Masaryk Station (John Russell) (29 page)

The local CIC had proved more resolute than the US Army, and six months later Cecelja had been arrested. Eighteen months of imprisonment followed, but no charges were brought by the Americans, and Yugoslav requests for his extradition were eventually refused. In April 1947 the US Government finally decided that the priest did have crimes to answer for, but by then it was too late—he had already been released. With increasing numbers of Soviet
defectors to shift, the CIC had decided that the Rat Line could be useful in more ways than one, and put Cecelja back in business.

Russell would have preferred not to use him, but there wasn’t much choice where fugitive escapes to the sun were concerned. The real question was how to get the priest’s help without paying for it, at least in monetary form. Russell was more than willing to promise the Earth on the CIC’s behalf—one more burning bridge behind him seemed neither here nor there.

The priest was around forty, and looked more Irish than Croatian. He was Russell’s height, with dark hair showing hints of grey. He wasn’t wearing a robe or dog-collar, and no church abutted his two-storey house. Like Father Kozniku, clearly he had placed God on the back-burner.

He expressed no surprise at receiving a visitor from the CIC, although he insisted on seeing Russell’s accreditation.

‘We have a favour to ask,’ Russell began, once they were seated in the large lounge overlooking the lake, and an Austrian youth had brought them both coffees. ‘Two Ukrainian Catholics, a man and a woman, whom the Soviets are pursuing.’

Cecelja paused in the act of transferring sugar from bowl to cup. ‘I presume you know the fees.’

‘A favour we shall reciprocate,’ Russell went on. ‘But not, in this case, with cash. Our funds have been frozen,’ he explained. ‘Temporarily, we hope.’

Cecelja found that amusing. ‘The mighty United States war machine can’t put its hands on three thousand dollars?’

‘I’m sure the war machine could, but not our little part of it.’

‘So what are you offering us?’

‘We’re offering you a free pass. A statement to the effect that the accusations of collaboration raised against you have been officially dismissed. And all previous statements to the contrary expunged
from our official records. Put the two together, and any future application for US visa will be a formality.’

Cecelja looked interested, but didn’t reply right away.

‘This situation won’t last for ever,’ Russell told the priest.

‘Which situation is that?’

‘The one in which Uncle Sam is so desperate for help from people like you that it’s willing to forgive and forget.’

‘Ah, that sounds like a threat.’

‘You could see it as a choice. On the one hand, securing your own future safety and helping two good Catholics escape from the communists. On the other …

Cecelja steepled his fingers. ‘Put that way, the choice does seem rather obvious.’

‘I would say so,’ Russell agreed. And it was—sending the two down the Rat Line wouldn’t cost Cecelja anything, but the promised paper might prove priceless. Even if it failed to materialise, he wouldn’t be out of pocket.

‘So when can I expect these “good Catholics”?’

‘I’ll be dropping them off next Thursday.’

‘Along with the document you promised?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then …’ The priest rose and offered his hand, which Russell duly accepted. Over the past few years he had met several men with copious blood on their hands, and all they had shared was a certain coldness. Cecelja didn’t even have that. Without a knowledge of his deeds, there was literally nothing to set him apart.

Russell drove back to Salzburg with the window open, revelling in the freshness of the wind. He had forgotten to arrange a meeting with Sewell, but despite its being Saturday, he found him in his CIC office.

‘I can’t believe you persuaded the good Father to take them free of
charge,’ Sewell said, as they drove across town to the Photo and Document lab. ‘You must have got him on a really good day.’

At the lab, Russell placed his order with the CIC’s resident forger—new passports, travel documents, transit passes, extra IDs, and baptismal certificates for two. The American didn’t want to start work without photos, but eventually agreed that they could be affixed near the end of the process. Russell came away feeling positive: success with Cecelja, success with the documents—it seemed like his luck was in.

And there was one more piece of good fortune to enjoy. Before he took to the road again, Sewell suggested calling the local airbase, and sure enough, a transport was leaving for Frankfurt in less than an hour. He was on a roll.

It didn’t last. The flight was smooth enough, but the sky over Rhein-Main was humming with traffic, and the queue to land took almost as long. The reason, as he discovered on reaching the offices, was a general alert. While Russell had been travelling south on Friday, the Soviets had been shutting the Berlin rail link down, and American reliance on their air links had risen accordingly, tripling their flights in and out of the city.

It was dawn on Sunday before Russell had a seat on one, and seven in the morning before he stepped blearily down on to the tarmac at Tempelhof. Reaching home to find Effi and Rosa at breakfast, he grabbed a fork and took turns stealing scrambled eggs off their plates.

‘Did it all go all right?’ Effi asked, when Rosa left them for a few moments.

‘Better than I hoped. How’s Rosa?’

‘She’s worried about us both going away. She doesn’t actually say so, and I do keep reminding her that we’ll only be gone for two or three nights, but I know she is.’

‘Mmm. Well, let’s make sure we have a good day today.’

‘We’re going to Zarah’s for lunch. And Bill will probably be there.’

‘Well, that’ll be good.’

‘Oh, and Ströhm rang for you. He sounded disappointed when I told him you were away, and that Monday we were both going off again.’

‘He must be feeling the pressure,’ Russell said.

‘The baby or the Russians?’

‘He can’t wait for the baby. It’ll be the Russians. Stuck between the devil and the deep red sea.’

‘The devil being Comrade Ulbricht.’

‘Or the Americans. He’s spoilt for choice.’

Effi dismissed it all with a wave of the hand. ‘Anyway, I’m packed. And these,’ she said, pointing them out, ‘are my audition reels.’ There were four of them, each in small round cans of roughly similar size.

‘I hope Merzhanov’s isn’t a lot bigger,’ Russell observed. ‘It’ll stand out if it is.’

Effi shook her head. ‘We can empty one of these and rewind the new film on to it,’ she said.

Russell gave her an admiring look. ‘You should have been the secret agent, and I should have been the beauty.’

Bill Carnforth was at Zarah’s when they arrived, peeling potatoes in a rather fetching apron. His news was more sobering—having allowed a resumption of rail traffic between Berlin and the Western zones, the Soviets had turned their attention to the only road link, and closed its bridge over the Elbe, ostensibly for repairs. ‘They’re just messing with us,’ Carnforth said. ‘And they’re gonna keep on doing it until we throw up our hands in despair and head back home.’

‘And you should have seen it on Ku’damm yesterday,’ Zarah interjected. ‘Thousands of people spending their money like they couldn’t wait to get rid of it. If they don’t reform the currency soon, we’ll be back to barter.’

‘And if they do,’ Russell mused, ‘then God only knows how the Soviets will react.’

‘But what could they do?’ Zarah wanted to know. ‘Money is money.’

‘I think they’re doing it already, honey,’ her fiancé observed.

‘You mean blocking the autobahn?’

‘And the railway.’

‘But you won’t let them cut us off,’ Zarah insisted, as if he was the one who would take the decision.

‘I wish I was certain of that,’ he said, placing another peeled potato in the saucepan. ‘Me and General Clay would give them a fight, but it won’t be our call. The politicians will have to decide.’

‘They’ll stand up to the Russians eventually,’ Zarah said confidently. ‘But it still doesn’t seem like a very good time to go waltzing off to Prague,’ she told Effi. ‘Couldn’t you wait a few weeks?’

‘It’s all arranged,’ Effi told her. A year ago she would have filled Zarah in on what was actually happening, but since Carnforth had appeared on the scene she and Russell had opted not to burden her sister with a possible conflict of loyalties. ‘And I do want to see Císař,’ she added. ‘You liked that film of his you saw.’

‘Did I? What was it?’

‘
Beloved Morning.
’

‘Oh yes, that was good. So you’re back on Wednesday or Thursday?’

‘I think so,’ Effi told her

‘Can we meet you at the station?’ Rosa asked.

‘No, sweetheart. We don’t know which train we’ll be on, and it might be very late.’

The girl looked crestfallen. ‘Will you wake me when you get back?’

‘Of course we will.’

That afternoon they all went to see a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical at a recently re-opened local cinema, and half-danced their way back to Zarah’s flat. There was an undamaged double staircase fronting one of the bombsites on Kant Strasse, and this provided Effi and Russell with the opportunity to recreate one particular scene. Their attempt seemed more than creditable to Russell, and he failed to see why their audience found it so amusing.

Back at Carmer Strasse that evening, Rosa did a drawing of the two of them whirling each other around in the street. Examining it over her shoulder, Russell felt close to tears.

Janica

I
t was chaos at Anhalter Station on Tuesday morning. Overnight the Soviets had decreed that any Berliners wanting a ticket to the Western Zones could only buy it at Friedrichstrasse Station, and every available railway employee at Anhalter was surrounded by people haplessly protesting the inconvenience. But it was much more than that, Russell realised. As Friedrichstrasse Station was in the Soviet zone, the Russians had effectively awarded themselves a veto over who might leave the city.

It didn’t affect him and Effi for now. They weren’t leaving Stalin’s new empire, and they already had their train tickets. Their route was the usual one via Dresden, which Russell had taken in March 1939 with the German naval plans concealed in a false-bottomed suitcase. He still sometimes wondered how he’d managed not to soil himself during that particular border inspection. On that occasion he’d had a publicity shot of Effi to divert the guards; now he had the real thing.

It was a bright summer morning, and soon they were rolling through a healthy-looking countryside, the fields of flourishing crops only blighted by the occasional hulk of a burnt-out tank. These were all German, and Russell guessed that they had been left beside the line deliberately, as a visible reminder of who had won the war.

Their train made reasonable time by post-war standards, but it still took three hours to reach Dresden, which had the dubious
distinction of looking even worse than Berlin. Russell shared the opinion, widely-held among Germans, that the air attack on Dresden in February 1945 had been a war crime, and he saw no reason to stop there—as far as he was concerned all those responsible for the Allied bombing of civilian targets should have ended up in the Nuremberg dock.

He had once said as much to an RAF wing-commander.

‘Those were brave men!’ the man had barked out in response.

‘I’m sure a lot of them were,’ Russell had replied. ‘And so were a lot of the Germans who committed war crimes in Russia.’

The RAF man had looked as if he wanted to hit him, but had just about managed to restrain himself.

Why were people so stupid? Did they really thinking bravery always went hand in hand with virtue?

As their train sat in Dresden platform, Russell told Effi about the exchange.

She smiled at him. ‘After two thousand years of this,’ she said, waving a hand at the partly-cleared ruins beyond the tracks, ‘you’d think men would step aside and give women a chance. But I don’t see it happening.’

‘Touché,’ Russell observed.

Forty minutes later they reached the border, and climbed out to take their walk through the inspection shed. The two of them were almost waved through, as Russell had assumed they would be—people entering Czechoslovakia at the state’s invitation were unlikely to be searched. Most of the people travelling in the opposite direction, however, weren’t so lucky. The Czechoslovak natives presumably all had permission to leave, but it looked as if each and every one of them was being subjected to a rigorous search. By contrast, the only obvious foreigners—two Germans and a Russian—were barely inspected at all.

As they walked forward to their waiting train, Effi drew what seemed the logical conclusion. ‘I think I should come back alone.’

‘I don’t think …’

‘I’ll be fine. They were only searching Czechs, and as long as I don’t have you standing behind me, making me nervous … and we did talk about you and Janica going on to Vienna.’

‘And you pointed out that the train toilet was the logical place to put on the makeup. If she goes with me there won’t be an opportunity, unless we find some way of sneaking her into our hotel.’

‘That would be crazy,’ Effi said. ‘She’ll have to do without the makeup. She’s only twenty-nine, for heaven’s sake—I looked the same at twenty-nine as I did at twenty-one. And there’s another thing. After what we saw this morning it looks like Berlin will get harder to leave. If we take Janica back there, we may not be able to get her out again.’

It was a good point, but hardly relevant to Russell’s main concern. ‘I don’t want you bearing all the risk,’ he said.

‘Well, you’re going to have to get used to it. Don’t you see? It makes so much more sense not to put all our eggs in one basket. If you and Janica go on Vienna, and for some dreadful reason she’s stopped at the border, then at least we’ll still have the film.’

‘And a very disappointed Merzhanov,’ Russell pointed out. But he would face that problem if and when it arose. He hated the thought of Effi carrying the film out alone, but he could see she was right. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But I’m not happy about it.’