Silesian Station

The Wave of the Past

'Tell me,' Russell said, somewhat unnecessarily.

'He was just the way your detective described him. A dark blue uniform with a peaked cap, and when he took it off I saw his grey hair. And the eyebrows, much darker, black I think. A slight beer belly, but not really overweight. He just stood there watching the bottom of the staircase. You know the smoker's kiosk? He was standing right next to it.'

She paced to and fro. 'I watched him, but not all the time. You know they say that people have a sixth sense that they're being watched, and I didn't want him to notice me. And of course I was also watching for you, so I had to take my eyes off him every now and then. Anyway the train arrived and the people started coming down the steps - quite a few of them, but not really a crowd - you could see each person. And he was looking at this one girl. She looked about twenty, and she was quite smartly dressed. Dark hair and one of those little felt hats that were fashionable about three years ago. She put her suitcase down and she was digging around in her bag for something. A little book - an address book perhaps. And he walked towards her, a big smile on his face. He said something to her, and she looked relieved. He went to pick up her suitcase, but at that moment she caught sight of someone she knew over his shoulder - a young man in a Wehrmacht uniform. She said something to Eyebrows and he smiled back at her, but the moment her back was turned his face seemed to curdle. He was really angry. He walked back to his place by the kiosk and watched the last few people come down the stairs, but he didn't approach anyone else. There were other single women, but they all looked like they knew where they were going.'

She paused for breath. 'When everyone had come through he lit a cigarette and walked out through the main entrance. I followed him - don't worry, I kept a good distance and there were lots of people around and he never looked back. His car was parked at the end of the cab rank, and there were cops around - you'd have thought they'd have had a word with him...'

'It says something that he still has use of a car,' Russell added.

'I suppose it does. It was a Mercedes Cabriolet, by the way - my father used to have one.'

'Did you get the number?'

'I memorized it as I walked past,' she said. 'I ran for the cab at the head of the line, almost knocking over a pair of old ladies in the process, and jumped in the back. I asked the driver for a pencil, but he didn't have one, and then I realized I'd forgotten the number. I looked round just as he drove past us and what do you think I said?'

'Follow that cab?'

'More or less.'

'The cabbie was a Bavarian, so I had to say it twice, but we caught him up at the Michael Kirche-Strasse lights.' Effi lifted the hem of her dressing-gown halfway up her right thigh to reveal a red scrawl. 'I wrote the number down with my lipstick.'

'That must have made the cabbie's evening,' Russell said, noticing the two threes which ended the registration number.

'He was watching the lights. I told him to hang back a bit in case Eyebrows noticed he was being followed, and we sort of played hide and seek behind a Wehrmacht lorry all the way to Alexanderplatz. We all followed the Stadtbahn for a couple of blocks and then he turned up towards Schonhauser Platz and stopped outside that line of shops at the bottom of Dragoner-Strasse. We stopped about fifty metres short of him but the traffic had thinned right out, and when he came out of the shop with his bag of groceries he looked right at us. He got back in his car and moved off, and I told myself I had his number and it would be better if he didn't know he'd been followed. I told the cabbie to let him go, and was still wondering whether I'd done the right thing when he turned off the street about two hundred metres further up. We gave him a couple of minutes and drove slowly by. His car was parked beside an apartment block - one of those old three-storey ones at the top of the street. There was no sign of him.

'I was just about to tell the cabbie to take me home when I thought - oh my God, what if Eyebrows got the taxi number and tracks down the driver and asks him where he took me. So I got him to drop me at Friedrichstrasse Station, and took the Stadtbahn home. And there I was, basking in my untrackability when two young soldiers came up and loudly asked me for my autograph. The whole carriage watched me get off at Zoo Station.'

Russell smiled, but Effi's story had left him feeling more than a little anxious. He wondered why. She might have been a byword for recklessness in the past, but in this instance she seemed to have acted with commendable caution. Was he underestimating her again?

'Well?' she asked.

'You did brilliantly,' he said.

'I thought so.'

'I could do with a drink,' Russell said.

She poured them both one.

'The girl he approached,' Russell asked. 'Did she look Jewish?'

'She was dark, and she looked sort of lost - haunted even - at first. But you don't see many Jews smiling the way she did when her soldier boy appeared. Not in public anyway.'

'But she looked distressed enough to be Jewish before that,' Russell said dryly.

'Yes.' Effi sat down beside him on the sofa. 'Do you think it's possible he's holding Miriam prisoner in his apartment?'

'If so, he doesn't seem satisfied with just her,' Russell said. Unless, he thought, the man was abducting girls to rape and kill them. Or eat them, like Kuzorra's famous cannibal, whose name he'd already forgotten.

'So what are we going to do?' Effi asked, putting her head on his shoulder.

'I'm damned if I know,' Russell said. 'There's no point in going to the police - it might even be dangerous. We have to find out more about Eyebrows, I suppose. Watch his apartment, see where he goes. Talk to his neighbours, if we can do it without giving ourselves away. Hope he leads us to Miriam.' He found himself yawning and looked at his watch - it was almost two o'clock. 'We can draw up a plan of action over coffee in the park.'

'That sounds good.'

'It does. How did your meeting go, by the way?'

'Don't ask. I don't think I've ever met so many brilliant people in one room, and every last one of them with a death wish. They cracked jokes about all the Nazi leaders, and were practically praying for someone to kill Hitler. They're organising discussion groups on the possibilities of sabotage. The possibility that one of them might be a Gestapo informer doesn't seem to have occurred to them. I think they'll talk themselves into their graves. I came out of there feeling quite frightened, because by law I should have reported every last one of them to the Gestapo. I decided my defence would be that I hadn't taken them seriously, which at least had the virtue of being probable. I certainly won't be going back.'

'And what about Madame Voodoo?'

'She seemed a bit surprised too. I think she'll be sticking to the stars from now on.'

He wasn't at all sure why, but he had rarely found Effi more desirable. He slipped the dressing gown off her thigh, revealing the lipstick number. 'I hope you've copied that down,' he said, 'because it's likely to get smudged.'

Next morning the sky over the Tiergarten was a disappointing grey, and they had the cafe almost to themselves. Russell divided the newspaper between them, but it only took Effi a few moments to throw her pages down in disgust. 'It's that day again,' she said, pointing out a headline.

It was Hitler's mother's birthday, and thousands of German women would be receiving their Honour Crosses from local Party leaders for providing the Reich with extra children.

'If only she'd come back and give him a slap round the head,' Effi muttered.

Russell laughed.

'So what are we going to do about Miriam?' she asked.

Russell folded his paper. 'All right. Let's assume Eyebrows kidnapped her. Why would he do that?'

'For sex?'

'Perhaps. For himself or for others?'

'You mean like a white slaver or something like that?'

Russell grimaced. 'I'm not sure white slavers exist. The fictional ones usually sell their victims to Arabs, and they always want blondes.'

'The whole world seems to,' Effi said wryly.

'I don't,' Russell told her.

'That's sweet. But look, if he took her for himself he'd have to keep her somewhere, and I can't imagine him keeping her in his flat. The walls are thin in those buildings. I suppose he could be keeping her drugged, but not for weeks on end, surely. He must have another place. Maybe somewhere out in the country.'

'Maybe. Let's take it one step at a time. Eliminate the apartment first.'

'How are we going to do that?'

'I don't know. Start with the portierfrau, I suppose. We can drive over there tomorrow morning.'

'Yes, let's do that.'

'You haven't told me how the filming went,' Russell said, deliberately changing the subject.

'Oh, the usual mess. They think it's finished, but that's only because they haven't looked at the rushes yet. I expect I'll find out on Monday or Tuesday that they've decided to reshoot a few scenes. The last one in particular. It's supposed to be uplifting, but half the crew were laughing behind their hands.

You never know, of course.' She looked at her watch, and got to her feet. 'I've got to go. My parents are expecting me for lunch, and they seem to eat it earlier each time I see them.'

They took cabs from the Zoo Station rank, hers heading out towards the family home in Wilmersdorf, his to Neuenburger Strasse. The Hanomag was where he had left it, Frau Heidegger hovering in her apartment door-way.

She made sympathetic noises about Russell's bruised face, and seemed satisfied with his story of walking into an open car door. 'I have a parcel for you,' she said. 'And there's some coffee in the pot.'

Some of it had been there for several days, Russell guessed, after taking the first bitter sip. The parcel turned out to be a large envelope. It was sealed with red wax, suggesting either a nineteenth century eccentric or something more atavistic, like Himmler's gang. At least they hadn't scrawled 'Return to Heydrich' on the back.

'Something official?' Frau Heidegger asked, with all the casualness of an SS attack dog.

'It'll be my new accreditation from the Propaganda Ministry,' Russell said, placing the envelope to one side. 'They had to re-issue it now that I've become an American citizen,' he added glibly. 'How have you been?'

Frau Heidegger was as well as could be expected, given the state of her knees. The doctor had told her to keep bending them, and now they were more painful than ever. Her brother was still frightening her with visions of Berlin under air attack, and one of her skat partners had heard that food rationing would be introduced the moment war broke out with England. She claimed that Dagmar's romantic entanglements were wearing her out, but she seemed to be enjoying them almost as much as Dagmar. Siggi had taken things a little too far the other evening, serenading her from the courtyard like some crazed Hanoverian Romeo - 'I'm afraid he stood on the roof of your car, Herr Russell' - but it had worked. Dagmar had eventually taken him inside, probably for a good talking to.

After one last sip of coffee, Russell looked at his watch and made his excuses. Up in his flat he spread the envelope's contents out on his table. There were three carbon copies of official documents, each on headed Air Ministry notepaper, and a covering note, signed by 'a comrade', which purported to explain the sources. The same 'comrade' also announced his willingness to answer questions.

Russell skimmed through the documents. The first listed up-to-date production figures - current and projected - for the Stuka dive-bomber. The second contained the minutes of a meeting held to discuss a new American bombsight. The third detailed the experimental fixing of supplementary fuel-tanks to the Luftwaffe's longest-range bomber. This, the document's author explained, would extend the effective round-trip range of these bombers by approximately five hundred miles.

It was like one of those old parlour games where you had to guess which one of several stories was false. The last one, Russell decided. It was the only one of the three from which the Soviets could draw conclusions that were both vital and wrong. Everyone knew that Stalin was moving his industrial base eastwards, and here was something to help him decide how far he needed to move it. Russell reached for his atlas and checked the distances. If what the document said was true, then only catastrophic setbacks on the ground would render Soviet cities east of Gorki vulnerable to attack. Conclusion: the five hundred mile figure was a lie, designed to discourage the Soviets from moving their industries still further east.

A nice idea, Russell thought. And nicer still that the Soviets would know that the information was fake, and take the appropriate steps. He grabbed a dusty sheet of paper from his typewriter, thought for a second, and scrawled 'first instalment' across it. He put this in the envelope with everything else, and sat for a moment, staring at his flat.

It was beginning to look like a place that nobody lived in. Which was just about right. Waiting for sleep the previous night he had again found himself thinking about asking Effi to marry him. The trouble was, one good reason for doing so was to give her the possibility of American citizenship, which might make practical sense but certainly muddied the emotional waters. Russell wanted there to be only one reason for their marriage - the fact that they loved each other. 'Some hope,' he murmured to himself.

It was almost twelve-thirty. After inspecting the Hanomag's roof for damage he drove over to Grunewald. Paul was sitting on the wall at the end of the drive, still in his Jungvolk uniform. The boy's mouth dropped open when he saw his father's face.

Russell managed to convince him that the damage was superficial, but detected a hint of scepticism when it came to the supposed accident. 'Where are we going?' he asked, hoping to avert any questions.

'We haven't been to the Aquarium for a long time.'

They spent a couple of hours peering into illuminated tanks of varying sizes. The shoals of exotically coloured minnows glistened, the sharks gazed out of seemingly dead eyes, the anaconda refused, as usual, to unwind. After the porpoises had cheered them up they sat outside with their ice creams and watched barges chug by on the Landwehrkanal.

On their way home Paul announced that there was no Jungvolk meeting in three weeks' time - could they go camping that weekend?

'Leave Saturday morning and come back Sunday? I don't see why not. Has your mother agreed?'

'Not yet, but she will. I thought about asking Effi to come as well, but she doesn't seem the camping sort, really.'

'No. Just the two of us will be better, I think.'

'I think so.'

'Where do you want to go? Camping, I mean?' Russell felt absurdly pleased that his son wanted to go camping with him.

'The Harz Mountains?'

'The Harz Mountains it is.'

The sun finally broke through as they reached the house in Grunewald. Paul insisted on asking his mother about the camping while Russell was there, and Ilse agreed readily enough. He casually told her about his visit to Scheffler's tomb in Breslau, and, rather to his surprise, saw a softness in her eyes which he hadn't seen for years. Her husband Matthias asked Russell in for a drink but he declined, claiming, truly enough, that he was late for work.

Half an hour later he was parked outside the American Embassy. He sat in the front seat for a while, examining the wide boulevard through windscreen and mirrors, but no one seemed to be loitering with intent to spy. And what if they were? he asked himself. The Germans had all but ordered him to knock on the enemy's door.

He took the SD's envelope from the passenger seat, got out, and walked swiftly down the pavement to the Soviet Embassy. The letter-box was small, as if the Soviets were fearful of receiving too much information, and he had to force the envelope through.

A few minutes later he was joining Slaney in the Adlon Bar.

'I see you stirred up some trouble in Silesia,' was the American's first comment, his gaze fixed on Russell's bruise.

'I couldn't find any trouble,' Russell replied. He told Slaney about his search for alleged victims of Blechowka.

'There's been another imaginary incident, then,' the American said. 'It's in there,' he said, indicating the Beobachter which Russell had been carrying round with him all day. 'Hand it over.' He leafed through the pages, found what he wanted, and passed it back. 'Top right.'

The article was heavy on indignation, light on facts. The Polish police in Katowice - or Kattowitz as the Beobachter insisted on calling it - had 'frightfully mistreated eighteen members of the German minority, beating them with rubber truncheons and twisting their limbs.' The officers had been acting on 'direct orders from Warsaw' and 'indirect orders from England.'

Russell laughed. 'I can just see it,' he said. 'Chamberlain and Halifax plotting in the Cabinet Room. "Why don't we get the Polish police in Kattowitz to twist the limbs of a few Germans?" God, I don't suppose either of them has even heard of Kattowitz.'

'It's the "eighteen" I like,' Slaney said. 'You can just imagine them trying to decide what number of victims the story can bear before it becomes completely unbelievable.'

'So there's no real news?'

'Nothing to get excited about.'

'Has Chamberlain's team reached Moscow yet?'

'Yesterday. Their ship docked in Leningrad just before midnight on Wednesday. The galley staff were all Indian, so the diplomats had nine days of curries for lunch and dinner - I dread to think what the atmosphere was like. Anyway, they had a day's sightseeing on Thursday, took the overnight Red Arrow, and presumably spent most of Friday recovering. The talks were supposed to start today.'

'No word yet?'

'No. And there won't be anything positive. You know what'll happen next. The Brits and French will ask the Russians to join them in guaranteeing Poland, and the Russkis will say, "Fine, but how we can get at the Germans if the Poles won't let our troops into their country?" The Brits and French will try to pretend there isn't a problem, but everyone knows the Poles would never agree to a single Russian soldier on their blessed soil, let alone the Red Army. So the whole thing's dead in the water.'

'Probably,' Russell said. He realized he was still clinging, like most Europeans, to the hope that enough opposition would force Hitler to back off .

'The real point,' Slaney continued relentlessly, 'is that Stalin's got absolutely nothing to gain from signing up. If Hitler attacks Poland, and the British and French honour their guarantee, then Stalin can join the fun whenever he wants to, or just sit back and let the Western powers tear each other to pieces. And if the Limeys and Frogs leave the Poles in the lurch, then Stalin can thank his lucky stars he didn't sign up, because he would have found he was fighting Hitler all on his own.'

'How come you're so wise, Daddy?'

'Beer must be good for the brain.'

Russell grinned at him. 'Fancy getting some food? I haven't eaten since breakfast.'

'No thanks. I had a late lunch.'

Russell stopped off at the reception desk on his way to the restaurant. Like most of Berlin's foreign correspondents he used the Adlon as a second business address, and there were two items waiting for him - a wire from Cummins and a plain envelope with his name on it.

He opened the latter after ordering his meal. It contained everything he had suggested to Wilhelm Isendahl - the group's latest leaflet, a covering letter, and a typed article of around a thousand words. 'Father of Liars!' the leaflet proclaimed, and proved its point with a string of extracts from Hitler's speeches. The article looked, at first glance, like a serious expose of Nazi economic policies, but an Adlon restaurant heaving with Nazi uniforms didn't seem the place to read it.

He turned to Cummins' wire, which was short and depressingly to the point: POGROM BRATISLAVA AUGUST 11 STOP FIRST OUTSIDE GERMANY STOP SUGGEST INVESTIGATION SOONEST CUMMINS.

'I'll be back in a minute,' he told the waiter, who had just arrived with his wine. Making sure to take Isendahl's envelope with him, he walked back across to the bar. 'What do you know about a pogrom in Bratislava?' he asked Slaney.

'Nothing. Has there been one?'

'Apparently there was one yesterday.' He showed Slaney the wire.

'I'm glad my paper has a Central Europe correspondent,' he said. 'Bratislava's not my idea of a good time.'

It wasn't Russell's either, but he saw Cummins' point. A pogrom in Slovakia was like a secondary outbreak of plague, a sign that the disease was spreading, and couldn't be contained. Back in the restaurant he sipped at the glass of Mosel, wondering how the hell he was supposed to get there. The quickest way by train was via Prague, and that would take at least twelve hours. Worse still, he realized, his permit for the Protectorate had run out, and the chances of getting another before Monday morning were zero. He would have to go round the Protectorate in a bloody great circle - down to Nuremberg and Munich and then across to Vienna - and that would take at least a day. The blood would be dry by the time he got there.

He rushed his meal in the hope that Thomas Cook would still be open, but the frontage on Unter den Linden was firmly shut up. He drove on down to Anhalter Station, where trains left for the South; there was one to Leipzig at ten o'clock, with only a two hour wait for the connection to Nuremberg. He would be there by six-thirty, in Munich by eleven. The trains to Vienna were slow on Sundays, but he should arrive before nightfall.

Russell decided to think about it, and ordered a coffee at one of the con-course cafes. The arrivals board caught his eye, a litany of long delays and cancellations. The Wehrmacht manoeuvres were still wreaking havoc with the schedules.

He could fly, he suddenly realized. At least to Vienna, if not Bratislava. He drained his coffee and set out for Tempelhof in the gathering dusk. There would be no more flights that day, but someone might still be around.

The Lufthansa information desk was closing as he arrived, but the young man behind it seemed in no hurry to get home. There were no flights to Bratislava, he told Russell, and none to Vienna on Sundays. There were, however, flights on every other morning, and they left at nine. The price seemed astronomical, but with any luck the Tribune would pay it. If they didn't, too bad. An extra day with Effi was worth it.

He asked how long the flight took, and was told two and a half hours. This was progress, he thought. Getting from one atrocity to another had never been easier.

'So what do we do,' Effi asked, 'just knock on his door and ask if he's holding any girls prisoner?'

They were sitting in the Hanomag, about fifty metres down from the apartment block on Dragoner-Strasse. The street had a Sunday quietness about it, just a few smartly-dressed couples walking towards the spire in the distance, presumably intent on attending a late morning service.

'We wait,' Russell said. He was still recovering from Effi's performance at the wheel on the drive over.

'For how long?'

He smiled at her.

'Patience is not one of my strong suits,' she admitted.

'I'd never have guessed.'

'I...' she began, just as the nose of the Mercedes peered out from between the buildings.

'Look at me,' Russell said, as it turned towards them. 'As if we're talking.'

The Mercedes drove past on the other side of the road, and its driver cast a cursory glance in their direction. There was nothing suspicious or interrogative in the look, but Russell was left with a fleeting impression of cold purpose.

'Shouldn't we be following him?' Effi said, hand on the ignition key.

'No. He'd see us. And now we know he's out, we can go and question the portierfrau. Or I can,' he corrected himself.

'Why you? I can charm people.'

'I know you can. And if she's a movie fan - which, in my experience, ninety-nine per cent of portierfrauen are - she'll recognize you, and our anonymity will be shot to shreds.'

'Oh, all right. But what are you going to say?'

'I don't know yet.'

He crossed the street to the front entrance. The front door responded to his push, and a sign above the stairway to the basement told him where to find the portierfrau. He walked down the narrow stairs and knocked on a door with attractive stained glass windows. A woman of about sixty pulled it open, a small schnauzer dancing happily at her feet. Beethoven was playing in the back-ground, and the passage behind her was full of expensive-looking objets d'art.

She shooed the dog back in and pulled the door shut behind her.

'Good morning,' Russell said with a smile. 'I'm sorry to disturb you on a Sunday morning, but the local garage have told me that one of the tenants here owns a Mercedes Cabriolet, and that he might consider selling it. I'm wondering if you can tell me which apartment he occupies.'

'That would be Herr Drehsen in Number 5. But I'm afraid he's just gone out. I heard the automobile leave not ten minutes ago.'

Russell looked suitably distressed. 'That is a pity. I'm interested in buying a Cabriolet for my mother to use,' he explained, 'and I was hoping to ask the owner - Herr Drehsen, you say? - if he really was interested in selling it. I don't suppose that any other members of his family are likely to be at home?'

'His family? Herr Drehsen lives alone.'

'Excuse me for asking, but do you know him well?'

'Not well, no. I do his cleaning for him once a week, but Herr Drehsen is one of those men who keeps himself to himself.' She seemed somewhat relieved by the thought.

'He hasn't mentioned the idea of selling his car to you?'

'He has not.'

'Well, thank you very much, Frau...'

'Frau Jenigebn.'

'Thank you. I may return on another day, but I have others cars to look at this afternoon, and it's possible that one of those may meet my needs.'

'Can I pass your name on to Herr Drehsen?'

'Of course. Bloch. Martin Bloch.'

Russell walked back up the stairs and across the street.

'Well?' Effi demanded.

'His name's Drehsen. The portierfrau cleans for him, so he can't be keeping any girls in his apartment. And I'd be surprised if he brings any women here. She's the sort who would disapprove, and she gave no hint of it. And his car's usually parked outside her back window.'

'What did you tell her?'

'That I thought his Mercedes might be for sale. It was the best I could think of.'

'Clever.'

'That's me. So, this is where he comes when he fails to pick a girl up. We need to know where he goes when he succeeds.'

'We need to see him pick one up.'

'We do. Presumably he'll try again on Friday.'

'We don't know he only goes on Fridays,' Effi protested.

'All three sightings,' Russell reminded her.

She sighed. 'It seems a long time to wait if Miriam's still in danger.'

'If she's still in danger. It's been six weeks now.'

'But this might be the week that matters.'

Russell looked at her. 'What else can we do? If we start following him everywhere he's bound to spot us, and when the right time comes we need him not to recognize this car. We know there's no point in involving the police. And I'm off to Bratislava tomorrow for God knows how many days.'

'You'll be back by Friday though?'

'I hope so.'

He left Effi half-asleep in bed the following morning, and drove across town to leave the Hanomag at Siggi's mercy in the Neuenburger Strasse courtyard. A tram from Hallesches Tor got him to Tempelhof Field, where he posted Isendahl's envelope to himself at the Potsdam poste restante. He had several ideas for getting article and leaflet out of the country, but carrying them across the border between Vienna and Bratislava was not one of them.

The aeroplane looked similar to the one which had carried him, Zarah and the children to London earlier that year, but Paul was not around to confirm the name and number, or to volunteer a raft of technical specifications. There seemed more seats than before, and the air hostess, busy dispensing twists of cotton wool to his fellow-passengers, was noticeably prettier.

The aeroplane took off on time, rising over Wilmersdorf and Grunewald before veering round to the south. The pilot straightened her out at about two thousand metres, and the parched Saxon fields spread out beneath them. The sky was clear in all directions, and as they passed over Dresden the peaks of the Erzgebirge were clearly visible up ahead. Around half-past ten Prague appeared to their right, nestling in the silver bend of the Vltava. It looked serene and peaceful, as most places did from a kilometre up. Another hour and Vienna was visible across the wider ribbon of the Danube. As their plane taxied to a halt, the clock on the single storey aerodrome building read exactly eleven-thirty.

Once inside, Russell asked for the quickest way of reaching Bratislava.

'You mean Pressburg?' the young German at the desk responded.

'I mean the town that used to be called Pressburg,' Russell agreed. Until 1918 most of Slovakia had been ruled from Vienna.

There were several options, the young man told him curtly. He could take the gratis automobile into Vienna and take a train back out again. He could try his luck at the local station, which was much closer to Pressburg. He could take a boat down the Danube, though that would take around seven hours. He could look for an autobus outside.

Following up the final suggestion, Russell walked into an argument between a cab driver and a rather ancient German. Their dispute, he quickly discovered, was over the fare to Pressburg - the old gentleman insisting that it was only half of what the cabbie was demanding. 'I'll pay the other half if you'll take me too,' Russell offered.

Both seemed angry for a moment, as if he'd deliberately spoiled their fun, but his suggestion was accepted.

The capital of the newly independent Slovakia was about sixty-five kilometres away, and the drive took about ninety minutes. The border formalities consumed around thirty of those, the Slovaks keen to demonstrate their new independence. Every item in Russell's suitcase was meticulously examined, leaving him highly relieved that he had left Isendahl's leaflet and article behind.

During the final leg of the journey he asked both driver and fellow-passenger about Friday night's pogrom, but neither had much to say. The old German had been visiting relatives in Berlin for several weeks and the driver - a Slovak - pleaded a lack of fluency in any language but his own. Russell hoped his reticence had something to do with shame.

Bratislava looked down on the Danube from the end of a range of hills. Dropped off in the square at the centre of the Old Town, Russell consulted the street map in his vintage Baedeker. German cartographers were still including synagogues in 1929, and a cluster of them signified the Jewish quarter.

It was only a few blocks away, and easy to recognize from the debris littering the pavements. A whole line of shop fronts had been staved in, and while some were covered with hastily-nailed planks, others still gaped open, their shelves bearing nothing but shards of glass. There was a normal flow of people on the narrow street, but there seemed less noise than there should be, as if someone had turned the city's volume down.

The first synagogue he came to was daubed with swastikas and other insults, but the entrance was guarded by a posse of Slovak policemen. Russell showed his press card to the likely leader, but the man just shook his head. Pleas in German and English were met with a brief but noticeably hostile burst of Slovak.

Russell gave up for the moment. A cafe-bar down the street offered food, drink and the possibility of conversation. He was not an expert on central European cuisines, but the menu seemed like a mixture of Hungarian and Jewish, and most of the clientele looked the latter. One young man was staring at him from a nearby table. His face and angry expression reminded Russell of Albert Wiesner.

'I'm a journalist,' he said in German. 'An American journalist.'

The boy looked surprised. 'Can you prove it?' he asked in perfect German, looking around him as he did so.

'Yes,' Russell said simply, taking out his passport and journalistic accreditation.

The young man came over to examine them.

'Have a seat,' Russell offered. 'Can I get you a drink?'

'Whatever you're drinking. I'm Mel,' the youth added, offering his hand.

Russell took it and called for another Pilsen. 'Tell me what happened on Friday night,' he said.

Mel took another precautionary look around the bar. 'It was actually Saturday morning,' he began. 'About a hundred of them came roaring down from Masarykplatz. They were mostly Germans, but there were some Slovaks. You can see what they did.'

'What set them off ?'

'Nobody knows for sure, but most people think it was organized by the Freiwillige Schutzkorps - the local storm troopers.'

'Was anyone killed?'

'No. A miracle really. A lot of people were hurt, though. Some were punched or battered with staves when they tried to defend their shops, and a lot of people were cut by flying glass.'

'Did the police come?'

'Oh yes. Four hours after they were called. Their station's up on Stefanikstrasse - a five minute walk away.'

The story - and the bitterness - seemed all too familiar.

'The worst thing for most people - not me, because I'm not religious - but the bastards destroyed a lot of important stuff in the synagogues. Stuff that was hundreds of years old.'

'The local police wouldn't let me in,' Russell told him.

'You want to see it? There's a back door.'

'Show me.'

'When we've finished our beers.'

A few minutes and several alleys later, they reached the small yard at the rear of the synagogue. The door opened to Mel's push, and they found them-selves in a small storeroom. Another door brought them through to the main chamber, and a scene of devastation. Pools of water lay across the stone floor, and still-sopping carpets had been thrown across seats to dry out.

'They turned on the water hydrants,' Mel whispered.

Hangings had been ripped from the walls, and replaced with more red daubs.

'Who are you and what do you want?' a voice asked.

'He's an American journalist, Uncle Ignaz,' Mel shouted. 'He's come to see what the scum did.'

'Has he? Then bring him over here.'

Uncle Ignaz was leaning over a desk that contained several scrolls of scripture. All were torn and some were stained.

'They defecated on the Torah scrolls,' he said. 'They squatted over them and they forced their shit out with their hatred.'

'Did they steal the ornaments?' Russell asked, remembering Kristallnacht.

'Oh yes. They took everything that glittered. But these are what matters,' the man almost cried, looking down at the scrolls.

Back on the street, Russell thanked his young guide and headed for the town centre. A lone policeman gave him directions to the Freiwillige Schutzkorps headquarters, which were down near the port. Two Slovaks gave him further help en route, both with expressions of surprise at his choice of destination. Reaching the flag-bedecked warehouse-turned-barracks, he was told that the local leader was in Vienna for a conference. One of his deputies, a young dark-haired German with blue eyes, was happy to explain the recent outrage.

Friday's violence, he claimed, had been provoked by an attack on two of his men. A gang of Jews had fallen upon them in the ghetto and beaten them very badly.

Could Russell speak to these men?

The young German regretted that that would not be possible.

Russell went in search of a hotel. The Central, an elegant old pile at the bottom of Stefanikstrasse, seemed both adequate and eager for his custom. The German officers all stayed at the Savoy-Carlton, the manager remarked after seeing his passport, and the German presence had discouraged other foreigners from visiting the new country.

Russell asked whether any other foreign journalists had come to investigate Friday's events.

'Only one stayed here,' the manager said. 'And only for one night,' he added, handing Russell his key.

His room overlooked the street, with a chair and table placed by the window. He spent the next hour writing up his story, and hoped that Cummins would think it worth the expense. He could have written most of it in Berlin, but his description of the flooded synagogue and soiled scrolls had added an extra dimension. Where were the boys from Pathe News when you needed them?

He reached the post office a few minutes before closing, and persuaded the clerk he had time to wire the story off. That done, he walked down to the Danube in search of a restaurant with a river view. As he waited for his food he read through that morning's Beobachter, which he had earlier abandoned in favour of the Times. Only one story caught his eye. A 'renowned German economist', interviewed by the paper, claimed that recent border changes had resulted in the Poles having too much coal. 'The nation which needs coal most is entitled to it,' the Professor noted, leaving little room for doubt as to which nation that was.

It was an interesting argument, Russell thought. He imagined Africa laying claim to East Prussia's farmlands on similar grounds - surely they needed the grain more than the Germans did.

He should have been collecting stories like this, he told himself. There had been enough of them over the years, and once Hitler and his thugs were confined to history no one would believe the Alice in Wonderland aspects of the world they had spawned.

If they ever were confined to history. He had always assumed that they would be - 'when?' and 'how?' were the questions which mattered. But were he and the old Marxist inside him kidding themselves? Perhaps a rolling programme of conquests could keep economic logic at bay, like a locomotive consuming the carriages it pulled.

So much insanity, and here he was, eating a lovely meal, enjoying a beautiful view. As night descended a crescent moon slowly rose above the distant Hungarian plain, flooding the Danube with pale light and sparkling in the wake of the passing barges.

So much peace, until a convoy of lorries, their headlights blazing, rumbled up to the bridge on the German side of the river. There they stopped, and soon small fires were burning by the riverbank, groups of men gathered around them. War was coming, but not tonight.

He was woken next morning by a smiling young bell-boy with wire in hand. His story had reached San Francisco, and here was the grateful reply - REPORT FROM WARSAW SOONEST. He groaned, and the bell-boy looked as sympathetic as anyone could with a palm outstretched. Russell gave him the only coin he could find, got dressed, and went in search of a newspaper.

The local German paper offered some explanation for Cummins' request. Late on Monday the German authorities had closed the Silesian frontier in the Beuthen area and cut off all local telephone communications. This, the newspaper said, was in response to the 'terrible events in Kattowitz'.

That was it. No mention of a Polish response, or of wider implications. It could be another storm in a teacup; it could be the first shots of a second Great War. Warsaw did seem a good place to find out.

But how to get there? According to the hotel manager, the only passenger flights from Bratislava's tiny aerodrome went to Prague, so it had to be the train, at least to begin with. He walked up Stefanikstrasse to the station, intent on taking the train into Vienna, but a bad-tempered booking clerk told him he might have to wait all day. 'Address your complaints to your own government,' the man added disgustedly, mistaking him for a German.

Russell put him right, and asked if there were through trains to Poland.

'Who knows? If you take the Poprad train to Zilina Junction you may be able to reach Teschen. Or even Nowytarg. The Germans are running their military trains as if this was their own country. And they tell us nothing.'

A mystery tour through the Slovakian backwoods had limited appeal, but what choice did he have? He bought a through ticket to Krakow, and went in search of the Poprad train. It was waiting on the far platform, and rapidly filling up. In the yard beyond a troop train was waiting for a locomotive, soldiers sitting in the boxcar doorways, swinging their legs like bored children.

The time for departure arrived, and a collective whoop of surprise greeted the jerk into motion. The first forty kilometres raced by, but beyond Trnava the stops grew longer and more frequent. Time after time their train was held in a refuge siding for military trains to pass, those heading north with troops and equipment, those heading south to pick up more.

Russell had neglected to bring any food, and was fortunate in his fellow-passengers, a Slovak family of five who shared their lunch of bread and cold sausage with him. None spoke a word of English or German, but their simple pleasure in sharing lifted his heart. Another large family filled the compartment next door, but not with joy. They were Jews abandoning Bratislava, fleeing to the supposed safety of relatives in Poland. The words 'frying-pan' and 'fire' came to mind.

The train reached Zilina Junction at five in the evening. The footplate crew uncoupled their locomotive but left it where it was, offering hope that some-one might reconnect it. Russell walked down to the end of the platform and took in the view. Zilina Junction seemed to be a Slovakian Crewe, a station more important than the community it served. Hills rose on all sides of the small red-roofed town, yellow fields rising to pale green meadows, and these to dark green forests.

An hour or so later a station official arrived with the news that their train was going no further. Questioned about alternatives, he managed to sound vaguely optimistic. Services to the north and east were scheduled, he said, and he had no definite word of cancellations. A train might appear at any time, and passengers who wished to spend the night in the station hotel would be roused if one did.

As he finished speaking the sounds of an engine could be heard, and everyone turned to see the smoke pumping skyward above the trees, but it was a troop train, and it hardly slowed as it passed the station. Several soldiers waved to those watching from the platform, but only one child waved back. Russell heard the deep rumble as the train crossed the river, and stood there watching the tell-tale trail of smoke as it burrowed into the distant hills. The locomotive had been Slovakian, but the boxcars and troops had been German.

By the time he arrived at the station hotel all the beds had been let several times over. There were other hostels in the town, but it seemed wiser to stay within sight and sound of the trains. A bowl of stew and two Pilsens later he walked back across to the station, only to find that every square metre of the waiting room had already been colonised. It was still warm, so he stretched out on a bench in the open and watched the darkening sky reveal its stars.

Around ten another troop train steamed in from the south, but this one took the line heading east towards Poprad. If the Germans were sending troops to every border crossing between Slovakia and Poland, Russell realized, the chances of civilians getting across seemed depressingly remote. He had a horrible feeling his next journey would be back to Bratislava.

He tried to sleep, but only managed the occasional doze before the hard awkwardness of the bench woke him up again. A marked drop in the temperature compounded his discomfort - he hadn't been this cold since his last night stroll on the deck of the Europa. Only four weeks had passed since then, but it felt like months. He lay there wondering if he could have man-aged things better, but no obvious alternatives suggested themselves.

At Russell's umpteenth time of waking a thin ribbon of light was silhouetting the eastern hills, and a few minutes later the first sounds of activity were audible in the hotel across the road. He went in search of a hot drink, and found the early kitchen staff seated round a happily boiling samovar. His American status gained him a warm welcome, a large mug of tea and as much bread and jam as he could eat.

One grey-haired old Slovak had a smattering of German, and his summary of local opinion was short and to the point. The Germans were even worse than the Czechs, and the Slovaks just wished they would all bugger off. If he was thirty years younger, he would get the hell out of Europe as soon as he could, and head for New Zealand. He didn't know much about the place, but it had hills and sheep, and it was a wonderfully long way from anywhere else.

The sound of an arriving train penetrated the hotel kitchen. It was the Orava valley train, sent on from Kralovany with some stranded southbound passengers. The Zilina Junction night shift - a pair of middle-aged Slovaks with cheery smiles and not much else - seemed bemused by the train's appearance off its usual route and were unprepared to forecast its future movements. The locomotive driver, on the other hand, was quite sure where he was going, and that was back where he had come from. And yes, he told Russell, the Orava valley route into Poland was open. Or at least it had been on the previous afternoon.

The tank locomotive ran round its train, took on water, and backed onto the other end of the three wooden coaches. Russell decided he might just as well be stranded high in the mountains as where he was, particularly when the chances of returning to Bratislava seemed so remote. And there was always the chance the border would still be open.

He took his seat and watched as others arrived from the station hotel. The Jewish family from Bratislava brought up the rear, laden with belongings and sleeping infants.

The little train set off at a sedate pace, and only changed speed thereafter when a particularly steep gradient slowed it still further. The sun slid down the valley sides, and was sparkling on the river when they reached Kralovany soon after eight. German troops milled around boxcars in the nearby sidings and a line of vehicles in the station yard, causing Russell to fear further delays, but their train only stopped for a few minutes before setting out on its usual run to Szuchahora.

The Orava valley was more dramatic, slopes soaring on either side of the tracks as they climbed towards Poland. The border, much to Russell's relief, was open. He and his fellow travellers walked past an untended hut on the Slovak side and along a pair of rusted tracks towards a small modern building on the Polish side. Inside, a couple of young soldiers with antique-looking rifles looked on as a single customs officer meticulously examined and stamped each arrival's passport. His entry granted, Russell stood outside the waiting Polish train and admired the view of the Tatra Mountains, rising like a wall into the southern sky.

The train left with admirable promptness, and rattled down through the pines to the junction at Nowytarg. A connection arrived from Zakopane half an hour later, and spent the next three hours, twisting and turning its way out of the foothills, reaching Krakow's Plaszow Station soon after two. Russell had spent the final hour of this journey dreaming of a slap-up lunch in Krakow's Rynek G3owny, but the imminent departure of the day's last Luxtorpeda express to Warsaw changed his mind. He bought some Polish currency at the station bureau de change and climbed aboard. Advancing to the restaurant car, he was relieved to find a long and mouth-watering menu.

After his last few trains, this one seemed to fly along, as if its wheels were barely touching the rails. One hour to Kielce, another to Radom, and they were sweeping down onto the plain of the Vistula. As the wide sluggish river appeared on their right, a long line of barges struggling downstream, the locomotive whistled a welcome to the outskirts of the Polish capital. Ten minutes later it was hissing to a halt in Central Station.

Russell had not been to Warsaw since 1924, and then only for a night. He and Ilse had been travelling from Moscow to Berlin, and, in the manner of those times, had spent the night on a comrade's floor. He did, however, remember a recent conversation with a German journalist just back from the city: there were two good hotels, the Europejski, which prided itself on being the most expensive in Europe, and the Bristol, which was cheaper and better.

The Bristol was full to the brim. Russell walked on to the Europejski, reasoning that his enforced frugality at Zilina Junction more than made up for a touch of extravagance in Warsaw.

There were rooms available. He looked at three of them, realized they weren't going to get any better, and took the third, a vast space under a distant ceiling with windows overlooking the inner courtyard. The bath was stained an attractive green, the toilet a complementary brown. Flies had drawn in-tricate patterns on the huge gold-framed mirror with their own waste. The furniture and fittings had been at their peak a century earlier, but at least the bed was softer than the bench at Zilina Junction. Too soft, in fact - as Russell stretched out, the mattress curled around him like a frankfurter roll. He lay there for several moments, laughing like a lunatic.

In the bathroom the water coughed, spat and coughed again, before finally running hot. Working on the assumption that the miracle might not repeat itself, Russell shaved, washed his hair and took a long and very pleasant bath. By the time he emerged the light outside was fading, and ominous noises from the courtyard below suggested an orchestra in the process of tuning up.

The Europejski's restaurant had a higher reputation than its rooms. He walked downstairs and found a table in the open courtyard, just as the band swung into a better-than-expected version of Louis Armstrong's 'Potato Head Blues'. Not the sort of the music you could hear in Germany any more, and sitting there in the warm Warsaw evening, working his way through a very acceptable bottle of French wine, he realized how much he had missed it these past few years. His fellow-diners, most of whom looked like rich Poles, seemed to take it all for granted - there was nothing in their faces or behaviour to suggest that a war might be imminent. Every now and then another couple would wend their way between the tables to the small dance floor in front of the orchestra, and glide around the floor in each other's arms, as if life was just a happy procession of songs.

After dinner Russell went, rather reluctantly, in search of his fellow jour-nalists. In the Bristol bar he found a clutch of Brits earnestly debating the coming football season with one bemused American, and pulled the latter aside. Connie Goldstein was an Irish Jew from New York City who had spent most of the 1930s tracking the rise of anti-Semitism in central and eastern Europe. He was a good journalist and even better writer, but the big agencies he freelanced for were always begging him to write about something else for a change.

Russell had known him quite well during Hitler's early years in power, but the American's reporting of the Nuremberg Laws had got him expelled from Germany, and they hadn't met again until the previous month, when Gold-stein had joined the Europa at Southampton on its voyage to New York.

'You're back, then,' Russell said, as they waited to be served at the bar.

'For the last time, I expect,' Goldstein said. 'The proverbial's about to hit the fan.'

'Why Warsaw?'

'I don't know, really. It feels almost voyeuristic, like watching a bull in its pen before it goes out to die.'

'Nice.'

Goldstein grimaced. 'You think that's strange. I've been in Lublin the last few days, visiting some long-lost relatives. They live in a large block of flats in the Jewish quarter, and I made a list of everyone in the block. I took down their names and ages. Eighty-seven people, all of them Jews.'

'Why?'

'I wanted a record, just in case.'

'In case of what?' Russell asked, though he knew what Goldstein feared.

'In case they disappear.'

Russell looked at Goldstein, wondering if the man was letting his hatred warp his judgement.

'It's not just the Nazis, you know,' Goldstein said. 'Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Lithuania, here in Poland...if the Nazis start murdering Jews they'll have plenty of helpers.'

'No doubt about that.'

'And think about Poland. The Nazis inherited about half a million German Jews, and six years later they've still got 200,000. If there's a war with Poland they'll win it, and then they'll have three million more Jews to deal with. Where will they send them? Where could they send them?'

The logic was compelling, as logic often was. If Goldstein was right, they were heading into something like hell, and Russell felt more than a little reluctant to accept the inevitability of such a denouement. He clutched for a straw. 'I don't suppose the Germans have re-opened the Beuthen frontier?'

'No, and the Poles have shut down the entire Silesian frontier in retaliation.'

'Wonderful.'

'Gestures have their place. And it's surprising how much both of them seem to enjoy their mutual stupidities. You've heard about the latest postal row?'

'No.' Russell explained that he'd been out of touch for forty-eight hours.

'Ah, well, that idiot Frick has ruled that Polish addresses on letters originating in Germany have to be spelt in the German way, or they won't be allowed out. The Poles have retaliated by saying that all letters with such spelling will simply be returned to the sender. So no one will get any mail from Germany.'

'When's the next press briefing?'

'They're at ten every morning at the Foreign Office press department. It's on the other side of the Square. But don't expect to learn anything new.'

'I don't suppose there's any good news from Moscow?'

'Only bad. The talks with the British and French have been adjourned, and they won't be resumed until the Poles agree to the presence of Soviet troops. Which no one believes they will. Everyone's expecting some hapless British or French diplomat to arrive here in the next day or so, and be told as much by the government. Meantime, rumour has it that the Germans are pushing really hard for a non-aggression pact, and receiving more than a little encouragement. Ribbentrop's just waiting for an invitation to Moscow.' Goldstein looked at his watch. 'I'm headed that way myself, and I ought to be getting to the station.'

'You think a deal's that imminent?'

'Who knows? But the crucial decisions are being taken there, not here.'

Russell watched him walk away, and experienced a momentary feeling of panic. He had gotten used to war being a few weeks away, not a few days. Across the room, the laughter of his fellow journalists seemed almost ghoulish.

Abandoning his drink, he strode the short distance to Pidsulski Square in search of...what? People who hadn't yet heard the bad news, or showed no sign that they had? They were there all right - the prostitutes lingering by the ornate lampposts, the droshky drivers dozing on their seats behind shuffling horses. A couple walked across in front of him, the young man full of enthusiasm for something, the girl sharing it with her smile.

Lambs to the slaughter.

Russell trudged back to the Europejski and took the lift up to his floor. The band in the courtyard below was playing loud enough to keep Europe awake, and the small dance floor was a scrum of swaying bodies. He undressed and lay on the bed, enjoying the cool breeze and the joyous blaring of the horn section. Sleep seemed unlikely but he woke a few hours later, sweat streaming off his body. He had dreamt that the walls were closing in, but it was only the mattress.

Over breakfast the next morning Russell needed a few moments to work out which day it was: Thursday, which gave him less than thirty-six hours to get back to Berlin for his appointment at Silesian Station.

In Pidsulski Square the droshky drivers were standing around smoking, the prostitutes nowhere to be seen. The Foreign Ministry press briefing was well attended, and as uninformative as Goldstein had predicted. A silver-haired Pole wearing spats and a wingtip collar obligingly invited questions about his country's willingness to allow Soviet troops on her soil, then suavely refused to answer them. The only point of substance was provided by another official, who gravely announced that the foreign press corps would shortly be issued with gasmasks.

Russell was still digesting this piece of news when an incongruous sight met his eyes. As he descended the steps outside, a troop of Polish cavalry clip-clopped into the square, pennants fluttering from their lances, scabbards and helmets glinting in the morning sunshine. And all courtesy of H.G. Wells' time machine, Russell mused, as the troop trotted off towards the old royal palace. 'The wave of the past' a familiar voice said behind him, precisely echoing his thought.

It was Yevgeny Shchepkin, the man who had knocked on his Danzig hotel room door in the opening hour of 1939 and lit the fuse of his reluctant espionage career. Shchepkin was wearing a light cotton suit, open shirt and what seemed rather smart-looking shoes for a Soviet agent. His face looked gaunter, but the grey hair was more luxuriant, perhaps in compensation. Russell smiled at the Russian. 'I thought I'd seen the last of you.'

Shchepkin smirked, as if mere survival was a major accomplishment.

In his case it probably was, Russell thought.

'A walk in the park?' the Russian suggested, indicating the entrance to the Saxon Gardens at the side of the palace.

'Why not?'

They strolled in silence to the gateway, as if conversation in the open was forbidden. 'I don't suppose this is a chance encounter,' Russell said as they passed through.

'Well, yes and no. Our being in Warsaw at the same time is a matter of chance. But a meeting had already been decided on, and once one of our people at the Europejski had reported your arrival...'

'It must be fate,' Russell said wryly. 'So why do we need a meeting?'

'Ah, Moscow has decided that using the legation in Berlin smacks of amateurism, and they want to convince the Germans that they're taking your deliveries really seriously. So you and I will be meeting outside Germany on a regular basis - your new job offers ample justification for such trips.'

It did, but such an arrangement would involve Russell in carrying supposedly secret information across the German border. Hauptsturmfuhrer Hirth would be party to the arrangement, of course, but the border authorities would not be. Did that really matter? Or was he still sweating over the experience in March, when his last Soviet contact had planted incriminating material in his suitcase? 'Whatever happened to Comrade Borskaya?' he wondered out loud.

Shchepkin made a face. 'Ah, Irina. She was very keen. Her plot against you was all her own.'

'She was very keen?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'What happened?'

Shchepkin shrugged. 'She was found guilty of working for a foreign power. And I assume executed.'

Russell pictured her exasperated expression, and remembered her telling him he would have the satisfaction of supporting world socialism in the struggle against fascism. He wondered what she'd been thinking when they led her down the last corridor in the bowels of the Lyubyanka. That someone had made a mistake?

'You seem to have gotten yourself into something of a bind,' Shchepkin observed, as they passed a series of baroque statues symbolizing the human virtues. 'Blackmailed into working for the Gestapo, and turning to us for assistance.'

'Turning to you with a mutually beneficial suggestion,' Russell corrected him. 'And if Borskaya hadn't tried to betray me, the Nazis would never have known there was anything to blackmail me for.'

'True. How did you talk yourself out of that, by the way? Comrade Borskaya assumed it was dumb luck.'

It had been in part, but Russell was reluctant to admit as much. He told the Russian the whole story, up to and including the donation of his Soviet fee to a German official as a wedding present. 'I'm probably the only man who ever bribed his way in to Nazi Germany.'

'Not a pleasant epitaph,' Shchepkin muttered.

They stopped in the shade of an old water tower, the first one in Warsaw according to the accompanying plaque. It had been built by Marconi in 1850, when the city had still belonged to the Russia of the Tsars.

'The questions for your fake German spy are waiting in Moscow,' Shchepkin said casually, as if all Russell needed to do was nip round and collect them.

'Moscow? You don't expect me to spend days travelling there and back for a couple of pages? If the post's good enough for Heydrich, why isn't it good enough for Beria?'

Shchepkin grinned at that, but persevered. 'They also want to talk to you.'

'About what?'

'That's for them to tell you. But look, as a journalist you should be there in any case. That is where the decisions are being taken,' he went on, unconsciously repeating Connie Goldstein's line.

'A deal's coming? In the next few days?'

'Nothing is 100 per cent certain, you understand, but if you travel to Mos-cow I think I can guarantee you a - what do you call it in English? A scoop - that's the word. A scoop,' he repeated, enjoying the sound of it.

'He's really going to do it - sign a pact with the devil?'

Shchepkin sighed. 'It will buy us time. Though I agree it will be hard to explain.'

'Ah, go on. If you can get away with calling collectivization and five million dead an advance towards socialism, then a pact with the devil should be a piece of cake.'

Shchepkin stopped and looked at him, a strange look on his face. 'You know, I never realized before just how angry you are.'

'Aren't you? When we met in 1924...is this where you hoped we would be fifteen years later?'

'No, of course not. But this is where we are. A dream that hasn't come true is not necessarily dead. And there are many comrades still willing to die for ours.'

'Yes, but...'

'You remember Fritz Lohr, the sailor you met in Kiel?'

'I never knew his name.'

'He died without telling them yours. He jumped out of a third floor window at the Gestapo headquarters in Hamburg.'

Russell was shocked. At the sudden intrusion of death, at the horrible realization that his own life had been hanging by a torturer's thread, and he hadn't even known it. 'When?' he asked.

'In May, I think. Perhaps early June.'

Russell could see the man's face, his utter belief in what he was fighting for. And his companion, the prostitute Geli, with her dark-ringed eyes and cynical smile. What had happened to her?

'And this woman in Berlin,' Shchepkin continued relentlessly. 'Sarah Grostein. She seems willing to risk her life for the cause.'

'She is,' Russell agreed. Almost too willing.

'What is she like?'

'Clever. Determined. Resourceful. And she feels she has nothing to lose. An ideal agent.'

'And you like her,' Shchepkin said.

It was not a question, but Russell answered it anyway. 'Yes, I do.'

They had reached the side of a small lake. A tall fountain was spraying water into the air, crafting rainbows.

'Let me speak as a friend,' Shchepkin said. 'I understand why you find it hard to trust us, but hear me anyway. When we talked in Danzig and Krakow I asked if you planned to take sides in the coming war. Do you remember your answer?'

Russell did. 'I said not if I could help it.'

'Exactly. But you have changed in the last eight months, and maybe your answer has too.'

Russell smiled at him, and gestured him to a nearby seat. 'Perhaps it has,' he admitted. 'There's a man in Breslau,' he continued after they had both sat down. 'His name is Josef Mohlmann, and he's the Reichsbahn Deputy-Director of Operations for South-eastern Germany. I don't know his home address, but it shouldn't be difficult to find out. He was an SPD member, and he thinks it was a mistake to fight the communists rather than the Nazis. He's recently lost his wife, he's lonely, and he drinks too much. I think he's in a position to give you advance warning of any invasion, and I think he will if you approach him in the right way.'

Shchepkin was staring intently at him, his lower lip glistening slightly. 'How did you meet this man?'

'By accident,' Russell lied. This didn't seem the moment to explain his connections to American intelligence. 'I could be wrong about him, but I don't think so.'

Shchepkin massaged his chin with the fingers of his left hand. 'Perhaps you could approach him?'

'No, it needs to be a fellow German. One who'll convince him that betrayal is the only way to save their country.'

Shchepkin thought about this. 'You are right,' he said at last. He turned to face Russell. 'So can I persuade you to visit Moscow?'

Russell held his gaze. 'Let me ask you something. As a friend. Can you guarantee my safety? That I won't be arrested and shipped off to Siberia for thwarting Comrade Borskaya's little plot?'

'Of course. For one thing, you are a well-known journalist. For another, you are useful to us, and have just proved as much. Why would anyone wish to send you to Siberia?'

It fell somewhat short of a guarantee, but it made sense. Of a sort. And Moscow did seem like the place for an East European correspondent to be at this moment in history. Russell sighed at the thought of another endless train journey. 'All right,' he said. 'Since you asked so nicely.'

Shchepkin delved into his inside pocket and brought out some papers. 'Your ticket and your visa. The train leaves at two.'

As it rumbled across the Vistula Bridge, Russell stretched out in his first class compartment and went back over the conversation, wondering at the skill with which Shchepkin had manipulated him. The sort-of-apology for Borskaya's betrayal - regrettable, of course, but these things happened, and one could hardly criticise over-enthusiasm, particularly when the person responsible had just been shot. The touch of flattery - encouraging him to relate his own resourcefulness at the Czech border. And the tugs at his conscience provided by the dead Fritz Lohr and the living Sarah Grostein, made more compelling by what sounded - and perhaps even was - a genuine plea for help. There had even been an appeal to his journalistic greed - the 'scoop' in Moscow dangled in front of him like a big fresh carrot.

And, Russell realized, there had been no hint of a threat. Which, contrarily, felt much more threatening. Shchepkin was a master, no doubt about it.

The train made good time across the plains and low hills of eastern Poland. Here too the fields were bursting with grain, but there were no signs of urgency in the harvesting, no gangs of students or soldiers helping the farmers. Reckoning the food would be better on this side of the border, Russell ate an early dinner, and was just sipping the last of his coffee when the train emerged from a stretch of forest and eased past a huge sign bearing the slogan 'Workers of the World Unite'. Behind it a wide swathe of cleared land stretched towards a barbed wire barrier lined with watchtowers. Beyond that, the Soviet border authorities at Niegoreoje were waiting to check each visitor's credentials.

Russell's passport and visa were given the most cursory of glances, almost, he joked to himself, as if they were expecting him. A first class sleeper compartment was waiting for him in the Soviet train, complete with beautifully starched sheets and a bar of Parisian soap - the sort of accoutrements that any member of the Romanov family would have taken for granted. Russell hoped there was no one he knew on the train.

Darkness fell as his fellow-passengers queued to enter the workers' state, and it was almost nine by the time the train got underway. This was usual, his coach attendant assured him - they would only be the usual two hours late reaching Moscow. Russell considered a drink in the restaurant car, but decided his body was in more need of sleep.

The bed was surprisingly comfortable, but anxieties over Effi kept him awake. Once he had realized he wouldn't be back by Friday, he'd been afraid she would try something on her own. Another attempt at following Eyebrows perhaps, or something more dangerous which he hadn't even thought of. Before leaving Warsaw he had tried to wire her, but all communications with Berlin had been cut, and he'd been forced to send a message via his London agent Solly Bernstein. The man had never taken a holiday as long as Russell knew him, but there was always a first time. 'Please, Effi ,' he murmured. 'Be sensible.'

It was almost ten in the morning when the train rolled into Moscow's Byelorusskaya Station, and Russell emerged into the stifling heat of the Soviet capital. He was looking forward to a first ride on Moscow's famous new Metro, but a uniformed NKVD driver was waiting for him at the platform entrance, eyes shifting to and fro between the arriving passengers and the photograph he held in one hand.

'Citizen Russell?' he asked politely, using the non-Party form of address.

'Yes.'

'Come with me please,' he said, with the precision of someone who'd learnt the phrase in the last hour or so.

The sleek black car that was waiting outside looked custom-made for American gangsters, with its thick glass windows and wide running boards. His chauffeur opened the back door, but Russell mimed his wish to sit up front. He hadn't been in Moscow since 1924 and he wanted a good view of what Stalin had done with it. 'Which hotel are we going to?' he asked, but got no answer.

He tried again five minutes later, when it became obvious that they were driving out of the city rather than into it, and eventually teased out a reply.

'Festival Aviation,' the man told him, taking both hands of the wheel to mime an aeroplane in flight. 'Tushino,' he added definitively.

Russell was more interested in a bath than an aerial pageant, but explaining this to his companion proved impossible. Not, he suspected, that it would make any difference if he could. If the NKVD had decided he needed to watch aeroplanes, then that was what he'd be doing.

They drove for about twenty minutes through Moscow's north-western suburbs. The architecture was uninspiring, the streets almost empty of people, and the only other vehicles on the road seemed to be lorries. Part of the drabness, Russell realized, was the complete absence of advertising hoardings. But only part. The Party had obviously legislated for only two colours of paint in the latest five year-plan.

After passing a line of giant hangars, they stopped at gates in a high wire fence and the driver showed his documentation to the waiting guards. A dim roar in the distance swelled with astonishing speed, and well over a hundred bombers appeared in the windscreen, flying across their line of sight in close formation, no more than four hundred metres from the ground.

His companion made an enthusiastic noise, and gestured towards the disappearing bombers with obvious admiration.

It was just like home, Russell thought.

The aerodrome building was flanked with what looked like temporary grandstands. The driver drew up behind the one on the right, said 'Come with me please,' again, and led Russell around to the front. 'Foreign press,' his guide said, pointing to a particular section of seats. Not that Russell needed the help. His fellow hacks were easy to pick out - less conservatively dressed, less interested in the proceedings, and smoking cigarettes which didn't jettison all their tobacco if held in anything other than a horizontal plane.

There were also seats to spare, which couldn't be said of the other sections. Russell noticed a couple of familiar faces - a German journalist whom he had loathed for years, and an American whom he remembered meeting somewhere in the Rhineland, in the days that followed Hitler's reoccupation. He raised a hand to the latter, and received a wry smile in reply.

The bombers had gone wherever bombers went to, and a succession of fighter pilots were now showing their skills, twisting and turning and inverting their speeding planes at alarming proximity to the ground. Binoculars had been provided for the journalists, and Russell pointed his at the terrace of the aerodrome building. As he adjusted the focus Stalin swam into view, dressed in a lightweight suit, smiling broadly at the acrobatics on display.

Molotov, by contrast, looked like he'd just swallowed something particularly nasty. That, or he'd just found out that Ribbentrop was on his way.

It was scary, Russell thought, how much damage a few deranged bastards could do.

The demonstration of potency went on. An autogyro was wheeled out in front of them, lifted off by its rotors, and driven out of sight by its engine. A fleet of gliders hove silently into view and landed in almost perfect harmony across the wide field. And that, as Russell saw from his programme, concluded the morning session. 'Luncheon gratis' came next.

As he left the grandstand in search of the promised repast, a thin man in a very shiny suit fell into step beside him. 'You will attend a meeting tomorrow morning,' the man said in near-perfect English. 'That is August 19,' he added for good measure. 'You will be collected from your hotel at 10am.'

'Okay,' Russell agreed. 'Do you know which hotel I'm staying at?'

'Metropole,' the man said with a surprised look. 'Yes?'

'If you say so.'

'The press bus will take you,' the man said, just to be sure. 'And this is for your expenses,' he added, handing Russell an envelope. An address in Russian had been crossed out, most of a stamp torn off.

The man disappeared as abruptly as he had materialised. Russell ripped open the envelope, transferred the small wad of brand new notes to his back pocket, and walked on to the VIP refreshment tent. He was half-hoping to find Stalin at the front of the queue, but the great leader was obviously lunching in private. Russell found his American acquaintance hovering by the buffet of cold meats, either spoilt for choice or wondering where the least potential damage lay. They shared recent histories and reasons for being in Moscow, and agreed that things looked ominous.

So did the weather. As the first event of the afternoon - the bombing of a dummy factory on the far side of the aerodrome - got started, dark clouds were looming above the low hills to the west, tiny forks of lightning fizzing inside them. As the thunder of exploding bombs rolled across the airfield, nature's thunder offered a distant counterpoint, like an enemy drawing near.

There was time for two small airships to sail languorously past before the first drops of rain fell, but the sky grew darker by the second, and a steady downpour was in progress when the final act began - the mass dropping of airborne troops from a fleet of transport planes. The parachutes opened like a frenetic garden of flowers, and floated down like so many windblown petals. The troops rolled as they fell and bounced back up, except for one left clutching his ankle and writhing in pain. His comrades ignored him, racing to their designated rendezvous points, a series of flags planted in oil drums, glowing red in the stygian gloom.

The press bus deposited Russell and most of the other foreign journalists outside the Metropole soon after five. His third floor room had a spartan no-nonsense feel to it, but was comfortable enough, and the view across Sverdlov Square was impressive. A huge portrait of Stalin adorned the Bolshoi Theatre, causing Russell to ponder the possibility that the General Secretary had been taking dancing lessons. It seemed unlikely.

The storm had passed, leaving a slightly fresher feel. Russell stood by the open window, wondering about next morning's rendezvous with the NKVD. Everything seemed relatively straightforward - he had nothing to hide, or at least not very much. They would ask him about Sarah Grostein and Josef Mohlmann, and he would tell them all he knew. They would hand him their fake responses to the SD's fake questions, along with any additional briefing they considered necessary. If they wanted him to do anything else - shoot Goebbels, perhaps - he would politely decline. What could they do? As far he could judge the NKVD needed him as much, if not more, than he needed them.

Everything would be fine.

He needed to check in with the press liaison people, and find out when and where the briefings were being held. A fellow hack would know, and a fellow hack was more than likely to be propping up the bar. He headed downstairs.

A solitary English journalist was drinking tea in the bar. He looked about sixteen, and claimed to be a freelance, but the upper-crust accent made Russell suspect, perhaps unfairly, that the young man was spending pater's money on a Thirties version of the Grand Tour. He had the information Russell required, and passed it on with a sneer, as if keen to show how little official briefings mattered to a real journalist.

Outside the sky had cleared, and a fiery dusk hung over the eastern end of Marx Prospekt. Russell walked up the slope into Red Square, remembering the excitement of doing so fifteen years before. The square looked much the same, the huge expanse of cobbles, the sombre majesty of the surrounding walls and buildings. Some public spaces, like Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, evoked a frantic joy in modern life; others, like Pariser Platz or Trafalgar Square, seemed merely pompous. None evoked raw power like this place did. Whether draped in snow or bathed in a sultry evening haze, Red Square almost hummed with power, as if the stones were straining to hold it in.

He had felt this in 1924, and been reassured - all this power at the service of the revolution! But now it felt different, both empty and sinister, and the illuminated red stars above the Kremlin walls seemed like baubles, worn only to flatter and deceive.

Later in that same visit, he and Ilse had walked around the square after making ever-so-silent love in the crowded dormitory. It had been two in the morning, but a politburo meeting must have been imminent, because cars carrying Trotsky and Zinoviev swept across the cobbles and in through the Kremlin's Spassky Gate as they watched, and a few minutes later Nikolai Bukharin had hurried across the square on foot, looking, as ever, like an absent-minded young professor. Stalin had presumably already been inside, trying on the dead Lenin's shoes for size. He was probably in there now, finalising his price for letting Hitler off the leash. Slaney had been right. The British, the French, the Poles...they had given Stalin no choice. And boy, would they pay for their mistake. They and everyone else.

Saturday proved interesting. Emerging from the Metropole a few minutes early, Russell found his driver sitting in his shirtsleeves on the gangster car's running board, thoughtfully smoking a cigarette. The sun was already high in the sky, the heat shimmering off the pavements.

Russell was expecting a first visit to the NKVD's Lyubyanka headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Street, and was somewhat cheered when the driver headed off in the opposite direction. Five minutes later he pulled up outside an innocent-looking office building on a road Russell didn't recognize. They climbed the stairs to the third floor, where two men in different uniforms were waiting in the large and surprisingly modern Room 303. Both were younger than Russell, but not by much. Both had short fair hair and typical Slavic faces, hawkish eyes over high cheekbones and small mouths. They introduced themselves as Comrades Moskalenko and Nazarov, the first representing the Party, the latter the Army.

So both the NKVD and the GRU wanted a piece of him. It was nice to be wanted.

Dual questioners apart, the meeting went much as he'd expected. Moska-lenko handed him a list of the questions they wanted the SD's fake informer to answer. They were in German, but encoded. A book code, he explained, passing over the book. Russell faked a suitable look of bemusement, and had the principle explained to him. The Soviet choice was an old German translation of War and Peace, which had the advantage of not being banned in Germany, but would add considerably to the weight of Russell's suitcase.

The GRU man took up the baton, asking Russell a series of questions about Mohlmann, almost none of which he could answer. Asked again how he'd met the man, he made up a chance encounter in a beer garden. Nazarov seemed less interested in Sarah Grostein, and Russell could understand why. She might provide access to higher decision-makers, but there was something shockingly urgent about trains heading your way full of troops and military vehicles.

And that was it. No new tasks were announced, promised or threatened. He would function as the cut-out between Sarah - now to be known as 'the violinist' - and Shchepkin; he would continue to transmit false information between the knowing Soviets and the unknowing Germans. There were only two bombs strapped around his life.

One last question, he said. If their government signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis, how would that affect him?

Not at all, they said. No pact had been announced; and even if one should be, the Party had no illusions as to its permanence. Was Russell suggesting that they would betray comrades to the Nazis?

Of course not, Russell answered, recalling the list of German comrades - real or imaginary - which Borskaya had planted on him. It had taken more than one individual's 'keenness' to produce that. Still, he couldn't see any point in them betraying him again. He left the building feeling less than satisfied, but relieved that it hadn't been worse.

His driver took him on to the late morning press briefing, which proved an utter waste of time, but gave him the opportunity of joining his fellow journalists for lunch. The general opinion was that the trade agreement would be signed that afternoon, and the non-aggression pact in a week or so.

At the American Embassy he was given ten minutes with the press attache, who cheerfully told him that the Soviets had been warned - make a deal with the devil and he'll stab you in the back. At the devil's embassy they had nothing to say, but the smiles and smirks suggested bad news for Poland. He went back to the hotel, thought about decoding the NKVD's questions for the fake agent in Berlin, and decided he wasn't that curious.

He wrote a brief, doom-laden piece on the upcoming deal, and spent the next two hours traversing the bureaucratic hoops required to wire it. Another lonely dinner, another stroll in Red Square, and he returned to find a woman in his bed.

A naked one, as became apparent when she pulled back the sheet.

A present from the chaps in Room 303, he thought. And beautiful too.

He stood there stupidly for what was probably only a couple of seconds, caught between bodily desire and every other conscious impulse, of which loyalty to Effi and suspicion of spooks bearing gifts loomed largest.

She smiled at him and moved slightly, causing the bedsprings to squeak.

'No,' he said, turning his eyes in search of her clothes, and finding them neatly folded on the chair. He picked them up and passed them to her. 'Thank you, but no.'

Her smile turned into a shrug.

Two minutes later she was gone. Russell gazed out at the empty square, reliving the movement of her body in his mind's eye. 'You would have hated yourself in the morning,' he muttered to himself.

Sunday morning's press briefing was as short as the name implied. The Soviet spokesman announced the signing of an economic treaty with Germany on the previous evening, but refused to divulge any details or take questions on whether the economic agreement was the forerunner of a political pact. The assembled foreign press corps grumbled its way back out to the heat.

Russell decided that now was a good time to explore the new Metro. Descending into the depths at the Comintern station, he rode out to the far end of the original line, inspecting the stations as he went. On the way back he alighted at a couple, and spent the time between trains exploring the avant garde architecture. It was very impressive.

He emerged at Pushinskaya Station, and sought out a shaded bench in the square. A few people were out for a Sunday morning stroll, but the city seemed quiet, lost in its summer torpor. Stalin's revolution, Russell thought, was like the dog that didn't bark in the Sherlock Holmes story. What mattered was what wasn't there - there were no church bells on a Sunday morning, no advertising on trams and hoardings, no conspicuous wealth. All of which could be construed as signs of success, at the least as proof of survival. But something else was also missing, something that could only mean failure. There was no popular enthusiasm.

Where had it all gone? In 1924 this city had overflowed with young idealists from around the world, all drawn to the workers' state by its international sponsorship of justice and equality. Fifteen years on, and it was full of home-grown cynics. Somewhere along the way the hopes of something better had become the dread of something worse.

News of the forthcoming Pact seeped out over the next forty-eight hours, like blood from a heavily-bandaged wound. Monday morning's Pravda was full of praise for the already-announced economic agreement, and hinted at a future extension into the political realm. The Soviet spokesman at the morning's briefing refused to confirm any such intentions, but his tone said otherwise; and as the day progressed the foreign press corps slowly gathered in the Metropole Bar, rather in the manner of steamboat passengers waiting for the order to abandon ship. Mid-evening, one intrepid hack bearded a gloomy-looking member of the British negotiating team in a hotel toilet, and was told that a member of the Russian team had confirmed an imminent visit from Ribbentrop. In the early hours of the morning a short-wave listener at the American Embassy heard German radio make the official announcement, and quickly tipped off one of the American journalists. The Metropole Bar greeted the news with a cynical cheer, but the silence thereafter was more telling. The journalists began drifting off to their rooms, most of them looking every bit as depressed as Russell felt.

The official Soviet news agency Tass removed any lingering doubts on the following morning: Foreign Minister Ribbentrop would be arriving 'in the next few days' to sign a non-aggression pact. Russell and a fellow American journalist ran two members of the British negotiating team to ground in their hotel lift, and were blithely informed that the Anglo-French negotiations with the Soviets were still ongoing. Wishful thinking or blind idiocy, the two journalists asked each other in the foyer, before realizing it didn't matter.

So why stay in Moscow? Russell asked himself. It was bad enough sharing the same continent with Ribbentrop, let alone the same city. All the agencies would carry the official details of the signing - he'd be better off in Warsaw, seeing how the Poles reacted. Nearer to Berlin and home as well.

He wrote and sent off his story, and took the Metro up to Byelorusskaya Station to reserve a sleeper on the afternoon train. Back at the Metropole he noticed Connie Goldstein in a secluded corner of the bar.

'You made it,' Goldstein said.

'I've been here since Friday. And now I'm heading back to Warsaw. The phrase "all over but the shouting" seems applicable.'

'Yes, I suppose it is.' Goldstein capped his pen, closed the notebook he'd been writing in, and smiled up at him. 'Have you got an hour or so? I'd like to show you something.'

'Sure. What is it?'

'Wait and see.'

Goldstein led him outside and hailed one of the waiting 'taxis'. 'Khodynka airfield,' he told the NKVD driver in Russian.

Russell half-expected an argument - the taxis were usually reluctant to take foreign journalists beyond the invisible boundaries of the government district - but the driver made no objection. As they sped up an eerily empty Gorky Street, Goldstein chattered happily about returning to the States, and a new grandchild born earlier that year.

The trip to Khodynka only took twenty minutes, and Russell was astonished by what greeted them: the buildings of the small airfield, along with all available poles and stretches of fencing, were hung or emblazoned with swastikas. Either the Nazi flag had figured in the last five year-plan or every seam-stress in Moscow had been up all night stitching the damn things together.

'He's arriving tomorrow,' Goldstein said.

Russell didn't reply. He was dumbstruck by the sea of swastikas. Playing for time was one thing - communists the world over had come to accept the Bolsheviks' insistence that some degree of realpolitik was necessary to the survival of the workers' state. But this went way beyond any judicious trimming of sails. This felt more like self-abasement, more like gratuitous over-compensation. Like Judas turning up at the crucifixion and insisting on having his picture taken. Ribbentrop's ego would probably explode.

'This is where Nicholas II's coronation was held in 1884,' Goldstein observed. 'They didn't make enough souvenir mugs, and fourteen hundred people were trampled to death in the stampede.'

'Wonderful,' Russell muttered. 'Just wonderful.'

The journey back to Warsaw was slower than the journey out. The train clanked to halt after halt, occasionally at a barely-lit platform, most times in the middle of a seemingly endless plain. When dawn broke they were still on the Soviet side of the border, and the only breakfast came courtesy of a few enterprising peasant women, who approached the train at one of its interminable stops with scraps of bread and a few raw carrots. It was almost ten in the morning when their train rolled out of the Soviet Union through the gap in the barbed wire, and almost noon before their Polish train left the border station. It was faster than its Russian equivalent, but not by much, and the sun was low on the western horizon by the time it reached Warsaw.

Russell made sure that trains were still running into Germany, checked into a cheap hotel opposite the station, and took a taxi to the Europejski. Finding no fellow-journalists, he moved on to the Bristol, where several foreign correspondents were lined up at the bar. There had been no official announcement of a pact, he was told, but Ribbentrop had arrived in Moscow that morning, and everyone knew that an agreement was about to be signed.

There was one Pole in the party, an English-speaking journalist with one of the local dailies. He had obviously been drinking for a while, which both explained his belligerent attitude and facilitated its expression. 'The sooner the better,' he said, thumping his palm on the polished bar. 'While we still have allies,' he added pointedly, marching an accusative gaze down the row of English faces.

Out on the street Russell saw other Polish faces brimming with a similar bravado, the facial equivalent of the cavalry he had seen in Pidsulski Square. But there were also eyes dulled by resignation, or seemingly stunned that the moment had finally arrived. The Poles he spoke to in English had only one question - would England and France live up to their obligations? Yes, Russell told them, though part of him hoped the answer was no. If sacrificing Poland would keep his son out of a European war, he'd do it in a heartbeat. The trouble was, it wouldn't.

His hotel was quieter than expected, his bed more comfortable, but he still slept badly, hovering most of the night between waking and dreaming, fragments of his own war flickering harmlessly out of reach, like a silent movie through a curtain of gauze. He woke with the smell of the trenches in his nostrils and the old familiar feeling that this was the day he would die.

As he walked up Nowy OEwiat towards Pidsulski Square he scanned the faces of passers-by, and thought he saw something approaching relief. The Pact had been announced, he guessed, both in Moscow and here on the radio. The die was cast.

The Foreign Office Press Department spokesman confirmed as much. He added little of a specific nature, but resolutely refused to accept that Polish intransigence was in any way to blame for the country's new vulnerability. Germany and Russia had always been Poland's enemies, he insisted, and always would be. Poland would fight them both if she had to, hopefully in the company of her Western allies.

Back on the square, Russell felt a sudden overwhelming need to be home, and had to dissuade himself from taking an immediate cab to hotel and station. There was a train mid-afternoon, he told himself - time to write and wire off his piece. There was no need to hurry.

He wrote his impressions of Warsaw on the brink, and walked down to the Post Office. There was no wire traffic out through Germany, but the elderly clerk was aggressively confident of the route via Copenhagen. He and his fellow Poles were not surrounded, he seemed to be saying. The rest of the world was still within reach.

Russell checked out of his hotel, bought his ticket and lunched in the station restaurant. The concourse seemed unusually busy, with lots of children chasing each other around piles of luggage, but there was no hint of panic, despite the headlines announcing the Pact in the lunchtime editions. There was a photograph of Ribbentrop arriving at Khodynka, beaming for the Soviet cameras.

Russell's train failed to leave on time, raising fears that it might be cancelled, but the French wagons-lits eventually jerked into motion. He wondered how many more trips they would be taking across Europe, and where they would be stranded when the frontiers slammed shut.