‘My partner will be back soon. He will decide about the girl.’
Rosa was staring at Ströhm as if he’d gone mad, and he suddenly realised that she might use his name. He leaned forward and ruffled her hair. ‘Pretend you don’t know me,’ he said in German. ‘I told her she has nothing to fear,’ he told the Russian in his language.
‘We shall see.’
‘You said your colleague wouldn’t be long,’ Ströhm said, checking his watch. In two minutes Russell would be at the door. With the Russian happy to wait in silence, he counted out sixty seconds, then abruptly strode across the room, winking at Effi once his back was turned to the enemy. He peeled back the edge of a curtain, and looked out.
‘They’re here,’ he said over the Russian’s angry insistence that he come away from the window. ‘Let me take the girl in the other room,’ Ströhm pleaded. ‘If she sees you kill them she’ll be harder to handle.’
‘All right,’ the Russian agreed. For all his sangfroid, he was obviously relieved that his partner was back.
Ströhm took Rosa by the hand, gave her a reassuring smile, and ushered her through the bedroom door. ‘Stay in there,’ he said gently, and shut it behind her.
It was almost too late. Turning back to the room, he heard the key click in the apartment door, and as the Russian reached, almost casually, for Effi’s arm, Ströhm bundled into her back. They were both still falling when the silenced gun coughed, and the sound of their bodies hitting the floor found an echo a few seconds later.
The Russian was seated on the floor, his back against the sofa, his legs splayed out in front of him, a bullet hole in his chest. He wheezed, grimaced, and somehow seemed to settle, like a puppet whose strings had been dropped.
Effi got to her feet, took one look at the dead Russian, and went through to the bedroom to comfort Rosa.
‘What are you going to do with him?’ Ströhm asked Russell after a few moments’ silence. ‘Him and his partner.’
Russell put down the pistol and ran a hand through his hair. ‘While you were doing your K-5 impression I was wondering exactly that, and I did come up with one idea. I have no right to ask you this—you’ve done more than enough already—but …’
‘How can I help?’
‘Well, I need to dump them somewhere in their car. It has to look like an accident, or we’ll be getting more visits like this one. If you bring your car along, you can give me a lift back.’
‘Okay, but won’t the bullets be a giveaway?’
‘They’ll have to come out.’
Ströhm went to the window to look at the street. ‘When do you think we should leave?’
‘The sooner the better. The place I have in mind is up in the British sector, and they don’t do night patrols any more. But let me tell Effi what’s we’re doing.’
‘Give me the keys and I’ll bring the Russians’ car around,’ Ströhm offered.
In the other room Effi was sat on the bed, Rosa’s head on her shoulder.
‘It’s all over, sweetheart,’ Russell said, leaning over to kiss the child on the forehead. ‘He can’t hurt you and Effi now.’
‘Is he dead?’ she whispered.
‘He is. It was him or us, I’m afraid.’
‘I’m glad,’ Rosa said.
‘What about the body?’ Effi asked.
‘Gerhard and I will take it away. Are you okay?’
‘Yes, I suppose so. Be careful.’
‘Aren’t I always?’
One thing about their building, as Russell and Effi knew from previous complaints, was that they were always the last ones to bed. The two men carried the corpse down through the silent stairwell, and once Ströhm had signalled the all-clear, Russell dragged it out to the street. Fitting another body into the boot wasn’t easy, but between them they managed somehow. There was always the chance that someone one had seen their struggle from a window, but the street lighting was poor, and Berliners weren’t as conscientious about reporting wrong-doing as they had been at one time. Either they’d seen too much of it, or their trust in authority was at a very low ebb. Both, most likely.
‘Where are we going?’ Ströhm asked.
Russell told him.
‘Okay. I’ll get my car and follow you.’
‘If I didn’t know better,’ Russell said wryly, ‘I’d say you were almost enjoying yourself.’
‘I might be now,’ Ströhm admitted, ‘but I wouldn’t want to go through those ten minutes again.’ As he walked to the Party car, he asked himself why he had actually risked his life. Several reasons came to mind—too much alcohol, his fury with the Russians, loyalty to a friend. But what mattered now was that he’d got away with it.
Ströhm started up the Horch, and drove it around the corner into Carmer Strasse, where Russell was just walking out to the Maybach with bottle in hand.
They started off, and within a few minutes were heading northwest up a mostly empty Berliner Strasse. Occasionally another car would pass in the other direction, but they saw no British patrols. The Western Allies would all be keen save petrol, Ströhm thought, now that they couldn’t bring anymore in.
Up ahead, Russell was looking for flaws in his hastily conceived plan. If a proper investigation was held—and he hoped the British authorities would make that as difficult as possible for the Soviets—then it had look like the two GRU men had been on their way home with the film when one of two things had happened—either Beria’s men had got to them, or they’d had a terrible accident. And since he couldn’t think of any way to fake the former, it had to be the latter. Complete with flames. Two burnt bodies and one burnt film.
The boys in the boot had even supplied the accelerant—the spare of can of petrol in the back was probably standard issue for GRU murder squads.
It took twenty minutes to reach the bridge across the choked canal. The long gap in the parapet, which he’d noticed several months earlier, was, like most of Berlin, awaiting repair. Even the string of warning flags had blown away. It was, as Russell had thought at the time, an accident waiting to happen.
He stopped and got out. There were lights in the distance in both directions, but the immediate area was lit by the moon, revealing an industrial wasteland of hulk-filled docks, burnt-out factories, and sidings strewn with splintered wagons.
Ströhm joined him, and they pulled the corpses out on to the bridge. ‘Now for the difficult bit,’ Russell murmured, getting down on his haunches and taking out his pocket knife. In the First War they’d used to say that dead men didn’t bleed, but digging out the bullets was a messy business, and the smell of innards did evoke the trenches with a vengeance. When he was done, he walked back twenty metres and dropped the three bullets in the stagnant water below.
There was still no sign of other traffic. After lifting the Russians into the front seats, and jamming their Tokarev pistols into their pockets, Russell doused them and the film with petrol, then fashioned a Molotov cocktail using the bottle and handkerchief he’d brought along for that purpose.
There was no need to push the car—just removing the handbrake and turning the wheel would suffice. In the event, the car gathered speed faster than Russell expected, and he barely had time to light the cocktail and thrust it through the open window. The blaze was instant, the two bodies silhouetted in flame as the car toppled over the edge and out of sight. A split-second later it hit the concrete towpath with a crash that was probably heard in Karlshorst, and a curtain of flame soared upwards, like an all-too-effective beacon.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Russell said, unnecessarily.
They spent several minutes in fear of approaching lights, but once Ströhm had pulled them off the main highway and into the Westend back streets both men felt a lot safer.
‘Thank you,’ Russell said. The two words seemed hardly enough, but he couldn’t remember meaning them more.
‘You’re welcome,’ Ströhm said lightly.
‘What chance in a thousand brought you around tonight?’
Russell asked him.
Ströhm laughed. ‘Believe it not, I wanted to talk about the Yugoslavs.’
‘What about them?’
‘Haven’t you heard? The Soviets are throwing them out of the Cominform for having minds of their own. It’s over,’ he added after a moment.
‘What is?’
Ströhm ignored that. ‘What made you leave the Party?’ he asked.
So that was it, Russell thought. ‘You know I can’t remember any particular thing—it was a lot of things, all adding up. One day I just knew that I wanted out. That the reasons I’d had for joining no longer made any sense to me.’
Ströhm thought about that for a minute or so. ‘They say Brecht’s coming back,’ he said eventually, as if the poet’s blessing might make all the difference.
‘ “Hatred, even of meanness, contorts the features”,’ Russell quoted.
‘Always?’
‘I don’t know. I do know that socialism’s dead in the water, for our lifetime at least. The Yanks and Stalin—they’ve got each other now, perfect scapegoats for anything that goes wrong in their own empires. The Yanks prattle on about freedom and free enterprise, the Soviets about welfare and full employment, and neither will admit that they lack what the other has. They’ll both spend a fortune on weapons and come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who makes trouble on their own patch.’ Russell grunted. ‘You know what happened? The Nazis made everyone look good for a few years, but now they’re gone, and we’re back with crap meets crap.’
Ströhm shook his head, but more in sadness than disagreement. ‘Only a year ago, I would have pitied you for your cynicism.’
‘And now?’
‘It fits the facts. But I haven’t given up on socialism—not quite yet.’
‘I may have given up on politics,’ Russell said, ‘but I don’t think I have on justice. Though what that means in practice … well, I guess I’ll have to find out.’ He turned to Ströhm. ‘When we ran into each other this evening, and I told you about the film and the dead Russian in the boot, why didn’t you just walk away, like any sensible human being?’
‘You still haven’t told me what’s on this precious film.’
‘And I’m not going to. There are some things you’re safer not knowing.’
‘All right. But one day?’
‘One day,’ Russell agreed. The day they put Beria into the ground, or someone drove a stake through the bastard’s heart. ‘What will you do?’ he asked, changing the subject.
‘God knows. Work for a change, of course, and get kicked out of the Party? Hold my nose and join the SPD? I can’t learn Serbo-Croat and run off to Belgrade—I have a child coming. Which reminds me: Annaliese must not hear about tonight. From you or Effi.’
‘If you say so. But after all the adventures she and Effi had, I think she’d understand.’
‘Oh, so do I, but that doesn’t mean she’d forgive me. And she’d probably be right.’
Russell didn’t argue. They drove on through the moonlit streets, seeing no other vehicle until they reached Bismarck Strasse.
‘Drop me a few blocks away,’ Russell said. ‘You don’t want this car seen on Carmer Strasse again.’
A few minutes later he was watching the Horch recede, Ströhm’s arm held aloft in farewell. After wiping his gore-stained hands on a convenient tuft of grass, Russell started for home. He felt tired to the bone, but strangely buoyant considering the past few hours. Would it all work? It just might, he supposed.
Some Soviet forensic genius might find bullet holes in the charred flesh, or some unforeseen proof that it hadn’t been an accident. The GRU bosses might wonder why Russell was still alive, and why their men had shown such mercy. Would they try and correct this oversight? Perhaps, but probably not—with the film gone, what would be the point?
There was no sure and certain way out, no Gordian knot that Russell could cut. He would have to live with the knowledge that assassination by the GRU was a life-threatening possibility, like cancer and falling masonry. To be actively avoided, but not at the cost of all else.
He walked on through the dark and silent streets. Beria would be in bed at this hour, if he wasn’t out trawling Moscow for young girls. After his tête-à-tête with Shchepkin the bastard would be perching a little less easily on his blood-stained throne, which was something. He would certainly be more careful when it came to hidden cameras.
It occurred to Russell that if the GRU did succeed in killing them all, then the film’s release and Beria’s subsequent fall from power would posthumously offer some slight compensation.
It was almost three in the morning. In a few more hours Shchepkin would be knocking at the Americans’ door, and not long after that Johannsen would ring with the terrible news that Russell’s cover was comprehensively blown.
It would doubtless take several weeks of boring questions, but then he would be free of them all.
His strange career in the shadows, which Shchepkin had launched more than ten years before in that shabby Danzig hotel room, would finally be over. They might eventually kill him, but they would never recruit him again.
And in September his son was getting married. His son, who’d survived the Eastern Front, and now seemed as sane as anyone could be, who’d entered that madhouse with a functioning heart and a soul. And if he and Effi had do anything to with it, Rosa too would come into her own.
Russell turned into Carmer Strasse, where the only light showing was theirs.
‘It’s me,’ he said softly, as he opened the door.
‘So it is,’ Effi said, taking him into her arms.
Historical addendum
The Soviet siege of Berlin’s three Western sectors, and the airlift which frustrated it, lasted until May 1949. By the end of that year the country as a whole was formally divided into two states, the Western-backed Federal Republic (West Germany) and the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic (East Germany). Berlin was also divided in two, the Soviet sector becoming the capital of East Germany, the Western sectors a West German enclave. Movement between the two halves of the city was restricted but possible.
East Germany was doomed from the beginning by the behaviour of its Soviet sponsors, particularly that of their soldiers in the months straddling the end of the war. Only a party of saints could have sold the German people on communism in such a context, and the KPD was far from that. Those leaders returning from exile had long since interiorised the Soviet model, and they quickly sidelined comrades like my Gerhard Ströhm who had other ideas of how a socialist state might develop. Bertolt Brecht did finally return in 1951, and spent his last five years outwardly supporting the new regime and inwardly lamenting its tyrannical nature.
After a brief and brutally suppressed uprising in June 1953, East Germany settled into being one of the hardest of the hard-line regimes in the Soviet Bloc. This encouraged emigration and flight, particularly of those educated and skilled people the regime could least afford to lose. The most porous border was that between West and East Berlin, and the only way to close it proved to be a wall. One was duly erected in August 1961, and stood for the next twenty-nine years as a potent symbol of Soviet communism’s moral and political bankruptcy.
It was finally torn down in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, and in the brief interregnum which followed socialist opponents of the East German regime debated the possibility of establishing something new in their country, a system which was neither capitalist nor Soviet communist, but an authentic German socialism which drew on the best of both systems. Like the ‘Ströhms’ of 1945–48, they saw their hopes denied.
Series acknowledgments
I would like to thank my publishers—Ben Yarde-Buller at Old Street in the UK, Katie Herman and Juliet Grames at Soho Press in the US—for their faith, support and general hard work over the last seven years. The series wouldn’t have happened without them, and the same could certainly be said of my agent Charlie Viney, who helped me convert a very different orig
inal idea into a series that was both commercial and rewarding to write. I also owe a great deal to David Reynolds, who not only edited most of the books, but shared in their gestation process during many long walks through the Surrey countryside.
Many others have unwittingly contributed to the series. Among the numerous books I have used for research, I would like to mention two in particular. Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night and Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary are autobiographical accounts of communists, and both offer vivid, highly readable, evocations of the struggles the two men were engaged in. The idea of communism is discredited now—the Soviet version deservedly so—but understanding what motivated so many idealistic and intelligent people to fight for it is essential if twentieth-century history is to make any sort of sense. When it comes to fiction, no one nailed ideological intrigue like Eric Ambler, and in recent years Alan Furst has proved a worthy successor.
As far as Berlin is concerned, I am indebted to the many authors who lived and wrote there in the 1930s and 1940s, and to all the various archivists who continue to preserve (these days mainly on the net) photographs and maps of how it was back then. It may no longer be possible to visit the city that Russell and Effi lived in, but the archivists’ work makes it so much easier to imagine.
Lastly, I must acknowledge the contribution of my wife, Nancy, as sounding board, critic and inspiration. She and Effi differ in many ways, but I couldn’t have imagined Effi without her.
David Downing, November 2012
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