Masaryk Station (John Russell) (37 page)

It was half-past two P.M.; he had half an hour to wait. He spent it by the window, eyes on the street and ears cocked for feet on the stairs. After an hour he reluctantly accepted that Shchepkin wasn’t going to ring, then belatedly checked that the phone was working. It was.

He locked the flat back up, and showed the same caution departing that he had on arrival. At a bank on Hardenberg Strasse he joined the queue for changing currency and eventually took possession of sixty new Deutschmarks. After walking back to Zoo Station, he spent the half-hour waiting in the buffet for the Wannsee train, and reading the local British newspaper. All the good news was on the front page—two days earlier, Foreign Secretary Bevin had told the world the British wouldn’t leave Berlin ‘under any circumstances’. The Americans had not yet given any such assurance, but that didn’t worry Russell. The steady stream of C-47s skimming the Wilmersdorf skyline seemed a lot more compelling than any words.

Ströhm had been anticipating the radio programme for most of the day. The Hungarian Arthur Koestler had been a member of the Party in the 1930s, and Ströhm had a vague memory of seeing him at a KPD meeting in the pre-Hitler years. He had worked for the Comintern in France, and as a journalist in Spain, before disillusionment caught up with him, and caused him to write the novel which RIAS had dramatized for that evening’s broadcast,
Darkness at Noon
.

Ströhm had heard a lot about the book, but was still unprepared for the impact it had on him. He already knew it concerned a fictional Bolshevik named Rubashov, whom Stalin had turned on and imprisoned. The man’s philosophising proved fairly predictable—it was more his memories that undid Ströhm. Little Loewy, the Party secretary who hanged himself, was Rubashov’s Stefan Utermann. In
Darkness at Noon
, the Bolshevik Rubashov journeyed from Moscow to Antwerp, and ordered Loewy to sacrifice comrades and conscience for the greater good of the Soviet Union. He had travelled the much shorter distance from Hallesches Ufer to Rummelsburg, and done exactly the same.

Ströhm thought of Harald Gebauer up in Wedding, as he often did at such moments. That usually reassured him, but not this time. Harald’s criticism of the Party was implicit, because it came from the heart, and he would probably pass unnoticed for longer than those more cerebrally-gifted comrades whose critiques were spoken or written. But eventually someone would notice, and be all the angrier when they realised how long it had taken. And then someone else would discover that Ströhm had known the man for years, and might be prevailed on to show him the error of his ways. The error of believing in mankind.

The play was still underway, but Ströhm was caught by this
glimpse into his future: Gerhard Ströhm, closer of doors, firer of metaphorical bullets. Confiscator of dreams.

Once Rosa had fallen asleep, Russell and Effi discussed how long they could afford to wait for Shchepkin. They had agreed to give him until Tuesday, but how much longer than that? There was no easy answer. The moment they made the film public, their bargaining power would be finished, but so, they hoped, would be Beria’s career. At that point the MGB chief would have nothing to lose, but, unless Josef Stalin was completely impervious to world opinion, he and his country did. But would Uncle Joe act quickly enough, and kill Beria before a vengeful Beria succeeded in killing them? Even if Stalin did move promptly, the chances were still good that Russell’s role in the atomic business—not to mention his concealing of the film from his CIC bosses—would reach the light of day. Broadcasting proof of Beria’s infamy might bring justice for Sonja, her sister, and all the other women the man had probably raped or killed, and it might even lead to a diminishing of Soviet cruelty at home and abroad, but it wouldn’t do much for Russell and Effi.

Waiting, though, would get riskier by the day. If Shchepkin was in the Lyubyanka, then literally hundreds of MGB agents would be scouring Berlin for them and their copy of the film.

‘A few more days,’ Effi suggested. ‘Until Thursday. We can take it to the Americans on Friday morning.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Russell argued. ‘I wish we’d made more copies. I’d feel a lot happier if we had a dozen to distribute. Then we’d know it couldn’t be suppressed.’

‘Why would the Americans suppress it?’

‘Think about it. If we can blackmail Beria with it, then so can they.’

Annaliese was on nights that week, and Ströhm was alone when the phone rang late that evening. It was Uli Trenkel from the office, and he sounded more than a little drunk.

‘Have you heard?’ he asked excitedly.

‘Heard what?’

‘The Yugoslavs. They’ve been kicked out of the Cominform.’

‘What?!’

‘I’ve seen tomorrow’s
Telegraf
. The headline reads “Tito breaks with Stalin; Tito accused of Trotskyism”.’

‘But that …’ Ströhm was lost for words.

‘Absurd. Isn’t it? But there’s nothing we can do.’ Trenkel prattled on, until Ströhm abruptly ended the call for both their sakes. He poured himself a glass of
payok
whisky and went to stand by the open window. It was a chilly night, the sky full of stars.

So that was it, he thought. He had always imagined their first years in power as years of trial and error, the way they had been in Russia. An experimental journey, in which they all learnt from their mistakes. But now he knew different. There would be none of that in Germany, or anywhere else in eastern Europe. Wherever the Soviets were in control, their journey was being re-run. And if they hadn’t learnt from their mistakes, then those condemned to repeat them wouldn’t be allowed to either.

‘To the comrades in Belgrade,’ Ströhm murmured, raising his glass to the star-filled sky.

It was raining again on Tuesday morning. Russell had anticipated another solo trip into town, but Effi and Rosa, having exhausted the possibilities of all those things they’d brought to entertain themselves, refused to live in exile any longer. ‘We’ll go to Zarah’s,’ Effi told him. ‘And if Shchepkin rings with good news then we can just walk home.’

‘And if he doesn’t?’

‘I don’t know. Let’s worry about that when it happens.’

Russell wasn’t convinced, but there was no changing her mind. After they got off the train he accompanied them to the end of Zarah’s street, and then approached Carmer Strasse with the same caution, and the same result, as before.

Only this time the telephone rang, and it was Shchepkin who spoke when Russell picked up. ‘Remember your daughter’s namesake?’ he asked. ‘Where we remembered her? Five o’clock.’

The line clicked off.

No mention of success, but maybe Russell was supposed to infer that from the Russian’s survival. The only other explanation he could think of was that Shchepkin had shrunk from confronting Beria, and that they were all back to square one.

He would know soon enough.

A café on Ku’damm offered refuge for an hour so, and then Russell started working his way westwards through the streets north of the elevated Stadtbahn. Shchepkin hadn’t stressed the importance of not being followed, but he hadn’t needed to, as finding the two of them together in one place would now be the stuff of Beria’s dreams. Russell was already convinced that no one was shadowing him, but he used the Elisabeth Hospital to make sure, using the main entrance and then leaving by a back service door which Annaliese had shown him and Effi the previous year. The street outside ended by the Landwehrkanal.

Reaching it, he sat down on a convenient bench. The waterway was devoid of traffic, a victim no doubt of the Soviet blockade, and despite the early evening sun, walkers were almost as sparse. The towpaths on either side of the canal had always been a favourite spot for exercising Berlin’s dogs, but the latter’s population had hardly begun to recover from the ravages of the war.

The city’s cats had fared slightly better, and one mangy specimen emerged from a nearby bombsite and rubbed itself against his legs, meowing piteously.

The spot where Rosa Luxemburg’s corpse had been fished from the water was a few hundred metres to his right, close to the bridge that carried Potsdamer Strasse over the canal. It was at least two years since he and Shchepkin had last met there, and Russell idly wondered how differently the Russian Revolution might have developed had she survived the Spartacus Rising. No other figure in European Marxism had possessed the moral and intellectual stature that might have given Lenin pause.

It was a minute to five. He rose from the seat and walked on, the cat following for a few metres, before abruptly giving up on him, and scampering off across the cobbles.

Shchepkin was waiting on a bench near the bridge, his white hair hidden under his hat. It occurred to Russell that they were only a stone’s throw from the Soviet sector. ‘Well?’ he asked, sitting down.

‘He accepted our terms,’ Shchepkin said calmly, with only a hint of a smile.

As Russell let his breath out, he realised how much he’d expected the worst.

‘Irina and Tasha are in a hotel on König Strasse,’ the Russian went on. ‘Tomorrow morning the three of us will hands ourselves over to the Americans. I shall tell them that the Soviets finally realised that you and I were working against them, offer myself as a defector, and demand asylum for my wife and daughter as the price of telling them all that I know. You will tell the Americans that since the Soviets have finally rumbled us, your usefulness has to be over, and you’re submitting your resignation. And once you’ve convinced them that you won’t reveal any of their secrets, they’ll have to let you go.’

‘It sounds good,’ Russell said. In fact the sense of relief was so
overpowering that he began to doubt it. Had Beria really caved in so completely? Were they safe again? Was he finally off the hook?

Searching for a flaw, he found one. And with sinking heart wondered how they—and particularly Shchepkin—could have missed it. ‘Look, as things stand he kills one of us and the other releases the film. But if he captures us both at the same moment, then neither of us will know what’s happened until it’s too late. Okay, we have him for now, but in the long run, surely it won’t be beyond him to coordinate two kidnappings. No matter where we go, we’ll be looking over our shoulders.’

Shchepkin smiled briefly. ‘There’s one thing you don’t know,’ he said. ‘There is no long run for me. I shall be dead in a few weeks.’

‘What?’

‘The doctors tell me my heart is giving out. Broken, perhaps,’ Shchepkin added with a wry smile.

Russell felt a mixture of emotions, of which sadness was the strongest.

‘But I’ve put the film beyond their reach, and I shall be in American custody. I will tell them Beria wants me dead—not why, of course—and they will protect me as long as I keep telling them things. And believe me, I will talk and talk.’

His pauses for breath, Russell realised, were not for dramatic purposes.

‘Beria will have no reason to threaten you, because he believed me when I told him that you don’t know where I’ve hidden it.’

‘I hope so.’

‘One more thing. The moment I’m safe with the Americans, you must destroy your copy of the film. It kept me alive in Moscow, but after tomorrow it will serve no purpose. On the contrary, if Beria’s enemies ever learned of its existence …’

‘His enemies?’

‘The Americans, the GRU, he even has enemies in the Politburo. If any of them found out about the film, and forced you to reveal its location; or if someone stumbled across it by accident in its hiding place, then Beria would consider we had broken our side of the bargain, and God only knows what he’d do. So better to get rid of it. My copy is enough to keep you safe.’

‘I’ll see that it’s destroyed. But your wife and daughter—do they know you’re dying?’

‘I think Irina guesses, but she hasn’t said anything.’

‘How will they survive in the West without you?’

‘I don’t know. They will have no money, but at least they’ll be safe. Natasha is a bright girl.’

‘I know, I’ve met her.’

‘So you have. Of course, if you can help them in any way I would appreciate it.’

‘I’ll do my best.’