The partner's eyes swivelled to take in Effi and Rosa. 'Jews!' he said, with the triumphant surprise of someone who had just happened upon a pair of living dinosaurs. 'You're under arrest,' he added superfluously.
Effi looked at the two of them. There was no kindness in their faces, and not much in the way of intelligence: nothing, in short, to which she might appeal as one human being to another. She helped Rosa to her feet, swaying slightly as she did so. Her head wound was beginning to throb.
'Don't leave me,' Rosa said numbly.
'I won't.'
Franz had closed the girl's suitcase. He gave it to her, and then looked up at Effi, offering a silent apology with his eyes.
'Thank you for your help,' she told him, picking up her own suitcase.
'This way,' one of her captors insisted, and gave her a gratuitous shove. She stumbled down onto her knees, and her head started whirling around. A hand grabbed her upper arm, and she could hear Rosa screaming: 'Leave her alone! Leave her alone!'
'I'm all right,' she managed to say. 'Help me up,' she told the man, and much to her surprise, he did. A crowd of women was watching them, and Effi found herself wondering how many of them had seen her in the movies.
They were ushered across the wide street, and up the opposite sidewalk, the two leather coats striding along behind them. They seemed in ridiculously high spirits, and Effi could almost feel them preening themselves when a ready-made audience of women erupted from the Memeler U-Bahn station. Effi had not heard the all- clear, but the air raid was obviously over. Come to think of it, she hadn't heard a warning either. Even the sirens were admitting defeat.
The nearest police station was a hundred metres further up the road. The front desk was untended, but voices could be heard below – the local Orpo officers were either still waiting for the all-clear or wholly engrossed in a game of cards. One Gestapo man headed for the stairs while the other stood watch over their prize. Lowering herself onto a bench, Effi still felt a little woozy, but after a minute or so something seemed to shift. Her wound continued to throb, but she no longer felt like passing out.
The other Gestapo man reappeared with a suitably chastened sergeant, and soon the former was describing their capture on the telephone. His voice grew less jaunty as the call progressed, and Effi deduced that their future was no longer in his hands. He confirmed as much when he came out. 'Dobberke's people will collect them later,' he told his partner. Catching Effi's eye, he hesitated for a moment, as if there was something he wanted to say, then continued out through the doorway. His partner followed without so much as a glance in their direction.
'Are they going to kill us?' Rosa asked in a whisper.
'I shouldn't think so,' Effi said, although she really had no idea. 'The war's almost over,' she added, as if that was bound to make a difference. The girl looked less frightened than she should, and Effi had the strange feeling that their arrest had almost come as a relief.
'I'm sorry about my blouse,' Rosa said after a few moments. 'I should have let you burn it.'
'No,' Effi said. 'I'm glad you kept it. This isn't your fault. It's just bad luck. But don't worry, I think we'll be all right.'
'We deserve to be,' Rosa said. 'That's what my mother used to say – we deserve to be safe.'
'We certainly do,' Effi agreed, laughing in spite of herself.
The sergeant's face appeared in the hatch, with a look that suggested she'd lost her mind.
It was two hours before 'Dobberke's people' arrived, two hours in which every policeman on the premises found time to give them the once-over. Only one man looked actually pleased to see them there, whereas several sighed with either sympathy or exasperation. Most gave them mystified stares, as if they found it hard to believe that Jews were still walking their streets. The uniformed Gestapo who came to collect them were obviously more used to dealing with fugitive aliens, and shoved them through the doors of the Black Maria with hardly a second glance.
There was a small barred window in the back, but Effi already knew where they were going. She had heard of Dobberke: one of the Jews she had sheltered at the Bismarck Strasse flat in 1943 had escaped from the collection camp on Grosse Hamburger Strasse, which Dobberke then ran. All Jews captured in Berlin had been taken and held there, until their numbers were sufficient to justify a transport. A year later another fugitive had told her that the Grosse Hamburger Strasse camp had been closed, and its functions transferred to the old Jewish Hospital out in Wedding. And that Dobberke was now in charge out there. The greifer – those Jews who scoured Berlin's streets and cafes for U-boats on the Gestapo's behalf – were also based at the hospital.
In most situations, Russell had once told her, there were some things beyond an individual's control and some things that weren't, and what mattered was realising which was which. He'd been talking about some politician – she couldn't even remember which one – but the principle held true for all sorts of things, from acting in movies to surviving the Nazis. Or, in this particular case, a Jewish collection camp. So which things in this situation were still in her control?
Her identity, above all. Who was she claiming to be? They had assumed she was a Jew, and she hadn't denied it, mostly for fear that she and Rosa would be sent to different fates. But now…
What did she want? To live, of course, but not at the cost of abandoning the girl.
Were they still killing Berlin's Jews? They couldn't send them east anymore, so were they kil ing them here? Was there a gas chamber out at the Jewish Hospital? It was hard to imagine such a thing in the heart of Berlin. Even the Nazis had shrunk from that – it was why they had bothered to move the Jews east before killing them. But maybe now they had nothing to lose.
If she wasn't a Jew, then who was she? Not the film actress Effi Koenen, who was still wanted for treason – a definite death sentence there. And not Erna von Freiwald, who was probably now being hunted in connection with the Lubeck-bound fugitives. Helping the Jews might not see her executed, but helping those involved in the plot to kill Hitler probably would. So Dagmar Fahrian, the woman whose papers she now carried? Dagmar had to be a better bet, particularly if Furstenwalde soon fell to the Russians. Perhaps Dagmar's sister had married a Jew before the Nuremberg Laws came into force, and then given birth to a mischling daughter after that became illegal. Perhaps the sister had died, and the Jewish husband had sent the child to Dagmar for safe keeping, before disappearing himself.
As a story, it had a lot to commend it. She and Rosa would be kept together, and both would have a better chance of survival – Effi as a misguided aryan, Rosa as a mischling. As the van zigzagged its way up the rubble- strewn Muller Strasse she gave Rosa a whispered account of their new mutual history.
The girl listened intently, only frowning slightly at the end. 'But we will get our real history back one day?' she half asked, half insisted.
'We certainly will,' Effi promised her. She wondered what Rosa would make of the fact that her new protector had once been a film star. Through the rear window she could see the S-Bahn bridge by Wedding Station. They were almost there.
A few minutes later the van pulled to a halt. The back door was flung open, and one of the uniforms gestured them out. Stepping down onto the street, Effi saw that they had stopped beside a tall iron archway. A plaque announced the address as Schulstrasse 78, and the building behind it as a Pathology Department.
Beyond the arch there was a two-storey gatekeeper's lodge, and this, they soon discovered, was used for administration. A woman took their papers, timed their arrival, and told the bloodstained Effi that she would be taken to the hospital for medical treatment. When Effi asked that Rosa be allowed to accompany her, the woman sighed in exasperation, but made no objection. A young orderly escorted them down a long underground corridor and up several flights of stairs to the medical facility, where a nurse with a Jewish star found Effi a trolley to lie on, and then disappeared in search of a doctor. The man who turned up ten minutes later looked like a Der Sturmer stereotype of a Jew, but lacked the star to prove it. He examined Effi's head wound with none-too-gentle fingers, pronounced it superficial, and marched off, shouting over his shoulder that the nurse should apply a bandage.
She stuck her tongue out at his retreating figure.
'Are all the staff here Jewish?' Effi asked.
'Staff, patients and detainees,' the nurse told her, rolling the bandage around Effi's head. 'In varying degrees, of course. Most of the people on the second floor are half-Jews or quarter-Jews who were married to aryans. Or just had influential friends. The Jews scheduled for transport are in the old Pathology building.'
