Zoo Station

by David Downing

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Do you want me to come with you? As cover or something?’

  ‘No thanks. You’d make me even more anxious.’ He kissed her, promised to ring the moment he had something to tell, and walked out to the car. There was no sign of the weekend sunshine – a thick blanket of almost motionless cloud hung over the city, low enough to brush the spires of the Memorial Church. As he drove on down Tauenzienstrasse, Russell decided to leave the car at home – the U-bahn seemed more anonymous. On arrival, he steeled himself to refuse a coffee from Frau Heidegger, but for once she wasn’t at home. He put on fresh clothes and was soon on the train to Neukölln.

  Zembski had the passport waiting in a desk drawer. ‘A nice job, if I say so myself,’ he muttered, using a photographer’s black cotton bag to pick it up and hand it over. ‘You should keep your own fingerprints off it,’ he advised. ‘And please – burn it the moment you’re finished with it. I’ve already burned the negatives.’

  ‘I will,’ Russell said, examining the photograph inside. It looked as though it had always been there.

  He walked back to the U-bahn station, hyper-conscious of the passport in his pocket. Pretending to be McKinley might get him through a spot check, but anything more rigorous and he’d be in real, real trouble. The passport was far too big to eat, though he supposed he could just tear the picture out and eat that. Explaining why he’d done so might prove difficult, though.

  He reminded himself that he was only guessing about the poste restante, but it didn’t feel like guessing – he knew it was there. Once on a train, he decided on another change of plan. The U-bahn might be anonymous, but he would be needing somewhere to read whatever it was McKinley had accumulated. He couldn’t take it to his own flat or Effi’s, and he had no desire to sit in a park or on a train with a pile of stolen documents on his knee. In the car, on the other hand, he could drive himself somewhere secluded and take his time. This seemed like such a good idea that he wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him earlier. How many other obvious possibilities had he failed to notice?

  Frau Heidegger was still out. He backed the Hanomag out of the courtyard, accelerated down Neuenburgerstrasse, and almost broad-sided a tram turning into Lindenstrasse. Calm down, he told himself.

  On the way to the old town his head raced with ideas for foiling discovery and capture. If he checked who was on normal duty in the poste restante, and then waited till whoever it was went to lunch, he’d probably be seen by someone less liable to go over the passport with a magnifying glass. Or would the lunchtime stand-in, being less used to the work, be more careful? A crowded post-office would give more people the chance of remembering him, an empty one would make him stand out.

  He parked the car on Heiligegeiststrasse, a hundred metres north of the block which housed the huge Post Office, and walked down to the main entrance. The poste restante section was on the second floor, a large high-ceilinged room with high windows. A line of upright chairs for waiting customers faced the two service windows. One of these was occupied, the other not.

  Heart thumping, Russell walked up to the available clerk and placed McKinley’s passport on the counter. ‘Anything for McKinley?’ he asked, in a voice which seemed to belong to someone else.

  The clerk took the briefest of looks at the passport and disappeared without a word. Would he come back with a sheaf of papers or a squad of Gestapo? Russell wondered. He stole a look at the other customer, a woman in her thirties who was just signing for a parcel. The clerk serving her was now looking at Russell. He looked away, and wondered whether to put the passport back in his pocket. He could feel the man still looking at him. Don’t do anything memorable, he told himself.

  His own clerk returned, quicker than Russell had dared hope, with a thick manila envelope. Letting this drop onto the counter with a thump, he reached underneath for a form. A couple of indecipherable squiggles later he pushed the form across for signing. Russell searched in vain for his pen, accepted the one offered with a superior smirk, and almost signed his own name. A cold sweat seemed to wash across his chest and down his legs as he scrawled an approximation of McKinley’s signature, accepted his copy of the receipt and picked up the proffered envelope. The five yards to the door seemed endless, the stairs an echo chamber of Wagnerian proportions.

  On the street outside a tram disgorging passengers was holding up traffic. Fighting the ludicrous temptation to run, Russell walked back towards his car, scanning the pavement opposite for possible watchers. As he waited to cross Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse he snuck a look back. There was no one there. If there had been, he told himself, they’d have seen the envelope and arrested him by now. He’d got away with it. For the moment, anyway.

  Much to his relief the car started straightaway. He turned onto Konigstrasse by the Post Office and headed up towards the railway bridge, chafing at the slowness of the tram in front of him. As he rounded Alexanderplatz he decided, at the last moment, that Landsbergerstrasse offered the quickest route out of the city, and almost collided with another car. Away to his right the grey bulk of the Alex leered down at him.

  He slowed the Hanomag and concentrated on driving the three kilometres to the city’s ragged edge without getting arrested. As he swung round Büschingplatz he thought for one dreadful moment that a traffic cop was flagging him down, and the beads of sweat were still clinging to his brow as he drove past the huge state hospital on the southern edge of the Friedrichshain. Another kilometre and he could smell the vast complex of cattle markets and slaughter houses that sprawled alongside the Ringbahn. As he reached the top of the bridge that carried the road over the railway by Landsbergerallee Station he had a brief panoramic view of the countryside to the east: the two small hills rising, almost apologetically, from the vast expanse of the Prussian plains.

  Mentally searching, earlier that day, for a safe place to study McKinley’s material, he had recalled a picnic with Thomas’ family on one of those hills. As he remembered it, a road ran south from Marzahn between them, and a winding access road led up to a picnic area on the hill nearest the city.

  His memory was correct. The road wound up through dark, dripping trees to the bald brow of the hill, where picnic tables had been arranged to take advantage of the view across the city. There was no one there. Russell parked in the allotted space behind the tables and gazed out through the windscreen at the distant city. The nearest clump of large buildings, which Thomas had pointed out on their previous visit, made up Berlin’s principal home for the mentally ill, the Herzberge Asylum. Which was highly apt, given the probable content of the reading matter on the seat beside him.

  He reached for the envelope and carefully prised it open. There were about fifty sheets of paper in all, a few in McKinley’s writing, most of them typed or printed. Russell skipped through them in search of Theresa Jürissen’s letter. He found it at the bottom of the pile, with a date – the date it had been written – scrawled in pencil across the right-hand corner. Going back through the other papers, Russell found other dates: McKinley had arranged his story in chronological order.

  The first document was a 1934 article from the Münchner Zeitung, a journalist’s eye-witness report of life in an asylum entitled ‘Alive Yet Dead.’ McKinley had underlined two sentences – ‘They vegetate in twilight throughout the day and night. What do time and space mean to them?’ – and added in the margin: ‘Or life and death?’ The second document was a story from the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps, about a farmer who had shot his mentally-handicapped son and the ‘sensitive’ judges who had all but let him off. A reader’s letter from the same magazine begged the authorities to find a legal and humane way of killing ‘defective’ infants.

  Russell skipped through several other letters in the same vein and numerous pages of unattributed statistics which demonstrated a marked decline in the space and resources devoted to each mental patient since 1933. So far, so predictable, Russell thought.

  The next item was an article by Kar
l Knab in the Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift journal. Again, McKinley had underlined one passage: ‘We have before us in these asylums, spiritual ruins, whose number is not insignificant, notwithstanding all our therapeutic endeavours, in addition to idiots on the lowest level, patient material which, as simply cost-occasioning ballast, should be eradicated by being killed in a painless fashion, which is justifiable in terms of the self-preservatory finance policy of a nation fighting for its existence, without shaking the cultural foundations of its cultural values.’ This was chilling enough, Russell thought, but who was Knab? He was obviously far from a lone voice in the wilderness, but that didn’t make him a spokesman for government.

  There was a lot of stuff on the Knauer boy, but most of it was in McKinley’s writing – guesses, suppositions, holes to be filled.

  It was the last few sheets of paper which really caught Russell’s attention. Most were from a memorandum by Doctor Theodore Morell, best known to the foreign press community as Hitler’s Quack. He had been given the task of gathering together everything written in favour of euthanasia over the last fifty years, with a view to formulating a draft law on ‘The Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life’. Those eligible included anyone suffering from mental or physical ‘malformation’, anyone requiring long-term care, anyone arousing ‘horror’ in other people or anyone situated on ‘the lowest animal level’. The Nazis qualified on at least two counts, Russell thought.

  As Theresa Jürissen had said, the main area of controversy among those who favoured such a law was the openness or otherwise of its administration. In this memorandum Morell concluded that secrecy was best, that parents would be much happier thinking that their child had simply succumbed to some illness or other. He hadn’t yet decided whether doctors should be involved in the actual killing of their patients, but he insisted on their compulsory registration of all congenitally ill patients.

  The final item was the letter, and Russell now realised why McKinley had been so excited by it. Theodore Morell might be Hitler’s doctor, but he was a private citizen, entitled to his own ideas, no matter how psychopathic they might be. The letter, though, was something else. It confirmed the gist of Morell’s memorandum under the imprint of the KdF, the Kanzlei des Führers. It tied Hitler to child-killing.

  Russell shook the papers together and stuffed them back into the envelope. After sliding the whole package under the passenger seat, he got out of the car and walked across the damp grass to the lip of the slope. A small convoy of military trucks was driving east down Landsbergerallee, a solitary car headed in the opposite direction. A dense layer of cloud still hung over the city.

  McKinley had had his story, Russell thought. The sort of story that young journalists dreamt of – one that saved lives and made you famous.

  But what was he, John Russell, going to do with it? Get rid of it, was the obvious answer. Along with the passport.

  He watched a distant Ringbahn train slide slowly out of sight near the slaughter houses. It might be the obvious answer, but something more courageous was required. He owed it to McKinley, and probably to himself. He owed it to all those thousands of children – tens of thousands, for all he knew – that a creep like Morell found ‘unworthy of life’.

  McKinley had probably thought his story would save them all. Russell had rather less faith in the power of the press, but having everything out in the open would at least make it more difficult for the bastards.

  How could he get the stuff to McKinley’s paper? Not by post, that was for sure. He’d have to carry it out himself, and that would be no fun whatever.

  How had McKinley planned to file the story? Or had he been just as stuck as he now was? That would explain why he’d put it in the poste restante.

  Which had been a good idea. And still was, Russell decided. Under his own name this time. The passport would have to go.

  But how could he get rid of it? Burning it made sense, but flames tended to be conspicuous, particularly on a day as dark as this one, and in any case he had no means of creating any. He could burn the damn thing in his apartment, but he felt reluctant to carry it a moment longer than he had to, and particularly reluctant to bring it home, where the Gestapo might be waiting on his sofa. Somewhere on the open road, he thought, with a good view in either direction. Back in the car, he slid it under his seat. Driving back down the hill he felt a strange urge to sing. Hysteria, he told himself.

  At the post office in Marzahn he bought a book of matches and – since it seemed less suspicious – a packet of cigarettes to go with them. He also purchased a large envelope which he addressed to himself, care of the poste restante in Potsdam – he had no desire to revisit the counter at Heiligegeiststrasse under a different name. He then used the public telephone to call Effi.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘Too wonderful to talk about,’ he said pointedly. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Trying to memorise my part.’

  ‘Can you meet me in the Zoo Station buffet?’ he asked. ‘At four o’clock,’ he added, checking his watch.

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  Once back on the Landsberg road Russell started looking for a suitable place to burn the passport. A mile or so short of the Ringbahn bridge he found a wide entrance-way to a farm track and pulled over. Retrieving the passport from under his seat he ripped it into separate pages and set light to the first one, holding it down between his knees until it was too hot to hold, then shifting it to and fro with his feet until all that remained were black flakes. With his other hand he wafted the resulting smoke out through the open windows.

  In the time it took him to burn the remaining five sheets only two lorries went by, and their drivers showed no interest in Russell’s slightly smoking car. He gathered the blackened remains in his handkerchief, which he knotted and placed in his pocket before resuming his journey. Twenty minutes later he consigned both handkerchief and contents to a lonely stretch of the scum-covered Luisenstrassekanal. The final remains of Zembski’s handiwork disappeared with a dull plop, leaving Russell with several burnt fingers to remember them by.

  It was almost three-fifteen. He got back in the Hanomag, and drove west towards Potsdamerplatz. The traffic round the southern edge of the Tiergarten was busy for the time of day, but he reached his destination – a street halfway between Effi’s flat and Zoo Station – with five minutes to spare. He parked facing the direction she would come from, assuming she hadn’t picked this day of all days to change her usual route.

  Ten minutes later she came into view, walking quickly in her high heels, a few wisps of dark hair floating free of the scarf and hat.

  She didn’t see him, and jumped with surprise when he told her to get in. ‘You said Zoo Station,’ she said angrily, as he moved the car down the road. As far as he could see no one had been following her.

  ‘That was for the benefit of anyone listening. I’ve got something to show you. In private.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just come to the flat then?’

  ‘Because,’ he explained, ‘anyone caught with this lot in their flat is likely to end up like McKinley.’

  ‘Oh.’ She was taken aback, but only for a second. ‘So where are we going?’

  ‘Along the canal, I thought, opposite the Zoo restaurant. There’s always people parked there.’

  ‘Mostly kissing and cuddling.’

  ‘We can always pretend.’

  Once they were there, Russell reached down for the manila envelope under Effi’s seat. Even with the assistance of the nearby streetlamp, reading was difficult, but he didn’t dare turn on the car’s internal light. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you don’t need to read all of this. These last few pages – he handed her Morell’s memo and Theresa’s letter – should be enough to convince Zarah.’

  ‘You want me to show them to her?’

  ‘God, no. I want you to tell her what they are and what’s in them. She’ll believe you. If you tell her, she won’t need
to see them.’

  ‘Okay.’ Effi started to read, her face increasingly frozen in an expression of utter disgust. Russell stared out of the window, watching the last of the daylight fade. A coal barge puttered by on the canal, the owner’s dog howling his response to an unknown animal’s cry emanating from deep within the zoo. ‘My country,’ Effi murmured, as she moved on to the next sheet.

  She read the whole memorandum, and then the KdF letter. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘If she’d kept that appointment, Lothar would be on a list by now.’

  ‘And it won’t be an easy list to get off,’ Russell said.

  They sat there in silence as another barge went by. In the Zoo restaurant across the water someone was stacking dishes.

  ‘What can we do?’ Effi wanted to know.

  ‘I don’t know. But you can tell Zarah you’re convinced. And tell her I’m destroying the papers.’

  ‘You’re not going to?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not yet, anyway. I’m going to put them somewhere safe for a while.’

  She gave him a searching look, as if she wanted to reassure herself of who he was. ‘All those children,’ she said.

  ‘Achievements of the Third Reich’

  After the excitement of the previous day, Russell spent Tuesday trying to work. The third article for Pravda was due by the end of the week, and one of the Fleet Street heavies wanted a second ‘Ordinary Germans’ piece before committing themselves to a series. It was write-by-numbers stuff, but he kept finding his mind drifting away from the subjects at hand, usually in the direction of potential threats to his liberty.

  If the SD had the same bright idea about the poste restante that he had had, and checked through the records, they’d discover that McKinley had collected something nine days after his death. Everyone knew that Himmler was prone to strange flights of dark fantasy – rumour had it that SS agents were searching for the elixir of eternal life in Tibet – but he’d probably draw the line at mail-collecting ghosts. A light bulb would go on over his head, complete with the word-bubble: ‘It must have been someone else!’ And who would he and his minions think of first.