‘Why are they doing this?’ Effi asked. ‘To us in particular, I mean.’
‘It’s hard to know. There are Jews in the American administration who’d happily string up all the ex-Nazis, let alone bar them from making movies. And there are other, more powerful Americans who are worried about movies like ours, movies that ask real questions and support progressive ideas.’
Effi wasn’t Russell’s partner for nothing. ‘So we’ve become one of the battlefields between the Americans and the Russians?’
Dufring gave her an appreciative look. ‘Something like that, yes.’
After leaving Shchepkin Russell took a look at the new Soviet Memorial. It was in the form of a stoa, with six columns bearing the names of the fallen, and a statue of a Red Army soldier atop the centre of the colonnade’s roof. A tank and howitzer had been placed on each side. The context made it moving, but like most Soviet architecture, it seemed firmly rooted in the past.
He walked on past the Brandenburg Gate and into an almost unrecognisable Pariser Platz. Stretching out ahead, the once stately Unter den Linden was a corridor of ruins. The Adlon Hotel, which had still been there in April, had obviously succumbed in the final days, and was now little more than a shell. The American Embassy wasn’t even that.
Wilhelmstrasse had been virtually levelled. The buildings that had housed the Nazi government and its predecessors — the Foreign Ministry, the Justice Ministry, Promi — had all but vanished. Hitler’s new Chancellery, whose ceremonial opening Russell had attended in 1939, was a field of broken stone. The street itself was still lined with rubble, with barely room for two cars to pass each other.
Further up Unter den Linden, his favourite coffee house had disappeared. He knew it was ridiculous, but he’d spent so many mornings at Kranzler’s drinking their wonderful coffee and reading the newspapers, and he’d hoped against hope that it might have survived. On the opposite corner, the Cafe Bauer had suffered the same fate.
He eventually found a functioning canteen in the bowels of Friedrichstrasse Station, and a quiet corner in which to examine Shchepkin’s missive. Rather to his surprise, it was only a pair of lists. There was one for him with five names, each with a personal and work-place address. Effi’s had just two names, Ernst Dufring and Harald Koll.
There were no suggestions at to how these Party members should be approached, and no reiteration of what Shchepkin’s superiors wanted to know. The latter, he supposed, was clear enough. If push came to shove, as it probably would, did these German communists feel that they owed their primary loyalty to their own party or to Moscow, to Germany or to the Soviet Union?
What weren’t so clear were the consequences of a bad report. A word of comradely admonishment? Summary expulsion from the Party? Incarceration? Or even a bullet in the back of the head? He should have asked Shchepkin, Russell realised. He might have received a straight answer.
After everything that had happened in the last twelve years the current members of the KPD should have a pretty shrewd idea of what was what. Those who’d returned from Soviet exile would certainly be well aware of Stalin’s methods, and of the need to use them. But comrades like Strohm and Leissner — who’d spent the Nazi years in Germany, out of touch with their Soviet mentors — they might still have their illusions intact. And these were the men he might have to condemn.
He couldn’t betray Gerhart Strohm, a man he liked, respected and owed. They had first met in the autumn of 1941, when Strohm had contacted him, and asked if he was interested, as a journalist, in the first expulsions of Jews from Berlin. Between then and Russell’s precipitate flight in December, the two of them had borne witness to several departures from different railway yards. It had been a bitter, frustrating experience, but at least they had got to know each other.
Strohm had been born in California to German emigrants, then sent back to his German grandparents when both parents were killed in a car crash. At university he had immersed himself in left-wing politics, and soon after the Nazis took power had been arrested on a minor charge. After serving his sentence he had found work as a railway dispatcher and, Russell assumed, been part of the splintered communist underground. But it was not as a communist that he’d come to Russell — his Jewish girlfriend had been killed by the Nazis, and the fate of her community was almost an obsession. As a railwayman and a comrade he had access to all the relevant information — where the trains left from, when they were scheduled, where they ended up.
In 1941, Strohm had helped Russell recover some crucial papers from the left luggage office at Stettin Station, and a week or so later had helped arrange the first leg of his escape from Germany. Few men had done as much for Russell, and without any thought of personal advantage.
He would talk to Strohm first — find out what the man really thought. If he was head over heels in love with Stalin, then well and good. If he hated the dictator’s guts, then no one need know. And if Strohm seemed oblivious to the perils of an anti-Soviet stance, then a quiet word might not go amiss. The railwayman could do what he wanted with the news that Stalin was watching him.
Russell left the canteen and headed north towards the river. Another temporary walkway allowed him across, and he picked his way east and north through the devastated University Hospital complex. Strohm’s workplace address was on Oranienburger Strasse, only a stone’s throw from the old synagogue, and not much further from the flat where Ali and her parents had lived before the latter’s deportation.
The address in question housed new education and welfare departments, and Strohm’s office was part of the former. He was surprised and pleased to see Russell, and begged him to wait while he dealt with a delegation of angry teachers. Russell watched Strohm listen to their complaints — of which a lack of electricity and fresh water were only the most serious — and was impressed by his response. He neither played down the problems nor apologised for those that were clearly beyond his control, and he didn’t fob them off with promises he might not be able to keep. Just the sort of politician the country needed, Russell thought.
He had noticed a busy canteen on the ground floor, but once the teachers were gone, Strohm suggested they go out for lunch — he knew a good cafe nearby. It was on August Strasse, and reminded Russell of the workers’ cafe Strohm had frequented when he worked at Stettin Station. The long room was full of steam and conversation, the food basic but surprisingly plentiful.
‘So, what have you been doing these last six months?’ Strohm asked him. ‘I heard that you found your girlfriend.’
Russell skimmed through his recent life, something he seemed to be doing several times a day. ‘I never asked you in April,’ he said, ‘but what happened to the comrades who helped us escape in 1941? The Ottings and Ernst and Andreas. And the comrades at Stettin Station whose names I never knew.’
Strohm grimaced. ‘The Ottings were murdered by the Gestapo, and so were the two men who sent you to Stettin. I have no knowledge of the other two. Do you know their surnames?’
‘No.’
Strohm shrugged. ‘I’ll try and find out, but I can’t promise anything. The Poles are in Stettin now…’
‘I know.’
‘But someone you knew came back from the dead.’
‘Who?’
‘Miroslav Zembski.’
‘The Fat Silesian!’ Russell said delightedly. He remembered telling Strohm about Zembski in 1941, and his reasons for believing the photographer dead.
‘The camps had a way of thinning people out — you probably wouldn’t recognise him now.’
‘Is he working as a photographer?’ Zembski had been a well-respected freelance in the 1930s until a brawl at Goering’s country lodge cost him his official accreditation. After that he had run a camera shop and studio in Neukolln, while working undercover for the Comintern.
‘He works for the Party newspaper. At the office on Klosterstrasse. I was talking to him a couple of months ago, and he seemed to remember you fondly.’
‘I’ll go and see him when I get the chance.’ He felt buoyed by Zembski’s survival, though overall it was much as he’d feared. At least four people had died to get him out of Germany. There was only one thing he could do for them — refuse to betray the comrades they had left behind. Comrades like Strohm. He asked him how things were going.
Strohm sighed, which was not a good sign. ‘Some things are going well,’ he said after a pause. He looked at Russell. ‘This is off the record?’
