Masaryk Station (John Russell) (20 page)

Anticipating the question hadn’t provided Russell with a satisfactory answer. He couldn’t admit to shopping Croat ‘freedom fighters’ or writing an exposé of the Rat Line without bringing the wrath of his American employers down on his head. ‘Beats me,’ he said, with all the insouciance he could muster. ‘All I can think is that it must have been the fucking Ukrainians—either friends of Palychko who think I sold him out, or enemies angry that I tried to help him.’

‘It was Croats,’ Youklis insisted. Dempsey was saying nothing, just looking disappointed, as if Russell had let the side down by becoming a target.

‘What have I done to offend
them
?’

‘That’s what we want you to tell us,’ Youklis persisted.

Russell shrugged. ‘I can’t. Unless I’ve trodden on some toes without realising it. I have talked to victims of the Ustashe …’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’

‘The same reason we held the Nuremberg Trials, so that war crimes won’t be forgotten. I’m a journalist, remember?’

‘So you keep telling me. I don’t suppose you’ve been playing around with a woman named Luciana Fratelli?’

‘What? Who’s she?’

‘Monsignor Kozniku’s secretary.’

‘Her? No, not my type. Why do you ask?’

‘Her body was found floating in the docks on Sunday evening. And Dempsey here had the mad idea that her boyfriend discovered
the two of you were playing around behind his back, and decided to kill you both.’

‘Brilliant theory,’ Russell noted sarcastically. ‘She’s an Italian, not a Croat.’

‘She works for a Croat organisation,’ Dempsey insisted.

‘And I’ve only ever met her once,’ Russell went on, ignoring him. ‘When I collected Palychko’s papers.’ He guessed that the Croats, seeking the betrayer of their comrades, and knowing that she had access to the names, had tortured the truth out of her. He didn’t ask Youklis what state the body was in.

‘Right,’ Youklis was saying. ‘And there’s no other Croat woman you’ve been fucking, no Croats you owe money to?’

‘No and no. Maybe they really were after the Serb.’

‘Not according to our informants.’ Youklis sighed with apparent frustration. ‘But whatever you’ve done to piss them off—and I don’t for a goddamned minute think you’ve told us all you know—you’ve made yourself a target. And we can’t carry on babysitting you until they get bored and go home.’

‘I wasn’t aware that you had been.’

‘You know what I mean. You’re no use to us here anymore. We’re sending you back to Berlin.’

‘Well, I won’t object.’

‘I didn’t think so. But on your way home, there’s a job that needs doing.’

His punishment, Russell thought, or was he just being paranoid? ‘Where this time?

‘Prague.’

‘And what’s the job?’

‘You’ll be briefed in Vienna.’ Youklis extracted a sheet of paper and an envelope from his briefcase. ‘That man at that address, he’s expecting you sometime tomorrow. Your ticket’s in the envelope.’

Russell’s first thought was that he would miss Sasa’s funeral, after promising her parents he’d be there. His second was that denying him even that modicum of atonement was strangely fitting. Killers shouldn’t turn up at a victim’s funeral.

Youklis, bizarrely, was holding out a hand in farewell. Russell shook it, marvelling at the hypocrisy. The American disliked and distrusted him, and had cheerfully risked Russell’s life in Belgrade without a moment’s compunction, but no one could fault his manners.

After Dempsey had dropped Russell off downtown, he started for home intending to pack, and then realised he couldn’t cope with any more of Marko’s grief at this particular moment. Instead, he ate a final dinner at his favourite restaurant, and then sat out in the Piazza dell Unità, watching the sunset until the darkness was almost complete. Walking back up the hill he stopped at a public telephone to ring Artucci’s two contact numbers, but no one answered at either. The Italian was long gone, Russell guessed—either communing with the fishes, or halfway to Sicily.

He approached the ravaged hostel with caution, but no one was lurking in the piazza’s shadows with murderous intent. Two of Sasa’s younger siblings were sitting on the stairs, their bodies listless, their faces full of dull resentment. As well they might be, he thought, shutting the door to his room, but taking the faces in with him. He should be glad to be alive, he thought, but that feeling was beyond him.

Wednesday morning brought rain and a letter from Eva Kempka. Effi had twice tried to call her on the previous day, but each time the phone had kept ringing. That and a line in the letter—‘i know it’s ridiculous, but I think I’m being watched’—convinced her a visit to Kreuzberg was in order.

Eva lived opposite an infants’ school, just around the corner
from Russell’s pre-war home on Neuenburger Strasse. Block residents had been forbidden to open their windows when the heating was on, and sometimes Russell’s top-floor flat had grown so hot that they’d stretched out naked on his bed with a pair of borrowed film-set fans blowing right at them. The
portierfrau
Frau Heidegger had always called her John’s ‘fiancée’, and assuming she’d survived the war, would doubtless be pleased to hear of their marriage.

Eva’s flat was on the second floor. There was no response to Effi’s first knock, nor to a louder second. The view through the keyhole was limited, and offered no clues to the tenant’s whereabouts. After finding that everyone else was out on that floor, she went down to the basement in search of the
portierfrau
.

The woman in question was around fifty, unusually fat for post-war Berlin, and disinclined to be helpful, particularly when she found out who Effi was looking for. ‘Frau Kempka has been arrested,’ she stated, almost triumphantly.

‘What for?’ Effi asked.

‘I don’t exactly know, but I’m sure we could both make a good guess. Your kind can hardly …’

‘My kind?’

‘You know what I mean. It’s still illegal, you know, despite everything that’s happened.’

If the woman hadn’t been so fat, Effi thought, she’d be one of those people painting 88 on high walls and bridges—88 for HH or Heil Hitler. ‘I am not a lesbian,’ she told the
portierfrau
, adding a note of indignation for effect.

‘Oh. Well I’m sure I’ve seen you before.’

On the silver screen or a wanted poster, Effi wondered. ‘Not here,’ she said.

‘So what did you want with Frau Kempka?’

‘I’m a work colleague,’ Effi improvised. ‘She hasn’t turned up, and her boss wants to know why.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘So when was she arrested?’

‘They came on Sunday afternoon. About four, I think.’

‘Were they German or Russian?’

‘They weren’t in uniform. The one who spoke was German, but the other one could have been Russian. He had that flat face they have.’

‘Did Eva, er, Frau Kempka resist?

‘Oh, she kicked up a right fuss, screaming her head off as they put her in the car.’

‘But no one tried to help her?’

‘Well, it was the police, and anyway, no one around here likes her kind.’

‘I understand. Look, if she comes back could you ask her to telephone Effi?’

‘Oh, I doubt she’ll be back. Like I said, it is still illegal.’

‘But if she does?’

The woman was staring at her. ‘You’re Effi Koenen, aren’t you? I remember you in
Mother
. And what was that other one?
More Than Brothers
. Wonderful films. They knew how to make them before the war. Not like the moody nonsense they put out today. Would you give me your autograph?’

Without waiting for an answer she ducked back inside for something to sign.

Effi stood there, thinking that now the woman would call her if Eva did return. Fame did have its compensations.

There was a long wait while their first-class carriages were shunted aboard the ferry for the short ride to Rugen Island. As he watched
others travellers stream past his window on foot, Gerhard Ströhm couldn’t help noticing the resentful looks aimed his way, and the reason offered for his and his comrades’ special treatment—that they would be able to work on the journey—suddenly seemed a lot less convincing.

He had never been to Rugen Island, and neither, he imagined, had most of the others. In pre-Nazi days only the bourgeoisie had been able to afford weekends or weeks away in the expensive hotels, and after 1933 eager groups of
Hitlerjugend
and
Bund Deutscher Mädel
had pretty much monopolised the island’s woods and beaches. The only people working there had been those shipped in to service others.

It was as beautiful as Effi had said it was, Ströhm thought, as a conference-centre car carried him and three other delegates the last few kilometres to the converted hotel. The local Party had suggested a new holiday camp for city workers and their families, but had been overruled by Berlin. Too many echoes of ‘Strength Through Joy’, one official had told him; the Party needed a conference centre away from the capital, where its leading officials could escape the stresses of their daily work, and plan for the people’s future.

It didn’t look as if any expense had been spared. Ströhm’s room was probably the nicest he’d ever had, with its own tiny bathroom, large soft bed, neat modern desk and leather-backed chairs. The terrace below his window was a few steps up from the beach, the grey-blue Baltic beyond, stretching to a sharp horizon.

The main conference hall, as he soon discovered, was even more impressive, a slight stage overlooking rows of comfortable chairs beneath gabled wooden rafters. It all felt so new, so modern, so clean.

The first session that afternoon was devoted to administrative procedures, and the importance of standardisation in a socialist economy.
Ströhm found nothing to argue with in either the initial presentation or the various remarks from the floor. Of course they had to be efficient. Who would argue otherwise? Afterwards, as they all trooped off to the dining room, he found himself hoping that future sessions would offer rather more in the way of controversy.

The food, when it arrived, was something of a shock. For one thing there was so much of it, for another everything tasted so incredibly good. Scanning the room, Ströhm could see that others were just as surprised. Some agreeably so, as if they could hardly believe their luck, although others had dubious looks on their faces. Ströhm could imagine the chain of thought: the initial uneasiness turning into self-doubt, and then to a sort of wry resignation—‘i won’t help anyone else by leaving it on the plate.’

Or in the bottle. Ströhm knew very little about wine, but had no doubt that this was the best he had tasted. It was so smooth, so velvety. So rich.

After dinner, he joined one of the groups in the lounge. The conversation quickly settled on their pasts, and after a few minutes Ströhm realised why—that was where they had to go to find their justification. They had all worked hard, often for many years, with precious little reward. Many had suffered, losing friends and family, spending years in Nazi prisons or camps. Even those in exile had hardly slept on beds of roses. After all those years of sacrifice surely a little pampering wasn’t so inappropriate.

With his head full of wine, Ströhm was inclined to give them all the benefit of the doubt, and eventually a drunken chorusing of the ‘Internationale’ sent them all off to their beds with a glow in their hearts.

The journey to Vienna was as long and irksome as Russell expected it to be. It took him over three hours to reach Udine, where a further
two-hour wait was promised. He resisted the temptation to drop in on Boris the hotelier for a chat about dismembered corpses and their disposal, settling instead for a second breakfast at the surprisingly well-stocked station buffet. The train for the Austrian border eventually arrived, and chugged slowly up into the mountains, eventually passing Pontebba, where he’d run into Albert Wiesner almost three years earlier, while researching the Jewish escape line to Palestine. Albert was probably commanding a brigade by now.

The border formalities took less time than Russell expected, as did the wait for his connection in Villach. He’d taken this train in the opposite direction at the end of 1945, and been uplifted by nature’s handiwork after too many months of living with man’s. The sunlit mountains looked much the same today, but he felt like a different person, and the views were only that.

At Semmering, where the British Zone ended and the Russian Zone began, the walk from train to train was the same, and the Austrian capital, at first sight, looked little repaired from 1945. Taking a taxi from the Südbahnhof to the address in the American sector which Youklis had given him, the only real signs that thirty months had passed were the overgrown buddleias running riot in the ruins.

The address was in Josefstadt, an innocent-looking four-storey house on Florianigasse. His contact Sam Winterman had a top-floor office at the back of the building, with windows looking out on a plain brick wall. Winterman himself was tall and muscular, with a face that first looked handsome, but soon seemed merely wooden. He spoke with the sort of faint Southern accent that Russell associated, probably wrongly, with Virginia. His eyes were brown, and as dead as Youklis’s blue. ‘John Russell,’ Winterman muttered, for no apparent reason.

So far, so familiar, Russell thought, but a shock was in store.

‘Ah, good,’ Winterman said as the door behind Russell opened. ‘I think you two have met.’

They had indeed. It was Giminich—formerly Obersturmbannführer Giminich of the SS Security Police, the
Sicherheitsdienst—
whom Russell had last seen in Prague, towards the end of 1941. And Giminich wasn’t in handcuffs, chains, or some other appropriate form of restraint. In fact, he looked as pleased with this new world as he had with that previous one. He was older, of course, and the blond hair was no longer swept back in imitation of the great god Heydrich, but the smile was still every bit as smug.

‘Herr Russell,’ Giminich said, offering his hand.

‘You’ve got be joking.’

Giminich was unperturbed. ‘I understand,’ he said, in such a way that he seemed to be apologising for Russell’s lack of manners.