‘Good book?’ the waitress asked him. ‘Chuzzlewit,’ she said with a laugh, ‘what sort of name is that?’
‘English,’ he told her.
‘That explains it. What would you like?’
He ordered a Goldwasser, and looked round the room. A few faces had looked his way when he entered, but no one had shown any obvious interest since. One of the sailors stood up, playfully pulled his female companion to her feet, and headed for a door in the back wall. As it opened, the bottom of a staircase came into view.
The Goldwasser arrived, and a female companion shortly thereafter. She was about his age, thin verging on scrawny, with dark-circled eyes and a tired smile. ‘Buy me a drink, Herr Russell,’ she suggested in a low voice, before he could say he was waiting for someone else. She leaned across the table, put a hand over his, and whispered: ‘After we’ve had a drink we’ll go upstairs, and you’ll get what you came for.’
He ordered her drink, a sweet martini.
‘I am Geli,’ she said, stroking his hand with an absent-minded air. ‘And what are you doing in Kiel?’
‘I’m a journalist,’ he said, joining the charade. ‘I’m writing a story about the widening of the Kiel Canal.’
‘Extra width is always good,’ she said wryly. ‘Let’s go up. I can see you’re impatient.’
He followed her up two flights of stairs, watching the hem of her red dress swish against her black-stockinged calves. There were four rooms on the second floor, and pleasure was being noisily taken in at least one of them. Through the open door of a bathroom he caught sight of a plump blonde wearing only black stockings and a suspender belt, drying herself with a towel.
‘In here,’ Geli said, opening a door and gesturing him in. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes,’ she added, closing it behind him.
There was a window that overlooked an alley, and a threadbare carpet that covered half the wooden floor. A bare light bulb illuminated a large unmade bed which was supported in one corner by a pile of books. On the bed’s wooden headboard someone had written ‘Goebbels was here,’ and someone else had added ‘So that’s how I got this disease.’ Enough to put anyone off, Russell thought.
The door opened and a man came in, closely followed by Geli. He was younger than her, but not by much. He had fair hair, blue eyes and skin which had seen too much sun and wind. He was wearing a sailor’s greatcoat.
He shook Russell’s hand, and sat down heavily on the bed, causing it to creak alarmingly. Geli stood with her back to the window, half-sitting on the sill, watching the man unpick the seam of his coat lining with a penknife. It only took a few seconds. Reaching inside he pulled out a small sheaf of papers and handed them over to Russell.
It looked like a small sheaf, but there were more than thirty sheets of text and diagrams, all copied out onto the thinnest available paper. ‘These are not the originals,’ Russell thought out loud.
‘If they were, the Navy would know they were gone,’ the man said wearily, as if he was explaining matters to a particularly obtuse child.
‘Are there other copies?’ Russell asked.
‘One. For your successor, should you fail.’
‘And then you’ll need another one for his successor.’
The man offered him a grudging smile. ‘Something like that.’
‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Why not send this out by radio?
The man nodded at the papers. ‘Look at it. By the time we got that lot out every direction-finding squad in Germany would be banging on our door. And you can’t convey maps by radio, not with any ease.’ He offered a fleeting smile. ‘We used to post stuff to the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, but they got wise. They open everything now. Everything.’
Russell folded the papers in two and stuffed them into his inside pocket. ‘I have a better hiding place in my car,’ he explained.
‘Thank God for that. Look, I must go before…’
There was a sudden roar from below. ‘The stormtroopers have arrived,’ Geli said. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told Russell, ‘they’re not here for you.’
‘They fuck our women, fuck our country, and soon they’ll be fucking Europe,’ the man said. ‘But we’ll have them in the end.’ He shook Russell’s hand again and wished him good luck. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he told Geli, and slipped out of the door.
‘Just wait a few minutes,’ she told Russell, ‘and I’ll take you down.’
They were long minutes, but they eventually passed. As they went down, a storm trooper was coming up, almost dragging a girl in his wake. ‘Slow down, Klaus,’ Geli pleaded with him – ‘she’ll be no use to you unconscious.’ He grinned at her, as if consciousness was neither here nor there.
The noise from the bar had grown deafening. ‘The back door might be better,’ Geli said, and led him out through a bright but empty kitchen. ‘Just right and right again,’ she said, and closed the door behind him, removing most of the light. Russell felt his way along the back wall to the building’s corner, from where he could make out the dimly lit road. As he started down the side of the building a silhouette loomed in the mouth of the alley, a man in high boots, with a cap on his head.
Russell froze, heart thumping in his chest. The man was moving towards him, reaching for something with his hand…
His trouser buttons. A couple of metres into the alley he turned, pulled out his penis and, with a loud exhalation, arced a fierce stream of dull golden piss against the wall. Russell stood there, petrified of making any movement, wondering whether it would ever end. A ship in the bay sounded a long and mournful blow on its horn, but still the piss streamed out, forcing the man to shift his feet away from the spreading lake.
The arc finally collapsed. The stormtrooper gave a few pumps for luck, stuffed himself into his trousers and headed for the alley entrance. And then he was gone.
Russell hurried forward, hoping to escape before someone else had the same idea. He almost stepped in the prodigious puddle, but reached the entrance without mishap. His car was sitting across the road, hopelessly sandwiched between the two open lorries which had brought the storm troopers.
He hurried across, climbed in and started the engine. Five or six manoeuvres later, he was still only halfway out. The temptation to ram the lorries was almost overwhelming, but he doubted whether the Hanomag had the weight to move them if he did. Fighting back desperation, he shifted the car, inch by inch, further into the road. He was almost there when several storm troopers emerged from the door across the road and started shouting at him. He was about to try a final, metal-scraping, lunge for freedom when he realised they were killing themselves with laughter. They had hemmed him in as a practical joke.
He opened the window and made a wry face, acknowledging their brilliant sense of humour. Three more manoeuvres and he was free, U-turning the Hanomag in front of them with a triumphant raise of the hand. As he headed south towards the centre of Gaarden he could see them happily waving goodbye in his rearview mirror.
His hotel bed was waiting for him, but it didn’t seem far enough away. He wanted, he realised, to get out of Kiel, and as quickly as possible. It was still only nine – time enough to find a small guesthouse in a small town, somewhere between here and Lübeck.
He took the more northerly of the Lübeck roads, and once in open country found a wide verge on which to pull over. With ears alert for approaching traffic he turned on the car light, opened up the false bottom of the suitcase, and placed the papers inside. He had planned to copy them for the British that night, but he’d need a whole weekend to copy this lot. He would have to be selective. They’d be none the wiser.
About ten kilometres further on, he found the town and guesthouse he was looking for. It wasn’t much more than a village bar, but the woman who ran it was happy to provide him with a room. ‘It was my son’s,’ she said, without explaining where he’d gone. The sundry toys and books suggested he was expected back.
Once
locked in, Russell retrieved the papers from the false bottom and skip-read through them. They were what Irina Borskaya had claimed they were – a detailed rundown of the German Navy’s current and contingency disposition in the Baltic. Most of the key information seemed to be included in the three maps which accompanied the text, and Russell set out to copy these. The British, he thought, should be thankful for whatever he could give them.
The maps were highly detailed, and it took him almost four hours to finish his work. He felt as if he had only just got to sleep when the landlady knocked on his door suggesting breakfast, and it was indeed only seven o’clock. Still, breakfast was good, and the sun was already above the horizon. Her son, it transpired, had joined the Navy.
Russell set out for Berlin soon after nine, papers and copies hidden in the false bottom, the suitcase itself wedged under the eye-catching model of the Preussen. There was no need, of course – no roadblock, no spot-checks, no officious small-town policemen eager to find fault with a car bearing a Berlin licence plate. Soon after one, he parked the Hanomag outside Zoo Station, pulled out the suitcase and nervously carried it in to the left luggage.
‘Nice day,’ the clerk said, taking the case and handing over a numbered ticket.
‘So far,’ Russell agreed. He rang Effi from the telephone stand along the hall and told her things had gone to plan. She sounded as relieved as he felt. ‘I’m going home to collect some clean clothes, and do a bit more shopping for Paul,’ he told her. ‘I’ll see you about six.’
She told him they had tickets for a revue at one of the smaller theatres near Alexanderplatz, and he tried, in vain, to sound enthusiastic. ‘I’m just tired,’ he explained. ‘I’ll be fine by then.’
He certainly felt safer with the suitcase squirreled away in Zoo Station’s cavernous left luggage. There was always the ticket of course, but if the worst came to the worst that was small enough to eat. Back at the car, he examined the model ship for the first time in daylight, and congratulated himself on his choice – it really was beautiful.
Frau Heidegger thought so too, and conjured up a bright red ribbon which she’d been saving for such an eventuality. There were messages from both his agents: Jake Brandon had sent a sarcastic wire from New York demanding copy, and Solly Bernstein had phoned to tell Russell that ‘his friends’ had arrived in London. He was still smiling when he reached his third floor room.
After a much-needed bath and change of clothes, he piled several more changes into his usual suitcase and carried it out to the car. Lunch at Wertheim was followed by a leisurely stroll round the toy department, and the acquisition of two other gifts which Paul had expressed an interest in. A book shop further down Leipzigstrasse supplied a third. He was probably spending too much, but he might never get another chance.
He managed to stay awake through the revue, but was unable to conceal his dismay when Effi suggested dancing. She took pity on him. ‘I know what’ll wake you up,’ she said as they climbed the stairs to her flat, and she was right. Afterwards, she showed him what she had bought for Paul – the gorgeous encyclopaedia of animals which he had admired on their last visit to the zoo shop.
Next morning they joined several hundred other Berliners on the sidewalk of the Ku’damm, well-wrapped against the cold at their outside table, rustling newspapers, sipping coffee and nibbling cake. This was how it used to be, Russell thought – ordinary Germans doing ordinary things, enjoying their simple civilised pleasures.
His newspaper, though, told a different story. While he’d been slinking round Kiel, the Czechs had lost patience with the German-backed Slovaks, sacking their provincial government and arresting their prime minister. The Beobachter was apoplectic – what nation could countenance such a level of disturbance just beyond its borders? Some sort of German intervention seemed inevitable, but then it always had. If the separatists won then Czechoslovakia would disintegrate; if denied, their campaign would simply continue. Either set of circumstances would generate enough turmoil for Hitler’s purposes.
Looking up from his paper, the sidewalk café-dwellers no longer seemed content in their simple pleasures. They looked tense, weary, anxious. They looked as though a war was hanging over their heads.
After lunch with Effi he drove over to Grunewald, dropped off his presents, collected his son and gave him a birthday hug. Twenty minutes later they were picking up Thomas in Lutzow and heading for the Plumpe. Thomas’s son Joachim had started his arbeitsdienst the previous week, and was repairing roads in the Moselle valley.
The weather was fine, but the team proved incapable of providing Paul with a birthday present. They lost 2-0, and were lucky not to lose by more. Paul’s despondency didn’t last long – by the time they were halfway to his home he was full of the party in prospect, and forgetful of Hertha’s dark betrayal.
Effi was already there when they arrived, talking happily to Thomas’s fourteen-year-old daughter Lotte. Over the next hour around a dozen of Paul’s friends – all of them male – were delivered by their parents, some in their Sunday best, some, for reasons best known to their parents, in their Jungvolk uniforms. The games they played seem surprisingly violent, but that, Russell supposed, was part of the same depressing mind-set. At least they hadn’t replaced ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ with ‘pin the nose on the Jew.’ Yet. He would write a piece on children for the ‘Ordinary Germans’ series, he decided. When he got back from Prague.
Still, Paul seemed happy and popular, which was something to celebrate. The adults – Ilse and Matthias, Thomas and his wife Hanna, Russell and Effi – sat together in the huge kitchen, drinking Matthias’s excellent wine. They smiled and laughed and toasted each other, but the talk was of happier times in the past, of how things used to be. At one point, watching Ilse as she listened to somebody else, Russell had a mental picture of her in Moscow fifteen years earlier, eyes alive with hopes of a better world. Now all of them were backing into the future, frightened to look ahead. They had their own bubble, but for how long?
The evening ended, bringing tomorrow that much closer. After congratulating each other on how well their presents had been received, both he and Effi lapsed into silence for most of the journey home. They were turning into her street when she suddenly suggested accompanying him to Prague.
‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in us both taking the risk.’ He switched off the car. ‘And you’re a German – they’d try you for treason. They’d have more options with me.’
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Swapping me for one of their spies, maybe.’
‘Or just shooting you.’
‘I doubt it. But I think having you there would make me more nervous. And more likely to give myself away.’
She searched his face, and seemed satisfied with what she found. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘It’s no fun just waiting by the phone, you know.’
‘I know.’
Upstairs, he noticed the script on her dressing table and had an idea. ‘Can you get another copy for yourself?’ he asked.
‘I don’t see why not. I could say I burnt the first one in a fit of despair. But why?’
‘I thought I’d take it with me in the suitcase. Camouflage. And one of your publicity shots would be good.’
She went and got one, a head and shoulders shot taken a couple of years earlier.
‘Your face would distract anyone,’ he said.
It was still dark when Russell woke and he lay there for a while, listening to Effi’s breathing and enjoying the warmth of her body. At seven-thirty he forced himself out of bed, washed and dressed in the bathroom, and finally woke her to say goodbye as she had insisted he must. She enfolded him in a sleepy embrace, then swung her legs out of bed and arched her back in a huge stretch. As he descended the stairs she stood in her nightdress by the half-open door, blowing him a farewell kiss.
Berlin was already waking to another working week. The Avus Speedway was busy, but only in the other direction, and he reac
hed Potsdam well before nine. After parking the Hanomag near the main post office in Wilhelmplatz, he lingered over breakfast in the coffee shop next door. The newspapers, as expected, were revelling in the misery of the Czechs.
At ten past nine he presented himself at the poste restante desk, and signed for the familiar envelope. Walking back to the Hanomag, he felt like a man who’d just been handed a ticking bomb. Not to worry, he thought – he’d soon have two.
The drive back was slower, and it was gone ten when he turned off the Ku’damm and saw the glass roof of Zoo Station framed by the buildings on either side of Joachimsthaler-strasse. He parked the Hanomag near the Tiergarten gate which he and Gert had used, inserted the folded envelope in his inside coat pocket, picked up the suitcase, and walked back to the nearest station entrance.
There was a queue for the left luggage, but no sign of the police, or of anyone loitering suspiciously. When his turn came Russell handed over his ticket, watched the clerk disappear, and waited for a thousand sirens to go off. A child in the queue behind him suddenly screeched, making him jump. A train rumbled overhead, but the roof didn’t fall. The clerk returned with the suitcase, took Russell’s money, and handed it over.
Next stop was the men’s toilet. The cubicles were small, and entering one with two suitcases required a level of planning which was almost beyond him. He clattered his way in, locked the door behind him, and sat on the seat for a few moments to recover what fragments of equanimity he still retained. The walls didn’t reach to the ceiling, but the adjoining cubicles were both empty, at least for the moment.
Zoo Station Page 28