Zoo Stationee

by David Downing

  He’d planned a few more hours of work before picking up Effi from the theater, but after Streicher and the Wiesners he felt more like punching someone. He found another Western on the Ku’damm and sank into a world of huge skies, lofty canyons, and simple justice. Chewing gum for the heart.

  Effi was tired and seemed as subdued as he felt. They walked slowly back to her flat, went to bed, and lay quietly in each other’s arms until she fell asleep. Her face grew younger in sleep, and she looked even more like Ruth Wiesner.

  WEDNESDAY EVENING, RUSSELL WAS listening to dance band music on the BBC when McKinley knocked on his door and suggested a drink. While he collected his shoes from the bedroom the young American scanned his bookshelves. “Half of these are banned,” he said admiringly when Russell returned.

  “I haven’t got round to burning them yet,” he replied, reaching for his coat.

  Outside it was warmer than it had been, but there were specks of rain in the air. As they turned the corner onto Lindenstrasse McKinley took a sudden look over his shoulder, as if he’d heard something.

  “What?” Russell asked, seeing nothing.

  McKinley shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.

  They walked under the elevated U-bahn tracks at Hallesches Tor, and across Blücherplatz to the bar they used for their infrequent drinks together. It was almost empty. The barman yawned on his stool; two old men in the corner stared morosely at each other. McKinley bought them beers—dark for Russell, light for himself—while Russell commandeered the only bowl with any nuts and carried it across to the table with the fewest standing pools. As he lowered himself into the seat it groaned alarmingly but held together. “We have to find a new bar,” he murmured.

  McKinley tried his beer and smiled in satisfaction. “Okay,” he said. “Now tell me about Schacht.”

  “He’s dead in the water.”

  “Okay, but why? I never understood economics.”

  “Schacht does. That’s why.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Russell thought about it. “Schacht wants to see the economy run according to the laws of economics. He did when he was Finance Minister, and as long as he’s in charge of the Reichsbank he’ll keep beating the same drum. The trade deficit is soaring, the Reichsbank’s holdings of foreign exchange are dwindling, and there’s a real possibility of another runaway inflation. The economy’s running out of control. Schacht would like to raise taxes and switch production from armaments to something that can be sold abroad. Some hope, eh? If Hitler and Goering have to choose between their armament program and the laws of economics, which do you think they’ll choose?”

  “But if the economy is in real trouble?”

  “Nothing a war won’t fix.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah, indeed. Schacht, shall we say, has the narrow view. He’s assuming several years of peace, at the very least. Hitler, on the other hand, sees a choice. He can either do what Schacht wants—rein in the war machine, raise taxes, and get the real economy moving again—or he can go for broke, and use the army to put things right. He sees all that wealth beyond his borders, just begging to be collected. That’s why Schacht has to go. Hitler’s not going to risk higher taxes in Germany when he can steal the same money from conquered foreigners.”

  McKinley looked at him. “I never know how serious you are. If this is such a big story—Schacht going, I mean—then why isn’t it on the front pages back home? If war’s so absolutely certain, how come you’re the only one who knows it?”

  Russell smiled. “Just gifted, I guess. Another beer?”

  When he got back from the bar, McKinley was making notes in his little black book. “Was your dance night a one-off, or are you going out with that girl from the embassy?” Russell asked him.

  McKinley blushed. “We’ve only been out twice. Merle, her name is—you know, like Merle Oberon. Her father’s just a storekeeper in Philadelphia but she’s determined to really see life. She wants to see Europe while she’s working here, and then the rest of the world if she can.”

  “Good for her.”

  “You’ve traveled a lot, haven’t you?”

  “Once upon a time.”

  “Have you been to Russia?”

  “Yes. I met my wife there—my ex-wife, I should say. At a Comintern youth conference in 1924. Lenin had just died and Trotsky hadn’t noticed that the rug was gone from under his feet. It was a strange time, a sort of revolutionary cusp—not the moment it all went wrong, but the moment a lot of Party people realized that it already had. Does that make sense?”

  “I suppose. I’m hoping to go in March. The nineteenth Congress is being held in Moscow and I’m trying to persuade the paper to send me.”

  “That’ll be interesting,” Russell said, though he doubted it would be.

  Neither of them wanted another drink, and the nuts were all gone. It was raining outside, and they stood for a moment in the doorway, watching the neon shimmers in the puddles. As they passed under the elevated tracks a Warschauer Brucke train rumbled across, its sides streaming with water.

  At the bottom of Lindenstrasse McKinley took a look back across the Belle Alliance Platz. “I think I’m being followed,” he said, almost guiltily, in response to Russell’s inquiring look.

  “I can’t see anyone,” said Russell, staring into the rain.

  “No, neither can I,” McKinley said, as they started up Lindenstrasse. “It’s more of a feeling. . . . I don’t know. If they are following me, they’re really good.”

  Too many Thin Man movies, Russell thought. “Who’s they?” he asked.

  “Oh, the Gestapo, I suppose.”

  “Moving like wraiths isn’t exactly the Gestapo style.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Why would they be following you?”

  McKinley grunted. “That story I told you about. That story I was going to tell you about,” he corrected himself.

  “I’m not sure I want to know anymore,” Russell said. “I don’t want them following me.”

  It was meant as a joke, but McKinley didn’t take it that way. “Well, okay. ...”

  Russell was thinking about the car he’d seen outside their block. He couldn’t imagine the Gestapo being that patient, but there were other sharks in the Nazi sea. “Look, Tyler. Whatever it is, if you really are being stalked by the authorities I should just drop it. No story’s worth that sort of grief.”

  McKinley bristled. “Would you have said that ten years ago?”

  “I don’t know. Ten years ago I didn’t have the responsibilities I have now.”

  “Maybe you should ask yourself whether you can still be an honest journalist with those sorts of responsibilities.”

  That made Russell angry. “You haven’t cornered the market in honest journalism, for God’s sake.”

  “Of course not. But I know what matters. That once mattered to you.”

  “Truth has a habit of seeping out.” Russell wasn’t even convincing himself, which made him angrier still. “Look, there are seventy-five million people out there keeping their heads down. I’m just one of them.”

  “Fine. If you want to keep your head down, wait until it all blows over—well . . . fine. But I can’t do that.”

  “Okay.”

  They walked the rest of the way in silence.

  THE CONVERSATION WITH MCKINLEY—or, more precisely, the sense of letting himself down that it engendered—lurked with annoying persistence at the back of Russell’s mind over the next few days. He finished his first article for Pravda—a paean to organized leisure activities—and delivered it himself to the smiling blonde at 102 Wilhelmstrasse. He received a wire from his US agent bubbling with enthusiasm for the two series. And, by special delivery, he received the letter he had asked Sturmbannführer Kleist for. It was typed rather than written, which was something of a disappointment, but the content left little to be desired: John Russell, it seemed, had full authority from the Propaganda Ministry and Ministry of the Interior to ask such questions “as would widen the foreign understanding of National Socialism and its achievements.” Those shown the letter were “asked and expect
ed to offer him all the assistance they could.” All of which would have felt much better if he hadn’t seen the disappointment in McKinley’s eyes.

  The weekend gave him a welcome break from worrying about his journalistic integrity. On Saturday afternoon he and Paul went to the zoo. They had been there so many times that they had a routine—first the parrot house, then the elephant walk and the snakes, a break for ice cream, the big cats and, finally, the pičce de résistance, the gorilla who spat, with often devastating accuracy, at passersby. After the zoo, they strolled back down the Ku’damm, looking in shop windows and eventually stopping for cake. Russell still found the Hitler Youth uniform slightly offputting, but he was gradually getting used to it.

  Sunday, a rare treat—an outing to the fair at the end of Potsdamerstrasse with both Paul and Effi. Getting them together was always harder than the actual experience of their being together: Both worried overmuch that they’d be in the other’s way. It was obvious that Paul liked Effi, and equally obvious why. She was willing to try anything at least once, was able to act any age she thought appropriate, and assumed that he could, too. She was, in fact, most of the things his mother wasn’t and never had been.

  After two hours of circling, sliding, dropping, and whirling they took a cab to Effi’s theater, where she showed Paul around the stage and backstage areas. He was particularly impressed by the elevator and trapdoor in mid-stage which brought the Valkyries up to heaven each evening. When Russell suggested that they should build one for Goebbels at the Sportspalast, Effi gave him a warning look, but Paul, he noticed, was mercifully unable to suppress his amusement.

  The only sad note of the weekend was Paul’s news that he would be away for the next weekend at a Hitler Youth adventure camp in the Harz Mountains. He expressed regret at not seeing his dad, and particularly at missing Hertha’s next home game, but Russell could see he was really looking forward to the camp. Russell was particularly upset because he would be away himself on the following weekend, delivering his first oral report to Shchepkin. And on that weekend he would also be missing Effi’s end-of-run party—Barbarossa had apparently raised all the national consciousness it was going to raise.

  EARLY ON MONDAY MORNING, he took the train to Dresden for a one-night stay. It was only a two-hour journey, and he had several contacts there: a couple of journalists on the city paper; an old friend of Thomas’s, also in the paper business; an old friend of his and Ilse’s, once a union activist, now a teacher. Ordinary Germans—if such people existed.

  He saw them all over the two days, and talked to several others they recommended. He also spent a few hours in cafés and bars, joining or instigating conversations when he could, just listening when that seemed more appropriate. As his train rattled northward on Tuesday evening he sat in the buffet car with a schnapps and tried to make sense of what he had heard. Nothing surprising. “Ordinary Germans” felt utterly powerless, and resigned to feeling so for the foreseeable future. The government would doubtless translate that resignation as passive support, and to some extent they were right. There was certainly no sense that anyone had a practical alternative to offer.

  When it came to Germany’s relations with the rest of the world, most people seemed pleasantly surprised that they still had any. The Rhineland, the Anschluss, the Sudetenland—it was as if Hitler had deliberately driven his train across a series of broken points, but—thanks be to God—the train was still on the track. Surely, soon, he would pull the damn thing to a halt. Once Memel and Danzig were back in the fold, once the Poles had given Germany an extra-territorial corridor across their own corridor, then that would be that. Hitler, having expanded the Reich to fit the Volk, would rest on his laurels, a German hero for centuries to come.

  They all said it, and some of them even believed it.

  Their own daily lives were getting harder. Not dramatically, but relentlessly. The economic squeeze was on. Most people were working longer hours for the same pay; many ordinary goods were growing slightly harder to find. The relief which had followed the return of full employment had dissipated.

  Children seemed to be looming ever-larger in their parent’s minds: the demands in time and loyalty of the Hitler Youth and BDM, the year’s exile of the arbeitsdienst, the prospect of seeing them marched off to war. If Ordinary Germans wanted anything, it was peace. Years of the stuff, years in which they could drive their people’s cars down their new autobahns.

  Only one man mentioned the Jews, and then only in a dismissive preamble—“now that the Jewish question is nearing solution.” What did he mean? Russell asked. “Well,” the man replied, “they’ll all be gone soon, won’t they? I have nothing against them personally, but a lot of people have, and they’ll be happier elsewhere, that’s obvious.”

  THE WIESNERS WOULD HAVE agreed with him. The girls seemed subdued when he saw them on Wednesday morning, polite and willing as ever, but less perky, as if more bad news had just descended on the household. One reason became clear when Frau Wiesner asked for a word with him after the lesson.

  She wanted to ask him a favor, she said. She didn’t want her husband to know but, could he, Russell, have a word with Albert. He was behaving recklessly, just saying whatever came into his mind, associating with . . . well, she didn’t know who, but . . . he wouldn’t listen to his father, she knew that, and he wouldn’t listen to her, but Russell, well, he was outside it all: He wasn’t a Jew, wasn’t a Nazi, wasn’t even a German. He knew what was happening, how dangerous things were. They were working on getting visas, but it took so long. Albert said they were dreaming, they’d never get them, but he didn’t know that, and he was putting the girls’ future at risk as well as his own. . . .

  She ran out of words, just looked at him helplessly.

  Russell’s heart sunk at the prospect, but he agreed to try.

  “I’ll make sure he’s here on Friday, after the lesson,” she said.

  THAT EVENING, HE WAS getting his Dresden notes in order when Tyler McKinley knocked on his door. “I’ve come to apologize,” the American said.

  “What for?” Russell asked.

  “You know. The other night.”

  “Oh that. Forget it.”

  “Okay. How about a drink?”

  Russell rubbed his eyes. “Why not?”

  They went to their usual bar, sat at the same table. Russell thought he recognized the stains from the previous week. His companion seemed relieved that he wasn’t holding a grudge, and was drinking dark beer for a change. The bar was more crowded than usual, with a population reaching toward double figures.

  McKinley got out his pipe and tin of Balkan mixture. “What got you started in journalism?” Russell asked.

  “Oh, I always wanted to be one. Long as I can remember.” The American smiled reminiscently. “When I was a kid I used to spend the summers with my mother’s folks in Nugget City—you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s a small town in California. Grew up in the Gold Rush days, been shrinking ever since. My granddad ran the local paper in his spare time. Just a weekly. Two pages. Four if something had actually happened. I used to help him with stuff. On print day we’d both come home covered in ink. I loved it.” He picked up the tobacco tin, and put it down again. “Granddad and Grandma both died when I was twelve, so all that stopped. I tried offering my services to the San Francisco papers, but they didn’t want kids hanging around in their print rooms. Not surprising, really. Anyway, I got involved with my high school paper, and then the college paper, and eventually got a job at the Examiner. Three years in sports, three on the city desk, and I finally got myself sent to Europe.” He grinned. “I still love it.”

  “What did your family think?” Russell asked. He meant about coming to Europe, but McKinley, busy loading his pipe, answered a different question.

  “My father was furious. He has his own law firm, and I was supposed to sign up, start at the bottom and eventually take over. He thinks journalists are grubby little hacks, you know, like The Front Page.” His eyes lit up. “Did you know they’re remaking that, with a woman reporter? Rosal
ind Russell, I think. And Cary Grant’s her editor. I read about it in one of Merle’s Hollywood magazines.”

  “Your Dad still furious?”

  “Not so much. I mean, they’re happy enough to see me when I come home.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “It’s funny,” he added, “my sister seems angrier than my father.”

  “What does she do?”

  “Nothing much, as far as I can tell. She’d make a much better lawyer than I would, but . . . well, you know . . . Dad would never take a woman into the firm.” He struck a match, applied it to the bowl, and sucked in. The bowl glowed, and a noxious plume of smoke escaped from his lips.