Masaryk Station jr-6

by David Downing

  ‘She might be right,’ Russell said. ‘I never thought your sister was the brightest spark in the universe, but she’s done a great job with Lothar.’

  ‘She has, hasn’t she? So you don’t think there’s any reason to worry?’

  He grunted. ‘There’s always that. But if you hadn’t said anything, well, she seems fine to me. And frankly, given her history, I expected a lot more problems than those we’ve actually had.’

  ‘You never said that before.’

  ‘Why tempt fate?’

  ‘Why indeed? Speaking of which, there’s another secret I’ve been keeping. The day before we left I had a visitor from Hollywood-or to be precise, from a Hollywood company that’s making a film in Berlin. The director wants me in his next movie.’

  ‘In Berlin?’

  ‘In Los Angeles.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yes, wow.’

  ‘Do you want to go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yes for the experience. And yes for Rosa-once I was worried about moving her around too much, but she loved coming here, and getting her out of Berlin would, er-’

  ‘Nip any possible problems in the bud,’ Russell cut in.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘You know the but. I miss you, and the idea of taking off for weeks or even months the moment you come back is …’

  ‘Not good,’ Russell finished for her. He smiled. ‘Maybe the Soviets need a spy in Hollywood. And I’m sure the Americans would like someone on the inside, telling them which actors are secret communists.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Only a little. Effi, I think you should go. For one film, anyway. It might be good for Rosa-who knows? — but in any case I’m sure she’ll love it. And it’s too good a chance for you to pass up.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Effi said again. ‘You know, I actually thought life would get back to normal after the war.’

  ‘You weren’t the only one.’

  ‘This film won’t happen before September,’ she added. ‘And I’m not missing Paul’s wedding.’

  ‘He would be upset.’

  Lying awake an hour or so later, it occurred to Russell that one of his oldest dreams had finally had come true-he was sleeping with a Hollywood actress.

  It was raining next morning, which suited their mood, because nobody wanted to leave. They got wet in the water taxi, and then had to dry out the Balilla, because no one had thought to put the roof up. But at least the car was there-Russell had woken up fearing that someone had stolen it, and wondering how he would get them both home.

  A gorgeous rainbow appeared as they drove out of the city, and by the time they reached Treviso the sun was draped across the mountains ahead. As they approached the Aviano airbase, Rosa leaned forward and suggested that Russell ‘just come home’ with them.

  ‘I’d love to,’ he told her, ‘but I can’t. I’ll be back soon, though,’ he promised, hoping it was true.

  ‘And you have to take the car back,’ Rosa remembered.

  ‘Good thing you reminded me.’

  They were an hour ahead of schedule, but the DC-3 was already waiting, the pilots anxious to leave at once.

  ‘You two look after each other,’ he shouted after Effi and Rosa as they climbed the steps, but he doubted if they heard him over the noise of the engines. They waved once, and disappeared inside, the door slamming shut behind them. Without much more ado, the plane accelerated off down the short runway, rose sharply into the air, and took a long climbing turn towards the mountains. Russell watched it shrink in size and finally disappear, before plunking himself back behind the Balilla’s wheel with a heartfelt groan.

  Russell arrived back in Trieste early that evening, returned the car to its reluctant owner, and took a tram along the waterfront to the Piazza dell Unita. Feeling less than ravenous, he eschewed the San Marco for once, and opted for one of the Caffe degli Specchi’s famous toasted sandwiches. The place seemed more full of couples than usual, but after the weekend he was probably just more conscious of being alone.

  Outside a huge orange sun was sinking into the sea. He walked back across the darkening Piazza Cavana, where traditional red lights glowed in half a dozen windows, and sun-tanned British soldiers loitered in groups, noisily drinking beer and sizing up the local whores. Travel back two thousand years in a time machine, Russell thought, and only the details-clothing, drinking receptacles, weapons-would be different. The Roman legion back from Judaea had become the East Staffordshires on their way home from Palestine.

  Five minutes later, Russell was climbing the stairs to his room. It wasn’t much past eight, but he felt exhausted, and only just summoned the energy to take off his shoes and trousers. The last thing he noticed before sleep overtook him was the moon peeking around his window frame.

  It was gone when he woke, the sound of a blast ringing in his ears, a ghostly haze of plaster dust clouding the room.

  Silence followed; the silence of the deaf, he realised.

  He clambered out of the plaster-strewn bed, reached for his trousers, and pulled them on. The dust was thicker out on the long narrow landing, but was already settling on the threadbare throws which lined the floor. The door to his old room had been blown across the head of the stairs, and through the gap where it had hung he could see a yellow streetlight. The room’s outer wall had all but vanished.

  And so, he discovered, had the floor. What was left of the bed had fallen into the room below, and the glinting mess at its centre was presumably Skerlic’s torso. Daylight would find the rest of him glued to the walls, Russell surmised.

  He dimly heard shouting; his ears were beginning to recover. People were trying to get into the room below but something was blocking the door. And now he heard a thin mewling sound coming from directly below him. There was at least one person under the fallen floor.

  He hurried downstairs to join those carting debris out into the street, and watched as three of Marko’s daughters were carried out. It was the girls he’d taken for the ride only four days before. Two were still breathing, their faces covered in cuts and bruises. Sasa’s face, by contrast, was completely untouched, but a falling beam had stove in her chest, and crushed the life from her body.

  An ambulance bell was tolling in the distance.

  ‘He said he was a professor,’ Marko was half-shouting, half-crying. ‘But who blows up professors? He lied to me, he must have done.’

  Russell doubted it. The Croats had assumed he was still in his old room, had waited until he returned from Venice, and then detonated their bomb. They hadn’t meant to kill any Serbs, but they hadn’t much cared if they did.

  He had got Sasa killed. He and all the others like him, playing their ridiculous games.

  Bearers of light

  After taking Rosa to school on Tuesday morning, Effi walked home intent on sorting out her professional life. The first task was to finish reading the Hollywood script, and this took her the rest of the morning.

  It had what she considered the usual Hollywood weaknesses-a tendency to sentimentalise, and the habit of assuming that only regular outbreaks of violence would keep the audience interested. But overall she liked it, and a director as good as Gregory Sinfield would doubtless make it better. If she wanted a reason to turn them down, she would have to look elsewhere.

  Nothing had come from RIAS, so she called Alfred Henninger on the telephone. He was most apologetic, but had no news. ‘I’m sure the series will go ahead,’ he said. ‘It’s just a matter of when.’

  Which wasn’t very helpful. With three hours to spare before Rosa’s return, she walked down to Zoo Station and took a tram to the Elisabeth, hoping that Annaliese would have a few moments to spare. As it turned out, it was her friend’s half-day off, and Effi only just caught her leaving for home.

  Gerhard had left for Rugen Island and some sort of Party conference, and Annaliese was happy to share a walk along the Landwehrkanal and into the slowly reviving Tiergarten.
After one botched effort, the British had finally succeeded in blowing up the huge flak towers that had sullied the landscape for almost seven years, and the park’s trees, decimated by bombings and the desperate need for firewood, were springing back to life. It seemed to Effi as if the city’s lungs were beginning to breathe again.

  She asked Annaliese if she any ‘political news’, their code for the rumours and gossip that Strohm brought home from work.

  ‘None,’ she said. ‘Either the Russians are biding their time or they’ve decided the Americans won’t be scared into leaving.’

  ‘Which does Gerhard think?’

  ‘That they can’t make their minds up. He doesn’t believe they have a plan. He thinks they just react to whatever their enemies do. So as long as no one provokes them, they’ll be reasonable.’

  ‘Why should the Americans provoke them?’

  Annaliese shrugged. ‘God only knows. I just wish they’d all go home.’

  Russell played the innocent over the next twenty-four hours, as the local police, under the none-too-subtle supervision of the Allied authorities, carried out their investigation. Two visits from Dempsey kept him informed of their progress in concocting a politically acceptable narrative. The bomb had apparently been planted by ‘remnants of the Ustashe’, as part of an ongoing cycle of revenge attacks that went back at least to the war and probably a thousand years further. If Skerlic hadn’t been a philosopher in this life, Russell thought sourly, he would surely be one in the next.

  ‘He must have been a spy,’ the hosteller kept saying, loading the three-letter word with enough contempt to sink one of the cruisers out in the harbour. One of the surviving daughters had lost an eye, the other had two badly broken legs, but they would both live. The building, on closer inspection, was less badly damaged than might have been expected. Russell’s old room needed reconstruction, but those around it hadn’t been that badly damaged. None of the guests had had to leave.

  On Wednesday afternoon, a car came to take Russell up to the villa, where Youklis and Dempsey were both waiting on the pine-scented terrace. ‘It was Croat Krizari,’ Youklis told him. ‘And they were definitely after you. Would you like to tell us why?’

  Anticipating the question hadn’t provided Russell with a satisfactory answer. He couldn’t admit to shopping Croat ‘freedom fighters’ or writing an expose of the Rat Line without bringing the wrath of his American employers down on his head. ‘Beats me,’ he said, with all the insouciance he could muster. ‘All I can think is that it must have been the fucking Ukrainians-either friends of Palychko who think I sold him out, or enemies angry that I tried to help him.’

  ‘It was Croats,’ Youklis insisted. Dempsey was saying nothing, just looking disappointed, as if Russell had let the side down by becoming a target.

  ‘What have I done to offend them?’

  ‘That’s what we want you to tell us,’ Youklis persisted.

  Russell shrugged. ‘I can’t. Unless I’ve trodden on some toes without realising it. I have talked to victims of the Ustashe …’

  ‘Why, for God’s sake?’

  ‘The same reason we held the Nuremberg Trials, so that war crimes won’t be forgotten. I’m a journalist, remember?’

  ‘So you keep telling me. I don’t suppose you’ve been playing around with a woman named Luciana Fratelli?’

  ‘What? Who’s she?’

  ‘Monsignor Kozniku’s secretary.’

  ‘Her? No, not my type. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Her body was found floating in the docks on Sunday evening. And Dempsey here had the mad idea that her boyfriend discovered the two of you were playing around behind his back, and decided to kill you both.’

  ‘Brilliant theory,’ Russell noted sarcastically. ‘She’s an Italian, not a Croat.’

  ‘She works for a Croat organisation,’ Dempsey insisted.

  ‘And I’ve only ever met her once,’ Russell went on, ignoring him. ‘When I collected Palychko’s papers.’ He guessed that the Croats, seeking the betrayer of their comrades, and knowing that she had access to the names, had tortured the truth out of her. He didn’t ask Youklis what state the body was in.

  ‘Right,’ Youklis was saying. ‘And there’s no other Croat woman you’ve been fucking, no Croats you owe money to?’

  ‘No and no. Maybe they really were after the Serb.’

  ‘Not according to our informants.’ Youklis sighed with apparent frustration. ‘But whatever you’ve done to piss them off-and I don’t for a goddamned minute think you’ve told us all you know-you’ve made yourself a target. And we can’t carry on babysitting you until they get bored and go home.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that you had been.’

  ‘You know what I mean. You’re no use to us here anymore. We’re sending you back to Berlin.’

  ‘Well, I won’t object.’

  ‘I didn’t think so. But on your way home, there’s a job that needs doing.’

  His punishment, Russell thought, or was he just being paranoid? ‘Where this time?

  ‘Prague.’

  ‘And what’s the job?’

  ‘You’ll be briefed in Vienna.’ Youklis extracted a sheet of paper and an envelope from his briefcase. ‘That man at that address, he’s expecting you sometime tomorrow. Your ticket’s in the envelope.’

  Russell’s first thought was that he would miss Sasa’s funeral, after promising her parents he’d be there. His second was that denying him even that modicum of atonement was strangely fitting. Killers shouldn’t turn up at a victim’s funeral.

  Youklis, bizarrely, was holding out a hand in farewell. Russell shook it, marvelling at the hypocrisy. The American disliked and distrusted him, and had cheerfully risked Russell’s life in Belgrade without a moment’s compunction, but no one could fault his manners.

  After Dempsey had dropped Russell off downtown, he started for home intending to pack, and then realised he couldn’t cope with any more of Marko’s grief at this particular moment. Instead, he ate a final dinner at his favourite restaurant, and then sat out in the Piazza dell Unita, watching the sunset until the darkness was almost complete. Walking back up the hill he stopped at a public telephone to ring Artucci’s two contact numbers, but no one answered at either. The Italian was long gone, Russell guessed-either communing with the fishes, or halfway to Sicily.

  He approached the ravaged hostel with caution, but no one was lurking in the piazza’s shadows with murderous intent. Two of Sasa’s younger siblings were sitting on the stairs, their bodies listless, their faces full of dull resentment. As well they might be, he thought, shutting the door to his room, but taking the faces in with him. He should be glad to be alive, he thought, but that feeling was beyond him.

  Wednesday morning brought rain and a letter from Eva Kempka. Effi had twice tried to call her on the previous day, but each time the phone had kept ringing. That and a line in the letter-‘i know it’s ridiculous, but I think I’m being watched’-convinced her a visit to Kreuzberg was in order.

  Eva lived opposite an infants’ school, just around the corner from Russell’s pre-war home on Neuenburger Strasse. Block residents had been forbidden to open their windows when the heating was on, and sometimes Russell’s top-floor flat had grown so hot that they’d stretched out naked on his bed with a pair of borrowed film-set fans blowing right at them. The portierfrau Frau Heidegger had always called her John’s ‘fiancee’, and assuming she’d survived the war, would doubtless be pleased to hear of their marriage.

  Eva’s flat was on the second floor. There was no response to Effi’s first knock, nor to a louder second. The view through the keyhole was limited, and offered no clues to the tenant’s whereabouts. After finding that everyone else was out on that floor, she went down to the basement in search of the portierfrau.

  The woman in question was around fifty, unusually fat for post-war Berlin, and disinclined to be helpful, particularly when she found out who Effi was looking for. ‘Frau Kempka has been arrested,�
� she stated, almost triumphantly.

  ‘What for?’ Effi asked.

  ‘I don’t exactly know, but I’m sure we could both make a good guess. Your kind can hardly …’

  ‘My kind?’

  ‘You know what I mean. It’s still illegal, you know, despite everything that’s happened.’

  If the woman hadn’t been so fat, Effi thought, she’d be one of those people painting 88 on high walls and bridges-88 for HH or Heil Hitler. ‘I am not a lesbian,’ she told the portierfrau, adding a note of indignation for effect.

  ‘Oh. Well I’m sure I’ve seen you before.’

  On the silver screen or a wanted poster, Effi wondered. ‘Not here,’ she said.

  ‘So what did you want with Frau Kempka?’

  ‘I’m a work colleague,’ Effi improvised. ‘She hasn’t turned up, and her boss wants to know why.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘So when was she arrested?’

  ‘They came on Sunday afternoon. About four, I think.’

  ‘Were they German or Russian?’

  ‘They weren’t in uniform. The one who spoke was German, but the other one could have been Russian. He had that flat face they have.’

  ‘Did Eva, er, Frau Kempka resist?

  ‘Oh, she kicked up a right fuss, screaming her head off as they put her in the car.’

  ‘But no one tried to help her?’

  ‘Well, it was the police, and anyway, no one around here likes her kind.’

  ‘I understand. Look, if she comes back could you ask her to telephone Effi?’

  ‘Oh, I doubt she’ll be back. Like I said, it is still illegal.’

  ‘But if she does?’

  The woman was staring at her. ‘You’re Effi Koenen, aren’t you? I remember you in Mother. And what was that other one? More Than Brothers. Wonderful films. They knew how to make them before the war. Not like the moody nonsense they put out today. Would you give me your autograph?’

  Without waiting for an answer she ducked back inside for something to sign.