The Berlin Girl

by Mandy Robotham

  ‘Don’t you see, Sara? I have to go. I have to do my bit, take part.’ Rubin’s normal persuasiveness verged on pleading.

  ‘But what if something happens to you? It’s dangerous!’ Her voiced muffled by flesh, then clearer as her head snapped up, dejected. ‘I thought it was enough you went to the meetings, but this … I couldn’t bear losing you, Rubin. Not after everyone else.’

  ‘But you won’t, I promise,’ he said, pulling her head into the crook of his arm, her hair coarse and dusty from her factory job, filthy and exhausting work but which she did without complaint. ‘I’ll be careful, my love. I’ll come back to you. For you.’

  He rubbed his thumb on her cheek, knew he would find tears to brush away. ‘But the underground, they’ve worked so hard to create this route, and it’s my place to help. It’s not just for Elias. It’s for so many others. And you know how important the letters are for us, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she sniffed. ‘And I’m proud of you, Rubin. I am. But I’m also afraid. That’s normal, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Sara, it is,’ he murmured. Though Rubin Amsel wasn’t quite sure what ‘afraid’ meant any longer; blended so expertly these days with terror, defeat, despondency and death. It was just another word. Feeling had become a luxury he couldn’t afford.

  44

  A Welcome Breath

  Berlin and Paris, 16th May 1939

  Despite an ever-present shroud of threat, the first few days of May settled into a lull. It seemed the perfect time for Georgie to recharge herself, especially when Kasper sent apologies for another delay in their meeting, causing irritation then relief. His deferral provided the opportunity to exit Berlin for a few days.

  As the train crawled out of Zoo station, she felt the tension seep from her shoulders, replaced with an expectation of light over dark. Rod greeted her in his own special way, showing her the sights of Paris in a whirlwind week. They ate pastries, and a lot else besides – what would her mother think of her sampling snails? Rod introduced her to the bars he favoured and the friends within. He seemed content, and undeniably more relaxed than he had been in those final few weeks.

  ‘I’d lived with the rise of the Nazis for so many years I suppose I didn’t notice the tension creeping up alongside,’ he said. ‘Now I’m relatively free of it, I realise how Berlin has become such a pressure cooker.’

  ‘Waiting to explode?’ Georgie raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s inevitable, kiddo.’ He stared into the froth of his coffee. ‘Just make sure you have an escape route ready. Please.’

  ‘Surely foreign correspondents will be protected?’ she ventured. ‘We’ll still have reporting rights, war or not.’

  ‘Probably,’ Rod said. ‘But if you think life in Germany is oppressive now, imagine how it will be when Hitler has carte blanche to ride roughshod over everyone. Goebbels and Bauer too. The question is: will you want to be there?’

  Their conversation was timely; sitting in a café over newspapers and croissants, they learned six Britons had been expelled from Germany in some tit-for-tat political scrap, the chief correspondent on the Daily Express among them. Another empty spot at La Taverne.

  Hitler was increasingly pushing for control of Danzig city, and British fascist devotee Oswald Mosley had marched in London with 3,000 disciples in tow. The smattering of tables nudging the wide Parisian boulevard seemed a world away, spring sunshine lighting the sky and the mood. Couples were holding hands, friends talking with animation, and only a few military uniforms darkened the tone. This was how the majority of Europe, to the west of Germany at least, was living life. Unencumbered. And while Georgie was loving it, this precious contact with Rod, she couldn’t help thinking the approaching storm should be met with some preparation.

  Why wasn’t the rest of the world truly afraid? Did everyone have to live directly under Hitler’s tyranny to realise his vile capabilities?

  Leaving the beauty and freedom of Paris was a wrench, and seeing Rod’s form disappear as the train pulled away from the platform made her heart twist with sadness. At the other end, however, the familiarity of Berlin proved a strange comfort – the smell of bratwurst and the coffee stalls at the station. Yes, that added odour of mistrust too, but she had missed it all the same.

  Rubin was there to meet her, helping with her luggage into a taxi. ‘Herr Max has asked that I take you home – he wants to talk to you about something.’ He paused, coughed slightly and clarified. ‘We want to talk to you.’

  ‘Do you now?’ Georgie replied, though she was more intrigued than annoyed at the presumption. And she could never be irritated at Rubin.

  She was unable to be cross with Max either, waiting at Frida’s with a beautifully prepared dinner, plus cocktails. She eyed him suspiciously at first. ‘Who did this?’ she asked, gesturing to the table.

  ‘I did.’ He looked slightly affronted. ‘I can cook, you know. I’m not a total Neanderthal.’

  ‘Never said you were.’ Though she couldn’t disguise her sheepish presumption. Was it all for her and Rubin?

  ‘Where are Frida and Simone?’ Georgie looked around the empty flat.

  ‘At the cinema,’ he said. ‘German film – way beyond my language skills. Besides, Rubin and I have got a proposition for you.’

  ‘So, go on, I’m all ears.’ She sat down and eyed the food hungrily.

  Max and Rubin exchanged looks and Max nodded. ‘We’re going to make a trip to Sachsenhausen,’ the older man said.

  The transport of letters from Elias and others had been via a small underground resistance group, made up mainly of Jews, and Rubin admitted to being among the circle for some time.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you before because I was afraid of the implications for you,’ he went on. ‘That you might be put in a position to cover up for me.’

  ‘So why tell us now?’

  ‘Basically, I was very nosy and wheedled it out of him,’ Max cut in.

  The conduit for the letters was a night-time drop from a junior guard, paid handsomely for his services, and it was Rubin’s turn to pick up the package.

  ‘And I’ve volunteered us as drivers and look-outs,’ Max added, though Georgie guessed at a second motive – her being able to confirm it as the site of her evening with Kasper.

  It didn’t sound like much like a fun excursion to Georgie. Did she want to revisit memories from that dreadful evening? Definitely not. And yet, the temptation was too good. She would have been furious with Max if he had gone without telling her – and he knew it. He had read her perfectly, prodding her weak spot in helping the Amsels. Max, surely, was driven by excitement and subterfuge. And if she was entirely honest, duty was not her sole motivator either.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘When do we go?’

  45

  The Temple Revisited

  Oranienburg and Berlin, 28th May 1939

  The town of Oranienburg seemed different in the evening dusk; a small collection of squat stoical German houses gathered around the archetypal town square and train station. Georgie’s eyes darted back and forth the entire journey, attempting to prod at her memory. But nothing emerged; it had been dark during her last journey and her attention then focused firmly on Kasper and his amusement, with little hope of logging any landmarks.

  Max drove the borrowed car, its licence plate carefully doctored to give a false identification, skirting the town and parking up in a residential street.

  ‘Is this it?’ Georgie queried. There was nothing to indicate a camp was nearby, the sole movement a lone cat padding across the road. She had no visual clues, only a faint prickling in her nostrils.

  ‘Beyond the next street,’ Rubin said. He was virtually twitching under his jacket, eyes fixed on the space ahead. ‘We’re early, and we need to wait until it’s dark.’

  Max was quiet in the front with Rubin, his breathing measured. They all knew how it should play out: they would park a little way from the camp entrance and Rubin skirt the peri
meter on foot – he had a roughly drawn map in his pocket passed on from the last collector – with Max hovering not far behind, a link in case Georgie needed to make an audible signal to both of them from the car. It was a sign with only one meaning: We need to leave! Quickly!

  The package would have been buried under the fence some time during that day – if they were lucky – and Rubin would retrieve it. It sounded simple enough, but they couldn’t yet see the look-out posts raised high on wooden platforms, overlooking the fence. Or the guards with guns cocked and ready.

  The minutes crawled by, air inside the car becoming thick and stale. Two women with small dogs walked down the road, their eyes flicking towards the car as they talked. Suspicion rained upon everyone in Germany, it seemed – the Nazis had skilfully made potential spies of everyone, creating so much mistrust among people who would otherwise be neighbours.

  Rubin kept his head still, like a child, and, from the front seat, Max muttered, through clenched teeth. ‘Just smile at them, George. Nothing too cheesy, just a friendly nod.’ George felt her skills as an actress reaching their zenith as she tipped up her chin in greeting and tried to look nothing like a woman on a highly suspect quest. The women returned her look but didn’t smile, walking on without a backward glance.

  Finally, the dark descended and Rubin looked at his watch. ‘Three minutes,’ he said, peering at the pencilled map for the last time. Max started the car and drove around the corner to a parallel street. This road was wider with no houses, but it was the cobbled surface under the wheels that stabbed at Georgie’s memory, in rumbling slowly towards the temple with Kasper. She peered into the gloom but saw very little, aside from a high, rough-brick barrier looming in the darkness. So, the divide she’d seen then had been a wall, to barricade people in – to unlawful imprisonment. How comforting her naivety had been then. And how much more would she have wanted to escape the temple if she’d known the stark truth?

  ‘If I’m not back within ten minutes, just leave. Both of you.’ Rubin’s steely voice sliced the atmosphere. He turned towards Georgie and his face had never looked so determined.

  ‘But …’ she started.

  ‘No buts,’ he said firmly. ‘I mean it. You should not be caught. Max?’

  ‘Understood. Ten minutes, from now.’ He looked at his watch and they both opened the door.

  ‘Okay, George?’ Max checked as she slid into the driver’s seat. He smiled through the car window, but it was so obviously fuelled by adrenalin and not the reassurance she wanted.

  ‘Yes, fine.’ But she wasn’t. Of course. Why would she be? She was a reporter, a virtual cub despite her new title as senior bureau chief. Just yards from a Nazi-run camp, where unspeakable acts were being perpetrated on people guilty only of being born into one sub-stratum or another. The world really had tipped upside down very, very quickly. All she could do was watch as their bodies were swallowed by the gloom.

  If the minutes had dragged in waiting for darkness, now the seconds moved at a snail’s pace, each rustled leaf or squeak of wildlife piquing her attention. She opened the window, allowing her ears to tune in to the night sounds, and stem the slow grind of nausea inside her guts. Concentrate, George. Concentrate.

  Five minutes in, she heard the growl of an engine starting ahead, felt herself sinking automatically down in the driver’s seat when headlights sparked into life. Was it coming from outside the temple? Were they that close? She froze as the yellowy orbs became larger and brighter, almost blinding, and a car rolled slowly alongside over the cobbles. It was stupid but instinctive: she turned her head sideways and looked at the car’s occupants, saw the Reich flag flutter just before she glimpsed the lone body in the back seat, lit by something inside. Owlish glasses and a stern man’s face glanced in return, though not with any great recognition, merely curiosity. He – anyone – would have been thinking: what is that woman doing here? Parked up, in the darkness, alone. Or speculated she wasn’t alone, perhaps a man beneath her, skulking out of sight. Georgie didn’t care then what anyone thought of her reputation, only that they dismissed her as idling, innocently or not.

  There was something in the man’s face, though, that tweaked at her memory while the car’s back lights receded into the distance, a shadow of the familiar. He wasn’t in uniform – even with a brief glimpse there was no glint of pips or epaulettes – so unlikely to be an officer from that awful night. Clearly, it was her imagination running riot, fuelled by anxiety at the minutes ticking by to seven and then eight. Where was Max? He was supposed to be hovering on the edge of the small brush of trees, eyes on the car and ears towards Rubin. But there was no sign. Should she get out, peer into the sparse wooded area? And do what?

  The hands on her watch began to speed up. Nine … nine and half minutes. Her neck pulsed with a sudden, intense heat. She sparked the engine into life. Her father had taught her to drive, insisting it was a life skill everyone should have; she was rusty, though, and hadn’t admitted as much to Max. Georgie winced as the gear cranked noisily into forward and then reverse, turning the car around in several back and forward moves, bobbling slowly over the stones and wary of the attention of any more late-night walkers.

  Even in the shadows, her watch registered ten minutes and she stuck fast, with no intention of abandoning them both. Her eyes were fixed on the rear-view mirror for any sign, the window rolled down for any twitch of the undergrowth. Tick, tick … the seconds crept towards eleven minutes. Come on! Where are you? She willed their arrival with every bone and muscle in her body.

  The assault on her ears seemed to come from everywhere; a swaying light in the mirror with shouts in her left ear to accompany, and in her right, more shouts, closer and moving swiftly. Urgent. Desperate.

  ‘… un, Rubin … run!’ She caught only half of the words, but it was undoubtedly Max’s cry, his breathless pleas spraying backwards into the darkness. Georgie swivelled her head to see him emerge from the bushes near to the wall, stop and say again – ‘Come on! Nearly there’ – making scooping motions with his hand, as if to reel in Rubin like a large fish.

  Her foot was brushing the accelerator in readiness. Rusty or not, that was instinctive.

  Finally, out of the blackness there was a second body emerging – the slower, slightly more solid frame of Rubin from between the foliage, Max stretching to pull at his arm and dragging him towards the car door. The glow behind them was not headlights, as she first feared, but several torches, their beams swinging in the blackness and catching the back of the car. But they were moving closer, along with the sound of boots clattering on the cobbles, the smack of their soles more pronounced with every second.

  ‘Halt! halt!’ voices ordered loudly as they sprinted towards the car.

  Intent on the lights in the mirror, Georgie felt the weight of Max thud into the back of car, followed by a second heft that she took to be Rubin.

  ‘Drive! DRIVE!’ Max shouted and her foot slammed down on the pedal, the car juddering and almost bunny-hopping across the road surface, wheels screeching and a smell of burning oil flooding the air as Georgie willed the engine to work even faster. The shouts receded into the background and Georgie allowed herself a gulp of air – her first for what seemed like an age – only to have it snatched back as there was a crack behind and something hard ricocheted off the metal body of the car with such force that it could only have been a bullet.

  ‘Are you both all right?’ Georgie cried, driving as fast as she dared, unsure of which direction, but away from the town and buildings and towards the black and anonymous countryside. Behind them, the torchlights became pinpricks in the mirror. Only then did Georgie begin to breathe properly, her heart still at a fierce gallop, slamming her chest wall until it hurt.

  ‘Rubin?’ questioned Max, as they slowed to a normal driving pace. The older man had uttered nothing since they’d leapt into the car.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine … fine.’ He was still panting, with exertion or fear it was difficult to tell, but Ge
orgie relaxed a little. Despite being short of breath, he sounded like the Rubin she knew.

  ‘Max, where’s this coming from? Are you hurt?’ Then, it was Rubin’s voice in a mild panic. She daren’t take her eyes off the road, but Georgie could hear the two righting themselves in the back seat, one hauling the other onto the leather seat and a distinct groan.

  ‘There’s a lot of blood,’ Rubin said.

  A fresh injection of panic speared her heart. ‘Max? Max?’ Silence. ‘Rubin, what’s wrong with him?’

  She drew into a small lay-by between some trees, pitch dark around them and no lights visible for at least a couple of miles – the last of which had felt an eternity until it was safe to stop. They managed to stem the bleeding with Georgie’s scarf and by the weak light of a fading torch, she looked at the wound on Max’s lower leg as he lay on the back seat.

  ‘How bad is it?’ He grimaced, a delayed dread and pain taking hold.

  Georgie was no nurse, but neither was she squeamish. She looked hard at the four-inch gash, flesh red and raw underneath. It was deep. Almost certainly, it needed stitching and cleaning well to avoid infection. It wasn’t hard to guess that Max had been torn on barbed wire, his own adrenalin acting as a powerful analgesic until they had made it into the car.

  ‘We need to get you to a hospital,’ Georgie said. Each flashed a look – the same, shared thought: How do we explain this?

  Rubin took over the driving until they reached the more populated city boundary, while Georgie applied an even pressure on the wound, Max’s leg on her lap in the back seat.

  ‘I’m really sorry if I’ve got blood on your skirt,’ he said, head back and teeth set together.

  ‘Oh, this old thing,’ she played along, ‘it’s just a rag.’ The fact that it had cost her half a weekly wage in Wertheim’s was not worth saying. To have Max there at all, in the back of the car and not lying on those cobbles outside a Nazi camp, was compensation enough.