Masaryk Station

by David Downing

After five minutes of haggling they agreed a price. ‘I should have let you go in alone,’ Russell admitted once they’d left. ‘He knows how to deal with men.’

  That evening they returned with the film, and followed the youth down a flight of stone steps to a whitewashed basement. The equipment was already set up. ‘It’s simple,’ their tutor explained, after pocketing the wad of dollars. ‘You just switch them both on, here and here. Adjust the focus with this if you need to, but you probably won’t. How long is it?’ he asked, as he threaded the film on to the sprockets.

  ‘Only twenty minutes or so,’ Effi told him.

  ‘Well after you’ve made the first copy, have a look at it. If there’s a problem, I’ll be upstairs. If not, make the second.’

  They did as he told them. Neither wanted to see the film again, but occasional glances were enough to assure them that it was running to speed. Once the first copy had been made, Effi transferred it to the projector, and played the first couple of minutes. It wasn’t as crisp as the original, but in Russell’s opinion was good enough.

  The second copy took them another half an hour, and when they finally emerged on to the pavement darkness was falling. As they waited on the U-Bahn platform Effi asked him where they would hide theirs.

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ he told her. ‘Anywhere but Hanna’s vegetable patch, I suppose.’ That was where he’d buried the atomic research papers in 1945.

  ‘I suppose that would be the first place the Russians would look.’

  After they emerged from the Zoo Station entrance, Russell stopped at a public telephone and rang the number in the Soviet sector which he used to contact Shchepkin. After the usual coded exchange, he hung up secure in the knowledge that a meeting was arranged for noon the next day.

  ‘So we’ve lit the fuse,’ Effi said, as they walked underneath the railway bridge on Hardenberg Strasse.

  ‘I guess we have.’ Thinking over Shchepkin’s warning, that a vengeful Beria might very well come after them, he decided that their one gun mightn’t be enough.

  At noon the next day Russell waited for Shchepkin at the eastern end of the Tiergarten. It was the Russian’s favourite meeting place—like most of his compatriots he seemed to enjoy staring at the ruined Reichstag—but Russell found the whole setting profoundly depressing. He remembered the park when it was a lovely place for stroll, and the parliament wasn’t packed with Nazis.

  Sitting on their usual bench, he wondered how Shchepkin would cover his tracks when he took the original film ‘beyond Beria’s reach’. Did the Russian have easy access to some office out in Karlshorst where the MGB manufactured false papers? Shchepkin’s position in that organisation was a complete mystery to Russell. He knew the Russian had been imprisoned for several months—maybe more—towards the end of the war, but he had never really found out why. All Shchepkin had said to him was that he’d ended up on the wrong side in some inter-party dispute, and been rehabilitated, at least in part, because of his suitability as Russell’s control. But he obviously had other duties to perform, and other agents to supervise, so presumably someone in the Kremlin must like him.

  Trusting Shchepkin was rather like stepping out into a river of unknown depth. And yet he did.

  The list the Russian had asked for—of those whose untimely death would trigger the film’s release—was in Russell’s inside pocket. It hadn’t been easy to compile. Some names were obvious—Effi and Rosa, Zarah and Lothar, Thomas, Hanna and Lotte—but others were not. He hesitated before dragging Paul and Marisa into things, but the MGB knew he had a son, and would have no trouble finding him. At Effi’s insistence he included Bill Carnforth, although God only knew what the American would think if he knew his name had ended up on Beria’s desk. He wondered what Zarah had told her fiancé about his own past dealings with the Soviets. Not much, he suspected—her fears for Effi would keep her silent.

  And there Russell had drawn the line. If Beria was still desperate to inflict punishment, he would have to settle for friends or very distant relations, and he would have to find them himself.

  Shchepkin was walking towards him, white hair glinting in the sunlight. There was nothing distinctive about his appearance, Russell thought, nothing to indicate his nationality or line of work. He looked as much like a French businessman or German professor as he did a Soviet agent.

  After taking possession of the reels in their brown paper parcel, Shchepkin seemed reluctant to leave.

  ‘So what’s the latest from Karlshorst?’ Russell asked.

  ‘You know about Sokolovsky’s letter.’

  ‘I think everyone in Berlin does.’

  ‘Well, today our man at the Control Council will be willing to discuss a compromise. And this afternoon, our man at the City Council will announce the introduction of a new Soviet currency for all of Berlin.’

  ‘Keep them guessing, eh?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘It won’t work. The Allies will just extend their currency to Berlin.’

  ‘Probably. And then the shutters will fall.’

  ‘And after that?’

  Shchepkin shrugged. ‘By then, you and I may be past caring.’ He got wearily to his feet. ‘I won’t reach Moscow before Friday, so you have a few more carefree days. After that, watch out.’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘Have you hidden yours away?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Do it, but not too deep. It won’t be there long.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Shchepkin smiled. ‘I’ll tell you that when I get back. Early next week, I hope.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  The Russian nodded, and strolled off towards the Brandenburg Gate, leaving Russell to walk back across the park. He hadn’t yet hidden their copy of the film because he couldn’t decide where to hide it. There was no place of concealment in their small flat which would escape a thorough search, and leaving it in a station left-luggage locker would simply transfer the problem. In the old days he would have sent the ticket to himself at a poste restante, but with Berlin’s immediate future so uncertain—and the Soviets already wreaking havoc with the postal services—that course also seemed much too risky.

  Burial was the obvious alternative, but where could he bury the damn thing? There was only an overlooked courtyard at Carmer Strasse, and, as Russell had said to Effi the previous evening, he could hardly return to the scene of his earlier excavations in Thomas’s garden. Which only left the Grunewald. That evening, he thought. A long walk through the trees.

  Carrying a spade was clearly not on, so he spent most of the afternoon trawling the local shops in vain for a digging implement he could carry under his jacket. In the end he settled for one of their serving spoons, on the dubious grounds that it was better than nothing.

  After dinner with Effi and Rosa, he caught a 76 tram on Ku’damm, rode it to the end of the line, and then walked down Königs Allee to the old Hundekehle restaurant, where he and Paul had often shared a Saturday ice cream. Beyond it, the forest stretched several miles to the west, and several more to the north and the south. A haystack for his needle.

  There were an annoying number of people on the paths, out enjoying the evening sunshine. And as he discovered a few minutes later, there was a surprisingly large band of optimists casting their flies out into the Grunewald See. He turned off into the trees on his right, and soon found the clearing where they’d often picnicked more than ten years before. While the children had played their games, he, Ilsa, Thomas and Hanna had sat and drunk wine and ridiculed the Nazis. Who had had the last laugh? he wondered.

  There was no one there now, only dappled grass and branches swaying in the breeze. Russell walked around the edge of the clearing, looking for a suitable place. It couldn’t be too obvious, but he had to be able to find it again.

  One tree with spreading overground roots seemed to be a good bet, and for several minutes he sat with his back to the trunk, listening and watching for the sounds of humans nearby. On s
uch a lovely summer evening it was hard to believe that the city beyond the forest was under virtual siege.

  When he was certain as he could be that no loving couple was likely to rise out of the nearby long grass, he went to work with his spoon, carefully scooping the earth out from between two roots. The soil was looser than he expected, and it didn’t take him long to excavate a foot-deep well for the tin. After laying it flat on the bottom, he re-filled the hole, and did what he could to disguise the fact that one had been dug. The sun had sunk behind the trees, and it was hard to see his handiwork, but he was fairly confident that no one would find the tin by accident.

  For all that, he felt reluctant to leave. He couldn’t shake the thought that he might have been watched, that someone had seen him bury something, and was only waiting out there in the dark for the chance to dig it up. He knew it was crazy, but there it was. And as he sat there, Russell remembered Mordechai Kohn, the death camp escapee he had interviewed a year or so after the war. Mordechai’s survival tip was to imagine how things might pan out, like a novelist unfolding a plot in his mind, and then take what steps seemed appropriate to help himself and hinder his enemy. ‘A simple example,’ he told Russell, ‘you imagine people coming to arrest you. What will you do when they knock on your door? Well, the first thing you do is head for a back window. And if it’s already open, that will save you precious seconds. So you go and open the window now, before they knock on your door.’

  Sitting against the tree in the rapidly-darkening forest, Russell tried to follow the young Jew’s advice. He imagined what might happen, and what he could do about it. One thing came to mind.

  It became apparent next morning that their days of waiting were also likely to decide the fate of the city. The morning papers bore out Shchepkin’s predictions of the previous day, and later that morning an RIAS news reporter announced that General Clay had rejected ‘in toto Soviet claims to the city of Berlin’. This was followed up midafternoon by the much-anticipated news that the Western currency reform would be extended to include Berlin. Details would be broadcast at eight that evening.

  Like most of the city’s inhabitants, Russell, Effi, and Rosa tuned in to hear them. From midnight on Friday, the old Reichsmarks could be exchanged for new Deutschmarks, on a one-to-one basis for the first sixty, and at a rapidly declining rate thereafter.

  ‘The shops will be packed for the next two days,’ Effi said.

  ‘Those that are open.’

  The three of them went down to Ku’damm to see what was happening, and found the pavements jammed with people trying to spend their Reichsmarks on goods or extravagant dining. But most of the shops had shut early, and several restaurants had already altered their menus, offering only food that would spoil, and hoarding the rest until the change had been made.

  ‘Have we got any bills to pay?’ Russell asked Effi on the way home. ‘Because now’s the time to pay them.’

  Next morning they woke to a steady drizzle, and the news that the Soviets had closed the road and railways between the Western Zones and Berlin. Some people, though, were already fighting back. KPD demonstrators had been thwarted the previous evening when they’d to break up a City Assembly meeting, and the latter had then decided by a large majority to allow competition between the new Western currency and its Soviet counterpart.

  Another hour, and RIAS was reporting sporadic power failures in all three Western sectors of the city. Asked to explain these interruptions in the electricity supply, a Soviet spokesmen claimed serious ‘technical difficulties’ were affecting one of the generating stations in their sector.

  Soon after that, Thomas phoned. There was going to be a mass meeting at the Hertha stadium that afternoon—Russell was welcome to a lift if he wanted to come. He did. An hour or so later, when Thomas arrived at the door, the American garrison commander Frank Howley was spitting defiance on the wireless. After promising Berliners that the American people wouldn’t let them starve, he warned the Soviets not to trespass in his sector. ‘We are ready for you—and if the day comes, believe me, many a comrade will go across the golden Volga.’

  ‘The Chinese curse,’ Thomas said, as they both walked down to the car, ‘to live in interesting times.’

  To Russell’s surprise, the Plumpe stadium was packed to capacity, something it had never quite managed in all his and Paul’s years of watching Hertha. It had been a day of ominous portents, but the mood among the crowd was unmistakably upbeat. Hardship might be in prospect, but so was real change, and after the past five years that was a deal that most Berliners were more than willing to make. As Ernst Reuter, the main speaker, explained: It was about systems, not money—while the latter could conceivably be integrated, the former could not. The choice was between a Soviet Berlin and a divided Berlin—there was no third option.

  Russell knew he was right, but still felt saddened at the thought of his home being sundered in two.

  For Thomas, though, the glass was half-full. ‘Bastards have been running our Berlin for fifteen years. Better to get half of it back than none.’

  Gerhard Ströhm couldn’t remember a morning when he’d felt less inclined to go to work. He had arrived home the previous evening to a long tirade from Annaliese about conditions at the hospital; the electricity supply cuts, which everyone was quite rightly blaming on the Soviets, had necessitated a reduction in surgery hours. What sort of people, she raged, used the sick as a weapon to blackmail their enemies?

  Ströhm had had no answer for her then, and walking to work had none for himself. He still found it hard to believe that the Soviets intended starving the city into submission, still hoped that it was all a big bluff in extremely bad taste. As if to remind him of what was at stake, yet another American C-47 roared in across the rooftops a few streets behind him on its approach to Tempelhof. If it was a bluff, it looked as if the Allies were preparing to call it.

  He didn’t think the morning could get any worse, but he was wrong. A note calling him upstairs was waiting on his desk, and Ströhm knew he was in trouble when Marohn mentioned ‘the business’ at Rummelsburg. ‘You did well there,’ his boss told him. ‘So now that a similar problem has arisen again, well, the people upstairs are hoping you can repeat the trick.’

  Ströhm didn’t like the suggestion that he’d ‘tricked’ the workers at the railway repair shops—and, by implication, had ‘tricked’ Utermann into taking his own life—but he let it go. Worse seemed likely to follow, and Marohn was only the messenger, and so Ströhm simply nodded his acquiescence, and waited for the explanation.

  The ‘similar problem’ had arisen in Aue, a small town in Saxony. Railways workers there were refusing to load ore from Wismut’s uranium mines, and the Soviet authorities were hoping that their German comrades could straighten the situation out. If not, they would have to take ‘administrative measures’.

  ‘Why are the workers refusing?’ Ströhm asked.

  ‘You’ll have to ask Manfred Pieck—he’s the local union leader.’

  ‘No relation to Wilhelm, I assume.’ Wilhelm Pieck was second only to Ulbricht in the KPD hierarchy.

  ‘No, but he is a Party veteran. Joined in 1926. He ran the underground in Chemnitz during the war.’

  Another Utermann, Ströhm thought, his heart sinking at the prospect.

  ‘I’ve arranged a car for you,’ Marohn was saying, as if that might make the job palatable. ‘With a chauffeur, of course.’

  ‘I can drive myself,’ Ströhm retorted. ‘But why don’t I just take a train? If I arrive like visiting royalty no one’ll listen to me.’

  ‘The Soviets will, and that’s the point. They’ll only treat you as an equal if you look like one.’

  Ströhm knew when he was beaten. ‘All right. But I will drive myself.’

  Which was easier said than done, of course. He had learned to drive at university almost twenty years earlier, but had hardly been behind a steering wheel since. People said you never forgot, but his first few miles in the shiny Ho
rch 851 were a painful lesson in remembering. The watching faces on the pavement, he noticed, seemed universally contemptuous, though whether of his driving or his privileged status he couldn’t be sure.

  According to Marohn, the autobahn would ‘whisk’ him all the way to Chemnitz, but his boss obviously hadn’t been down it recently. There were pot holes everywhere, and huge cracks in the concrete hosting columns of swaying weeds. On the bright side, it was virtually empty, and after a while Ströhm began to enjoy himself, slaloming south across the crumbling surface. He loved trains, and the chance they gave you to sit by the window and watch the world go by; but there was something just as liberating about sitting alone in a car, controlling your own direction and speed. An illusion of independence perhaps, but an intoxicating one nonetheless.

  Soon after six P.M. Ströhm reached Chemnitz, where Marohn had suggested he spend the night. He found the local Party office easily enough, and was given a room reserved for official guests in the nearby hotel. The owner was too sycophantic for words, but both dinner and room were more than adequate. After eating he went upstairs, and read until his eyelids began to droop. As he drifted into sleep, he wondered what the next day would bring, what challenge to his conscience awaited him in Aue.

  Russell woke with a start on Saturday morning, not knowing where he was. He’d been walking down a snow-covered street, with shadows lurking in every doorway, but here was Effi making gentle snuffling noises in her sleep.

  Shchepkin should be in Moscow, he thought. He would probably be seeing Beria that day. Russell didn’t need to imagine the rage on the Georgian’s face when he heard what Shchepkin had to tell him—he’d seen it in the film.

  From now until Tuesday, these were the dangerous days. Shchepkin would tell Beria that if he wasn’t back in Berlin by then, Russell would make his copy available to the Americans. And as Shchepkin had said, the sensible thing for Beria to do was accept the deal on offer, and for him to get used to the idea that at least one other recording of him committing murder was hidden out of reach. But would Beria be able to do this? Or would he hold on to Shchepkin, and gamble on scooping Russell up by Tuesday? In that case Beria would assume that once everyone was safely ensconced in the Lyubyanka, eliciting the location of the films would not present too great a problem. And in this he was certainly right.