Silesian Station (2008) (9 page)

'Oh not long. One week. Two maybe. Say you come again next Friday. Yes?'

'Right,' Russell agreed without enthusiasm. The Americans, the Germans, and now the Russians. Thank God the British had given up on him.

The embassy door closed swiftly behind him, as if pleased to be rid of his presence. It wasn't personal, Russell guessed. Just that sense of carefree bonhomie which Soviet establishments exuded the world over.

He walked up to Friedrichstrasse, had another coffee at the Cafe Kranzler, and telephoned the number Hauptsturmfuhrer Hirth had given him. The voice at the other end recognized Russell's name, which was hardly surprising but disconcerting nevertheless. He gave a brief run-down of his first meeting at the Soviet Embassy, and listened as the message was laboriously repeated back to him.

'That is all,' the voice said, as if expecting applause.

If only it was, Russell thought.

He walked back down Unter den Linden to the car, retrieved the Berlin street map from the glove compartment and spread it across the wheel. His next port of call, he discovered, was out beyond Friedrichshain.

His route took him past the end of the street in which the Wiesners had ended their Berlin days. There were more than a few obviously Jewish faces to be seen, but fewer stalls selling furniture and knick-knacks than there had been six months ago. Perhaps they had all been sold. Perhaps some new regulation forbade it.

He eventually reached the address he'd been given - a boarding house in a quiet cul-de-sac that had seen better days. The landlady, a thin middle-aged woman with a young woman's hairstyle, looked Russell up and down, and apparently decided that he was worthy of assistance.

The Isendahls were gone, she said. At the end of May, as far as she could remember. And yes, Freya had received letters from America. She had always given the stamps to the boy next door who collected them. Her husband had said they would send her a forwarding address, but they hadn't. And to be perfectly honest she'd been glad to see the back of them. They were always having friends round, lots of them, and no, they weren't noisy, but there was something about them...

'Were they Jews?' Russell asked innocently.

'Certainly not. That's not allowed, is it? It certainly shouldn't be.'

'Of course not,' Russell agreed. Clearly the woman had no idea that Wilhelm Isendahl was Jewish. 'What did her husband look like?' he asked.

'Oh, nice looking. Blond hair, tall, very charming when he wants to be.'

Russell gave the woman a card with his telephone number. 'If they do send a forwarding address, could you ring me? I'll reimburse any expenses, of course.'

He drove back into the city, wondering whether he should carry on looking. The friends might be innocent, but they seemed more likely to be comrades, and he had no desire to open doors that were best left shut. He would think about it. Maybe ask Kuzorra's advice.

After lunching at Wertheim he rang Effi from the bank of booths by the Leipziger Strasse exit. There was no answer. A quick stop-over at the Adlon offered reassurance that no major news was breaking - the sundry journalists gathered at the bar were wondering how they could wheedle invitations to one of Goering's hunting extravaganzas.

Back on Leipziger Strasse he collected the last available dress suit in his size from Lehmann Dress Hire. On the last occasion he'd used this particular shop it had been trading under the name Finkelstein.

He tried Effi again when he got back to Neuenburger Strasse, but there was still no answer. He told himself not to worry - she had said she was going shopping, after all. She might still be with Zarah. And he couldn't afford to spend his days wondering what she was up to and worrying whether she was all right. That wasn't who they were.

There was still no sign of Frau Heidegger's sister, but she had stirred herself sufficiently to attach an official notice to the inside of the front door. A city-wide Air Raid Protection exercise was being held on the following Wednesday, and all citizens were obliged to cooperate fully with the relevant authorities. Reading through the small print Russell discovered that a complete black-out would be in operation. Selected buildings would be 'bombed', the resulting 'victims' removed by medical teams.

Where to, Russell wondered. Imaginary hospitals? It might make a good story, though. Frau Heidegger would be in her element.

He collected Effi's presents from upstairs and drove across town to her flat. He half-expected that she'd still be out, but they arrived together, she in a cab full of her purchases. Helping her carry these up, he forgot his own pile of parcels. She looked exhausted, but barely a minute had passed when she sprung back up from the sofa and insisted on their walking down to the Ku'damm for dinner. Russell had a brief memory of himself more than twenty years earlier. On his two home leaves from the trenches he had been utterly unable to sit still.

Over dinner she described her day in fearsome detail - the morning with Zarah, lunch with a make-up artist friend who was also working on
More Than Brothers
, a shopping spree in the Ka-De-We on Tauenzien-Strasse. She'd even managed a session with the street astrologer she consulted every month or so.

'She told me the next few weeks were a good time for grasping opportunities,' Effi told him. "Aren't they all?" I asked her. "Some more than others," she said. I paid three marks for that.'

Russell shook his head. He was never sure how seriously Effi took her astrological adviser.

Back at the flat he remembered her presents, and went to collect them from the car. She loved them all - the soft leather driving gloves from Macy's, the Billie Holiday records which he'd half-expected customs would confiscate, the French perfume she'd originally discovered on their second trip to Paris, the deep crimson dress from Bergdorf Goodman. The latter looked every bit as good on her as Russell had imagined it would.

'I'll wear it tomorrow,' she said, thanking him with a kiss.

Friday evening's premiere was at the Universum, the modernist cinema half-way up the Ku'damm. The stars of the film, along with their escorts, were supposed to arrive between six forty-five and seven, the stars of the Party in the following fifteen minutes. 'This is one time we can't afford to be late,' Effi told Russell the next morning. 'So please be back here by five.'

Getting a lecture from Effi on punctuality was like taking dietary advice from Goering, but he let it go. 'I'll be here. But how are we getting there? A cab?'

'No, no. The studio are sending a car. It'll be here at six-thirty.'

'Right. So what are you doing today?'

'Hairdresser and manicurist this morning. And learning this,' she added, holding up the
More Than Brothers
script. 'I was hoping you could test me on Sunday.'

'Love to.' She seemed more like her old self, he thought, as he eased the Hanomag out onto the street. Or was she just putting up a better front? He thought about the talk they had planned for the weekend, and wondered just how much it was safe to tell her.

He was intending to do some background reading that morning, but events conspired against him. A major story was breaking, according to the British colleagues who frequented the Cafe Kranzler, and Russell joined the rest of the foreign press corps in pursuit of the pieces. According to 'reliable sources', one Robert Hudson, Secretary of the Department of Overseas Trade in London, had buttonholed the German delegate Herman Wohlthat at - of all things - a recently-opened Whaling Conference, and made him a series of unofficial offers. According to Wohlthat, whose swift report home was now being disseminated through the Berlin rumour mill, Hudson had offered him joint rule of the former German colonies and British economic assistance in return for German disarmament. None of this was in the public sphere as yet, but it soon would be.

First things first, Russell told himself, and called an old contact in the Foreign Ministry. Was it true? he asked. Off the record, yes. Hudson had made the offers all right, but no one in Berlin had any idea what official sanction, if any, he'd had for making them. The smart money in Ribbentrop's entourage was that the man had been drunk.

Possibly, Russell thought, as he headed for the central post office. He'd have put his money on Hudson being just one more defective product of the public schools, with all the confidence in the world and none of the judgement. They seemed drawn to Whitehall's fl ame like dim moths, and particularly to those departments dealing with the wicked outside world.

At the post office he wired a contact in London who was likely to know the score, and hurried down the Wilhelmstrasse for that morning's briefing. The spokesman, an alarmingly thin young man with a swastika-emblazoned tie, refused to answer any questions about 'The Hudson Affair', and looked increasingly annoyed by the foreign press corps' protracted refusal to take no for an answer. Finally getting his own way, he triumphantly produced a statement from the Hungarian Foreign Minister condemning the recent publication of an anti-German book in Budapest. The book in question, as one of the American journalists delighted in repeating, warned of German designs towards Hungary and claimed that Germany was bound to lose a European War. How had the German government pressured the Hungarian government into making this statement?, the journalist wanted to know.

The spokesman sighed, as if the question was beneath contempt. He had some statistics for them, he said, flourishing a piece of paper to prove it. In the previous June the United States had exported $3.4 million worth of arms to Britain in June and $2.5 million worth to France. Germany, by contrast, had received a shipment of ammunition worth $18. He raised indignant eyes to his audience, at least half of whom were rolling with laughter.

'Another day in Looneyland,' Slaney observed as they walked out.

Russell went back to the post office to see if his wire had been answered. It had - Hudson had indeed been freelancing.

And with what looked like catastrophic results, Russell told himself. The Germans might realize that no such offers were really on the table, but they might also be left with the sneaking suspicion that the British still hungered for a way out of their obligations to Poland. As for the Soviets, they'd probably take Hudson's indiscretions as confirmation of what they already suspected, that the British were much more interested in doing a deal with Nazi Germany than in doing a deal with them. 'And so to war,' he murmured to himself.

He had enough for a short commentary piece, he thought, something they could use alongside the agency reports if the story took off. He sequestered a corner table at the Adlon Bar to write it out, then headed back to the post office to wire it off. By then it was almost four o'clock. He turned the Hanomag for home.

The studio car was on time, but Effi was not. Russell treated himself and the harassed-looking driver to a small measure of the Bourbon he had brought back from America, and was gratified by the appreciative smile he received in return. 'That's good,' the young man said, just as Effi emerged looking suitably ravishing. Her dark hair fell past her face in sweeping waves, her brown eyes glowed, the clinging red dress was beautifully set off by a lace scarf in deepest violet. She had found a shade of lipstick which perfectly matched the dress.

The young driver let out an involuntary sigh of appreciation. For reasons best known to itself, Russell's mind conjured up the image of Effi in her Gestapo cell, rising from the floor in desperate monochrome. It seemed weeks ago, but it wasn't.

The Universum was at Ku'damm 153, only a few minutes away. A hundred metres short of the cinema they joined a slow-moving queue of cars waiting to unload their celebrity passengers. On the other side of the road a few hundred watchers were held behind temporary barriers by a handful of schutzpolizei.

The long-departed Bauhaus architect Eric Mendelssohn had designed the building, which was one of Russell's favourite Berlin landmarks. On the outside, it looked as if someone had sliced the superstructure off an ocean liner, swung the bridge round ninety degrees, and dropped the whole lot beside the Ku'damm. UNIVERSUM was spelt out in huge, solid letters along the semi-circular prow; a fifty-foot poster above the doors advertised the film currently showing. This particular poster - which featured a futuristic Prussian Army galloping madly along beneath the title
Liberation
- seemed almost as avant garde as the cinema. Effi Koenen was one of the four names listed below the two stars.

They climbed from the car, Effi drawing appreciative murmurs from the crowd. Russell could imagine the asides: what on earth does she see in him?

Once inside, they were hurried to their seats. The auditorium was virtually full, but three rows in the centre had been reserved for the celebrity guests. The actors and actresses chatted among themselves, apparently oblivious to the unconcealed interest of everyone else.

The Reichsminister for Propaganda arrived about ten minutes later. His wife was expensively dressed but, in Russell's admittedly biased opinion, looked somewhat frumpy. The rest of Goebbels' retinue seemed to have been chosen on grounds of size - the seven dwarves came to mind, though they all seemed too pleased with themselves to be Grumpy. Goebbels acknowledged the rest of the audience with a cavalier wave of the hand, then sat looking round at the sweeping, modernistic lines of the auditorium. There was an almost bemused look on his face, as if he was wondering how a Jew could have designed something so gorgeous.

The film let the cinema down, of course. It was standard Third Reich ho-kum, with the usual tried and trusted ingredients - a misunderstood genius whose iron will saves his people, male underlings who find their true purpose by abandoning mere reason, women who reach beyond kitchen, church and children at their peril. The setting - a much-used one in recent years - was the Prussian War of Liberation against Napoleon.

Christina Bergner, sitting three seats along from Russell, played the tragic heroine. As Countess Marianne, the wife of an imprisoned Prussian general, she goes to plead her husband's case with the French occupation commander and, somewhat predictably, falls in love with him. Effi plays her friend, her confidante and - when the Countess finally sacrifices love, life and everything else for the Fatherland - her teary exculpator. She looked rather good in eighteenth century costume, Russell thought.