It was five past nine when they set off, the two lorries rolling quietly down towards the River Gail, and drumming their way across the girders. There were sometimes British spot checks at the bridge, but thanks to a Jewish lieutenant at the local British HQ, they knew that none were arranged for that night.
The lorries started climbing, their engines noisy in the clear mountain air. Most of the passengers were standing, hands clutching the sides for balance as they stared out at the moonlit landscape. The phrase ‘shining eyes’ came to Russell, which sounded romantic but fitted the bill. A night this beautiful would cause most eyes to shine, and these people had a vision to live for. He thanked fate and Isendahl for letting him share their journey.
The lorries rumbled down the cobbled street of a small and almost lightless town, where a swaying drunk sidestepped the leading lorry with a matador’s aplomb, then sunk gracelessly back against the kerb. The road was now sharing the valley with a river and railway, the three of them intertwining their southerly course as the slopes above them steepened.
Two more towns followed, each darker than the last. A few minutes after leaving the second, the lorries drew to a halt in a passing place above the noisy river. It felt like the middle of nowhere, but was, as Lidovsky told Russell, just three kilometres from the Italian frontier. ‘We used to get nearer, but the British started moving their checkpoints towards us. So now we have a longer walk.’
Once everyone was off the lorries, Lidovsky’s partner Kempner gathered them in a circle and stressed the need for silence, before leading them across the road and up the bank beyond. Soon a long column was winding its way up through the trees, grateful for what little illumination the quarter-moon could offer. Behind and below them, the sound of the returning lorries slowly faded into silence.
About fifty metres above the road a parallel path wound through the pines. They followed this for what seemed a long way, with only an occasional whisper disturbing the silence. The valley below was lost in shadow, but they could hear the river rushing over the stones, and the moon still hung above the opposite ridge, threading the forest with a wash of pale light. It was bitterly cold, and despite the risk of stumbling Russell had both hands buried in his sleeves.
They’d been walking about half an hour when Lidovsky appeared, working his way down the column. He was warning everyone to be extra careful — they would soon be passing above a British checkpoint.
Russell heard it before he saw it, the sounds of laughter rising above the ferment of the river. And then he could see the glow of the brazier, and the jeep it illuminated. Four of them stood round the fire, evenly spaced like points of the compass, holding their hands out to warm them, first the palms, then the backs.
The column trekked on in silence, the light of the fire disappearing from view. It was another half an hour before they stopped, and then for no apparent reason. Russell’s curiosity got the better of him, and he worked his way up the stationary column to where the trees abruptly ended. About seventy metres in front of him, across a wide stretch of snow-dusted meadow, smoke was drifting from the chimney of a small building. This, he presumed, was the Italian guardhouse that Lidovsky had told him about, one of many built in the mid-1930s, when the Duce still had doubts about Hitler.
And someone had got there before them, someone who soon would get a surprise. As Russell watched, two shadowy figures — presumably Lidovsky and Kempner — arrived beside the door, where they paused for a second before entering in quick succession. There were no sudden shots, which had to be good, but a long couple of minutes elapsed before one man emerged and waved the rest of them forward.
It was Kempner. ‘It’s a man and his son,’ he said. ‘They have papers from the Rothschild.’
‘But what are they doing out here alone?’ one woman asked.
Russell didn’t hear the answer. He was staring at the man who’d followed Kempner out. The last time he’d seen that face it had been a good deal chubbier, and the body had been encased in the black cloth and leather of Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst — the SS foreign intelligence service. Hauptsturmfuhrer Hirth had been his handler in the summer of 1939, when the SS had employed him as a double against the Soviets. It had been either that or see Effi dispatched to a concentration camp.
The son had now emerged, a boy of about ten. He held his father’s hand and stared at the assembled Jews.
Then Hirth saw Russell. The eyes blinked in disbelief, the lips opened and closed, then mouthed the word bitte. Please. And as if to strengthen the plea, he glanced down at the boy beside him.
Hirth’s other hand, Russell noticed, was thrust deep in his pocket. Did he have a gun?
Russell hesitated. If he exposed the man now, people might get shot. And there seemed no urgency — Hirth had nowhere to run.
People were squeezing into the guardhouse, drawn by the warmth of the fire. Russell left Hirth hanging, and went in search of Lidovsky. They’d be there for several hours, the Haganah man told him. Until dawn. Then an hour’s walk back to the road, where their transport would be waiting.
Russell asked him where the man in the hut was from.
‘Danzig originally. His wife was Polish, a shiksa. They spent the war on a Polish farm, but she died in the summer. Why do you ask?’
‘Just a journalist’s curiosity. I thought I’d seen him somewhere before.’ He watched Lidovsky disappear inside, and felt Hirth arrive at his shoulder.
‘Please,’ the former Hauptsturmfuhrer pleaded in a whisper, ‘don’t give me away. For my son’s sake. He’s already lost his mother. Don’t…’
‘The shiksa,’ Russell said sarcastically.
‘No, his real mother. She was killed last year in the bombing.’
Which was probably the truth, Russell thought. He asked Hirth where he was going.
‘Rome. Then, well, there are people there who will help me. South America, I expect. A new life. Look, if you give us away, they’ll turn us over to the authorities. They’ll shoot me, and then they’ll have to shoot the boy. And he’s done nothing to deserve that.’
He probably hadn’t. Neither had the millions that Hirth and his kind had sent to their deaths, but Russell had to admit that wreaking vengeance unto the last generation seemed a touch medieval for 1945.
Could he really let Hirth walk away?
What did he actually know that the man had done? Hirth had worked for Heydrich when the death camps were being planned, but Russell had no idea how implicated the Sicherheitsdienst had been in the actual slaughter. They hadn’t run the camps, driven the trains or fed the ovens. Had Hirth used a Jewish head for a paperweight? He had to have blood on his hands, but how much? Enough to justify killing his son?
The son couldn’t have been much more than five when the orders went out — he had nothing to answer for. But Hirth was right — if the Jews didn’t kill the boy they would probably leave him to die. At best he’d be an orphan.
There was no justice in letting Hirth go free, and none for the boy in killing his father.
‘All right,’ Russell agreed reluctantly.
‘Thank you,’ Hirth said quietly as Lidovsky walked towards them.
‘You and your son must come with us,’ the Haganah officer insisted.
‘We’d be most obliged,’ Hirth said, after a quick glance at Russell. ‘I must find my son,’ he said, after Lidovsky had gone.
There was no need. They were entering the guardhouse by one door when one of the Jews burst in through the other, holding Hirth’s son by the scruff of the neck. The boy was screaming, his trousers round his knees. ‘See what I saw,’ the man said, pushing the boy to the ground. He tried to cover himself, but there was the tell-tale foreskin.
Hirth tried to help his son, but Lidovsky had a gun to his head. He pushed the SS man onto the ground and held him down with a foot on his chest. ‘Pull off his trousers,’ he told two of the men.
Hirth squirmed and kicked, but all to no avail. First the trousers and then the underpants, and another unc
ircumcised penis was shrivelling in the cold.
It was the way the Gestapo had checked for Jews, but Russell doubted whether Hirth was relishing the irony.
Kempner was going through the coat and trouser pockets. They had already seen the fake papers, but not the gun. It was a Sauer 38H, with SS lightning rods engraved in the grip.
Russell imagined Hirth taking it from his desk, realising the risk it represented, but bringing it along regardless, because any gun was better than none.
Now Lidovsky and Kempner were discussing his fate — short sentences batted to and fro across the few inches that separated their faces. Russell considered intervening, but to say what? He glanced at the boy, who was firmly held by one of the Jews, trousers still flopping around his ankles. The fear in his face was almost too much to bear.
Kempner and Lidovsky pulled Hirth to his feet, took an upper arm each, and dragged him out through the door. The boy cried out once, a heartfelt wail, and struggled in vain against the arms that were holding him.
The shot came sooner than Russell expected.
Hirth’s son screamed and redoubled his efforts to break free; the man held him for a few seconds more, then abruptly released his grip. The boy hitched up his trousers and half-stumbled out through the door, holding one palm raised before him, as if to ward off evil.
Russell sank down to the floor with his back against the wall. He told himself that Hirth had gone to whatever Jew-hating Valhalla Heydrich’s finest went to, and that most SS Hauptsturmfuhrers probably deserved shooting. But it was the look on the son’s face that he would remember. The dawning of irretrievable loss.
Several hours later, when Lidovsky came round announcing that it was time to go, Russell asked him what they intended doing with the boy.
‘We’ll leave him here. One of the women tried to talk to him — she told him we would take him to the nearest town, but he just ignored her. He’s out there trying to dig a grave with his bare hands.’
‘He’ll die if we just leave him.’
‘Only if he wants to. The path to the road is clear enough.’
Russell walked outside. Hirth’s body was lying on its side in the frosty grass, an angry red hole above the ear. The boy was sitting a couple of metres away, staring out at the lightening sky to the east. His assault on the frozen earth had barely scratched the surface.
‘Come with us,’ Russell said.
‘I’d rather die,’ the boy replied without turning his head.
Some days at Babelsberg, after hours inside the skin of camp survivor Lilli Neumann, Effi would stare at the face in the dressing room mirror and wonder whose it was. Sometimes it would take as much as an hour to claw her own self back, but even with Russell away she never doubted the need — this was a character that could take her over, and drag her down to who knew where.
She was more or less herself again when a knock sounded on the door. ‘Come in,’ she called out, expecting to be told that the bus was waiting.
A man stepped into the room. ‘Effi Koenen?’ he asked, with only the slightest hint of query.
‘Yes.’
‘May I have a word?’ he asked in more than passable German. The accent was American, but he was in civilian clothes, a smart black coat over a light grey suit. He was about thirty, Effi guessed, with straight brown hair, regular features and unusually white teeth.
‘What about?’
‘May I sit down?’ he asked, indicating the easy chair.
She gestured her acquiescence. ‘I can’t give you very long,’ she said.
‘I only need a few minutes.’ He put one leg over the other and brushed an imaginary speck of dirt off his knee.
‘Who are you?’
‘I represent the American Government — your husband’s employer. Or one of them at least.’
‘Do you have a name?’
‘Seymour Exner.’
She went back to the mirror to finish removing her make-up. ‘So what can I do for you, Seymour?’
‘We have a request to make. Well, to be honest, it’s more than a request. Two weeks ago your partner John Russell asked for our help in removing certain obstacles to your participation in this film, and at the time we were happy to oblige…’
‘At the time?’
‘If you had confined yourself to the job in hand we would have no regrets about helping out. However…’
She turned to face him. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘The black market.’
‘What about it? I don’t have time to visit markets, black or otherwise.’
‘The other night?’
The penny dropped. ‘I was helping a friend buy medicines — she’s a sister at the Elisabeth Hospital.’
He brushed that aside with a wave of an arm. ‘The black market is a fact of life,’ he said. ‘You must realise that. People must buy and sell whatever they have to in order to survive, to prevail, and morality doesn’t come into it — not for the moment. And the same is true of politics. The Nazis are gone and people would like to think that there’s an end to it, but we believe that the new enemy is already here in Berlin. And we will do whatever we have to, use whoever we have to, in order to prevail. Do I make myself clear?’
‘You’ll do what you have to. It sounds familiar, but I never took much notice of politics. And I still don’t understand what all this philosophising has to do with me.’
He breathed a sigh of frustration. ‘Nothing, if you confine yourself to what you are good at, and leave crusades to the church.’
Effi smiled inwardly, remembering something Russell had told her weeks ago, that a quarter of the country’s Protestant clergy had joined the Nazis before they even came to power.
‘We intend talking to Mr Russell when he returns,’ Exner said, as if that would make Effi feel better. ‘Perhaps the two of you should talk this through before you take any more unconsidered actions.’
That made Effi angry — receiving an incomprehensible telling-off from a brash young idiot was bad enough; hearing him suggest that she wait for the balm of Russell’s calming influence was downright insulting. ‘So you’re telling me I should come to work each day, do my job and go back home, and forget about everything else.’
‘A dramatic way of putting it, but yes.’
She shook her head. ‘And if I don’t? What are you threatening me with?’
‘Nothing terrible. You will just find that the difficulties you encountered in getting a work permit — those difficulties that we resolved for you — will rear their ugly heads once more, and the film will need a new leading lady. If it proceeds at all, that is. We help those who are prepared to help us,’ he added, his voice turning suddenly colder.
Effi’s first and almost overwhelming impulse was defiance, but she bit back her tongue on the words that were forming. ‘I understand,’ she said, a deal more graciously than she felt. ‘No more crusades.’
He smiled at that. ‘It’s in all our interests,’ he said. Job done, he got up to leave. ‘Have a good weekend.’
Once the door had closed behind him she went back over the conversation. If their trip out to Teltow had occasioned his visit, then there had to be more to it. Neither she nor Annaliese had done anything to suggest they were anything more than buyers, so where had anyone got the idea they were starting a crusade?
There was only one explanation that fitted. The men they had met must work for Geruschke — hadn’t Kuzorra told Russell that the black marketeer included drugs and medicines among his illicit trades? One or both of the men had recognised her as Russell’s partner, and reported it to Geruschke. And he had concluded that her presence at the canal basin was part of a continuing ‘crusade’ on her and Russell’s part.
So Geruschke employed the former Gestapo officer. She had been wondering what to do about the latter ever since she recognised him. She had thought of reporting him to the occupation authorities, but what was the point if she didn’t know where to find him again?
Now she probably did. She had arranged to meet Irma at the Honey Trap on Saturday — she would see if the singer recognised the man’s description.
But — and the realisation brought her up short — she had also learned something else, something much more troubling. If Geruschke was behind it all, how come his envoy was a man from the American Government? Had she just been warned to lay off the black marketeer because he was vital to their war against the ‘new enemy’?
That, she realised, could explain why Geruschke had let Russell go. The Americans needed them both, so first they saved Russell from Geruschke, and now Geruschke from Russell and her.
How crazy was that?
The party reached the transit camp at Pontebba early on Tuesday evening. Since reaching the road on the Italian side of the border, they had endured a day of seemingly interminable waits, first for the lorry, and then for the various Italian authorities to decide on what bribes they were willing to accept. The British had been conspicuous by their absence, but that hadn’t felt surprising — even up here in the northern foothills, Italy seemed far removed from the war and its hangover, from the bleakness afflicting so much of northern Europe.
It was partly the relative warmth, Russell thought, as he stiffly climbed down from the back of the lorry. It was the first time in a week that he hadn’t felt really cold.
The Pontebba site had hosted a munitions dump before the Jewish Brigade arrived, and now that both were gone it look like a half-abandoned POW camp, a few dusty barracks in a sea of discarded packing. Russell headed straight for the office to enquire after Otto Pappenheim.
‘He’s here,’ the Haganah representative confirmed, once Russell had explained why he wanted him. ‘But he and a few of the others have driven down to Resiutta — there’s a cinema there. And girls.’
Russell walked across to the group’s designated barracks and left his suitcase on an empty cot. The room was full of excited chatter — his Jewish companions might still be a long way from their Palestine, but reaching Pontebba obviously felt like a huge step in the right direction.
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