Silesian Station (2008) (27 page)
A Stadtbahn train arrived within minutes. It was full of citizens ignoring the government's ongoing anti-alcohol campaign, one of whom held the train up for five minutes at Friedrichstrasse by jumping in and out of the door like a demented rabbit. The train eventually reached Zoo Station, where an even rowdier Friday night crowd was waiting to get on. Russell alighted with some relief, and walked down the steps to street level. In the space in front of the station, two uniformed cops were asking a boy of about four where his mother was. He looked around as if searching for her, then screamed a simple 'I don't know!' at his questioners.
Russell walked under the Hardenberg Strasse bridge and crossed the road. Three minutes later he was approaching the flat. There were no suspiciously loitering cars, no leather coats clogging up the entrance.
Effi was in her dressing-gown. Her excitement turned to horror when she saw his face.
'It's much worse than it looks,' he said.
'But how....'
'One of the local lads in Wartha didn't like my attitude. Don't worry about it.'
They hugged and kissed until Russell reached for the cord.
'No, no, no,' she said. 'First we must talk.'
He grinned. 'Okay. How did your meeting go?'
'Oh that.' She dismissed it with a wave of a hand. 'I went to the station to meet you,' she said. 'I thought you'd be on Miriam's train, and....'
'I missed it.'
'I know. But I saw him. The man with the dark eyebrows. And he tried to pick up a young girl.'
'T
ell me,' Russell said, somewhat unnecessarily.
'He was just the way your detective described him. A dark blue uniform with a peaked cap, and when he took it off I saw his grey hair. And the eyebrows, much darker, black I think. A slight beer belly, but not really overweight. He just stood there watching the bottom of the staircase. You know the smoker's kiosk? He was standing right next to it.'
She paced to and fro. 'I watched him, but not all the time. You know they say that people have a sixth sense that they're being watched, and I didn't want him to notice me. And of course I was also watching for you, so I had to take my eyes off him every now and then. Anyway the train arrived and the people started coming down the steps - quite a few of them, but not really a crowd - you could see each person. And he was looking at this one girl. She looked about twenty, and she was quite smartly dressed. Dark hair and one of those little felt hats that were fashionable about three years ago. She put her suitcase down and she was digging around in her bag for something. A little book - an address book perhaps. And he walked towards her, a big smile on his face. He said something to her, and she looked relieved. He went to pick up her suitcase, but at that moment she caught sight of someone she knew over his shoulder - a young man in a Wehrmacht uniform. She said something to Eyebrows and he smiled back at her, but the moment her back was turned his face seemed to curdle. He was really angry. He walked back to his place by the kiosk and watched the last few people come down the stairs, but he didn't approach anyone else. There were other single women, but they all looked like they knew where they were going.'
She paused for breath. 'When everyone had come through he lit a cigarette and walked out through the main entrance. I followed him - don't worry, I kept a good distance and there were lots of people around and he never looked back. His car was parked at the end of the cab rank, and there were cops around - you'd have thought they'd have had a word with him...'
'It says something that he still has use of a car,' Russell added.
'I suppose it does. It was a Mercedes Cabriolet, by the way - my father used to have one.'
'Did you get the number?'
'I memorized it as I walked past,' she said. 'I ran for the cab at the head of the line, almost knocking over a pair of old ladies in the process, and jumped in the back. I asked the driver for a pencil, but he didn't have one, and then I realized I'd forgotten the number. I looked round just as he drove past us and what do you think I said?'
'Follow that cab?'
'More or less.'
'The cabbie was a Bavarian, so I had to say it twice, but we caught him up at the Michael Kirche-Strasse lights.' Effi lifted the hem of her dressing-gown halfway up her right thigh to reveal a red scrawl. 'I wrote the number down with my lipstick.'
'That must have made the cabbie's evening,' Russell said, noticing the two threes which ended the registration number.
'He was watching the lights. I told him to hang back a bit in case Eyebrows noticed he was being followed, and we sort of played hide and seek behind a Wehrmacht lorry all the way to Alexanderplatz. We all followed the Stadtbahn for a couple of blocks and then he turned up towards Schonhauser Platz and stopped outside that line of shops at the bottom of Dragoner-Strasse. We stopped about fifty metres short of him but the traffic had thinned right out, and when he came out of the shop with his bag of groceries he looked right at us. He got back in his car and moved off, and I told myself I had his number and it would be better if he didn't know he'd been followed. I told the cabbie to let him go, and was still wondering whether I'd done the right thing when he turned off the street about two hundred metres further up. We gave him a couple of minutes and drove slowly by. His car was parked beside an apartment block - one of those old three-storey ones at the top of the street. There was no sign of him.
'I was just about to tell the cabbie to take me home when I thought - oh my God, what if Eyebrows got the taxi number and tracks down the driver and asks him where he took me. So I got him to drop me at Friedrichstrasse Station, and took the Stadtbahn home. And there I was, basking in my untrackability when two young soldiers came up and loudly asked me for my autograph. The whole carriage watched me get off at Zoo Station.'
Russell smiled, but Effi's story had left him feeling more than a little anxious. He wondered why. She might have been a byword for recklessness in the past, but in this instance she seemed to have acted with commendable caution. Was he underestimating her again?
'Well?' she asked.
'You did brilliantly,' he said.
'I thought so.'
'I could do with a drink,' Russell said.
She poured them both one.
'The girl he approached,' Russell asked. 'Did she look Jewish?'
'She was dark, and she looked sort of lost - haunted even - at first. But you don't see many Jews smiling the way she did when her soldier boy appeared. Not in public anyway.'
'But she looked distressed enough to be Jewish before that,' Russell said dryly.
'Yes.' Effi sat down beside him on the sofa. 'Do you think it's possible he's holding Miriam prisoner in his apartment?'
'If so, he doesn't seem satisfied with just her,' Russell said. Unless, he thought, the man was abducting girls to rape and kill them. Or eat them, like Kuzorra's famous cannibal, whose name he'd already forgotten.
'So what are we going to do?' Effi asked, putting her head on his shoulder.
'I'm damned if I know,' Russell said. 'There's no point in going to the police - it might even be dangerous. We have to find out more about Eyebrows, I suppose. Watch his apartment, see where he goes. Talk to his neighbours, if we can do it without giving ourselves away. Hope he leads us to Miriam.' He found himself yawning and looked at his watch - it was almost two o'clock. 'We can draw up a plan of action over coffee in the park.'
'That sounds good.'
'It does. How did your meeting go, by the way?'
'Don't ask. I don't think I've ever met so many brilliant people in one room, and every last one of them with a death wish. They cracked jokes about all the Nazi leaders, and were practically praying for someone to kill Hitler. They're organising discussion groups on the possibilities of sabotage. The possibility that one of them might be a Gestapo informer doesn't seem to have occurred to them. I think they'll talk themselves into their graves. I came out of there feeling quite frightened, because by law I should have reported every last one of them to the Gestapo. I decided my defence would be that I hadn't taken them seriously, which at least had the virtue of being probable. I certainly won't be going back.'
'And what about Madame Voodoo?'
'She seemed a bit surprised too. I think she'll be sticking to the stars from now on.'
He wasn't at all sure why, but he had rarely found Effi more desirable. He slipped the dressing gown off her thigh, revealing the lipstick number. 'I hope you've copied that down,' he said, 'because it's likely to get smudged.'
Next morning the sky over the Tiergarten was a disappointing grey, and they had the cafe almost to themselves. Russell divided the newspaper between them, but it only took Effi a few moments to throw her pages down in disgust. 'It's that day again,' she said, pointing out a headline.
It was Hitler's mother's birthday, and thousands of German women would be receiving their Honour Crosses from local Party leaders for providing the Reich with extra children.
'If only she'd come back and give him a slap round the head,' Effi muttered.
Russell laughed.
'So what are we going to do about Miriam?' she asked.
Russell folded his paper. 'All right. Let's assume Eyebrows kidnapped her. Why would he do that?'
'For sex?'
'Perhaps. For himself or for others?'
'You mean like a white slaver or something like that?'
Russell grimaced. 'I'm not sure white slavers exist. The fictional ones usually sell their victims to Arabs, and they always want blondes.'
'The whole world seems to,' Effi said wryly.
'I don't,' Russell told her.
'That's sweet. But look, if he took her for himself he'd have to keep her somewhere, and I can't imagine him keeping her in his flat. The walls are thin in those buildings. I suppose he could be keeping her drugged, but not for weeks on end, surely. He must have another place. Maybe somewhere out in the country.'
'Maybe. Let's take it one step at a time. Eliminate the apartment first.'
'How are we going to do that?'
'I don't know. Start with the portierfrau, I suppose. We can drive over there tomorrow morning.'
'Yes, let's do that.'
'You haven't told me how the filming went,' Russell said, deliberately changing the subject.
'Oh, the usual mess. They think it's finished, but that's only because they haven't looked at the rushes yet. I expect I'll find out on Monday or Tuesday that they've decided to reshoot a few scenes. The last one in particular. It's supposed to be uplifting, but half the crew were laughing behind their hands.
You never know, of course.' She looked at her watch, and got to her feet. 'I've got to go. My parents are expecting me for lunch, and they seem to eat it earlier each time I see them.'
They took cabs from the Zoo Station rank, hers heading out towards the family home in Wilmersdorf, his to Neuenburger Strasse. The Hanomag was where he had left it, Frau Heidegger hovering in her apartment door-way.
She made sympathetic noises about Russell's bruised face, and seemed satisfied with his story of walking into an open car door. 'I have a parcel for you,' she said. 'And there's some coffee in the pot.'
Some of it had been there for several days, Russell guessed, after taking the first bitter sip. The parcel turned out to be a large envelope. It was sealed with red wax, suggesting either a nineteenth century eccentric or something more atavistic, like Himmler's gang. At least they hadn't scrawled 'Return to Heydrich' on the back.
'Something official?' Frau Heidegger asked, with all the casualness of an SS attack dog.
'It'll be my new accreditation from the Propaganda Ministry,' Russell said, placing the envelope to one side. 'They had to re-issue it now that I've become an American citizen,' he added glibly. 'How have you been?'
Frau Heidegger was as well as could be expected, given the state of her knees. The doctor had told her to keep bending them, and now they were more painful than ever. Her brother was still frightening her with visions of Berlin under air attack, and one of her skat partners had heard that food rationing would be introduced the moment war broke out with England. She claimed that Dagmar's romantic entanglements were wearing her out, but she seemed to be enjoying them almost as much as Dagmar. Siggi had taken things a little too far the other evening, serenading her from the courtyard like some crazed Hanoverian Romeo - 'I'm afraid he stood on the roof of your car, Herr Russell' - but it had worked. Dagmar had eventually taken him inside, probably for a good talking to.
After one last sip of coffee, Russell looked at his watch and made his excuses. Up in his flat he spread the envelope's contents out on his table. There were three carbon copies of official documents, each on headed Air Ministry notepaper, and a covering note, signed by 'a comrade', which purported to explain the sources. The same 'comrade' also announced his willingness to answer questions.
Russell skimmed through the documents. The first listed up-to-date production figures - current and projected - for the Stuka dive-bomber. The second contained the minutes of a meeting held to discuss a new American bombsight. The third detailed the experimental fixing of supplementary fuel-tanks to the Luftwaffe's longest-range bomber. This, the document's author explained, would extend the effective round-trip range of these bombers by approximately five hundred miles.
It was like one of those old parlour games where you had to guess which one of several stories was false. The last one, Russell decided. It was the only one of the three from which the Soviets could draw conclusions that were both vital and wrong. Everyone knew that Stalin was moving his industrial base eastwards, and here was something to help him decide how far he needed to move it. Russell reached for his atlas and checked the distances. If what the document said was true, then only catastrophic setbacks on the ground would render Soviet cities east of Gorki vulnerable to attack. Conclusion: the five hundred mile figure was a lie, designed to discourage the Soviets from moving their industries still further east.
A nice idea, Russell thought. And nicer still that the Soviets would know that the information was fake, and take the appropriate steps. He grabbed a dusty sheet of paper from his typewriter, thought for a second, and scrawled 'first instalment' across it. He put this in the envelope with everything else, and sat for a moment, staring at his flat.
It was beginning to look like a place that nobody lived in. Which was just about right. Waiting for sleep the previous night he had again found himself thinking about asking Effi to marry him. The trouble was, one good reason for doing so was to give her the possibility of American citizenship, which might make practical sense but certainly muddied the emotional waters. Russell wanted there to be only one reason for their marriage - the fact that they loved each other. 'Some hope,' he murmured to himself.
It was almost twelve-thirty. After inspecting the Hanomag's roof for damage he drove over to Grunewald. Paul was sitting on the wall at the end of the drive, still in his Jungvolk uniform. The boy's mouth dropped open when he saw his father's face.
Russell managed to convince him that the damage was superficial, but detected a hint of scepticism when it came to the supposed accident. 'Where are we going?' he asked, hoping to avert any questions.
'We haven't been to the Aquarium for a long time.'
They spent a couple of hours peering into illuminated tanks of varying sizes. The shoals of exotically coloured minnows glistened, the sharks gazed out of seemingly dead eyes, the anaconda refused, as usual, to unwind. After the porpoises had cheered them up they sat outside with their ice creams and watched barges chug by on the Landwehrkanal.