Russell a few minutes. In the living room his equally blonde wife was sitting on the sofa, cradling a blonde baby. Goebbels would have thought himself in heaven.
Jentzsch was clearly fond of Kuzorra, and seemed more than willing to talk, but Russell could tell from his frequent glances at wife and child that the young policeman had no intention of putting his family at risk.
He and other colleagues had been told of Kuzorra’s arrest, and were warned not to involve themselves without specific instructions from the occupation authorities. Their superiors were doing what they could to secure the detective’s release.
‘Kuzorra thinks that Rudolf Geruschke has set him up.’
‘I’m sure he did.’
‘Do your superiors think so?’
‘I don’t know. But we were told to suspend the investigation, at least for the time being.’
‘What about the man who denounced him, Martin Ossietsky?’
‘He works for Geruschke.’
‘At the Honey Trap?’
‘No. He’s in charge of a warehouse out in Spandau. Geruschke brings a lot of goods into the city, and that’s one of his storage depots. There are several others.’
Russell thought for a moment. ‘I could confront Ossietsky. As a journalist, I mean. He might give something away.’
Jentzsch shook his head. ‘He won’t. And you’d be putting yourself in real danger. Geruschke doesn’t like people prying into his business.’
‘What could he do — kill me?’
‘He might.’
‘He didn’t kill Kuzorra, just moved him out of the way.’
‘He’s not a psychopath — he doesn’t go around killing people for the fun of it. But people who oppose him have turned up dead. Always in circumstances where someone else could be blamed, but that’s not hard to arrange, not these days. At least twenty violent deaths are recorded each day across the city, and that’s only in the British, French and American zones. The Soviets don’t keep records of the ones they bury.’
‘So what can I do to help Kuzorra? Do you know anyone in the French administration who would talk to me?’
‘Not really. There’s a major I deal with sometimes. He seems a reasonable man, but I don’t think he works in the right section.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Jean-Pierre Giraud.’
‘Okay. So what have you and your colleagues been doing? Or have you just washed your hands of Kuzorra?’
‘Not quite,’ Jentzsch said with commendable honesty. ‘I keep asking the bosses, just to let them know that we haven’t forgotten him. I think our best hope is that they let him retire.’
‘Which would mean dropping the investigation.’
‘It’s already been dropped.’
‘But would Kuzorra let it lie?’
Jentzsch sighed. ‘Probably not.’
Russell was an hour late arriving at Ali’s, but dinner was still cooking. He was about to tell Effi about Miriam when she announced some news of her own. ‘You know you thought Wilhelm Isendahl was too cocky to survive the war?’
‘Yes.’ When Russell had first met Isendahl in 1939, the blond young Jew had enjoyed dining in restaurants patronised by the SS. He and his gentile wife Freya had helped them rescue Miriam and the other girls from the house on Eisenacher Strasse.
‘Well, Ali’s found him. And he’s here in Berlin.’
‘I don’t believe it. That’s great.’ Isendahl had found four families to shelter the rescued girls, but had, at the time, told no one else who they were. But now he could tell them who had taken Miriam. And if any members of the family had survived, they might know what had happened to her, or even where she was.
‘What about Freya?’ he asked.
‘Someone told me that she was in America when Pearl Harbour was attacked,’ Ali said. ‘She may be back now. I don’t know. Anyway, here’s his address.’
Russell pocketed the piece of paper, thinking he could go there next day. ‘I saw Uwe Kuzorra today,’ he announced. ‘He’s the detective we hired to find Miriam in 1939,’ he explained to Ali and Fritz.
‘The one who helped you escape in 1941,’ Ali added for her husband’s benefit.
‘The same. Anyway, he swears he saw Miriam early in 1942. Recognised her from the photograph I gave him. She was walking down Neue Konigstrasse with a baby in a pram.’
‘A baby,’ Effi echoed. ‘How old was it?’
‘Kuzorra couldn’t tell.’
Effi did a quick calculation. ‘If the child was less than eighteen months old, then the father was someone she met after we rescued her. But if it was older than that…’
‘Then the father was one of those SS bastards who visited the house on Eisenacher Strasse,’ Russell said, completing the unwelcome thought. ‘Kuzorra thought she looked happy,’ he added in mitigation.
‘Motherhood can do that,’ Effi told him. ‘It makes no difference who the father is.’
Sunday morning, Effi and Russell went their separate ways. Annaliese expressed disappointment that Russell wouldn’t be sharing their walk, but he suspected she was being polite, and set out for Friedrichshain with a clear conscience.
Isendahl had lived there in 1939, and Russell found himself wondering whether the man had managed to bluff his way through the entire war without even moving apartments. It seemed unlikely — by the end of the war, few adult males of any race had been able to evade the call of the state — but he wouldn’t have put it past him. As it turned out, this apartment was two streets away from the old one, which he and Effi had visited in 1939. Isendahl lived alone in two large rooms, with a panoramic view across the ruins.
His blond hair was longer than Russell remembered, and the old resemblance to Hitler’s security chief Reinhard Heydrich was less marked. ‘We Victims of Fascism are doing well,’ he told Russell, as he ushered him into the spacious book-lined living room. It had taken Isendahl a few seconds to recognise his visitor, but he seemed genuinely pleased to see him. Wilhelm was still a young man; he’d been a prominent member of the KPD youth wing when Hitler first came to power, so he couldn’t be much more than thirty.
What a way to spend your twenties, Russell thought. But then he’d spent most of his own following Lenin’s illusory star.
Isendahl reclaimed the bottle of beer that stood beside his typewriter, and opened one for his guest. After filling each other in on their respective wars — Isendahl had, in his own words, ‘settled for mere survival’ in 1943, and spent almost two years cooped up in a comrade’s roof-space — Russell asked what his host was doing now. Isendahl was happy to tell him, or at least to keep talking, but his answers were somewhat vague. He was working for a local Jewish group which helped survivors get where they wanted to go. He was also liaising with the Soviet occupation authorities, but in what capacity and on whose behalf was less than clear. When Russell asked after his wife Freya, Isendahl looked uncharacteristically sheepish, and mumbled something about this not seeming the right time to send for her. A further question elicited a reluctant admission that she’d been living in New York with her parents since 1941.
Back in 1939, Isendahl had scorned the notion of a Jewish homeland in Palestine — ‘you don’t fight race hatred by creating states based on race’ Russell remembered him saying — but the six years since had modified his stance. Now he was keen to stress the distinction between right and leftwing Zionists, rather than condemn Zionism per se. Without being asked, he rattled off a long list of different groups, ending, somewhat dramatically, with one called the Nokmim, or Jewish Avengers. These followers of a Lithuanian partisan named Abba Kovner were, as their name suggested, determined on vengeance. They believed that six million Nazi deaths were necessary before the Jewish survivors could learn to live with themselves.
