Potsdam Station (10 page)

More usefully, he found a drawer-full of socks and underwear that might still fit him.

The bed was only slightly damp, and almost obscenely comfortable. He lay on his back, staring up at the pictures on the walls, and wondered what had happened to the boy who put them there. Several hours later he was woken by the sirens, and chose to ignore them. There were worse things in life than a bomb through the ceiling.

The ghost of a star

April 10 – 13

T
hey came in the night, as they always did. A half-heard key in the door, a rough hand on the shoulder, a succession of barked orders – ‘get up, get dressed, get a move on.’ Then the back staircase, the Black Maria parked beside the rubbish bins, the short drive up an empty Mokhavaya Street, the archway and gates swallowing him up.

He was bundled in through a side door, walked down a blue-lit corridor and into a yellow-lit reception room, planted on a stool in front of a desk. His personal details were copied from his passport and other papers onto a new form, and he was asked, somewhat bizarrely, whether or not he smoked. When he asked the official across the desk the reason for his arrest he was given nothing more than an if-you-don’t-know-I’m-not-going-to-tell-you smirk.

Registration complete, he was hustled along barely lit corridors and up barely lit stairs to his new quarters. His escort shoved him in, pulled the door shut, and flicked up the metal flap to make sure he was still there. It was a six-by-four-foot cell. The bed took up half the available space, a battered tin bucket sat in the far corner. He was not going to get much exercise.

Nor much sleep if the light bulb hanging from the ceiling was always on, which it doubtless was. He could see other yellow lights through the window, which suggested his cell overlooked the inner courtyard, but what the hell did that matter? The quality of the view was hardly a priority.

He lay down on the bed, wondering if the solo cell boded well or ill. Privacy was nice, but so was someone to talk to. And he would have liked someone other than the authorities to know he was there.

He should be terrified, he thought, but all he could feel was a damning sense of failure.

He had let Effi and Paul down, behaved like an idiot. Making a pain in the arse of himself hadn’t worked in the US or Britain, where the only sanction was refusing his calls. So why in God’s name had he expected it to work here, where swatting away human pests was almost a national sport?

Stupid, stupid.

But this was no time for self-flagellation. If there was any flagellating to do the Soviet authorities would be only too happy to oblige. He needed to calm down, keep his wits about him. ‘Sobriety breeds success’, as one puffed-up schoolmaster had written on one of his essays, the day before Archduke Franz Ferdinand bit the dust.

He wondered whether someone had overheard him at the Shchepkins’ door, and reported him for breaching the ‘general rules governing conversations between foreigners and Soviet citizens?’ He hoped not – Shchepkin’s wife and daughter would also be under arrest if that was the case – but it seemed the logical explanation. Of course, if Shchepkin himself had been carted away on some ludicrous pretext of consorting with foreign agents, then a foreigner trying to contact him would be a dream come true to those who’d done the carting. It would provide them with ‘evidence’ that Shchepkin was in touch with ‘foreign powers’. The irony was, the only real spying Russell had ever done had been
for
the Soviet Union. His work for the Americans had involved him in nothing more dangerous than lining up potential contacts.

His request to join the Red Army’s triumphal progress could hardly have given them reason to arrest him. They only had to say no, as indeed they had. And if they wanted to punish him for chutzpah, then a swift deportation would surely have been more than sufficient.

So why was he here? He supposed they would tell him eventually, always assuming there was a reason.

*  *  *

In Berlin, Effi woke soon after eight with the sun in her eyes – it was reflecting off an unbroken window on the other side of Bismarck Strasse. She examined the sleeping face of the child beside her for traces of the nightmare which had woken them both a few hours earlier, but there were none. The face was almost serene.

In the thirty-six hours which had passed since her arrival, Rosa had given no additional cause for concern. True, she didn’t talk very much, but she replied when spoken to, and did all that was asked of her. She had objected only once, albeit with an almost desperate intensity, when Effi suggested they get rid of a particular blouse. It wasn’t that the blouse was badly faded and frayed, though that in itself would have been reason enough. The problem was the incompleteness of the fading, and the star-shaped patch which had held its colour beneath the yellow badge.

‘My mother made this blouse,’ Rosa had pleaded. ‘It’s the only thing I have. Please.’

Effi had relented. ‘But we must hide it well. And you must never wear it. Not until the war is over.’

Rosa had accepted the conditions, folded the blouse with the sort of care one reserved for religious relics, and placed it at the bottom of a drawer.

Other items in her suitcase included a chess set and a pack of cards, both homemade. Her mother had taught her many games during their years of hiding, and Rosa had become particularly good at chess, as Effi soon discovered. She could also sew, though not with the same proficiency.

Her real talent was for drawing. Effi had assumed that the beautifully crafted cards and chess ‘pieces’ were the work of Rosa’s mother, but it soon became apparent that they were the child’s. Given a pencil and paper that second afternoon, she produced a drawing of the street outside that astonished the two adults. It wasn’t the rendering of the bomb- gapped buildings opposite which caught their attention, accurate though that was. It was the figure in the foreground: a man walking by with a suitcase, looking back over his shoulder, as if in fear of pursuit. Real or imagined, he was utterly convincing.

In the Lyubyanka, the sun had risen and fallen before they came for Russell again. Breakfast had been a bowl of thin soup with a hunk of stale bread, dinner the same. Yet he didn’t feel hungry. It had been like that in the trenches on the eve of a German attack – the mind was too busy fighting off fear to take note of what the body was saying.

They passed along many corridors, ascended and descended several staircases, as if his escort had orders to disorient him. Eventually they came to their destination – a large, windowless room that smelt of mould. There were seats on either side of a table, one upholstered leather, the other bare metal. Ordered onto the latter, Russell tried to bolster his spirits by compiling a probable list of the books in the prison library. Kafka, of course. The Marquis de Sade and Machiavelli. The Okhrana Book for Boys. What else? Had Savonarola written his memoirs?

The door opened behind him, and he resisted the temptation to turn his head. A tall faired-hair man in an NKVD uniform walked briskly past him, placed a depressingly thick file of papers on the desk, and took the leather chair behind it. He was about thirty-five, with wide nose, full-lipped mouth and blue eyes just a little too close together.

He placed his cap on the side of the desk, positioned the desk-lamp to shine in Russell’s face, and turned it on.

‘Is that necessary?’ Russell asked.

‘I am Colonel Pyotr Ramanichev,’ the man said, ignoring the question and opening the file. He looked at the top page. ‘You are John David Russell, born in London, England, in 1899. You lived in Germany from 1924 to 1941, and became an American citizen in 1939. You lived in the United States for most of 1942, and then returned to England. You describe yourself as a journalist.’

‘I am a journalist.’

‘Perhaps,’ Ramanichev admitted, as if he didn’t much care either way. ‘In 1939 you did other work for us – courier work – in exchange for our help with some fugitives from the Nazi Gestapo. Jews, I believe. You were paid by us, and presumably by the Jews as well.’

‘I was not paid by the Jews, and I was forced to use all the money I received from you – money I received for writing articles – to bribe my way out of a trap that one of your people set.’

‘The traitor Borskaya.’

‘If you say so.’ The glare of the lamp was annoying, but only debilitating if he allowed it to be so.

‘And was the traitor Shchepkin your only other contact?’

‘Why traitor?’ Russell felt compelled to ask. He had long feared for Shchepkin – the man was too honest with himself.

‘He has admitted serving the interests of a foreign power.’

‘When did this happen? Is he dead?’

‘These matters do not concern you. I repeat: was Shchepkin your only other contact?’

‘Yes.’

‘Later that year you suggested that a German railway official named Möhlmann might be willing to provide the Soviet Union with information on military movements.’

‘Yes.’

‘You suggested this to Shchepkin.’

‘Yes.’

‘And in 1942, after escaping from Germany, you met Shchepkin in Stockholm. Following that meeting, at which Shchepkin was supposed to invite you to the Soviet Union, you chose to visit the United States instead.’

‘Shchepkin did invite me to the Soviet Union,’ Russell retorted. He wasn’t sure whether his own supposed guilt was supposed to rub off on Shchepkin, or the other way round, but it was beginning to look as if their fates were intertwined. ‘And he was very upset when I refused.’

Ramanichev smiled for the first time, albeit fleetingly. ‘So you say. But I’m sure you can see how this looks. In all your dealings with us, over many years, your only contacts have been with proven traitors. Why would such people have dealt with you if your sympathies were really with the Soviet Union?’

Russell resisted the temptation to ask Ramanichev if he had ever read
Alice in Wonderland
. ‘That’s absurd,’ he said.

The Russian lifted an eyebrow. ‘Absurd? And yet the moment you arrive in Moscow, you are knocking at Shchepkin’s door. You know where he lives, you have an animated conversation with his daughter.’

‘I only knew that he lived near the Novodevichy Cemetery. I knocked on a lot of doors, as I’m sure you know. And I had no idea he had been arrested,’ Russell explained patiently. ‘I was hoping he could help me.’

‘With further plots against the Soviet state?’

‘Of course not. I have already explained my reasons for coming to Moscow. On Saturday, to your colleague Leselidze.’

‘Explain them to me.’

Russell went through it all again: his wish to reach Berlin as soon as possible, in case his wife or son needed help; his realisation that the Red Army would reach the city first, and his request to accompany the leading units as a war correspondent.

Ramanichev was having none of it. ‘You could have arrived with the Americans once the city was secure. But knowing that members of the capitalist press have never been permitted to accompany the Red Army, you spend a full week travelling to Moscow, just on the off chance that we are willing to abandon our policy. And all in the cause of reaching Berlin just a few days earlier.’

‘What other reason could I have?’

‘As far as I can see this elaborate ploy can only have one purpose. You were sent here to convince us that the Americans and the British have no interest in taking Berlin.’

All right, Russell told himself, they’re not just crazy, they do have reasons for distrusting the West. But even so. ‘I believe General Eisenhower sent Comrade Stalin a letter saying exactly that,’ he said.

‘Yes, he did. And knowing that we might find the general’s message hard to believe, the Americans also sent you, with the same message wrapped up in what I believe they call a “human interest story” – the man who can’t wait to see his wife and son again, who has been told that the Soviets are certain to be first in Berlin. Reinforcing an important lie with a second, less consequential-looking falsehood – it’s a classic tactic.’

‘That’s ridiculous…’

‘Ridiculous?’ Ramanichev exclaimed, raising his voice for the first time. ‘Ridiculous that you should work for American intelligence? Wasn’t that who you were working for in Prague in 1939?’

‘Yes, but..’

‘And did you not act as a contact between German military intelligence and the American Embassy in 1940 and 1941?’

‘Yes…’

‘But you expect me to believe that the moment you escaped from Germany – and chose to go to America – you also stopped working for American intelligence?’

‘That’s what happened. It’s the truth. Just like Ike’s letter is the truth, and the reasons I gave you for coming here. The Americans have no plans for taking Berlin.’

Ramanichev shook his head. ‘On the contrary. Over the last two weeks three Allied airborne divisions have been making the necessary preparations.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ was all Russell could say.

‘According to our information, the British 1st, US 101st and US 82nd airborne divisions have orders to seize Oranienburg, Gatow and Tempelhof airfields.’