Effi was long gone when he woke. After a quick breakfast at the Cafe Kranzler he stopped off at the Propaganda and Foreign Ministries to see if any briefings were scheduled for the day - there were none. He found out why from Slaney, who was downing his usual milky coffee in the Adlon breakfast room. 'The bastards have had their bluff called,' the American said jubilantly. 'The Nazis in Danzig issued the Poles with an ultimatum, and the Poles issued one right back. The Nazi leader blustered for a bit, the Poles held firm, and he just threw in the towel. Last thing I heard he was trying to convince the Poles that the original ultimatum was a hoax.'
'So it's all blown over.'
'Looks like it. For the moment anyway. I don't imagine Adolf will let things lie for long.'
'Have you wired it off already?'
'No point. "Small crisis in Danzig fizzles out" isn't much of a headline, is it?'
'True.' Russell got up to go. 'I'm off to find some petrol.'
'Good luck.'
As he started up the Hanomag, Russell had an idea. 'You're going home,' he told the car, directing it up Luisen-Strasse towards Invaliden-Strasse. A short drive through the maze of industrial backstreets beyond Lehrter Station brought him to the garage owned by Zembski's cousin Hunder, where he had bought the Hanomag six months earlier.
The garage yard was full of automobiles, most of them taxis. A line of lorries was parked along the far wall, under the noxious cloud of smoke provided by the adjoining locomotive depot. Hunder was doing sums in his office, small piles of bills rising from his desk and floor like ancient stones.
He greeted Russell with evident relief, and an apparently bountiful supply of petrol. Since they were friends, he would let the Englishman have a full tank at only twice the usual price.
Russell grinned and accepted - what else were expenses for? Outside, Hunder summoned one of his young apprentices to siphon fuel from the nearest taxis.
'What are they all doing here?' Russell asked.
Hunder smiled. 'In for repair, every last one of them.'
Russell got it. 'And they'll all be ready for the road the moment the manoeuvres end.'
'What a cynic you are.'
Ten minutes later he was on his way. A tap on the fuel gauge brought it springing to attention, like a fourteen-year-old in a brothel, as his old sergeant had used to say.
Berlin's other motorists seemed to be conserving their fuel, and the trip out to Dahlem took him less than half an hour. Thomas was digging in the garden, and as grateful for the interruption as Hunder had been. He took Russell into his study, poured them both a generous glass of schnapps, and listened, with increasing anger, to his friend's account of the final meeting with Kuzorra.
'What can have happened to her?' he said when Russell was finished. 'I can understand her falling prey to some criminal, but that wouldn't explain the police threatening Kuzorra.'
'Here's his bill, by the way,' Russell said, fishing it out of his pocket and handing it over.
Thomas looked at it briefly, and put it to one side. 'What more can we do?' he asked. 'Find another detective?'
'We could try.'
'Whatever we do, we should do it discreetly. I don't want the Kripo out at the factory. Or here come to that.'
'We could give up,' Russell said. 'It would be the sensible thing to do. One girl, who may or may not be in trouble.'
'That's just it,' Thomas said. 'I've been wondering why I care so much about what happened to this girl. It's because she is just one girl. Not a nation or a race or a class - I've given up thinking that we could save any of those, but surely we should be able to save one person. Or at least give it a damn good try.'
His ex-brother-in-law never ceased to surprise Russell. 'All right,' he said.
'Another detective?'
Russell thought about it. 'Not yet. You still haven't heard anything from her family?'
'Not a word.'
'I'm going to Silesia for work,' Russell said, having just decided as much. His paper wanted him there, so why not take the opportunity? 'I'll go and see the family, see if they can provide any clues. There may be other relatives or friends in Berlin that we know nothing about - something as simple as that.'
Thomas doubted it, but agreed it was worth trying. Driving on to Grunewald to collect Paul, Russell tried to put Miriam Rosenfeld out of his mind. He understood - even shared - Thomas's reasons for wanting to find her, but the task itself might be beyond them.
His son opened the door of the Grunewald home in his Jungvolk uniform, Ilse hovering behind him. 'I've just got back,' he said. 'I need to get this glue off my hands,' he added, holding them for inspection before shooting off upstairs.
'They've been making model planes all morning,' Ilse told Russell. 'It's one of the things he likes about the Jungvolk.'
'He likes a lot of it. Everything but the propaganda, really.'
'I think they're all bored by that. Paul has a whole pile of information folders in his bedroom, but I don't think he's read any of them.'
'Good.'
'They don't know what they think at that age. Paul has that badge he got at the World's Fair pinned above his bed - "I have seen the future".'
'I saw it in New York,' Paul said, rattling down the stairs. 'I got most of it off,' he added, meaning the glue.
Paul wanted to go boating on the Havelsee, an ambition shared by several thousand others. The queue for a boat was interminable, but out on the wide lake water their fellow-Berliners were soon left behind, mere dots in the distance, barely discernible against the wooded shorelines. Russell had hired a hat to shade himself, and when Paul insisted on rowing he sat back and watched as his Jungvolk-uniformed son came to grips with the oars. He was getting older, Russell thought. A trite realization perhaps, but one with some meaning. The trip to America had given the boy something, and the return to Germany hadn't taken it away.
He asked Paul about the Jungvolk meeting, but all the boy wanted to talk about was the World's Fair. 'Remember the Life Savers tower?' he enthused, referring to the 250-foot parachute hoist they'd both gone up in. The plunge before the chute opened had certainly taken several years off Russell's life. At the moment of release he'd been reading the quote from Lenin which topped the Soviet exhibit, and had been left with the impression that the bottom had suddenly fallen out of socialism.
'And Elektro,' Paul said, 'wasn't he fantastic?'
The Westinghouse robot had been amazing, though teaching him to smoke seemed a poor use for futuristic technology. General Motors' Futurama had been just as incredible - a gigantic scale model that took fifteen minutes to traverse in a moving armchair - but its vision of express highways policed by radio towers seemed less than heart-warming. Russell had agreed with Walter Lippman's assertion that the Fair demonstrated man's inability 'to be wise as he is intelligent, to be as good as he is great.' When Russell had showed his son the relevant article in the Herald Tribune, Paul had given him a withering look and said, 'I bet he didn't go up on the Life Saver.'
When Russell got back to Effi's he found her wearing the red dress he'd brought back from America. 'I feel like dancing,' she said, and after a quick snack in the Old Town they scoured the streets around Alexanderplatz for a suitable venue. Before the Nazis there had been a dozen dance halls in the area, some boasting orchestras with a real feel for the new American jazz. Six years on, the pickings were much slimmer, but they found one joint under the Stadtbahn station with a floor and a band that were just about passable. It was full when they arrived and kept getting fuller, but both were laughing with exhilaration when they left two hours later. Berlin had life in it yet.
Next morning they took their usual breakfast in the Tiergarten, and Russell announced that he was probably going to spend a few days in Silesia. 'For the paper,' he added. 'And I'm going to look up Miriam's family. I'll probably be back on Thursday. '
'I've been invited to something that evening,' Effi told him, then hesitated.
'What?' Russell prompted.
>
'A social gathering,' she said. 'Maybe something more. A friend has asked me to meet some people.'
'Who?'
She hesitated again. 'Christiane.'
Russell looked blank.
'My astrologer.'
'Ah.'
'She's not as wacky as you think she is.'
'That's a relief.'
She gave him the chandelier look. 'I'm going to go.'
'And I'm not invited?'
'No,' she said. 'We agreed to keep these things separate.'
'We did.'
'I can meet you afterwards. It'll be over by nine, I should think.'
Russell didn't like it, but knew he was being unreasonable.
They both sat in silence for a minute or more. It was a lovely warm morning, a breeze shifting the leaves of the trees, the ducks going about their business on the miniature lake. The smell of fresh coffee wafted out from the cafe behind them, the only sounds a train on the distant Stadtbahn and the rustle of morning papers.
'All this,' Effi said. 'It's hard to imagine it ending.'
Russell's first task on Monday was to check that the crisis in Danzig had really blown over. It had. The main item of news in the morning papers was a train accident in Potsdam. The crossing keeper had lifted the gates after a passenger train passed through, only for a goods train to follow. Seven had been killed, the keeper arrested.
He wired San Francisco that he was heading for Breslau and drove back to Neuenburger Strasse. There was another message for Dagmar by the telephone - 'Siggi wants an explanation!!!' in Frau Heidegger's boldest capitals. The portierfrau herself was nowhere to be seen, so Russell left a brief note explaining his absence and walked down to Hallesches Tor in search of a cab.
On reaching Silesian Station he found that the next express to Breslau was not for an hour. He sat drinking coffee on the concourse, wondering if Miriam had ever been there. He kept a look-out for men with grey hair and black eyebrows, but none appeared.
Silesian Angels
Russell had considered driving the 450 kilometres to the Polish border - the autobahn would, after all, have carried him two-thirds of the way - but finding petrol in Silesia might prove difficult, and there was always the chance that some jumped-up uniform on manoeuvres would choose to commandeer the car. Still, as his train slipped further and further behind schedule he began to wish that he had risked it. Passages of exhilarating speed were few and far between; the train spent most of its time either advancing at a steady crawl or wearily hissing to a complete stop.
He had planned to spend the night in the border town of Beuthen, but on arrival in a rapidly-darkening Breslau he and his fellow-passengers were informed that the train's onward journey would be subject to delay. The sight of their decoupled locomotive heading off into the gloom was disheartening, and enquiries at the booking office offered no compensatory encouragement. Russell decided he would rather spend the night in a hotel.
Others had already reached the same conclusion, and the taxi rank outside the station was empty. Asking after trams, he was told that the city centre was only a ten-minute walk away. 'Past the Party House,' the kiosk holder told him, pointing up the street towards a building draped with the usual giant swastikas, 'and turn right.'
Darkness had fallen, and the dimly-lit streets seemed strangely empty for nine in the evening. As he walked his spirits seemed to lift, and he realized that he usually felt safer outside Berlin. Why was that? Because he felt safer in motion? Or because he had only himself to worry about?
The first hotel he came to was the Monopol. The name was familiar, and he soon found out why - a placard attached to the wall in reception proudly announced that Hitler had stayed the night in 1932. The room in question had doubtless been preserved in all its Fuhrer-scented glory, complete with pubic hairs trapped in amber and sheets for sniffing.
His own first floor room was small, but included a private bathroom. After testing the bed for bounce he went back down to the bar, which was almost as empty as the streets. Two men in suits dourly acknowledged his greeting and turned their attention back to their schnapps. Russell tried engaging the barman in conversation, but all attempts to elicit a quotable opinion about anything more serious than football proved fruitless. He left his beer unfinished, ordered an early wake-up call at reception, and wearily climbed the stairs to his room.
He was out of the hotel soon after seven the following morning, having reserved a room for two nights hence. It was another blue sky day, and the sun had long since risen above the thin line of mountains to the south. Russell couldn't recall a better summer, and remembered that that was what everyone had said about 1914. The 'wonderful summer before the war.'
Over coffee and rolls in the station restaurant he scanned the papers for something to follow up, and found exactly what he was looking for. Both carried virtually identical accounts of a border incident the previous day. Polish provocateurs had crossed the border some ten kilometres north-west of Beuthen and attacked a German farmer and his family in the village of Ble-chowka. The farmer had been badly beaten, his wife subjected to unspeakable - but unspecified - indignities. How much longer, the editors asked, could the Reich put up with such outrageous behaviour from its eastern neighbour? About a month, if Slaney was right.
Russell finished his coffee and looked up at the clock above the departure board. He had half an hour to spare - time to do a little preliminary checking. There was a man named Josef Mohlmann on the list which Russell had memorized in New York, and he worked for the railway administration here in Breslau. Half an hour should be long enough to find the building.
In the event, it took only a couple of minutes. A convenient official gave Russell the necessary information - the Reichsbahn Direktion building was only a short walk away, on the other side of the station. He walked through the tunnel and found it without difficulty - a five-storey stone block the size of a small football pitch. Six huge statues were perched high above the colon-naded entrance, three of which bore striking resemblances to Jesus, Cortez and Britannia. All of whom seemed somewhat unlikely subjects.
It was almost eight o'clock, and a steady stream of suited workers was pouring in through the front doors. His target might be one of them, but Russell had no time to introduce himself that morning. He would pay Mohlmann a visit when he got back from the border.
He walked back down the tunnel and up the steps to an empty Platform 3. A short train was soon shunted into the station for Russell and the handful of other passengers. Soon they were out of Breslau and chugging south-eastward towards Oppeln through fields of golden grain. Several rakes of empty tank transporters were stabled in country sidings, but the tanks themselves were nowhere to be seen.
The landscape slowly grew more hilly, and soon after noon the first pits of the Silesian coalfield loomed into view. The train stopped for several minutes in Gleiwitz, then ran on towards Beuthen and the eighteen-year-old border between Germany and Poland, stretches of forest alternating with straggling mining villages.
Before 1918 Gleiwitz, Beuthen, Konigshutte and Kattowitz had been the four principal towns of German Upper Silesia, but once the new borders had been established by the Versailles peace-makers and a local plebiscite, the latter two - along with 80 per cent of the coal mines and industrial installations - had found themselves in Poland. Beuthen had been spared, but now lay in a narrow and decidedly vulnerable finger of German territory. To the north, east and south the Polish border lay less than three kilometres away.
A taxi driver in the station forecourt told Russell that the border village of Blechowka was about ten kilometres to the north-west, and proved willing to take him there in his rather ancient-looking vehicle. He made no mention of the previous day's frontier incident, and Russell decided not to tempt fate by introducing the subject, settling instead for a few general enquiries about local attitudes.
The driver, a grey-haired man in his fifties or sixties, was only too happy to list German Silesian grievances.
The Poles had taken most of their coal, and they had no real need for so much - half the mines weren't even being worked anymore. And it was German men who had excavated them, and built the railways and the industries that went with them. Why should the Poles get all the benefit?
'Should we take them back?' Russell asked.
'Not if it means war,' the man said, surprising him. 'But if the Poles start one, well that's another matter!'
Russell had expected a rough ride to Blechowka, but the roads had been recently improved, presumably by the military. The villages they passed through seemed busy and prosperous: a few children watched the taxi wheeze by, but most of the inhabitants were only visible in the distance, working in the fields. The manoeuvres were taking place thirty kilometres to the north, the driver volunteered, and the locals were hurrying to get the harvest in before they moved south.
Blechowka was on the other side of the Beuthen Forest, a straggly street of houses and farms less than a kilometre from the border. It had a couple of shops and a police station worthy of a much larger community. Russell marched into the latter and asked the duty officer about the previous day's incident.
The man asked him what he was talking about.
Russell showed him the newspaper report, and watched an emotional sequence play itself out in the man's face - from bewilderment to suspicion, anxiety to denial. 'I'll have to see about this,' he said, and disappeared through an adjoining door, newspaper in hand.
He returned with a question a couple of minutes later. 'Who are you?'
'I'm a journalist,' Russell said, getting out his accreditation from the Propaganda Ministry. 'The German people have the right to know about the threats facing them,' he added for good measure.
The man disappeared again, for longer this time. He returned with the smile of someone who had moved a problem on. 'You must talk to the authorities in Beuthen,' he told Russell, returning the newspaper. 'At the Rathaus. We cannot help you here.'
Silesian Station (2008) Page 19
