Lehrter Station (25 page)

‘Left,’ he said automatically as they roared up towards the intersection with Greifswalder Strasse. Which was the best way to go? The American sector was closest, but how would they get across the Spree? When he’d walked to that stretch of the river the other day, all the bridges had still been down. The simplest route was straight along Neue Königstrasse to Alexanderplatz, crossing the Spree and Spreekanal by the Old City bridges – he knew that they were open. Then down Unter den Linden to the Brandenburg Gate, where the British zone began. The British might stop them and make a fuss, but they wouldn’t shoot anybody.

Neue Königstrasse was almost empty, a late night tram brimming with passengers striking sparks in the other direction.

A nasty thought occurred to Russell. He turned to Schreier, and asked him in German whether there’d been a telephone in the apartment.

‘Yes.’

‘Was it working?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘There was a telephone,’ Russell told Halsey, in response to the latter’s quizzical look.

They were passing between the remains of the Statistical and Tax Offices, Vinny driving the jeep at a steady forty as they approached the brighter lights of Alexanderplatz. Back in the spring Russell had done a day’s involuntary labour on this stretch of road, helping dig gun emplacements for the defence of the city.

After Neue Königstrasse, Alexanderplatz and the streets leading into it seemed almost brimming with life. Several strands of music were audible and the square itself was awash with people. Some of the men looked German, but most were wearing uniforms, and clinging on to a local girl. Judging by the high-pitched screams of delight, almost everyone was drunk, and the only thing waved at their passing jeep was a clearly empty bottle.

They swung round under the Stadtbahn bridge, drove down Königstrasse’s rubble-lined canyon, and crossed the Spree on the makeshift replacement for the old Kurfürsten Bridge. On the other side of the Schloss the Christmas fair in the Lustgarten offered a second oasis of life and light, the carousels gaily circling against a backdrop of ruptured stone.

Another makeshift bridge and they were slaloming down Unter den Linden, twisting this way and that through the gathered piles of rubble. A mile in the distance, the silhouette of the Brandenburg gate was hardening against the night sky. As they crossed the almost deserted Friedrichstrasse, Russell began to believe they would make it.

His confidence was short–lived. There was something up ahead, something involving movement and vehicles, between Pariserplatz and the site of the vanished Adlon Hotel. Was it a checkpoint, or just some Soviet unit doing God knows what? He could see a brazier aflame by the side of the road, several soldiers warming their hands. Two jeeps and a truck were lined up beyond.

An officer had noticed them coming, and was striding out into the road, clearly intent on pulling them over.

Russell took in the scene. The brazier suggested the Russians had been here for a while, and there was no sign that they were expecting a gang of murderous American abductors – none of the soldiers were taking cover or reaching for rifles. ‘It’s just a routine check,’ Russell told Halsey. ‘Let me handle it.’

They were about a hundred metres away now, and Vinny’s foot was easing down on the brake.

‘No,’ Halsey said suddenly. ‘Don’t stop. Drive on through.’

There was no time to argue the pros and cons. Vinny did the best job he could, slowing down enough to lull the Soviet officer into a false sense of security, then ramming his foot through the accelerator. The Russian jumped aside a second too late, and cried out in pain as the wing struck his trailing leg.

The soldiers were lunging for their rifles now, and Russell hunched himself down in his seat, waiting for the first whining bullet, blessing the
fate which had put him in front. It seemed an age, but then there was a sudden volley of shots, and a cry of pain from behind him. They were crossing Pariserplatz now – another hundred metres and they’d be in the British sector.

More single shots rang out, and then a burst of automatic fire. A spray of liquid bathed the back of Russell’s neck, and something heavy dropped onto his shoulder. He felt the slight shift of light as they ran under the Brandenburg Gate and into the Tiergarten. The shooting had stopped.

Vinnie pulled the jeep to a halt a few hundred metres down the Chaussee, and helped Russell get out from under the body. Halsey had taken a bullet through the nose, and bits of his brain were everywhere.

Schreier was dead as well, still clutching his photograph. He had taken two bullets in the centre of the back.

A heartfelt ‘fuck’ was Vinny’s comment on the situation. He lit a cigarette and stood there gazing out across the darkened Tiergarten.

George just shrugged, like he’d seen it all before.

Looking at the dead Halsey, Russell realised he couldn’t care less. Which was a sobering thought.

R
ussell stared out at the city below. It was probably Leipzig, which from this height looked deceptively intact. He remembered Goebbels going there and giving one of his pep talks, spouting off amidst suitably Wagnerian ruins. Victory or Siberia! It hadn’t taken a genius to work that one out, even then.

He still felt worried about leaving Effi, despite all her protestations. In the war she’d learned to take care of herself – that was what she’d told him. And he knew it was true, up to a point; these days she took time to consider, rather than jump straight in. But there were a lot of careful people pushing up daisies.

The plane lurched again, and he told himself he’d be better advised worrying about his own safety. The way the DC3 rattled, it was easy to imagine the plane shaking itself to pieces on the ground, let alone in the winds now raging over Germany. The Soviet fighters which had shadowed the early part of the American flight had long since scurried back to base.

Their pilot announced that they were crossing the zonal border, and the turbulence abruptly vanished, as if it had been a Russian trick. Or perhaps the Americans had found a way of calming the winds. They had to be good at something.

He closed his eyes and re-ran his last meeting with Scott Dallin. The American had been furious. A dead chemist, a dead operative, the Soviets already raising merry hell with his superiors. All of which had been
bad enough, but what apparently galled him most was the fact that he couldn’t blame Russell. Vinny and George had obviously corroborated his own version of the events, and correctly identified Halsey as the author of his own demise.

‘I think you’ll find he was on something,’ Russell had told Dallin. ‘If you bother to look.’

‘
On
something,’ Dallin had echoed, as if Russell had chosen the wrong preposition.

‘Drugs. Uppers of some sort. Cocaine would be my guess. You can get it at any nightclub.’

‘We should close them all down.’

Russell had let that pass – if Dallin had his way, he’d have razed what was left of the city. His hero was probably Tamerlane.
He
had never bothered with occupations.

He smiled at the thought. At least Dallin had raised no objection to his trip. On the contrary, he had seemed only too pleased to have him out of the way.

Russell wondered how the Americans would placate the Soviets. By giving them Halsey’s head on a plate, most likely. Metaphorically speaking. If the boy had parents they were in for a shock. Death
and
disgrace.

He closed his eyes again, and let the throb of the engines lull him to sleep. He was only expecting a nap, but when he finally woke more Soviet fighters were riding shotgun on either side of the Dakota, patrolling the skies above their Austrian occupation zone.

Half an hour later they were down, and taxiing to a halt outside the Schwechat Airport terminal building. Austria and Vienna, like Germany and Berlin, had been divided into four occupation zones, and Schwechat had fallen inside the capital’s British sector, but civilian planes of all four powers were using the runway and other facilities.

The entry formalities were just that, and Russell’s progress was only halted by the lack of a taxi or bus. On Sundays, it seemed, arriving civilians were expected to walk the eight kilometres to the city centre, and it was more than an hour before he managed to cadge a lift in a British Army jeep.

After a twenty-minute drive along mostly empty roads the driver dropped him off in the Stephansplatz, at the heart of the inner city. Russell had made several trips to Vienna in pre-Anschluss days, but the current city bore little resemblance to the one he remembered. Many of the hotels had been destroyed, and rooms were at a definite premium. It took him an hour to find one that was empty, and half an hour more to find one he could afford. This hotel was on Johannesgasse, and almost in one piece, the staircase climbing past a boarded-over rip in the wall, through which the cold wind literally whistled. His room was fine, apart from the lack of hot water.

Feeling peckish, he went out looking for a café. Vienna’s centre looked in better shape than Berlin’s, but not by much. There were the same, precarious-looking, lattice-like facades, the same inner walls with their scorched decorations exposed to the world. Fewer of them, perhaps, but more than Russell had expected. Either the Austrians had been daft enough to put up a real fight or the Russians had just felt like breaking things. Or both.

He eventually found a small bar. The interior reminded him of days gone by, but the same wasn’t true of the coffee. There was no heating, so at least the windows were clear of steam. He sat there for half an hour, watching well-wrapped people trudge past, all looking grim as the weather.

As he walked back down Kärntner Strasse towards his hotel a jeep drove by in the opposite direction. It was flying the flags of the occupying powers, and carrying soldiers in all four uniforms. Russell had read about these international patrols in the English papers, and he wondered again how the French and Russians could bear it. A soldier’s life, as he knew from the trenches, was one long stream of banter, and here they were spending their days with no one they could talk to.

Waking alone on Monday morning, Effi had the momentary sensation of being back in the house on Bismarckstrasse, with the war still underway.
The sense of relief when she realised it wasn’t caused her to laugh out loud.

The Russians had announced the closure of the Babelsberg studios until Tuesday. The reason given was ‘refurbishment’, but what this amounted to was left unspecified – one joker among the prop boys had put his money on the installation of hidden microphones and cameras. Whatever the reason, Effi had the day off, and a chance to question the authorities about her flat on Carmerstrasse.

She was relieved that Russell had left Berlin. The exodus to Palestine seemed a good story, and few things made him happier than gnawing at one of those. Rather more importantly, it put him – or so she hoped – beyond Geruschke’s reach. Russell might have presented the story of his abduction as a bad, semi-comic movie script, but she could tell how badly it had shaken him. And that had scared her. Losing him was not something she wanted to contemplate.

And then there was Otto 3, who seemed, from the little that Wilhelm Isendahl had told them, like a father who might be worth finding. She might not like the consequences, but she had to put Rosa first.

She was pleased that Hanna and Lotte wanted to come home, even though that meant that she and John would need to move out. The sooner normal life was resumed, the sooner Rosa could come home.

Though of course it would be different for her. Rosa was Jewish – that was why Effi had needed to take her in. But what did that mean for the future? Sometimes the girl’s Jewishness seemed easy to ignore. Rosa had never mentioned, let alone requested, any sort of religious or cultural observance, and she had, on one or two occasions, displayed an unusually virulent atheism for a seven year-old. Though after what she and her family had been through, perhaps nothing should seem surprising.

But still. Could she and John just ignore the girl’s background? Didn’t it help people to know where they came from? The girl’s life had been shaped by the catastrophe that the Nazis had inflicted on her people, and one day she would want to know why. If her father was found, he would raise her as a Jewish daughter.

A second pang of prospective loss was enough to drive Effi from the bed. She threw on some winter clothes and went downstairs in search of breakfast. If they did bring Rosa back, she would have the highest-grade ration card, just like herself and John. The leading actor, the journalistspy, the ‘Victim of Fascism’ – Berlin’s privileged few.

Half an hour later she was boarding a bus at the stop on Kronprinzenallee. Riding northward, she realised that her own doubts were gone – she wanted to stay. The filming was going well, and it felt wonderful, not just to be working again, but to be making a movie that mattered, one that might help her fellow Germans come to terms with what had happened. It felt like atonement of a sort, or the beginnings of such.

And it was good to be around Thomas again, and Ali, and Annaliese.

And John had to be here, at least until he found some way of disentangling himself from the Soviet embrace. Effi remembered him once saying that espionage was like quicksand – the more you struggled, the more you were trapped. But if anyone could wriggle his way free then he could.

The previous evening she had talked to Thomas about the flat on Carmerstrasse, and he had suggested legal help – Berlin might be short of food and housing, but lawyers were springing up like weeds. Effi knew she couldn’t cast a family of refugees out onto the street, but that begged the question of who she
would
be willing to eject – whoever the current inhabitants were, they wouldn’t have anywhere else to go.

She had hoped Thomas would know how the current system worked, but it seemed to vary from district to district. There had to be tens of thousands of people returning from war or exile, and only a few would be Jews. And, as Thomas had cheerfully reminded her, most of the city’s property deeds had fallen victim to explosions or fire. He had advised her to start at the local town hall and see what they had to say.

She seemed to remember that their local
Rathaus
had been reduced to its constituent bricks, but, as she’d expected, enough of the front wall remained for a notice board bearing the new address.

The new offices were a ten-minute walk away, in what had once been an elementary school, and probably would be again. There were about
twenty people waiting in the old lobby, but none, as she soon discovered, were there to enquire about housing. She was directed down a long corridor, still lined, somewhat surprisingly, with thematic maps of the vanished Reich, to the classroom now occupied by the Housing Office. This comprised an elderly man and woman, stationed at adjoining tables beyond several neat rows of abandoned desks.

The man made a note of her name and the Carmerstrasse address, and began working his way through the twenty or so cardboard boxes which lined the wall behind him, occasionally pausing to stretch his back. After about five minutes he emitted a grunt of surprise, which Effi rightly assumed meant success.

He brought several pieces of paper back to the table, and skimmed through them. ‘This flat was confiscated by the state on February 10th, 1942’, he told her. ‘Ownership was forfeited following the owner’s – your – arraignment for treason.’ He looked over his glasses at Effi with rather more interest than he’d initially shown.

‘Which means what?’ Effi asked him.

He looked confused. ‘Which part don’t you understand?’

‘I understand all of it. Are you telling me that this ruling still holds?’

‘As of this moment, yes.’

‘Decisions of the Nazi courts are still valid?’

‘Most of them, yes. There has to be continuity.’

Effi held on to her temper. ‘Are you telling me the apartment is no longer mine?’

‘No, not necessarily. But I’m afraid you cannot expect to simply resume possession.’

But it’s
mine
, she felt like shouting.

‘You will have to apply for repossession,’ he said. He was, she realised, actually trying to help.

‘So I’ll need a lawyer.’

He nodded. ‘I would certainly recommend it.’

‘Who’s living there now?’ she asked. ‘And how long have they been there?’ She would feel much better about ejecting a family who’d been
gifted the apartment by the local Nazis than she would a group of refugees from the East.

‘The name of the current residents is Puttkammer,’ he read from his papers. ‘A woman and three children. They moved in earlier this year, in March.’

Well at least they weren’t Jews, Effi thought. Not then, and not with a name like that. She asked for advice on how to proceed, and gratefully watched as he wrote out a simple list of steps she needed to take, and where she should go to take them. It sounded straightforward enough, though likely to take every hour God sent. It would all have to wait until filming was over.

She thanked him and made her way back to the street. Schlüterstrasse and its cafeteria were only a short walk away, so she headed that way, hoping for lunch with Ellen Grynszpan. The former was available, the latter not, and after eating Effi started for home. But as she passed the remains of the Schmargendorf
Rathaus
on Hohenzollerndamm, it occurred to her that Zarah’s house might be standing empty.

This time it was a woman she eventually spoke to. Effi explained the situation: that she was there on her sister’s behalf, that Zarah and her son Lothar were in London, and that her brother-in-law was probably dead.

‘Jens Biesinger?’ the woman asked, reaching for a file of papers.

‘Yes,’ Effi agreed, somewhat surprised.

‘What makes you think he’s dead?’

‘The last time Zarah saw him, he told her he had suicide pills for them both. That was in April, just before the Russians entered the city.’

‘And she wanted to live,’ the woman said drily. ‘Apparently he did too.’

‘You mean he’s still alive?’

She was still looking at the file. ‘He is indeed. And would you believe it? – he’s working for us.’

‘Us?’

‘The District Administration. At the Housing Office.’

Effi couldn’t believe it. ‘And where’s that?’

‘On Güntzelstrasse. It’s only a short walk away.’

‘So he’s still the legal owner of the house?’

‘According to this.’

‘Then I suppose I’ll have to go round there,’ Effi decided. She couldn’t honestly say she was eager to see Jens again, but he was Lothar’s father.

She walked back outside, and asked a passing boy for directions. Ten minutes later she was outside a door signed ‘Jens Biesinger, Director’. Of what, it didn’t say.