Zoo Stationee

by David Downing

  The town, though pleasant enough, suffered in comparison to Cracow. Its churches were not quite as beautiful, its streets not quite as charming, its square—the Stary Rynek—not quite as grand. As he wandered somewhat aimlessly around the city center he noticed several faded German names on streets and buildings, but the German language was still audible on those same streets, along with Polish and Yiddish. It would take another war, Russell thought, before the winners could take it all.

  He dined in the hotel restaurant. The veal escalopes—zrazikis—were excellent, the wine surprisingly good, but neither could dispel his deepening depression. It wasn’t just McKinley and Wiesner; he had hardly spent two waking hours with Effi since Rügen Island, and his contact with Paul since returning from England had consisted of two friendly, but brief, telephone conversations. And here he was in darkest Posen, waiting for Shchepkin to go through one of his cloak-and-dagger mating rituals.

  He went back to his room, hoping against hope for a simple knock on the door. An hour or so later he got one, but it wasn’t Shchepkin. A short woman in a long skirt and blouse brushed past him and into the room before he could say anything.

  “Close the door, Mr. Russell,” she said. The language was definitely German, but not a sort that Russell had ever heard before.

  The woman had roughly parted blond hair which just failed to reach her shoulders, blue eyes, thin lips, and heavily accented cheekbones. In another life she might have been attractive, Russell thought, but in this one she wasn’t really trying. She wore no make-up, and her cream-colored blouse badly needed a wash. He now remembered seeing her on the other side of the dining-room, arguing with one of the waiters.

  “John Russell,” she said, as much to herself as him. “I am your new contact.”

  “Contact with whom?” he asked. It was hard to imagine her as a Gestapo agent provocateur, but how would he know?

  “My name is Irina Borskaya,” she said patiently. “I am here in place of Comrade Shchepkin,” she added, glancing around the room and finding a chair.

  “Has something happened to Comrade Shchepkin?” Russell asked.

  “He has been reassigned. Now, please sit down Mr. Russell. And let us get down to business.”

  Russell did as he was told, feeling a pang of sorrow for Shchepkin. He could see him on the Cracow citadel—“You really should wear a hat!” But why assume the worst? Perhaps he really had been reassigned. Stalin couldn’t kill everyone who’d ever worked for him.

  He pulled the latest article out of his briefcase and handed it over. She took a cursory glance at the first page and placed it in her lap. “You were asked to talk to armament workers.”

  He recounted his visit to the Greiner Works, the conversations he had had with Labor Front officials and ordinary workers. She listened intently but took no notes. “Is that all?” she said when he was finished.

  “For the moment,” Russell said. “Where is your accent from?” he asked, partly out of curiosity, partly to take her mind off his skimpy research.

  “I was born in Saratov,” she said. “In the Volga region. Now, we have another job for you.”

  Here it comes, Russell thought—the point of the whole exercise.

  “We need you to collect some papers from one of our people and bring them out of Germany.”

  Not a chance, Russell thought. But refuse nicely, he told himself. “What sort of papers?” he asked.

  “That doesn’t concern you.”

  “It does if you expect me to bring them out.”

  “They are naval plans,” she said grudgingly.

  Russell burst out laughing.

  “What is so amusing?” she asked angrily.

  He told her about Shchepkin’s comment in Danzig—“none of those naval plans Sherlock Holmes is always having to recover.”

  She wasn’t amused. “This is not a Sherlock Holmes story—the comrade in Kiel has risked his life to get a copy of the German fleet dispositions for the Baltic.”

  “Then why not risk it again to bring them out?” Russell argued.

  “His life is worth something,” she said tartly, and quickly realized that she had gone too far. “He is too valuable to risk,” she amended, as if he might have mistaken her meaning.

  “Then why not send someone else in to get them?”

  “Because we have you,” she said. “And we have already established that you can come and go without arousing suspicion. Were you searched on your way here, or on your way to Cracow?”

  “No, but I wasn’t carrying anything.”

  She put the article on the carpet beside her chair, crossed her legs and smoothed out the skirt on her thigh with her left hand. “Mr. Russell, are you refusing to help us with this?”

  “I’m a journalist, Comrade Borskaya. Not a secret agent.”

  She gave him an exasperated look, delved into her skirt pocket, and brought out a rather crumpled black and white photograph. It was of him and Shchepkin, emerging from the Wawel Cathedral.

  Russell looked at it and laughed.

  “You are easily amused,” she said.

  “So they tell me. If you send that to the Gestapo I might get thrown out of Germany. If I get caught with your naval plans it’ll be the axe. Which do you think worries me more?”

  “If we send this to the Gestapo you are certain to be deported, certain to lose your son and your beautiful bourgeois girlfriend. If you do this job for us, the chances of your being caught are almost nonexistent. You will be well-paid, and you will have the satisfaction of supporting world socialism in its struggle against fascism. According to Comrade Shchepkin, that was once important to you.”

  “Once.” The clumsiness of the approach angered him more than the blackmail itself. He got up off the bed and walked across to the window, telling himself to calm down. As he did so, an idea came to him. An idea that seemed as crazy as it was inevitable.

  He turned to her. “Let me sleep on this,” he said. “Think about it overnight,” he explained, in response to her blank expression.

  She nodded. “Two PM in the Stary Rynek,” she said, as if she’d had the time and place reserved.

  “It’s a big square,” Russell said.

  “I’ll find you.”

  SUNDAY WAS OVERCAST BUT DRY. Russell had coffee in one of the many Stary Rynek cafés, walked up past Garbary station to the Citadel, and found a bench overlooking the city. For several minutes he just sat there enjoying the view: the multiplicity of spires, the Warta River and its receding bridges, the smoke rising from several thousand chimneys. “See how much peace the earth can give,” he murmured to himself. A comforting thought, provided you ignored the source. It was a line from Mayakovsky’s suicide note.

  Was his own plan a roundabout way of committing suicide?

  Paul and Effi would miss him. In fact, he liked to think they’d both be heartbroken, at least for a while. But he was neither indispensable nor irreplaceable. Paul had other people who loved him, and so did Effi.

  All of which would only matter if he got caught. The odds, he thought, were probably on his side. The Soviets would have no compunction about risking him, but their precious naval plans were another matter—they wouldn’t risk those on a no-hope adventure. They had to believe it would work.

  But what did he know? There could be ruses within ruses; this could be some ludicrously Machiavellian plot the NKVD had thought up on some drunken weekend and set in motion before they sobered up. Or everyone concerned could be an incompetent. Or just having a bad day.

  “Shit,” he muttered to himself. He liked the idea of the Soviets having the German fleet dispositions for the Baltic. He liked the idea of doing something, no matter how small, to put a spoke in the bastards’ wheels. And he really wanted the favors he intended to ask in return.

  But was he fooling himself? Falling for all the usual nonsense, playing boys’ games with real ammunition. When did self-sacrifice become a warped form of selfishness?

  There were no answers to any of this, he realized. It was like jumping through an open window with a fuzzy memory of which floor you
were on. If it turned out to be the ground floor, you bounced to your feet with an heroic grin. The fifth, and you were jam on the pavement. Or, more likely, a Gestapo courtyard.

  A life concerned only with survival was a thin life. He needed to jump. For all sorts of reasons, he needed to jump.

  He took a long last look at the view and started back down the slope, imagining the details of his plan as he did so. A restaurant close to the Stary Rynek provided him with a plate of meat turnovers, a large glass of Silesian beer, and ample time to imagine the worst. By two o’clock he was slowly circling the large and well-populated square, and manfully repressing the periodic impulse to simply disappear into one of the adjoining streets.

  She appeared at his shoulder halfway through his second circuit, her ankle-length coat unbuttoned to reveal the same skirt and blouse. This time, he thought, there was worry in the eyes.

  She managed to leave the question unspoken for about thirty meters, and then asked it with almost angry abruptness: “So, will you do this job for us?”

  “With one condition,” Russell told her. “I have a friend, a Jewish friend, in Berlin. The police are looking for him, and he needs to get out of the country. You get him across the border, and I will do the job for you.”

  “And how are we supposed to get him across the border?” she asked, suspicion in her tone.

  “The same way you always have,” Russell said. “I was in the Party myself once—remember? I knew people in the Pass-Apparat,” he added, stretching the truth somewhat. “Everyone knew about the escape routes into Belgium and Czechoslovakia.”

  “That was many years ago.”

  “Not according to my information,” Russell bluffed.

  She was silent for about fifty meters. “There are a few such routes,” she admitted. “But they are not safe. If they were, we would not be asking you to bring out these papers. Maybe one person in three gets caught.”

  “In Berlin it’s more like three out of three.”

  She sighed. “I can’t give you an answer now.”

  “I understand that. Someone will have to contact me in Berlin to make the arrangements for my friend’s journey, and to give me the details of the job you want me to do. Tell your bosses that the moment my friend calls me from outside the Reich, I will collect your papers from wherever they are and bring them out.”

  “Very well,” she said after a moment’s thought. “You had better choose a point of contact in Berlin.”

  “The buffet at Zoo Station. I shall be there every morning this week. Between nine and ten.”

  She nodded approvingly. “And a mark of identification. A particular book works well.”

  “Storms of Steel? No, half the customers could be reading that. Something English.” He mentally pictured his bookshelves at Neuenburgerstrasse. “Dickens. Martin Chuzzlewit.”

  “A good choice,” she agreed, though whether for literary or other reasons she didn’t say. “Your contact will say that he’s been meaning to read it, and will ask you if it’s any good.”

  “He?” Russell asked.

  “Or she,” she conceded.

  NINE O’CLOCK ON MONDAY morning found him in the Zoo Station buffet, his dog-eared copy of Martin Chuzzlewit prominently displayed on the counter beside his cup of mocha. He wasn’t expecting the Soviets to respond that quickly, and he wasn’t disappointed—10:00 came and went with no sign of any contact. He collected the car from outside the zoo and drove across town to the Wiesners. There was no obvious police presence outside, which probably meant that they’d recruited some local busybody for their observation chores. A curtain twitched as he walked up the outside steps, but that could have been coincidence.

  The sense of raw pain had gone from the Wiesners’ flat—replaced by a grim busyness, a determination to do whatever needed doing. There was grief to spare, the faces seemed to say—no need to spend it all at once.

  And there was good news, Frau Wiesner told him. They had old friends in England, she said, in Manchester. The Doctor had written to them several weeks ago, and a reply had finally arrived, offering a temporary home for the girls. They had tickets to travel a week from Thursday.

  “I may have more good news,” Russell told her. “I have friends who may be willing to smuggle Albert across the border.”

  Mother and daughters all stared at him in amazement. “What friends?” Frau Wiesner asked.

  “The comrades,” he said simply. The comrades they had both abandoned, he thought.

  “But I had no idea you were. . . .”

  “Like you, I left a long time ago. And I can’t go into details about the arrangements. But if I can fix things, can you get in touch with Albert at short notice?”

  “Yes.” The hope in her eyes was painful to see.

  “And will he trust me, do you think?

  She smiled at that. “Yes, he likes you.”

  “And if we can get him out, there is nothing to keep you here?”

  “The lack of a visa. Nothing else.”

  “I’m still working on that.”

  HE TRIED TO WRITE THAT AFTERNOON, but the words refused to matter. As evening fell he took himself off to the Alhambra and sat through an overblown Hollywood musical, murmuring sour asides to himself in the dark. The film had been made on the sort of budget which would feed a small country, but was mercifully devoid of consciousness-raising pretensions. The consciousness-lowering effect was presumably accidental.

  The Ku’damm was gearing up for the night as he emerged, thick with human and motorized traffic. He walked slowly westward with no real destination in mind, looking in windows, studying faces, wondering if the Soviets would agree to his terms. People lined up outside the theaters and cinemas, streamed in and out of the restaurants, most of them laughing or happily talking, living the moment as best they could. A police car careened up the center of the wide road, its siren parting the traffic like waves, but the visible signs of a police state were thin on the ground. In fact, Russell thought, it was the absence of violence which told the real story. The blood and the broken glass, the groups of men on corners, clutching their razors and itching for a brawl—they were all gone. The only violent lawbreakers left on the streets of Berlin were the authorities.

  He walked back down the opposite pavement, picked up the car, and drove home.

  TUESDAY OFFERED MORE OF THE SAME: waiting in vain at the buffet counter, working with words like a juggler in mittens. Frau Heidegger seemed irritating rather than quirky, Paul almost provokingly gung-ho in his description of the previous Saturday’s Jungvolk outing. Even the weather was bad: A cold rain fell throughout the day and into the evening, creating lake-size puddles in many of the streets. The Hanomag, as Russell discovered on his way to collect Effi, had a less-than-waterproof floor.

  At least her film was finished. “I have seen the error of my ways, and a good wife is all I want to be!” she exclaimed as they left the studio. “But only,” she added as they reached the car, “after I’ve slept for at least a week. In the meantime you may wait on me hand and foot.”

  Later, he was still working up to telling her about his weekend in Posen when he realized she’d fallen asleep. Which was all for the best, he decided. There’d be time enough for explanations if and when the Soviets said yes. Looking down at her sleeping face, the familiar lips ever-so-slightly curled in a sleeper’s smile, the whole business seemed utterly absurd.

  CONTACT WAS MADE ON THURSDAY. The buffet clock was reaching toward ten when a man loomed over Russell’s shoulder and almost whispered the prearranged sentence. “Let’s walk,” he added, before Russell had time to declaim on the virtues or otherwise of Martin Chuzzlewit.

  The man made for the door with what seemed unnecessary haste, leaving Russell floundering in his wake. He seemed very young, Russell thought, but he looked anonymous enough: average height and build, tidy hair and a typical German face. His suit was wearing at the elbows, his shoes at the heels.

  At the station exit the man turned toward the nearest Tiergarten entrance, pausing for a nervous look back as they reached it. Russell
glanced back himself: The street was empty. Ahead of them, a few solitary walkers were visible among the leafless trees.

  “It’s not a bad day,” the young man said, looking up at the mostly gray sky. “We will walk to Bellevue Station, like friends enjoying a morning stroll in the park.”

  They set off through the trees.

  “I am Gert,” the young man said. “And it is agreed. We will take your friend across the Czech border, and you will bring the papers to us in Prague.” He fell silent as a steady stream of walkers passed them in the opposite direction—a middle-aged couple and their poodles, a younger couple arm in arm, an older man with a muzzled Doberman—and paused to offer Russell a cigarette on the Lichtenstein Bridge across the Landwehrkanal. His hand, Russell noticed reluctantly, was shaking slightly.