Zoo Station (21 page)

Zembski had the passport waiting in a desk drawer. A nice job, if I say so myself, he muttered, using a photographers dark-sack to pick it up and hand it over. You should keep your own fingerprints off it, he advised. And pleaseburn it the moment youre finished with it. Ive already burned the negatives.

I will, Russell said, examining the photograph inside. It looked as though it had always been there.

He walked back to the U-bahn station, hyper-conscious of the passport in his pocket. Pretending to be McKinley might get him through a spot check, but anything more rigorous and hed be in real, real trouble. The passport was far too big to eat, though he supposed he could just tear the picture out and eat that. Explaining why hed done so might prove difficult, though.

He reminded himself that he was only guessing about the poste restante, but it didnt feel like guessing: He knew it was there. Once on a train, he decided on another change of plan. The U-bahn might be anonymous, but he would need somewhere to read whatever it was McKinley had accumulated. He couldnt take it to his own flat or Effis, and he had no desire to sit in a park or on a train with a pile of stolen documents on his knee. In the car, on the other hand, he could drive himself somewhere secluded and take his time. This sounded like such a good idea that he wondered why it hadnt occurred to him earlier. How many other obvious possibilities had he failed to notice?

Frau Heidegger was still out. He backed the Hanomag out of the courtyard, accelerated down Neuenburgerstrasse, and almost broad-sided a tram turning into Lindenstrasse. Calm down, he told himself.

On the way to the old town his head raced with ideas for foiling discovery and capture. If he checked who was on normal duty in the poste restante, and then waited till whoever it was went to lunch, hed probably be seen by someone less liable to go over the passport with a magnifying glass. Or would the lunchtime stand-in, being less used to the work, be more careful? A crowded post office would give more people the chance of remembering him; an empty one would make him stand out.

He parked the car on Heiligegeiststrasse, a hundred meters north of the block which housed the huge post office, and walked down to the main entrance. The poste restante section was on the second floor, a large high-ceilinged room with high windows. A line of upright chairs for waiting customers faced the two service windows. There was a customer at one window, but the other was free.

Heart thumping, Russell walked up to the available clerk and placed McKinleys passport on the counter. Anything for McKinley? he asked, in a voice which seemed to belong to someone else.

The clerk took the briefest of looks at the passport and disappeared without a word. Would he come back with a sheaf of papers or a squad of Gestapo? Russell wondered. He stole a look at the other customer, a woman in her thirties who was just signing for a parcel. The clerk serving her was now looking at Russell. He looked away, and wondered whether to put the passport back in his pocket. He could feel the man still looking at him. Dont do anything memorable, he told himself.

His own clerk returned, more quickly than Russell had dared to hope, with a thick manila envelope. Letting this drop onto the counter with a thump, he reached underneath for a form. A couple of indecipherable squiggles later he pushed the form across for signing. Russell searched in vain for his pen, accepted the one offered with a superior smirk, and almost signed his own name. A cold sweat seemed to wash across his chest and down his legs as he scrawled an approximation of McKinleys signature, accepted his copy of the receipt, and picked up the proffered envelope. The five yards to the door seemed endless, the stairs an echo chamber of Wagnerian proportions.

On the street outside a tram disgorging passengers was holding up traffic. Fighting the ludicrous temptation to run, Russell walked back toward his car, scanning the opposite pavement for possible watchers. As he waited to cross Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse he snuck a look back. There was no one there. If there had been, he told himself, theyd have seen the envelope and arrested him by now. Hed gotten away with it. For the moment, anyway.

Much to his relief the car started without protest. He turned onto Konigstrasse and headed up toward the railway bridge, chafing at the slow pace of the tram in front of him. As he rounded Alexanderplatz he decided, at the last moment, that Landsbergerstrasse offered the quickest route out of the city, and almost collided with another car. Away to his right the gray bulk of the Alex leered down at him.

He slowed the Hanomag and concentrated on driving the three kilometers to the citys ragged edge without getting arrested. As he swung round Buschingplatz he thought for one dreadful moment that a traffic cop was flagging him down, and the beads of sweat were still clinging to his brow as he drove past the huge state hospital on the southern edge of the Friedrichshain. Another kilometer and he could smell the vast complex of cattle markets and slaughterhouses that sprawled alongside the Ringbahn. As he reached the top of the bridge which carried the road over the railway by
L
andsbergerallee Station he had a brief panoramic view of the countryside to the east: two small hills rising, almost apologetically, from the vast expanse of the Prussian plains.

Earlier, mentally searching for a safe place to study McKinleys material, he had recalled a picnic with Thomass family on one of those hills. As he remembered it, a road ran south from Marzahn between them, and a winding access road led up to a picnic area on the one nearest the city.

His memory served him well. The road wound up through dark dripping trees to the bald brow of the hill, where picnic tables had been arranged to take advantage of the view across the city. There was no one there. Russell parked in the allotted space behind the tables and gazed out through the windshield at the distant city. The nearest clump of large buildings, which Thomas had pointed out on their previous visit, made up Berlins principal home for the mentally ill, the Herzberge Asylum. Which was highly apt, given the probable content of the reading matter on the seat beside him.

He reached for the envelope and carefully prized it open. There were about fifty sheets of paper in all, a few in McKinleys writing, most of them typed or printed. Russell skipped through them in search of Theresa Jurissens letter. He found it at the bottom of the pile, with a datethe date it had been writtenscrawled in pencil across the right-hand corner. Going back through the other papers, Russell found other dates: McKinley had arranged his story in chronological order.

The first document was a 1934 article from the
Munchner Zeitung
, a journalists eyewitness report of life in an asylum entitled Alive Yet Dead. McKinley had underlined two sentencesThey vegetate in twilight throughout the day and night. What do time and space mean to them?and added in the margin: or life and death? The second document was a story from the SS journal
Das Schwarze Korps
, about a farmer who had shot his mentally handicapped son and the sensitive judges who had all but let him off. A readers letter from the same magazine begged the authorities to find a legal and humane way of killing defective infants.

Russell skipped through several other letters in the same vein and numerous pages of unattributed statistics which demonstrated a marked decline in the space and resources devoted to each mental patient since 1933. So far, so predictable, Russell thought.

The next item was an article by Karl Knab in the
Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift
journal. Again, McKinley had underlined one passage: We have before us in these asylums, spiritual ruins, whose number is not insignificant, notwithstanding all our therapeutic endeavours, in addition to idiots on the lowest level, patient material which, as simply cost-occasioning ballast, should be eradicated by being killed in a painless fashion, which is justifiable in terms of the self-preservatory finance policy of a nation fighting for its existence, without shaking the cultural foundations of its cultural values. This was chilling enough, Russell thought, but who was Knab? He was obviously far from a lone voice in the wilderness, but that didnt make him a spokesman for the government.

There was a lot of stuff on the Knauer boy, but most of it was in McKinleys writingguesses, suppositions, holes to be filled. It was the last few sheets of paper which really caught Russells attention. Most were from a memorandum by Doctor Theodore Morell, best known to the foreign press community as Hitlers Quack. He had been given the task of gathering together everything written in favor of euthanasia over the last fifty years, with a view to formulating a draft law on The Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life. Those eligible included anyone suffering from mental or physical malformation, anyone requiring long-term care, anyone arousing horror in other people or anyone situated on the lowest animal level. The Nazis qualified on at least two counts, Russell thought.

As Theresa Jurissen had said, the main area of controversy among those who favored such a law was the openness or not of its administration. In this memorandum Morell concluded that secrecy was best: that parents would be much happier thinking that their child had simply succumbed to some illness or other. He hadnt yet decided whether doctors should be involved in the actual killing of their patients, but he insisted on their compulsory registration of all congenitally ill patients.

The final item was the letter, and Russell now realized why McKinley had been so excited by it. Theodore Morell might be Hitlers doctor, but he was a private citizen, entitled to his own ideas, no matter how psychopathic they might be. The letter, though, was something else. It confirmed the gist of Morells memorandum under the imprint of the KdF, the Kanzlei des Fuhrers. It tied Hitler to child-killing.

Russell shook the papers together and stuffed them back into the envelope. After sliding the whole package under the passenger seat he got out of the car and walked across the damp grass to the lip of the slope. A small convoy of military trucks was driving east down
L
andsbergerallee, a solitary car headed in the opposite direction. A dense layer of cloud still hung over the city.

McKinley had had his story, Russell thought. The sort of story that young journalists dreamed ofone that saved lives
and
made you famous.

But what was he going to do with it? Get rid of it, was the obvious answer. Along with the passport.

He watched a distant Ringbahn train slide slowly out of sight near the slaughterhouses.
I
t was the obvious answer, but he knew he couldnt do it. He owed it to McKinley, and probably to himself. He owed it to all those thousands of childrentens of thousands, for all he knewthat a creep like Morell found unworthy of life.

McKinley had probably thought his story would save them all. Russell had rather less faith in the power of the press, but having everything out in the open would at least make it more difficult for the bastards.

How could he get the stuff to McKinleys paper? Not by post, that was for sure. Hed have to carry it out himself, which would hardly be a barrel of laughs.

How had McKinley planned to file the story? Or had he been just as stuck? That would explain why hed put it in the poste restante.

Which had been a good idea. And still was, Russell decided. Under his own name this time. The passport would have to go.

But how could he get rid of it? Immolation seemed the obvious answer, but flames tended to be conspicuous, particularly on a day as dark as this one, and in any case he had no means of creating any. He could burn the damn thing in his apartment, but felt reluctant to carry it a moment longer than he had to, and particularly reluctant to bring it home, where the Gestapo might be waiting on his sofa. Somewhere on the open road, he thought, with a good view in either direction. Back in the car, he slid it under his seat. Driving back down the hill he felt a strange urge to sing. Hysteria, he told himself.

At the post office in Marzahn he bought a book of matches andsince it seemed less suspiciousa packet of cigarettes to go with them. He also purchased a large envelope which he addressed to himself, care of the poste restante in Potsdam; he had no ambition to revisit the counter at Heiligegeiststrasse under a different name. He then used the public telephone to call Effi.

Is everything all right? she asked anxiously.

Too wonderful to talk about, he said pointedly. What are you doing?

Trying to memorize my part.

Can you meet me in the Zoo Station buffet? he asked. At four oclock, he added, checking his watch.

Ill be there.

Once back on the Landsberg road Russell started looking for a suitable place to burn the passport. A mile or so short of the Ringbahn bridge he found a wide entranceway to a farm track and pulled over. Retrieving the passport from under his seat he ripped it into separate pages and set light to the first one, holding it down between his knees until it was too hot to hold, then shifting it to and fro with his feet until all that remained were black flakes. With his other hand he wafted the resulting smoke out through the open windows.

In the time it took him to burn the remaining five sheets only two trucks went by, and their drivers showed no interest in Russells slightly smoking car. He gathered the blackened remains in his handkerchief, which he knotted and placed in his pocket before resuming his journey. Twenty minutes later he consigned both handkerchief and contents to a lonely stretch of the scum-covered
L
uisenstrassekanal. The final remains of Zembskis handiwork disappeared with a dull plop, leaving Russell with several burned fingers to remember them by.

It was almost 3:15. He went back to the Hanomag, and started working his way west toward Potsdamerplatz. The traffic around the southern edge of the Tiergarten was busy for the time of day, but he reached his destinationa street halfway between Effis flat and Zoo Stationwith five minutes to spare. He parked facing the direction she would come from, assuming she hadnt picked this day of all days to change her usual route.