Silesian Station (2008) (8 page)

'And you got the American passport?' she asked.

'I did.' This didn't seem the right moment to mention the other side of the bargain - that he was now working for American intelligence. A picture of the sunny briefing room in Manhattan crossed his mind, the gaunt-faced Murchison dragging on his umpteenth Lucky Strike of the day. Over there it had all felt a little unreal. Europe had seemed a long way away.

He still meant to tell Effi , but the events of the last few days had complicated matters.

She sensed his reticence, though not its cause. 'I know you had to promise them something,' she said quietly, meaning the Gestapo. 'And I know we have to talk about what we're going to do. Together, I mean. But I need to think. I couldn't think in that place, just couldn't. After this wretched premiere... Can we go somewhere at the weekend, somewhere quiet, away from Berlin?'

'Of course we can.' Introspection was not something he associated with her. Intelligence, yes, but she'd always run on instinct rather than thought.

It was late afternoon when they arrived back at the flat. 'I think I need to sleep,' she said. 'But you'll stay, won't you? Could we get into bed and just hold each other?'

Ten minutes later Russell was lying there, wide awake, relishing the scent of her newly-washed hair, the feel of her body tucked into his. 'We'll work it out,' he whispered, though he had no idea how. He remembered the poster in the torchlight, the jeering threats in the darkness. 'We will,' he murmured, more to himself than to her. She managed a grunt of agreement and slid away into sleep.

A Leap in the Light

T
hursday began well. The sun was already streaming through the curtains when they woke, and long sleepy love-making seemed to dissolve any lingering distance between them. They shared a bath, took turns drying each other, and found themselves back on the rumpled bed. A second immersion in the tub exhausted the supply of dry towels.

They drove down to the Ku'damm for breakfast and sat outside with large cups of milky coffee, watching fellow Berliners on their way to work. 'You'll need a dress suit,' Effi said. 'For the premiere,' she added in explanation.

'I'll hire one. And that reminds me - I've got presents for you at home.'

Her eyes lit up. 'You'll bring them over?'

'I will.'

Effi looked at her watch. 'I told Zarah I'd see her this morning.'

'Then we'd better get going,' Russell said, signalling the waiter.

During the drive out to Grunewald he told her about Miriam, and his hiring of Kuzorra on Thomas's behalf. She listened but said nothing, just stared out of the window at the shops lining the Ku'damm. When Russell realized she was crying he pulled over and took her in his arms.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'It sounds like a story with such a sad ending.'

Outside Zarah's house she kissed him a loving goodbye, and he watched the front door close behind the two sisters before moving off. Russell had woken in the middle of the night, full of fear that Effi would leave him, that she wouldn't risk her life on his ability to satisfy the SD. Here now, in the bright light of a summer morning, the notion seemed risible, but traces of the fear still lingered.

He drove back into town, stopping for petrol at the garage halfway up Ku'damm. According to Jack Slaney, the special permits required by travellers to the Czech Protectorate were only available from the Ministry of Economics building on Wilhelmstrasse, and needed further ratification from the Gestapo. A long morning's work, Russell guessed.

The Ministry office concerned did not open for business until ten-thirty. Russell read the
Beobachter
over a second coffee at Kempinski's and arrived at the permits desk a few seconds early. The bureaucrat behind it checked his watch, raised his eyes, and asked Russell why he intended visiting the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

'I'm a journalist,' Russell said, passing over his Ministry of Propaganda press credentials. 'I want to see how the Czechs are enjoying their liberation.'

The bureaucrat suppressed a smile. 'You're entitled to a permit of course, but I should warn you that the Gestapo are unlikely to ratify it. The border is tightly closed,' he added, with unnecessary relish. 'When do you wish to go?'

'Monday week,' Russell told him. 'The 31st.'

The man took one printed green card from the small stack on his desk, filled in the dates by hand, and signed it. 'You must take this to the Alex. Room 512.'

Russell drove across town, parked his car in the street beside the Stadtbahn station, and walked across Alexanderplatz. The bell-towered slab of a building which housed most of Berlin's Kripo detectives and several Gestapo departments was situated on the far side, the relevant entrance on Dircksen Strasse.

Room 512 was on the fifth floor. The Gestapo duty officer hardly glanced at the green card. 'Come back in a week,' he said dismissively.

Russell smiled at him. 'If there should be a problem, please contact Hauptsturmfuhrer Ritschel at Prinz Albrecht-Strasse or Hauptsturmfuhrer Hirth of the Sicherheitsdienst at 102 Wilhelmstrasse. I'm sure one of them will be able to help.'

'Ah,' the man said. 'Let me write those names down.'

Russell retraced his path to the outside world, pausing only to wash his hands at one of the green washbasins which dotted the corridors. A ritual cleansing perhaps.

The heat was still rising but a few clouds had gathered, almost apologetically, in the western sky. Resisting the temptation to eat an early lunch at Gerhardt's he drove across town, left the Hanomag in the Adlon parking lot, and walked the short distance back along Unter den Linden to No.7, where the former palace of Princess Amelia, Frederick the Great's youngest and reputedly favourite sister, now housed the Soviet Embassy.

Russell rang the bell and glanced around, half-expecting a posse of men in leather coats propping up linden trees, all reading their newspapers upside down. There were none. The door was opened by a thin-lipped Slav in a grey suit. He was holding the last few millimetres of a cigarette between thumb and forefinger.

'Visa?' Russell said in Russian.

'Come,' the man said, looking beyond him for an unlikely queue. He took Russell's press identification and passport, gestured towards the open door of a waiting room, and strode off towards the rear of the building, his shoes rapping on the marble floor.

There was an obvious couple in the waiting room, Jews by the look of them, in their mid to late thirties. Russell wished them good morning and sat down in what proved a surprisingly comfortable chair.

'You are here for a visa?' the man asked.

'Yes,' Russell said, surprised by the directness of the question. 'I'm a journalist,' he added, 'an American journalist.'

'You are not German?'

'No, but I've lived here for many years.'

Silence followed, as if the two Jews were trying to work out why anyone foreign would choose to live in Germany. They were middle-class Jews, Russell noticed. The young man's clothes showed signs of serious wear and repair, but they would have been expensive when he bought them.

'Do you know anything about the situation in Shanghai?' the woman asked him suddenly.

'Not really. A lot of German Jews have emigrated there over the last six months. I believe the Gestapo chartered several ships.'

'They did. My cousins went on one, but we have heard nothing since.'

'That doesn't mean anything,' her husband interjected. 'You know what the post is like here - imagine what's it like in an occupied country like China.' He turned to Russell. 'We are here for transit visas,' he explained.

'I still think...' his wife began, but saw no point in completing the thought out loud. 'But what are they all doing in Shanghai?' she asked her husband. 'What will we do?'

'Survive,' he said tersely.

'So you say. We could survive in Palestine.'

Her husband made a disparaging noise. 'Palestine is just a big farm. Shanghai is a city. And if we don't like it we can go on to Australia or America.'

'With what?'

'We shall earn. We always have. Until Hitler came along and said we couldn't.'

'That's all very...' She stopped as footsteps sounded in the hall.

The grey suit appeared in the doorway, a newly-lit cigarette in one hand. 'Joseph and Anna Handler? This way.'

Russell was left to examine his surroundings. The Embassy seemed remarkably silent, as if most of the staff were off on holiday. Or off on a purge. The waiting room contained framed portraits of both Lenin and Stalin, gazing severely at each other from opposite walls. He thought through what he intended to say one more time, and hoped he wasn't guilty of over-confidence. He had got away with playing both ends against the middle in March, but he knew he'd been lucky as well as clever. The penalties for failure would be even worse this time, because Effi would also have to pay them. He might be shot as a spy, might escape with deportation. She would go to Ravensbruck.

The smoker returned about fifteen minutes later, and led Russell down a corridor to an office overlooking the central courtyard. A youngish woman with short curly hair and glasses sat behind the only desk, filing her finger-nails. After a minute or so she held them up to the window, examined them from every conceivable angle, and lowered them again.

'Do you speak Russian?' she asked Russell in that language.

'Only a little.'

'English?'

'I am American.'

'Yes I see.' She picked up the passport.

'I am not here for a visa,' Russell said. 'I need to see your highest-ranking intelligence officer - NKVD or GRU, it doesn't matter.'

She just looked at him.

'I am a friend of the Soviet Union,' Russell said, exaggerating somewhat. 'I'm here to offer my services.'

'Wait there,' she said, taking his passport and press credentials and leaving the room. She was wearing bright red carpet slippers, Russell noticed.

A few seconds later the smoker took up position in the doorway. Russell's smile elicited nothing more than a faint curl of the lip. It seemed distressingly likely that the object distorting his suit pocket was a gun.

Several minutes went by before the woman returned. A single sentence of Russian to the smoker, and he gestured Russell to follow. They climbed a wide marble staircase lined with poster-size photographs of factories and dams, and walked around the balustraded gallery. The furthest door led into a spacious office, high-ceilinged with a huge glass chandelier and two tall windows over-looking the Unter den Linden. A man in a dark grey suit, round-faced and balding, stood waiting in the middle of the room.

'Mr Russell? Please take a seat. We can speak in English, yes?' He chose an armchair for himself. 'Thank you, Sasha,' he said to the smoker, who left, closing the door behind him. 'So, you offer us your services?'

'And not for the first time,' Russell said.

'No? Please tell me. I know nothing of you.'

'May I know your name?'

'Konstantin Gorodnikov. I am trade attache here at the embassy. With other responsibilities, of course.'

After sketching in his communist past, Russell told the Russian about the series of articles he had written for
Pravda
earlier that year, and the oral reports on conditions in Germany that had accompanied them. 'My initial contact was Yevgeny Shchepkin - he never told me which service he worked for - but someone took his place at our third meeting, a woman named Irina Borskaya...'

'Wait a moment,' Gorodnikov said. He walked over to his desk, took a sheet of paper from the pile beside the typewriter, and selected a pen from those in the tray. A quick search for something to rest the paper on turned up a dog-eared copy of a popular German film magazine. Fully equipped, the Russian reoccupied his chair. 'Please continue.'

Russell did so. 'Comrade Borskaya never told me exactly who she worked for, either. She asked me to bring some documents out of Germany, and I agreed to do so on condition that her people helped a friend of mine across the border into Czechoslovakia. We both kept our parts of the bargain, but then she asked me to do something else. And when I refused, she planted some incriminating papers on me and tipped off the Gestapo.

'All this happened earlier this year. The Germans were not sure that I'd actually done anything illegal, but they knew I'd been in contact with your people over the articles and they suspected that there was more. Then, while I was in America this month, they arrested my girlfriend Effi for telling a bad joke about Hitler. When I got back last Monday the SD gave me a choice - work for them or Effi would be sent to a concentration camp. When I asked what they wanted me to do, they said I was to reestablish contact with you people and offer you intelligence. The idea being, of course, that they would be giving me false intelligence to pass on. So here I am. Obviously I have no desire to help the Nazis, or I wouldn't be telling you all this.'

Gorodnikov had written copious notes throughout this exposition, only pausing to sweep an imaginary speck of dust from his trousers when Russell mentioned Borskaya's attempted betrayal. 'That is very crystal clear,' he said, once it was plain the other had finished. 'You have skill for organising information.'

'That's my job,' Russell said dryly.

'Yes, I think so. And crystal clear means little without truth. I have no way to know how true this story is, here, now, but there can be later checking - I think you know that. So, let us say your story is true.'

'It is.'

'So. First question. If our person tries to have Gestapo arrest you, I think you will be very angry with Soviets. So why you want to help us? Why not just do what Gestapo want, and then you and your lady friend will be safe?'

'As I said, I don't like them. That's the first thing. I'm not crazy about you lot either, but if I'm forced to make a choice then there's no real contest. The Soviet Union might turn into something good - miracles can happen. Nazi Germany is something else. Nothing good grows out of scum. Do you understand?'

'You are anti-Nazi. That is good, but not surprise. Many people are anti-Nazi. Many Germans.'

'True, but they're not all being asked to help the bastards.'

Gorodnikov smiled for the first time.

'And they're not all willing to work for you,' Russell went on.

'How you work for us?'

'Well, I'll be bringing you false information that you know is false. Someone should be able to work something out from that.'

'Yes, but...'

'Look, I don't want any misunderstandings here. I'm not saying that I'm willing to die for the Soviet Union. Or anyone else for that matter. I'm willing to take some risks, but not those sort of risks. I won't take any more secrets across borders for you, but I'm ready to do some courier work inside Germany. And I'll pass on all the useful information which I come across as a journalist - I have good contacts here, and in London.'

'And you'll do this because the Nazis are scum?'

'And for one other thing.'

'Ah.'

'I want an escape route for myself and my girlfriend. I want you and your people to guarantee us a way out of Germany if we need one. I don't think that's unreasonable - I mean, it must make sense for you to keep your people out of the bastards' clutches. I know you can do it, and after the trick Com-rade Borskaya tried to play on me I think you owe me that much.'

'Mm.' Gorodnikov scribbled another couple of lines. 'All right, Mister Russell. I will send this information to Moscow. They will decide.'

'How long?' Russell asked, hoping the Russian would say a couple of months.