uniforms,' he said.
'You will wear the uniforms the Nazis give their foreign labourers. Many were captured in East Prussia.'
That made sense. 'And once I've guided the team to these two locations… where do we go then?'
'The team will go to ground and wait for the Red Army.'
'Where exactly?'
'We are investigating several possibilities.'
'Okay. But once the team is safely in hiding I assume I'll be free to look for my family?'
'Yes, but only then. I understand your concern for your family, but you can only leave the team when Major Kazankin agrees to your release. This is a military operation, and the usual rules apply. I'm sure I don't need to remind you of the penalty for desertion.'
'You don't,' Russell agreed. Nor did he doubt their ability to enforce it. The NKVD had a global reach, and peace or no peace, they would eventually hunt him down. And he could see how important this must be to them. If, as some experts claimed, the Soviets had sacrificed an eighth of their population to win this war, they hardly wanted to end it at the mercy of an American atomic monopoly. The stakes could hardly be higher.
'So you accept,' Nikoladze said, looking slightly more relaxed.
'I do,' Russell replied, glancing at Shchepkin. He seemed almost grateful.
'Have you ever jumped from a plane?' Kazankin asked. He had a deep voice, which somehow suited him down to the ground.
'No,' Russell admitted.
'Your training will begin this afternoon,' Nikoladze said.
'But first a bath,' Russell insisted.
Half an hour later, he was standing under a near-scalding downpour in the warders' shower-room when a further drawback suggested itself. Regardless of success or failure, by the end of the operation he would know far too much about Soviet atomic progress – or the lack thereof – for them to ever consider letting him loose. The most likely culmination to his involvement was a quick bullet in the head from Kazankin. One more body on the streets of Berlin was unlikely to attract attention.
For the moment they needed him – Nikoladze had been visibly relieved when he'd agreed to join the team. Even knowing he wanted to reach Berlin, they had feared a refusal. Why? Because they still believed he was working for American intelligence, and a real American agent would hardly agree to help the Soviets gather atomic secrets. And on the off-chance that he was telling the truth, and no longer working for the Americans, they had brought along the only man whom he might conceivably trust. Yevgeny Shchepkin. Resurrected, dusted off, and asked to help them bring Russell on board.
They must want the German secrets very badly.
Dried and dressed in clothes collected from his hotel, he found the major waiting for him. 'The car's outside,' the Russian said.
A thin young man with dark wavy hair and spectacles was waiting in the back. 'Ilya Varennikov,' he introduced himself.
'The scientist,' Kazankin growled.
For Effi and Rosa, Saturday was a day spent learning the ropes. The morning meal of wassersuppe and a few potato peelings served notice that yesterday's dinner had not been a fluke, but, as Johanna wryly remarked, starvation seemed unlikely in the short time remaining. They were allowed exactly forty-five minutes of exercise, circling a small courtyard under a square of smoke-streaked sky, and were then left with nothing to do but wait another twelve hours for another bowl of wassersuppe.
Once one of the guards had been cajoled into sharpening Rosa's only pencil, the girl seemed happy to draw, and Effi embarked on the task of learning as much as she could about their place of imprisonment. Johanna knew quite a lot, but residents of longer standing were more aware of how different the place had been only a few months earlier, and how it had changed in the meantime.
There were, it seemed, about a thousand Jews still resident in the hospital complex. As the nurse had told Effi, those living in the hospital proper – the half-Jews and quarter-Jews, the dreaded greifer – were the privileged ones. The atmosphere on that side of the barbed wire was said to be increasingly febrile, with much drinking, dancing and promiscuous coupling. The non-Jewish authorities, far from forbidding such activities, were avidly joining in. Everyone was fiddling while Berlin burned.
Still expecting a summons to interrogation, Effi sought information about her likely interrogator. SS Hauptscharfuhrer Dobberke, as everyone seemed to agree, was a thug of the first order, but many of the same people seemed, almost despite themselves, to have a sneaking respect for the man. Yes, he did punish any serious rule-breaking with twenty-five lashes of his favourite whip, and yes, he would stick anyone lacking funds on a transport east with hardly a second thought, but he never exceeded the twenty-five, and once he had taken a bribe he always delivered his side of the bargain.
And not all the bribes were monetary. Dobberke loved the ladies, and was more than ready to stretch the rules in a woman prisoner's favour if he received a favourable response to his overtures. Effi forced herself to consider the possibility – would she let the bastard fuck her if it improved her and Rosa's chances of survival? She probably would, but doubted she'd be given the chance. Dobberke was said to like his flesh tender, and though she had become many things over the last four years, young wasn't one of them.
The church bells were ringing as Paul, Neumaier, Hannes and Haaf walked into Diedersdorf that evening. A gesture of defiance, Paul guessed, in that no one was left to attend any services. The only show in town was at the village hall – a screening of the movie Kolberg, which rumour claimed had cost as much as a thousand new tanks. According to battalion some idiot from Personnel had delivered the tickets in his staff car, engine still running, eyes nervously scanning the eastern horizon and sky.
Reaching the village hall the foursome discovered that their tickets, far from being free, simply entitled them to come up with a four Reichsmark entrance fee. After some grumbling – Hannes was all for telling the doorman to stuff his wretched movie – they came up with the cash and filtered inside. The hall lacked sufficient chairs for the likely audience, and those available, arranged in rows at the back, were already occupied. But the large area of floor space at the front was still only sparsely populated, and they managed to secure a stretch of wall on the far side to sit against. Looking round, Paul could see that most of the men were from artillery units like their own. The few tank men present had managed, with characteristic arrogance, to seize the front row of chairs.
The hall gradually filled, the babble of conversation growing steadily louder, until the ceiling lights abruptly went out, and the film began flickering on the large white sheet which covered half of the end wall. The first scenes drew deep sighs of appreciation, less for their content than for the fact that the film was in colour.
Paul, like almost everyone else in the hall, already knew the story – the Pomeranian town's defiance of the French in 1807 had been a staple of school history lessons and Hitlerjugend meetings for as long as he could remember. It had, however, ended in failure when the overall war was lost, and Paul was intrigued to discover how Goebbels and his film producers – Effi's 'nightmare machine' – had finessed this unfortunate fact. He soon found out. Kolberg opened in 1913, after the eventual defeat of the French, with one of the characters reflecting on the importance of civilian militia, and the crucial role the men of the town had played in pointing the way towards victory.
Most of the rest was flashback. The indomitable mayor first overcame the doubters in his own camp – some seduced by foreign liberalism, others weakened by cowardice or too much self-importance – and then held the French at bay with the usual heady mixture of ingenuity, courage and extraordinary will-power.
It was impressively done, and almost insultingly lavish. He remembered Effi explaining how salt was always used for snow, and that hundreds of railway wagons would be used to transport it to a set. And then there were the soldiers – thousands of them. Where had they come from? They looked too much like Germans to be prisoners. They could only be real soldiers, taken out of the front line at some point in the last eighteen months. It beggared belief. Paul felt anger rising inside him. How many men had died for lack of support while Goebbels was making epics?
Let it go, he told himself. This might well be the last movie he would ever see. He should enjoy the spectacle, enjoy imagining a night in Kristina Soderbaum's arms. Forget everything else.
And, for most of the film, he did. It had to end though, and when the lights came on it felt like a slap in the
