Somewhere out there a engine driver was waiting for the all-clear to sound. And when it did his train would jerk into motion, trundling its way around the north-eastern edge of the city, heading for the cutting which lay three kilometres north of where she was sitting. It was a freight train, and one of the covered vans was loaded with crates containing Spanish Embassy furniture. All the friendly embassies had been moved out of Berlin and away from the bombing in 1944, but their new location, some fifty kilometres east of the capital, was in imminent danger of Russian occupation, and the Spanish had requested permission to ship their valuable furniture home through neutral Sweden. The criminal idiots at Ribbentrop's Foreign Office had decided that the threat to Franco's sideboards was more important than their own forces' chronic shortages of supplies, and had ordered the Reichsbahn to divert the necessary rolling stock from military duties.
Franco knew nothing of this, and nor, Effi suspected, did his ambassador. The shipment had been suggested by Erik Aslund, and organised by an attache whose hatred of the Nazis stemmed from his devout Catholicism. It wasn't the first time Aslund had used a furniture shipment for his own ends, which centred around getting prospective victims of the Nazi regime to safety. Two years earlier, when the bombing first became serious, the Swedish Embassy had supposedly crated and shipped its own furniture home to Stockholm. Tables and chairs had been carried aboard at one end, Jews helped off at the other. The switch had been made in these woods, the furniture broken up and buried once the fugitives were on their way.
It was soon after that that Effi began working with Aslund. She had never found out what position he held at the Swedish Embassy, but assumed he had one. When she had eventually asked him, as a personal favour to her, to check whether an Anglo-American journalist named John Russell had arrived in Sweden around the end of 1941, it had taken him only a few days to come up with a positive answer.
She knew he had ties with at least two of the Swedish churches in Berlin, but he had never given her any other reason to think him religious. He was obviously a brave man, but she never got the feeling that he enjoyed taking risks – there was something irreducibly sensible about him which reminded her of Russell. He was younger than John, around thirty-five, and conventionally good-looking in the classic Nordic way. She had seen no evidence of a sense of humour, but given the sort of world they shared that was hardly surprising.
As far as she knew, Aslund had no idea of her own true identity. He knew her as Frau von Freiwald, a gentile widow who was willing to shelter fugitive Jews for a few precious days and nights in her spacious Bismarck Strasse apartment. He also, as far as she knew, had no suspicion that Ali, far from being her aryan niece, was one of several thousand Jewish fugitives – or 'U-boats' – living illegally in Berlin. He had never offered any explanation of his involvement in dangerous anti-state activities, but perhaps he assumed that common decency needed none. He was a Swede, after all.
Outside, the natural light had vanished, but the night battle over Berlin was throwing moving shadows on the wall behind her, and she could just about hear the familiar medley of droning planes, anti-aircraft fire and exploding bombs. She felt her fists tightening with the usual anger – what possible purpose could so much death and destruction serve? The war was won and lost, and punishing the women of Berlin for the crimes their fathers, sons and brothers had committed elsewhere – many and terrible as these undoubtedly were – seemed like something her own despicable government would have done. For reasons that now escaped her, she had expected better of the British and Americans.
She laid her head back down and closed her eyes. She wondered how John felt about his country's bombing campaign, and the fact that most of the people he loved were among the millions on the receiving end. She remembered his outrage when the Luftwaffe had bombed the Spanish town of Guernica for Franco, and an argument not long after with his diplomat friend Doug Conway. 'The bombing of civilians is always, always, a war crime,' Russell had insisted at the dinner party in question. No one had agreed with him. He was being naive, Conway had said. They had the planes, they had the bombs, and they weren't going to let an inability to hit precision targets stand in the way of their use. 'No doubt about that,' John had agreed. 'But that won't make it less of a crime.'
She hoped he still felt that way, that the war hadn't changed him too much. That he would still recognise her.
She remembered a trip to the Zoo with him and Paul. It had been one of those spring days when everything seemed right with the world, even with the Nazis in power. Paul had only been about seven, so it must have been early in their love affair. The three of them had clambered aboard the same elephant, and clung to each other as it lumbered along the wide path between the iron cages…
She woke suddenly, thinking she'd heard a noise outside. There were no lights, no banging – it must have been an animal, perhaps a fox who frequented the cottage and had suddenly scented its human occupant. She hurriedly used her flashlight to check her watch. It was almost two o'clock. Another half-hour and she would have been late for the rendezvous. How could she have been so careless?
There were no moving shadows on the wall, no distant thunder – the air raid had ended. Outside the fires raised by the bombing were reflected in the clouds, casting the world in an orange glow. She selfishly hoped that her own building had been spared – finding new accommodation with her current identity papers shouldn't prove too difficult, but any contact with the authorities involved some sort of risk.
It was cold, and she could feel the damp of the cottage in her bones. She thought about using the outside toilet, but a memory of dense cobwebs persuaded her to squat down in the garden. She was almost forty years old, but spiders still frightened her more than the Gestapo.
She decided to get going. There were only two kilometres to walk, along an easy-to-follow path, but it would be prudent to reach her destination early, and give herself the chance of sizing up the situation from a distance.
Walking as quietly as she could, she followed the path around the northern shore of the lake and up into the woods. The rendezvous point was a designated picnic area close to, but above, the road from Frohnau to Bergfelde. As she and Ali had discovered at the weekend, it had several wooden benches and tables, along with a board bearing faded pictures of animal life and stern warnings against dropping litter. Engraved arrows on a plinth directed viewers towards prominent landmarks of the distant capital, and one recent visitor had brought the display up to date by scratching 'ruins of' in front of several names.
Effi approached the area with extreme caution. No lights were visible, which was as it should be. She thought she heard murmurs of conversation, but was far from sure.
She worked her way off the path and through the trees, grateful for the masking effect of a noisy breeze as she got closer to the edge of the clearing. Stopping, she thought she could make out several figures, some standing, some sitting at one of the picnic tables. Another few metres and she was sure. There were six of them.
They looked innocent enough, but that was the mistake tigers made about staked-out goats.
She told herself that the person or persons who had brought them would still be watching from hiding, if only to confirm her own arrival. She would not see them, and they would only see her from a distance – Aslund had a keen appreciation of cell structures and the security they provided. Which was why he wanted her to take the group from here to the train, to provide a cut-out between his organisation in the city and the railwaymen.
It was always possible that the initial escorts had been arrested en route, their places taken by Gestapo agents. If so, the latter would be close by, watching and waiting for Effi to reveal and condemn herself.
She forced herself to wait a little longer. As she strained ears and eyes for sign of any other watchers, one of the figures at the table suddenly got to his feet and stretched. 'I imagine many ways in which it would all end,' he said to his companions, 'but I never considered a midnight picnic.'
The other men laughed, removing Effi's suspicions. These men had not been brought by the Gestapo.
She took a deep breath and strode out of the trees. The six men, hardly surprisingly, all jumped at her sudden appearance.
'I am your guide,' she said softly. 'We have about two kilometres to walk, and I want you to follow me in single file. Move as quietly as you can. And please, no talking.'
They did as they were told.
She led them back down the path she had taken, turning off onto another after two hundred metres. This new path led north, climbing into the trees and around the side of a low hill. Effi doubted whether the paths in this wood saw much traffic anymore, but Hitlerjugend playing soldiers had infested all woods within easy reach of the capital until the end of 1942, and nature had not yet succeeded in erasing all proof of their perambulations. This
