Stattin Station

Propagandists

Shortly before five the following morning, Effi Koenen let herself out of the apartment and walked down to the stygian street. The limousine was ticking over, its slitted headlights casting a pale wash over a few yards of tarmac. The only evidence of the driver was the bright orange glow of a cigarette hanging in mid air. It seemed absurd that the studio still had petrol to burn when the military was apparently running so short, but Goebbels had obviously convinced himself that his movie stars were as vital to the war effort as Goering's planes or the army's tanks, and on a cold November morning Effi found it hard to disagree with him.

'Good morning, Fraulein Koenen,' the driver said, expunging his cigarette in a shower of sparks. She recognised the voice. Helmut Beckman had first driven her to work almost ten years earlier, and she still felt grateful for the trouble he'd taken to calm her beginner's nerves.

Effi took the seat beside him, as she did with most of the drivers. As she'd once told a disbelieving co-star, she felt a fraud sitting in the back - she was happy to play royalty on stage or on screen, but not on the journey to work. The view and the conversation were also better, although these days the former usually amounted to a black tunnel stretching into an uncertain distance.

'I took my wife to see Homecoming at the weekend,' Beckmann said once they had turned the first corner, heading for the Ku'damm. 'You were very good.'

'Thank you,' Effi said. 'And the film?'

There was a short silence, as the driver arranged his thoughts. 'It was well done,' he said eventually. 'I can see why it won that prize at the Venice Film Festival. The story was...well, there wasn't much of a story, was there? Just a succession of terrible things happening one after the other. It was a bit...I suppose transparent is the word. The writer had his point to make, and everything was lined up so he could. But I guess when you work in the business you notice things like that. And it was certainly better than most. My wife loved it, though she was really upset that you were killed.'

'So was I,' Effi said lightly, although in fact she'd been rather glad. Her character, a German schoolteacher in the territories acquired by Poland in 1918, had succumbed to a stray Polish bullet only minutes before salvation arrived for her fellow Germans in the form of the invading Wehrmacht. She had hoped that her overblown martyrdom would further undermine the credibility, and propaganda value, of the film, but from what she could gather, Frau Beckmann was far more typical than her husband. According to John, acts of violence against Polish POW workers had risen markedly since the film's release a few weeks earlier.

'But she didn't think much of the lawyer,' Beckmann added. 'And when I told her Joachim Gottschalk had turned down the part she got all weepy. She still hasn't got over what happened to him.'

'Few of us have,' Effi admitted. 'Joschi' Gottschalk had committed suicide a couple of weeks earlier. He had been one of Germany's favourite leading men, particularly among female cinema-goers, and the Propaganda Ministry had been more than happy to bank his bulging box office receipts so long as he kept quiet about his Jewish wife and half-Jewish son. But Gottschalk had chosen to parade his wife before a social gathering of high-level Nazis, and Goebbels had blown his diminutive top. The actor had been ordered to get a divorce. When he refused, he was told that the family would be separated by force; his wife and child would be sent to the new concentration camp at Theresienstadt in the Sudetenland, he to the Eastern Front. Arriving at the film star's home to enforce this order, the Gestapo had found three dead bodies. Gottschalk had taken what seemed the only way out.

News of his fate had not been officially released, but as far as Effi could tell, every man, woman and child in Berlin knew what had happened, and many of the women were still in mourning. There had even been talk of a studio strike by his fellow professionals, but nothing had come of it. Effi hadn't particularly liked Gottschalk, but he'd been a wonderful actor, and his family's fate had offered a chilling reminder - if one was really needed - of the perils of saying no to the Nazi authorities.

'What are you shooting today?' Beckmann asked, interrupting her reverie. They were driving through the Grunewald now, following the red lights of another limousine down the long avenue of barely visible trees. A procession of stars, Effi thought dryly.

'We're re-shooting the interiors with Hans Roeder's replacement,' she said. 'There aren't many, and they decided it was easier to shoot them again with Heinz Hartmann than write the character out of those scenes which haven't been shot.' Hans Roeder had been one of the few Berliners killed in a British air raid that year, and only then by falling shrapnel from anti-aircraft fire. Unlike Gottschalk he had been unpopular, essentially talentless, and a ferocious Nazi. A Goebbels favourite.

How much longer, she asked herself. She had always loved acting, and over the years she'd gotten pretty damn good at it. Over the last ten years she'd done her share of propagandist films and stage shows - one of her and John's favourite pastimes had been ridiculing the stories the writers came up with - but she had also done work that she was proud of, in films and shows which weren't designed to canonize the Fuhrer or demonize the Jews, which did what she thought they were supposed to do, hold up a mirror to humanity, loving if possible, instructive if not.

But now there was only the propaganda, and today she would be back in the costume of a seventeenth-century Prussian countess, bravely resisting a Russian assault on Berlin. The moral of the film was clear enough: the writers had not burdened the story with any conflicting ideals. As far as she could tell, the main crime of the Russians - apart, of course, from their initial insolence in invading Germany - lay in their physiognomy. The casting director had scoured the acting profession for men with a Slavic turn of ugliness, and come up with more than enough to fill the screen.

All of which pleased her no end. Even Frau Beckmann would struggle to find this film convincing.

When his number 30 tram eventually hove into view, Russell noticed with some dismay that it was one of the older vehicles. More and more of these were being brought back from the breakers' yards to replace modern relatives now gathering rust in the depot for want of spare parts or a mechanic to fit them. They were certainly more beautiful - this one had exquisite porcelain lamps attached to its inner sides - but that was all that could be said for them. They were almost as slow as walking, and their lack of springs ensured that every bump in the track was experienced to the full. This particular one was packed, and despite the cold weather smelt as rank as yesterday's U-Bahn.

The passengers thinned out a bit on Tauenzien Strasse, and quite a lot more on Potsdamer Strasse, but there were still a lot standing when an obviously pregnant woman got on at Potsdamer Platz, the yellow star conspicuously sewn across the left breast of her rather threadbare coat. Russell watched the expressions of his fellow passengers, wishing he had a seat to give up. Many simply turned their heads, and most of those that didn't looked angry, as if they'd been insulted or threatened in some way. But not all. Much to Russell's surprise, a young German in an army uniform abruptly got to his feet and offered the Jewish woman his seat.

She tried to refuse, but he was having none of it, and, with a quick smile of gratitude, the woman sat herself down. The soldier then looked round at his fellow passengers, daring any of them to raise a protest. None did, at least verbally, leaving Russell to wonder what would happen if the woman's champion got off before she did. In that event, he decided, he would pick up the torch. He hadn't hit anyone in several years, but there was something about living in Hitler's Germany which cried out for that sort of release on a fairly regular basis.

In the event, his services were not required; both he and the woman got off at the Brandenburg Gate, she heading in the direction of the Reichstag, he down Unter den Linden, past the barely-functioning American Consulate and Goebbels' 'fumigated' Soviet Embassy, towards Kranzler's and what passed these days for a morning coffee. He bought a Volkischer Beobachter from the kiosk outside, took a window seat in the sparsely populated restaurant, and got out the appropriate pink, yellow and white ration sheets for his ersatz coffee, watered-down milk and real sugar. One of the ancient waiters eventually noticed him, lumbered over, and laboriously cut off the requisite stamps with the small pair of scissors which hung like a fob watch from the front of his waistcoat.

War speeded up the process of dying, Russell thought, but tended to slow down everything else.

He examined the front page of the Beobachter, and the black-rimmed photograph of Generaloberst Ernst Udet that filled most of it. Udet, the head of the Reich Air Ministry's development wing, had been killed the previous day while test-piloting a new German fighter.

Russell had seen the Great War ace's flying show back in the 1920s, and Udet had never struck him as a real Nazi, just one of those people who are supremely gifted in one narrow sphere, and never apply much thought to anything else. The job of creating a new Luftwaffe would have appealed to him, but he wouldn't have worried too much about how or why it might be used. According to German friends, Udet had been more responsible than anyone for the highly successful Stuka dive bomber, and Russell hardly felt inclined to mourn his passing. Paul would though, and Russell could see why. Only the U-boat aces could compare with the fighter pilots when it came to the sort of lone wolf heroics that young boys of all ages loved to celebrate.

A state funeral was planned for the coming Saturday. And unless he was very much mistaken, Paul would want to go.

Russell went through the rest of the paper, secure in the knowledge that all the other papers would be carrying the same stories. Some, like the Frankfurter Zeitung, would be better written, others, like the Deutsche Allegemeine Zeitung, would be tailored to a particular class sensibility, but the political and military facts would not vary. What one paper said, they all said, and all were equally disbelieved. The German people had finally woken up to the fact that the claimed tally of Russian prisoners now exceeded the stated number of Russians in uniform, all of which chimed rather badly with the sense that those same Russians were fighting the German army to a virtual standstill. Each week another pincer movement was given the honour of being the most gigantic of all time, until it seemed as if the whole wide East was barely large enough to accommodate another battle. But still the enemy fought on.

And yet, despite themselves, the German newspapers did offer their readers a mirror to the real situation. It was merely a matter of learning to read between the lines. Over recent weeks, for example, there had been many articles stressing the inherent difficulties of the war in the East: the inhuman strength of the primitive Russian soldier, the extremes of climate and conditions. Prepare yourself for possible setbacks, the subtext read, we may have bitten off more than we can chew.

Russell devoutly hoped so. He drank the last of his coffee with a suitable grimace, and got up to leave. He had twenty minutes to reach the Foreign Ministry, which hosted the first of the two daily press conferences, beginning at noon. The second, which was held at the Propaganda Ministry, began five hours later.

Outside the sun was still shining, but the chill easterly wind was funnelling down the Unter den Linden with some force. He turned into it, thinking to check out the window of the closed American Express office on Charlottenstrasse, which someone had told Effi about. The reported poster was still in pride of place, inviting passers-by to 'Visit Medieval Germany.' Either the authorities had missed the joke, or they were too busy trying to catch people listening to the BBC.

Russell laughed, and received an admonitory glance from a passing soldier. Further down the street he encountered two women dressed in black, with five sombre-looking children in tow. Their soldiers wouldn't be coming back.

At the Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse he climbed the two flights of bare steps to the Bismarck Room, took one of the remaining seats at the long conference table and nodded greetings to several of his colleagues. As ever, a pristine writing pad sat waiting on the green felt, a sight which never ceased to please Russell, knowing as he did where the pads actually came from. They were manufactured at the Schade printing works in Treptow, a business owned and run by his friend and former brother-in-law Thomas, and mostly staffed by Jews.

The Berlin Congress had been held in this room in 1878, and the furnishings seemed suitably Bismarckian, with dark green curtains, wood-panelled walls and more Prussian eagles than Goering had paintings. An enormous and very up-to-date globe sat on one side of the room; a large map of the western Soviet Union was pinned to a display stand on the other. The arrows seemed perilously close to Moscow, but that had been the case for several weeks now.

At noon precisely, Braun von Stumm strode in through the far doors and took the presiding seat at the centre of the table. A diplomat of the old pre-Nazi school, he was much the more boring of the two principal spokesmen. His superior Dr Paul Schmidt - young, fat, rude and surprisingly sharp for a Nazi - was more entertaining but even less popular. He tended to save himself for the good news.

The first question of the day was the usual plant, dreamt up by the Germans and asked by one of their allies, in this case a Finn. Would the German Government like to comment on the American plan to ship large numbers of long-range heavy bombers to the Philippines, from which they could reach Japan? The German Government, it became clear, would like to comment at length, on this and every other aggressive move which the warmonger Roosevelt was making these days. The American journalists doodled on their pads, and Russell noticed a particularly fine caricature of von Stumm taking shape under the scurrying pencil of the Chicago Times correspondent.

As usual the spokesman sounded as if he was speaking by rote, and his languid diatribe eventually petered out, allowing a Hungarian correspondent to ask an equally spurious question about British brutality in Iraq. This elicited another long answer, moving the doodlers onto the second or third page of their pads, and twenty minutes had passed before a neutral correspondent got a word in.

Would Herr von Stumm like to comment on foreign reports of Wehrmacht difficulties around Tula and Tikhvin? one of the Swedes asked.

The rings around both Moscow and Leningrad were tightening daily, von Stumm announced, then promptly shifted the discussion a few hundred kilometres to the south. The battle for the Crimean capital of Sevastopol was entering its final phase, he said, with the German 11th Army now launching ceaseless attacks on the Russian defences that surrounded the beleaguered city.

More dutiful questions followed from the Italian and Croatian correspondents, and time was almost up when von Stumm finally allowed an American question. Bradley Emmering of the Los Angeles Chronicle was the lucky man. Would the spokesman like to comment on the BBC's claim that a German freighter flying an American flag had been seized in mid-Atlantic by the US Navy?

No, von Stumm said, he would not. The BBC, after all, was hardly a reliable source. 'And that, gentleman,' he said, getting to his feet, 'will be all.'

It wasn't. 'Would the spokesman like to comment on the widespread rumour that Generaloberst Udet committed suicide?' the Washington Times's Ralph Morrison asked in his piercing nasal drawl.

Von Stumm seemed struck dumb by the impudence of the question, but one of his aides swiftly leapt into the breach. 'Such a question shows a deplorable lack of respect,' he snapped. Von Stumm paused, as if about to add something, but clearly thought better of the idea and stumped out.

The Americans grinned at each other, as if they'd just won a major victory.

Russell found Morrison on the pavement outside, lighting one of his trademark Pall Malls. 'How did he do it?' Russell asked.

Morrison looked around to make sure that no one was listening - the 'Berlin glance' as it was called these days. 'My source in the Air Ministry says he shot himself.'

'Why?'

'Not so clear. My source says it was over a woman, but he's also been telling me for months that Goering and Milch have been using Udet as a scapegoat for all the Luftwaffe's problems.'

'Sounds right.'

Morrison shrugged. 'If I find out anything for certain, I'll pass the story on to Simonsen. He should be able to place it on his next trip back to Stockholm. There's no way they'd let any of us get away with as much as a hint, not with a full state funeral on the way.'

'True.' Russell checked his watch. He was due to meet Dallin in an hour, which left him time to eat a bowl of soup at the Adlon before walking to their usual meeting place in the Tiergarten. The soup proved better than he expected - the Adlon still managed to produce a decent meal, especially for its old habitues - and the sun had emerged once more as he ventured across Pariser Platz, though the Brandenburg Gate and onto the camouflaged Chaussee, or the East-West Axis as it was now called. Huge nets interlaced with lumps of foliage were suspended above the arrow-straight boulevard, which would otherwise have offered the perfect direction-finder for anyone seeking to bomb the government district.

Russell headed out across the still-frosty grass in the general direction of the Rose Garden. No one seemed to be following him, but it wouldn't matter if they were - the Germans were already aware of his meetings with the intelligence man from the American Consulate. Indeed, they were probably under the impression that they had set the whole business up.

In the summer of 1939, Reinhard Heydrich's foreign intelligence organisation, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, had seized on Russell's known contacts with the Soviet NKVD and blackmailed him, or so they believed, into working for them. But when war broke out his Anglo-American parentage made him more relevant to the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht intelligence service that was run by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and the SD had graciously handed him over. It had taken the Abwehr several months to claim the gift - as Russell later found out, Canaris had been knocked for six by the depravity of German behaviour in Poland - and when they did finally pull him on board, his duties proved much lighter than expected. Russell had considered refusing, if only to test the continuing potency of the original SD threats to Effi and his family; but if all the Abwehr wanted was help translating English and American newspaper articles, it didn't seem worth the risk. And there was always the chance that working for Canaris might provide him with some protection against Heydrich.

This happy arrangement had continued through the first winter of the war, and the calamitous spring and early summer of 1940.

Throughout that period Russell had also been paying off another debt. Although his mother was American, he had grown up in England and felt essentially English. He was a British national, with a passport to prove it. As Hitler's aggressive intentions became clearer, and the possibility of an Anglo-German war grew ever more likely, he had faced the certainty of deportation and years of separation from Paul, Effi and everyone else he cared for. In March 1939 the Americans had offered him a deal - an American passport, which would allow him to remain in Germany, in exchange for a little low-level intelligence work, contacting possible opponents of the Nazis in the fast-expanding Reich. He had accepted their offer, and safely managed a few such contacts before the war broke out. Over the next year, much to Russell's relief, the Americans had disappeared into their shells, and made no demands that he couldn't ignore or endlessly defer. But in the autumn of 1940, with France kaput and England on the ropes, they had started pressing him again. Rather than seek out the contacts they prescribed, any of whom might turn him in to the Gestapo, Russell had come up with a suggestion of his own - could he not act as a safe, neutral and deniable channel between the Americans and the Admiral's Abwehr, passing on information which each had an interest in the other knowing? Russell knew that the Abwehr had created such links with the British through Switzerland - why not operate a similar arrangement with the American Consulate here in Berlin.

He secured a meeting with the Canaris's deputy General Oster, and finally a meeting with Canaris himself. The Admiral had liked the idea, and so had the Americans. Since November 1940, Russell had been carrying messages between them, and feeling very pleased with himself. The work was safe in itself, and more to the point, gave the Abwehr and the Americans respectively good reason to keep him out of Heydrich's clutches and spare him any riskier assignments.

It seemed too good to be true, but his luck continued to hold. After Hitler's invasion of Russia, Russell had braced himself for new approaches from the SD and the Soviets, but neither had yet made contact. The latter, he assumed, would find it difficult to reach him, and the former had apparently lost track of his existence. He only hoped that yesterday's visit to Zembski's studio hadn't started bells ringing in Heydrich's belfry on Wilhelmstrasse.

He had almost reached the Rose Garden, with more than ten minutes to spare. He walked on around it, in the vague direction of the huge concrete flak tower which loomed over the distant zoo. Despite the sunshine the Tiergarten was virtually empty; there were two women pushing prams and several men in uniform enjoying a kick-about, along with the usual army of darting squirrels. Scott Dallin was nowhere to be seen, which probably meant that he was already sequestered in the Rose Garden.

The American was sitting on one of the benches, hands in pockets and overcoat collar turned up, a hat concealing most of his golden-brown hair. 'Hi,' he said. 'Jesus, it's cold.' Russell sat down beside him.

Dallin was another tall Californian, but any resemblance to Gerhard Strohm ended there. If the latter looked like a refugee from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the former might have stepped out of a Scott Fitzgerald novel. He always looked well turned-out, even when most of his Consulate colleagues had been reduced to scarecrows by the clothing shortage - though he did have a tendency to wear the sort of colours that suited sunny California rather better than corpse-grey Berlin.

Money was the obvious reason. Dallin had grown up in Santa Barbara the son of a water tycoon, so one of Russell's friends at the Consulate had told him. He had attended an Ivy League college in the East, and encountered no apparent problems in securing a plum post in the diplomatic service. When he had arrived in Berlin a year or so ago it had been his first trip out of America, and it had showed. Dallin wasn't stupid, but he knew very little and didn't seem sufficiently aware of that fact. His obvious doubts about Russell probably stemmed from reading the official file and discovering his communist past. A man like Dallin would have no idea how anyone good or intelligent could become a communist, and would therefore assume that the man in question was either a knave or a fool. And since Russell was obviously not a fool, the odds on his being a knave of some sort had to be high.

'Imagine how cold it's getting outside Moscow,' Russell said.

'I guess that's something,' Dallin agreed. 'But let's get this over with. What's the word from the Admiral?'

'He has some figures for you,' Russell said, pulling a folded sheet of paper from his inside pocket and passing it over. 'Oil and manpower. Oil and manpower shortages, to be precise.'

Dallin studied the figures, and let out a low whistle. 'These don't look so good for Adolf.'

'If they're true, they're not.'

'You think they're faked? An under-estimate, I suppose.'

Russell shrugged. 'I've no way of knowing, but my guess is not.'

'So why pass them on? It's an admission of weakness.'

'Ah. The second half of the message is that Stalin is considering a separate peace. Provided Moscow doesn't fall, that is - Uncle Joe will only negotiate from a position of strength.'

Dallin thought for a moment. 'I don't get it,' he said eventually. 'Is there a connection?'

'Canaris doesn't mind you - us - supporting the British, in fact he wants that to continue, because one thing he dreads is a German victory in the West. But he doesn't want us joining up with the Russians, because the other thing he dreads is a German defeat in the East. So his main aim is to prevent that happening, to keep the two wars separate. The statistics are supposed to convince us that the Soviets will avoid defeat whether we help them or not, and the separate peace rumour - which is almost certainly a fiction - suggests that helping them would be against our own interests, and that any tanks we send them might eventually be used against us.'

Dallin looked suitably confused. 'Does the Admiral know which side he's on?'

'Good question. He hates communists as much as he hates Nazis, and he probably hates democrats too. But now that the Kaiser's gone there's not much else on offer. I think the only thing you can say for certain about Canaris is that he is a German patriot. He wants Germany - his Germany, not Hitler's - to survive the war, and that will only happen if the Russians and their German communist allies are kept at arm's length, and if Hitler and the Nazis are deposed, allowing Canaris and a few like-minded generals to strike a deal with the West. None of which is impossible, but as a sequence of events you'd have to say it was pretty unlikely.'

'Oh, I don't know,' Dallin said, rubbing his hands together. 'Look how eager you Brits were to push Hitler east, until someone in London had the bright idea of guaranteeing Poland.'

'True, but Churchill wouldn't do a deal last year, and I'd say Britain's position is stronger now than it was then.'

'Unless Moscow really does fall.'

'It won't.'

'You have some private intelligence?'

'Nope. Just a hunch.' Or just wishful thinking, he thought to himself. 'What have you got for the Admiral?' he asked.

'Only one thing really. We want the Admiral to understand that if the Japs attack us in Asia, we won't just meet them head on, we'll also declare war on Germany. Tell him that we'll have no choice, because our strategic plan calls for fighting and winning a European war before we deal with the Nips.'

'Is that true?'

'Who knows? But if the Germans believe it, it might encourage them to restrain the Japanese for a few months more. And if the Japs don't take any notice and attack us, Hitler might reckon we're going to attack him anyway, and be fool enough to get his declaration in first. Which would save Roosevelt the job of persuading Congress that the two wars were one and the same.'

'Nice,' Russell said. 'How are things going in Washington? With the Japanese, I mean?'

'Time is definitely running out, which brings me to another matter. You remember Franz Knieriem?'

It was not a name that Russell had been hoping to hear. 'Vaguely,' he lied.

'He was one of the men on that list you were given in New York, back in '39. An official at the Air Ministry. You decided against contacting him.'

'I remember.'

'Why?'

Russell thought back. He had engineered an innocent meeting with the man, and had decided to take it no further. The credentials had been perfect - an ex-Social Democrat with a brother who had died in Dachau, an effusive character reference from an old colleague now living in America - and the possibility of gaining access to restricted Air Ministry files had certainly appealed to Washington; but Russell had formed an instinctive distrust of the man. Franz Knieriem, he had decided, might well be the death of him.

But how to explain that to Dallin? 'I just didn't trust him,' he said, knowing how inadequate it sounded.

'Nothing stronger than that?' Dallin predictably asked. 'Because we need you to try again. We'll probably be out of here in a few weeks, and the chance will be gone. Look, I'll tell you what we need to know and why. Last June, when Hitler was in Florence, he told Mussolini that he would have a trans-Atlantic bomber ready for service by the end of this year. One that could make it to New York and back from the Azores. Now we haven't found a trace of this bomber, and it may just be a figment of Hitler's imagination, but, something like this, we have to be sure. New Yorkers don't want to be settling down to a Yankee game next season and suddenly find there are German bombers overhead.'

'It doesn't sound very plausible, does it?'

'No, but we can't afford to ignore the possibility.'

And I can't afford to take the risk, Russell thought.

'If the guy calls the Gestapo, you can just make a run for the Consulate,' Dallin suggested, as if this was something people did every day.

'They'd come in and get me.'

'Why? The cat would be out of the bag, and creating a diplomatic incident wouldn't put it back in again.'

'And my girlfriend? You've already told me that there's nothing you could do for her.'

'There isn't. At least, I don't think so. Let me have another try, see what I can do. In the meantime, will you at least think about it? If we get into the war, you'll be separated from your girlfriend anyway.'

'I'll give it some thought,' Russell said, seeing no point in a blank refusal.

But he had no desire to contact Knieriem again. The way things were going, Dallin and Company would soon be gone, and he was confident he could string the matter out until they were.

It was getting dark when the studio limousine dropped Effi off at the main entrance of the Elisabeth Hospital. She had been visiting the wounded once a week for a couple of months now, a willing participant in Goebbels' latest campaign to raise morale among the troops. There were supposed to be three of them there tonight, but the other two had cried off, one actress claiming a headache, the other a queasy stomach. The experience was generally depressing, but it was only a couple of hours, and Effi had felt like flaying them.

An orderly insisted on escorting her through the maze of corridors, happily chatting as they walked - he seemed to remember her films better than she did. Reaching the first of the military wards, she announced her arrival to the staff nurse, Annaliese Huiskes, whom she knew from previous visits.

'Anyone you particularly want me to see?' Effi asked.

'No. Just as many as you can manage. They'll all be delighted.'

A bit of an exaggeration, Effi thought, as she headed for the visitor-less bed. There were always quite a few who were happy to see her, but some had visitors of their own, and others simply turned their heads in mute refusal. Those that welcomed her would often ask about her work, and which other stars she had met. Some would flirt, but more wanted to talk about their girlfriends and wives. The hardest were those who had lost limbs or suffered other disfigurement, and were fearful that they would no longer be wanted.

Her first man - boy, really - was initially almost too star-struck to talk. She slowly won him round, asking the usual questions about family and friends and how he was mending, trying to satisfy his curiosity about life in Babelsberg and the glamorous world of movies. Eventually she was passed, like a prize that had to be shared, from patient to patient and on into the next ward, down a queue of stunned or frightened faces that formed a knot in her throat and brought her perilously close to tears.

Most of the men refused to talk about the war, but those who were willing could talk of little else. 'You can't imagine what's it's like,' they would say, some resentfully, others almost in wonderment, as if they themselves were already finding it hard to credit their memories.

'So tell me,' Effi would reply.

'You're better off not knowing,' the soldiers would say, almost proudly.

'It's always better to know,' Effi would say, though some of the stories gave her reason to doubt it. The boy of eighteen showered with the flesh of his best friend, suddenly headless trunks collapsing in almost comic slow motion, the constant fear of losing one's genitals and no longer being a man.

And then there was the guilt. They had all done it - arriving in a Russian village, stealing the food and the shelter, pushing women and children out into the dark and the cold. 'It was them or us - what else could we do?'

'And what if they resist?'

'Then we shoot them. The children too. Once you've shot the mother you have to shoot the children. How would they survive on their own?'

Her last patient, a young man in his mid-twenties with neat blond hair and the sort of rugged outdoor face which the Propaganda Ministry liked on its posters, had needed shrapnel removing from his neck, but seemed set for a quick recovery. His mind, though, was in such turmoil that he could hardly lie still, twisting his head this way and that, convincing Effi that he would rip out the stitches that criss-crossed his throat. 'The Russians will fight on,' he told Effi, as if he was resuming an interrupted conversation. 'They can't retreat and they can't surrender, so what else can they do? If they retreat then their people shoot them, if they surrender then either we shoot them or they starve. There's no food for prisoners. That's just the way it is. But you can't fight an enemy that won't retreat or surrender. You just have to keep killing and killing and hope that he'll run out of soldiers before we do. But he won't, will he?' the soldier almost shouted. 'The Fuhrer must know this, so why does he keep telling us to attack?'

'Sssshhh,' Effi said, afraid the man would talk himself into trouble. 'We can't know what the Fuhrer knows. He may be getting false reports from his generals.'

The man's eyes lit up. 'That must be it. Someone should tell him. You should tell him. You're famous.'

'I will,' Effi promised.

'All my friends are dead,' he said.

'You're not,' Effi said. 'And you have to get better, and get back to your wife and children. They need you.'

The soldier gave her a questioning look, as if to check her sincerity. 'You're right,' he said without conviction. 'I must get better.'

As she leaned over to kiss him on the forehead she saw tears glistening in his eyes.

Visiting time was over, and she made her way back down the wards, smiling at the men she had spoken to. Annaliese Huiskes was sitting back in her chair, a glass of pinkish liquid in her hand, looking as tired as Effi felt. She was almost thirty, Effi knew, and prettier than she looked tonight.

'Come in,' Huiskes said, reaching inside a desk drawer for a bottle and a second glass. 'Have a drink.'

'Of what?' Effi asked.

'Hospital schnapps. We have the raw alcohol, and one of the doctors is good at giving it different flavours. This one's not bad.'

A drink did seem like a good idea, and it tasted no worse than some of the cocktails that the better hotels were now serving up.

'How did it go?' Huiskes asked.

Effi sighed. 'I hope I help. Some of them anyway. The last man I saw - Becker was the name above the bed - seemed very disturbed.'

'I'll leave a note for the night shift. But he's one of the luckier ones.' She drained her glass, looked at the bottle, and abruptly returned it to the desk drawer. 'It's hard to keep track,' she said. 'There're so many coming and going - more than ever these last few weeks. I hope that just means that we're getting a larger share than before, but who knows? I have a friend in the SS Hospital, and that sounds even worse. One night one of her patients started screaming, 'I can't do it anymore!' and most of the others joined in, until half the ward was screaming and the other half weeping.'

'Do what, I wonder,' Effi murmured.

'Killing people, of course. In their hundreds, thousands even. Jews mostly, but Russians too. They force them to dig huge graves, line them up on the side, and then shoot them. Row after row. Her patients can't stop talking about it, she says.'

'Why?' Effi wanted to know. 'Why are they shooting so many?'

Annaliese shrugged. 'Who knows? I haven't heard from my Gerd for weeks,' she added, as if he might have the answer.

'Where is he?'

'Somewhere in the south. He's with 60th Motorised. I worry about him not coming back, and I worry about who he'll be if he does come back.'

After the meeting with Dallin, Russell had walked the short distance south to the Abwehr headquarters, a five-storey building on Tirpitz Ufer overlooking the Landwehrkanal. The Section 1 offices seemed busy, but section chief Colonel Hans Piekenbrock only made him wait a few moments. After listening to Russell's report of what Dallin had said, the Colonel made a face. 'Is that all?'

'Yes.'

'Very well.'

'But there is one other thing.'

'Yes?'

'When I started working for the Abwehr in this way I made it clear to the Admiral that I could not continue doing so if Germany became involved in a war with my own country.'

'I believe that was the understanding,' Piekenbrock agreed.

'So I will be permitted to leave with all the other journalists?'

'That is my understanding,' the Colonel confirmed.

'That's all I wanted to know,' Russell said, getting up. He only wished he could believe it.

It had grown visibly darker during his brief visit, and the chances of his reaching the second daily press conference on time were remote. But why bother? He wasn't going to learn anything significant, and if one of Goebbels' minions inadvertently let something slip, he wouldn't be allowed to file it. His job was a joke, whichever way he looked at it.

He turned west along the canal towpath, thinking Effi might be home early for once, only to remember as he reached the Cornelius Bridge that this was her hospital night. A drink, he thought, and after skirting round the Zoo he made tracks for the bar on the Ku'damm where he'd last encountered some real whisky. Crossing Hardenbergstrasse he suddenly remembered that Effi's last film was showing just up the road at the Ufa-Palast.

She had, unusually for her, refused to see the film with him when it first came out, and he had never gotten around to seeing it on his own. He walked on up to the giant cinema, which had been the largest in Europe until Hamburg built a bigger one. The early evening showing was beginning in less than fifteen minutes.

There was a long queue at the box office, and the cinema itself was more crowded than he expected, with over three-quarters of the seats filled. Russell settled into an aisle seat near the front, just as the recorded orchestra struck up a rousing theme over shots of the German countryside. The film was dedicated to those Germans whose forefathers had emigrated to the East and faced the ensuing hardships, chief among which, it soon transpired, was proximity to Poles.

Effi soon appeared on screen, sporting a Brunhilde hairstyle and dressed like Babelsberg's idea of a humble schoolteacher. Watching her, Russell always felt an absurd pride, as if he had anything to do with how good she was. She dismissed her loving class of bright young Germans and walked home through the town, accompanied by looks from the local Poles which mingled disgust and lechery in equal measure. Her father, the local German doctor, was waiting with news that the German hospital was being closed down.

So far, so predictable, Russell thought; but as the film unfolded he was left with a grudging respect for its makers. It could have been so much worse - such films usually were. This one occasionally teetered on the edge of unintentional farce - the scenes with the Jews were risible as ever - but in general the temptation to over-egg the pudding was manfully resisted. For once in Babelsberg's Nazi life, actions were allowed to speak louder than the cartoon villains, and it worked. Once Effi's father had been beaten to death, his lawyer friend shot and blinded and another young girl treated to a stoning, the audience were ready for Effi's reluctant declaration of war on the local Poles. In her final stirring speech, delivered to her fellow Germans after they'd all been imprisoned for listening to a Fuhrer broadcast, she painted an idealistic picture of the future, and the Reich of which they'd soon be a part, where 'all around the birds are singing and everything is German.' In a bad film it would have sounded ludicrous, but in this one it somehow worked - by this time even Russell found himself rooting for the poor beleaguered minority, and very upset by the final shooting of Effi's character. When the Wehrmacht arrived to put things right, he felt like shaking a fist though, unlike many in the audience, refrained from actually doing so.

Making his way out of the cinema, he understood why Effi had not wanted him to see it. It was a powerful film. All those German families - and there were millions of them now - whose sons were away in Russia or Yugoslavia or Africa would feel better about their being there. And if the dreaded letter should arrive, they would have some consolation in knowing that their sons had died for such an irrefutably noble cause. Effi had been that convincing.

Arriving home to the empty apartment, Russell realised he had not bought any food. There were plenty of potatoes though, one rather sad looking onion, and an egg, which he decided to save. He sliced both as thinly as he could, and placed them in a frying pan with salt and a little ersatz butter over a low heat. They were browning nicely when Effi arrived.

She threw her bag down, burrowed into his arms and squeezed him as tightly as she could. They kissed.

'Hello,' she said.

'You've been drinking,' he said, tasting the schnapps on her breath. She looked exhausted.

'I certainly have, and I feel like more. Is there any wine left?'

Russell poured her a glass. 'I saved you an egg.'

'I've eaten.' Hours ago, but she didn't feel hungry. 'Put the egg in the potatoes, and I'll have a taste.'

Russell did as he was told. 'Another early start in the morning?'

'Oh yes. All this week, but that should do it.'

'How was the hospital?'

'The same as ever. Terrible. Heartbreaking. Infuriating. It's impossible not to feel sorry for most of them, but some of the things they admit to... it's hard not to feel that they deserve everything that's happened to them. I know they're just following orders, so it's not really their fault, but it is their fingers on the triggers. But... I don't know. What would any of us do in the same situation?'

Russell stirred in the egg. 'The one thing I do know is how hard it is to break ranks. The pressure to conform, to go along with the consensus, is enormous. You need virtually everyone on board to start a mutiny.'

Like everyone screaming 'I can't do it anymore', Effi thought. She told him what Huiskes had told her about the SS hospital. 'It was Annaliese who gave me the drink,' she added. 'She has a bottle hidden in her drawer in the ward office. I expect they all do.'

'More than likely.'

'And there's no end in sight is there? It's all gone downhill in a few months. Victory after victory for two years and suddenly we're holding our breath. I was looking down the ward this evening and thinking that these are the casualties of success - what on earth is failure going to look like?'

'We'll know in the next few weeks. Whether or not he's failed, I mean. It's impossible to tell at the moment. We don't know how much the Soviets have left, or how quickly the winter will set in. One interesting thing I heard today - the weather's already turned in Siberia, so the Soviets are safe from the Japs until spring. That's a lot of men they can bring west.' 'Hmmm. How was your day?'

Russell took the loaded plate across to the table, placed it between them, and handed her a fork. 'The usual rubbish.' He told her about the press conference, and offered an edited version of his meeting with Dallin - despite precautions, they were never completely sure that the Gestapo hadn't managed to plant a microphone. 'Then I went to see Homecoming,' he admitted.

'Oh, did you?'

'You were really good.'

'I know.'

'And that makes you feel bad.'

She gave him a wry smile. 'Of course. It makes me feel part of it. Just like the boys I talk to, gunning down Jews. I'm sure they're good at their job too.'

'It's not the same,' Russell said, and it wasn't. Not completely.

'Isn't it? It feels like it is. I'm not doing another film like that, John. I'd rather quit.'

'Would they let you?'

'I think so,' she said, for the first time considering the possibility that they wouldn't.

'What would you do?' Russell asked.

'I've no idea,' Effi said getting up. She walked through into the living room, and a few seconds later the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra were easing into 'I'll never smile again'.

She reappeared in the archway. 'Come dance with me.'