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 away 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
'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.
The ARP exercise had spared Neuenburger Strasse, much to the dismay of both Beiersdorfer and Frau Heidegger. The former was only now removing the black-out sheets from the communal hallway, and both were eager to hear Russell's account of his attachment to one of the mobile units. Frau Heidegger seemed horrified by what she heard, and was only slightly mollified by Beiersdorfer's assurance that London, not Berlin, would be on the receiving end of such bombing raids.
Russell left them to their optimism, and went up to his rooms. He took almost three hours over the article - it was his first major piece for the
Next stop was the Alex. The duty officer in Room 512 searched through a pile of refused Protectorate visa applications for Russell's, and deduced from its non-appearance that the refusal had not yet been put to paper. When Russell suggested that his application might have been accepted, the man opened a drawer to demonstrate its emptiness, only to find a single waiting permit. He examined it for several seconds, and finally passed it over.
Russell drove back across the river to the American Express office on Charlotten-Strasse. A couple of months earlier a German friend had told him that first class travellers - like army officers and government officials - were allowed to sleep through the border checks, provided they handed their documents over to the carriage attendant with a decent tip. And after his traumas at the same border in March that seemed like a really good deal, especially if the
As it happened, the American Express office could sell him a first class ticket and book him into a hotel, but the sleeper reservation required a trip to Anhalter Station.
By the time he got back to the Adlon bar it was gone five. Noticing Dick Normanton hard at work at a corner table, Russell bought him a whiskey. 'Anything I should know?' he asked, placing the glass down on the polished wooden surface.
'Thanks,' Normanton said wryly, and took a sip. 'Just between us,' he said. 'I don't want my fellow Brits to get wind of this.'
'My lips are sealed.'
'Have you heard of Ernest Tennant?'
'English businessman. Friend of Ribbentrop's, impossible as that seems.'
Normanton smirked. 'Not so much these days. Tennant's just been visiting Ribbentrop's castle...'
'The one he stole by putting the owner in Dachau?'
'Do you want to hear this story or not?'
Russell raised his palms in surrender.
'They arrived in Berlin together this afternoon - Ribbentrop had his two private coaches attached to the express from Munich. Tennant came straight here, and I had a chat with him in his hotel room.'
'You know him?'
'My owner does, and Tennant told him he was seeing Ribbentrop. Reading between the lines, I'd say he was hoping to emerge as a peacemaker, but ready to put some distance between himself and the Nazis if Ribbentrop refused to play ball. Which of course he did. Told Tennant that Hitler was the greatest human being since Mohammed, and then started back-tracking when he realized the implication - that the Fuhrer was less important than a mere Arab.'
'The usual nonsense.'
'Exactly. The important part came later. On the train here Tennant got talking to Walther Hewel - know who he is?'
'Hitler's liaison with Ribbentrop, or is it the other way round?'
'Both, I suppose. Anyway, his take on the current situation - and we assume Adolf's - is that Chamberlain and Co. rushed into guaranteeing Poland without really thinking it through, and that they're now desperately looking for a face-saving way out. The Germans think that Hudson's Howler was just the first of many trial balloons, that when push comes to shove the British will provide themselves with some sort of excuse not to fight.'
'Which is bad news.'
'For everybody. The Poles because they'll get squashed, the Germans and the British because they'll find themselves at war with each other without really wanting to.'
