Stattin Station (33 page)

Russell could almost hear Effi shudder.

'This way,' Andreas said, heading towards the rats. About fifty metres further in, a series of offices had been mounted on stilts against one wall, with long windows overlooking the warehouse floor. Access was by a metal staircase, which led up to a door marked 'Quaymaster'. The rooms were lined with what looked like postal sorting shelves, but devoid of furniture.

'This is it,' Andreas said apologetically.

'It'll have to do,' was all Russell could think to say.

'I should be on my way,' Andreas told them. 'I'll be back in the morning. Or whenever I can.'

They watched until his torch flickered out, then held each other tight for several moments.

'Oh John,' was all Effi could say.

'Anyone would think we were going down in the world,' Russell said, plunking down their bag and turning on the torch he had taken from the dead
ordnungspolizei
. He shone it around the office. Despair was like a physical weight pressing down on his shoulder blades. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I can't tell you how sorry.'

'I'm sorry too,' Effi said. 'Sorry that it looks like the bastards have beaten us.'

'We're not beaten yet,' he said mechanically. He had failed her, he thought.

'No,' she said, 'but John, I'm frightened. I don't want to die, but if we're caught... we'll be executed, won't we?'

'I will be. Both of us, probably,' he added, thinking that this was hardly the moment for a white lie.

'I'd rather die with you,' she said emphatically. 'Can we do that together? If the Gestapo surround this place or come bursting in can we just end it here?'

'We can if you want.' Paul would be better off without him, he thought.

'We've had a good life,' she said, as if that made ending it more palatable.

It was a long night. They had a little food, but no water, and after a few hours both were so thirsty that Russell went outside to collect what he could in the bottom of a broken bottle. They found a ragged rug in one of the offices, but even folded in four it did little to soften the floor, and when morning light started seeping into the warehouse neither of them had enjoyed more than a few minutes' sleep.

They found a long-disused toilet for their morning ablutions, ate a sparse breakfast, and explored their surroundings. The warehouse was about two hundred metres long, with another set of raised offices towards the far end. Doors on the eastern side led to the street, those on the west to the quayside with its rusted rails and cranes and an apparently abandoned dock basin. Beyond the water and the low roofs of Lastadie, they could see the elegant spires of Stettin against the grey sky, a vision of tranquillity at odds with the fear churning inside them.

Each moment they expected the rising sound of motors on the street outside, and their relief at seeing Andreas come through the corrugated door was profound. He had come on foot, and not alone. Another, older man was with him, whom he introduced as Hartmut.

Hartmut unpacked a camera and collapsible tripod from the canvas bag he was carrying and began setting them up in the brightest available pool of light.

'They know you came to Stettin,' was Andreas's first devastating remark. 'Let me tell you what has been decided. There will be no more ships for at least a week, which, given the situation in the city, is much too long for you...'

'What is the situation?' Russell asked.

'Many arrests. Your friends Hans and Margarete, many others.'

A wave of sadness and guilt washed through Effi's brain.

'And Ernst?' Russell was asking.

'Ernst is safe for the moment.'

'They must have found the men we killed.'

'No,' Andreas said with a hint of a smile. 'The bodies were moved last night. They were put back in their car and the car was pushed into one of the deeper docks before first light. It was a committee decision,' he added, as if that were explanation enough. 'The bodies will never be found, and later this morning one of our people inside the local Kripo will tell the Gestapo about a tip-off he has received, that someone saw two cars in a high speed chase on the Stargard road late yesterday evening. Which should get them looking in the wrong direction altogether.'

'I'm ready,' the other man shouted across. He was unfolding a large sheet of dark red cloth.

'You need new papers,' Andreas said in reply to Russell's questioning look. 'Which means photographs.'

'We need to fix our make-up,' Effi said, tearing her thoughts away from Hans and Margarete. She still wore most of her last application, but the previous night's rain had removed most of Russell's. The moustache, though, showed no sign of loosening its grip on his upper lip.

'As quick as you can,' Andreas urged them.

'We're almost out in any case,' she told Russell, as she worked on the area around his eyes.

'Then save it for yourself,' he said. 'You're the one who'll be recognised.' 'There's enough,' she told him. 'And I can't leave you with one side of your face looking twenty years older than the other.'

Preparations completed, they each had their photographs taken standing in front of the red material that Andreas held up as a backcloth. The photographer grumbled about the light, but thought the resulting pictures would probably do.

'Who'll be looking at them?' Russell asked Andreas. 'Where are we going?'

'Riga.'

'Riga?!'

Andreas sighed. 'You can't stay in Stettin, and Riga's the only other place with regular sailings to Sweden. We have people there who'll look after you, and it's the one direction the Gestapo will not expect. These days no one travels east out of choice.'

'A train?' Russell asked.

Andreas nodded. 'Trains. It'll take about two days. You'll need to change in Danzig and Konigsberg, perhaps in Tilsit as well. Don't worry,' he said, noticing their expressions, 'you will have excellent papers. Your chances are good. Certainly much better than they would be here.'

'Who do we contact when we get there?'

'I'll tell you that this evening. The overnight express for Danzig leaves at eight-thirty, and we will find a way to get you there before then.'

'How?'

'I don't know yet. Your papers will be for a husband and wife, by the way. Herr and Frau Sasowski. Werner and Mathilde.'

'What happened to them?' Russell asked.

'They committed suicide after the Gestapo killed their son.'

More dead people, Effi thought. They were being lifted out of Germany by the arms of the dead.

'Married at last,' Russell said to her, as Andreas and the photographer walked away across the warehouse floor.

She put an arm round his waist and leant her head on his shoulder.

Andreas had brought water with him, enough to last them the day. There was still some food, but neither of them felt hungry, and they spent most of the daylight hours curled up on the folded rug, drifting in and out of uneasy sleeps. Russell had wondered whether one of them should stay awake, and decided there was no point. If the Gestapo roared up outside, there would be enough time to follow through on their pledge of the night before. More than enough.

Strange as it seemed, Effi felt safer by day. The night might hide them, but not from fear or surprise, whereas daylight, which rendered them visible, also seemed redolent of life - the distant sounds of unloading elsewhere in the docks, the ships' horns like mournful animals seeking a place to rest. If this was where her life ended, in a derelict corner of a city she had never seen before, then she wanted her final moments in the light, conscious of every last cobweb that hung from the ceiling, of every piece of rubbish which the breeze blew along the warehouse floor.

Dying in darkness would be so... so completely
wrong
.

She thought about the Ottings and what they must be going through, and struggled to conceal her own sense of dread.

Andreas returned soon after six. 'All the entrances to the docks are being watched,' he announced with his usual smile. 'The roads and ferries.'

'So how will we get out?' Russell asked calmly, wondering what the young man had up his sleeve this time.

'By boat,' Andreas said triumphantly. 'A small boat will come to the quay outside at seven. It will take us out of the docks, and up the Oder to a small landing stage close to the railway station. You will only have a five-minute walk. That's good, eh?'

Russell admitted it sounded so.

Andreas handed over their new documentation, which looked convincing enough. Had they still been alive, Werner and Mathilde Sasowski would have been fifty-four and fifty-two, roughly the ages which he and Effi looked in the photographer's grainy pictures. There were no obvious signs that the latter had just been added to the frayed and grimy papers.

'And here are your tickets,' Andreas added, handing them across.

'How much do we owe you?' Russell asked, reaching for his wallet. It seemed like weeks since he'd spent any money.

Andreas made a gesture of refusal. 'We didn't pay for them,' he said. 'Now, once you reach Riga, you must go to 16 Satekles Street - it's near the station - and ask for Felix. You must tell him that you have a message from Stettin. Have you got all that?'

Russell repeated it.

'Good. Now all we all have to do is wait.' He looked at his watch. 'Forty-two minutes.'

Effi asked Andreas about himself. How long had he been a painter? Was he married?

He wasn't married and he wasn't a painter - the van was his father's. He had worked in the docks since he was sixteen, and been a Party member almost as long - since 1932, in fact. Both his uncles had been killed the following year, one in a street fight and one in a concentration camp. So had many others. But the Party was still strong in Stettin, and particularly in the docks. Seven iron carriers had been sabotaged over the last two years, all sent to the bottom of the Baltic with explosives which the Gestapo and their sniffer dogs had failed to find. Things were certainly bad at the moment, but the cells had all shut down - 'like the compartments of a U-boat'. A few would be prised open, but most would survive. And after the war... well, Effi would return to a communist Germany, and make a movie about her own escape and the comrades who helped her. 'We will all play ourselves,' Andreas decided.

At five minutes to seven they walked out onto the darkened quay, Andreas guiding them to a ladder of iron rungs which led down to the water. The faintest of lights was already visible in the mouth of the basin; as it grew steadily nearer, the low purr of an engine became audible. With Andreas carrying their bag they all climbed down towards the water, waiting in a vertical queue for the boat to draw up alongside. It was a simple skiff with a one-man crew - a wizened old man who nodded a greeting from his seat by the tiller.

He gently opened the throttle and turned the craft back towards the dock entrance, running parallel with the barely visible quayside wall. He had extinguished his faint light, Russell noticed. Now that he was carrying illicit cargo, hitting something probably seemed a much better bet than being noticed. Russell asked Andreas whether the Gestapo had patrol boats.

'They borrow the Navy's,' he whispered back. 'But only one after dark. Usually. It's better that we don't talk,' he added. 'It carries further than you think.'

The wall to the right disappeared as their basin merged with the next, the one where they'd seen the ship being unloaded on the previous evening. Peering through the gloom Russell thought he could make out two large ships, but no lights were showing, either aboard or on the adjoining quay.

The channel narrowed again as they neared the junction with the Oder, and the water grew choppier, rocking the small boat from side to side. As they turned into the river, the opposing current seemed strong enough to stop them, and Russell had a nightmare vision of being stuck in the same spot until morning. But suddenly, for no reason that he could see, the pressure eased and the skiff resumed its steady progress, albeit more slowly.

He knew from previous visits that the Oder was about a hundred and fifty metres wide, but only the near bank was visible, a long quayside at which several small ships were berthed. There were lights in some of them, and on the quay behind them, but Russell hoped and guessed that their boat would be impossible to see against the darkness of the opposite bank.

A lighted shape appeared ahead, running across his line of vision. It was a tram, he realised, crossing the river. The bridge took form as another smaller light glided across, and as they neared the central piers a match flared above them. It was a man lighting a cigarette, and he was looking down at them.

Gestapo, was Russell's first thought.

'It's downstream,' the man said, loud enough for them to hear.

'The patrol boat,' Andreas explained as they passed under the bridge. Russell breathed a sigh of relief, and asked himself why the comrades hadn't been this well organised when the government of Germany was still up for grabs. The boatman kept to the centre of the stream, out of sight from either bank. There was a surprising amount of traffic along the western side - trams, lorries, even the occasional private car - but no silhouetted pedestrians. The Nikolai Kirche rose out of the gloom, and soon they were passing under the other bridge connecting central Stettin with its Lastadie suburb. Even though he felt wracked with tension, Russell could see something magical in this journey, as they moved unseen through the heart of a living city.

The railway bridge loomed ahead, and beyond that the dark shapes of islands in the river, another bridge, and the long roof of the station rising above the western bank. The boatman steered them into a narrow channel, cut the motor, and drifted the skiff up to a small landing stage. 'This is it,' Andreas said unnecessarily, using one hand to hold the boat against the wooden staging. 'The station is over there, and there are steps up to the bridge at the other end of the path.'

'Thank you,' Russell said, shaking his hand. He offered the boatman a nod of gratitude.

Effi reached over and gave Andreas a quick hug. 'We'll make that film,' she said.