‘Haven’t you heard? Manfred Haferkamp was killed the other day. A suicide, according to the police in the Russian zone, but there are lots of rumours. Haferkamp hated the Russians and their German supporters — Ulbricht and his gang — and he wasn’t afraid to say so.’
‘Maybe he should have been,’ Russell murmured. He felt sick inside. Had his report caused this? Hadn’t Shchepkin implied that expulsion from the Party was the worst that could happen? Or had that been wishful thinking on his own part? He wanted to talk to the Russian.
‘What’s the matter?’ Effi asked him, once they’d left the young man.
He told her.
She squeezed his arm, but didn’t try to argue him out of feeling responsible. ‘Is there anything you can do?’
‘I can tell Shchepkin…’ he began, but that was far as the thought went. What could he tell Shchepkin?
‘Perhaps he was fooled too.’
‘Perhaps,’ Russell said doubtfully.
At the front entrance a public telephone was actually working. He dialled the emergency number that Shchepkin had given him, and left the agreed message. They would meet the next morning.
Effi took his place at the phone, called Lucie at home, and dictated a list of reception points for Russell to write down. All were stations or railway yards, and Russell remembered most of them from 1941, when they’d been used to ship Jews in the other direction. He supposed he should be pleased that Torsten and the children weren’t headed for a Nazi death camp.
They went their separate ways, he to visit the railway locations, she to the local Housing Office. If the refugees reached Berlin they would need somewhere to live, preferably somewhere big enough to accommodate Esther and Leon as well. With grandparents and grandchildren both qualifying as Victims of Fascism, the man she spoke to seemed sanguine enough, though he noted that Torsten’s status might prove problematic.
Effi felt like pointing out that Torsten was also a ‘victim’, but then so, she supposed, were half the people in Europe.
For Russell, the only difficulty was getting from place to place in anything approaching a reasonable time. It all seemed to take forever, but by the end of the afternoon he had left messages and contact details at all the relevant offices. He finally arrived home to find Effi ensconced in their bedroom with a bespectacled young man. The bed was covered with photographs, grainy blow-ups of faces and figures against the same desolate backdrop. ‘That’s my Gestapo killer,’ Effi said, pointing out one face. ‘And here’s the American colonel we saw with Geruschke that night.’
There were two copies of each photograph. ‘Here’s our first Otto,’ Russell said, noticing the accountant in the background of one picture. ‘And this is the man who was going to shoot me in Kyritz Wood. I can’t see his partner anywhere.’
Effi examined the face of the would-be killer, and shuddered. ‘And we have three addresses,’ she added. ‘Including my Gestapo man’s. Horst is a star.’
‘It was the irregulars who followed them home,’ the photographer admitted, but he still seemed pleased by the compliment. ‘There are eleven faces,’ he said, ‘so that’s fourteen packs.’
Russell pulled the suitcase from under the bed and counted out the cigarette packets. It was time he asked Dallin for more.
Sattler dropped them into a canvass holdall and zipped it up. ‘Let me know if you need any inside shots,’ he said. ‘But please, I’d appreciate you not mentioning my name to anyone.’
‘Geruschke makes a very bad enemy,’ Russell agreed.
‘It’s my business I’m thinking of,’ Sattler countered. ‘I’m doing a lot of work for Americans — that’s why I’m in Dahlem this afternoon — and I don’t want to upset anyone.’
‘What sort of work?’ Russell asked out of curiosity.
‘Nothing like this,’ Sattler told him, gesturing towards the display on the bed. ‘Mostly sex, but the Americans like to call it art. God knows how they won the war.’
Effi saw him downstairs to the door, then came back up. Russell was still scanning the photographs. ‘That boy’ll go far,’ he observed.
‘He will, won’t he?’
‘Germany’s future,’ Russell murmured, still looking at the pictures. ‘Now what do we do with these?’
The Tiergarten black market seemed busier than usual, probably because it was Christmas Eve. Remembering he hadn’t got a present for Effi, Russell took more interest than usual in the items for sale, but nothing leapt out at him. It was hard to take this Christmas seriously, even with a light coating of snow on the ground.
Shchepkin appeared at his shoulder with all the old magical abruptness, but seemed more agitated than usual. And when Russell started pouring out his indignation over Haferkamp’s death, the Russian just told him to get a grip. ‘We have a real problem,’ he said. ‘Nemedin is still furious with both of us. We have to fix him before he fixes us.’
‘Why?’ Russell asked. ‘I mean, why’s he furious?’
‘The farce with Schreier, his guards getting killed. He had his knuckles rapped by Beria — if it weren’t for his family connections he’d have been recalled. And he blames us. You in particular, but he’s also suspicious of me.’
‘Oh shit,’ Russell murmured.
‘Indeed.’
‘So how do we fix him? Do you have any brilliant ideas?’ Asking the question, he wondered what sort of answer he wanted to hear.
‘I hope so. While you’ve been chasing Jews I’ve been digging up incriminating material. I now have access to Nemedin’s NKVD personnel file, and such files — in case you don’t know — are very comprehensive. Your own runs to forty-five pages, and Nemedin’s is five times as long. He has, shall we say, a controversial history. He was responsible for the purging of several other communist parties during the time of the Pact, and he was involved in the execution of the Polish officer corps — almost ten thousand of them — in 1940.’
‘So the Poles in London are telling the truth.’
‘About that, yes, though not about much else. But can we concentrate on the matter in hand? There’s enough in Nemedin’s file to tell the Western allies who and what he really is, which is the first objective. I also have a photograph of Nemedin with a British agent. It was taken by our people in London, with a view to incriminating the Englishman, but we can use it the other way round, to cast doubt on Nemedin’s loyalty. I want you to deliver the file and the photograph to a British journalist named Tristram Hadleigh — do you know him?’
‘No.’ Though judging by the name he knew the type.
‘He has friends in your Secret Service, and I assume that he’ll either get the story printed or pass it on to them. If the file and the photograph are published, Nemedin’s ability to work outside the Soviet Union will be over. His face will be known, and there’ll be a huge question mark over his loyalty. At worst, he’ll be called back to Moscow; at best, Beria will have him shot for incompetence. Do I shock you? He’d like nothing better than to have me shot. And you too, after what happened with Schreier.’
‘Why do I have to deliver these things? What’s wrong with the post? Or some young German boy?’
‘They’ll be more credible coming from you. It mustn’t look like one of our schemes. You’re a journalist with a good track record here in Berlin, with ties to the old KPD. And that’s where you say you got hold of the stuff — from a disgruntled German comrade.’
‘Why not give it to the Americans? We can tell them the truth.’
‘No, it has to be the British. If the journalist passes it to the British Secret Service, Beria will hear about it from his mole in London.’
‘I’d forgotten about that. So how are you going to get the stuff to me? By post?’
‘No. You’ll have to collect it from a dead letter drop.’
‘Why?’
‘The post can’t be trusted, and the fewer people who know about this the better. I’ll be in Warsaw when you pick it up…’
‘What?’
