Stattin Station (22 page)

'You won't go?'

'Absolutely not. I shall stay in Berlin. You know -' she lowered her voice to a whisper '- I heard a wonderful story yesterday about a Jewish woman who wanted an Aryan work permit. She waited for an air raid, and then looked for a block in which the Party office and all of its records had been destroyed. Then she went to the report centre for people who've been bombed out and gave them a false name, a real photograph and the number of one of the houses which had been destroyed. They had no way of checking her story so they gave her the permit. And some emergency money! The welfare service fed and housed her for several weeks, and then evacuated her to Pomerania. And now she's got a job working as a housekeeper for a Party bigwig!'

Effi couldn't help smiling.

'I know there's not enough bombing at the moment,' Ali went on, 'but Kurt says - he's my boyfriend,' she explained, blushing slightly - 'he says it will get worse and worse once the Americans come into the war. There'll be more and more record offices bombed, and it'll be harder and harder for them to keep track of people. More and more Jews will be living as Christians - hundreds of them, I wouldn't wonder.' She looked at her watch. 'I must go. Do I look all right?'

'You look gorgeous,' Effi said, and meant it. She watched the girl go, thinking of herself at seventeen. She'd been every bit as headstrong, but the possible consequences of her youthful exuberance had not included years in a concentration camp.

The next face Russell saw belonged to Obersturmbannfuhrer Giminich. Someone else's fingers were playing with his hair, causing shooting pains across his scalp.

'Not serious,' a voice behind him said in Czech-accented German. The fingers did one more painful dance. 'Water, disinfectant, bandage,' the voice added. 'That is all.'

'Do whatever you have to, doctor,' Giminich said curtly. 'You have been extremely fortunate,' he told Russell, in a tone that implied someone else would have made a more deserving recipient of such luck.

Russell recognised his surroundings - he was back in the original hotel bedroom. He asked how long he'd been out.

'About half an hour,' Giminich grudgingly revealed.

'This stings,' the doctor told him, a second before dousing his head with what had to be neat alcohol.

He wasn't exaggerating. The shock took Russell's breath away, and for a second he thought he was losing consciousness again. 'Christ,' he murmured, as the pain slowly subsided.

The doctor began wrapping a long bandage around Russell's head. He was younger than he'd sounded, a short Czech in his late twenties or early thirties man with a shock of curly dark hair and a cadaverous face.

'What did you see of your assailants?' Giminich wanted to know. He was pacing up and down, a lit cigarette clamped between finger and thumb. Schulenburg, Russell now noticed, was standing by the blackout-screened window.

'Nothing really. The car was an Adler, but I didn't see any faces.'

'The car was stolen,' Giminich said, as if someone had asked him to explain the motorisation of the Czech resistance. 'It was abandoned outside Hiberner Station,' he added unnecessarily.

Russell was wondering why he'd been so stupid. The men who had tipped off Grashof had assumed that Russell was in league with the SD, and Russell himself had done nothing to shake that assumption. He had made no protest when taken away at Masaryk Station, and he had said nothing at the Sramota Cafe to suggest he was an unwilling participant in the entrapment process. Grashof's friends in the resistance had assumed Russell was one of the enemy, and following Grashof's arrest they had sought the obvious retaliation. He could hardly fault their logic, painful as the consequences still were.

'Did you see anything suspicious on your way back to the hotel?' Giminich asked him.

'I thought I was being followed on the Charles Bridge,' Russell said incautiously. 'But I wasn't,' he added quickly. Think before speaking, he told himself.

'What made you think you were not?' Giminich asked, his pacing momentarily suspended.

Russell went through the story, concluding with the disappearance of his supposed tail in another direction.

'They work in pairs,' Giminich told him.

'There was no one else,' Russell insisted, although it now seemed likely that there had been.

Giminich looked dissatisfied, but then that was who he was. The doctor had finished with his bandaging, and looked only too ready to depart. 'You must see a doctor when you reach Berlin,' he told Russell. 'But you will be fine.' Like Giminich, he seemed less than ecstatic about this outcome.

Russell thanked him anyway.

'You will come to headquarters now,' Giminich told him. 'Where your protection can be assured.'

The prospect of several hours cooped up in the Petschek Palace was appalling, but Russell very much doubted that he could refuse. What Giminich had just said was depressingly true - Heydrich's men in black were all that stood between him and the righteous wrath of the Czech Resistance. Irony was too short a word.

He slowly levered himself off the bed, and was pleasantly surprised by the lack of any sharp reaction inside his skull. The doctor had been right; the bullet had caused little more damage than a sudden blow from a sharp instrument. He had seen many such wounds in Flanders, where they had often been welcomed as a relatively painless ticket away from the front line.

The trip down in the lift made him feel slightly woozy, but the cold night air soon put that right. Night had fallen, and the car waiting outside had the usual thinly-slit covers over its headlights. 'Has Prague been bombed?' he asked his companions.

'Of course not,' Schulenburg told him.

Then why a blackout, Russell wondered but didn't ask. The Resistance was probably grateful.

The streets were virtually empty, only one darkened tram squealing its way past them as they neared the top of Wenceslas Square. In less than five minutes they were drawing up outside what Russell could only assume was the Petschek Palace. He had seen the building by daylight in 1939, a vast block of huge stones which reminded him of the Inca capital Cuzco in Paul's much-loved
Wonders of the World
book. It had five main floors, with two more in the roof and an unknown number below ground level. Several, if Russell knew the Gestapo and SD. They loved their cellars.

Inside the hanging lights seemed permanently dimmed, walls and stairs receding upwards into apparently depthless shadow. A uniformed SD officer was waiting for Giminich, and instructions.

'Take ten men from the Cinema,' Giminich told him. 'And make sure there are reports in tomorrow morning's Czech newspapers. A list of names, and the reasons for their execution.'

Russell had a terrible notion of what this was all about. 'You're not going to kill ten prisoners in retaliation for the attack on me?' he blurted out, realising as he did so that protest would only anger his hosts. 'I don't want that sort of blood on my hands,' he added, as if Giminich would care a damn what he wanted.

'It's nothing to do with you,' Giminich snapped, waving his surprised subordinate away. 'Whatever you want and whatever your sympathies, those who tried to kill you considered you a representative of the Reich. Such attacks must be deterred.'

'And you think killing ten innocent men will weaken the will of the Resistance?'

'I do. But I repeat, this is not your concern.' He turned to Schulenburg. 'Willi, take Herr Russell to the reception lounge.'

'This way,' Schulenburg ordered, as Giminich strode away down a corridor. The reception lounge was in the opposite direction, and surprisingly well-furnished for a police headquarters. A place to park visiting dignitaries, Russell assumed, not to mention foreign journalists on the run from the Resistance. 'You will remain here,' Schulenburg ordered.

'One question,' Russell said, although he wasn't at all sure he wanted the answer. 'What is the Cinema?'

Schulenburg smiled, which was scary in itself. 'It's the room downstairs where prisoners wait for their interrogations. The walls are bare, and several months ago one of them told his interrogator that he had seen his worst imaginings projected onto them. Like a horror film. It has been called the Cinema ever since.' He closed the door behind him.

Russell lowered himself into the nearest armchair. A vehicle was in motion outside the blacked-out window, but that was all he could hear - the building might have been empty for all the sound its other occupants were making. The walls didn't look as if they'd been sound-proofed, but they were probably already thick enough for the Gestapo's purposes. For all he knew there were men and women screaming their heads off a few rooms away.

He looked around him. The armchairs, polished wooden table and eighteenth-century desk, the fleur-de-lys embossed wallpaper, ornate cornices and bucolic oil paintings - all the trappings of moderate affluence, anywhere in Central Europe. It all looked so ordinary, in a faded, antiquated sort of way. Like the anteroom to an outmoded version of hell.

His head was throbbing, which might or might not be a good sign. He placed a hand over the wound, and found the bandage was sticky with blood. Not wet, though. He walked across to the mirror, but no amount of twisting his head could provide him with a decent view. Another two inches to the left, he thought, and his brains would have been splattered all over Lepanska Street. Perhaps he was destined to survive the war.

Unlike the ten men from the Cinema. Their deaths were not down to him, not in any real sense. He hadn't attacked them himself, hadn't ordered reprisals. But if he hadn't been seduced by the promise of Swiss weekends with Effi, those ten men would not be living their last few hours.

He shook his head, and pain coursed through it.

The door opened, revealing Schulenburg. 'Come,' he said.

Russell reached for his bag, noticing for the first time the neat line of blood droplets which adorned it.

'Leave that,' Schulenburg ordered.

'We're not going to the station?'

'Not yet.'

They walked down a long corridor, turned left, and descended a flight of worn stone steps. With each step down the weight of the building seemed to grow, and Russell felt the kernel of fear in his stomach begin to expand. He told himself not to worry. What could they possibly want from him? Silence was the obvious answer, one that chilled him to the bone. He had a sudden picture of himself, knelt down, his executioner holding the pistol to the back of his neck.

Two head shots in one day seemed excessive.

They were, he guessed, two floors below street level. A shorter corridor, an ominously reinforced door, and they were entering one end of a long narrow room. It was spotlessly clean, and the metallic smell of blood was probably all in his imagination. Or emanating from his own head wound.

Obersturmbannfuhrer Giminich was waiting, along with two uniformed men with machine guns, several other Germans in plain clothes and a line of Czech prisoners. Seven of them. One was the man who had followed him across the Charles Bridge.

'Do you recognise any of these men?' Giminich asked.

Russell took his time, walking slowly down the line, scrutinising each face with apparent thoroughness. Most were bruised, some cut as well, and a couple of eyes were swollen shut. The open eyes were full of defiance. Not to mention loathing.

The man from the bridge was not the only one he recognised. A second man, younger, with a pugnacious face and longish blond hair, also seemed familiar, but not from today. Russell realised he must have come into contact with him during one of his two trips in 1939, but he couldn't remember which, let alone what the circumstances had been. He was fairly sure that the man had recognised him.

'No,' he told Giminich, 'I don't recognise any of them.'

'Are you certain? Take another look.'

Russell took another slow walk along the line-up. Had the man on the bridge already confessed? Was Giminich using the man to trap him?

He wasn't going to give the man up, but... 'I can't be sure,' he said, hedging his bets.

'But you have an idea?'

'No, not really. Nothing that I'd risk an innocent man's life on.'

'They tried to kill you,' Giminich reminded him.

'Someone did,' he agreed. And I can't say that I blame them, he thought to himself. Judging by the looks on the Czech faces, he would be well-advised to avoid post-war Prague.

Rather to Russell's surprise, Giminich did not seem disappointed. 'Very well, ' he said, consulting his watch. 'You will be taken to the station now. You will be well looked after until the train leaves, and a compartment has been arranged for your personal use as far as Dresden. I'm sure I don't need to remind you of our earlier conversation, about the wording of your report to the Admiral.'

'No,' Russell agreed, 'you don't.'

Walking up the stone stairs seemed infinitely preferable to walking down, as if the weight of the building was sloughing off his back. They collected his bag from the guest lounge and made their way out to the interior courtyard, where a combination of masked headlights and ill-fitting window screens cast everything in a thin blue light, as if the world was wreathed in cigarette smoke.

Schulenburg got in the back with him, but said nothing on the short drive to the station. The concourse was unusually empty, and Russell felt sadly reassured by all the uniforms and guns in evidence - leaving Prague like a Nazi celebrity might not prove a treasured memory, but it definitely seemed preferable to dying in a hail of Resistance bullets.

The train was already at the platform. Schulenburg rapped out a few orders and walked away without a word of farewell, leaving two uniformed
Ordnungspolizei
to stand guard outside Russell's compartment until the train departed. It began drawing out of the station at precisely nine o'clock. It was his third departure from the Masaryk Station in two years, and all three had been accompanied by a decided whiff of desperation.

He headed for the bar, where the blackout screens had not been lowered. They were just passing the locomotive depot where Russell had witnessed a more successful Resistance execution, and it suddenly occurred to him that the face he had vaguely recognised in the line-up had belonged to the young man standing guard outside the sand-dryer building on that long-ago night.