Stettin Station E-Book

David Downing

• Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

It is November 1941. Anglo-American John Russell is living in Berlin, tied to the increasingly alien city by his love for two Berliners: his fourteen-year-old son, Paul, and his actress girlfriend, Effi. One of a small and dwindling handful of permitted and much-censored American journalists, Russell has found himself pushed into serving as a point of contact between the anti-Nazi Abwehr and American intelligence. But his real work, as he now sees it, revolves around one crucial question what fate awaits those Berliner Jews who are now being shipped to the east? His investigation has already brought him into perilous proximity with the local communist underground, and will soon involve him in a celebrity murder with global ramifications. As Russell and Effi edge closer to some very dangerous truths, feuding German intelligence services and America's imminent entry into the war further complicate their struggle to outfox and outlive Hitler's Reich.

Leseprobe

This novel is set in Germany and German-occupied Europe in the final months of 1941. It opens on November 17th 1941, the day that the Japanese First Air Fleet sailed from Japan’s Inland Sea on the first leg of its long voyage to Pearl Harbour. None of the novel’s characters, fictional or otherwise, knew that such a voyage was underway until December 7th, when the First Air Fleet reached its destination and brought America into the war.

STETTIN STATION

DAVID DOWNING

Contents

DedicationTitle PageWays of leaving BerlinPropagandistsBetrayals on offerAces lowA broken eggImprovisationsA valued friend of the ReichThe Petschek PalaceNo warningRolf and Eva VollmarThe fan in the mirrorSeparate hellsPraiseAbout the AuthorCopyright

Ways of leaving Berlin

There was no doubt about it – two years into the war, the Third Reich was beginning to smell.

The U-Bahn was unusually ripe that morning, John Russell thought, though it was only the sheer severity of the pong which gave rise to any surprise. Berliners seemed increasingly reluctant to use the hyper-abrasive standardised soap, which removed both dirt and skin, and there was no alternative to the chemical-rich standardised food, which had created a city-wide epidemic of flatulence. Some laid particular blame on the grey, clayey bread, others on the miracle ingredient which turned the ersatz butter yellow. But whatever the cause, the U-Bahn was the place to experience the consequences, and several of his fellow passengers were travelling with their noses buried deep in scarves and handkerchiefs.

At the far end of the violently rocking car – adequate suspension was a casualty of the rubber shortage – two middle-aged men in leather coats were looming over an attractive woman and her young child. They were all smiles, but her rapidly changing facial expressions bore all the unease of a potential victim, and her relief at reaching her stop was obvious to all but her unwitting tormentors.

The Gestapo seemed to be all over the capital these days, their numbers rising steadily since the onset of the Russian campaign and the economic downturn which had soon accompanied it. Over the last month, since the announcement of victory in early October and the subsequent collapse in morale when that had proved a mirage, the swelling numbers of leather-coated myrmidons had been ever more noticeable, and the fact that these two were pestering women on the U-Bahn offered clear proof that the bastards’ numbers had outstripped the availability of their beloved black Mercedes.

The impression of political screws tightening was the main reason why Russell had finally decided it was time to get out. There was, however, no point in applying for an exit permit – with his history, the Germans wouldn’t let him go until the United States formally entered the war, and maybe not even then. Even if they did prove unexpectedly willing to abide by international conventions in his particular case, Russell foresaw months of internment, trapped in a camp somewhere, waiting and wondering whether any of the freshly arrested were coughing up his name along with the blood and the broken teeth. It was not a pleasant prospect.

Nor were there any circumstances in which the Nazis would let his girlfriend Effi go. She might not be Marlene Dietrich, but her name and face were recognisable to a lot of Germans, and Joey Goebbels would never allow such a public defection. And if the authorities did, for reasons best known to themselves, let Russell go, they could always use her as a hostage for his good behaviour. All the stories he had not been allowed to file, the stories he hoped to tell once he escaped the cage, would have to remain untold. His exit – their exit – would have to be an illegal one.

The Americans wouldn’t offer any real help, despite his years of admittedly half-hearted time in their employ. Russell’s main contact at the Consulate had said that they would try to get him out, but that there was nothing they could do for Effi; the two of them were not married, and even if they were, well, surely Russell could see the problem. He could. These last few weeks, with the undeclared war escalating in the Atlantic, the German security agencies were no longer respecting the diplomatic rules, and had even invaded the Consulate on one occasion. If he and Effi sought sanctuary there, it seemed more than likely that Heydrich’s goons would simply stride in and drag them back out.

Only the comrades remained, and the emergency telephone number he’d been given more than two years ago. This belonged to a photographic studio in Neukölln which he had used for work in his freelance days, and the burly Silesian named Miroslav Zembski who owned and ran it. Russell had used the number once in September 1939, and had thereafter deemed it prudent to avoid all contact with Zembski and his studio. Until the previous Friday, that is, when he’d called the number from a public telephone on the Ku’damm.

Someone had answered, at least in the sense of picking up the phone. A slight intake of breath was all Russell heard at the other end, and he had probably imagined the whiff of malevolence seeping down the wire. He had put the phone back after a few seconds, and concluded that a personal visit to the studio would be unwise. But three more days of ominous news from Washington – Japan and the US really did seem to be sliding into war – had reignited his sense of urgency, and put him on this train to Neukölln. He knew he was being reckless: if Zembski wasn’t there, then at best he had disappeared, at worst he was under arrest, and Russell would gain nothing from finding out which it was. Yet here he was, needing to know. Like a moth to a very real flame.

He told himself that Zembski would probably be there, that his own telephone call could have been picked up by a child or an idiot while the fat Silesian was busy taking pictures, that he was, in any case, an innocent customer with a film in his pocket to prove it, a highly appropriate set of shots of his son Paul at a Jungvolk passing-out parade. The risk was negligible, he told himself, the potential prize enormous.

He emerged from the U-Bahn entrance on the western side of Berlinerstrasse, and walked under the S-Bahn bridge in the direction of the studio. The last time he had visited it, the street had been full of traffic, the air full of savoury smells, the buildings awash with neon and full of things to sell. Now it reminded him of a German colleague’s words, that these days the capital had all the colour of a corpse. The lights were out, the odours dubious, the shop windows at least half empty. The sky seemed to be clearing, a state of affairs which Russell and his fellow-Berliners had once anticipated with some relief, assuming – fools that they were – that such conditions would make it easier for the RAF to see and hit their industrial and transport targets. But no, the British pilots seemed incapable of hitting anything relevant to the war effort. Their bombing campaign was like an Italian lottery in reverse – your chances of losing were extremely remote, but no more remote than anyone else’s. Some dear old grandmother in her suburban apartment was as likely to catch it as IG Farben – in fact probably more so, because the pilots were presumably targeting the chemical giant.

Russell stopped outside the restaurant which sat across the road from Zembski’s. The photographer’s name was still above the door, but the drawn blackout curtains precluded any view of the interior. Was there anyone in? There was only one way to find out.

Crossing the empty road, Russell pushed open the door with what he hoped was the brashness of innocence. There was nobody behind Zembski’s counter, on which lay a tripod, still attached to a clearly broken camera. A middle-aged man in a dark grey suit was sitting on one of the chairs which the photographer had used for family portraits, his leather coat draped across another, his hands cradled in his lap. His younger partner was sitting almost behind the door, arms folded across the front of his coat. A gun lay on the cabinet beside him.

‘How can I help you?’ the older man asked with a heavy Bavarian accent. He was about forty, with sharpish features that ill-suited his general bulk, rather in the manner of an over-inflated Goebbels.

‘Is the studio closed?’ Russell asked. ‘Where is Herr Zembski?’ he added, realising a few seconds later that acknowledging an acquaintance with the studio’s owner might prove unwise.

‘He is no longer here,’ said the younger man. He was a Berliner, dark and thin, with the sort of face that would always need shaving.

‘He has gone out of business,’ the first man said. ‘Please sit down,’ he told Russell, indicating a chair and taking a notebook and pencil from the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘We have some questions.’

‘What about?’ Russell asked, staying on his feet. ‘And who are you?’ he added, hoping to play the outraged innocent.

‘Gestapo,’ the older man said shortly, as if it hardly needed saying.

It didn’t, and Russell decided that asking to see the man’s identification might be pushing his luck. He sat down.

‘Your papers?’

Russell handed them over, and noted the flicker of interest in the Gestapo man’s eyes.

‘John Russell,’ he read aloud. ‘American,’ he added, with a glance at his partner. ‘Your German is excellent,’ he told Russell.

‘I’ve lived here for almost twenty years.’

‘Ah. You live on Carmer Strasse. That’s near Savigny Platz, is it not?’

‘Yes.’

The man turned to his accreditation from Promi, as the Ministry of Propaganda was almost universally called. ‘You are a journalist. Working for the San Francisco Tribune.’

‘Yes.’

His interrogator was now scribbling in the notebook, copying down relevant details from Russell’s identity and press documents. ‘You have been to this studio before?’ he asked without raising his eyes.

‘Not for a long time. Before the war I used it whenever I needed photographic work.’

The eyes looked up. ‘A long way from Savigny Platz. Are there no studios closer to home?’

‘Zembski is cheap.’

‘Ah. So why did you stop coming here?’

‘I changed jobs. The paper I work for now uses the big agencies for photographs.’

‘So why are you here today?’

‘A personal job.’ Russell took the envelope of snapshots from his inside pocket, silently blessing his own forethought, and handed them over. ‘I wanted one of these enlarged, and I’ve lost the negatives. I remembered Zembski doing something similar for me years ago, and doing it well. They’re of my son,’ he added in explanation.

The older Gestapo man was looking through the pictures, his younger partner peering over his shoulder. ‘He’s a good-looking boy. His mother is German?’

‘Yes, she is.’

Russell felt a sudden, almost violent aversion to the way the two men were staring at the pictures of Paul, but managed not to show it.

The photographs were handed back to him.

‘So Zembski won’t be back?’ he asked.

‘No,’ the older man said with the hint of a smile. ‘I believe he returned to Silesia.’

‘Then I will have to find another studio. Is that all?’

‘For the moment.’

Russell nodded, a tacit recognition that a conditional release was all that anyone could hope for in such difficult days, and the younger Gestapo man even opened the door for him. Once outside he play-acted a period of hesitation, ostentatiously checked that his ration stamps were in his pocket, then headed across the street to the café opposite, where he made a further show of inspecting the meagre menu on display before venturing into the steamy interior. Twice in the distant past handwritten notes on the studio door had pointed Russell in this direction, and on both occasions he had found Zembski amiably chatting with the proprietor, an old man with thick Hohenzollern sideburns. The latter was still there, propping up his counter and eyeing Russell with more than a trace of suspicion. The only other customer was reading a paper by the window.

‘Remember me?’ Russell asked. ‘Zembski used to do a lot of work for me before the war. I came in here to collect him more than once.’

A non-committal grunt was all the reply he got.

Russell took a deep breath. ‘And now there’s a couple of Heydrich’s finest camped out in his studio,’ he went on more quietly, hoping that he hadn’t misjudged his audience. ‘Do you know what happened to him?’

The proprietor gave him a long stare. ‘Nothing good,’ he murmured eventually. ‘It’s not much of a secret, not around here anyway. The authorities came to cal, soon after midnight on Thursday. There were two cars – I saw them from upstairs – I was just getting ready for bed. They just knocked the door down, woke up half the street. I think there were four of them went in – it’s hard to see across the street in the blackout, but there was a moon that night. Anyway, there were shots, two of them really close together, and a few minutes later one man came out again and drove off. A van arrived after about half an hour and two bodies were carried out. It was too dark to see who they were, but I’m guessing one of them was Miroslav. He hasn’t been seen, and two of the… two men have been arriving each morning and leaving each night ever since. What are they doing in there?’

Russell shrugged. ‘Nothing much that I could see. Asking questions, but I’ve no idea why. Was Zembski mixed up in anything? Politics, maybe?’

It was a question too far. ‘How should I know?’ the proprietor said, straightening up to indicate the interview was over. ‘He just came in here for coffee, in the days when we used to have some. That and a talk about football.’

All of which left a lot to be desired, Russell thought, walking back up Berlinerstrasse towards the U-Bahn station. Particularly for Zembski, who presumably was dead. But also for himself. His only hope of an illegal escape was apparently gone, and worse: in the unlikely but still conceivable event that Zembski was alive, his own name might be one of those being mentioned in the interrogation. Russell counted the days – more than four had passed, if the café owner’s memory was accurate. In the old KPD it had always been assumed that most prisoners, if denied the chance to kill themselves, would eventually break, and the only obligation placed on Party members was to hold out for twenty-four hours, thus giving their comrades a good head start on the inevitable pursuit.

Zembski must be dead, Russell thought, as he descended the stairs to the U-Bahn platform. The Silesian would have given up his grandmother by now, let alone a casual fellow-traveller like himself.

Some certainty wouldn’t go amiss, though. Zembski had falsified a passport for him once, and a few months later had helped him get a woman comrade out of the country. She had killed an SS Colonel, but Zembski had not known that. He had known that Russell was in touch with Moscow, but not that the German authorities were aware of those contacts. The potential for confusion was enormous, and Russell earnestly hoped that the Gestapo were suitably confused. They usually liked some semblance of clarity before turning their dogs on a prominent foreigner.

As the U-Bahn train rumbled north he remembered that even the Gestapo were legally obliged to inform a family of a relative’s death. Zembski’s cousin Hunder, who owned the garage across the river where Russell’s car was waiting out the war, might have some definite information.

Russell changed onto the Stadtbahn at Friedrichstrasse, travelled the single stop to Lehrter Station, and made his way through the tangle of streets which lay to the east of the rail yards. The garage office seemed deserted, which was hardly surprising given the virtual cessation of private motoring that had accompanied the Wehrmacht’s long, petrol-hungry drive into Russia. The gate hadn’t been locked though, and Russell finally found an old mechanic with his head under the bonnet of a Horch in the farthest corner of the yard.

Hunder Zembski had been called up two months ago, the man told him, grimacing as he straightened his body. The Army needed all the mechanics it could get, and being almost fifty hadn’t saved his boss. ‘You have to be almost ready for burial to get an exemption,’ the man said. ‘Like me,’ he added proudly.

After paying his car a sentimental visit, Russell retraced his steps to Lehrter Station and took the S-Bahn home. Darkness had almost fallen by the time he emerged from Zoo Station, and as he walked the short distance to Effi’s apartment on Carmer Strasse a host of invisible hands were pulling and fixing blackout curtains into place on either side of the street.

Their own were already in place – in recent weeks, with both of them working long days, natural light was a weekend luxury. Russell treated himself to a glass of their precious wine, the penultimate bottle of a case which some lust-crazed producer out at Babelsberg had optimistically bestowed on Effi. It tasted slightly sour, a clear sign that they weren’t drinking it fast enough.

There was food in the flat – his double rations as a foreign journalist and her variable perks as a reasonably prominent actress meant they never ran short – but the only real temptation were the two precious eggs. Effi had boiled an extra meal of potatoes yesterday for such an eventuality, and Russell put half of them in the frying pan with as little of the bilious butter as he could manage, eventually adding one of the eggs. He took his plate through to the living room and turned on the radio, half hoping that Effi didn’t get in until after the next news bulletin. As a foreign journalist he was allowed to listen to foreign broadcasts, but Germans were not. Many Berliners he knew ignored the prohibition, keeping the volume down low enough to foil any spying ears, but he and Effi had agreed that in their case the risk was unnecessary. There were enough times he could listen on his own, either here in the apartment or at one of the two foreign press clubs, and nothing to stop him telling her what he had heard.

The BBC news, when it came, was only mildly encouraging. On the Moscow front, the Germans had suffered a setback outside Tula, but the failure to mention any other sectors probably implied that the Wehrmacht was still advancing. The RAF had bombed several north German ports with unstated results, and the British army facing Rommel in North Africa was henceforth to be known as Eighth Army. What, Russell wondered, had happened to the other seven? The one piece of unalloyed good news came from Yugoslavia, where a German column had been wiped out by Serb partisans, and the German High Command had promised a retaliatory reign of terror. Some people never learned.

He switched the radio to a German station playing classical music and settled down with a book, eventually dozing off. The telephone woke him with a start. He picked up expecting to hear Effi, and an explanation of what had held her up. Had the air raid sirens gone off while he was asleep?

It wasn’t her. ‘Klaus, there’s a game tonight,’ a familiar voice told him. ‘At number 26, ten o’clock.’

‘There’s no Klaus here,’ Russell said. ‘You must have got the wrong number.’

‘My apologies.’ The phone clicked off.

Russell pulled his much-creased map from his jacket pocket and counted out the stations on the Ringbahn, starting at Wedding and going round in a clockwise direction. As he had thought, Number 26 was Puttlitz Strasse.

It was gone half-past eight, which didn’t leave him much time. After checking his street atlas he decided it was walkable, just. He wrote a hurried note to Effi, put on his thickest coat, and headed out.

The moon was rising, cream-coloured and slightly short of full, above the double-headed flak tower in the distant Tiergarten. He walked north at a crisp pace, hoping that there wouldn’t be an air raid, and that if there was, he could escape the attentions of some officious warden insistent on his taking shelter. As the moon rose, the white-painted kerbstones grew easier to follow, and his pace increased. There were quite a few people out, most of them wearing one or more of the phosphorescent buttons which sprinkled the blackout with faint blue lights. Vehicles were much thinner on the ground, one lorry with slitted headlights passing Russell as he crossed the moon-speckled Landwehrkanal.

It was ten to ten when he reached the Puttlitz Strasse Station entrance, which lay on a long bridge across multiple tracks. Gerhard Ströhm was waiting for him, chatting to the booking clerk in the still open S-Bahn ticket office. He was a tall, saturnine man with darting black eyes and a rough moustache. His hair was longer than the current fashion, and he was forever pushing back the locks that flopped across his forehead. Physically, and only physically, he reminded Russell of the young Stalin.

‘Come,’ Ströhm told Russell, and led him back out across the road and down a flight of dangerously unlit steps to the yard below. As they reached the foot an electric S-Bahn train loomed noisily out of the dark, slowing as it neared the station.

‘This way,’ said Ströhm, leading Russell into the dark canyon which lay between two lines of stabled carriages. His accent was pure Berliner, and anyone unaware of his background would have had a hard job believing that he’d been born in California of first-generation German immigrants. Both parents had been lost in a road accident when he was twelve, and young Gerhard had been sent back to his mother’s parents in Berlin. Bright enough for university in 1929, his strengthening political convictions had quickly disqualified him from any professional career in Hitler’s Germany. Arrested in 1933 for a minor offence, he had served a short sentence and effectively gone underground on his release. For the last seven years he had earned a living as a dispatcher in the Stettin Station goods yards.

Russell assumed Ströhm was a communist, although the latter had never claimed as much. He often sounded like one, and he had got Russell’s name from a comrade, the young Jewish communist Wilhelm Isendahl, whose life had intersected with Russell’s for a few nerve-shredding days in the summer of 1939. Ströhm himself was obviously not a Jew, but it was the fate of Berlin’s Jewish community which had caused him to seek out Russell. Some six weeks earlier he had slid onto an adjoining stool in the Zoo Station buffet and introduced himself, in a quiet compelling voice, as a fellow American, fellow anti-Nazi, and fellow friend of the Jews. He hoped Russell was as interested as he was in finding the answer to one particular question – where were the Jews being taken?

They had gone for a long walk in the Tiergarten, and Russell had been impressed. Ströhm exuded a confidence which didn’t feel misplaced; he was clearly intelligent, and there was a watchfulness about him, a sense of self-containment more serene than arrogant. Had it ever occurred to Russell, Ströhm asked, that those best placed to trace the Jews were the men of the Reichsbahn, those who timetabled, dispatched and drove the trains who carried them away? And if the men of the Reichsbahn provided him with chapter and verse, would Russell be able to put it in print?

Not now, Russell had told him – the authorities would never allow him to file such a story from Berlin. But once America had entered the war, and he and his colleagues had been repatriated, the story could and would be told. And the more details he carried back home the more convincing that story would be.

In a week or so’s time, Ströhm had informed him, a trainload of Berlin’s Jews would be leaving for the East. Did Russell want to see it leave?

He did. But why, Russell had wanted to know, was Ströhm taking such a personal interest in the Jews? He expected a standard Party answer, that oppression was oppression, race irrelevant. ‘I was in love once,’ Ströhm told him. ‘With a Jewish girl. Storm troopers threw her out of a fourth floor window at Columbiahaus.’

Which seemed reason enough.

Ströhm had suggested the simple Ringbahn code, and six days later Russell’s phone had rung. Later that night he had watched from a distance as around a thousand elderly Jews were loaded aboard a train of ancient carriages in the yard outside Grunewald Station, not a kilometre away from the house where his ex-wife and son lived. A few days later they had watched a similar scene unfold a few hundred metres south of Anhalter Station. The previous train, Ströhm told him, had terminated at Litzmannstadt, the Polish Lodz.

This was the fourth such night. Russell wasn’t sure why he kept coming – the process would be identical, like watching the same sad film over and over, almost a form of masochism. But each train was different, he told himself, and when a week or so later Ströhm told him where each shipment of Jews had ended up, he wanted to remember their departure, to have it imprinted on his retina. Just knowing they were gone was not enough.

The two men had reached the end of their canyon, and a tall switch tower loomed above them, a blue light burning within. As they climbed the stairs Russell could hear engines turning over somewhere close by, and the clanking of carriages being shunted. Up in the cabin there were two signalmen on duty, one close to retiring age, the other younger with a pronounced limp. Both men shook hands with Ströhm, the first with real warmth; both acknowledged Russell with a nod of the head, as if less certain of his right to be there.

It was an excellent vantage point. Across the Ringbahn tracks, beyond another three lines of carriages, the familiar scene presented itself with greater clarity than usual, courtesy of the risen moon. Three canvas-covered furniture trucks were parked in a line, having transported the guards and those few Jews deemed incapable of walking the two kilometres from the synagogue on the corner of Levetzowstrasse and Jagowstrasse. Taking out his telescopic spyglass – a guilty purchase from a Jewish auction two years earlier – Russell found two stretchers lying on the ground beside the front van, each bearing an unmoving, and presumably unwilling, traveller.

The remaining 998 Jews – according to Ströhm, the SS had decided that a round thousand was the optimal number for such transports – were crowded in the space beyond the line of carriages, and making, in the circumstances, remarkably little noise. Their mental journey into exile, as Russell knew from friends in the Jewish community, would have begun about a week ago, when notification arrived from the Gestapo of their imminent removal from Berlin. Eight pages of instructions filled in the details: what they could and could not bring, the maximum weight of their single suitcase, what to do with the keys of their confiscated homes. Yesterday evening, or in some cases early this morning, they had been collected by the Gestapo and their Jewish auxiliaries, taken to the synagogue, and searched for any remaining passports, medals, pens or jewellery. Then all had been issued with matching numbers for their suitcases and themselves, the latter worn around the neck.

‘The Reichsbahn is charging the SS four pfennigs per passenger per kilometre,’ Ströhm murmured. ‘Children go free.’

Russell couldn’t see any children, although his spyglass had picked out a baby carriage lying on its side, as if violently discarded. As usual, the Jews were mostly old, with more women than men. Many of the latter were struggling under the weight of the sewing machines deemed advisable for a new life in the East. Others, worried at the prospects of colder winters, were carrying small heating stoves.

The loading had obviously begin, the crowd inching forward and out of his line of vision. At the rear, a line of Jewish auxiliaries with blue armbands were advancing sheepdog-style, exhaling small clouds of breath into the cold air, as their Gestapo handlers watched and smoked in the comfort of their vehicles.

There were seven carriages in the train, each with around sixty seats for a hundred and fifty people.

One man walked back to one of the auxiliaries and obviously asked him a question. A shake of the head was all the response he got. There was a sudden shout from somewhere further down the train, and it took Russell a moment to find the source – a woman was weeping, a man laid out on the ground, a guard busy slitting open a large white pillow. There was a glint of falling coins, a sudden upward fluttering of feathers, white turning blue in the halo of the yard lamp.

There was no more dissent. Twenty minutes more and the yard was clear, the furniture vans and cars heading back toward the centre of the city, leaving only a line of armed police standing sentry over the stationary, eerily silent train. Feathers still hung in the air, as if reluctant to leave.

A few minutes later a locomotive backed under the bridge and onto the carriages, flickers of human movement silhouetted against the glowing firebox. A swift coupling, and the train was in motion, moonlit smoke pouring up into the starry sky, wheels clattering over the points outside Puttlitz Strasse Station. Even in the spyglass, the passengers’ faces seemed pale and featureless, like deep sea fish pressed up against the wall of a moving aquarium.

‘Do we know where it’s going?’ Russell asked, as the last coach passed under the bridge.

‘That crew are only booked through to Posen,’ Ströhm said, ‘but they’ll find out where the next crew are taking it. It could be Litzmannstadt, could be Riga like the last one. We’ll know by the end of the week.’

Russell nodded, but wondered what difference it would make. Not for the first time, he doubted the value of what they were doing. Wherever the trains were going, there was no way of bringing them back.

He and Ströhm descended the stairs, retraced their path between the lines of carriages to the distant bridge. After climbing the steps to the street they separated, Russell walking wearily south, his imagination working overtime. What were those thousand Jews thinking as their train worked its way around the Ringbahn, before turning off to the East? What were they expecting? The worst? Some of them certainly were, hence the rising number of suicides. Some would be brimming with wishful thinking, others with hope that things weren’t as bad as they feared. And maybe they weren’t. Two families that Russell knew had received letters from friends deported to Litzmannstadt, friends who asked for food packages but claimed they were well. They were obviously going hungry, but if that was the worst of it Russell would be pleasantly surprised.

He reached home soon after midnight. Effi was already in bed, the innocence of her sleeping face captured in the grey light that spilt in from the living room. Staring at her, Russell felt tears forming in his eyes. It really was time to leave. But how was he going to get them both out?

Propagandists

Shortly before five the following morning, Effi Koenen let herself out of the apartment and walked down to the stygian street. The limousine was ticking over, its slitted headlights casting a pale wash over a few yards of tarmac. The only evidence of the driver was the bright orange glow of a cigarette hanging in mid air. It seemed absurd that the studio still had petrol to burn when the military was apparently running so short, but Goebbels had obviously convinced himself that his movie stars were as vital to the war effort as Goering’s planes or the army’s tanks, and on a cold November morning Effi found it hard to disagree with him.

‘Good morning, Fraulein Koenen,’ the driver said, expunging his cigarette in a shower of sparks. She recognised the voice. Helmut Beckman had first driven her to work almost ten years earlier, and she still felt grateful for the trouble he’d taken to calm her beginner’s nerves.

Effi took the seat beside him, as she did with most of the drivers. As she’d once told a disbelieving co-star, she felt a fraud sitting in the back – she was happy to play royalty on stage or on screen, but not on the journey to work. The view and the conversation were also better, although these days the former usually amounted to a black tunnel stretching into an uncertain distance.

‘I took my wife to see Homecoming at the weekend,’ Beckmann said once they had turned the first corner, heading for the Ku’damm. ‘You were very good.’

‘Thank you,’ Effi said. ‘And the film?’

There was a short silence, as the driver arranged his thoughts. ‘It was well done,’ he said eventually. ‘I can see why it won that prize at the Venice Film Festival. The story was…well, there wasn’t much of a story, was there? Just a succession of terrible things happening one after the other. It was a bit…I suppose transparent is the word. The writer had his point to make, and everything was lined up so he could. But I guess when you work in the business you notice things like that. And it was certainly better than most. My wife loved it, though she was really upset that you were killed.’

‘So was I,’ Effi said lightly, although in fact she’d been rather glad. Her character, a German schoolteacher in the territories acquired by Poland in 1918, had succumbed to a stray Polish bullet only minutes before salvation arrived for her fellow Germans in the form of the invading Wehrmacht. She had hoped that her overblown martyrdom would further undermine the credibility, and propaganda value, of the film, but from what she could gather, Frau Beckmann was far more typical than her husband. According to John, acts of violence against Polish POW workers had risen markedly since the film’s release a few weeks earlier.

‘But she didn’t think much of the lawyer,’ Beckmann added. ‘And when I told her Joachim Gottschalk had turned down the part she got all weepy. She still hasn’t got over what happened to him.’

‘Few of us have,’ Effi admitted. ‘Joschi’ Gottschalk had committed suicide a couple of weeks earlier. He had been one of Germany’s favourite leading men, particularly among female cinema-goers, and the Propaganda Ministry had been more than happy to bank his bulging box office receipts so long as he kept quiet about his Jewish wife and half-Jewish son. But Gottschalk had chosen to parade his wife before a social gathering of high-level Nazis, and Goebbels had blown his diminutive top. The actor had been ordered to get a divorce. When he refused, he was told that the family would be separated by force; his wife and child would be sent to the new concentration camp at Theresienstadt in the Sudetenland, he to the Eastern Front. Arriving at the film star’s home to enforce this order, the Gestapo had found three dead bodies. Gottschalk had taken what seemed the only way out.

News of his fate had not been officially released, but as far as Effi could tell, every man, woman and child in Berlin knew what had happened, and many of the women were still in mourning. There had even been talk of a studio strike by his fellow professionals, but nothing had come of it. Effi hadn’t particularly liked Gottschalk, but he’d been a wonderful actor, and his family’s fate had offered a chilling reminder – if one was really needed – of the perils of saying no to the Nazi authorities.

‘What are you shooting today?’ Beckmann asked, interrupting her reverie. They were driving through the Grunewald now, following the red lights of another limousine down the long avenue of barely visible trees. A procession of stars, Effi thought dryly.

‘We’re re-shooting the interiors with Hans Roeder’s replacement,’ she said. ‘There aren’t many, and they decided it was easier to shoot them again with Heinz Hartmann than write the character out of those scenes which haven’t been shot.’ Hans Roeder had been one of the few Berliners killed in a British air raid that year, and only then by falling shrapnel from anti-aircraft fire. Unlike Gottschalk he had been unpopular, essentially talentless, and a ferocious Nazi. A Goebbels favourite.

How much longer, she asked herself. She had always loved acting, and over the years she’d gotten pretty damn good at it. Over the last ten years she’d done her share of propagandist films and stage shows – one of her and John’s favourite pastimes had been ridiculing the stories the writers came up with – but she had also done work that she was proud of, in films and shows which weren’t designed to canonize the Führer or demonize the Jews, which did what she thought they were supposed to do, hold up a mirror to humanity, loving if possible, instructive if not.

But now there was only the propaganda, and today she would be back in the costume of a seventeenth-century Prussian countess, bravely resisting a Russian assault on Berlin. The moral of the film was clear enough: the writers had not burdened the story with any conflicting ideals. As far as she could tell, the main crime of the Russians – apart, of course, from their initial insolence in invading Germany – lay in their physiognomy. The casting director had scoured the acting profession for men with a Slavic turn of ugliness, and come up with more than enough to fill the screen.

All of which pleased her no end. Even Frau Beckmann would struggle to find this film convincing.

When his number 30 tram eventually hove into view, Russell noticed with some dismay that it was one of the older vehicles. More and more of these were being brought back from the breakers’ yards to replace modern relatives now gathering rust in the depot for want of spare parts or a mechanic to fit them. They were certainly more beautiful – this one had exquisite porcelain lamps attached to its inner sides – but that was all that could be said for them. They were almost as slow as walking, and their lack of springs ensured that every bump in the track was experienced to the full. This particular one was packed, and despite the cold weather smelt as rank as yesterday’s U-Bahn.

The passengers thinned out a bit on Tauenzien Strasse, and quite a lot more on Potsdamer Strasse, but there were still a lot standing when an obviously pregnant woman got on at Potsdamer Platz, the yellow star conspicuously sewn across the left breast of her rather threadbare coat. Russell watched the expressions of his fellow passengers, wishing he had a seat to give up. Many simply turned their heads, and most of those that didn’t looked angry, as if they’d been insulted or threatened in some way. But not all. Much to Russell’s surprise, a young German in an army uniform abruptly got to his feet and offered the Jewish woman his seat.

She tried to refuse, but he was having none of it, and, with a quick smile of gratitude, the woman sat herself down. The soldier then looked round at his fellow passengers, daring any of them to raise a protest. None did, at least verbally, leaving Russell to wonder what would happen if the woman’s champion got off before she did. In that event, he decided, he would pick up the torch. He hadn’t hit anyone in several years, but there was something about living in Hitler’s Germany which cried out for that sort of release on a fairly regular basis.

In the event, his services were not required; both he and the woman got off at the Brandenburg Gate, she heading in the direction of the Reichstag, he down Unter den Linden, past the barely-functioning American Consulate and Goebbels’ ‘fumigated’ Soviet Embassy, towards Kranzler’s and what passed these days for a morning coffee. He bought a Völkischer Beobachter from the kiosk outside, took a window seat in the sparsely populated restaurant, and got out the appropriate pink, yellow and white ration sheets for his ersatz coffee, watered-down milk and real sugar. One of the ancient waiters eventually noticed him, lumbered over, and laboriously cut off the requisite stamps with the small pair of scissors which hung like a fob watch from the front of his waistcoat.

War speeded up the process of dying, Russell thought, but tended to slow down everything else.

He examined the front page of the Beobachter, and the black-rimmed photograph of Generaloberst Ernst Udet that filled most of it. Udet, the head of the Reich Air Ministry’s development wing, had been killed the previous day while test-piloting a new German fighter.

Russell had seen the Great War ace’s flying show back in the 1920s, and Udet had never struck him as a real Nazi, just one of those people who are supremely gifted in one narrow sphere, and never apply much thought to anything else. The job of creating a new Luftwaffe would have appealed to him, but he wouldn’t have worried too much about how or why it might be used. According to German friends, Udet had been more responsible than anyone for the highly successful Stuka dive bomber, and Russell hardly felt inclined to mourn his passing. Paul would though, and Russell could see why. Only the U-boat aces could compare with the fighter pilots when it came to the sort of lone wolf heroics that young boys of all ages loved to celebrate.

A state funeral was planned for the coming Saturday. And unless he was very much mistaken, Paul would want to go.

Russell went through the rest of the paper, secure in the knowledge that all the other papers would be carrying the same stories. Some, like the Frankfurter Zeitung, would be better written, others, like the Deutsche Allegemeine Zeitung, would be tailored to a particular class sensibility, but the political and military facts would not vary. What one paper said, they all said, and all were equally disbelieved. The German people had finally woken up to the fact that the claimed tally of Russian prisoners now exceeded the stated number of Russians in uniform, all of which chimed rather badly with the sense that those same Russians were fighting the German army to a virtual standstil. Each week another pincer movement was given the honour of being the most gigantic of all time, until it seemed as if the whole wide East was barely large enough to accommodate another battle. But still the enemy fought on.

And yet, despite themselves, the German newspapers did offer their readers a mirror to the real situation. It was merely a matter of learning to read between the lines. Over recent weeks, for example, there had been many articles stressing the inherent difficulties of the war in the East: the inhuman strength of the primitive Russian soldier, the extremes of climate and conditions. Prepare yourself for possible setbacks, the subtext read, we may have bitten off more than we can chew.

Russell devoutly hoped so. He drank the last of his coffee with a suitable grimace, and got up to leave. He had twenty minutes to reach the Foreign Ministry, which hosted the first of the two daily press conferences, beginning at noon. The second, which was held at the Propaganda Ministry, began five hours later.

Outside the sun was still shining, but the chill easterly wind was funnelling down the Unter den Linden with some force. He turned into it, thinking to check out the window of the closed American Express office on Charlottenstrasse, which someone had told Effi about. The reported poster was still in pride of place, inviting passers-by to ‘Visit Medieval Germany.’ Either the authorities had missed the joke, or they were too busy trying to catch people listening to the BBC.

Russell laughed, and received an admonitory glance from a passing soldier. Further down the street he encountered two women dressed in black, with five sombre-looking children in tow. Their soldiers wouldn’t be coming back.

At the Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse he climbed the two flights of bare steps to the Bismarck Room, took one of the remaining seats at the long conference table and nodded greetings to several of his colleagues. As ever, a pristine writing pad sat waiting on the green felt, a sight which never ceased to please Russel, knowing as he did where the pads actually came from. They were manufactured at the Schade printing works in Treptow, a business owned and run by his friend and former brother-in-law Thomas, and mostly staffed by Jews.

The Berlin Congress had been held in this room in 1878, and the furnishings seemed suitably Bismarckian, with dark green curtains, wood-panelled walls and more Prussian eagles than Goering had paintings. An enormous and very up-to-date globe sat on one side of the room; a large map of the western Soviet Union was pinned to a display stand on the other. The arrows seemed perilously close to Moscow, but that had been the case for several weeks now.

At noon precisely, Braun von Stumm strode in through the far doors and took the presiding seat at the centre of the table. A diplomat of the old pre-Nazi school, he was much the more boring of the two principal spokesmen. His superior Dr Paul Schmidt – young, fat, rude and surprisingly sharp for a Nazi – was more entertaining but even less popular. He tended to save himself for the good news.

The first question of the day was the usual plant, dreamt up by the Germans and asked by one of their allies, in this case a Finn. Would the German Government like to comment on the American plan to ship large numbers of long-range heavy bombers to the Philippines, from which they could reach Japan? The German Government, it became clear, would like to comment at length, on this and every other aggressive move which the warmonger Roosevelt was making these days. The American journalists doodled on their pads, and Russell noticed a particularly fine caricature of von Stumm taking shape under the scurrying pencil of the Chicago Times correspondent.

As usual the spokesman sounded as if he was speaking by rote, and his languid diatribe eventually petered out, allowing a Hungarian correspondent to ask an equally spurious question about British brutality in Iraq. This elicited another long answer, moving the doodlers onto the second or third page of their pads, and twenty minutes had passed before a neutral correspondent got a word in.

Would Herr von Stumm like to comment on foreign reports of Wehrmacht difficulties around Tula and Tikhvin? one of the Swedes asked.

The rings around both Moscow and Leningrad were tightening daily, von Stumm announced, then promptly shifted the discussion a few hundred kilometres to the south. The battle for the Crimean capital of Sevastopol was entering its final phase, he said, with the German 11th Army now launching ceaseless attacks on the Russian defences that surrounded the beleaguered city.

More dutiful questions followed from the Italian and Croatian correspondents, and time was almost up when von Stumm finally allowed an American question. Bradley Emmering of the Los Angeles Chronicle was the lucky man. Would the spokesman like to comment on the BBC’s claim that a German freighter flying an American flag had been seized in mid-Atlantic by the US Navy?

No, von Stumm said, he would not. The BBC, after all, was hardly a reliable source. ‘And that, gentleman,’ he said, getting to his feet, ‘will be all.’

It wasn’t. ‘Would the spokesman like to comment on the widespread rumour that Generaloberst Udet committed suicide?’ the Washington Times’s Ralph Morrison asked in his piercing nasal drawl.

Von Stumm seemed struck dumb by the impudence of the question, but one of his aides swiftly leapt into the breach. ‘Such a question shows a deplorable lack of respect,’ he snapped. Von Stumm paused, as if about to add something, but clearly thought better of the idea and stumped out.

The Americans grinned at each other, as if they’d just won a major victory.

Russell found Morrison on the pavement outside, lighting one of his trademark Pall Malls. ‘How did he do it?’ Russell asked.

Morrison looked around to make sure that no one was listening – the ‘Berlin glance’ as it was called these days. ‘My source in the Air Ministry says he shot himself.’

‘Why?’

‘Not so clear. My source says it was over a woman, but he’s also been telling me for months that Goering and Milch have been using Udet as a scapegoat for all the Luftwaffe’s problems.’

‘Sounds right.’

Morrison shrugged. ‘If I find out anything for certain, I’ll pass the story on to Simonsen. He should be able to place it on his next trip back to Stockholm. There’s no way they’d let any of us get away with as much as a hint, not with a full state funeral on the way.’

‘True.’ Russell checked his watch. He was due to meet Dallin in an hour, which left him time to eat a bowl of soup at the Adlon before walking to their usual meeting place in the Tiergarten. The soup proved better than he expected – the Adlon still managed to produce a decent meal, especially for its old habitués – and the sun had emerged once more as he ventured across Pariser Platz, though the Brandenburg Gate and onto the camouflaged Chaussée, or the East-West Axis as it was now called. Huge nets interlaced with lumps of foliage were suspended above the arrow-straight boulevard, which would otherwise have offered the perfect direction-finder for anyone seeking to bomb the government district.

Russell headed out across the still-frosty grass in the general direction of the Rose Garden. No one seemed to be following him, but it wouldn’t matter if they were – the Germans were already aware of his meetings with the intelligence man from the American Consulate. Indeed, they were probably under the impression that they had set the whole business up.

In the summer of 1939, Reinhard Heydrich’s foreign intelligence organisation, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, had seized on Russell’s known contacts with the Soviet NKVD and blackmailed him, or so they believed, into working for them. But when war broke out his Anglo-American parentage made him more relevant to the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht intelligence service that was run by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and the SD had graciously handed him over. It had taken the Abwehr several months to claim the gift – as Russell later found out, Canaris had been knocked for six by the depravity of German behaviour in Poland – and when they did finally pull him on board, his duties proved much lighter than expected. Russell had considered refusing, if only to test the continuing potency of the original SD threats to Effi and his family; but if all the Abwehr wanted was help translating English and American newspaper articles, it didn’t seem worth the risk. And there was always the chance that working for Canaris might provide him with some protection against Heydrich.

This happy arrangement had continued through the first winter of the war, and the calamitous spring and early summer of 1940.

Throughout that period Russell had also been paying off another debt. Although his mother was American, he had grown up in England and felt essentially English. He was a British national, with a passport to prove it. As Hitler’s aggressive intentions became clearer, and the possibility of an Anglo-German war grew ever more likely, he had faced the certainty of deportation and years of separation from Paul, Effi and everyone else he cared for. In March 1939 the Americans had offered him a deal – an American passport, which would allow him to remain in Germany, in exchange for a little low-level intelligence work, contacting possible opponents of the Nazis in the fast-expanding Reich. He had accepted their offer, and safely managed a few such contacts before the war broke out. Over the next year, much to Russell’s relief, the Americans had disappeared into their shells, and made no demands that he couldn’t ignore or endlessly defer. But in the autumn of 1940, with France kaput and England on the ropes, they had started pressing him again. Rather than seek out the contacts they prescribed, any of whom might turn him in to the Gestapo, Russell had come up with a suggestion of his own – could he not act as a safe, neutral and deniable channel between the Americans and the Admiral’s Abwehr, passing on information which each had an interest in the other knowing? Russell knew that the Abwehr had created such links with the British through Switzerland – why not operate a similar arrangement with the American Consulate here in Berlin.

He secured a meeting with the Canaris’s deputy General Oster, and finally a meeting with Canaris himself. The Admiral had liked the idea, and so had the Americans. Since November 1940, Russell had been carrying messages between them, and feeling very pleased with himself. The work was safe in itself, and more to the point, gave the Abwehr and the Americans respectively good reason to keep him out of Heydrich’s clutches and spare him any riskier assignments.

It seemed too good to be true, but his luck continued to hold. After Hitler’s invasion of Russia, Russell had braced himself for new approaches from the SD and the Soviets, but neither had yet made contact. The latter, he assumed, would find it difficult to reach him, and the former had apparently lost track of his existence. He only hoped that yesterday’s visit to Zembski’s studio hadn’t started bells ringing in Heydrich’s belfry on Wilhelmstrasse.

He had almost reached the Rose Garden, with more than ten minutes to spare. He walked on around it, in the vague direction of the huge concrete flak tower which loomed over the distant zoo. Despite the sunshine the Tiergarten was virtually empty; there were two women pushing prams and several men in uniform enjoying a kick-about, along with the usual army of darting squirrels. Scott Dallin was nowhere to be seen, which probably meant that he was already sequestered in the Rose Garden.