Potsdam Station

The Lightning Tower

April 18 – 20

The PS-84 transport rumbled down the sparsely-lit runway for what seemed an eternity, before bouncing itself hopefully into the sky. The four men glanced at each other, feeling, for the first time, the solidarity of danger shared. Even Kazankin gave Russell a rueful smile, and he was probably the designated executioner.

It had been a day of waiting, first for news of their inflatable boat, and then for departure. Their dinghy had eventually shown up somewhat the worse for wear, having collected two bullet holes crossing the Oder crossing. They’d been patched to Kazankin’s satisfaction, and survived a trial inflation. There had been better news from the front – the German defences on the Seelow Heights had been penetrated, and Zhukov’s tanks were on the last lap of their thousand-mile journey to Berlin. It seemed unlikely that they would reach the city in time for Lenin’s birthday, but they were only a couple of days behind schedule.

These had been the day’s high points – the four of them had spent most of the morning poring over maps, checking their equipment and endlessly rehearsing contingency plans for when things went wrong. Russell had then spent several hours watching the Soviet bombers run through their routine: taking off and heading south, returning two hours later for another bellyful of bombs, taking off again. There had been 80,000 Germans in Breslau when the Soviets surrounded the city in February, and each receding plane would subtract a few more. Like a fist that couldn’t stop hitting a face.

Now, as their transport droned on towards Berlin, he wondered how badly the German capital had suffered. He had seen aerial photographs of the destruction, but somehow they hadn’t seemed real, and whenever he imagined the city it was the old Berlin, the one he had lived in, that appeared in his mind’s eye. The one that wasn’t there anymore.

He would soon have a new picture. His task was to guide the team to the Institute that night, get them back before dawn to the safety of the Grunewald, then move them on to the Hochschule on the following evening. Their last stop, as Nikoladze had told him that afternoon, would be the railway yards outside Potsdam Station, where an underground cell of German comrades was still in contact with their Soviet mentors. They would hide out there until the Red Army arrived.

In case of accidents or misunderstandings, the members of the team had letters signed by Nikoladze sewn into their jackets. These testified that the holders were on an important mission for the NKVD, and demanded that any Red Army soldier who ran into one or all of them should both provide any necessary protection and immediately notify the relevant authorities.

In the meantime, there was the small matter of the Nazi authorities. How tight was their grip in these final days? One could hope that the demands of the front had thinned the police presence in Berlin, though it seemed more likely that all of the bastards would be needed to keep the population in order as the Russians approached. But who would be out on the streets – the Kripo, the military police, the SS? All of them? As Nikoladze had reluctantly admitted, their knowledge of the restrictions placed on foreign workers was several weeks old. Would the four of them be challenged as they made their way across the city, or simply taken for granted?

How easy was movement, come to that? Were any trains or trams still running, or had they been bombed to a halt? And if public transport continued to function, were foreign workers still allowed to use it?

Not to worry, Russell decided, as the plane took a sudden lurch – the parachute drop would probably kill him.

They seemed to be veering northwards now, and he thought he could detect the faintest of glows in the eastern sky. They’d been hoping for more, but the recently risen quarter-moon was concealed behind a thick layer of cloud, and the drop looked set to take place in almost total darkness. That might lessen the chances of their descent being spotted, but there didn’t seem much point in arriving unnoticed with a broken neck.

The minutes ticked by. The pilot was under orders to draw a wide arc around the southern outskirts, in the sanguine hope that Berlin’s air defences would all be narrowly focussed on the approaches used by the British. So far, it seemed to be working – no searchlights had leapt to embrace them, and neither flak nor fighter had sought to blow them away.

‘Five minutes,’ the navigator shouted from the cockpit doorway. Russell felt his stomach lurch, and this time it wasn’t the plane.

Kazankin and Gusakovsky were instantly on their feet, checking their harnesses one last time. According to Varennikov, both men had served with the partisans, and had ample experience of landing behind enemy lines. He was in excellent hands, Russell reminded himself. Up until the moment that they no longer needed him.

Varennikov, he noticed, had lost his usual smile, and was tugging at his own harness with what seemed unnecessary violence. Kazankin took over, testing each strap, jollying the young physicist along. Satisfied that his charge was under control, he gestured Russell to his position at the front of the queue. A position that Russell realised was logical – jumping last, the two experienced men would have a better shot at working out where everyone was – but it still seemed a bit like punishment.

‘One minute,’ the navigator shouted.

The door was wrenched open and the wind swept in, causing the plane to rock, almost blowing them over. Recovering his balance, Russell looked out and down. There were no lights, no hint of land, only a writhing pit of darkness and cloud. ‘Oh shit,’ he muttered.

‘Go!’ the dispatcher yelled in his ear, and out he leapt, childishly intent on pre-empting the helpful shove. Proud of himself, he forgot to pull the ripcord until several seconds had passed, and then tugged at it with a ferocity born of panic. As the chute burst open the quality of darkness suddenly shifted – he had fallen out of the clouds and into the lightless air beneath. There was still no sign of a world below, and no sign of other chutes above.

As he drifted down he noticed that the sky to his right was slightly lighter. The hidden moon, he realised, and felt strangely comforted – there were shades and dimensions, an east and a west, an up and a down.

The world below took form and shape, one second a blur, the next a faceful of wet grass and the smell of loamy earth. He lay there for a second, checking his body for pain, and almost shouted for joy when he realised there was none. He had done it. He had jumped out of a plane in total darkness and lived to tell the fucking tale.

But where were the others? He gathered in the chute, rolled it up, and looked around for somewhere to stuff it. There was nowhere. A flat open field stretched into nothingness in all directions. There were no trees, no moving shadows, no sounds of other humans. His three companions had been swallowed by the night.

First things first, he told himself – work out where you are. The paler sky away to his left had to be the east. He sought confirmation from his Red Army compass, but there wasn’t enough light to read it. Still, it had to be the east. And since the plane was flying roughly northward when he jumped, his companions would have hit the ground further to the north. ‘Somewhere over there,’ he murmured to himself, turning on his heels and peering hopefully into the gloom.

Should he go looking for them? Or wait for them to find him? They knew when he had jumped, and should have a pretty good idea of where he was. And if they didn’t show up in, say, twenty minutes, he could head for the rendezvous point they’d arranged for exactly this contingency.

Or perhaps not. Was this the moment to abandon his new Soviet buddies? They’d gotten him into Berlin – well, almost – and there was nothing more he needed from them. Not this week, in any case. And he was fairly sure that they intended to kill him before the week was out. So why hang around?

Because, he told himself, he believed in Nikoladze’s promise of retribution. Given that they were planning to kill him anyway, that particular threat was only designed to keep him on board, but they’d still be hell-bent on punishment if he left them in the lurch. The Soviets would own half the world in a month or so’s time, and their assassins would be roaming the other half. It wouldn’t be wise to antagonise them. Do the job and then get lost – that was the best of several poor options. Once the war was over, everyone would calm down a bit. He could promise to keep their secrets, and mention in passing that he’d arranged for their publication in the event of his sudden demise.

He couldn’t read his watch either, but it must have been at least ten minutes since he fell to earth. He would give them another ten.

There was noise above, he realised – a low drone in the distance. For a moment he thought their plane must be circling, but soon realised his mistake. This sound was slowly filling the sky.

As if in reply, a beam of light reached into the sky. Others swiftly followed, like the lights going on in a theatre. The lowness of the clouds was visible now, so the bombers would be up above them. The gunners below had no more chance of seeing their prey than the bombardiers had of picking out targets. Either someone had got the weather forecast wrong or the Allies no longer cared where their bombs fell.

The invisible bombers seemed almost above him, perhaps a little to the north. The first flashes erupted away to the north-east, swiftly followed by a staccato series of distant explosions. Spandau, he guessed. And Siemenstadt. Industrial areas.

Over the next few minutes the line of flashes crept around to the east, heading for the city centre. He heard the booms of the flak guns, saw flashes of exploding shells through newly diaphanous clouds. But no blazing plane fell through the veil.

His twenty minutes were up, and there was still no sign of the others. It was, he decided with some reluctance, time to move on. With the bundled-up chute under one arm, he began working his way across the increasingly boggy field, hoping to find the first of two roads. On several occasions his second-hand boots – stolen by the NKVD from God knows who – sunk deep into patches of mire, and a misjudged leap across a small stream resulted in one waterlogged foot.

A line of trees loomed ahead, and perhaps marked the looked-for road. He was some thirty metres away when voices rose above the almost constant rumble of distant explosions. German voices. Russell sank to his haunches, thankful that what light there was, was ahead of him.

He could see them now, two male figures walking northward, one wheeling a bicycle. What were they doing out here after midnight?

‘Spandau’s catching it,’ one of them said, with the tone of someone lamenting bad weather.

‘Seed potatoes!’ the other one exclaimed. ‘That’s what I forgot.’

‘You can pick them up tomorrow,’ his friend told him.

They walked on out of earshot, apparently heading for the cluster of roofs to the north, silhouetted by burning Spandau.

Bombers were still droning overhead.

He clambered in and out of a ditch that ran alongside the road, slipped across the narrow ribbon of tarmac, and slid down a small bank on the other side. The new field seemed even boggier, and the smell of shit grew steadily stronger as he worked his way across the waterlogged ground. The Soviet map of the area had placed a sewage farm slightly to the north-east of their intended route, so he was probably in the right area.

Above the horizon yellow-white flares crackled and danced in an almost orange sky. The word ‘devilish’ came to mind. He was walking towards hell.

If he was remembering the map correctly, another kilometre would bring him to a second, wider highway, which ran south from Seeburg towards Gross Glienicke and Kladow. The point, a kilometre south of Seeburg, where this road entered a sizable wood, had been chosen for the reunion of an accidentally scattered team.

It took him twenty minutes to reach the empty road, and another five to sight the dark wall of trees that lay ahead. A direct approach seemed unwise – there might be other locals about, and who knew what sort of strain the night’s events had wrought on Kazankin’s nerves – so he took the long way round, walking out across the adjoining field and entering the wood from the west, before working his way back to the rendezvous point.

But the only cracking twigs were the ones he stepped on, the only sounds of breathing the ones provided by his own lungs. There was no one there.

He settled down to wait. His watch told him it was almost one – they were supposed to have reached the Havelsee by one-thirty. There was no chance of that now, but he had always thought the timetable absurdly optimistic. Expecting to reach, search and get away from the Institute before a six o’clock sunrise had never been on.

He closed his eyes. His feet were wet and cold, and he was feeling his age. One war was enough for anyone. What had his generation done to deserve two?

The intensity of the bombing was lessening, and the sky above seemed empty of planes. It occurred to him that once the searchlights went off movement would again become difficult.

Noises away to his left jerked his eyes open. It sounded like footsteps coming his way. There were whispers, a louder rustle, a muttered curse. Three vague shadows moving between the tree trunks.

‘Russell,’ a voice hissed. It was Kazankin.

‘I’m here,’ he murmured, mostly to himself. ‘This way,’ he added, with rather more volume. It was hard to believe that anyone else would be skulking in this particular patch of forest.

Kazankin was the first to reach him, and his surprise at finding Russell was written on his face. He was holding a large canvas holdall in one hand, like a plumber with his tools.

‘What happened?’ Russell asked.

The Russian exhaled with unnecessary violence. ‘Comrade Varennikov decided his chute was faulty,’ he said coldly. ‘By the time we got him through the door you were long gone. We landed on the other side of Seeburg.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Varennikov said, for what was probably the hundredth time. ‘I panicked,’ he explained to Russell. ‘It was just…’ His voice tailed off.

‘We need to get going,’ Kazankin said, looking at his watch.

‘It’s too late,’ Russell told him. ‘We’re already an hour behind schedule, and we didn’t have one to spare.’

He expected Kazankin to argue with him, but the Russian just looked at his watch again, as if hoping for a different time. ‘So what do you suggest?’ he asked when none was forthcoming.

‘Get as close to the lake as we can tonight, lie low during the day, and then cross as soon as it looks safe tomorrow evening. That’ll give you most of the night to ransack the Institute.’

‘We still have time to get across the lake tonight.’

‘Yes, but the Grunewald is popular with walkers. They’ll be more chance of our being spotted on that side of the water.’

‘You think the people of Berlin are still going for walks?’

It was a reasonable question, Russell realised. And he had no idea what the answer might be. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.

‘We’ll go on,’ Kazankin decided.

They crossed the road, and plunged into the wood on the other side. Kazankin took the lead, with Russell behind him, then Varennikov. Gusakovsky, carrying the inflatable dinghy, brought up the rear. They had hardly gone a hundred metres when the light suddenly dimmed. The searchlights were being turned off.

Their progress slowed, but Kazankin, as Russell reluctantly acknowledged, was good at picking a path. It only took them an hour to reach the wide and empty Spandau-Potsdam highway, and soon after two-thirty they emerged from the forest close to the road connecting Gatow to Gross Glienicke. They followed this for a while, and almost ran into trouble, hearing the raised voices of some approaching cyclists with barely enough time to find cover. The cyclists, who looked in the dark to be wearing Luftwaffe caps, had obviously been drinking, and were singing a rather ribald song about that organisation’s beloved leader. They were presumably heading home to Gatow Airfield, which lay a couple of kilometres to the south.

If the airmen hadn’t been singing, Russell thought, they would never have heard them in time.

Kazankin led them off the road and out across empty fields. There was no sign that these were being worked, either for crops or pasture. German agriculture, at least in the vicinity of Berlin, seemed a thing of the past.

Eventually they reached another road, and passed into another stretch of woodland. Russell was beginning to feel tired, and the younger Varennikov seemed only slightly more energetic. Kazankin and Gusakovsky, by contrast, looked capable of walking all the way home to the Soviet Union.

There were big houses in these woods, but neither lights nor barking dogs. The rich owners were long gone, probably up in the Alps, lamenting the fact that they couldn’t ski all the year round.

And then, suddenly, they were standing on a small pebble beach, staring out across the dark Havelsee. The lake was at its narrowest here, little more than five hundred metres across. There were no lights visible, and all they could hear were breeze-ruffled leaves and their own breathing.

Kazankin was right, Russell thought. The Grunewald was big – almost fifty square kilometres. If they ran into walkers, so what? – they were foreign labourers, looking after the paths and the trees. They should get across tonight.

Gusakovsky was already inflating the boat, although where he was finding the breath was beyond Russell.

‘On the map,’ Kazankin said, ‘there was an island a few hundred metres south of here.’

‘Lindwerder,’ Russell said.

‘Is it inhabited?’

‘It was used for test-firing rockets in 1933,’ Russell remembered. ‘But only for a few weeks. As far as I know, it was only used as a picnic spot in the years before the war.’

‘It might be a good place to spend the day,’ Kazankin said, as much to himself as Russell. ‘We would have advance warning of any visitors.’

‘A good idea,’ Russell agreed.

Ten minutes later, Gusakovsky had inflated the boat. He took it out into the water, rolled himself in, and kept it in situ with one of the wooden paddles that Kazankin had extracted from his holdall. The others waded out to join him, and somehow got themselves aboard. The dinghy seemed alarmingly low in the water, but showed no sign of sinking any lower. The two NKVD men started paddling them towards the island.

Russell sat gazing out at the barely visible shores, remembering Sunday afternoons here with Effi, Paul or both. A Berlin institution – a sail on the Havelsee, with a shore-side stop for a picnic. He didn’t think he’d ever seen the lake in darkness.

Lindwerder hove slowly into focus, a low forested hump in the water around two hundred metres long. They grounded the dinghy on a gravel beach, then carried it up into the trees. ‘Wait here,’ Kazankin ordered, and disappeared into the darkness.

He was back ten minutes later. ‘There’s no one here,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

He led them up through the trees, over the crest of the island’s slight ridge, and came to an abrupt halt. Looking down, Russell could just about see a natural hollow in the slope.

Kazankin took two small spades from the holdall, and handed one to Gusakovsky. Both men began to dig, their breathing growing steadily heavier as the minutes went by. After about fifteen, Kazankin pronounced himself satisfied.

Russell wondered how many hides like this the two men had built in their time with the partisans.

‘It’s almost dawn,’ the Russian commander said, staring up at the eastern sky. ‘We’ll wait for light to build the roof. And take another look at the maps.’

Half an hour later the roof was in place, and Kazankin was pulling the briefing material from his trusty canvas bag. There was a street map of Dahlem and Zehlendorf, an aerial photograph of the area surrounding the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and, most useful of all, a hand-drawn plan of that part of the Institute supposedly used for atomic research. The map was only a few years old, the photograph reasonably clear, and the diagram, according to Nikoladze, had been drawn by an Institute worker only three years before. Russell had seen them all at the Lissa airfield, and been impressed – the NKVD researchers had exceeded his expectations. Kazankin was no slouch either. As the Russian commander described their intended course of action, Russell felt a reluctant admiration. The man said what needed to be said and nothing more; he seemed determined and utterly fearless.

Outliving him would not be easy.

Despite sleeping with Rosa tucked into her body, Effi awoke in the middle of the night feeling colder than she could ever remember. The hospital’s electricity supply had been cut off on the previous day, and what little heating there was had disappeared with it. According to rumour, they were also running out of water. Some sort of end seemed near.

Any day now they might all be led outside and shot. Come to that, they might be shot where they were.

It was, she thought, about three in the morning. Rosa was sleeping soundly, but many of the adults seemed as wakeful as she was – all across the room limbs were shifting, murmurs and whispers being traded.

The idea of dying here, in the last days of the war, was almost too much to take. She had thought about trying to escape – she assumed almost everyone had – but not to any useful effect. Even with the end so near, the camp was efficiently guarded by locks, walls and guns. On her own, she would have preferred any risk to simply waiting, but she wasn’t on her own anymore. How many people, she wondered, had gone to their deaths with their children, when they might conceivably have saved themselves on their own? It was wonderful really, if you could say that of something so tragic.

Would she ever have a child? She had been asking herself that question with increasing frequency since her forced separation from John. Which was somewhat ironic – when they’d been together the subject had rarely been raised. They’d had each other, and he’d had Paul, and she’d had her career and her nephew. They’d never ruled out having a child with each other, but there had been a tacit acceptance that they wouldn’t, or at least not yet.

Well, if she had another birthday in May, it would be her thirty-ninth. Which might well be too late, although miracles happened. And then there was Rosa, or whatever her real name was. Effi had only known the girl for ten days, but already found life without her hard to imagine. And there was no one to send her back to. She wondered how John would feel about adopting a daughter. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt fairly confident that he’d like the idea. And Paul, if he lived, could be the grown-up brother.

The thought brought tears to her eyes. She lay there in the dark, the sleeping girl enfolded in her arms, trying not to sob.

The makeshift defence line on the eastern outskirts of Müncheberg was still in German hands when Paul’s adopted combat group reached it just before dawn. This was almost a pleasant surprise, given how over the course of the night the Russians had often seemed ahead of them.

Around fifty of them had slipped out of Worin and across the open fields when darkness fell on the previous day. Once assembled in the next patch of forest, they had struck out for Müncheberg, some ten kilometres to the west. It had been a long and twisting journey, in which the sights or sounds of fighting nearby had often dictated a change of course. Stopping to rest while the moon was up, they had watched in petrified silence as one line of enemy lorries had passed a mere stone’s throw away, the soldiers within filling the night with their songs of triumph. Only a kilometre or two from Müncheberg they had found themselves forced between two burning villages, not knowing which side was setting the fires.

And Müncheberg itself, it transpired, was soon to be parted from the Reich. According to the latest reports the Russians had broken through to both north and south, leaving most of Ninth Army in peril of encirclement. All troops were being pulled back to the Berlin defence lines, either with their own units or as members of combat groups newly formed by the military police who controlled the crossroads outside the town. Paul, to his intense annoyance, was told to join up with a new unit built around the remnants of a Hitlerjugend battle group. When he protested this decision, arguing that his gunnery skills would be utterly wasted in an infantry unit, he was treated to a lecture on the bravery and commitment of the Hitlerjugend, who could ‘give the fucking army a lesson in how to stand and fight.’

They probably could, but only because they were too young to know any better. Most of his new comrades seemed to be fifteen or sixteen, and Paul doubted whether their life expectancy warranted shaving kits. Scanning the smoke-blackened child faces lining the road he felt a further lurch towards total despair. Some seemed utterly blank, others close to feral. Some were on the verge of tears, and probably had been for weeks. Understandable reactions, each and every one.

The good news, from Paul’s point of view, was that the Hitlerjugend’s suicidal devotion to the Führer had earned them transport – their unit, unlike others, had been allotted trucks and fuel enough to reach Erkner. He climbed aboard his vehicle with relief, and tried not to notice the age of the other passengers. Get to Erkner, he told himself, and a chance would occur to seek out his old battalion, most of whose members still considered personal survival a more than worthwhile goal.

The lorry moved off, and he closed his eyes for some much-needed sleep.

‘I’m Werner Redlich,’ a small voice interrupted him. ‘I heard you tell the MP you’re a gunner.’

‘Yes,’ Paul said without opening his eyes.

‘I wanted to be a gunner,’ the boy persisted.

Paul looked at him. He had noticed him at the crossroads – a sad and far too thoughtful face for one so young. Like most of the others, he was wearing a brown shirt, short trousers and an oversize helmet. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘Fifteen,’ Werner replied, as if were the most natural age for a soldier to be. ‘Nearly fifteen,’ he corrected himself. ‘Are your family in Berlin?’

‘No,’ Paul said, shutting his eyes again, ‘they’re all dead. And I need some sleep.’

‘Okay,’ Werner said. ‘We can talk later.’

Paul smiled to himself, something he hadn’t done for a while. He spent the next couple of hours drifting in and out of sleep, the lorry jerking him half-awake each time it accelerated away from road blockages caused by refugees, retreating soldiers or the earlier depredations of the Red Air Force. When he fully came to, the back of the lorry was empty, and Werner was offering him a can of food and a mug of coffee. ‘Where are we?’ he asked, looking out over Werner’s head. ‘And where is everyone?’

‘Stretching their legs. We’re in Herzfelde.’

The sky above the houses was purest blue, and the war seemed, at that instant, a long way away. He levered the tin open, and began spooning its contents into his mouth. ‘Why have we stopped here?’ he asked between mouthfuls.

Werner was looking down the road. ‘We’re wanted,’ he told Paul.

‘Who by?’

‘SS.’

‘Then we’d better go.’ Paul took one last mouthful of soup, and lowered himself down to the road. Fifty metres away, the unit was coalescing around a couple of black uniforms. A Führer Order, he guessed, as they walked forward to join the throng.

He was right. The SS Sturmbannführer leaning on the windshield of his APC had paper in hand, and after gesturing successfully for everyone’s attention, began reading the latest bulletin: ‘Hold on another twenty-four hours, and the great change in the war will come! Reinforcements are rolling forward. Wonder weapons are coming. Guns and tanks are being unloaded in their thousands.’

Paul looked around, expecting at least the odd smirk, but every young face seemed enraptured. They wanted so hard to believe.

‘The guns are silent on the West Front,’ the Sturmbannführer continued. ‘The Western Army is marching to the support of you brave East Front warriors. Thousands of British and Americans are volunteering to join our ranks to drive out the Bolsheviks. Hold on another twenty-four hours, comrades. Churchill,’ the Sturmbannführer concluded with the air of a magician saving his biggest rabbit for last, ‘is in Berlin negotiating with me.’

Now there were smiles on the young faces. They were going to win after all.

Paul reminded himself that it wasn’t so long since he had taken official pronouncements seriously. Even now, a small part of his brain was wondering whether the British leader might really be in Berlin.

‘Do you believe it?’ Werner asked quietly, as they walked back towards their vehicle.

‘Of course,’ Paul said in a tone that implied the opposite.

‘Neither do I,’ the boy said, removing his helmet to run a finger along a still-healing gash in his forehead.

‘Where are your family?’ Paul asked him.

‘In Berlin. In Schöneberg. My father was killed in Italy, but my mother and sister are still there. At least I think they are. I’ve heard nothing since we were sent to the front.’ He raised his eyes to meet Paul’s. ‘I promised my father I’d look after them.’

‘Sometimes there’s no choice and you have to break a promise. Your father would understand that.’

‘I know,’ Werner said, sounding more like fifty than fifteen. ‘But…’ He let the word hang in the air.

‘We’re loading up,’ Paul told him.

Ten minutes later they were on their way, heading off the main road, driving south-west towards Erkner, which until recently had still been functioning as a terminus for Berlin’s suburban trains. There were lots of refugees on the road, many with possessions piled in pushcarts or prams, some with a dog strutting happily alongside, or a cat curled up among salvaged bedding. Did these people imagine safety ahead, or were they simply putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the guns? Paul hoped they were planning to bypass the German capital, because heading into Berlin would, as the English saying had it, exchange the fire for the frying pan. Over the next couple of weeks, with the Nazis desperate and the Soviets hungry for revenge, his hometown seemed like a place to avoid.

They were only about fifteen kilometres from the outskirts now, rolling down the sort of road – sun-dappled forests on one side, gently rippling lakes on the other – that had featured on pre-war Reichsbahn posters. ‘No longer a road leading home,’ he murmured to himself.

Half an hour later they drove into Erkner, eventually stopping in a still-busy street close to the town centre. People emerged from houses and shops to stare at this children’s army, anxiety warring with disapproval in many of the faces. Some ducked back in, only to return with food and cigarettes for the soldiers. One woman in her forties, catching Paul’s eye, and presumably noticing his less than pristine condition, asked him and Werner if they would like a wash.

They were only too pleased – it was a while since either had seen soap of any description, and even the wartime variety, which tended to remove skin along with the dirt, seemed like a rare luxury. Werner was not yet shaving, but Paul took the opportunity to remove four days’ worth of stubble. Some of the wildness in his face came away with the razor, but there was no disguising the sunken cheeks, the dark semi-circles under the eyes, the loss staring back at him. He turned hurriedly away, and went back out to find Werner eating cake in the kitchen.

The woman silently ushered Paul into the front room, and shut the door behind them. ‘He’s only fourteen,’ she said, as if Paul himself might not have noticed. ‘I can hide him here. Burn the uniform and say he’s my nephew. No one will be able to disprove it, and it will all be over soon.’

Paul looked at the woman. Presumably she realised that her suggestion, if reported, would result in her being shot. He wondered where she and all those like her had been for the last twelve years. ‘You can ask him,’ he said.

Back in the kitchen, Werner listened to the woman’s offer, and politely rejected it. ‘I must get back to Berlin,’ he told her. ‘My family are relying on me.’

‘Time to get up,’ Kazankin announced, pulling back the branches that covered them. The sky was still clear, the light fading fast.

Despite being bone tired, Russell had managed only three or four hours of sleep. He had spent most of the day lying on his back, examining the blue sky through the lattice of vegetation which Kazankin and Gusakovsky had created, listening to Varennikov’s snoring and the war’s relentless soundtrack. Hardly ten minutes had passed without a bomb exploding, a flak gun booming or a plane droning overhead. How had Berliners managed to sleep during the last two years?

He struggled out of the dug-out, and reluctantly opened the can of cold mystery rations that Kazankin handed him. He wasn’t hungry, but forced himself to eat whatever it was, envying his companions’ apparent appetite.

‘Time to go,’ Kazankin said.

The canvas bag was left in the refilled dugout, and Russell and Varennikov were given spades to carry, bolstering the impression that they were foreign labourers. The two NKVD men, Russell noticed, were now carrying their machine pistols in the smalls of their backs.

They all took to the dinghy, and paddled their way across the short stretch of water that separated Lindwerder from the mainland. Once ashore, Gusakovsky dug a shallow hole while Kazankin deflated their craft, the hiss of escaping air sounding preternaturally loud in the silent forest. Boat buried, they set off through the trees, Kazankin in the lead, Russell wondering who might they run into. In pre-war summers they might have stumbled over any number of trysting couples, and if London’s blacked-out streets were any guide, a life of constant danger seemed to heighten the desire for outdoor sex. But surely it was still too cold for assignations in the woods. There were always a few eccentrics who liked a walk at night, but he could see no reason for the police to patrol the Grunewald. With luck, they might manage the whole five kilometres without meeting a single soul.

Kazankin strode on ahead, his body radiating bullish confidence. They crossed a couple of paths and one clearing dotted with picnic tables which Russell thought he recognised from years before. At one point Kazankin halted and gestured for quiet, and a moment or so later Russell saw the reason – a cyclist was crossing their line of travel, the beam from his handlebar lamp jerking up and down on the uneven path. Where on earth could he be going?

After half an hour’s walking they reached the Avus Speedway, which had served as the world’s narrowest motor racing circuit until 1938, its eight kilometres of two-way track topped and tailed by hairpin bends at either end of the Grunewald. The two lanes had been part of the autobahn since then, but that evening’s traffic was decidedly sparse, an official-looking car heading towards Potsdam, two military lorries rumbling north-west towards the city. Once they had vanished, the road lay eerily empty, two ribbons of concrete stretching away between the trees. As they walked across, Russell remembered driving Paul down the Speedway in his new car, early in 1939. His son had been only eleven years old, still young enough to be thrilled by a 1928 Hanomag doing a hundred kilometres an hour.

He wondered if the car was still where he’d left it in 1941, gathering rust in Hunder Zembski’s yard. If the authorities had known it was there, they would surely have confiscated it. But who would have told them? The Hanomag had probably fallen victim to Allied bombs – only a brick wall separated Hunder’s yard from the locomotive depot serving Lehrter Station, an obvious target.

They crossed the railway tracks on the eastern side of the Speedway and plunged back into forest. Russell knew this part of the Grunewald reasonably well – his son Paul, his ex-brother-in-law Thomas and Effi’s sister Zarah had all lived fairly close by – and the paths seemed increasingly familiar. Another twenty minutes and they would reach Clay Allee, the wide road that separated the Grunewald from the suburbs of Dahlem and Schmargendorf.

Which was far from comforting. He felt safe in the forest, he realised. Streets would be dangerous.

As if to confirm that thought, a siren began to wail. Others soon joined in, like a pack of howling dogs.

This could be construed as good news – the streets would be emptied, making it less likely that they would encounter the authorities. The familiar drone of bombers grew louder behind them, and the searchlight beams sprang up to greet them. Tonight though, there were no clouds to turn back the light, and the overall effect was to deepen the darkness below.

The first bombs exploded several kilometres to the east, and through the remaining screen of trees Russell saw rooftops silhouetted against the distant flashes. Closer still, a car with thin blue headlights drove towards them, and then turned off down an invisible road.

Kazankin halted. He had brought them out of the forest at exactly the right place, not much more than a kilometre from the Institute. Russell was impressed, but wasn’t about to say so. ‘That’s Clay Allee,’ he told the Russian. ‘The Oskar Helene Heim U-Bahn station is down to the right, about two hundred metres.’

They had discussed this last lap earlier in the day. They could approach the Institute through Thiel Park, a long, twisting ribbon of greenery which stretched from Clay Allee almost to their destination, but Russell, looking at the Soviet map, had argued for the shorter, simpler route. Two minutes on Clay Allee, ten on Gary Strasse, and they would be there. There would be nothing furtive about their progress, nothing to raise suspicion.

Rather to his surprise, Kazankin had agreed. Now, eyeing the prospect, Russell began to wonder. The street looked far too empty, and not nearly dark enough. And who in their right mind would be promenading down a suburban street in the middle of a bombing raid? So far the bombs seemed to be falling on other parts of the city, but would Berliners be that blasé? Would anyone?

He said as much to Kazankin, and got short shrift in return. ‘This is perfect,’ the Russian insisted. ‘They’ll be no one on the street. Let’s go.’

They went, abandoning the single file of a partisan detachment for the sort of tired grouping a quartet of foreign labourers might form on their way back from a long day’s work. As they reached Clay Allee and turned south towards the U-Bahn station a military lorry without lights roared into view and out again, leaving Russell’s heart thumping inside his jacket.

It seemed to be the only vehicle moving in Dahlem. They crossed the bridge over the U-Bahn tracks and turned left onto Gary Strasse. Several houses had been hit in earlier bombing raids, and much of the debris was still lying in the road, which shocked Russell almost as much as the level of damage. The fact that the German authorities could countenance such levels of civic untidiness spoke volumes.

Their boots had not been chosen for softness, and their footfalls on the city pavements sounded distressingly loud. As if to confirm Russell’s fears, he saw a curtain twitch in a bedroom window. He imagined someone reaching for a telephone, then told himself it wouldn’t be working. No system could function in these conditions.

They turned a bend in the road to find two men walking towards them. In uniform. One hastened his stride, as if eager to deal with them. ‘What are you doing out?’ he asked, while still ten metres away.

‘We’re on our way back to our barracks,’ Russell told him, in what he hoped was Polish-accented German. ‘They kept us working on the new defences until late,’ he volunteered, holding up his spade as evidence, ‘and there was no transport to bring us back. We’ve walked about ten kilometres.’

The policeman was in front of them now. ‘Papers,’ he demanded preemptorily. His companion, walking up behind him, looked a lot less interested.

The first man was at least fifty, Russell thought. Probably sixty. But he seemed confident of his ability to deal with four potential opponents. He was probably used to ordering foreign workers around.

Russell handed over the papers that identified him as Tadeusz Kozminski, a construction worker from Kattowitz in Silesia.

The officer examined them, or at least pretended to – it was hard to believe he could read anything in this much gloom. Behind him a series of flashes lit the night sky, swiftly followed by the sound of explosions. They seemed to be getting nearer.

The others passed over their papers.

‘Your name?’ the policeman barked at Kazankin.

‘He doesn’t speak German,’ Russell interjected. ‘I’m the only one who does.’

‘Where is your barracks?’ he was asked.

This was the question they had feared. During their discussions at the Polish airfield, Nikoladze had asked Russell whether he knew of any places in Dahlem where foreign workers might be billeted, and the only one he could think of was a stormtrooper barracks once infamous for its book-burning excesses. It was in the right area.

‘On Thiel Allee,’ Russell said. ‘Just up from Berliner Strasse.’

‘Where do you mean?’ his interrogator asked, suspicion in his voice. His hand was busy unclipping the leather holster on his hip.

Russell saw surprise bloom in the man’s eyes, heard the sudden ‘pff’. As the policeman sank to his knees, revealing the dark shape of his companion, the noise was repeated. The other man collapsed with little more fuss, leaving life with only the slightest of gasps.

The two NKVD men just stood there for a moment, their silenced pistols pointing down at the ground, ears straining for any indication that the crime had been witnessed. There was only the rumble of distant explosions.

Satisfied, they each grabbed a pair of legs, hauled the fresh corpses across to the low hedge bordering the road, and tipped them over. They would doubtless be visible in daylight, but by then…

Varennikov’s mouth was hanging open, his eyes reflecting the shock that Russell felt. He had seen a lot of dead bodies over the last few years, but he couldn’t remember ever watching another human being lose his life at such close quarters, and with such astonishing suddenness. And the sangfroid of the Soviet security men was breathtaking. Two Germans, two bullets, two bodies dumped in the shadows. And if there were wives or mothers who loved them, who the hell cared?

Kazankin urged them back into motion with the jerk of an arm. They had to be nearly there, and sure enough, a sign for Ihne Strasse soon emerged out of the gloom. They were only a block away.

Russell had visited the Institute once before, on a journalistic assignment in early 1940. He had made an appointment to see Peter Debye, the Dutch physicist then in charge, but had received a less than fulsome welcome when he reported at reception. Debye, it later transpired, had just been fired for refusing to accept Reich citizenship, but the news had not been cleared for official release, and Russell had spent an hour strolling around the grounds before he received the definitive no. If Nikoladze was right and it hadn’t been bombed, he was fairly sure he would recognise the building. The Lightning Tower – the large cylindrical structure at its western end – was too distinctive to miss.

It would probably still be. The Americans would have done their damnedest to destroy the whole complex once they discovered that atomic research was going on there, and they would have redoubled those efforts once they knew that the Soviets would be reaching Berlin before them. But trying and succeeding were two very different things where aerial bombing was concerned. If any country’s bomber command had won medals for precision in this war, then Russell hadn’t heard about it. The fact that they’d been aiming at the Institute seemed a near-guarantee of its survival.

A few moments later his cynicism was rewarded, as the stark silhouette of the Lightning Tower reared up against the flare of a distant explosion. They had reached their first objective, and much quicker than he had expected. ‘That’s it,’ he told Kazankin in a whisper.

They advanced along their barely discernible road, and crossed another. Beyond the dim shape of the tower, the long three-storeyed building stretched away. As they drew nearer the deepening orange of the sky reflected in the even rows of windows that lined the sides and roof. There were no lights visible, but blackout curtains were bound to be in place. The whole German scientific establishment might be inside, all working flat out on some new monstrosity for the Wehrmacht to use.

But Russell didn’t think so. The building felt empty. In fact the whole area – all the large shapes in the darkness that made up Wilhelm II’s dream of ‘a German Oxford’ – felt empty. As if the German scientific establishment had finally summoned the nerve to say ‘Fuck you, Adolf’, and headed on home.

He remembered the building standing in an open, well-manicured square of parkland, but the war had taken a toll, and patches of unkempt vegetation now offered useful camouflage for a raiding party. Kazankin pushed his way through the surrounding hedge and led them to one such patch, not far from the base of the Lightning Tower. Looking up, Russell could see the vertical ribs, and the small rectangular windows just below the coolie hat roof which gave the tower its resemblance to a fat medieval turret. When the war began it had housed a particle accelerator for atomic experiments, but that was probably long gone.

The eastern sky was growing lighter with each new blaze, and Kazankin found he could read his watch. ‘Almost eleven,’ he told Gusakovsky – they were slightly ahead of schedule. The moon would rise in twenty minutes, and on a clear night like this would make a considerable difference. But it would only be up for four hours, which they’d spend in the hopefully empty Institute, out of sight and searching for secrets. When it went down at a quarter past three, they would still have three hours of darkness in which to reach the sanctuary of the Grunewald forest.

They crouched there for what seemed an age, until Kazankin was satisfied that no one had seen them. He then led them across to the nearest porticoed entrance, and hopefully depressed the handle on one of the double doors. It swung slowly open. This implied human occupancy, but the complete lack of light suggested the opposite. Which was it? Had the Institute been closed down? Had its scientists decided that the war was over and gone back to their families? Or had the whole shebang been transferred to some safer location? That would explain the absence of security – there would be nothing left to guard.

There should at least be a caretaker, though. Some hapless old man, down in the basement, waiting for the all-clear to sound.

Kazankin disappeared into the darkness, and for what seemed like several minutes the others waited where they were, listening to the muffled sounds of his exploration. Finally the thin beam of the Russian’s masked flashlight blinked on, revealing a long corridor in which every door seemed to be closed.

‘Is it empty?’ Varennikov asked in a whisper.

‘No,’ Kazankin answered shortly. ‘There are no blackout curtains down in the offices, so we must lower them ourselves before we use any light. Now…’ He took the folded diagram of the building out from inside his jacket, flattened it against the corridor wall, and shone the flashlight on it. Several rooms at the western end, close to where they stood, were marked with crosses. So was the Lightning Tower.

‘I think we’re wasting our time,’ Russell heard himself say.

‘That is possible,’ Kazankin said coldly. ‘But since we have three hours to waste I suggest you and Comrade Varennikov start here’ – he picked out the nearest cross in the diagram, which marked a large room facing onto the inner courtyard – ‘and work your way down this side of the building to the tower.’

‘Where will you be?’ Russell asked, thinking about the possible caretaker.

Kazankin paused for a long moment, as if he was wondering whether to divulge the information. ‘Shota will stay here by the entrance,’ he said eventually. ‘I will check the building next door. According to our information, it has a lead-lined basement area known as the Virus House where certain experiments have been performed. If I can find it, and if anything looks interesting, I will come back for Comrade Varennikov. If not, you must be back here by three-fifteen. Understood?’

Russell nodded. It was the first time he’d heard Gusakovsky’s first name, and the extra intimacy was somehow comforting. Once he and Varennikov were inside the first office, Russell closed the door behind them and carefully closed the blackout curtains before trying the light. Unsurprisingly, the electricity was off – they would have to rely on their flashlights. Which was probably no bad thing, he decided. Most curtains bled a little light around the edges, and the brighter the source the sharper the glint.

Varennikov started rummaging through the desks and filing cabinets. They had not been cleared out, which might bode well, but the young physicist gave no sign of finding anything significant. Outside, the level of bombing seemed to have abated, although it might just have moved further away. ‘There’s nothing here,’ the Russian concluded.

They moved on to the next room, a laboratory. Once Russell had blanked off all three windows, Varennikov used his flashlight to explore the room. The various items of scientific equipment meant nothing to Russell, but the physicist seemed encouraged, and swiftly applied himself to sifting through several filing cabinets’ worth of experimental results.

To no avail. ‘Nothing,’ he said, slamming the last cabinet shut with a loud bang, and then wincing at his own stupidity. ‘Sorry.’

The next room was almost bare, the laboratory that followed devoid of anything useful. Only two small offices remained on this side of the corridor, and the first was replete with papers. Halfway through the first pile, Varennikov extracted a single sheet and sat staring at it for what seemed a long time.

‘Interesting?’ Russell asked.

‘Maybe,’ the Russian said. He put that sheet and several others to one side.

The next office was even more rewarding. Halfway through one folder of papers the Russian’s excitement became almost palpable. ‘This is very interesting,’ he murmured, apparently to himself. ‘An ingenious solution,’ he added in the same tone, taking out the relevant sheet and placing it with the one he had taken from the previous room. Others followed: the beginnings of a nuclear pile in more ways than one.

At the end of the corridor a door and small passage brought them into the Lightning Tower. The particle accelerator had been removed, leaving a vast echoing space, and only the metal stairway spiralling up the sides and the Manhattan-style island of filing cabinets in the centre of the floor precluded the tower’s re-employment as a fairground wall of death. The perfect metaphor for Nazi Germany, Russell thought. Once the petrol ran out, it had dropped like a stone.

‘It must have been huge,’ Varennikov was saying, a look of awe on his face. Almost reluctantly, Russell thought, the Russian turned his torch beam on the filing cabinets, and began rummaging through their contents.

He was soon lost in the task, throat clicking in apparent appreciation as he added more papers to the Moscow-bound sheaf. It took the better part of an hour to riffle through each cabinet, and by then the file was bulging, the physicist smiling. ‘We’ll have to be quick with the rest of the offices,’ Russell told him.

‘Yes, yes,’ Varennikov agreed, with the air of a man who already had what he needed.

Which, as they soon discovered, was just as well. The outside offices contained only administrative records. They found no further evidence of Heisenberg’s progress in creating a German atomic bomb, but they did discover what the famous physicist’s salary was. Russell thought about translating the Reichsmarks into roubles for Varennikov’s enlightenment, but decided it would be unkind.

They were in the last room when two things happened. First there was a shout, a few frantic words in German that included nein. And then, only a heartbeat later, the window blew in, sucking in the roar of an exploding bomb with a hail of shattered glass. Russell felt a sharp pain in his face, and heard Varennikov gasp. An instant later, a second bomb exploded, then another and another, each one sounding a blissful stretch further away.

Russell picked a small shard of glass from his check, and felt the blood run. He trained each eye in turn on the moonlit gardens – both were still working. Varennikov, his flashlight revealed, had lost his right ear-lobe, and the stub was bleeding profusely. He seemed more shocked than harmed.

Russell suddenly remembered the shout. He switched off his flashlight, carefully opened the door, and stepped out into the dark corridor. There was nothing moving, and no sign of Gusakovsky or Kazankin, but a thin wash of light filled the lobby area some twenty metres to his left. And there was a dark shape on the floor.

Two, as it turned out. The old man was nearer, a neat black hole drilled through the left side of his forehead, a few locks of silver hair draped across his right eye. Gusakovsky was just beyond him, unnaturally twisted, the back of his head glistening in the dim light. He had been thrown against the wall by the blast, Russell guessed. The bomb must have landed almost on the doorstep, blowing the doors inwards, a split second after Gusakovsky’s shooting of the caretaker.

The Russian’s gun was lying close to his splayed hand. Russell bent down to pick it up, and placed it in his belt.

‘Wh-where’s Kazankin?’ Varennikov stuttered behind him.

It was a question that needed answering, but far from the only one. Were there any emergency services still operating in Berlin? If so, were they already fully occupied? If any were spare, how long would it take them to arrive? Sooner or later someone was bound to. They had to get away from the Institute.

But where to?

And where was Kazankin?

Russell worked his way between pieces of furniture to the open doorway, and clambered gingerly out across the ruined portico. The moon was almost down, but flames were rising from a building away to his left, flooding the world in yellow light. The bomb had gouged a sizable crater across the pathway leading to the street gates, and the remains of a body lay heaped on the grass ten metres beyond. From a distance, it looked like a shapeless mass of bloodied flesh; closer up, Russell could identify shreds of the foreign worker uniform. One quarter of the face was strangely untouched, and in it a single staring eye. Kazankin’s.

He wasn’t supposed to feel sorry for his potential executioner, but he almost did.

He looked around. One building on Gary Strasse was merrily burning, but the other three bombs had only inflicted blast damage. No more were falling, and the sky sounded empty of planes. Had Kazankin and Gusakovsky fallen prey to a single stray stick, not so much aimed as discarded?

Varennikov had followed Russell out, and was now standing there, clutching the sheaf of papers, staring down at what was left of Kazankin. He ran a hand through his hair. ‘What now?’ he asked. It sounded more like a plea than a question.

Russell responded. ‘This way,’ he ordered, leading the Russian out through the gates and across the empty street. As they approached the intersection with Boltzmann Strasse they both heard vehicles approaching from the Thiel Allee direction. Russell broke into a run, Varennikov following. They turned the corner into Boltzmann Strasse and headed for the pool of deep shadow offered by two large trees.

They had barely reached it when two vehicles drove across the intersection they had just left behind. Fire trucks of some kind, Russell guessed. They would find three bodies, one caretaker and two foreign workers.

One of whom, he realised, was still carrying his Soviet pistol. Fuck!

It was too late to do anything about it. With any luck the Nazis would assume that there’d only been two of them. ‘Let’s go,’ he told Varennikov.

‘Where are we going?’ the Russian asked as they walked towards the Thielplatz U-Bahn station.

‘To my brother-in-law’s house,’ Russell told him.

‘Your brother-in-law? But he’s a German!’

‘Yes he is. And he’s probably the best chance we have of saving our lives.’ He certainly couldn’t think of any others. But was it fair to land on Thomas’s doorstep with a Soviet physicist, and half the Gestapo in probable pursuit? The thought crossed his mind that he could simplify matters no end by taking out Gusakovsky’s silenced gun and leaving Varennikov in a Dahlem gutter. But he knew he couldn’t do it. The Soviets might find out. And he rather liked the young Russian.

He asked himself how he would feel if Thomas turned up at his door with a ticking bomb. He would take him in, he knew he would. He and his ex-brother-in-law had fought on opposite sides in the First War, but they’d been on the same side ever since.

Thomas even had a cellar – Russell could remember him remarking how they’d probably need it after one of Goering’s speeches on the invincibility of the Luftwaffe. They should be able to hide out there until the Red Army reached Berlin. And once they did, then saving Varennikov should earn both him and Thomas some much-needed credit with the Soviets.

All of which assumed Thomas being there. He could imagine him evacuating Hanna and Lotte to Hanna’s parents in the country, but he found it hard to imagine Thomas leaving his factory or his Jewish workers. As far back as 1941 he’d been all that stood between them and the trains heading east – he had even taken to cultivating a few Nazi acquaintances as insurance. And things was unlikely to have improved. If the bombing had spared him, Thomas would be there.

‘How far is it?’ Varennikov asked, interrupting his thoughts.

‘About two kilometres,’ Russell told him. He couldn’t remember hearing an all-clear, but the bombers seemed to have gone. With the searchlights dimmed, the moon down, and the blackout still in force, it could hardly have got any darker. Even the whitened kerbs offered little help – six years of weather and footfalls had worn the paint away.

They took the bridge across the U-Bahn cutting, and headed up the narrow Im Schwarzen Grund. It might be dark, but the main roads carried a heavier risk, and he was fairly confident of finding his way through Dahlem’s suburban maze. Varennikov looked less certain, but plodded dutifully along beside him. If the sheaf of papers under his arm amounted to a bomb for Stalin, then the Americans would eventually have questions for Russell. He decided that Thomas didn’t need to know what this was all about. For everyone’s sake.

The street was quiet. In the poorer parts of Berlin, people would be hurrying home from the large public shelters, but in richer suburbs like Dahlem most houses and blocks had their own. And for obvious reasons the police presence had always been thinner here than in the old socialist and communist strongholds of working-class Wedding and Neukölln. In some areas of Wedding even the Gestapo had needed military back-up.

The streets were quiet, but not entirely empty. Twice on Bitter Strasse the two men were forced to skulk in the shadows while people went by, an air-raid warden on an unlit bicycle, a woman in a long coat. Two of the phosphorescent badges that Russell remembered from the early years of the war were pinned to her chest like pale blue headlights.

There was no sign that Dahlem had been bombed that night – apart, that is, from the four which had fallen around the Institute – but it had clearly suffered during the preceding months. As they crossed the wide and empty Königin Luise Strasse, Russell noticed several gaps in the once imposing line of houses, and the depredations onVogelsang Strasse seemed, if possible, even heavier. Had the Schade residence survived?

It had. Identifying the familiar silhouette against the starry backdrop gave Russell an intense sense of relief. He had spent many happy hours in this house and the garden that lay behind it. Thomas had bought it in the early 1920s, soon after taking over the family’s paper and printing business from his ailing father. Russell and Ilse had stayed there when they returned, as lovers, from the Soviet Union in 1924. Through the 1930s he and Effi had spent many a Sunday lunch and afternoon as part of the extended family, eating, drinking and lamenting the Nazis.

Unsurprisingly for four in the morning, the house lay in darkness. But the small front garden did look unusually unkempt, and the thick spider’s web which Russell encountered on the porch implied a distinct lack of human traffic.

‘It looks empty,’ Varennikov said. He sounded relieved.

‘Come,’ Russell told him, heading for the archway at the side of the house, where another web was waiting. Many years earlier, Thomas had invited him back to the house, only to realise he’d forgotten his keys. ‘There’s a spare one round the back,’ his friend had said, and there it had been, gathering moss under a water bucket.

The bucket was in the same spot, and so was the key. It felt a little rusty, but still opened the back door. Russell ushered Varennikov into the huge kitchen that Hanna loved so much, and told the Russian to stand still while he attended to the blackout curtains. Once these were closed, Russell used his flashlight to reveal the room’s geography.

Two things immediately caught his eye. The documents on the large kitchen table were Thomas’s Volkssturm call-up papers. They had been issued the previous autumn.

And on the mantelpiece above the stone fireplace there was one of the black-bordered memorial cards that Russell remembered from 1941. Joachim Schade smiled out of the photograph. Thomas had lost his son.