‘None at all.’
When Thomas came back she took her leave, and ten minutes later was up on stage, going through the familiar repertoire. As before, she finished with ‘Berlin Will Rise Again’, and Effi noticed a glint of tears in Thomas’s eyes.
‘I’ll just use the bathroom before we go,’ she told him when the performance was over, and worked her way through to the back of the club. Noticing Irma through the open door of her dressing room, Effi was just leaning in to say goodbye when a familiar voice sounded just down the passage. She stepped quickly over the threshold and pulled the door to.
‘Oh it’s you,’ Irma said looking up.
‘Shhh,’ Effi told her, opening a narrow gap between door and jamb, and pressing one eye up against it. The youth from the canal basin rendezvous was standing outside another doorway, apparently waiting for someone to come out. He looked even younger than he had in the dark, and she noticed a long thin scar on the left side of his neck.
He turned to go, and the other man — the Gestapo thug from the station platform — emerged through the doorway. She had a fleeting glimpse of his face as he turned away, and followed his young partner out towards the back door. There had to be somewhere for parking, she realised — Geruschke didn’t seem like a man who took buses.
She pushed the door shut.
‘What are you doing?’ Irma asked.
‘Just someone I didn’t want to see again.’
‘A fan?’
‘Not exactly.’
Irma worked it out. ‘One of Geruschke’s goons?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t mess with him, Effi. He’d cut out his grandmother’s heart and sell it for dog food.’
‘Why do you work for the bastard?’ Effi felt compelled to ask.
Irma gave her a sharp look. ‘Same reason we both worked for Goebbels. Sometimes there’s only one show in town.’
Albert’s business with the Haganah people at Pontebba had used up most of Saturday, and persuading a local garage to supply him with a full tank of petrol took care of the rest. He had purchased the car, a black Lancia Augusta, from the widow of a long-vanished Fascist mayor in the Po valley, and was delivering it to a Haganah base outside Salzburg. According to the widow her husband had rarely used the car in peacetime, and had kept it locked in its garage throughout the war. Motoring smoothly up towards the frontier on that Sunday morning, it seemed eager to make up for lost miles.
As they neared the frontier Russell kept a lookout for Hirth’s son, but saw no sign of the boy. The descending path from the guardhouse had indeed been easy to follow, and he hoped that hunger would eventually drive the boy down.
There were no problems at the border — Albert’s papers were exquisite forgeries — and none at the subsequent checkpoints. They stopped for lunch at the Villach transit house, which had just received another shipment of orphans. They would be going south in the next few days, Lidovsky told Russell. And no, he added without being asked, there had been no sightings of the Hauptsturmfuhrer’s son. He felt it too, Russell thought. They had let themselves down.
Soon after one o’clock they set off again. Albert was eager for news of his mother and sisters. ‘I can’t believe I haven’t seen them for so many years,’ he said. Did Russell think they would eventually come to Palestine? ‘I live on a kibbutz, but I can find them a flat in Tel Aviv.’
Russell told the truth as far as he knew it, that his mother was torn, that the girls were happy in England, at least for the moment. ‘Of course, if you do get your state…’
‘We will.’
‘You’re that certain?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have a journalist friend who agrees with you. He says the Zionists have the two things that matter — sympathy and money.’
Albert smiled at that. ‘He’s right.’
‘The Arabs won’t give up their home without a fight.’
‘No, I’m sure they won’t. But they will lose.’
‘There are more of them.’
‘That won’t matter. Our men have learned a lot, first in our Palmach militia, then in the British Jewish Brigade — and we’re better fighters than they are. And our morale will be better. We Jews are all in it together, but the Arabs with money treat the others like shit.’
Russell grunted his concurrence.
‘And there’s another thing. The Arabs in Palestine have other countries they can move to — Transjordan, Syria, Egypt, the Lebanon. We have nowhere else. We have to win. The British will try and stop us, but their hearts aren’t in it, and in any case their day is over. The Americans are the ones that matter, and they support us.’
‘Anti-Semitism is hardly unknown in the States,’ Russell said mildly.
‘No, but a third of our people now live there. That’s a lot of money, a lot of sympathy. And a lot of voters that the politicians won’t be able to ignore. Americans love an underdog.’
‘That’s the British. Americans love a winner.’
‘Even better. We will win, believe me.’
‘Oh, I do,’ Russell said. And he did. In fact, only the British Government seemed otherwise inclined.
They drove up the Drau valley to Spittal, then turned onto the mountain road to Radstadt. There was snow on the slopes but rain in the air, and no fear of the road being blocked. It was around two hundred kilometres from Villach to Salzburg, and by late afternoon they had reached the first of the three Jewish DP camps that Albert needed to visit. The first, a permanent affair, bore the unofficial name of New Palestine; the others were purely for transients, and had less to offer in terms of food and accommodation. The Haganah had an arrangement with the American authorities not to increase the number of residents in their Austrian zone, Albert told Russell, so they needed to keep people moving, shifting groups on across the Italian or German borders to make room for new arrivals.
Having dropped off the car soon after dawn, they hitched a ride on a lorry heading east to pick up another group of Jews travelling west. Cold rain fell in sheets for most of the three-hour journey, and the River Enns, when they reached it, looked almost too choppy to cross. But a small boat heaved its way to their landing stage an hour or so later with thirty Jews on board, and Russell watched several look round in wonderment before climbing aboard the lorry. They had reached the relative safety of the American zone.
Russell and Albert clambered aboard the boat, and watched with admiration as the captain worked his way up and across to the eastern shore. It was a half hour walk from there to St Valentin, but they saw no sign of Russian occupation forces until they reached the station, where a few Red Army men were drinking tea in the platform cafeteria. They seemed unusually subdued, Russell thought. Probably hung over.
Their train to Vienna only stopped once, and it was still early afternoon when they arrived at the Westbahnhof. Russell had expected an overnight stop, but Albert was anxious to reach Bratislava that day. A cab carried them across the city and over the Danube to the station in Floridsdorf, where a local train was waiting, seemingly just for them. The whistle blew the moment they were safely on board, and an hour or so later they alighted at a desolate country halt. A ten-minute walk brought them to the Austrian end of a long wooden footbridge, which extended out across a wide expanse of marsh and river. The frontier was in there somewhere, and two Red Army soldiers were guarding the Austrian end, albeit with no great diligence. They waved the two men through without even checking their papers.
‘How about coming the other way?’ Russell asked once they were on the bridge. ‘Do they just let your people through?’
‘A small bribe is usually enough,’ Albert replied. ‘The only people they stop are their own.’
There were no guards on the Czech side, but a longer walk to transport. After twenty minutes or so they met
