Could he really let Hirth walk away?
What did he actually know that the man had done? Hirth had worked for Heydrich when the death camps were being planned, but Russell had no idea how implicated the Sicherheitsdienst had been in the actual slaughter. They hadn’t run the camps, driven the trains or fed the ovens. Had Hirth used a Jewish head for a paperweight? He had to have blood on his hands, but how much? Enough to justify killing his son?
The son couldn’t have been much more than five when the orders went out — he had nothing to answer for. But Hirth was right — if the Jews didn’t kill the boy they would probably leave him to die. At best he’d be an orphan.
There was no justice in letting Hirth go free, and none for the boy in killing his father.
‘All right,’ Russell agreed reluctantly.
‘Thank you,’ Hirth said quietly as Lidovsky walked towards them.
‘You and your son must come with us,’ the Haganah officer insisted.
‘We’d be most obliged,’ Hirth said, after a quick glance at Russell. ‘I must find my son,’ he said, after Lidovsky had gone.
There was no need. They were entering the guardhouse by one door when one of the Jews burst in through the other, holding Hirth’s son by the scruff of the neck. The boy was screaming, his trousers round his knees. ‘See what I saw,’ the man said, pushing the boy to the ground. He tried to cover himself, but there was the tell-tale foreskin.
Hirth tried to help his son, but Lidovsky had a gun to his head. He pushed the SS man onto the ground and held him down with a foot on his chest. ‘Pull off his trousers,’ he told two of the men.
Hirth squirmed and kicked, but all to no avail. First the trousers and then the underpants, and another uncircumcised penis was shrivelling in the cold.
It was the way the Gestapo had checked for Jews, but Russell doubted whether Hirth was relishing the irony.
Kempner was going through the coat and trouser pockets. They had already seen the fake papers, but not the gun. It was a Sauer 38H, with SS lightning rods engraved in the grip.
Russell imagined Hirth taking it from his desk, realising the risk it represented, but bringing it along regardless, because any gun was better than none.
Now Lidovsky and Kempner were discussing his fate — short sentences batted to and fro across the few inches that separated their faces. Russell considered intervening, but to say what? He glanced at the boy, who was firmly held by one of the Jews, trousers still flopping around his ankles. The fear in his face was almost too much to bear.
Kempner and Lidovsky pulled Hirth to his feet, took an upper arm each, and dragged him out through the door. The boy cried out once, a heartfelt wail, and struggled in vain against the arms that were holding him.
The shot came sooner than Russell expected.
Hirth’s son screamed and redoubled his efforts to break free; the man held him for a few seconds more, then abruptly released his grip. The boy hitched up his trousers and half-stumbled out through the door, holding one palm raised before him, as if to ward off evil.
Russell sank down to the floor with his back against the wall. He told himself that Hirth had gone to whatever Jew-hating Valhalla Heydrich’s finest went to, and that most SS Hauptsturmfuhrers probably deserved shooting. But it was the look on the son’s face that he would remember. The dawning of irretrievable loss.
Several hours later, when Lidovsky came round announcing that it was time to go, Russell asked him what they intended doing with the boy.
‘We’ll leave him here. One of the women tried to talk to him — she told him we would take him to the nearest town, but he just ignored her. He’s out there trying to dig a grave with his bare hands.’
‘He’ll die if we just leave him.’
‘Only if he wants to. The path to the road is clear enough.’
Russell walked outside. Hirth’s body was lying on its side in the frosty grass, an angry red hole above the ear. The boy was sitting a couple of metres away, staring out at the lightening sky to the east. His assault on the frozen earth had barely scratched the surface.
‘Come with us,’ Russell said.
‘I’d rather die,’ the boy replied without turning his head.
Some days at Babelsberg, after hours inside the skin of camp survivor Lilli Neumann, Effi would stare at the face in the dressing room mirror and wonder whose it was. Sometimes it would take as much as an hour to claw her own self back, but even with Russell away she never doubted the need — this was a character that could take her over, and drag her down to who knew where.
She was more or less herself again when a knock sounded on the door. ‘Come in,’ she called out, expecting to be told that the bus was waiting.
A man stepped into the room. ‘Effi Koenen?’ he asked, with only the slightest hint of query.
‘Yes.’
‘May I have a word?’ he asked in more than passable German. The accent was American, but he was in civilian clothes, a smart black coat over a light grey suit. He was about thirty, Effi guessed, with straight brown hair, regular features and unusually white teeth.
‘What about?’
‘May I sit down?’ he asked, indicating the easy chair.
She gestured her acquiescence. ‘I can’t give you very long,’ she said.
‘I only need a few minutes.’ He put one leg over the other and brushed an imaginary speck of dirt off his knee.
‘Who are you?’
‘I represent the American Government — your husband’s employer. Or one of them at least.’
‘Do you have a name?’
‘Seymour Exner.’
She went back to the mirror to finish removing her make-up. ‘So what can I do for you, Seymour?’
‘We have a request to make. Well, to be honest, it’s more than a request. Two weeks ago your partner John Russell asked for our help in removing certain obstacles to your participation in this film, and at the time we were happy to oblige…’
‘At the time?’
‘If you had confined yourself to the job in hand we would have no regrets about helping out. However…’
She turned to face him. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘The black market.’
‘What about it? I don’t have time to visit markets, black or otherwise.’
‘The other night?’
The penny dropped. ‘I was helping a friend buy medicines — she’s a sister at the Elisabeth Hospital.’
He brushed that aside with a wave of an arm. ‘The black market is a fact of life,’ he said. ‘You must realise that. People must buy and sell whatever they have to in order to survive, to prevail, and morality doesn’t come into it — not for the moment. And the same is true of politics. The Nazis are gone and people would like to think that there’s an end to it, but we believe that the new enemy is already here in Berlin. And we will do whatever we have to, use whoever we have to, in order to prevail. Do I make myself clear?’
‘You’ll do what you have to. It sounds familiar, but I never took much notice of politics. And I still don’t understand what all this philosophising has to do with me.’
He breathed a sigh of frustration. ‘Nothing, if you confine yourself to what you are good at, and leave crusades to the church.’
Effi smiled inwardly, remembering something Russell had told her weeks ago, that a quarter of the country’s Protestant clergy had joined the Nazis before they even came to power.
‘We intend talking to Mr Russell when he returns,’ Exner said, as if that would make Effi feel better. ‘Perhaps the two of you should talk this through before you take any more unconsidered actions.’
That made Effi angry — receiving an incomprehensible telling-off from a brash young idiot was bad enough; hearing him suggest that she wait for the balm of Russell’s calming influence was downright insulting. ‘So you’re
