Masaryk Station (John Russell) (38 page)

‘I don’t think they’ll miss me,’ Shchepkin said, surprising Russell. Personal emotions didn’t usually come up in their conversations. ‘These past few days I’ve realised—we’re strangers to each other. I feel like I’m standing outside their house and watching them through the window. I love them, of course, but more in memory than anything else. And love should be more than an echo.’ He glanced at Russell. ‘But now I’m getting morbid, and you and I have work to do. For three years now we’ve been feeding the Americans a diet of truths, half-truths, and outright lies, and now they’ll expect to be told which is which. Unless we intend to be completely honest with them—which I, for one, do not—there are some comrades, for example, whom I won’t betray—then we need to agree our version of events.’

‘That could take a week,’ Russell observed.

‘I told Irina I’d be back in three hours.’

For the next two, as the sun slowly sank towards the distant rooftops, and the American planes droned across the sky beyond the canal, they trawled their joint career, discussing those American and Soviet agents they had betrayed and those they had not, agreeing which names they would offer up and which they wouldn’t, going over which nuggets of information they could happily divulge and which would be safer to keep to themselves. As a rough guiding principle, they agreed to protect those on either side who actually believed in their cause, and give up those who were only interested in advancing their careers.

Russell’s brain was spinning by the time they finished. ‘I’ll never remember it all,’ he said.

‘Neither will they,’ Shchepkin said reassuringly. ‘I had an old teacher, back in the twenties,’ he went on, almost dreamily. ‘He was about sixty, and he’d faced interrogations in a dozen countries. When we found ourselves in that situation, he told us, we should make our inquisitors feel like they were looking in an honest mirror, seeing both the good and the bad in themselves. And once we’d managed that, we should try and offer them some sort of absolution. He said we’d be surprised how grateful they would be, and how much getting them to question themselves reduced their ability to question others.’

‘You don’t have a manuscript stashed away somewhere, do you? “
Tips for Political Prisoners: A Bolshevik Handbook
”.’

Shchepkin’s eyes twinkled. ‘Unfortunately not.’

A tram was crossing the bridge to their left as they both stood up.

‘I doubt we’ll meet again,’ the Russian said, offering his hand.

Russell took it. ‘I won’t forget your wife and daughter,’ was all he could find to say. Or you, he thought, as Shchepkin walked slowly off in the direction of the Soviet sector.

When Russell got to Zarah’s, she and her American fiancé were having a loud argument in the kitchen.

‘It’s nothing serious,’ Effi told him. ‘And quite wonderful in a way—I don’t think she ever shouted at Jens.’

Russell put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Speaking of wonderful, it seems we’re in the clear.’

Her eyes lit up. ‘Really?’

‘According to Shchepkin.’ He sighed. ‘Who’s dying, by the way.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘He wasn’t specific. Some sort of heart disease apparently.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yes, me too. But he’s got his wife and daughter out, and he thinks we’re all safe.’

‘And you think so to?’

‘Well, he’s never been wrong about anything before.’ Apart from the system he’d devoted his life too, Russell thought, but didn’t say.

‘So we can go home?’

He considered suggesting they stay for the night, but the argument in the kitchen showed no sign of abating. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said.

Told they were leaving, Zarah emerged. ‘Rosa’s half asleep,’ she said, ‘why don’t you leave her here, and I’ll take them both to school in the morning?’

Rosa, though, was keen to go home. ‘Why are they fighting?’ she asked once they were outside.

‘People do,’ Effi told her. ‘It doesn’t mean they don’t love each other.’

‘I know that.’

They walked most of the way in silence, the two adults digesting what seemed their new-found liberation. They were turning on to Carmer Strasse when Effi wondered out loud how the Americans would react.

‘Oh, I expect they’ll give me a hard time for a few weeks,’ Russell told her. ‘But they’ll let me go eventually.’

‘And in the meantime, I can decide between
The Islanders
and Hollywood,’ Effi said. ‘Assuming we can still get out of Berlin.’

‘Can’t you do both?’

‘Maybe. And you know, I really would like to do a movie with Císař. Not right away, but when I can think about Prague without shivering.’

There were several cars parked close to their building, but Russell recognised them all, and the stairwell was reassuringly empty. It was only after he’d closed the apartment door behind them that the two young men emerged from the bedroom. One had fair hair and a typical Slavic countenance, the other Asian eyes and slightly bowed legs. Both were gripping Tokarev pistols with business-like silencers.

One held them at gunpoint while the other patted them down, and then ordered them on to the sofa while his comrade searched Rosa and Effi’s bags. A grunt of minor triumph accompanied his discovery of the newly-purchased handgun.

Russell was noticing signs of a search. Things had been moved and then put back, but not quite in the same position. They’d been looking for the film.

‘Do these two speak Russian?’ the obvious Russian man asked him, waving his gun in Effi and Rosa’s general direction.

Russell could see no point in lying. ‘No,’ he said.

This seemed to please his interrogator. ‘Well, where is it?’ he asked.

‘Where’s what?’

The man smiled. ‘If you waste our time you’ll only make it harder on yourself and your family. We know you have it, and if you won’t tell us where it is, we shall take you all to our sector and question you until you do. And once we have you over there, I can’t see what reason we’d have for ever bringing you back.’

Listening, Russell knew he had no choice. His first thought when the two men appeared had been that Shchepkin had badly misread his boss, but this Russian’s repeated use of ‘it’ suggested otherwise. If these men believed there was only one copy, then they hadn’t come from Beria. GRU most likely, Soviet Military Intelligence. But how had they found out about the film? There was one obvious candidate. ‘How is Merzhanov?’ Russell asked.

‘He’s dead.’

‘And the woman who was with him?’

‘The same. You admit, then, that they gave you the film?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is it?’

‘If I tell you, what’s to stop you killing us, too?’

‘If you give us the film, why would we do that?’

He was almost certainly lying, but as Russell had noticed in a similar situation three years earlier, hope really did spring eternal. And sometimes with reason.

The Russian added a real stick to his dubious carrot: ‘But if you don’t tell us where it is, I shall hurt your wife or daughter. And if that doesn’t convince you, then I shall kill one of them.’

As Russell looked at Effi and Rosa, it felt like ice was forming in his brain. ‘I buried it in the forest,’ he told the Russian.

‘Which one?’

‘The Grunewald,’ he said, noting the flicker in Effi’s eyes as she caught the word.

‘We will go there at once. My comrade will stay with the woman and girl as a guarantee of your behaviour.’

‘Can I explain that to them?’

‘Tell them to do as he says.’

Russell explained the situation to Effi, trying not to scare Rosa any more than she already was. There was no point in telling Effi to
take any chance that arose—she would know that already—and for all he knew one of the Russians understood German.

Effi squeezed his hand and gave him an unconvincing smile. The thought that he might never see her again seemed utterly ridiculous.

As he and the Russian walked down the stairs, Russell tried to think through the implications. The GRU wanted the tape to use against Beria, but they wouldn’t want the world to know about it—only the West would gain from that. This was both good news and bad news. Good because the Americans would remain in the dark; bad because any Westerners who knew about the film would need to be silenced.

The bad news seemed to render the good news redundant.

The car, a Maybach SW42, was around the corner. ‘You drive,’ the Russian said.

It wasn’t a car he’d driven before, but after grinding his way down to Ku’damm, he finally got the hang of the gear stick. The boulevard was busy, and when a red light held them halfway down, he thought about leaning his head out of the window, and telling the world he was being abducted. What would the Russian do—shoot him?

He probably would. And then shove the body on to the street and drive off. There would be plenty of witnesses, but none would lift a finger to help Russell, any more than they had in the ’30s, when the brownshirts had picked on some hapless Jew.

And what was the point of fighting back now? Effi and Rosa should be safe until the Russians had the film in their hands. It was better to wait, and take the chance he’d planned for.

He drove on, half-blinded by the setting sun, crossing the Ringbahn by Halensee Station, and following the winding Königs Allee to the Grunewald’s eastern perimeter. Private vehicles weren’t permitted beyond the lightless Hundekehle Restaurant, but Russell
drove on down the access road. There seemed little chance of their being challenged at this hour, and he had reasons of his own for not wanting too long a walk after he had dug up the film.

They only passed one couple, who gave them a dirty look but kept on walking. The twosome had taken them for
warmer brüder
, Russell thought, men who were out for an illegal fuck in the forest.

A minute or so later he brought the car to a halt. As far as he could tell in the fading light, they’d reached the nearest point on the road to where he’d buried the film.

They both got out.

‘How far is it?’ the Russian asked.

‘A few minutes. No more.’

They started walking, Russell showing the way. Under the eaves it was darker still, but he found the clearing without any problem. ‘It’s over here,’ he said, walking towards the tree.

‘Where?’

‘Here,’ Russell told him, sinking to his knees. This was the moment he feared, when the Russian might order him aside and do the digging himself.

He didn’t.

Russell took his time scooping out the still-loose earth with his hands, and just as his questing fingers made contact with metal, the Russian leaned over his shoulder to see what was happening.

‘You’re in my light,’ Russell told him.

‘Well, hurry up,’ the Russian said, stepping back a pace.

Uttering a short and very silent prayer that internment hadn’t disabled the gun, Russell curved his hand around the grip, inserted one finger ahead of the trigger, and jerking it free of its temporary grave, opened fire at point-blank range.

The crack echoed through the forest, scattering loudly cawing birds up into the night sky.

The Russian was still moving, whimpering softly. The eyes looking up at Russell were those of a small boy.

He raised the gun, steeled his heart, and fired again.

When the door closed behind Russell and his escort, Effi’s first impulse was to have a good weep. But Rosa had beaten her to it—Effi’s daughter was sobbing in eerie silence, the way her real mother had taught her, when they lived in a Christian friend’s garden shed, and the Gestapo’s main hobby was seeking out hidden Jews.

She took the girl in her arms and tried to hide the hatred she was felt for their Russian guard. After drawing the curtains he had sat down opposite them, lit a cigarette, and held them in his gaze. His narrow eyes made Effi think of Mongols, and cruelty, but so far at least he’d shown no sign of murdering them.

Effi told herself there was no reason for despair, not yet anyway. When Russell had told her about his brainstorm—the death-camp escapee’s advice and the gun he’d buried with the film—she’d thought it all a touch absurd, but it might well save their lives. It would be almost dark by the time they reached the Grunewald, which would surely improve his chances. She had to believe he’d come back.

What would happen when he did? What would he do? Just knock on the door and shoot this staring Russian when he opened it?

But she didn’t think the Russian would be so obliging. Either he and his partner would have a signature knock, like she and Ali had had in the war; or he’d wait to hear the other man’s voice.

And if he didn’t hear it, then what? He would probably assume it was a friend or a neighbour who had knocked, and send her to answer it. And he would hold on to Rosa just in case. If Russell just burst in shooting, the girl might be killed in the crossfire.

But Russell would already have worked all that out, Effi knew.
The reason he’d taken the death-camp escapee’s advice to heart so readily was that it chimed so well with his own way of doing things.

So, what would he do? And how could she help them all survive it?

It had taken Ströhm until late afternoon to get his hands on the full text of the Cominform Resolution, and after leaving work he stopped at a bar on Potsdamer Strasse to read the whole thing through. His sense of outrage increased as he did so. The Yugoslavs were accused of ‘left deviationism’ one moment, and then ‘supporting capitalist elements’—a rightist deviation—the next. The Yugoslavs were criticised for their ‘hostile attitude to the Soviet Union’, when everyone knew they had bent over backwards in praise of Stalin; and for creating a ‘military bureaucratic system’, which was too ironic to be true. Ströhm didn’t see how anyone could believe such rubbish. But all the East European parties, including his own, had put their signatures to the Resolution and its principal demand, that the current Yugoslav leadership either change course or face instant removal.