell said, surprising himself. But why not? The money was there.
Effi noticed. On Saturday evening they went to a comedy theatre revue involving friends of hers, and he twice needed prodding to join in the applause. An hour’s dancing in one of the halls off Alexanderplatz took his mind off everything else, but on the drive home he almost drove through a red light at Potsdamerplatz.
“What’s eating you?” she asked.
As they drove along the southern edge of the Tiergarten he gave her the whole story of his dealings with Shchepkin and Borskaya, ending with the request to take out the documents, and his realization that he could use the situation to help the Wiesners. “Seduced by my own cleverness,” he admitted. “And now I feel like digging myself a very deep hole and hiding in it.”
“Like a fox?”
“More like a rabbit.”
She took his right hand and squeezed it.
Glancing to his right, he could see the worry in her face. “I can’t back out now,” he said.
“Of course not. Why don’t we stop here?” she added.
He pulled up under the trees, and turned to face her.
“You couldn’t go on the way you were,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She took his hand again. “You know what I mean,” she insisted.
And he did.
Monday was a rush. Effi insisted on coming to the Embassy with him-“everyone says I look Jewish, so they’ll think I’m his sister”-and then displayed her usual inability to be ready on time. Once Russell had finally gotten her to the car, he suddenly remembered, with another downward lurch of his stomach, that he’d forgotten to tell Eva Wiesner about the blue scarf. A ten-minute search for something suitable in the KaDeWe on Wittenbergerplatz made them five minutes late, a derailed tram in Potsdamerplatz five minutes more. Russell had a mental picture of a Gestapo officer walking along beside the queue, then suddenly stopping and pointing at Albert.
They left the car on Dorotheenstrasse and walked the single block to the Unter den Linden. Across the wide, now-lindenfrei, avenue, they could see the queue stretching up Wilhelmstrasse past the side of the Adlon. There were no uniforms in sight, no pointing fingers, no scuffle in progress.
They crossed Unter den Linden and walked toward the end of the queue. Albert was about ten from the back, standing close to the stone building on his right, but making no effort to conceal himself. When he saw Russell he simply walked out of the queue. “This is hopeless,” he said to no one in particular. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”
“We were looking for you,” Russell said. “The car’s this way,” he added, thinking that he’d seen pantomimes with more convincing scripts. Several facial expressions in the queue offered unwelcome confirmation of this opinion.
But there was no sign of the audience that mattered. The three of them walked back to Dorotheenstrasse.
“In the back,” Russell told Albert, indicating the tight space behind the seats. He drove three blocks down Dorotheenstrasse, turned right onto the much busier Friedrichstrasse, and headed south toward Hallesches Tor. He dropped Effi off by the elevated station.
“Be careful,” she said, as she kissed him goodbye through the driver’s window. “I’ll see you tonight.”
I hope so, Russell thought. He glanced across at Albert, who was now sitting beside him. The boy looked about sixteen.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“I was eighteen last month.”
The age I was when I went to war, Russell thought. A tram swung in front of him, causing him to brake sharply. Concentrate, he told himself. An accident now really would be fatal.
They drove past Tempelhof as a small plane took off, then under the Ringbahn and on toward Mariendorf, the city growing thinner with each mile. A police car went past in the opposite direction, two plainclothes Kripo men chatting in the front seats, but that was all. Twenty minutes after leaving Dorotheenstrasse they were out on the lake-strewn Mittelmark, passing under a completed section of the orbital autobahn.
So far, so good, Russell thought.
“My mother gave me the message from my father,” Albert said, breaking the silence. “What exactly did he say?”
Russell repeated what he remembered.
“They beat him badly, didn’t they?” Albert asked.
“Yes, they did.”
Albert fell silent again. They passed through Zossen, where a surfeit of signs pointed would-be visitors in the direction of General Staff HQ. The complex of buildings came into view, and Russell found himself wondering which maps the planners had on the tables that day. Poland, most likely, and all points east.
He wondered if the Soviets would put up a fight. Their German operation was hardly impressive-a boy with shaky hands and a man in Kiel they couldn’t risk. Where had all the communists gone? Seven years ago they’d been slugging it out with the Nazis-millions of them. Some would still be lying in wait for the right moment, but most, he suspected, had simply turned their backs on politics. He hoped that whoever was waiting in Gцrlitz knew what the hell he was doing.
“Where have you been staying?” he asked Albert, once they were back in open country.
“It’s better you don’t know,” the boy said.
“It probably is,” Russell agreed.
Silence descended again. Albert seemed calm enough, Russell thought. Calmer, in fact, than he felt himself. At least the car was behaving, its engine purring smoothly as they cruised along the mostly deserted road at 65 kph. Everyone else had chosen the autobahn.
The sky to the south seemed clearer, which suggested a cold, clear night. Did that augur well or badly for an illicit border crossing? Visibility would be better for everyone-pursuers and pursued. He tried to remember what phase the moon was in, and couldn’t.
Albert had rescued the Beobachter from the floor between them. “Why do you read this rubbish?” he asked, scanning the front page.
“To know what they’re doing,” Russell said.
Albert grunted disapproval.
“Which reminds me,” Russell went on. “There’s a piece in there about the crisis in Ruthenia…”
“Ruthenia? Where’s that?”
“It’s part of Czechoslovakia. Look, you need to know this stuff. Czechoslovakia is more than Czechs and Slovaks. There’s Moravians and Hungarians and God knows who else. And Ruthenians. The Germans are encouraging all these groups to rebel against the Czechoslovak government, in the hope that they’ll provoke a major crackdown. Once that happens, they’ll march in themselves, saying that they’re the only ones who can restore order and protect these poor victimized minorities.”
“All right.”
“And the Czech government has started taking action against the Ruthenians. Read the piece. See how pleased the Germans are. ‘This is not the sort of behavior that any government could tolerate in a neighboring state, etc.’-you can practically see them rubbing their hands with glee. They’re preparing the ground. So keep an eye on the news. Don’t hang around in Prague any longer than you have to, or you’ll find Hitler’s caught up with you.”
“I have the names of people in Prague,” Albert insisted. “They will tell me.”
“Good. But remember Kristallnacht-and what a surprise that was, even after five years of persecution. If I were you, I’d head for Hungary as soon as I could. Once you’re there you can work out the best way to England.”
“I don’t think I will be going to England. My plan is to go to Pales-tine.”
“Oh,” Russell said, taken by surprise. “Does your mother know?”
“Of course. I am a man now. I must do what is best for the whole family. When I get work and somewhere to live, I can send for them.”
“Immigration is restricted.”
“I know that. But we will find a way.”
“If there’s a war, they’ll stop it altogether.”
“Then we will wait.”
They were entering Kottbus now, and Russell concentrated on not drawing attention to his driving. But the market town seemed caught in its afternoon nap, and they were soon back in open country. A few kilometers more, and they passed under the Silesian autobahn. Their road grew suddenly busier, and a sign announced that they were 93 kilometers from Gцrlitz.
It was not yet three o’clock. At this rate they would arrive far too early. They needed one of those stopping places with a view which the Germans loved so much.
The Germans, Russell repeated to himself. After fifteen years of living there, of feeling a little more German each year, the process seemed to have slipped into reverse. Lately, he seemed to be feeling a little less German each day. But not more English. So what did that make him?
“Why are you doing this?” Albert asked him.
Russell just shrugged. “Who knows?”
“The reason I ask-a year ago, before Kristallnacht, I used to wonder how people could be so cruel, but I never questioned why someone was kind. Now it’s the opposite. I can see all sorts of reasons why people are cruel, but kindness is becoming a mystery.”
He was six years older than Paul, Russell thought. Just six years. He tried to think of an adequate answer to Albert’s question.
“Whatever the reason, I thank you anyway,” Albert said. “My family thanks you.”
“I think there are many reasons,” Russell said. “Some good, some not so good. Some I don’t understand myself. I like your family. Maybe it’s as simple as that.” And maybe, he thought, any half-decent family in the Wiesners’ situation would have been enough to push him off his fence.
The phrase “I used to be a good journalist” passed through his mind, leaving him wondering where it had come from. This had nothing to do with journalism. He thought about McKinley’s papers, uselessly hidden in the poste restante, and came, with a sudden lift of the heart, to a realization so obvious that he couldn’t believe he had missed it. If he was going to risk his life and liberty for a few military secrets, then why not take out McKinley’s papers as well? He had only one head to cut off.
The road was climbing now, the sky almost cloudless. Around ten kilometers from Gцrlitz Russell found the stopping place he had been looking for, a wide graveled ledge overlooking a pretty river. Eager to stretch, they both got out, and Russell ran through the arranged script for the Gцrlitz buffet. “Once you are in Prague, the first thing you must do-the first thing-is to telephone me. Your mother won’t leave Germany until she knows you’re safe.”
“You haven’t given me the number,” Albert said sensibly.
Russell made him repeat it several times, wondering as he did so-and hating himself for it-how long the boy would resist a Gestapo interrogation.
Albert seemed to know what he was thinking. “I won’t give you up,” he said simply.
“None of us know what we’ll do in a situation like that.”
“I won’t get into a situation like that,” Albert said, pulling a grubby-looking Luger from his coat pocket.
Oh shit, Russell thought, glancing left and right in search of approaching traffic and barking “Put it away!” The road was blissfully empty. “That’s…” he started to say, and stopped himself. What right did he have to give the boy advice? Albert had been in Sachsenhausen once, and his father had died there. It wasn’t hard to see why going out in a blaze of gunfire seemed preferable to going back.
He breathed out slowly. “You have to leave the coat with me,” he said. “Won’t the gun be obvious in your jacket pocket?”
“I’ll put it in my belt,” Albert said, and did so. He then took the coat off and offered Russell a 360-degree turn, like a model at a fashion show. The gun didn’t show.
Back in the car, Albert pulled a workingmen’s cap from a pocket of the discarded coat, and Russell reached into the KaDeWe bag for the blue scarf. “The recognition signal,” he explained, and Albert wrapped it around his neck, reminding Russell of Paul on a skating trip.
They drove on, the sky a deepening blue as dusk approached, the mountains slowly creeping above the southern horizon. As they reached the outskirts of Gцrlitz it occurred to Russell that anyone with a brain would have studied a plan of the town-the last thing he wanted to do was ask directions to the station. Go to the town center and look for signs, he told himself. The Germans were good at signs.
He picked up some tram tracks and followed them in what seemed the obvious direction. After passing several large industrial concerns, the road narrowed through a handsome arch and arrived at a wide street full of old buildings. There were theaters, statues, a large water fountain-in any other circumstances, Gцrlitz would be worth an afternoon stroll.
“There!” Albert said, indicating a sign to the station.
They drove down a long straight street, toward what looked like a station. It was. The station building was about a hundred meters long, the entrance to the booking hall right in the center. There were lighted windows to the left of this entrance, and steam billowing out of two large vents.
Russell pulled the car to a halt behind a Reichsbahn parcels truck. “The buffet,” he said, pointing it out. “There’ll be an entrance from the booking hall.”
It was ten to five.
Albert just sat there for a few seconds, then turned to shake Russell’s hand.
The boy looked nervous now, Russell thought. “Safe journey,” he said.
Albert climbed out and, without a backward look, headed toward the entrance. There was nothing furtive about his stride-if anything it was too upright. He leapt up the two steps and in through the doorway.
Start driving, Russell told himself, but he didn’t. He sat there watching as the minutes passed. Two men in SA uniform emerged, laughing at something. A man ran in, presumably late for a train. Only seconds later a spasm of chuffs settled into the accelerating rhythm of a departing engine.
He imagined Albert sitting there, and wondered whether he’d tried to buy a coffee. If he had, he might have been refused; if he hadn’t, some power-mad waiter might have tried to move him on. He imagined a challenge, the gun pulled out, the sound of shots and a frantic Albert flying out through the doorway. Russell wondered what he would do. Pick him up? Race out of Gцrlitz with the police in hot pursuit? What else could he do? His mouth was suddenly dry.
And then Albert did come out. There was another man with him, a shortish man in his forties with graying hair and a very red nose, who shifted his head from side to side like an animal sniffing for danger. The two of them walked across to the small open truck with a timber load which Russell had already noticed, and swung themselves up into their respective cab seats. The engine burst into life and the truck set off down the street, leaving a bright tail of exhaust hanging in the cold evening air.
Left Luggage
After leaving gцrlitz, Russell took the next available chance to telephone Effi. A brass band was practicing in the first bar he tried, but with receiver and hand clamped tight against his ears he could just about hear the relief in her voice. “I’ll be waiting,” she said.
He chose the autobahn north from Kottbus, hoping to speed the journey, but an overturned vehicle in a military convoy had the opposite effect. By the time he reached Friedrichshain it was almost nine o’clock. Frau Wiesner could hardly have opened the door any faster if she’d been waiting with her hand on the knob.
“He was collected,” Russell said, and her lips formed a defiant little smile.
“Sit down, sit down,” she said, eyes shining. “I must just tell the girls.”
Russell did as he was told, noticing the bags of clothing piled against one wall. To be given away, he supposed-there was no way they would be allowed to take that much with them. He wondered if the Wiesners had any more valuables to take out, or whether the bulk of the family assets had been concealed behind the stickers in Achievements of the Third Reich. It occurred to him that Germany’s Jews had several years’ experience in the art of slipping things across the German border.
“And my visa has arrived,” Frau Wiesner said, coming back into the room. “By special courier from the British Embassy this afternoon. You must have some influential friends.”
“I think you do,” Russell told her. “I’m sure Doug Conway had a hand in it,” he explained, somewhat untruthfully. There seemed no reason for her to know about his deals with Irina Borskaya and Trelawney-Smythe. “But there is something you might be able to do for me,” he added, and told her what he wanted. She said she would ask around.
He left her with a promise to drive over the moment Albert phoned, and a plea not to worry if the wait lasted more than a day. If they still hadn’t heard anything by Thursday he knew she’d be reluctant to leave, even though they both knew that in this context no news was almost certain to be bad news.
On the other side of the city, Effi welcomed him with an intense embrace, and insisted on hearing every detail. Later, as they were going to bed, Russell noticed a new film script on the dressing table and asked her about it. It was a comedy, she told him. “Twenty-three lines, four come-on smiles, and no jokes. The men got those.” But at least it was pointless, a quality which Mother had taught her to admire.
The next morning, Russell left her propped up in bed happily declaiming her lines to an empty room, and drove home to Neuenburgerstrasse. There was no sign of Frau Heidegger, and no messages on the board, from either Albert or the Gestapo. He went up to his room and read the newspaper, his door propped open in case the phone rang. Jews had been forbidden from using either sleeping or restaurant cars on the Reichsbahn, on the grounds, no doubt, that they would appreciate their hunger more if they were kept awake.
He heard Frau Heidegger come in, the clink of the bottles as she set them beside her door. It was Tuesday, Russell realized-skat night. With Effi not working, and his own weekends given over to espionage, he was beginning to lose track of the days. He went down to warn her about his expected call, and paid the price in coffee.
Back upstairs, the hours ticked by with agonizing slowness, and the only calls were for Dagmar, the plump little waitress from Pomerania who had taken McKinley’s room. She, not unusually, was out. According to Frau Heidegger she sometimes came in at 3:00 in the morning with beer on her breath.
Russell nipped out to buy some eggs while Frau Heidegger kept guard, and cooked himself an omelette for dinner. Most of the other tenants returned home from work, and the concierges arrived, one by one, bottles in hand, to play skat. The waves of merriment reached higher up the stairs as the evening went on, but the telephone refused to ring, and Russell felt his anxiety grow. Where was Albert? Sitting in some border lockup waiting to be picked by the Gestapo? Or lying dead in some frozen mountain meadow? If so, he hoped the boy had managed to take some of the bastards with him.
The skat party broke up soon after 10:30, and once the other concierges had passed noisily into the street Frau Heidegger took the phone off the hook. Russell went to bed and started reading the John Kling novel which Paul had loaned him. The next thing he knew, it was morning. He walked briskly down to Hallesches Tor for a paper, skipping through it on the way back for news of spies or criminals apprehended on the border. As he replaced the phone a red-eyed Frau Heidegger emerged with an invitation to coffee, and they both listened to the morning news on her people’s radio. The Fьhrer had recovered from the slight illness which had caused the cancellation of several school visits on the previous day, but no young Jews named Albert had been picked up trying to cross into Czechoslovakia.
The morning passed at a snail’s pace, bringing two more calls for Dagmar and one from Effi, wanting to know what was happening. Russell had no sooner put the phone down after her call than it rang again. “Forgot something?” he asked, but it was Albert’s voice, indistinct but unmistakably triumphant, which came over the line.
“I’m in Prague,” it said, as if the Czech capital was as close to heaven as its owner had ever been.
“Thank God,” Russell shouted back. “What took you so long?”
“We only came across last night. You’ll tell my mother?”
“I’m on my way. And they’ll be on the train tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And good luck.”
Russell hung up the phone and stood beside it, blissfully conscious of the relief spreading out through his limbs. One down, three to go. He called Effi back with the good news and then set off for the Wiesners.
Frau Wiesner looked as if she hadn’t slept since he had left her on Monday, and when Russell told her Albert was in Prague she burst into tears. The two girls rushed to embrace her and started crying too.
After a minute or so she wiped her eyes and embraced Russell. “A last coffee in Berlin,” she said, and sent the two girls out to buy cakes at a small shop on a nearby street which still sold to Jews. Once they were out of the door, she told Russell she had one last favor to ask. Disappearing into the other room, she reemerged with a large framed photograph of her husband and a small suitcase. “Would you keep this for me?” she asked, handing him the photograph. “It is the best one I have, and I’m afraid they will take it away from me at the border. Next time you come to England…”
“Of course. Where is he, your husband? Did they bury him at Sachsenhausen?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I did not tell you this, but on Monday, after the visa came, I gathered my courage, and I went to the Gestapo building on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. I asked if his body could be returned to me, or if they could just tell me where he is buried. A man was called for, and he came down to see me. He said that my son could claim my husband’s body, but I could not. He said that was the legal position, but I knew he was lying. They were using my husband’s body as bait to catch my son.”
Sometimes the Nazis could still take your breath away.
“And this,” she continued, picking up the suitcase, “is what you asked for on Monday.” She put it on the table, clicked it open, and clicked again, revealing the false bottom. “The man who made this was a famous leather craftsman in Wilmersdorf before the Nazis, and he has made over a hundred of these since coming to Friedrichshain.”
“And none have been detected?”
“He doesn’t know. Once Jews have left they don’t come back. A few have written to say that everything went well, but if it hadn’t…”
“They would be in no position to write.”
“Exactly.”
Russell sighed. “Well, thank you anyway,” he said, just as the girls came back with a box of assorted cream cakes. They insisted on Russell having the first pick, then sat round the table happily licking the excess cream from their lips. When he suggested driving them to the station the next day, he could see how relieved Frau Wiesner was, and cursed himself for not putting her mind at rest at sooner. How else could they have gotten there? Jews were not allowed to drive, and most cabdrivers wouldn’t carry them. Which left public transport, and a fair likelihood of public abuse from their fellow passengers. Not the nicest way to say goodbye.
The train, she said, was at 11:00, and he was back the next morning at 9:30. The girls squeezed into the back with their small bags, Frau Wiesner in the front with a suitcase on her lap, and as they drove down Neue Konigstrasse toward the city center Russell could feel all three of them craning their necks and filling their memories with the sights of their disappearing home.
Effi was waiting at the Zoo Station entrance, and all five of them walked up to the westbound express platform. A pale sun was shining, and they stood in a little knot waiting for the train to arrive.
“You didn’t tell me Albert was going to Palestine,” Russell said to Eva Wiesner.
“I should have,” she admitted. “Distrust becomes a habit, I’m afraid.”
“And you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The girls prefer England. The clothes are better. And the movie stars.”
“You’ll come see us in England?” Marthe asked him in English.
“I certainly will.”
“And you as well,” Marthe told Effi in German.
“I’d love to.”
The Hook of Holland train steamed in, hissing and squealing its way to a stop on the crowded platform. Russell carried Eva Wiesner’s suitcase onto the train, and found their assigned seats. Much to his relief, there were no Stars of David scrawled on the girls’ seatbacks. Once the three of them were settled he went in search of the car attendant, and found him in the vestibule. “Look after those three,” he said, pointing them out and wedging a five hundred Reichsmark note in the man’s outside pocket.
The attendant looked at the Wiesners again, probably to reassure himself that they weren’t Jews. Fortunately, Eva Wiesner looked as Aryan as anyone on the train.
Russell rejoined Effi on the platform. The signals were off, the train almost ready to go. A piercing shriek from the locomotive’s whistle brought an answering scream from an animal in the adjoining zoo, and the train jerked into motion. The girls waved, Eva Wiesner smiled, and they were gone. Russell and Effi stood arm in arm, watching the long train as it rumbled across the iron bridge and leaned into the long curve beyond. Remember this moment, Russell told himself. This was what it was for.
After a quick lunch with Effi in the Uhlandeck Cafй he set off for Kiel. The Berlin-Hamburg autobahn was still under construction, which left him with the old road through Schwerin and Lubeck, around 350 kilometers of two-lane highway across the barely undulating landscape of the North German plain. After three hours of this he began to wonder whether the train would have been better. The car had seemed a safer bet, but only, he realized, because he had fallen for the juvenile notion that it made escape seem more feasible. In reality, he had about as much chance of outrunning the Gestapo in the Hanomag as an Aryan sprinter had of outrunning Jesse Owens.
He arrived in Kiel soon after dark, stopped at the railway station to buy a town guide at one of the kiosks, and studied it over a beer in the station buffet. Kiel itself stretched north along the western shore of a widening bay which eventually opened into the Baltic. Gaarden was on the other side of the bay, accessible by steam ferry or a tram ride around its southern end.
Russell decided to look for a hotel near the station-nothing too posh, nothing too seedy, and full of single businessmen leading relatively innocent lives. The Europдischer Hof, on the road which ran alongside the station, met the first two requirements, and on a busy day might have met the third. As it was, several lines of hopeful keys suggested the hotel was half empty, and when Russell asked for a room the receptionist seemed almost bemused by the scope for choice. They settled on a second floor room at the front, which looked out across the glass roof of the station, and the seagull colony which had been founded on it.
The hotel restaurant showed no signs of opening, so Russell walked north down the impressive Holstenstrasse and found an establishment with a decent selection of seafood. After eating he walked east in the general direction of the harbor, and found himself at the embarkation point for the Gaarden ferry. The ferry itself had left a few seconds earlier and was churning across the dark waters toward the line of lights on the far side, some half a kilometer away. Looking left, up the rapidly widening bay, Russell could see what looked like a large warship anchored in midstream.
He stood there for several minutes enjoying the view, until the icy wind became too much for his coat to cope with. Back at the hotel he had a nightcap in an otherwise deserted bar, went to bed, and fell asleep with surprising ease.
He woke early, though, and found that the Europдischer Hof considered breakfast an unnecessary luxury. There were, however, plenty of workingmen’s cafйs selling hot rolls and coffee around the station. By eight he was driving through the town center, heading for the northern suburb of Wik, where the main harbor for merchant ships was situated. He had already finished his article on German sailors, but the Gestapo weren’t to know that, and he needed an honest reason for being in Kiel. Over the next couple of hours he talked to sailors in the cafйs on the Wik waterfront, before moving on to the eastern end of the Kiel Canal, which lay just beyond. There he watched a Swedish freighter pass through the double locks which protected the canal from tidal changes, chatting all the while with an old man who used to work there, and who still came to watch. Driving back along the western shore of the haven Russell got a better view of the warship he’d seen the night before. It was the recently commissioned Scharnhorst, and its guns were lowered toward the deck, as if apologizing for their existence. Two U-boats were tied up alongside.
He wasn’t hungry but had lunch anyway, along with a couple of beers to calm his nerves, before following the tracks of the Wellingdorf tram through Gaarden. The Germania Bar wasn’t hard to spot-as Gert had said, it was almost opposite the main gate of the Deutsch Werke shipyard-and there was no shortage of places to leave the car. The bar itself was on the ground floor of a four-storey building, and seemed remarkably quiet for a lunch hour. He drove another few hundred meters toward Wellingdorf before turning and retracing the route back to Kiel.
With Paul’s birthday in mind, he spent the rest of the afternoon looking round the shops in the town center. The two toy emporiums he found were uninspiring, and he’d almost given up when he came across a small nautical shop in one of the narrower side streets. Pride of place in the window display had been given to a model of the Preussen which, as Paul had once told him, was the only sailing ship ever built with square sails on five masts. The price made him wince, but the model, on closer inspection, looked even better than it had in the window. Paul would love it.
Russell carefully carried the glass case back to the car, did his best to immobilize it in the back, and covered it with the small rug he’d bought for Effi’s use on Rьgen Island. He checked his watch-another five hours until his appointment at the Germania Bar-and went back to the Europдischer Hof, hoping to wile the time away with a nap. Despite the unexpected bonus of a hot bath, he found sleep impossible, and just lay on the bed watching the room grow darker. Around five o’clock he turned on the lights and expanded the notes he’d made that morning.
At seven he walked across to the station for something to eat and another beer, eschewing a second with some difficulty. The concourse was full of boisterous sailors in Scharnhorst caps, presumably going on leave.
Back at the hotel, he collected his suitcase, handed in his key, and walked out to the Hanomag. As he headed for Gaarden the road seemed empty, but Gaarden itself was getting ready for Friday night, the open doorways of numerous bars and restaurants spilling light across the cobbled street and tramlines. There were a lot of sailors in evidence, a lot of women awaiting their pleasure, but no sign of the police.
He parked up against the shipyard wall and sat for a minute, examining the Germania Bar. Conversation and laughter drifted out through the open door, along with a smell of fried onions. Light edged the closed curtains in all but one of the upstairs windows; in the darkened exception a man could be seen leaning out, a cigarette bobbing between his lips. It was a brothel, Russell realized. And it was three minutes to eight.
Heart in mouth, he climbed out of the Hanomag, checked it was locked, and waited for a tram to pass before crossing the road. The bar was bigger inside than the outside suggested, with two walls of booths, a few tables and a small area for dancing should anyone feel the need. It was plusher than he’d expected, and cleaner. The booths were bound in leather, the bar itself highly polished. There were several young sailors to be seen, but most of the men, like Russell, were either entering or enjoying middle age inside their respectable overcoats. He took his off, seated himself in one of the two remaining empty booths, and laid Martin Chuzzlewit face up on the table.
“Good book?” the waitress asked him. “Chuzzlewit,” she said with a laugh, “what sort of name is that?”
“English,” he told her.
“That explains it. What would you like?”
He ordered a Goldwasser, and looked around the room. A few faces had looked his way when he entered, but no one had shown any obvious interest since. One of the sailors stood up, playfully pulled his female companion to her feet, and headed for a door in the back wall. As it opened, the bottom of a staircase came into view.
The Goldwasser arrived, and a female companion shortly thereafter. She was about his age, thin verging on scrawny, with dark-circled eyes and a tired smile. “Buy me a drink, Herr Russell,” she suggested in a low voice, before he could say he was waiting for someone else. She leaned across the table, put a hand over his, and whispered: “After we’ve had a drink we’ll go upstairs, and you’ll get what you came for.”
He ordered her drink, a sweet martini.
“I am Geli,” she said, stroking his hand with an absentminded air. “And what are you doing in Kiel?”
“I’m a journalist,” he said, joining the charade. “I’m writing a story about the widening of the Kiel Canal.”
“Extra width is always good,” she said wryly. “Let’s go up. I can see you’re impatient.”
He followed her up two flights of stairs, watching the hem of her red dress swish against her black-stockinged calves. There were four rooms on the second floor, and pleasure was being noisily taken in at least one of them. Through the open door of a bathroom he caught sight of a plump blond wearing only black stockings and a garter belt, drying herself with a towel.
“In here,” Geli said, opening a door and gesturing him in. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she added, closing it behind him.
There was a window that overlooked an alley, and a threadbare carpet that covered half the wooden floor. A bare light bulb illuminated a large unmade bed which was supported in one corner by a pile of books. On the bed’s wooden headboard someone had written “Goebbels was here,” and someone else had added “So that’s how I got this disease.” Enough to put anyone off, Russell thought.
The door opened and a man came in, closely followed by Geli. He was younger than her, but not by much. He had fair hair, blue eyes, and skin which had seen too much sun and wind. He was wearing a sailor’s greatcoat.
He shook Russell’s hand, and sat down heavily on the bed, causing it to creak alarmingly. Geli stood with her back to the window, half-sitting on the sill, watching him unpick the seam of his coat lining with a penknife. It only took a few seconds. Reaching inside he pulled out a small sheaf of papers and handed them over to Russell.
It looked like a small sheaf, but there were more than thirty sheets of text and diagrams, all copied out onto the thinnest available paper. “These are not the originals,” Russell thought out loud.
“If they were, the Navy would know they were gone,” the man said wearily, as if he was explaining matters to a particularly obtuse child.
“Are there other copies?” Russell asked.
“One. For your successor, should you fail.”
“And then you’ll need another one for his successor.”
The man offered him a grudging smile. “Something like that.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why not send this out by radio?”
The man nodded at the papers. “Look at it. By the time we got that lot out every triangulation van in Germany would be banging on our door. And you can’t convey maps by radio, not with any ease.” He offered a fleeting smile. “We used to post stuff to the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, but they got wise. They open everything now. Everything.”
Russell folded the papers in two and stuffed them into his inside pocket. “I have a better hiding place in my car,” he explained.
“Thank God for that. Look, I must go before…”
There was a sudden roar from below. “The stormtroopers have arrived,” Geli said. “Don’t worry,” she told Russell, “they’re not here for you.”
“They fuck our women, fuck our country, and soon they’ll be fucking all of Europe,” the man said. “But we’ll have them in the end.” He shook Russell’s hand again and wished him good luck. “I’ll see you later,” he told Geli, and slipped out of the door.
“Just wait a few minutes,” she told Russell, “and I’ll take you down.”
They were long minutes, but they eventually passed. As they went down a stormtrooper was coming up, almost dragging a girl in his wake. “Slow down, Klaus,” Geli pleaded with him. “She’ll be no use to you unconscious.” He grinned at her, as if the girl’s consciousness were neither here nor there.
The noise from the bar had grown deafening. “The back door might be better,” Geli said, and led him out through a bright but empty kitchen. “Just right and right again,” she said, and closed the door behind him, removing most of the light. Russell felt his way along the back wall to the building’s corner, from where he could make out the dimly lit road. As he started down the side of the building a silhouette loomed in the mouth of the alley, a man in high boots, with cap on head.
Russell froze, heart thumping in his chest. The man was moving toward him, reaching for something with his hand…
His trouser buttons. A couple of meters into the alley he turned, pulled out his penis and, with a loud exhalation, arced a fierce stream of dull golden piss against the wall. Russell stood there, petrified of any movement, wondering when it would ever end. A ship in the bay sounded a long and mournful blow on its horn, but still the piss streamed out, forcing the man to shift his feet away from the spreading lake.
The arc finally collapsed. The stormtrooper gave a few pumps for luck, stuffed himself back into his trousers, and headed for the alley entrance. And then he was gone.
Russell hurried forward, hoping to escape before someone else had the same idea. He almost stepped in the prodigious puddle, but reached the entrance without mishap. His car was sitting across the road, hopelessly sandwiched between the two open trucks which had brought the stormtroopers.
He hurried across, climbed in, and started the engine. Five or six maneuvers later, he was still only halfway out. The temptation to ram the trucks was almost overwhelming, but he doubted whether the Hanomag had the weight to move them if he did. Fighting back desperation, he shifted the car, inch by inch, further into the road. He was almost there when several stormtroopers emerged from the door across the road and started shouting at him. He was about to try a final, metal-scraping, lunge for freedom when he realized they were killing themselves with laughter. They had hemmed him in as a practical joke.
He opened the window and made a wry face, acknowledging their brilliant sense of humor. Three more maneuvers and he was free, Uturning the Hanomag in front of them with a triumphant raise of the hand. As he headed south toward the center of Gaarden he could see them happily waving goodbye in his rearview mirror.
His hotel bed was waiting for him, but it didn’t seem far enough away. He wanted, he realized, to get out Kiel, and as quickly as possible. It was still only 9:00, time enough to find a small guesthouse in a small town, somewhere between there and Lubeck.
He took the more northerly of the Lubeck roads, and once in open country found a wide verge on which to pull over. With ears alert for approaching traffic he turned on the car light, opened up the false bottom of the suitcase, and placed the papers inside. He had planned to copy them for the British that night, but he’d need a whole weekend to copy this lot. He would have to be selective. They’d be none the wiser.
About ten kilometers further on he found the town and guesthouse for which he was looking. It wasn’t much more than a village bar, but the woman who ran it was happy to provide him with a room. “It was my son’s,” she said, without explaining where he’d gone. The sundry toys and books suggested he was expected back.
Once locked in, Russell retrieved the papers from the false bottom and skimmed through them. They were what Irina Borskaya had claimed they were-a detailed rundown of the German Navy’s current and contingency disposition in the Baltic. Most of the key information seemed to be included in the three maps which accompanied the text, and Russell set out to copy these. The British, he thought, should be thankful for small mercies.
The maps were highly detailed, and it took him almost four hours to finish his work. He felt as if he had only just gotten to sleep when the landlady knocked on his door suggesting breakfast, and it was indeed only seven o’clock. Still, breakfast was good, and the sun was already above the horizon. Her son, it transpired, had joined the Navy.
Russell set out for Berlin soon after 9:00, papers and copies hidden in the false bottom, the suitcase itself wedged under the eye-catching model of the Preussen. There was no need, of course-no roadblock, no spot-checks, no officious small-town policemen eager to find fault with a car bearing a Berlin license plate. Soon after 1:00 he parked the Hanomag outside Zoo Station, pulled out the suitcase, and nervously carried it in to the left luggage.
“Nice day,” the clerk said, taking the case and handing over a numbered ticket.
“So far,” Russell agreed. He rang Effi from the telephone stand along the hall and told her things had gone to plan. She sounded as relieved as he felt. “I’m going home to collect some clean clothes and do a bit more shopping for Paul,” he told her. “I’ll see you about six.”
She told him they had tickets for a revue at one of the smaller theaters near Alexanderplatz, and he tried, in vain, to sound enthusiastic. “I’m just tired,” he explained. “I’ll be fine by then.”
He certainly felt safer with the suitcase squirreled away in Zoo Station’s cavernous left luggage. There was always the ticket of course, but if worse came to worse that was small enough to eat. Back at the car, he examined the model ship for the first time in daylight, and congratulated himself on his choice-it really was beautiful.
Frau Heidegger thought so too, and conjured up a bright red ribbon which she’d been saving for such an eventuality. There were messages from both his agents: Jake Brandon had sent a sarcastic wire from New York demanding copy, and Solly Bernstein had phoned to tell Russell that “his friends” had arrived in London. He was still smiling when he reached his third floor room.
After a much-needed bath and change of clothes, he piled several more changes into his usual suitcase and carried it out to the car. Lunch at Wertheim was followed by a leisurely stroll around the toy department, and the acquisition of two other gifts in which Paul had expressed an interest. A book shop further down Leipzigerstrasse supplied a third. He was probably spending too much, but he might never get another chance.
He managed to stay awake through the revue, but was unable to conceal his dismay when Effi suggested dancing. She took pity on him. “I know what’ll wake you up,” she said as they climbed the stairs to her flat, and she was right. Afterward, she showed him what she had bought for Paul-the gorgeous encyclopedia of animals which he had admired on their last visit to the zoo shop.
Next morning they joined several hundred other Berliners on the sidewalk of the Ku’damm, well-wrapped against the cold at their outside table, rustling newspapers, sipping coffee, and nibbling cake. This was how it used to be, Russell thought-ordinary Germans doing ordinary things, enjoying their simple civilized pleasures.
His newspaper, though, told a different story. While he’d been slinking round Kiel the Czechs had lost patience with the German-backed Slovaks, sacking their provincial government and arresting their prime minister. The Beobachter was apoplectic-what nation could countenance such a level of disturbance just beyond its borders? Some sort of German intervention seemed inevitable, but then it always had. If the separatists won then Czechoslovakia would disintegrate; if denied, their campaign would simply continue. Either set of circumstances would generate enough turmoil for Hitler’s purposes.
Looking up from his paper, the sidewalk cafй-dwellers no longer seemed content in their simple pleasures. They looked tense, weary, anxious. They looked as though a war was hanging over their heads.
After lunch with Effi he drove over to Grunewald, dropped off his presents, and gave his son a birthday hug. Twenty minutes later they were picking up Thomas in Lutzow and heading for the Plumpe. Thomas’s son Joachim had started his arbeitsdienst the previous week, and was repairing roads in the Moselle valley.
The weather was fine, but the team proved incapable of providing Paul with a birthday present. They lost 2-0, and were lucky not to lose by more. Paul’s despondency didn’t last long: By the time they were halfway home he was full of the party in prospect, and forgetful of Hertha’s dark betrayal.
Effi was already there when they arrived, talking happily to Thomas’s fourteen-year-old daughter Lotte. Over the next hour around a dozen of Paul’s friends-all of them male-were delivered by their parents, some in their Sunday best, some, for reasons best known to the parents, in their Jungvolk uniforms. The games they played seem surprisingly violent, but that, Russell supposed, was part of the same depressing mindset. At least they hadn’t replaced “pin the tail on the donkey” with “pin the nose on the Jew.” Yet. He would write a piece on children for the “Ordinary Germans,” series, he decided. When he got back from Prague.
Paul seemed happy and popular, which was definitely something to celebrate. The adults-Ilse and Matthias, Thomas and his wife Hanna, Russell and Effi-sat together in the huge kitchen, drinking Matthias’s excellent wine. They smiled and laughed and toasted each other, but the talk was of happier times in the past, of how things used to be. At one point, watching Ilse as she listened to somebody else, Russell had a mental picture of her in Moscow fifteen years earlier, eyes alive with hopes of a better world. Now all of them were backing into the future, frightened to look ahead. They had their own bubble, but for how long?
The evening ended, bringing tomorrow that much closer. After congratulating each other on how well their presents had been received, both he and Effi lapsed into silence for most of the journey home. They were turning into her street when she suddenly suggested accompanying him to Prague.
“No,” he said. “There’s no point in us both taking the risk.” He switched off the car. “And you’re a German-they’d try you for treason. They’d have more options with me.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Swapping me for one of their spies, maybe.”
“Or just shooting you.”
“I doubt it. But I think having you there would make me more nervous. And more likely to give myself away.”
She searched his face, and seemed satisfied with what she found. “All right,” she said. “It’s no fun just waiting by the phone, you know.”
“I know.”
Upstairs, he noticed the script on her dressing table and had an idea. “Can you get another copy for yourself?” he asked.
“I don’t see why not. I could say I burned the first one in a fit of despair. But why?”
“I thought I’d take it with me in the suitcase. Camouflage. And one of your publicity shots would be good.”
She went and got one, a head and shoulders shot taken a couple of years earlier.
“Your face would distract anyone,” he said.
It was still dark when Russell woke and he lay there for a while, listening to Effi’s breathing and enjoying the warmth of her body. At 7:30 he forced himself out of bed, washed and dressed in the bathroom, and finally woke her to say goodbye as she had insisted he must. She enfolded him in a sleepy embrace, then swung her legs out of bed and arched her back in a huge stretch. As he descended the stairs she stood in her nightdress by the half-open door, blowing him a farewell kiss.
Berlin was already waking to another working week. The Avus Speedway was busy, but only in the other direction, and he reached Potsdam well before 9:00. After parking the Hanomag near the main post office in Wilhelmplatz, he lingered over breakfast in the coffee shop next door. The newspapers, as expected, were reveling in the misery of the Czechs.
At ten past 9:00 he presented himself at the poste restante desk, and signed for the familiar envelope. Walking back to the Hanomag, he felt like a man who’d just been handed a ticking bomb. Not to worry, he thought-he’d soon have two.
The drive back was slower, and it was past 10:00 when he turned off the Ku’damm and saw the glass roof of Zoo Station framed by the buildings on either side of Joachimsthaler Strasse. He parked the Hanomag near the Tiergarten gate which he and Gert had used, inserted the folded envelope in his inside coat pocket, picked up the suitcase, and walked back to the nearest station entrance.
There was a line for the left luggage, but no sign of the police, or of anyone loitering suspiciously. When his turn came Russell handed over his ticket, watched the clerk disappear, and waited for a thousand sirens to go off. A child in the queue behind him suddenly screeched, making him jump. A train rumbled overhead, but the roof didn’t fall. The clerk returned with the suitcase, took Russell’s money, and handed it over.
Next stop was the men’s toilet. The cubicles were small, and entering one with two suitcases required a level of planning which was almost beyond him. He clattered his way in, locked the door behind him, and sat on the seat for a few moments to recover what fragments of equanimity he still retained. The walls didn’t reach to the ceiling, but the adjoining cubicles were both empty, at least for the moment.
He stood up, put the smaller suitcase on the toilet seat, and opened it up. After unclicking the false bottom, he removed the three maps he had copied, replaced them with McKinley’s papers, and closed the bottom. A brief struggle then ensued, as he fought to open the other suitcase in what little remaining space the cubicle had to offer. Half its contents ended up on the floor, but all were eventually transferred to the smaller suitcase, which was now satisfyingly full. After checking that the three maps were in his coat pocket he closed both suitcases, pulled the chain, and fought his way out of the cubicle.
The man at the left luggage looked surprised to see him again, but accepted the empty suitcase without comment, and handed him a new ticket. On the platform above he waited for a westbound Stadtbahn, thinking that this was where McKinley had died and where the Wiesners had left Hitler behind. On the far platform a man was angrily shaking the toasted almond machine, just as another man had been doing at Friedrichstrasse on the morning he returned from Danzig.
His train pulled in and out again, skirting the northern edge of the Tiergarten, crossing and re-crossing the Spree on its three-stop journey to Friedrichstrasse. Russell went out through the less-frequented car park entrance and walked briskly toward the embassy. His steps on the pavements sound unusually loud, and every car that kept on going seemed like a gift from God. Halfway across the Unter den Linden he decided that if anyone challenged him now, he would sprint through the embassy doors and never come out again.
But no one did. As before, he asked the receptionist for Unsworth and Unsworth for Trelawney-Smythe. The latter looked at the three maps as if he couldn’t believe his luck. “Where did you get them?” he demanded.
“A comrade in Kiel,” was all Russell would tell him. “A one-off,” he added. “There won’t be any more.”
“But how do I know these are genuine?”
“I guess you don’t. But they are. And your people must have ways of confirming at least some of it.”
“Perhaps.”
Russell took a meaningful look at his watch. “I have a train to catch.”
“And where are you off to this time?” Trelawney-Smythe asked, sounding almost friendly.
“Prague.”
“Ah, joining Adolf’s reception committee.”
“I hope not.”
Dropping in on Unsworth to say goodbye, he was told much the same. “And the British guarantee of Czechoslovakia?” Russell asked sarcastically.
“Without Slovakia there is no Czechoslovakia,” Unsworth said. “And therefore no guarantee.”
“Neat,” Russell said.
“Very,” Unsworth agreed.
Out on the street, Russell hailed a passing taxi. “Anhalter Bahnhof,” he told the driver. It seemed as if he and Hitler were heading in the same direction.
The train to prague left at noon, and was scheduled to arrive in the Czech capital shortly before 7:00. Russell boarded it with a sinking sensation in his stomach, and an alcohol-rich lunch in the dining car did nothing to improve matters.
The lunchtime editions carried the news that the Slovak premier Monsignor Tiso had been “invited” to Berlin. He had, over the past couple of days, seemed surprisingly reluctant to tip over the Czech apple-cart, and the Fьhrer was doubtless anxious to offer him some kindly advice. Their trains would cross at some point, Russell guessed. He would watch the passing windows for a prelate with a death wish.
Speaking of which… he reminded himself that the Wiesners were in London, that foreigners were hardly ever searched, that the next life was bound to be better than this one. He fought off a momentary impulse to quit the train at Dresden, the only stop before the frontier. If he did, the Soviets would probably come looking for him with murder in mind. And he could hardly have blamed them-a deal was a deal.
As the train wound its way up the upper Elbe valley toward the frontier he compiled a compendium of possible explanations for the material in his false-bottomed suitcase that even a reefer-smoking Neville Chamberlain would have found impossible to believe. As Gert had said, the important thing was not to be searched.
As the train slowed for the border inspection his heart speeded up. They came to a halt in a wide ravine, shared by double tracks and the loud, foaming river. The snow-speckled walls of the valley rose steeply on either side, and the long, low building which housed the emigration and customs services was partly suspended over the rushing waters. The river ruled out escape in one direction, and the tall electrified fence beyond the tracks precluded any hope of flight in the other. Like rats in a maze, Russell thought-only one way to go.
The loudspeakers suspended from the searchlight pylons crackled into life. All passengers were requested to leave the train and form a line on the narrow strip of tarmac alongside the tracks.
There were about 200 people in the queue, Russell reckoned, and they were filing into the building at a gratifying rate. Just a quick look at documents, he thought, and on we go. Beside him the train lurched forward, ready to pick up its passengers on the other side. Without its comforting presence Russell felt suddenly vulnerable.
Finally, he could see through the doorway. Uniformed officers sat behind two desks, while others hovered in the background, sizing up potential prey. Further on, two pairs of officers stood behind tables, searching through bags and suitcases. The first hurdle presented itself. The officer looked at his passport, and then at his face. “Your name?” he asked, and for a split second Russell’s mind was a terrifying blank.
“John Russell,” he said, as if he hadn’t been concentrating.
“Birthdate?”
That was easier. “Eighth of August 1899.”
“Thank you,” the official said, and handed him back his passport. Russell moved on, carefully avoiding all eye contact. Ignore me, he silently pleaded with the customs officials behind the tables.
In vain. “You,” the nearest said. “Open your case, please.”
Russell placed it on the table, willing his hands not to shake as he clicked the case open. The man and his blond partner stared for a second at the top layer of clothes, and the partner started digging around with his hands. “What’s this?” he asked, pulling out Effi’s script. “A Girl from the Mountains?”
“It’s a film script,” Russell said. “My girlfriend’s an actress,” he added. “Her photograph’s inside.”
The partner extracted it and both men took a good look. “I’ve seen her in something,” the first man said.
His partner rubbed his chin with forefinger and thumb. “I have, too.”
“I remember,” the first man said. “She was the wife of that guy who got killed by the Reds…”
“The Necessary Sacrifice,” Russell suggested helpfully.
“That’s the one. And she’s your girlfriend?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re a lucky man,” the partner said, replacing the photograph and closing the suitcase.
Russell had never heard a more beautiful click. “I know it,” he said with a grateful smile. Suitcase in hand, he walked out through the open doorway, repressing the urge to skip and dance.
The train pulled into Prague’s Masaryk Station at twenty past seven. On the streets it felt more like midnight-they were dark and mostly deserted, as if the city’s people were all at home, hunched over their radio sets. He had never seen Wenceslas Square so empty, even at four in the morning.
The Grand was fully operational though, its multilingual staff and art nouveau fittings a match for any barbarian invasion. Russell had stayed there twice before, once in the late 20s and once the previous September, when Chamberlain and Daladier were licking Hitler’s boots in Munich. He asked the receptionist if anything crucial had happened in the last seven hours, and was told that it hadn’t. Monsignor Tiso, he supposed, was still en route to Berlin.
Russell’s room was on the first floor, at the back. Apart from the lack of a view it seemed thoroughly adequate. After those few moments at the frontier, though, a pigsty would have seemed adequate, provided it was in Czechoslovakia. He dumped the unopened suitcase on the bed and went back down in search of dinner.
The hotel restaurant also seemed a lot emptier than usual, but the baked carp, fruit dumplings, and South Moravian white wine were all delicious. A walk seemed in order, but he reluctantly decided against one-his train left at 11:40 the following morning and he was anxious for the Soviets to collect their papers. The thought of having to dump them in the Vltava was more than he could bear.
He didn’t have long to wait. Shortly before 10:00 he answered a familiar-sounding tap on his door, and found Irina Borskaya anxiously glancing up the corridor. “Come in,” he said superfluously-she had already dodged under his arm. She was wearing the same long, charcoal gray skirt, but a different blouse. Her hair seemed a shade lighter, and this time there was a hint of bright red lipstick on her thin lips.
“The papers,” she said, sitting down in the upright chair.
“It’s nice to see you, too,” Russell said, opening the suitcase. After dumping his possessions onto the bed, he clicked the false bottom open, removed the sheaf of papers he’d picked up in Gaarden, and handed them over.
“What are those?” she asked, as he placed the envelope containing McKinley’s papers on the bedside table.
“A story I’m working on.”
She gave him a disbelieving look, but said nothing. After flicking through the naval dispositions, she reached inside her blouse and brought out a money clip containing Swiss Franc notes. High denomination Swiss Franc notes. “We promised to pay you well,” she said, as if reprimanding him for any possible doubts he might have had on that score.
“Thank you,” he said. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”
“There is no need for the pleasure to end,” she said. “We have other work…”
“No,” Russell said firmly. “We had a simple deal-you helped my friend out of Germany, I brought your papers to Prague. We’re quits. I wish the Soviet Union well, but not well enough to die for it.”
“Very well,” she said, rising from the chair and cradling the papers in one arm. The fact that she had no obvious place to conceal them led Russell to the conclusion that her room was close to his own. “If that is how you feel,” she told him, “then we understand. And we thank you for what you have done.”
Somewhat astonished by the ease with which his resignation had been accepted, Russell opened the door for her.
“When are you leaving?” she asked.
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Then have a good journey.” She put her head out, glanced to the left and the right, and walked off down the corridor in the direction of the stairs. The whole encounter had taken less than five minutes.
Before going downstairs the next morning Russell wrote a short covering letter to McKinley’s editor in San Francisco, explaining how he had come by the papers and offering his own brief summary of their significance. After breakfast in the hotel restaurant he walked around the corner to the main post office on Jind?iљskб, bought and addressed a large envelope, and asked for the quickest possible delivery. “It’ll be gone before he gets here,” the clerk observed, reading Russell’s mind. “On the afternoon plane to Paris,” he added in explanation.
Satisfied, Russell walked back to the Grand, collected his suitcase, and checked out. He was early for the train but he liked Masaryk Station, and he liked the idea of being closer to home.
As it happened, it didn’t matter, because he no longer had a seat. Two carriages of the train, including his own, had been commandeered by President Hacha and his swollen entourage. The Czech President, Russell gathered from discussions with sundry railway officials, had also been “invited” to Berlin, and a heart condition prohibited him from flying. Russell was assured that two extra carriages would be added to the night train, but no one seemed capable of explaining why they couldn’t be added to this one.
Oh well, Russell thought, there were many worse places to spend a day than Prague. As President Hacha and his dicey heart were about to find out.
He left the suitcase in the left luggage, took a tram back to the town center, and spent the next couple of hours ambling down the east bank of the river. The Czech flag was still flying from the ramparts of the famous castle, but for how long? A few days at most, Russell thought, and the city’s residents seemed to agree with him. As he walked back through the old town in search of a late lunch he noticed rapidly lengthening lines at one baker after another. News of Hacha’s trip had obviously spread.
This was it, Russell thought-the end of any lingering hopes for peace. There was no way of presenting this as part of some grand scheme to bring Germans home to the Reich. Hitler had thrown off the cloak. It was no longer if, but when.
The sight of an orthodox Jew on Nбrodnн Street reminded him of Albert. Long gone, he hoped, but what of Czechoslovakia’s 100,000 Jews? What were they doing this afternoon? Crowding the stations, loading their cars-or just sitting tight and hoping for the best, as so many German Jews had done? This orthodox Jew had a bagful of groceries, and seemed in no hurry to go anywhere.
He thought about what Albert had said during the drive to the Gцrlitz, that kindness had become more worthy of note, and more interesting to fathom, than cruelty. It was certainly harder to find.
With darkness falling he sought out a bar, and sampled several different Bohemian beers. Each tasted better than the last. He raised a toast to McKinley’s papers, now hopefully resting in some Parisian sorting-office, and another to McKinley himself. From time to time, over the last six weeks, he had found himself wondering why they had killed the young American. It was the wrong question to ask, he realized. It was like asking why they had killed Felix Wiesner. They might have had, or thought they had, particular motives, but the real reason was much simpler-they were killers. It was what they were. It was, in truth, all that they were.
The cold air streaming through his cab’s broken window kept him awake on his way to the station, but once ensconced in the overheated train he soon found himself falling asleep. The jerk of departure woke him for long enough to recline his seat, and the last thing he remembered was that he should have phoned Effi.
The next thing he knew he was waking with a sudden feeling of panic. He looked at his watch. Almost three hours had passed-they had to be nearing the frontier. But that didn’t matter anymore, he told himself. His subconscious was obviously stuck on the outward journey.
And then it occurred to him. He had never closed the false bottom. After Borskaya had gone he had just shifted the suitcase onto the floor, and this morning he had simply shoveled all the clothes back in.
The thought of another wrestle with a suitcase in a toilet made him groan, but it had to be done. He took it down from the overhead rack, and carried it out to the vestibule at the end of the car. Shading his eyes with his hands, and sticking his face up against the window, he could just make out the river running beside the tracks.
Inside the toilet he opened the suitcase, threw all the clothes on the floor, and went to close the false bottom.
It was already closed.
He stood there for a few moments, thinking back. When had he done it?
He hadn’t.
Clicking it open, he found several sheets of paper hidden inside. Holding the first one up to the dim light of the cubicle, he found that it contained a list of names and addresses-six under Ruhr, three under Hamburg. The other sheets-there were nine of them-followed a similar pattern. There were almost a hundred people listed, from all the different parts of Germany.
Who were they? No indication was given, none at all. But one thing was certain-the Soviets meant them to be discovered. That was why Borskaya had asked him when he was leaving, Russell thought-they had been inserted while he was downstairs at breakfast or out posting McKinley’s papers. That was why she’d accepted his resignation so easily. And the money-that worked both ways. Such generosity might keep him working for them, but if it didn’t, so much foreign currency would be hard to explain.
The names, he realized, had to be German communists-real or imaginary. Were these men and women whom Stalin wanted culled, but who were beyond his reach? Or was the list a work of fiction, something to keep the Gestapo busy while the real communists got on with their work? A bit of both, Russell guessed. A few real communists to keep the Gestapo believing, and then the wild goose chase.
He shivered at the nearness of his escape, and realized that the train was slowing down. He shoved the suitcase to the floor, yanked up the lid of the toilet, and started tearing the sheets of paper into smaller and smaller pieces. Once these were all in the bowl he reached for the lever, filled with the sudden dread that it wouldn’t work.
It didn’t. As beads of cold sweat multiplied on his forehead, Russell worked the lever again. It coughed up some water, but nowhere near enough.
There was a heavy knock on the door. “We are approaching the frontier,” a German voice said.
“Right,” Russell shouted back. What should he do? Try and swallow all the bits of paper, along with whatever international germs the toilet bowl had been saving for him? Anything but that.
The train was still decelerating. He looked for some access to the toilet’s workings, but everything was screwed down. He tried the lever one more time, more out of habit than hope, and for reasons known only to God it flushed. He stood there, reveling in the sight of empty water, until sweet relief gave way to a nightmare vision of Gestapo officers combing the tracks for all the pieces and painstakingly gluing them back together.
“Get a grip,” he murmured to himself. He picked up the suitcase, clicked the false bottom shut, and covered it with clothing retrieved from the floor. As he left the toilet he caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror, and wished he hadn’t. He looked deranged.
The train was still moving, the lighted platform of the Czech border point unrolling past the window. It was snowing now, thick flakes drifting down through the cones of light. “We are not stopping at the Czech crossing point tonight,” the German railway official was saying to a female passenger. No Czechoslovakia, no border, Russell thought. Did that mean they were not stopping at the German border either?
No such luck.
The passengers decanted onto the platform, a long strip of spotlit tarmac in a sea of darkness. As Russell joined the line, a new and highly unwelcome thought occurred to him. If the sheets were meant to be found, there had to have been a tip-off. The false bottom might be empty, but it was still a false bottom.
One explanation seemed workable, but only if the officials on duty were different from the ones he had encountered the day before. As the queue sucked him out of the snow and into the building, he anxiously examined the faces, but there were none he recognized.
The immigration official took one look at his passport and gestured to a man in plain clothes behind him. Gestapo. “This way, Herr Russell” the man said, without looking at his passport. He walked across to a large table, where another man in plain clothes was waiting.
“Put your suitcase on the table,” the first man said. He had long hair for the Gestapo, and an almost likable face. As he opened the suitcase, Russell noticed that his fingernails badly needed trimming.
“Could I have your name and rank?” Russell asked.
“Ascherl, Kriminalassistent,” he said without looking up.
He took out the clothes with more care than Russell had, and piled them on the other end of the table. Effi’s script was placed on the top. Then he ran his hands round the inside of the suitcase, obviously looking for a way of accessing the false bottom. Borskaya had been behind him when he opened it in the hotel room, Russell remembered.
“How do you open it?” Ascherl asked him.
Russell looked perplexed. “It’s open.”
“The hidden compartment,” the Gestapo officer said patiently.
Russell tried to look even more perplexed. “What are you talking about?”
Ascherl turned to his subordinate. “Your knife, Schneider.”
Schneider pulled out a large pocket-knife. Ascherl looked at the suitcase for a moment, ran his hand along inside it, then abruptly turned it upside down, pressed in the knife, and patiently sawed from one side of the bottom to the other. “This hidden compartment,” he said, reaching in a hand.
His look of triumph faded as his scrabbling hand failed to find anything in it. Two more cuts and he was able to wrench back a section of the reinforced leather bottom and shine a torch inside.
“Where is it?” he asked patiently.
“Where is what?” Russell replied, trying to sound bewildered. Most of the others in the room were watching them now, eager to see how the situation played out.
“Let me put it another way,” the Gestapo officer said. “What reason do you have for carrying a suitcase with a hidden compartment?”
“I didn’t know it had one. I only bought it yesterday, from a Jew in Prague.” He smiled, as if the answer had just occurred to him. “The bastard probably used it to smuggle valuables out of the Reich.”
“Undoubtedly,” Ascherl said.
Russell was still thanking heaven for his inspiration when he noticed a new face in the room-one of the customs officials from the day before. The man was looking straight at him, with an expression on his face that seemed part indignation, part amusement.
“But you are from Berlin,” Ascherl continued. “Did you travel to Prague without a suitcase?”
“It fell apart when I was there. I needed a new one.” Russell braced himself for an intervention by the customs official, but there was none.
“And this Jew just happened along?”
“No, there’s a market, like the ones they used to have in Berlin.” The customs official was still looking at him, still saying nothing. Was it possible that he didn’t remember this suitcase from the day before?
“Your wallet, please,” the Gestapo officer said.
Russell handed it over, and watched him remove the currency-a few Czech notes, some Reichsmarks, the clip of Swiss Francs.
“Where did these come?” Ascherl asked.
“I wrote an article for a Soviet paper, and they paid me in Swiss Francs. Several months ago now. I thought they might be useful in Prague. The SD knows all about this,” he added. “Look,” he said, indicating the wallet, “can I show you something?”
Ascherl handed it back, and Russell pulled out the folded sheet of Sturmbannfьhrer Kleist’s letter.
As the Gestapo man read it, Russell watched his face. If the list had been found in the hidden compartment then the letter could have been ignored. As it was, all Ascherl had was a story full of holes that he couldn’t fill in. Would he keep on trying, and risk offending the big boys on Wilhelmstrasse?
“I see,” he said finally, and looked up at Russell. “It seems we are all victims of the same plot. We received information… well, I won’t go into that. It looks as though the Reds have tried to set you up.”
“The suitcase was suspiciously cheap,” Russell admitted. Across the room the customs official was still watching, still doing his Mona Lisa impersonation.
“It’s not worth much now,” Ascherl said, surveying his knifework.
Russell smiled. “You were doing your duty, as any friend of the Reich would wish.”
Ascherl smiled back. “We have others. Confiscated from Jews. Perhaps we can find you another one with a hidden compartment. Schneider?”
Ascherl’s assistant disappeared into an adjoining room and reemerged almost immediately with two suitcases. Russell chose the smaller of the two, and packed it with his clothes and Effi’s script. The customs official had disappeared.
But not for long. As Russell came out of the building the man fell into step beside him. “Nice suitcase,” he said.
Russell stopped.
“I’m getting married next month,” the man said, carefully positioning himself between Russell and any watchers in the building they had just left.
Russell took out his wallet, removed the clip of Swiss francs, and handed it over. “A wedding present?”
The man smiled, gave him an ironic click of the heels, and strode away.
Russell walked on toward the train. The snow was heavier now, tumbling down through the pools of light, flakes clinging to the glistening wire. He could feel the sweat on his body slowly turning to ice.
The train, it seemed, was waiting only for him-the whistle shrilled as he stepped aboard. He made his way forward through the swaying cars, slumped into the reclining seat, and listened to the rhythmic clatter of the wheels, rolling him into the Reich.