sewn-on badge below each shoulder, the eagle and swastika motif above 'RBD Berlin'. His hair was shorter, the moustache gone, and he no longer resembled the young Stalin. He looked ten years older than the man Russell had known four years earlier.
There was no obvious friction between the two German communists, but he sensed that they didn't have much time for each other. Strohm deferred to Leissner, who was presumably his Reichsbahn superior, but their relative positions in the Party hierarchy might well be different. From what Russell had seen of them – which admittedly wasn't much – their different temperaments reflected very different ways of looking at the world. Leissner, he suspected, would have no trouble working with the Soviets, whereas Strohm probably would.
'I understand you are an old friend of Comrade Strohm,' Leissner said to Russell, sounding less than thrilled. 'You can catch up on old times in a moment, but first I must give you an update on our advance.'
It was much as Russell expected. The city's encirclement had been completed on the previous evening, and Soviet forces were pushing steadily in toward the centre from all directions. That morning a battle was raging along the Teltowkanal, only four kilometres away.
'Tomorrow they should be here,' Leissner said with barely suppressed excitement. 'The following day at the latest.'
He departed, leaving Strohm with them.
'It's really good to see you,' Russell said. 'I must admit, I assumed you were dead.'
'Not yet,' Strohm said wryly, walking over to embrace him. 'It's good to see you too. A welcome surprise. I won't ask how you got here – or why – I gather it's not a subject for discussion…'
'According to Comrade Leissner?'
'Yes.'
'Well, I wouldn't want to upset him. But I would like to know how you escaped the Gestapo in 1941. We were told in Stettin that the whole Berlin network had been arrested.'
'Most, but not all. A few were saved. Like myself.'
'How?'
'In the usual way. The Gestapo got careless – in one case they applied too much pressure and the comrade died, in another they gave the comrade a chance to take his own life. And those two deaths cut the only links to several cells, mine included.'
Strohm's recitation of tragedy was as matter-of-fact as ever. He had initiated their relationship in 1941, in the hope that Russell, as an American journalist, could somehow get news of the accelerating Holocaust to the outside world. Together they had witnessed the first steps of the process, the trains loading up under cover of darkness, at several different Berlin yards. Strohm's passionate concern for the Jews was personal – his Jewish girlfriend had been murdered by stormtroopers – but Russell had always known that the man was a communist, and when he and Effi needed to flee Berlin, Strohm was the man he had turned to. Strohm had taken the matter to his comrades, and they had arranged the first leg of his eventually successful escape.
Russell sighed. 'And now it's almost over,' he said, as much to himself as to Strohm. 'How are the Russians behaving in the suburbs?'
Now it was Strohm's turn to sigh. 'Not well. There have been many rapes in Weissensee and Lichtenberg. Even comrades have been raped.'
'I can't say I'm surprised,' Russell said. 'The Soviet papers have been almost inviting the troops to take their revenge,' he went on. 'They've changed their tune over the last few weeks, but I think the damage has already been done. '
'You're probably right, but I hope not. And not just because the women of Berlin deserve better. If the Red Army behaves badly, it'll make things so much more difficult for the Party. The people already lean towards the English and Americans, and we need the Red Army to behave better than their allies, not worse.'
Fat chance, Russell thought. 'Indiscriminate shelling is not going to win the Soviets many post-war friends in Berlin.'
'No, probably not. But at least there's some military point to that – the Nazis are still resisting. But raping hundreds of women… there's no excuse for that.'
'None,' Russell agreed, thinking about Effi. 'Look, I owe you a great deal…'
'You owe me nothing.'
'Well, I think I owe you something, but it's not going to stop me asking another favour.' He told Strohm about Effi, how she'd come back to Berlin, and probably become involved with a resistance group. 'She suddenly disappeared a few weeks ago, and her sister is convinced that she's been arrested. Is there any way you could check if that's true, and if it is, find out where she was taken? She's using the name Erna von Freiwald.'
Strohm looked up. 'I've heard that name in connection with one of the Jewish escape committees. But I never dreamt it was Effi Koenen. I thought she escaped to Sweden with you.'
Russell explained why Effi had chosen to stay behind.
'We have men in the police, but I have no idea if any of them are still at work. The area around the Alex is being turned into a strongpoint.'
'I know,' Russell said wryly. He told Strohm about his attempted visit, and the day of hard labour that had resulted.
'Ah. Well, I will see what I can find out, but don't get your hopes up – it may well be nothing. But before I go, tell me, the work we were doing in 1941 – did you get the story out?'
'I did,' Russell told him. 'But not in the way we wanted. The big story I had – the gas that Degesch produced for the SS without the usual warning odour – that must have gone into a dozen papers. But no editor was willing to headline it, to put it all together, and tell the whole story for what it was – the attempted murder of an entire people.'
'Why?' Strohm asked, just as Kenyon had in Moscow.
Russell offered him the same guesses, and shrugged. 'I tried. I made such a pest of myself that one editor actually hid in his cupboard rather than see me. I think that was when I realised I was onto a loser.'
'That's a terrible shame,' Strohm said quietly. 'But perhaps we were foolish to expect more.' His face was lined with sadness, and Russell found himself wondering how Strohm would make out in a Soviet-dominated Germany. Here was a man who wanted to believe in a better world – who had no hesitation about putting his own life on the line in pursuit of it – but who found it harder and harder to muster the required suspension of disbelief. He had seen through the lie that was Western capitalism, seen through the lie that was fascism. And soon he would see through the lie that was communism. He was too honest for his own good.
They embraced again, and Strohm disappeared down the staircase, calling out over his shoulder that he'd return with any news.
Varennikov, it seemed, had understood enough of the conversation to form his own judgement. 'Your friend seems more of a German than a communist,' he said casually.
'Maybe,' Russell said non-committally. Strohm had actually been born in America, but he doubted whether Varennikov would find that reassuring.
'It will take many years to rebuild our country,' Varennikov said, with an air of someone addressing a hostile meeting.
It seemed like a non-sequitur, until Russell realised that his companion was using the German despoliation of western Russia to justify the Red Army's behaviour in Germany. 'I'm sure it will,' he agreed diplomatically.
'But America has not even been touched,' the Russian went on, as if Russell had disagreed with him. 'I know a few English cities have been bombed, but my country has been laid to waste. You must remember – until the Revolution we had no industry, no dams, everything was backward. People worked so hard to build a modern country, and now they must do it all again. And they will. In fifty years the Soviet Union will be the richest country on earth.'
'Perhaps.'
'Of course, we must avoid another war. That is why the papers we found are so important – if we have an atomic bomb no one will dare to invade us, and all our socialist achievements will be safe from destruction.' His earnest face suddenly broke into a grin, making him look about twenty. 'Who knows? Perhaps we will both be made Heroes of the Soviet Union.' The battle began badly. The machine-gun was destroyed by only the second shell of the opening barrage, killing two of them. The rest ran for the nearest exit, shells exploding around them like the lashes of a giant whip. Had they emerged at the back, they might have kept running till evening, but a
