Potsdam Station (15 page)

She stuck her tongue out at his retreating figure.

‘Are all the staff here Jewish?’ Effi asked.

‘Staff, patients and detainees,’ the nurse told her, rolling the bandage around Effi’s head. ‘In varying degrees, of course. Most of the people on the second floor are half-Jews or quarter-Jews who were married to aryans. Or just had influential friends. The Jews scheduled for transport are in the old Pathology building.’

‘But the transports have stopped, haven’t they?’

‘Weeks ago.’

‘So what’s going to happen now?’

‘That’s what we all want to know,’ the nurse admitted with a shrug. She examined her handiwork. ‘There, that’ll do.’

The orderly took them back down the long tunnel, up the stairs and across the courtyard to the Pathology building. There was a guardroom just inside the entrance, and steps leading down to a large, semi-basement room. It was the first of four such spaces, and each seemed home to between twenty and thirty detainees. Most were women over thirty, but there was a smattering of younger women with children, and several men past middle age. As Effi and Rosa wandered through the rooms a few eyes looked up in curiosity, and a couple of the older women even managed a wan smile of greeting, but most of the faces held only fear and mistrust.

The first room seemed the emptiest. Having picked out a space for themselves, they examined the outside world through one of the high barred windows, Rosa perched precariously on her upturned suitcase. A barbed wire fence ran across their line of sight, bisecting the area of cratered lawns and broken trees that lay between them and the ivy-covered buildings of the main hospital. An almost idyllic setting, Effi thought. Once upon a time.

She was helping Rosa down when the sirens began to wail, and soon feet started tramping down the steps. The room began to fill up – these basements, Effi realised, were air-raid shelters for prisoners and guards alike. There were several men in Gestapo uniform, and one small bow-legged man in a black civilian suit who seemed to be in charge. Dobberke, she thought, as his black German shepherd cocked a leg against a metal table leg.

‘We’re all in the same boat now,’ a satisfied voice said behind Effi, confirming her previous thought. One of the sleeping women had woken up, and was now grinning at the coterie of Gestapo in the far corner. ‘I’m Johanna,’ she said, as the first bombs exploded in the distance. She looked about fifty, but could have been younger – her face was gaunt, her body painfully thin.

‘Dagmar and Rosa.’

‘Have you just been caught?’

‘This morning. And you?’

‘A few weeks ago. I flushed the toilet without thinking, and one of the neighbours heard.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘Three years of effort down the toilet. Literally.’

‘Are there no young people here?’ Effi asked.

‘They’re in the cells. Through there,’ she gestured with a hand. ‘Mostly men, but a few young women too – anyone they think might make a run for it.’

‘And the
greifer
, aren’t they here too?’

Johanna’s face darkened. ‘They’re not usually here during the day, and there are several I haven’t seen for a while. Either Dobberke has given them a head start, or they’ve just taken one for themselves. Whatever happens to us, they have no future.’

‘And what will happen to us?’ Effi wondered out loud.

Johanna shook her head. ‘Only God knows.’

Plunging into darkness

April 14 – 18

R
ussell had only just finished his breakfast when the usual escorts arrived. Three men were waiting in the interrogation room. The golden-toothed questioner from last time occupied Ramanichev’s place; an NKVD officer with a shiny bald head and sharp-eyed Tatar face sat to his left. The third man was Yevgeny Shchepkin, Russell’s old partner in espionage.

‘I am Colonel Nikoladze,’ Gold Teeth admitted, with the air of someone revealing a state secret, ‘and this is Major Kazankin. Comrade Shchepkin I believe you know.’

Shchepkin’s hair had turned white since Russell last saw him, and his body seemed strangely stiff in the chair, but the eyes were alert as ever.

‘We have sad news for you,’ Nikoladze began briskly, conjuring instant images of dead Effis and Pauls. ‘Your president died yesterday.’

The relief was intense. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Russell heard himself say. He supposed he was. He had never much liked Roosevelt, but he had admired him, particularly in the early years.

‘To business, then,’ Nikoladze said, laying both palms on the table. ‘We have a proposition for you,’ he told Russell. ‘As I understand it, you have family in Berlin, and concerns that they might come to harm when our forces reach the city.’

‘That is correct,’ Russell told him. Surely they couldn’t have changed their minds?

‘I believe you offered assistance. “Whatever your generals need to know”,’ Nikoladze read from the paper in front of him. ‘“Where everything is, the best roads, the best vantage points”.’

‘That’s what I said.’ He could hardly believe it.

‘So how would you like to arrive in Berlin several days ahead of the Red Army?’ Nikoladze asked, with a singularly unconvincing smile.

Russell looked up. ‘Ahead of?’

‘We are sending a small team into Berlin. Major Kazankin will be in command. A second soldier, a scientist and, we hope, yourself. You will all be dropped at night in the surrounding countryside, and will work your way into the city. You, Mr Russell, will act as the guide. And you will handle any accidental contacts with the local population – Kazankin here speaks a little German, but not enough to pass himself off as a native.’

‘Where exactly are we going?’ Russell asked, suspecting he already knew the answer. ‘Scientist’ was a bit of a clue.

‘You’ve heard of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute?’ Nikoladze asked, confirming his guess.

‘Any one in particular? There are several of them.’

‘The Institute for Physics,’ Nikoladze said, with some irritation.

This was not a man, Russell thought, who took life as it came. ‘It’s in Dahlem,’ he said. ‘Or was. It may have been bombed.’

‘As of last week, it was still intact. You know exactly where it is?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg?’

‘Yes.’

‘According to our information, these are the most important atomic research establishments in Berlin. We want to secure all the available documentation from these facilities, and get an accurate assessment of what materials and equipment they contain.’

‘Why not go in with the Red Army?’ Russell asked. ‘Are a few days going to make any difference?’ He knew he was arguing against his own interests, but the more he understood of the Soviets’ reasoning the safer he would probably be.

‘They might,’ Shchepkin answered him, speaking for the first time. Even his voice seemed weaker than it had. ‘The Germans may well decide to destroy everything, and if they do not, the Americans probably will. Three weeks ago they tried their best to destroy the uranium production facility at Oranienburg from the air, and they may well decide to send in a ground team.’

‘I doubt there’s anything they need,’ Russell protested.

‘There isn’t,’ Shchepkin agreed. ‘But they don’t want us to get it.’

That sounded right to Russell. Hitler might still be breathing fire, but his two principal enemies were already getting ready for the next war.

‘You will guide the team from the drop zone to the Institute, and then on to Charlottenburg,’ Nikoladze continued. ‘You know the city. And you speak Russian – so you can help our scientist translate from the German.’

Russell idly wondered what the cost of refusal would be. Siberia, in all likelihood. Which was neither here nor there, because he didn’t intend to refuse. He could see several drawbacks to acceptance – in fact, the more he thought about it the more occurred to him. Berlin was probably going to be the most dangerous place on earth over the next few weeks, and the Americans would be seriously displeased with anyone who helped the Soviets to an atomic bomb. To top it all, the idea of jumping from a plane with only a sheet of silk to combat gravity was truly petrifying.

But what did all that matter if it gave him the chance to find Effi and Paul? ‘I assume we won’t be wearing uniforms,’ he said.

‘You will wear the uniforms the Nazis give their foreign labourers. Many were captured in East Prussia.’

That made sense. ‘And once I’ve guided the team to these two locations… where do we go then?’

‘The team will go to ground and wait for the Red Army.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘We are investigating several possibilities.’

‘Okay. But once the team is safely in hiding I assume I’ll be free to look for my family?’

‘Yes, but only then. I understand your concern for your family, but you can only leave the team when Major Kazankin agrees to your release. This is a military operation, and the usual rules apply. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the penalty for desertion.’

‘You don’t,’ Russell agreed. Nor did he doubt their ability to enforce it. The NKVD had a global reach, and peace or no peace, they would eventually hunt him down. And he could see how important this must be to them. If, as some experts claimed, the Soviets had sacrificed an eighth of their population to win this war, they hardly wanted to end it at the mercy of an American atomic monopoly. The stakes could hardly be higher.

‘So you accept,’ Nikoladze said, looking slightly more relaxed.

‘I do,’ Russell replied, glancing at Shchepkin. He seemed almost grateful.

‘Have you ever jumped from a plane?’ Kazankin asked. He had a deep voice, which somehow suited him down to the ground.

‘No,’ Russell admitted.

‘Your training will begin this afternoon,’ Nikoladze said.

‘But first a bath,’ Russell insisted.

Half an hour later, he was standing under a near-scalding downpour in the warders’ shower-room when a further drawback suggested itself. Regardless of success or failure, by the end of the operation he would know far too much about Soviet atomic progress – or the lack thereof – for them to ever consider letting him loose. The most likely culmination to his involvement was a quick bullet in the head from Kazankin. One more body on the streets of Berlin was unlikely to attract attention.

For the moment they needed him – Nikoladze had been visibly relieved when he’d agreed to join the team. Even knowing he wanted to reach Berlin, they had feared a refusal. Why? Because they still believed he was working for American intelligence, and a real American agent would hardly agree to help the Soviets gather atomic secrets. And on the off-chance that he was telling the truth, and no longer working for the Americans, they had brought along the only man whom he might conceivably trust. Yevgeny Shchepkin. Resurrected, dusted off, and asked to help them bring Russell on board.

They must want the German secrets very badly.

Dried and dressed in clothes collected from his hotel, he found the major waiting for him. ‘The car’s outside,’ the Russian said.

A thin young man with dark wavy hair and spectacles was waiting in the back. ‘Ilya Varennikov,’ he introduced himself.

‘The scientist,’ Kazankin growled.

For Effi and Rosa, Saturday was a day spent learning the ropes. The morning meal of
wassersuppe
and a few potato peelings served notice that yesterday’s dinner had not been a fluke, but, as Johanna wryly remarked, starvation seemed unlikely in the short time remaining. They were allowed exactly forty-five minutes of exercise, circling a small courtyard under a square of smoke-streaked sky, and were then left with nothing to do but wait another twelve hours for another bowl of
wassersuppe.

Once one of the guards had been cajoled into sharpening Rosa’s only pencil, the girl seemed happy to draw, and Effi embarked on the task of learning as much as she could about their place of imprisonment. Johanna knew quite a lot, but residents of longer standing were more aware of how different the place had been only a few months earlier, and how it had changed in the meantime.

There were, it seemed, about a thousand Jews still resident in the hospital complex. As the nurse had told Effi, those living in the hospital proper – the half-Jews and quarter-Jews, the dreaded
greifer
– were the privileged ones. The atmosphere on that side of the barbed wire was said to be increasingly febrile, with much drinking, dancing and promiscuous coupling. The non-Jewish authorities, far from forbidding such activities, were avidly joining in. Everyone was fiddling while Berlin burned.

Still expecting a summons to interrogation, Effi sought information about her likely interrogator. SS Hauptscharführer Dobberke, as everyone seemed to agree, was a thug of the first order, but many of the same people seemed, almost despite themselves, to have a sneaking respect for the man. Yes, he did punish any serious rule-breaking with twenty-five lashes of his favourite whip, and yes, he would stick anyone lacking funds on a transport east with hardly a second thought, but he never exceeded the twenty-five, and once he had taken a bribe he always delivered his side of the bargain.