Zoo Stationee

Zoo Stationee Page 27

by David Downing

  The paths around the Neuersee were mostly deserted, just a couple of women with small children happily feeding the ducks. “You must memorize the arrangements,” Gert said, with the air of someone reading from a script. “Your friend must be in the station buffet at Görlitz at five o’clock on Monday afternoon. He must wear workingmen’s clothes, with a blue scarf around his neck. He must not have a suitcase or bag of any kind. When a man asks him if he knows where the left luggage is he should say, ‘Yes, but it’s easier to show you than explain,’ and walk out with that man. Understood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then repeat what I’ve just told you.”

  Russell did so.

  “Good. Now for your part. Your contact is in Kiel. Or in Gaarden, to be precise. You must be in the Germania Bar—it’s on the tram route to Wellingdorf, just outside the main entrance to the Deutsche Werke shipyards—at eight PM on Friday the tenth. With your Martin Chuzzlewit .”

  “I made it clear to the comrade in Posen that I wouldn’t collect your papers until I knew my friend was safe.”

  Gert gave an exasperated sigh. “He will be in Czechoslovakia by Tuesday morning, Prague by the afternoon. You should hear from him that day. Either that, or some of our people have been captured or killed with him. And if that happens, we hope you will honor their memory by honoring the bargain.”

  Russell gave him a look. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “Of course. Now, you will bring the papers back to Berlin, and then take them on to Prague as quickly as possible—”

  “I have to be in Berlin on that Sunday,” Russell said.

  “It would be better if you traveled before that. The border guards tend to be less vigilant on a Saturday night.”

  “Sorry, it’ll have to be Monday,” Russell said. The Sunday was Paul’s birthday.

  Gert controlled himself with a visible effort. “Very well,” he agreed, as if he’d made a huge concession.

  “And how do you suggest I carry them?”

  This was clearly in the script. “We do not know how many papers there are. If it is a matter of a few sheets, they can be sewn into the lining of your coat or your jacket. If there are a lot, then that will not be possible. If they search you and your luggage they will probably find them. The best thing is not to be searched.”

  “And how do I manage that?”

  “You probably won’t have to. They only search about one in ten, and foreigners very rarely. As long as you don’t draw attention to yourself, everything should be fine. Now, once you reach Prague, you must check in to the Grand Hotel on Wenceslas Square. You will be contacted there. Is that clear? Now please repeat the details of your treff in Kiel.”

  Russell repeated them. “What if no one approaches me on that day?” he asked.

  “Then you return to Berlin. Any other questions?” Gert’s hands seemed to be writhing in his coat pockets.

  He had none, or none that could be answered. At Bellevue Station they went their separate ways, Gert bounding up the stairs to the eastbound Stadtbahn platform, Russell ambling along the bank of the Spree to the kiosk beneath the Bellevue Schloss. He bought a cup of hot chocolate, took it to a riverside table, and watched a long train rumbling across the bridge to his left. “Everything should be fine,” he told himself in Gert’s Bavarian accent. It was the should which worried him.

  His next stop was the British Embassy. Rather than return for the car, he walked down the river to Kurfürstenplatz, and then along Zellenallee to the Brandenburg Gate and the western end of Unter den Linden. The queue outside the Embassy seemed longer than ever, the atmosphere inside the usual mix of irritation and self-righteousness. He asked to see Unsworth, and was shown up to his office. Once there, he admitted it was Trelawney-Smythe that he really wanted to see. “But I didn’t want to announce the fact in reception,” he explained to Unsworth. “I wouldn’t put it past the Nazis to include an informer or two among the Jews.”

  Unsworth looked slightly shocked at the thought, but agreed to escort Russell to the MI6 man’s door. Trelawney-Smythe looked startled to see him, and somewhat put out. “I know why you’re here, and the answer is no. We cannot make exceptions.”

  Russell sat himself down. “I take it this room’s secure,” he said.

  “We went over the whole building with a fine-tooth comb a few months ago,” Trelawney-Smythe said proudly.

  Russell looked up, half expecting to see a microphone hanging from the ceiling. “How interested would the Admiralty be in the German Navy’s Baltic Fleet dispositions?” he asked.

  To his credit, Trelawney-Smythe didn’t jump out of his seat. Instead, he reached for his pipe. “Very, I should imagine. After all, if a ship’s in the Baltic it won’t be in the North Sea.”

  “That’s the conclusion I came to,” Russell said. He smiled at the other man. “Don’t ask me how, but at some point in the next two weeks I should have my hands on those dispositions. Not to keep, mind you, and not for long. But long enough to copy them out.”

  Trelawney-Smythe lit his pipe, puffing vigorously out of the corner of his mouth.

  A technique learned in spy school, Russell thought.

  “You would be doing a tremendous service to your country,” the other man said in an almost torpid tone.

  “But not only for my country. There’s a price.”

  “Ah.” Trelawney-Smythe’s eyes narrowed. “You want money,” he said, with the air of a disappointed vicar.

  “I want you to make an exception, and come up with a visa for Eva Wiesner. And while you’re at it, I’d like an American passport.”

  That surprised the MI6 man. “How on earth do you expect us to get you one of those?”

  “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble if you set your mind to it. I do have an American mother, you know, so it’s hardly a huge stretch.”

  “Why do you want one?”

  “I’d have thought that was obvious. If there’s a war in Europe, anyone with a British passport will be sent home. With an American passport I can stay.”

  Trelawney-Smythe puffed at his pipe, digesting the idea, and Russell watched the slight widening of the eyes as he appreciated the possibilities—MI 6 would have a man in Germany once the war started!

  Not that Russell had any intention of doing anything more for them, but they weren’t to know that.

  “In the next two weeks, you said.”

  “Yes. But I want the visa for Eva Wiesner by Monday. That should give her time to arrange her exit visa, and she can travel with her daughters on Thursday. There’s no hurry about the passport,” he added. “So long as I have it before a war breaks out.”

  “You must like this family,” Trelawney-Smythe said, sounding almost human.

  “I do. The girls have only just lost their father, and there’s no good reason why they should lose their mother as well. She left the communists twenty years ago, for God’s sake. She’s not going to start a revolution in Golders Green.”

  “I hope not,” Trelawney-Smythe said wryly. “All right. I can get her a visa by Monday. The passport. . . . I can’t promise anything—the Yanks dig their heels in about the silliest things—but we’ll do our best. You weren’t born in America, were you?”

  “I was born in mid-Atlantic, if that helps. But on a British ship.”

  “Probably not, then.” He was sounding almost chummy now. “If you come in on Monday morning I’ll have the visa for you.”

  “I’ll see you then,” Russell said, resisting the temptation to be churlish. On his way out he noticed that the reading room was empty, and took time to consult the Embassy atlas. Görlitz was about two hundred kilometers southeast of Berlin, and about twenty from the Czech border. There were direct trains from Berlin, but they took most of the day and were probably checked as they neared the border area. If Albert got safely through the ticket barrier at this end he’d probably be picked up at the other. Russell was going to have to take him in the car.

  There were two obvious routes: He could stick to the old road or take the Silesian autobahn to just south of Kottbus, and join it there. He liked the idea of
escaping Hitler’s Germany by autobahn, but the old road, for reasons he couldn’t explain, felt safer.

  So, two hundred kilometers—say, three hours. Stick in an extra half-hour in case he had a puncture. If the car broke down they were sunk, but spending more than a few minutes in Görlitz, with Albert eye-wrestling anyone in uniform, seemed like an excellent way of committing suicide. When it came down to it, the car seemed worthier of trust than Albert’s temperament.

  Russell walked out to Unter den Linden, climbed into the Hanomag and headed east. If only Albert didn’t look so damned Jewish! The boy could hardly wear a mask, though the lifelike Goebbels mask which one of the American correspondents had made for last year’s Halloween party would have been singularly appropriate. How could he hide the boy’s face? A cap over the eyes, perhaps. Collar turned up and the required blue scarf. A pair of glasses? None of it would help if Albert insisted on vibrating with rage.

  And where was he going to pick him up? Not at the flat, that was for sure. Somewhere crowded? Only if it was somewhere a Jew didn’t stick out like a sore thumb, and places like that were thin on the ground. And the police would be looking for him—a Jew who knocked down a Gestapo officer with a table lamp was going to be high on their wanted list. They’d probably taken his picture in Sachsenhausen, and now all the Orpo stations would have copies hanging on their walls.

  He parked the car in the Wiesners’ street and went up. The girls were out—“starting to say their goodbyes”—and their mother seemed exhausted by grief and worry. Russell told her about Albert’s Monday appointment in Görlitz, and his own role as chauffeur. “Tell him to join the visa queue outside the British Embassy between twelve and one—as one Jew among several hundred he should be invisible. I’ll walk by and collect him soon after one. He should be wearing workingmen’s clothes, nothing too smart. But a decent coat on top of them for the queue. People try to look their best for the Embassy.”

  “I will tell him.”

  “He must be there,” Russell insisted. “If he’s not, that’s it. We won’t be given a second chance.”

  “He’ll be there.”

  “And I think I’ve got you a visa. You should be able to go with the girls next Thursday.”

  She looked as though she was having trouble believing it all. “We’ll know by then? About Albert?”

  “We should,” he said. One way or the other.

  RUSSELL’S WEEKEND FOLLOWED THE FAMILIAR pattern, but thoughts of the week ahead kept hitting him from behind, sending his stomach into momentary freefall. It wasn’t every week he delivered a fugitive from the Gestapo to the communist underground, went looking for military secrets in a dockside bar, and played some lethal form of hunt the parcel with the border police. The only time he could remember feeling like this was in the trenches, on those few occasions when he’d been ordered over the top. What had he gotten himself into?

  Paul was too distracted himself to notice his father’s distraction. On Saturday they did the rounds of Berlin’s best toy shops, so that Paul could provide Russell with some useful hints on which birthday presents to surprise him with. On Sunday they went to another away game, at Viktoria Berlin’s stadium in Steglitz, and came away delighted with a fortunate draw. Paul was still full of the trip to London, and eager to know when they could visit his grandmother in New York. “Maybe this summer,” Russell said, surprising himself. But why not? The money was there.

  Effi noticed. On Saturday evening they went to a comedy theatre revue involving friends of hers, and he twice needed prodding to join in the applause. An hour’s dancing in one of the halls off Alexanderplatz took his mind off everything else, but on the drive home he almost drove through a red light at Potsdamerplatz.

  “What’s eating you?” she asked.

  As they drove along the southern edge of the Tiergarten he gave her the whole story of his dealings with Shchepkin and Borskaya, ending with the request to take out the documents, and his realization that he could use the situation to help the Wiesners. “Seduced by my own cleverness,” he admitted. “And now I feel like digging myself a very deep hole and hiding in it.”

  “Like a fox?”

  “More like a rabbit.”

  She took his right hand and squeezed it.

  Glancing to his right, he could see the worry in her face. “I can’t back out now,” he said.

  “Of course not. Why don’t we stop here?” she added.

  He pulled up under the trees, and turned to face her.

  “You couldn’t go on the way you were,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She took his hand again. “You know what I mean,” she insisted.

  And he did.

  MONDAY WAS A RUSH. Effi insisted on coming to the Embassy with him—“everyone says I look Jewish, so they’ll think I’m his sister”—and then displayed her usual inability to be ready on time. Once Russell had finally gotten her to the car, he suddenly remembered, with another downward lurch of his stomach, that he’d forgotten to tell Eva Wiesner about the blue scarf. A ten-minute search for something suitable in the KaDeWe on Wittenbergerplatz made them five minutes late, a derailed tram in Potsdamerplatz five minutes more. Russell had a mental picture of a Gestapo officer walking along beside the queue, then suddenly stopping and pointing at Albert.

  They left the car on Dorotheenstrasse and walked the single block to the Unter den Linden. Across the wide, now-lindenfrei, avenue, they could see the queue stretching up Wilhelmstrasse past the side of the Adlon. There were no uniforms in sight, no pointing fingers, no scuffle in progress.

  They crossed Unter den Linden and walked toward the end of the queue. Albert was about ten from the back, standing close to the stone building on his right, but making no effort to conceal himself. When he saw Russell he simply walked out of the queue. “This is hopeless,” he said to no one in particular. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “We were looking for you,” Russell said. “The car’s this way,” he added, thinking that he’d seen pantomimes with more convincing scripts. Several facial expressions in the queue offered unwelcome confirmation of this opinion.

  But there was no sign of the audience that mattered. The three of them walked back to Dorotheenstrasse.

  “In the back,” Russell told Albert, indicating the tight space behind the seats. He drove three blocks down Dorotheenstrasse, turned right onto the much busier Friedrichstrasse, and headed south toward Hallesches Tor. He dropped Effi off by the elevated station.

  “Be careful,” she said, as she kissed him goodbye through the driver’s window. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  I hope so, Russell thought. He glanced across at Albert, who was now sitting beside him. The boy looked about sixteen.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “I was eighteen last month.”

  The age I was when I went to war, Russell thought. A tram swung in front of him, causing him to brake sharply. Concentrate, he told himself. An accident now really would be fatal.

  They drove past Tempelhof as a small plane took off, then under the Ringbahn and on toward Mariendorf, the city growing thinner with each mile. A police car went past in the opposite direction, two plainclothes Kripo men chatting in the front seats, but that was all. Twenty minutes after leaving Dorotheenstrasse they were out on the lake-strewn Mittelmark, passing under a completed section of the orbital autobahn.

  So far, so good, Russell thought.

  “My mother gave me the message from my father,” Albert said, breaking the silence. “What exactly did he say?”

  Russell repeated what he remembered.

  “They beat him badly, didn’t they?” Albert asked.

  “Yes, they did.”

  Albert fell silent again. They passed through Zossen, where a surfeit of signs pointed would-be visitors in the direction of General Staff HQ. The complex of buildings came into view, and Russell found himself wondering which maps the planners had on the tables that day. Poland, most likely, and all points east.

  He wondered if the Soviets would put up a fight. Their German opera
tion was hardly impressive—a boy with shaky hands and a man in Kiel they couldn’t risk. Where had all the communists gone? Seven years ago they’d been slugging it out with the Nazis—millions of them. Some would still be lying in wait for the right moment, but most, he suspected, had simply turned their backs on politics. He hoped that whoever was waiting in Görlitz knew what the hell he was doing.

  “Where have you been staying?” he asked Albert, once they were back in open country.

  “It’s better you don’t know,” the boy said.

 

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