'I tried,' Russell told the Obersturmbannfuhrer.
'He was forewarned,' Giminich said. 'And we shall find the men who forewarned him.'
Bully for you, Russell thought. 'So I'm free to go?'
'Not quite. Admiral Canaris must not hear of this. Your report to him will be very simple. You came to the rendezvous, but Grashof did not show up. That is all. If the Admiral discovers what really happened I will hold you personally responsible. Is that clear?'
'Very,' Russell agreed. He seemed to have got off lightly. 'My bag is still at the hotel,' he added.
Giminich was already on his way. 'Collect it and return to Berlin,' he snapped over his shoulder.
At least the rain was easing. His appetite returning, Russell walked up to the central square of the Little Quarter and found a small restaurant filling the street with enticing odours. The food was indeed good, but the staff and the other customers seemed unfriendly. He should have ordered in English rather than German, he eventually realised.
The rain had fully stopped when he emerged, and there was even a hint of blue in the sky above the castle. As he walked across the Charles Bridge he sense that he was being followed, and sure enough, fifty metres or so behind him, there lurked a small bespectacled man in raincoat and hat. He told himself that he was imagining things, that if he turned his head on any street in the world he was likely to find someone bringing up his rear, but the small man still looked suspicious. Reaching the tower at the eastern end of the bridge, Russell stood in a recessed doorway and waited. The small man, now walking a bit faster, seemed surprised to see him, but kept on going, disappearing into one of the streets that led into the heart of the Old Town.
Russell took a different route, trusting on a combination of memory and instinct to reach Na Prikope, and the foot of Wenceslas Square. From there he had no trouble finding Lepanska Street and the Alcron Hotel, but securing his possessions proved rather more difficult. The Czech receptionist refused to let him upstairs, and it took several phone calls to some unspecified authority and the helpful intervention of a passing SS officer before a busboy could be sent to retrieve his bag.
This accomplished, Russell still had several hours to waste before his train was due to depart. He considered a long sojourn in the well-stocked bar, but was deterred by the number of black uniforms on display. It also occurred to him that finding Masaryk Station in the blackout would be far from easy. Better to get there while it was still light, and camp out in the station restaurant for the duration.
Picking up his bag, he sauntered out of the front doors and began walking towards Wenceslas Square. He would later have a vague memory of a car engine bursting into life, but in the here and now the vehicle was almost level with him when he first became aware of it. Slowing his stride as he turned to look, Russell noted, in very swift succession, a flash in a window, a searing pain in the side of his head, and a loud echoing boom which went rolling down the narrow street. As the car sped away he fell backwards against the stone side of the building, and slumped to the pavement feeling more than a little foolish. The Resistance, he thought, as consciousness faded.
On her way to the studio that afternoon Effi remembered she had some shopping to do, and asked the driver to drop her off on the Ku'damm. She had hardly walked ten metres when she noticed Ali Blumenthal stepping down from a tram outside the Universum Cinema. There was no yellow star sewn into her coat.
'I'm going to the cinema with a friend,' Ali explained, once Effi had caught up with her. 'But I'm half an hour early.'
'Let's have a coffee,' Effi suggested. 'There's a place just round the corner.'
'Are you sure?' Ally asked. 'If they ask to see my papers...'
'They won't. They know me, and I'll say you're my baby sister.'
'If only I was,' Ali said wistfully.
The cafe was full, but empty tables just seemed to appear when celebrities arrived, and on this particular occasion Effi decided not to feel too guilty about it. She ordered coffees and cakes, and hoped that they wouldn't be noticeably better than those served at the adjoining tables.
The two of them chatted about films until the women at the next table left, and there was no longer any danger of their being overheard. Effi asked after Ali's family, and received an earful of the girl's frustration with her parents. 'My dad is such an
'You won't go?'
'Absolutely not. I shall stay in Berlin. You know -' she lowered her voice to a whisper '- I heard a wonderful story yesterday about a Jewish woman who wanted an Aryan work permit. She waited for an air raid, and then looked for a block in which the Party office and all of its records had been destroyed. Then she went to the report centre for people who've been bombed out and gave them a false name, a real photograph and the number of one of the houses which had been destroyed. They had no way of checking her story so they gave her the permit. And some emergency money! The welfare service fed and housed her for several weeks, and then evacuated her to Pomerania. And now she's got a job working as a housekeeper for a Party bigwig!'
Effi couldn't help smiling.
'I know there's not enough bombing at the moment,' Ali went on, 'but Kurt says - he's my boyfriend,' she explained, blushing slightly - 'he says it will get worse and worse once the Americans come into the war. There'll be more and more record offices bombed, and it'll be harder and harder for them to keep track of people. More and more Jews will be living as Christians - hundreds of them, I wouldn't wonder.' She looked at her watch. 'I must go. Do I look all right?'
'You look gorgeous,' Effi said, and meant it. She watched the girl go, thinking of herself at seventeen. She'd been every bit as headstrong, but the possible consequences of her youthful exuberance had not included years in a concentration camp.
The next face Russell saw belonged to Obersturmbannfuhrer Giminich. Someone else's fingers were playing with his hair, causing shooting pains across his scalp.
'Not serious,' a voice behind him said in Czech-accented German. The fingers did one more painful dance. 'Water, disinfectant, bandage,' the voice added. 'That is all.'
'Do whatever you have to, doctor,' Giminich said curtly. 'You have been extremely fortunate,' he told Russell, in a tone that implied someone else would have made a more deserving recipient of such luck.
Russell recognised his surroundings - he was back in the original hotel bedroom. He asked how long he'd been out.
'About half an hour,' Giminich grudgingly revealed.
'This stings,' the doctor told him, a second before dousing his head with what had to be neat alcohol.
He wasn't exaggerating. The shock took Russell's breath away, and for a second he thought he was losing consciousness again. 'Christ,' he murmured, as the pain slowly subsided.
The doctor began wrapping a long bandage around Russell's head. He was younger than he'd sounded, a short Czech in his late twenties or early thirties man with a shock of curly dark hair and a cadaverous face.
'What did you see of your assailants?' Giminich wanted to know. He was pacing up and down, a lit cigarette clamped between finger and thumb. Schulenburg, Russell now noticed, was standing by the blackout-screened window.
'Nothing really. The car was an Adler, but I didn't see any faces.'
'The car was stolen,' Giminich said, as if someone had asked him to explain the motorisation of the Czech resistance. 'It was abandoned outside Hiberner Station,' he added unnecessarily.
Russell was wondering why he'd been so stupid. The men who had tipped off Grashof had assumed that Russell was in league with the SD, and Russell himself had done nothing to shake that assumption. He had made no protest when taken away at Masaryk Station, and he had said nothing at the Sramota Cafe to suggest he was an unwilling participant in the entrapment process. Grashof's friends in the resistance had assumed Russell was one of the enemy, and following Grashof's arrest they had sought the obvious retaliation. He could hardly fault their logic, painful as the consequences still were.
'Did you see anything suspicious on your way back to the hotel?' Giminich asked him.
'I thought I was being followed on the Charles Bridge,' Russell said incautiously. 'But I wasn't,' he added quickly. Think before speaking, he told himself.
'What made you think you were not?' Giminich asked, his pacing momentarily suspended.
