'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 bed 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
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
