Silesian Station (2008)

by David Downing

  'I knew a young man of that name, back in '32-'33. Not personally, but by reputation - he was one of the youth wing's rising stars. I'm surprised he's still alive. You know what we used to call our Party activists in 1933?'

  'Dead men on furlough.'

  'Exactly. I'll see if I can get you an address.'

  'Thanks.'

  'And you'd better have mine - it's safer to visit than telephone.' She gave him a number and street in one of the posher districts to the north of the park.

  'Nice area,' he said.

  'My husband was a rich socialist,' she said without irony. 'Family money. And he had the sense to put everything in my name before the anti-Jewish laws were brought in. I used to feel guilty about having it all, but now it just feels like part of the disguise.'

  'I'll be in touch, one way or the other,' Russell said.

  She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, scenting the air with jasmine. 'Till then.'

  They set off in their separate directions. Both of them, Russell guessed, were thinking the same depressing thought - that there was one more person in the world who could, and probably would, betray them under torture. Look on the bright side, he told himself. If he was instrumental in delivering Sarah Grostein's 'valuable information' to the Soviets, they might feel like they owed him something. Yes, and pigs might soar like eagles.

  The Hanomag was like an oven, encouraging the pursuit of cold beer. Several cafes in the Old City's Schloss-Platz offered large awnings for drinking under, and the sight of the square's fountain seemed cooling in itself. Russell ordered a Pilsener and reminded himself he had a living to earn. The air raid rehearsal should make a story, but was there any way of finding out where the action was going to take place? Wandering round in the blackout looking for supposedly bombed houses seemed rather hit-and-miss, not to mention potentially dangerous. The local storm troopers would probably be out shooting imaginary paratroopers, and he had no desire to be one of them.

  The Propaganda Ministry might let him tag along with one of the ARP units if he asked nicely. How Germany's war preparations contribute to peace. Something like that.

  A second beer was tempting, but he decided to get the trip to Wedding over with first. This time it was Kuzorra who opened the door. 'Schnapps?' the detective asked immediately. 'Katrin is out,' he added, as if in explanation.

  'A small one,' Russell said.

  'I went down to the station,' Kuzorra began once they were seated, 'and met the train your girl would have been on. I talked to three of the crew - the conductor and two of the dining car staff. They all remembered her.'

  He took an appreciative sip of his schnapps, placed the glass on a shelf beside his chair, and reached inside the jacket which was draped across the back for a small notebook. He didn't open the notebook though, just held it in his lap. 'The conductor examined her ticket soon after the train left Breslau, but he also remembered seeing her much later in the journey, between Guben and Frankfurt he thinks. A sweet little thing, he called her. A little nervous.

  'And then there were the two waiters. The young one who took her order thought she was a 'looker', as he put it. Big eyes. I expect he would have told me how big her breasts were if I'd asked him. The older one - he has one of those moustaches which were old-fashioned in the Kaiser's time - he had to tell her that they couldn't serve her. Some rancid hag panicked at the thought of eating within ten metres of a Jew, and her husband insisted on their checking Miriam's identity papers. He said she looked surprised, but didn't kick up a fuss. Just went like a lamb. That was before Sagan, he thought.'

  'So we still can't be certain that she reached Berlin?'

  'Not completely, no. I talked to all the station staff, the left luggage people, every last one of the concessionaires - frankfurter stands, news kiosks, hair salon, the lot. I thought she must have been hungry after seven hours without food, but no one recognized her from the photograph. Several regulars were taking their week's holiday though, and they'll be back this Friday. I thought I'd go back for another try. It would be good to get an actual sighting at Silesian Station. Rule out the possibility that she got off at Frankfurt.'

  'Why would she do that?' Russell asked, more rhetorically than otherwise.

  Kuzorra shrugged. 'She may have been more upset by the business in the dining car than she showed. Took a sudden decision to head back home.'

  'She never got there.'

  'No. And I know it's unlikely. All my instincts tell me that she reached Berlin.'

  'And if she did...'

  'It doesn't look good.' The detective reached round and replaced the note-book in his jacket pocket. 'So shall I have another go this Friday?'

  'Yes, do that. Do you need any money?'

  'No. I'm still earning the retainer.'

  Russell got to his feet. 'I won't be around much this weekend, and I'm probably off to Prague on Monday, so leave any message at my number, and if you don't hear back straight away then just keep digging, okay?'

  'Suits me. Any excuse to get out of the house,' he added, as he showed Russell out.

  Clouds were gathering as he drove back into the city, and rain started falling as he crossed the Eiserne Bridge over the Spree. Effi had left her bright pink parasol in the back seat, and this protected him from the worst of the downpour as he walked from the car to the crowded portals of the Adlon.

  He phoned Thomas from the lobby to deliver the latest news.

  'I've never met the girl,' Thomas said, 'but for some reason she's keeping me awake at nights.'

  'It's called humanity.'

  'Ah, that.'

  In the bar, his fellow correspondents assured him that 'Hudson's Howler' had died a well-deserved death, and that no new story had risen to take its place. Hitler was still in the south enjoying his opera, and all was at peace with the world. Russell headed back to Neuenburger Strasse, Sarah Grostein, Freya Isendahl and Miriam Rosenfeld competing for prominence in his thoughts.

  Frau Heidegger was waiting with a message from Effi . The studio, dismayed by the possibility that its latest masterwork might be interrupted by the air raid rehearsal, had decided to put the cast and crew up at a hotel outside the city.

  'Does this mean you'll be here?' Frau Heidegger wanted to know. 'Because I've already told Beiersdorfer that you won't be.'

  'I'd better let him know then,' Russell said wearily. It amused him that Frau Heidegger, so scrupulous with her Herrs, Fraus and Frauleins, always refused that courtesy to the block warden. There was nothing political in it, unless contempt could be read as such.

  Beiersdorfer's rooms were on the first floor, and Russell had only entered them once before, as part of a deputation formed to dissuade him from reporting a ten-year-old girl for repeating a political joke that she was too young to understand. He remembered the portraits on the wall, the Fuhrer on one, Fat Hermann on the other. The man was too old to have served in the Luft-waffe, but he liked making model aeroplanes.

  Russell was left to wait in the hall while Beiersdorfer collected his clip-board. The man then amended his finely-wrought chart with painstaking care, sighing all the while. Russell let him finish before adding that he might be out anyway, on a journalistic assignment, and was duly rewarded with a Hitlerish splutter of exasperation.

  He approached his own room with an apprehension that he half-knew was unwarranted - why would Hauptsturmfuhrer Hirth have him beaten up again? - but still felt stomach-tinglingly real. This time though, the door was definitely locked, and the light responded to his flick of the switch. There were no thugs reclining on his sofa.

  He took a fresh bottle of beer to the seat by the window, and put his feet up on the sill. The rain and clouds had cleared as quickly as they'd come, leaving an unusually clear sky. The odd passing car apart, Berlin gave off a gentle hum. It was only six and a half years since the Nazis had taken over the city, but sometimes it felt as if the bastards had been there forever. Not tonight, though. He wondered whether Sarah Grostein was in be
d with her unsuspecting SS General, whether Freya and her firebrand were out there dancing round the feet of the Gestapo elephant. He thought about Thomas and his missing girl, about the new look in Effi's eyes. The bastards might be in power, but this wasn't just a city of billowing swastikas and Sportspalasts and 'wild' concentration camps, and it didn't just belong to Hitler and Goebbels and their brown-shirted swamp life. Other Berlins were still alive, still clamouring for attention. The Brechts and the Luxemburgs, the Mendelsohns and the Doblins - they might all be gone, but their ghosts still haunted Hitler's night.

  By the clear light of summer mornings, however, Russell felt rather less optimistic. He and his fellow foreign correspondents spent Tuesday and Wednesday trying to confirm the sundry depressing rumours circulating in the city. On the previous Saturday one German newspaper had announced that trade talks had been resumed between Germany and the Soviets. The various ministries refused to confirm or deny this, merely passing queries on to each other with a knowing nod and wink. Soviet Ambassador Astakhov, meanwhile, had invited two of Ribbentrop's officials to the All-Union Agricultural Ex-hibition in Moscow, which Molotov was opening on the following Tuesday. This might seem more like a punishment than a sign of deepening friendship, but the Soviets, as everyone knew, were incredibly fond of tractors.

  Were Hitler and Stalin edging towards some sort of pact? On Wednesday morning the front page headline in the Daily Express was PACT CERTAIN, but they were talking about an alliance between Britain, France and Russia. Someone was in for a shock.

  On a more definite note, the German Army manoeuvres for the coming summer were scheduled to start at the beginning of August, and to last for several weeks. These would take place throughout Sudetenland and Silesia, and in the area between Berlin and the Polish border. Or, to put it another way, right under Poland's nose. Reservists were being called up, and private vehicles were likely to be commandeered.

  By lunchtime on Wednesday the overall view in the Adlon bar was that war had slipped just a little bit closer. The only good news was purely personal. After several hours of squeezing himself through bureaucratic hoops Russell learned that the vehicles of foreign residents were exempt from military seizure.

  He had also been successful in persuading the Propaganda Ministry to let him join one of the Air Raid Protection units during the coming 24-hour rehearsal. The exercise was due to start at 3pm, and he spent the hour after lunch driving round the city and looking at the preparations. Gangs of workmen had been out since Monday whitewashing kerbs, corners, steps and anything else likely to trip people up in the blackout. Black cloth curtaining was already edging many windows, ready for pulling across when the sirens sounded, and many a grey-overalled ARP warden was standing sentry outside his block, waiting for the chance to give orders. Beiersdorfer, as Russell discovered on dropping off the car at Neuenburger Strasse, had been unable to find a helmet small enough for his head, and had to keep tipping it backwards to see.

  He walked down to Hallesches Tor and took a tram up Koniggratzer Strasse to Potsdamer Platz. His unit was based in an old warehouse, on the street running along the eastern side of the railway station. There were a couple of ancient-looking cars in the yard, along with assorted makeshift ambulances and several of the open lorries storm troopers had favoured for their raids in the good old days. Several wardens were sitting round on packing cases flirting with the unit's nurses, all of whom seemed to have been hand-picked by the Ministry for their blonde aryan chubbiness. One warden was cutting thin slits in the black material he had just fastened to the lorry's headlights.

  Russell introduced himself to the unit's commander, a weasel-faced man of around forty who seemed friendly enough. He gave Russell a press badge to pin on his shirt, complimented his choice of dark clothes, and told him to stay out of the way as much as he could. 'You can ride in the back of an ambulance when we go out, and then grab a seat wherever you can for the ride back.'

  A few minutes later, at three o'clock, the exercise officially began. Nothing happened for several hours, however. Everyone sat waiting, listening to the trains come and go in the adjacent station, until someone remembered he had brought a pack of cards with him. One game of skat was inaugurated immediately, another got started when another pack was purchased from one of the kiosks on the station concourse. Russell had lost almost a mark when the air raid warning finally sounded, three blasts of two minutes each, separated by two similar stretches of silence. 'A bit excessive,' as one of the wardens put it; 'by the time you've listened to all that, the enemy will have come and gone.'

  Planes were now audible overhead, the sound of anti-aircraft fire coming from all directions. It was shortly after seven when the unit received its first call-out - bombs had fallen in the Spittelmarkt. One car, one ambulance and two lorries hurtled down Leipziger Strasse, Russell clinging to the rails of the rear vehicle and marvelling at the ease with which Berlin had been brought to a halt. The popular shopping street was empty of traffic and people, save for two abandoned trams and a couple of stragglers disappearing into one of the public shelters.

  At the Spittelmarkt smoke was pouring out of two adjoining office buildings. A fire engine had already arrived and was pumping imaginary water in through the first floor windows. Black flags had already been placed on nearby buildings to indicate that they were in danger of collapse.

  Several people were lying on the pavement in front of the offices, competing for attention with some rather histrionic wailing. Placards lopped around their necks spelt out the nature of their injuries, and the nurse swiftly decided which victims were in direst need of hospital treatment. Stretcher parties transferred these unfortunates to the ambulance and one of the lorries, and both vehicles took off in the direction of St Gertraudt's Hospital. A flight of planes crossed almost overhead, but apparently dropped no bombs. Two of the firemen began arguing about how much imaginary water they had put on the imaginary fire.

  The second lorry took the walking wounded to the hospital, and Russell had the rear to himself as they headed back to the unit's base. The all-clear sounded as they crossed the Landwehrkanal, and people were spilling out of the public shelters as they drove up Koniggratzer Strasse. The sky looked blue and empty.

  'They won't call another one until it's dark,' one of the wardens guessed, as he gathered up the cards. He was right. It was soon after ten-thirty when the sirens sounded again, another ten minutes before they got the call - a major attack in the Wittenbergplatz. The whole unit crawled slowly southward down the blacked-out Potsdamer Strasse, turned right at the unlit Bulow Strasse Station and followed the dark mass of the elevated U-Bahn tracks westwards. Clinging on to his lorry Russell could see the dark shapes of planes against the stars, the flash of AA guns from the direction of the Tiergarten.

  The scene in the Wittenbergplatz probably echoed that in the Spittelmarkt, but the darkness made everything more difficult and, Russell thought, more distressingly real. It was easier to imagine the burst arteries and severed limbs when the wailing victims were invisible, easier to smell the panic when pencil torches were all you had to see through the smoke and when everyone seemed to be shouting at once. Russell found himself fighting back a rising tide of trench battle memories, and grasped at the prospect of action when a warden said, 'Come with me,' and led him in through the front door of an apartment block.

  The warden stopped at the first floor landing, shone his torch on Russell, and realized he'd made a mistake. 'What the hell,' he said. 'You take the east side. Knock on every door. If there's anyone in here, get them out.'

  Russell did as he was told. Or almost. He thought he heard noise behind a couple of doors, but didn't knock again when no one answered. The one family that did respond to his knock filed obediently down the stairs and out into the street, the adults arguing with each other, the children giggling nervously.

  The ambulances were loaded and ready to go, but Russell decided he had seen enough. Effi's flat was only a ten minute walk away, hidden a
way in a backstreet, and as far as he could tell, the organizers of this particular exercise were going for large squares and maximum publicity. He chatted to a few evacuated residents outside the KaDeWe until the all-clear sounded, then headed up Tauenzien-Strasse to the Kaiser Memorial Church. As he crossed the eastern end of the Ku'damm he stopped in the centre and stared up the long, arrow-straight avenue. A car was moving away in the distance; barely visible in the dim blue lights, it soon became one with the shadows.

  No ARP wardens came knocking at Effi's door, but the Luftwaffe's continuing antics made for a restless night. He was probably imagining it, but many of his fellow-Berliners looked distinctly bleary-eyed as they waited at tram stops on their journey to work. Not everyone had been inconvenienced, of course - Hitler had been enjoying Tristan and Isolde at far-off Bayreuth while the capital rehearsed. And Soviet Ambassador Astakhov, as Russell learned from Jack Slaney, had been wined and dined by Ribbentrop's East European chief, Julius Schnurre, until the early hours.

  'Where?' Russell asked.

  'Ewest's.'

  'They must mean business then,' Russell said dryly. The restaurant on Be-hren-Strasse was one of Berlin's finest.

  'You can bet that street didn't get bombed,' Slaney said in a similar tone.

  'Anyone know what was discussed?'

  Slaney shook his head. 'The trade guy Barbarin was there too, so maybe just that. They all seemed really chummy though, according to one of the waiters.'

  'Another straw in the wind,' Russell murmured.

  'Or on the camel's back,' Slaney suggested.

  Russell headed back to Neuenburger Strasse to write up his ARP exercise article. The smooth modern typewriter he'd inherited from Tyler McKinley was at Effi's place, but he still preferred the brutal mechanics of his old one. Another consequence of living in Nazi Germany - you only felt you were getting somewhere if physical violence was involved.