Silesian Station

Jewish Ballast

After Russell's train had stood for more than ten minutes in Berlin's Alexanderplatz Station, a voice over the loudspeakers announced that it would proceed no further. Those passengers travelling to a stop in western Berlin were invited to take the next train from the neighbouring Stadtbahn platform, and Russell seized the opportunity to call Effi from a public telephone.

'I knew it was you,' she said.

'I'll see you in about half an hour.'

'Wonderful.'

He replaced the receiver, surprised at the enormity of his relief. Someone in his subconscious had been more worried than he cared to admit.

He climbed up to the Stadtbahn platform, and stood watching for the lights of a westbound train. It was almost eleven, but the air was still warm and humid, with no hint of a breeze. The sky through the canopy opening was black and starless.

The train was almost empty, and Russell picked up an abandoned evening newspaper from one of the seats. 'German Farmhouses in Flames' the head-line screamed, above the all-too-familiar litany of grievances real, imagined and invented. He looked at the names of the villages and wondered whether their inhabitants knew of their new-found status as victims of the 'Polish archmadness'.

'It looks serious this time,' a man sitting opposite said, with a nod in the direction of the newspaper.

'Yes,' Russell agreed.

'But at least the Fuhrer is back in Berlin,' the man added hopefully.

Whoopee, Russell thought to himself.

The streets between Zoo Station and Effi's flat were empty, her porch mercifully devoid of loitering SD agents. She met him at the door with the sort of sweet, soft embrace that made going away worthwhile, and pulled him into the living room. 'Thank God you're back,' she said.

'Well...'

'Because it has to be tomorrow.'

Russell sunk into the sofa. 'What does?'

'Eyebrows, of course. There's going to be a war, isn't there?'

'Well...'

'So this could be our last chance. Things will change once the war begins.'

'True. But he may not come tomorrow.'

'He did last Friday.'

'What have...'

'I went to see. I didn't do anything. I got your message from Solly Bern-stein, but I just had to see. Don't worry, I was in disguise. I'm getting really good at the make-up. All he'd have seen was a fifty year-old spinster, but he didn't even look at me.'

'He didn't pick anyone up?'

'I don't know. I only stayed a few minutes because I was afraid I might do something stupid if he did. I should have stayed.'

'I'm glad you didn't.'

'I'm glad you're glad, but you do agree - tomorrow could be our last chance?'

'Yes, of course, but he may not pick anyone up tomorrow.'

'Oh yes he will. Me.'

'No, absolutely not. I knew you'd think of this eventually, but it won't work. Believe me, I've thought about it too. But follow it through. If you offer yourself as bait, and let him drive you off in his car, what happens then? I can follow, but if I get too close he'll spot me, and if I don't I might lose you. And if we're incredibly lucky, and neither of those things happens, we're still left with a problem when we get wherever it is we're going. I could probably deal with Eyebrows - assuming he doesn't pull a gun, that is - but the chances are there'll be others. I can't see any way of making it work.'

She smiled at him. 'I can.'

Next morning he took the NKVD papers from his suitcase, kissed a half-awake Effi goodbye, and walked down to Zoo Station. He'd half-expected a thorough search at the Polish border, and the need for another emergency phone call to Hauptsturmfuhrer Hirth, but his suitcase hadn't even been opened. The border authorities had been far too busy strip-searching a large family of Poles returning to their German home.

He called the SD number from the station, and rather to his surprise was put straight through to the Hauptsturmfuhrer. When Russell suggested a lunchtime treff in the Tiergarten, an exasperated Hirth told him to leave the papers in reception at 102 Wilhelmstrasse and hung up. Russell replaced the receiver, wondering what had happened. Had the Nazi-Soviet Pact rendered his supposed intelligence irrelevant, or had Hirth and Co. drawn the conclusion that caution was no longer necessary? Did he care? Chances were he would find out eventually, and probably wish he hadn't.

The garden in front of the SD building was full of roses in bloom, all much too fragrant for their owners. Russell presented his Russian envelope to the usual blonde receptionist, feeling more like a postman than an agent. She put it to one side, and went back to her reading as if he'd already gone.

Out on Wilhelmstrasse he became aware of activity on the roofs - soldiers, for the most part. A coup? he asked himself, without any real conviction. War, more likely. Thin gun barrels were also silhouetted against the blue sky - for all the much-trumpeted prowess of the Luftwaffe the regime obviously shared Frau Heidegger's fear of air attacks. The street was full of people hurrying to and fro, almost feverishly it seemed, and the Wertheim at the intersection with Leipziger Strasse was unusually crowded, the faces of emerging women full of grim satisfaction at a job accomplished. The German hausfrau was stocking up.

He walked on up the long canyon of grey blocks, past Goering's Air Ministry, the Reichsbahn building, Hitler's appalling new Chancellery. According to the man on the train he should be in there now, making the world a safer place for Germans. Of course, if the rumours of a nocturnal lifestyle were true, he was probably still in bed. Russell wondered what his dreams were like, whether his sleeping face was younger, more innocent. The stuff you never found in history books. The important stuff.

The Adlon Bar presented a stark contrast to the bustle outside. Slaney was sitting at his usual table, picking pastry crumbs off his tie, but the only other visible journalists were two of Mussolini's pet scribes.

'They're gone,' Slaney announced in response to Russell's bemused look. 'The Brits and French, that is. They all took trains to Denmark last night.' He lifted a large ring of keys from the table and let it drop. 'I've been left seven cars to look after.'

'Just the journalists?' Russell asked.

'Everyone but the diplomats.'

Russell sat down. 'It's coming that quickly?'

Slaney shrugged. 'Tomorrow, it looks like.

'Christ.' It was possible, he realized, to both expect an event and be surprised when it actually happened.

'The only question is whether Hitler will waste any time trying to buy off you Brits and the French. But I don't think it'll make any difference, one way or the other. He needs a war. It's the only way he can get the last one out of his system.'

Russell said nothing. He needed to talk to Paul, he realized. The schools were still out - he might be at home.

Ilse answered. 'He's out playing football with Franz and a few other friends,' she told him. 'You could try later.'

'No, I'll be seeing him tomorrow. Ilse,' he began, not sure what to say, 'Ilse, things are not looking good. Does Paul have any real idea of what's coming, what it's going to be like?'

There was a brief silence at the other end. 'Who knows?' she said eventually. 'He says all the right things. But do any of us know, really? Matthias says the people who went through the last war will all make the mistake of expecting the same, and those that didn't won't have a clue.'

It always galled him to admit it, but Matthias was probably right. He said so.

'Why don't you ask Paul tomorrow?' Ilse suggested.

'I will. We may be at war by then.'

He hung up, took his leave of Slaney, and took a tram south to Hallesches Tor. The Hanomag was still in the courtyard, its roof devoid of obvious foot-marks, and an anxious Frau Heidegger was at her usual post. She greeted him with a big smile, which made him feel good - he hadn't expected that she would hold his British ancestry against him, but you never knew.

She was, however, keen to learn the prospective enemy's intentions. 'It all seemed so clear yesterday,' she said, reaching for the dreaded coffee pot. 'Everyone thought the Pact would sort everything out. The English and the French would realize that they couldn't help the Poles, and the Poles would have to come to their senses and there'd be no need for a war. But nothing seems to have changed,' she lamented. 'The English and French won't give up their guarantee. I don't suppose they can now. It was so stupid of them to give one in the first place...'

Russell took a sip of coffee and wished he hadn't.

'When it comes down to it,' Frau Heidegger went on, 'does it really matter who owns Danzig or the Corridor? It's been twenty years and this is the first we've heard about Germans being killed in the Corridor. If they are then I suppose we have to do something about it, but it doesn't seem worth another war. Let's hope another conference can sort it out. By the way, don't forget there's another air raid rehearsal next Wednesday - Beiersdorfer will want to know if you'll be here.'

It was a timely visit from another portierfrau that set Russell free. He picked up a few clothes from his apartment - his entire wardrobe was moving across town, piece by piece - and headed back to the city centre in the Hanomag.

He and Slaney had only just finished lunch when two pieces of news filtered through to the waiting journalists in the Adlon Bar - the British Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson had gone to see the Fuhrer and, rather more significantly, all telephone and telegraphic contacts between Germany and the outside world had been cut. As one wag put it, if Henderson and Hitler emerged naked onto the Wilhelmstrasse and danced a waltz together, there was no way of telling the world.

Russell hung around, keen to know how the meeting turned out, but the Embassy refused to release a statement, let alone answer questions, and the pointlessness of remaining became increasingly obvious. That and the danger of drinking too much ahead of their appointment with Eyebrows.

He arrived home to a transformed Effi - he had to look at her twice to make sure it was her. She had, as she'd implied, become a veritable mistress of disguise. The basics had not been changed - she was still a slim, dark-haired, reasonably young and attractive woman - but everything else had been subtly shifted. Her hair seemed thicker, her eyes darker, her nose slightly larger. She looked more like a stereotypical Jewess, he thought, which was presumably the intention.

She was dressed differently too. Neatly, but austerely. Everything about her wardrobe was slightly old-fashioned, as if the world had ended in 1933. As indeed it had, in so many ways, for Germany's Jews.

And when she got up and walked around there was an awkward defensiveness in the way she moved that bore no relation to Effi's natural grace. It was uncanny. He had seen every film she had made, but never before had he realized just how good she was.

'And now for you,' she said.

They arrived at Silesian Station an hour ahead of the train's scheduled arrival time. There was no sign of Drehsen's Mercedes in its usual spot, and no sign of the man himself on the concourse. Effi took the suitcase and hurried up the steps to the platform, leaving Russell to check that the train was running and on time. It was.

He bought a newspaper and took up position opposite the taxi rank, leaning up against the stone wall of the station. The human traffic slowly thinned as the rush hour drew to a close, the majority of faces more drawn and anxious than a Friday evening usually warranted. Most Berliners, he guessed, were going home to turn on their radios, hoping not to hear martial music and warnings of an 'important announcement'.

Fifty minutes went by with no sign of the Mercedes. Time was running out. Russell walked back into the concourse and there the man was, standing in the middle of the open space, facing the steps to the platform. Where the hell had he parked his car?

Russell hurried back out. It wasn't on the station forecourt, so where? He strode briskly down the side of the station to Koppen-Strasse, which ran under the elevated tracks at the western end. Nothing. He hesitated, looked at his watch. He only had five minutes.

A train rumbled across in the right direction, steam bellowing into the early evening sky. Too early for the Breslau train, he told himself. Another headed the same way as he walked under the bridges, this one with the reassuring hum of a Stadtbahn electric. Turning the corner he saw a short line of cars parked alongside the far side of the station. The last was a Mercedes Cabriolet, but it carried the wrong number.

Russell started running. The station side seemed to stretch forever, and he had a painful stitch in his side by the time he reached its end. Turning into Frucht-Strasse, which ran eastwards under the tracks, he saw the car. It was parked on the far corner, in - as Russell ruefully realized - the very next place that Drehsen would have tried if his usual spot had been occupied.

He was out of time, and a train was steaming into the station above him, thundering over the bridge. As he reached the car a couple of girls, prostitutes probably, walked across the end of the street, the click of their heels amplified by the iron ceiling. He stopped for a second, as if searching his pockets for cigarettes, and caught sight of a man with a moustache and slicked-back hair in the black window of a defunct shop. It was himself.

The girls gone, he took another look round, crouched down, and stabbed the driver's side front tyre with the awl Effi had purchased that morning. There was a commendably violent hiss, and the tyre began deflating. From his other pocket he drew a small package of newspaper, gingerly removed the sharp piece of bottle glass it contained, and placed it just behind the wounded tyre. The temptation to disable the spare tyre as well, and make absolutely sure, was almost overwhelming, but he knew that would look too suspicious.

He ran down the southern side of the station, paused outside the entrance to regain his breath, and slipped back into the covered concourse through the stream of exiting passengers. Drehsen was standing in the same spot, his eyes now fixed on Effi . She was standing beside her suitcase some thirty metres away, a few paces from the bottom of the steps, anxiously scanning the concourse for her imaginary welcomer. She looked both lost and slightly angry, as if she was about to burst into tears.

Drehsen moved towards her almost apologetically, a hawk turning into a friendly owl. As she caught sight of him a hint of hope crossed Effi's face.

He let her speak first, and knowing what she intended to say, Russell had no trouble reading her lips: 'Have you come from my uncle?'

Drehsen smiled like an uncle's friend would, said a few words, and reached, almost tentatively for the suitcase. She hesitated for a second, then smiled gratefully back. He gestured towards the exit.

Russell followed them out. As they headed down the side of the station towards Frucht-Strasse he crossed the busy road beyond the taxi rank and headed along the opposite pavement, looking for any sort of concealed vantage point. He found one of the ubiquitous Der Sturmer display cabinets standing almost opposite Frucht-Strasse, and stood there pretending to enjoy the usual cartoons about Jewish bakers draining the blood from Christian children to make their matzoh.

Drehsen and Effi had reached the Mercedes, which she seemed to be admiring. He had opened the back door but Effi , as they had agreed, was insisting on sitting up front. Drehsen shrugged, put the suitcase on the back seat, and opened the front door for her. She got in.

He walked round to the driver's side and was reaching for the door handle when he saw the flat tyre. He got down on his haunches, picked up and examined the piece of glass, and dropped it again. He squatted there for a moment, presumably considering his options. Would he go for the spare?

He opened the driver's door and leaned in, talking to Effi . Was he suggesting a taxi? If not, then she would be. The exchange seemed to last a long time, but eventually he straightened his back, closed the door and went to retrieve the suitcase from the back seat. Effi got back out, and Russell found himself sighing with relief.

She and Drehsen walked back towards the taxi rank in the station fore-court, Russell keeping pace on the opposite pavement. The queue for taxis had evaporated and three were waiting in line. The driver of the leading cab took the suitcase from Drehsen and opened the rear door for Effi . Drehsen said something to him and got in on the other side.

Russell was around thirty metres ahead, close to the western throat of the forecourt. As the taxi pulled out he rushed diagonally across the road towards it, waving frantically. The driver slammed on his brakes, swerved to the right and ground to a halt inches from the kerb.

Effi erupted from the taxi. 'Uncle Fritz!' she cried happily.

'Magda,' he said. 'I'm so sorry. I was held up.'

She explained the situation to the driver, and apologised profusely for losing him his spot at the head of the line. Drehsen climbed slowly out of the back, seemingly unsure what to do, and exchanged glances with Russell. Making up his mind, he touched his cap to Effi and walked back into the station without another word.

It was what they had expected - after all, what else could he do? - but the coolness with which he did it was breathtaking.

Russell took the suitcase and they began walking the short distance to Bre-slauer Strasse, where he had left the Hanomag. Putting an arm round Effi's shoulder, he realized she was shaking. He stopped, put the suitcase down and enfolded her in a hug. She took a huge deep breath.

'All right?' he asked after a while.

'Yes,' she said. 'What a creepy man. And so convincing...'

'Did it work?' Russell interrupted her.

'Oh yes, it did. He told the cabbie Eisenacher Strasse and my heart sank, but the cabbie - God bless him - asked what number. It's 403. We were lucky really. If it hadn't been such a long street he'd never have asked.'

'You did wonderfully.'

'You too.' She reached up to kiss him. 'But the sooner we can dispense with the moustache, the better.'

'First things first,' he said, picking up the suitcase. 'We can take a look at 403 Eisenacher Strasse while Drehsen's getting his tyre changed.'

'He wanted me to wait while he changed it. And he didn't like the idea of a taxi. I had to get quite hysterical before he agreed.'

Eisenacher Strasse ran north to south across Schoneberg for almost two kilometres. Number 403 was a third of the way down, one of a row of detached three-storey houses immediately above Barbarossaplatz. It was impossible to tell which house it was - the sun had set and all were silhouetted against a deep red sky. On the other side of the road, bathed in reddish light, were a typing college and a small bookbinding factory. This part of Schoneberg had seen better days, but it still represented a considerable step up from Neukolln or Wedding. There were no tram-tracks, and not much traffic, but several modest-looking cars were parked in the spaces between the detached houses.

There was no way of stopping without drawing attention to themselves. Russell drove on to Barbarossa Platz, took the third exit, and pulled the car to a halt. 'Let's take a walk,' he said.

Three right turns brought them back onto Eisenacher Strasse, some two hundred metres above the row of houses. There were several other pedestrians on the pavement, and they fell in some twenty metres behind a uniformed young man and his girlfriend. The pair walked ever so slowly, as if intent on stretching out their time together.

The college and factory were in darkness but most of the houses had one or two lighted windows, some curtained, some not. 403 was the third from the end. Every window was curtained, and all showed lines of light. In the parking space alongside, two vehicles were drawn up, and there were two uniformed men talking in the front seats of the one nearer to the road. As they walked past one looked up, caught Russell's eye, and seemed to move them on with an almost involuntary twitch of the head.

'How,' Effi asked, when they'd walked another few paces, 'are we going to find out what's inside?'

'God knows.'

'One more look,' Effi suggested, as they reached the Hanomag.

'Why not? It's dark enough.'

Their persistence was rewarded. As the Hanomag drew level with the house the front door swung inwards, spilling yellow light down the steps to the street, and framing two uniformed men. There was a glimpse of shiny boots descending, a muffled shout of farewell. Effi twisted round in her seat to catch them under the streetlight and identify the black uniforms. 'SS,' she said, turning the consonants into a hiss.

'What a surprise,' Russell murmured. 'And emerging, unless I'm very much mistaken, from a brothel.'

'Oh no.'

'It could be a lot worse. If it is a brothel, then there's a good chance that Miriam is still alive.'

Russell woke early on Saturday morning, shut the door on the still-sleeping Effi , and waited heart in mouth as her People's Radio warmed up. When the strains of one of Beethoven's lighter sonatas emerged, he clicked off the set with a sigh of relief. No war had begun.

He went down to the Adlon to find out why.

According to the small coterie of American journalists already gathered in the bar, the answer was far from obvious. There were rumours that Mussolini had abandoned his buddy, rumours that Hitler had offered to guarantee the British Empire in return for a free hand in eastern Europe. If the latter rumours were true the Fuhrer had already had his answer - the previous afternoon the Brits and Poles had finally formalized the British guarantee as a pact of mutual assistance.

All in all, it looked as though Hitler had pulled back from the brink. The British Ambassador had travelled to London, presumably with something new to communicate, and the telephone and telegraph connections with the outside word had been restored in the early hours of the morning. Berlin's foreign press corps could again tell the world that they hadn't a clue what was going on.

There were no Foreign Office briefings to help them out, no press releases to interpret. Russell telephoned several contacts, all of whom proved less than communicative. His colleagues had much the same experience - German officials, it seemed, were loth to confirm or deny the dates of their own birthdays. Russell wrote out his version of what was happening and wired it off, aware that it would be overtaken by events long before it reached the newspaper bins around San Francisco's Union Square.

He had lunch with Slaney - who, for the first time since Russell had met him, seemed subdued by the weight of events - and headed out to Grune-wald for his Saturday afternoon with Paul. The boy was waiting by the gate, dressed, for once, in normal clothes.

'No Jungvolk meeting?' Russell asked as his son got into the car.

'Yes, there was, but it ended early. I had time to change.'

He'd had time before, and hadn't changed, but Russell decided not to probe. 'What shall we do?'

'Can we just go for a drive? Out of the city, I mean. Take a walk in the woods or something.'

'All right.' Russell thought for a moment. 'How about the Brauhausberg?' he asked. They could take the Avus Speedway most of the way, and take one of the southbound exits before Potsdam.

'That would be good,' Paul agreed, though without a great deal of enthusiasm. 'If America comes into the war, will you be arrested?' he asked abruptly.

Russell waited at a crossroads while a line of troop lorries drove past. 'No, I'd just have to leave Germany. Like the British and French journalists have done.'

'They've left already?' Paul blurted out, obviously surprised.

'On Thursday, most of them. The rest yesterday. But they may be back. And in any case, there's no chance of America coming into the war. You really don't need to worry about me.'

'Joachim's already gone,' Paul said.

'When?'

'A few days ago.'

'Where?'

'They won't tell the families that,' Paul said, sounding surprised at his father's stupidity.

'No, no, of course not.' He wondered how Thomas and Hanna were coping with their son's call-up. He should have phoned them.

They were on the Speedway now, and Russell was surprised by the volume of traffic. Cars full of families heading out for a day in the sunshine, anywhere beyond the reach of their radios and the city's loudspeakers. If they didn't get the dreadful news until evening, then that was one more day of peace they'd grabbed from their government.

'Do you think England will really go to war for Danzig?' Paul wanted to know.

'I think they'll stand by Poland.'

'But why? Danzig is German. And it's not England's fight.'

'Maybe not. But the English can't break their word again. And it's not about Danzig. Not really.' He expected Paul to ask what it really was about, but he didn't. He already knew.

'We've been doing a project on the victory in Spain,' Paul said, 'and how important the Luftwaffe was. They'll bomb London, won't they?'

'I expect so.'

'And the English air force will bomb us.'

'Yes.'

Paul was silent for more than a minute, looking out of the window and, Russell guessed, picturing a sky full of English bombers. 'It will be terrible, won't it?' Paul said eventually, as if he'd suddenly realized what a war could do.

Russell didn't know whether to be glad or sad.

'You never talk about your war,' Paul said almost accusingly. 'I used to think it was because you fought for England and you didn't want to upset people here, but it's not that, is it?'

'No, it's not.' He wondered what he should say, what he could say to a twelve-year-old boy and have him understand it. The truth, he supposed. 'It's because, in a war, you see what damage people can do to each other.' He paused for breath, like a man about to walk through fire. 'Exploding bodies,' he said deliberately, 'limbs torn off, more blood than you can imagine. The look in a man's eyes when he knows he's about to die. The smell of rotting human flesh. People without a scratch whose minds will never be the same again. The constant fear that it'll happen to you. The terrible knowledge that you'd rather it happened to anyone else.' He breathed in again. 'These are not things you want to remember, let alone share.' He glanced sideways to check Paul's reaction, and saw, for the first time, pity in his son's eyes.

What have I done? Russell asked himself, but over the next couple of hours, as the two of them walked and talked their way along the wooded paths of the Brauhausberg, Paul seemed more his usual self, as if some sort of burden had been lifted. Or perhaps it was just the sunshine though the leaves, the birdsong and the leaping squirrels, the mere insistence of life. There was no way the boy could have any real notion of the enormity of what was coming, and perhaps that was a blessing. Sometimes knowledge set you free, as one old comrade used to say, but sometimes it locked you up.

During the hours with his son Russell hardly spared a thought for Miriam Rosenfeld or 403 Eisenacher Strasse. Effi , he discovered on reaching home, had not been so fortunate. She had set aside the afternoon for evaluating a film script - an ensemble piece about soldier's wives in Berlin during the Great War - but had found the necessary concentration hard to come by. 'I can't stop thinking about her,' she said angrily. 'It's driving me crazy. I'm sure there are people being beaten to death in the concentration camps all the time, but they don't haunt me. Maybe they should, but they don't. Nor do all the children starving in Africa. But I can't stop thinking about one girl in a Schoneberg brothel. I can't get her out of my mind.'

Russell poured the two of them a drink.

'And you know what else I realized,' she continued. 'They're Jews. The girls will all be Jews. Jews for the SS to fuck.'

'Maybe.'

'No, definitely. Don't you see? Blonde is good. Blonde is worthy. Blonde is about pure love and motherhood and child-breeding. There's no place for pleasure in any of that, no sensuality. It's all about duty. Dark, on the other hand, is bad and dirty and unworthy. Dark is all about pleasure. I see the way most of these creeps look at me, as if I must be able to give them something they can't get at home. And Jewish girls are the darkest of the dark, the ultimate forbidden fruit. Who would the SS want more?'

'You're probably right,' Russell said, 'but what can we do?'

'We have to get Miriam out. And the others.'

'But how? We can't storm the place. We can't knock on the door and tell them we don't approve. We can't go to the police.'

'How about going over their heads?' Effi suggested. 'Write to Himmler. I could probably get a meeting with Goebbels after the way he drooled all over me at the Universum.'

Russell shook his head. 'I think they'd decide it was easier to shut us up than shut the brothel down.'

'All right. You told me you know the people who produce the anti-Nazi leaflets. Could we persuade them to publicise the place? Let the whole of Berlin know what their aryan knights are up to. Shame the bastards.'

Russell grunted. 'They have no shame.'

'They must want to protect their reputation,' Effi protested.

'Maybe. But if the girls are Jews then they'll have broken the law by having sex with non-Jews.'

'Not by choice!'

'Of course not, but what Nazi court would find them innocent? They might convict a couple of SS officers for form's sake, but their punishment would be a slap on the wrist. The girls would go to Ravensbruck. It sounds a terrible thing to say, but they'd be better off staying where they are.'

'Oh John.'

'I know, but... Look, I'll tell Thomas the whole story tomorrow. Maybe he'll have an idea.'

They went out to eat on the Ku'damm, then drove across town to the dance hall they'd found a few weeks earlier, but it wasn't the same. Effi insisted on their driving down Eisenacher Strasse one more time, but there was nothing new to see. 'What can we do?' she murmured to herself several times, putting different emphases on the four words, but neither she nor he could think of an answer. It was after one in the morning when Russell had the first glimmering of an idea. One good enough to wake her.

Effi was excited by his plan in the dead of night, but more subdued than usual when morning came. It seemed to Russell that there were two new Effis he had to get used to: the one who seemed to take their new situation far too lightly, as if it were a game with no real consequences, and the one sitting beside him now in the sunlit Tiergarten, who took it all far more seriously than he had ever imagined. Both Effis, he realized, had been there all the time, but the latter in particular still needed getting used to.

It was, he admitted, hard to sustain an acute sense of peril when house-maids wheeled their prams through hopping squirrels, and hard to take the world seriously when the front page of the Beobachter was almost all headline: 'Whole of Poland in War Fever! 1,500,000 men mobilized! Uninterrupted troop transport towards the frontier! Chaos in Upper Silesia!' Skimming through the editorial Russell noted an escalation of demands - not just Dan-zig and the Corridor but all the territories that Germany had lost in 1918.

Around eleven o'clock Effi set off for Wilmersdorf and a long-arranged family lunch. Russell had also intended to go, but work and the matter of Miriam's rescue seemed a lot more pressing. He arrived at the Adlon Bar to find it buzzing with an unconfirmed rumour that some German units had actually advanced into Poland on the previous Friday morning. An invasion had apparently been scheduled, and news of its cancellation had not reached the units in question. More significantly, as the journalists discovered at an Economics Ministry press briefing that morning, food rationing was starting the following day. The cards had been sent out a couple of weeks earlier, but Russell suspected that their activation would still come as a salutary shock to most Germans.

Frau Heidegger hadn't heard the news when he reached Neuenburger Strasse, and he wasn't about to spoil her morning. He did accept her offer of coffee with more inner enthusiasm than usual, because he was keen to confirm that her set of apartment keys was still hanging in its usual place by the door. She only had one item of mail for him - a formal letter from the US Embassy advising all Americans whose presence was not absolutely necessary to leave Germany. He wasn't expecting anything from the SD or NKVD, and he assumed Sarah Grostein would make contact when she had something for him.

On the way up to his room he knocked on Beiersdorfer's door, and told the block warden he didn't yet know whether he'd be home for the ARP exercise on Thursday. He would let him know on Tuesday. Beiersdorfer sighed, and reminded Russell that the weekly Party meeting was on Tuesday evenings, causing him to be out between seven and nine.

He had phoned Thomas from the Adlon and been invited to lunch. The family mood, as expected, was coloured by Joachim's absence - Thomas looked drained, his wife Hanna seemed withdrawn, and their fifteen-year-old daughter Lotte was trying to rather too hard to cheer them up. They ate in the sunny garden, but it felt all too different from the last such gathering, on the eve of Russell's trip to Prague. The first member of their extended family was gone. How many others would follow?

Afterwards, in the cool of Thomas's study, he told his friend about 403 Eisenacher Strasse and his plan for freeing its inmates.

Thomas was shocked, and surprised that he was. 'Are you sure you've got it right?' he asked.

'One missing girl. A man who approached her and others at Silesian Station. People who can use the police to prevent any investigation. A house with every window lit and SS officers coming down the steps. The same house our man was taking Effi to. Can you think of another explanation that fits?'

'No.'

'And if by any chance we have got it wrong, and the place is full of SS manicurists and etiquette tutors, we'll just leave them on the pavement.'

Thomas looked lost. 'I didn't mean...' he began.

'You were right,' Russell told him. 'About saving one life.'

Thomas grunted. 'How can I help?'

'I need a small van and a lorry. With full tanks, and without Schade Printing Works emblazoned all over them.'

'That shouldn't be a problem. But what...'

'Don't ask. If it ever comes back to you, just say I asked for the loan of the vehicles.'

'I feel I should be doing more.'

'You're doing enough already. I sometimes think you're providing the Jews of Berlin with half their income.'

After arranging to pick up the two vehicles on the following evening Russell drove north into Friedrichshain. The streets around Busching Platz looked even more run-down than he remembered, and Busching-Strasse was no exception. He drove slowly past the address Freya Isendahl had given him, looking out for any sign that the block was being watched, but the only humans in sight were two young children playing Heaven and Earth on the opposite pavement. He parked the car fifty metres further down, hoping that the mere presence of motorised transport would not be enough to provoke curiosity.

The Isendahls, he discovered, shared a fourth floor flat with another couple. They were comrades, according to Wilhelm, but Russell was still pleased they were out. Wilhelm and Freya's room was large, low-ceilinged, with distant views of Friedrichshain park. Russell glanced around, and was relieved by the lack of seditious leaflets on display. The room was certainly crowded, but there was nothing to suggest it was anything other than the first home of a young couple struggling to make ends meet.

Wilhelm offered him the single battered armchair, removing the copy of Rilke's Duino Elegies which was perched on one arm. Freya put a saucepan of water on the electric ring to make tea.

'Has my article been printed?' Wilhelm asked, taking one of the two up-right chairs. Even in blue overalls he managed to look vaguely aristocratic.

Russell admitted that it hadn't, that he was still looking for a safe way to get it out of Germany. He asked about the situation on the Siemens shopfloor, which kept Wilhelm talking until the tea was made.

'I need your help with something else,' Russell said once Freya was seated. He told them the story of his search for Miriam Rosenfeld, from her original disappearance to her probable imprisonment in the house on Eisenacher Strasse. They both listened intently, Wilhelm's face growing grimmer as Freya's eyes brimmed with unshed tears.

Russell explained his plan for getting the girls out, realizing as he did so that this was one of Sarah Grostein's life and death moments, when you opened yourself up to the possibility of betrayal. 'It's very simple,' he said in summary. 'On the day of the exercise - that's next Wednesday, the 30th - we turn up disguised as an ARP patrol, declare that the building has been hit by a bomb, and order everyone out. Even the SS have to obey ARP instructions, so we shouldn't have any trouble. We just separate the men from the girls, say we'll be back for the men, and drive away with the girls.'

'What do you want us to do?' Wilhelm asked.

'I need at least three more people to make it realistic. Can you drive?'

'Of course.'

'Then I'd like you to drive the ambulance.'

'Where are you going to get one of those?'

'I've been promised a vehicle, which I'll pick up tomorrow.'

'Do they use ordinary vans as ambulances? I've never seen...'

'They do. I was attached to a squad during the last rehearsal. They just paint the usual cross on them. And I'll be getting you some paint. Do you have anywhere we can keep the van? Out of sight, I mean.'

'I can find somewhere.'

'Good. And if you can get hold of any stretchers, that would be a bonus. The more details we get right the more convincing we'll be.'

'What will I do?' Freya asked.

Russell hesitated, expecting Wilhelm to oppose her participation, but he looked every bit as interested in her prospective role as she did.

'You could be a second nurse,' he suggested, hoping that Effi could get hold of two uniforms. It would be good to have two women, if only to inspire trust in the rescued girls. But another two men were needed, if only to intimidate the uncooperative.

'I can get them,' Wilhelm said. 'I know half a dozen who'd be more than willing to join us.'

'Jews?'

'Yes.'

'Then choose the ones who look least Jewish,' Russell said bluntly. 'We may have to order the SS around,' he added in explanation, 'and we can't afford the slightest doubt that we're who we say we are.'

'Understood,' Wilhelm said, ignoring the outraged expression on his non-Jewish wife's face. He asked Russell how much he knew about ARP procedures, seemed relieved by the answer, and agreed to bring two volunteers to a meeting in Friedrichshain park the following evening.

Russell drove back across the city feeling more confident than he'd expected - Wilhelm Isendahl was an impressive young man. He felt a little guilty at luring Freya into danger - this was hardly what her parents had had in mind when they asked him to make contact with their daughter. But she was no longer a child, and they were a long way away. He felt a surge of wholly unreasonable anger towards them, safe in their Brooklyn brownstone on the other side of an ocean.

He arrived home to find Effi taping black paper across the windows ahead of Monday's trial black-out. 'It seemed like a bad week to get arrested,' she explained.

The next few days were busy. Doing his job, and keeping abreast of all the rumours circulating Berlin's corridors of power and influence, left precious few hours for organizing what seemed, in his less optimistic moments, like a particularly bizarre method of committing suicide.

On Monday afternoon he drove up to Hunder's garage in Wedding, bought a full tank of petrol for the Hanomag and hired a parking space for Thomas's lorry. Hunder raised one oil-streaked eyebrow at the latter request, but didn't ask any questions. Russell found himself wondering whether Hunder was a secret comrade like his cousin Zembski, and hoping, if he was, that it wouldn't prove relevant.

He drove back across the city to Neukolln, beating the rush hour but leaving himself an hour to wait before the Schade Printing Works emptied out. Thomas showed him the vehicles and handed over the keys, refraining from expressing the anxieties all too obvious in his eyes. Russell drove the lorry north to Hunder's, slowly getting used to its size and controls. After leaving it in the designated spot he walked to Lehrter Station for the convoluted train journey back. It would have been easier to get Wilhelm to collect the van, but Russell didn't want anyone else knowing of Thomas's part in the operation.

It was almost seven by the time he got back to the printing works, but it only took him fifteen minutes to reach the large hospital on Palisaden-Strasse in the van. He parked across from the emergency department entrance and drew a rough copy of the ambulance cross in his notebook. It was one of those symbols that everyone recognized, Effi had said, but that everyone found hard to replicate from memory.

The Friedrichshain park was only a few minutes away. He left the van close to the gates and walked up to the agreed rendezvous point. Wilhelm was waiting with two young men, whom he introduced as Max and Erich. Neither looked particularly Jewish, and both had an undoubted physical presence. The four of them sat on a bench discussing meeting times, clothes and - something that Russell realized with a shock he had barely considered - what they would do with the rescued women. 'We can find Jewish families who will take them in for a few days,' Wilhelm announced. 'And after that we can see about getting them back to wherever they came from.'

When they had finished and the new recruits had headed off towards a different gate, Russell handed Wilhelm the key of the van. 'There are cans of red and white paint in the back,' he said, handing over the sketch he had drawn. Wilhelm looked amused, but placed it in his pocket. Russell watched him drive off in the direction of the Central Stockyards, where an unnamed relation had promised him use of a garage.

It was getting dark by the time he reached the West End, and the blacked-out Ku'damm looked like a vast railway tunnel. This time he found Effi stitching together pieces of cloth. 'I could only get one uniform,' she said. 'I couldn't think of a good reason for needing two' she added in explanation.

'What reason did you give for the one?'

'That my boyfriend likes playing doctors and nurses.'

Russell's first visit on Tuesday was to the American Embassy. The official letter recommending departure from Germany seemed an ideal excuse in the event that one should prove necessary, and he felt it wise to explain his lack of progress in contacting the men on Washington's list. This was no time to lose his American passport.

A harassed-looking Michael Brown listened to his excuses - that reporting the international crisis was both dictating his whereabouts and taking up all of his time - and blithely told him not to worry. 'Probably better to get this present business out of the way,' he said, presumably alluding to Poland. 'Wait for things to settle down again.'

Russell wholeheartedly agreed.

Dropping in at the Adlon, he found what remained of the foreign press corps twiddling its collective thumbs. The 'present business' showed no signs of resolution, but none of escalation either. The diplomatic channels between England, France, Poland and Germany were doubtless buzzing with activity, but none of the relevant governments were giving anything away. Rumour had it that the Germans had insisted on a Polish plenipotentiary coming to Berlin, and that England and France had pressed the Poles to send one. The Poles, mindful that a Czech President answering a similar summons had almost been bullied into a heart attack, were not racing to comply.

All of which was thoroughly irritating for the journalists. 'No-shows,' as one of the Americans pithily exclaimed, were 'no-news'.

Russell hung around until mid-afternoon, then went to meet Wilhelm Isendahl in the Alexanderplatz Station buffet. The young man was already there, gazing round at his fellow customers with a superior smile. As a closet Jew in a judenfrei establishment he could be forgiven, Russell thought.

They brought each other up to date with their respective preparations. Everything was going smoothly, which seemed far too good to be true. Wilhelm went off with Effi's paper-wrapped needlework clasped under one arm and Russell sat with a second cup of coffee, running another mental dress rehearsal in search of potential flaws. He found none, and wondered why that didn't seem more reassuring.

Driving south to Hallesches Tor he ate an early supper at his usual bar, listening to the U-bahn trains clattering their way in and out of the station above. At around eight he drew up in the Neuenburger Strasse courtyard and cut the engine. The sound of several women, all seemingly talking and laughing at once, filled the silence. Frau Heidegger's weekly skat night with her fellow-portierfrauen was well underway.

Her doors were open as usual. He walked through, causing all four women to look up. Frau Heidegger's smile of welcome was not echoed by her skat partners, who offered expressions ranging from irritation to outright hostility. He had, he guessed, committed two major sins - he had interrupted their game and been born English.

'Don't get up,' he reassured a struggling Frau Heidegger. 'I just wanted to leave a message for Beiersdorfer - I won't be here on Wednesday.'

'I'll tell him, Herr Russell.'

'Please, go on with your game,' Russell told the assembled company with a wide smile. He watched for a moment, waited until they were concentrating on their cards, and slowly backed away. As he passed through Frau Heidegger's open front door he slipped the ring of keys off its hook.

He walked up to his own apartment, found an old sweater to wrap Beiers-dorfer's ARP helmet in, and came back down to the first floor landing. He stood outside the door for a few seconds, hearing nothing within. Should he knock to make absolutely sure the man was out? No, he decided - it was better to take a slight risk than make a telling noise. The keys were neatly labelled with their apartment numbers and there was no sound of anyone on the stairs. He let himself in.

The apartment was in utter darkness - Beiersdorfer had rigged up black-out curtains that Dracula would have found comforting. Russell found the light switch and began looking for the man's helmet and arm-band. He tried the bedroom first, seduced by the idea of Beiersdorfer trying them on at his dressing table mirror, but eventually found them in a less fanciful place, in the box seat by the front door.

He had just removed the items when footsteps sounded on the stairs. He reached for the light, then realized that turning it off would look more suspicious than leaving it on. It sounded like two people, which probably meant Dagmar and Siggi, or Dagmar and whoever the other one was. Her familiar giggle came from almost outside the door, confirming his guess. The sound of feet receded upwards.

Russell wrapped the helmet in the sweater and stood there, ear pressed against the wood, until he heard the reassuring click of Dagmar's latch. He re-locked the door, took his booty out to the car, and went back in to return the keys. A sudden peel of laughter from inside Frau Heidegger's flat made him jump, but the skat players were far too absorbed in their entertainment to notice his hand reach across the necessary inches and replace the borrowed ring on its hook.

Back in the car, giving his heart time to slow down, he realized he should have risked taking the keys without advertising his presence to Frau Heidegger. Because what would do Beiersdorfer do when he found his stuff was missing?

Russell groaned as he realized he had made a second mistake. By locking the door when he left he'd as much as signalled that it was an inside job. He should have broken the lock somehow. Beiersdorfer would go straight to Frau Heidegger, the only other source of a key. Would she put two and two together? Perhaps. And if she did, would she say anything? She did loathe the man.

Should he go back in? Or would that be a third mistake? He decided it might. With any luck, Beiersdorfer wouldn't realize his stuff was missing until the ARP exercise started, and then he'd too busy to make trouble for the rest of the evening and night. And by mid-morning his precious things would be at the bottom of a canal. He could huff and puff all he wanted.

Russell headed back to the Adlon for his final felony of the night. Leaving the Hanomag on Unter den Linden, he slipped around the side of the hotel and into the dimly-lit parking lot at its rear. The cars left in Slaney's care were lined up along the far wall, each bearing Embassy stickers in the corners of their windscreens. Crouched out of sight behind them, Russell carefully un-screwed four of the number plates.

Wednesday passed slowly, for both Russell and the Fuhrer. The latter was supposedly waiting for a Polish plenipotentiary to bully, but the cynics at the Adlon had him hoping that none would show up. 'The war's a done deal,' Slaney said. 'The bastard's just waiting for a decent excuse.'

Russell had more immediate worries. Who and what were they going to find in the house on Eisenacher Strasse, always assuming that they got there without being stopped and arrested for impersonating an ARP unit? Would the uniforms and vehicles be convincing? Would the latter be reliable? Would someone make a mistake, say the wrong thing, panic? Would he? By mid-afternoon, when the sirens announced the beginning of the exercise, his mental list of things that might go wrong would have covered several sheets of paper.

How, he asked himself, had he involved Effi in something so dangerous?

She seemed oblivious to the possibility of failure, and was happily applying the first touches of her make-up when he set off, soon after four, for Hunder's garage in Wedding. He was half expecting to get caught in an imaginary air-raid, and have to spend time in a shelter, but his luck held. He had contrived to leave the Schade Printing Works lorry in a distant corner of Hunder's yard, and now parked the Hanomag in front, masking the lorry from anyone watching in the garage office. Suitably screened, he removed the lorry's number plates and screwed on those he had taken from the Adlon parking lot. If anyone compared them they would be in for a surprise, but it didn't seem likely.

He fixed slitted pieces of black cloth to the lorry's headlights, drove it out of its corner, and put the Hanomag in its place. Hunder had promised to leave the gates unpadlocked that night, but Russell thought it worth double-checking. 'Yes, yes,' the garage-owner confirmed, looking up briefly from what looked like accounts.

Russell drove the lorry back towards the Ku'damm, leaving it outside one of the old Jewish workshops near the Savigny Platz Stadtbahn station. The business had been 'aryanised' in 1938, and there was a fair chance that passers-by would assume the lorry was there on official business. As he walked the few hundred metres to Effi's flat the sirens began to sound. Just like last time, he thought - a first imaginary raid at around six. With any luck the second would also follow the previous pattern, and begin a couple of hours after dark.

He and Effi ignored the call to the nearby shelter, and judging by the lack of activity in their rapidly darkening street so did most of their neighbours.

Effi , in any case, would have surprised a few of them. She had put on ten years while Russell was out, her eyes and mouth slightly lined, her tightly-bound hair suffused with grey. She was also, as she showed on standing, noticeably plumper. 'Padding,' she explained, pressing down on the nurse's uniform.

She ordered Russell onto the dressing table stool.

It took her half an hour to recreate 'Uncle Fritz', this time with a slightly more military moustache. Examining himself in the mirror, complete with overalls, armband and helmet, Russell had to admit he looked different. 'I would recognize you,' Effi said, standing beside him, 'and Paul probably would. But no one else. Especially in the dark.'

The all-clear sounded just before seven-thirty. It was virtually dark now, and with the black-out regulations strictly in force it was hard to make out the buildings on the other side of the street. Earlier that day Russell had checked the weather and moon for the coming night - a clear sky was expected, with a quarter-moon rising soon after midnight. By that time, he hoped, everyone concerned would be safe in bed.

The two of them drank some warmed-up soup, and watched the clock tick slowly by. Eight-thirty - the Isendahls and their two friends should be setting out from Friedrichshain. Eight forty-five, and it was time for them to leave. Effi put a summer coat over the nurse's uniform, and Russell packed his helmet and armband in an old carpet bag. They walked downstairs and out into the night.

It really was dark, much darker, Russell thought, than during the previous exercise, and by the time they found the lorry he was beginning to wonder if they would ever find anything else. But the white-painted kerbs and the slitted beams of light did make a difference, and once they reached the Ku'damm it became clear that visibility was better on the bigger streets. All those cracks of lights added up, Russell guessed. He could think of no other reason.

It took them about ten minutes to reach their destination, a stretch of road by the Landwehrkanal, close to the Lichtenstein Bridge which connected the Zoo and the Tiergarten. Russell drove slowly past the vehicle that was already parked there, and made out the cross on its side.

He u-turned the lorry at the intersection with Rauch-Strasse and pulled up behind the fake ambulance. As he climbed down there was a loud screech from inside the Zoo.

'The animals don't like the darkness,' Wilhelm said, materialising out of it. He had managed to get himself an armband, and so, Russell discovered, had Max and Erich. And in this light Freya's uniform looked very convincing. After introducing Effi to the others as Magda, Russell said as much.

'We fooled one policeman already,' Wilhelm said. 'He came past about ten minutes ago, and wanted to know what we were doing here. I told him we were waiting for our commander, that he'd brought his son on the first call-out and was dropping him off at home between air raids. He believed me, thank God. I didn't want to shoot him.'

'You have a gun?'

'Of course.'

Russell didn't know what to say. He could hardly blame the man, but... 'Only in the last resort,' he insisted.

'Of course.'

Russell handed him the two spare number plates and a screwdriver, and held the torch as Wilhelm swapped them with the ones on the van. Once that was done, he addressed the assembled company, feeling like a gang-leader in a bad Hollywood film. 'All right. So we know what we're doing. We set off when the next raid begins, or at eleven if it still hasn't started. Max and Erich will come with me, Magda will travel in the ambulance with Wilhelm and Freya. No second names - the less we know about each other the better.'

They had less time to wait than Russell expected. Shortly before ten o'clock the roar of aeroplane engines brought forth the sirens, and these in their turn triggered a cacophony of screams, mewls and roars from the occupants of the neighbouring Zoo. Seconds later the flash of anti-aircraft fire from a nearby roof caused even more consternation, and Russell was convinced he heard the trumpeting of an elephant. As another volley of skybound blanks threw spasms of light across the road and canal they moved off in convoy, the lorry leading the way.

It was little more than a kilometre to the top end of Eisenacher Strasse, but the lack of lighting restricted their pace to a near crawl, and Russell had to circle Lutzow-Platz twice before he found the right exit. Once on Eisenacher Strasse it was a matter of judging distance, and trying to recognize familiar landmarks. Russell was beginning to worry that he had come too far when he spotted the sawtooth roof of the bookbinding factory.

He pulled up alongside the row of houses opposite and climbed down, just as a flight of planes flew noisily over. In the silence that followed faint voices and music were audible, and as his eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness he saw cracks of light where windows must be. The slitted beam of his torch revealed the number of the building in front of him. It was 403.

There was no noise from within, which seemed like good news. He walked round the corner of the building and found an empty space where the cars had stood. That was good news.

The others had gathered on the pavement, and the combined light of their muted torches created a pocket of half-light. A collective halo, Russell thought. How fitting.

He walked up the steps to the front door and used the brass door-knocker, loud enough, or so he hoped, to bring a reaction without rousing the curiosity of the whole street.

No one answered.

He banged again, louder this time. Beside him, Effi looked anxious.

This time there was a response. Footsteps inside, the click of a bolt being drawn back, a spillage of light as the door edged open.

Russell shoved his way through, causing a cry of consternation from within. Effi and Wilhelm followed. 'Air Raid Protection,' Russell barked at the man who was struggling back to his feet. 'This house has been bombed. I want everybody out. Now.'

'That's not possible,' the man said, but there was a welcome lack of certainty in his tone. Thin, balding and bespectacled, he was wearing a bizarre mixture of clothes, a civilian shirt and tie with police trousers and boots. 'You do know that this is SS property?' he almost pleaded.

'I don't care whose it is,' Russell told him. 'Targets are chosen at random, and it's a criminal offence to obstruct an Air Raid Protection unit in the course of its duties. Now, what is your name?

It was Sternkopf.

'Well, Herr Sternkopf, how many people are there in this house?'

'Four. Five including me.'

'How many women?'

'Four.'

Russell breathed an inner sigh of relief. 'Get the other lads,' he told Wilhelm. They had decided beforehand that the two of them would deal with any outside interference while Max and Erich searched the house.

'I must telephone Standartenfuhrer Grundel,' Sternkopf was saying.

Russell rounded on him. 'Herr Sternkopf, this is a serious exercise. If British bombers do attack Berlin there'll be no time to make telephone calls. Now please, this way.'

Sternkopf hesitated, but only for a second, as Russell escorted him outside. Max and Erich, who passed them on the steps, had already laid out the half-dozen stretchers which Wilhelm had borrowed from one of the few remaining Jewish clinics in Friedrichshain.

'Lie down on one of these,' Russell ordered. Sternkopf did so, and Freya hung a home-made placard around his neck that bore the words 'severe head injury'. She then squeezed some of the fake blood that Effi had borrowed from the studio onto the side of his head. 'It has to be realistic,' Russell told him sternly. 'Please moan as if you are in real pain.'

The front door opened again, spilling light across the pavement, and Russell saw Sternkopf staring at him, as if keen to remember what he looked like. 'Let's get him in the ambulance,' he told Wilhelm. 'It'll make it harder for him to remember our faces,' he added in a whisper.

They lifted him in, reminded him to moan, and shut the ambulance door. On the pavement, two young women were being told to lie down on stretchers. As far as Russell could make out in the gloom, both were young, dark and quite probably Jewish, but neither matched his picture of Miriam Rosenfeld. Both were wide-eyed with fright, and Effi was kneeling beside them, asking their names and quietly explaining that they were involved in an ARP exercise. She and Freya had insisted that telling the girls what was really happening would be more likely to panic than reassure them.

The street remained empty, the darkness occasionally breached by the distant flash of anti-aircraft batteries. Wilhelm's friends reappeared with another dark-haired girl. This one looked about fifteen. She clung to Erich with one hand, and held the neckline of her nightdress up against her throat with the other. 'This is Rachel,' Max said. 'We can't find anyone else.'

'The man said four,' Russell reminded him. He was damned if he was going to come this far and not find Miriam.

'Let me ask Ursel and Inge,' Effi said, and hurried across to the two girls on their stretchers. She returned a few moments later. Miriam's room was on the second floor, at the back.

'I'll go,' Russell told Wilhelm, and headed up the steps.

Inside, the doors were all hanging open. There was a big bed in Miriam's room, but no sign of the girl herself. Russell was looking under the bed when he heard the faintest of whimpers.

She was cowering in a cupboard, knees pulled up against her chin. 'Miriam,' he said, touching her shoulder as gently as he could, and she jerked back as if he'd given her an electric shock. 'Miriam, I'm here to take you away from this place. I've come from your mother and father. From Wartha. They're worried about you.'

She lifted her head and examined his face with a small child's eyes.

'Come,' Russell said gently. 'We must go.'

She wouldn't allow him to help her out of the cupboard, pushing his hand away with a sharp intake of breath. She extricated herself and stood looking at him, dressed in a long white nightgown which accentuated her black hair and olive skin.

He took a robe, and handed it to her. 'You'll need this outside.'

She put it on, and looked at him again, as if awaiting another instruction.

'Let's go downstairs,' he said, and, after only a slight hesitation, she accepted his invitation to walk down ahead of him. Outside she shied away from Wilhelm's helpful arm, but meekly laid down on one of the remaining stretchers.

'It's Miriam, isn't it?' Effi said, squatting down beside her.

The girl just looked up at her.

'Let's get Sternkopf out of the ambulance,' Russell said, but the sudden sound of an approaching vehicle stopped him in his tracks. Two thin head-lights were coming towards them. 'Keep going,' he murmured, but the vehicle was slowing down. As it inched past the ambulance and turned into 403's parking space Russell caught an unwelcome glimpse of silver runes on a black collar.

The car door slammed, and a bright torchbeam leapt out of the darkness, illuminating the pavement in front of the house. 'What is this?' a voice asked.

Russell turned his weaker beam on the intruder. 'This is an ARP exercise and your torch should be masked,' he said sharply, noticing, with a sinking heart, the uniform of a Waffen SS Standartenfuhrer, the holstered gun. He turned to the others. 'Let's get the wounded in the ambulance.'

'Not that one,' the Standartenfuhrer said. He was shining his torch at the fifteen-year-old. 'Rachel and I have a date.'

'You must postpone it,' Russell insisted. 'We can't leave her behind.'

'You can and you will,' the Standartenfuhrer told him, his tone hardening. 'This time tomorrow I shall be with my unit, and I have no intention of letting an imaginary air raid spoil a very real pleasure.'

Several options flicked across Russell's mind, none of them good. Should he, could he, leave Rachel behind to save the others?

A decision proved unnecessary. There was a sudden shift in the darkness behind the Standartenfuhrer, a glint of metal. The man's head jerked forward and his legs gave way, pitching him onto the pavement. Wilhelm had hit him with what looked like an ancient Luger.

'I couldn't see any alternative,' he said almost apologetically, and gave the prone body an exploratory kick in the ribs. 'He'll be out for a while.'

'Let's put him on a stretcher,' Russell heard a voice say. His own.

'No need for fake blood,' Wilhelm said cheerfully, as they carried him across.

He was right - the back of the man's skull was bleeding most convincingly. 'Sternkopf next,' Russell decided. As they carried the caretaker back to the pavement he gave no sign of having overheard the confrontation, but he did recognize the body on the stretcher.

'Standartenfuhrer Geisler,' Sternkopf muttered to himself. 'Another serious head wound,' he added, reading the placard which someone had already put round the unconscious SS officer's neck.

'The Standartenfuhrer is taking the exercise seriously,' Russell told Sternkopf reprovingly.

The rescued girls were sitting in the back of the ambulance, each wearing a placard describing a slight injury. Freya and Effi got in with them, leaving Wilhelm alone in the front. Erich and Max were waiting for Russell in the lorry cab.

'We'll be back in twenty minutes,' Russell told Sternkopf, and clambered up into the cab.

'Why can't you take us on the lorry?' the man complained.

'Health regulations,' Russell said glibly, and started the engine. Since they were supposedly headed for a hospital, they had included one in their itinerary. If they were stopped before they reached the Elisabeth on Lutzow-Strasse, they had their explanation ready. If they were stopped between the hospital and the Landwehrkanal, they would claim they'd got lost in the dark.

No one stopped them. Fifteen minutes after leaving the house on Eisenacher Strasse the two vehicles pulled up alongside the wall separating Schoneberger Ufer from the dark waters of the Landwehrkanal. As Effi swapped vehicles with Max and Erich, Russell handed Beiersdorfer's helmet over to Wilhelm. 'See you tomorrow,' he said.

The ambulance drove off, leaving Russell and Effi alone. 'Miriam didn't say a word,' she said, her voice sounding harsh in the darkness.

Russell drove north through the deserted Tiergarten and across the Moltke Bridge. Beyond the blue-lit Lehrter Station the streets seemed darker still, and he was past the entrance to Hunder's garage before he realized it. He backed up and drove in through the open gates.

Ten minutes later the lorry was back in its corner, complete with its original number-plates. Russell and Effi sat in the front seats of the Hanomag, helping each other remove their make-up by torchlight. 'We're back,' Effi said when they were finally done, and leaned over to kiss him. 'We did it,' she added, sounding almost surprised. 'We really did.'

'We're not home yet,' Russell reminded her.

As they headed south the sirens began sounding the all-clear, but it seemed as if Berlin had already written the night off and gone to sleep. Russell stopped the car halfway across the Moltke Bridge, checked that nothing was coming, and dropped the two Adlon number plates, the false moustache and Beiersdorfer's armband into the Spree. He hoped Wilhelm was being equally thorough.

It felt good to reach home, but the feeling was short-lived. As they came in through Effi's front door the telephone began to ring. They looked at each other, wondering who it could be. 'Did you give Wilhelm this number?' Effi asked.

'No.'

Effi picked up, listened, and said 'Yes, he is.'

'Someone named Sarah,' she told Russell.

He took the receiver. 'Sarah?'

There was a gulping noise at the other end. 'I have to see you,' she said.

'Okay, but...'

'And it has to be now.'

'Ah. All right. I'll walk over.'

'No, no. You must bring the car. Park it round the back. There's an alley runs up from the river end. I'll be waiting.'

Russell replaced the receiver and told Effi he had to go out again.

'What's happened?'

'Trouble,' he told her. 'She didn't explain.'

'You have to go?' It wasn't really a question.

'It's not far,' he said, as if that helped.

'Would it be useful if I came?'

'Probably. But this is one for me to sort out.'

She clung to him for a moment, then pushed him away. 'Hurry back.'

It was noticeably brighter outside - the recently-risen moon was bathing roofs and sky with pale light. The still-warm Hanomag sprang to life, and Russell sat behind the wheel rubbing his eyes and wondering which route would be safest. He then remembered that the all-clear had been sounded, and that he was driving his own blacked-out vehicle. Until he reached Altonaer Strasse he had nothing to worry about.

The streets were not as empty as they had been earlier, but he encountered only a dozen or so vehicles during the ten minute-drive. The cobbled alley that ran behind the houses on Altonaer Strasse was as dark as anything he'd encountered that evening, and he had to proceed at walking pace to avoid scraping the walls. He was about two hundred metres along when a light ahead flickered on and off.

Another hundred metres and his slitted headlights picked her out, a ghostly figure in a long white nightgown. 'This way,' she whispered, opening a back door and almost shoving him in. In the dimly lit kitchen he got his first good look at her, and his heart sank. She looked on the edge of hysteria, and her nightgown was splattered with what had to be blood.

'I've killed him,' she said, as if confirming the fact to herself.

Oh Christ, Russell thought. Several chains of consequence jostled for consideration in his mind, including the one featuring her arrest, her torture, and his name being taken down by an eager Gestapo scribe. 'What happened?' he asked, much more calmly than he felt.

She looked at him blankly for a moment, then snapped back into the present. 'He's upstairs,' she said. 'I'll show you.'

She raced up the carpeted stairs, Russell following at a suitably reluctant pace. Her Gruppenfuhrer was lying on his back by the empty hearth in the front bedroom, one arm at his side, the other twisted beneath him. His uniform tunic was unbuttoned, the jackbooted legs splayed out. A dark corona of blood surrounded the head, and his face had been battered beyond recognition.

'It was an accident,' she said.

Russell looked at her with disbelief.

'Not the face,' she admitted. 'But he fell. Honestly. He...I'd been reading some of Richard's poems, and I forgot to hide them away. He found them, and started reading one out loud, like it was all a huge joke... I tried to take the book away from him and he fell back across the arm of the chair and cracked his head on the edge of the fireplace. And then...I don't know, I just went out of my mind. I knew he was dead but I could still hear him laughing and I started hitting him with the poker and I couldn't stop.'

Russell ran fingers through his hair. Even if it had been an accident - and there was, he noticed, blood on the tiled surround of the fireplace - there was no way they could pass it off as one now. Even without her Jew-tainted past, she would be facing a murder trial and execution. With it, the process would be that much quicker. What could she do? He stood there staring at the body and its red mess of a face, trying to get his mind in gear.

'Who knows he's here?' Russell asked.

'The maid let him in. The neighbours on that side' - she gestured towards one wall - 'have left for the country, but the couple on the other side may have heard us arguing. I doubt it though - they're both quite deaf, and they sleep at the back.'

She could tell any investigators that the man had left, Russell thought. As long as the body wasn't found, no one could prove she was lying. Ah, but who was he kidding? This was Nazi Germany - they'd investigate her past, and once they knew who they were dealing with they'd get a confession. She might have money, but there was no way someone with her past could brazen it out. She had to disappear.

He asked when the maid would be back.

'At eight o'clock.'

'What will she do if no one answers the door?'

'She has a key.'

Russell exhaled noisily. 'Okay. First things first. We need to wrap him up and get rid of the blood.'

'A blanket?'

She looked better, he thought. The shock was wearing off. 'A thin one if possible,' he answered. 'He's going to be heavy enough as it is.'

They got to work. Russell rolled the body into a brown blanket, tying the ends with some twine until the whole ensemble resembled a giant Christmas cracker. Sarah mopped up the blood and got to work on the stain, scrubbing and scrubbing until it made no difference. The patch no longer attracted attention, but anyone who knew what they were looking for would find it.

Russell was already wondering where to take the body. It was a pity there was no locomotive depot nearby, no glowing firebox to cremate it in. 403 Eisenacher Strasse came to mind, but only for a moment - the Standartenfuhrer might still be unconscious but Sternkopf would have smelled a rat hours ago. And the moon would be up, making it much easier for the police to see what was going on. The shorter the distance he had to drive with a dead body in the car the better.

Which ruled out a trip to the country, and a clandestine burial in the woods. It had to be the Spree or the Landwehrkanal, he told himself. The simple option. The canal, he decided - the river bridges were too exposed. The spot where they had said goodbye to the ambulance earlier that evening.

'Time you got dressed,' he told her. 'And you can't come back here, so pack yourself a suitcase - nothing too big. Just a few changes of clothes and whatever else you want to keep.'

She didn't argue. As she began gathering things together Russell slid the wrapped body down the stairs and into the kitchen. Slipping out through the back door he found the sky had lightened, but the alley was still cloaked in darkness. There were no signs of life in any of the neighbouring houses.

He opened the passenger's side door, tipped the seat forward, and went back for the body, dragging it as quietly as he could across the stone, ears alert for the sound of any curious onlooker opening a window. He propped the legs up in the opening, walked around, pushed the driver's seat forward, and laboriously levered the whole bundle into the back seat. By the time he'd finished his breathing seemed loud enough to wake half the neighbourhood.

Back indoors, he stood in the hall thinking about the maid. 'You should leave a letter on this table,' he told Sarah when she came downstairs. 'Tell her you've gone away for a while and leave her a couple of weeks' wages. With any luck she'll just take it and go.'

Sarah did as he suggested, taking the required Reichsmarks from a healthy-looking bundle. 'I was afraid this day would come,' she said, leaving Russell to wonder whether her expectation had included these particular circumstances. She took a last wistful look around, and turned off the light.

Russell squeezed her suitcase into the boot and got in behind the wheel. 'Can we get out this way?' he asked.

'No. But there's a space at the end for turning.'

He started the engine, which sounded deafening. He told himself it didn't matter if people saw and heard them. As long as no one stopped them...

He drove slowly forward, the dark wall of the Stadtbahn viaduct looming to meet them, and turned the car in the circular space beneath it. The drive back down the pitch-black alley felt like an epic voyage, and Russell's shirt was slick with sweat when they reached the street beside the Spree. Everything seemed quiet, and dropping the body off the nearest bridge seemed, for a few moments, a more tempting prospect than driving round Berlin with a high-ranking corpse in the back seat. He told himself to be sensible. The quarter-moon had risen above the buildings to the west, greatly increasing visibility. And while a body dumped in the Spree would float and be found within hours, it might take days to arrange Sarah's escape from Berlin. Stick to the plan, he told himself. Schoneberger Ufer would be dark and deserted. They could take their time, do it right.

Assuming they reached it. As he drove back down Altonaer Strasse Russell had enough butterflies in his stomach to start a collection. He half expected to find police cars drawn up outside Sarah's front door, but the street was mercifully empty. Crossing Hansa-Platz, they headed into the Tiergarten, and as they arced round the Grosserstern circle a car went by in the opposite direction. Russell found he was approaching each bend as if the enemy was hidden around it, and almost gasping with relief at finding another stretch of empty road.

Sarah Grostein sat silent beside him, hands clasped together in her lap. What she was feeling he could hardly imagine - a few moments' loss of control had cost her everything but her life, and that still needed saving. He remembered her saying she liked the man, and tried to square that admission with the obliterated face. Maybe liking him had been the last straw.

Russell realized he didn't even know the man's name. He asked what it was.

'Rainer,' she said. 'Rainer Hochgesang.'

They reached the canal above Lutzow-Platz and drove along the southern bank towards Schoneberger Ufer. A car pulled out in their slipstream and stayed behind them for several blocks, before vanishing down a side street. Heart thumping, Russell checked the mirror several times to convince himself it was gone.

Finally they were there. Schoneberger Ufer was certainly deserted, though less dark than it had been a few hours earlier. He asked Sarah to stay where she was and walked across to the wall. The moon had turned from yellow to cream, and the waters of the Landwehrkanal were glistening with a beauty they hardly deserved. The usual red light was shining atop the distant Funkturm, which seemed like a sensible breach of black-out regulations. He wondered if they'd turn it off in a real air raid, and sacrifice the tower for an English bomber.

All was silence and stillness. The street on the far side of the canal was lined with old workshops, most of which now served as offices. On this side the overgrown site of a ruined synagogue lay between two warehouses. They should all be empty, give or take the odd night-watchman.

There was no point in waiting. Russell gestured Sarah to get out, pushed her seat forward, and pulled the blanket-bound body out onto the pavement. He dragged it quickly across to the wall and left it there. 'We need to weigh him down,' he said. 'You untie the strings while I find something.'

He hurried across the road and into the site of the burnt-out synagogue, searching for ballast. The remains of a fallen wall were scattered along one side. Somewhat appropriate, Russell thought, sending a dead Nazi to the bottom of the Landwehrkanal with Jewish bricks. He could almost hear the celestial applause.

He piled six bricks in his arms and staggered back across the road, ears straining for the sounds of an approaching car. Sarah had undone the strings, and they rammed three bricks into each end of the roll.

'Okay,' Russell muttered once they'd rebound the ends. He began lifting one end up towards the chest-high parapet. The canal was just as deep at the sides, and there was less chance of the Gruppenfuhrer catching on a propeller.

Sarah helped him lever the body onto the parapet, and held it in balance while he made sure he had it round the ankles. As they pushed it over, the strain on his arms was almost too much, but he managed to hang on, and to lower it down for another foot or so, until the hidden head was only a metre or so from the water.

He let go. There was a louder splash than he expected, but no lights appeared in the surrounding buildings. He stared down at the surface of the water, half-expecting the body to flop back up, but there was only a flurry of bubbles.

A small indeterminate sound escaped from Sarah's lips.

'Are you all right?' he asked.

'No,' she said. 'But yes.'

Russell took another look round. If someone out there was watching them, he or she would have telephoned the police. 'Let's get out of here,' he said.

They reached Neuenburger Strasse in less than ten minutes. He took her up to his apartment and showed her where everything was. 'I'll bring you some food tomorrow,' he told her, 'and I'll contact our people about getting you out. The tenant below has been called up, so you don't have to worry about moving around, but the bathroom's one floor down... If you do run into anyone just say you're an old friend from...where do you know well?'

'I grew up in Hamburg.'

'Then say you're an old friend from Hamburg, just visiting for a few days. Nothing else.'

She looked utterly lost, and he felt guilty leaving her, but Effi would be worried sick. He could telephone her from downstairs, but...

'I'll be all right,' she said, and tried to look as if she would.

He took the offered release. Twenty minutes later he was letting himself into Effi's apartment, feeling like he'd lived several lifetimes in a few hours. She let out a cry of relief and burrowed into his arms.

Russell's sleep was full of dreams, most of them anxious. He woke in the strange darkness of the blacked-out room and lay there on his back, compulsively listing all the things that could still go wrong. The Standartenfuhrer might have recognized someone - Wilhelm or one of his friends. Sternkopf could be down at Prinz Albrecht-Strasse, leafing through photographs of the state's enemies. Wilhelm and the others could have been stopped on the way back to Friedrichshain and taken to the cellars for interrogation. Sarah Grostein's maid might have found the bloodstain, or the body might have jettisoned its Semitic ballast and floated to the surface, making sense of what someone had seen in the middle of the night. In fact two separate police units could be out on the porch right now, arguing over which had precedence.

'Jesus,' Russell murmured. He might as well turn himself in and be done with it.

Effi stirred beside him. 'We're still here,' she said sleepily.

Russell found himself smiling. 'We are, aren't we?'

Over coffee they discussed the day ahead. During his drive home six hours earlier, Russell had decided to tell Effi about Sarah Grostein. The latter could hardly be compromised any more than she already was, and calling on the comrades to get her out was a decision he thought Effi should share. No one had told him that his and Effi's exit voucher was a one-time offer, but he couldn't help thinking that Moscow was unlikely to sanction unlimited escapes. If Sarah went, their chances of a similar exit were probably reduced.

Effi , of course, saw no dilemma. 'If they get her, they'll torture her,' she told Russell.

'Probably.'

'And yours will be one of the names she has to give,' Effi added, reinforcing her instinctive generosity with that cold calculation which still surprised him.

They went their separate ways, she to a meeting at the studio offices, he to the Adlon. After calling Thomas on the hotel phone with news of Miriam's rescue, he walked across to the bar. Work was low on the list of his priorities, but abandoning it completely would be foolishly suspicious. As it was, there was nothing new to report. No prominent Pole had arrived, and none was expected. One of the correspondents had been out walking the streets and riding the trams. Berliners, he said, were unanimous twice over. All of them expected the war that none of them wanted.

Russell dedicated the rest of the day to his own survival. He withdrew a large sum of cash from his bank, used his ration card to buy groceries at the Wertheim food hall, and drove down to Neuenburger Strasse with them. Frau Heidegger intercepted him, and the usual cup of undrinkable coffee was accompanied by a litany of complaints. Her knees were bad, the rations inadequate, and, to top it all, Beiersdorfer had threatened her with the police. 'The fool says someone stole his helmet,' she said, 'and as I'm the only other person with a key it must have been me. What an idiot! I mean, what would I want with his stupid helmet?'

Russell made his escape, grateful that Sarah's presence had so far gone unnoticed. She seemed unnaturally listless when he arrived, but made a visible effort to perk up as he explained what he intended doing. She had only made one trip to the bathroom, she said, and that in the middle of the night. He promised to drop in again on the following day.

From Neuenburger Strasse he drove east towards Neukolln. He had considered following instructions and calling Zembski on the telephone, but why risk a Gestapo listener? Privacy was easier to ensure in person. The photographic studio on Berlinerstrasse was open but empty - the river of parents bringing sons in uniform for a farewell portrait had presumably dried up, now that the boys in question were all leaning over the Polish frontier. The fat Silesian emerged from his small office and smiled when he saw who it was. 'Herr Russell. Long time, no see.'

'It's good to see you too,' Russell said, offering his hand.

'Do you need your picture taken again?' Zembski asked. Russell had last visited the studio to pick up a fake passport which the photographer had created for him.

'I was given your telephone number by mutual friends,' he said softly. 'They said to ask for Martin.'

Zembski looked surprised, but only for a second. 'You need to get out?' he asked, glancing over Russell's shoulder as if fearing to find the Gestapo in close pursuit.

'Not me. A woman. Tell them it's "The Violinist". They'll know who she is. Tell them she has to get out now - there's a body involved. And tell them she's bringing them some useful information,' he added, hoping it was true.

The door opened behind them - a middle-aged couple. 'I'll only be a moment,' the Silesian told them, and turned back to Russell. 'Your photographs should be ready tomorrow,' he said. 'If you call in the afternoon, I'll let you know.'

Russell left the studio and walked down Berliner Strasse in search of lunch. Most of his fellow-Berliners were wearing resigned expressions that morning, but then they usually did. He ordered a bowl of potato soup and sausages at the first bar he came to, washed it down with a beer, and stepped reluctantly back into the summer sunshine. He spent a few minutes in the Hanomag working out logistics, and then headed north towards the Schade Printing Works. Leaving the car in a street nearby, he took one tram to Alexanderplatz and another out to Friedrichshain, arriving at the park almost half an hour early for his meeting with Wilhelm Isendahl. He sat on the agreed bench and reflected that while Wilhelm had performed brilliantly the previous evening, nothing would persuade him to work with the man again. Wilhelm was too damn sure of himself already, and each dart he planted in the neck of the Nazi bull would make him more so. He would come to feel invincible, and then the bull would get him.

Watching the young man walk up the path towards him, Russell hoped he was wrong. Wilhelm was his usual calm, efficient self. The van was parked opposite the gate, he said, complete with original number plates - the others were in the Spree. The four young women were staying with two different families. It had seemed better to keep them in pairs, so each girl had someone who understood what they'd been through. The one Russell had brought out - Miriam - had still not spoken, and spent most of her time staring into space. Ursel, Inge and Rachel were in better shape, though all seemed prone to sudden fits of weeping. Russell had been right - their captors had told the girls that if any of them tried to escape they would all be sent to concentration camps for having sexual relations with aryans.

'There's some money in the Beobachter,' Russell said, indicating the newspaper beside him, 'for the families who are looking after them.' It had been Effi's idea. He almost gave her the credit for it, but remembered in time that Wilhelm didn't know her name.

They agreed to meet in a week's time. Russell walked out to the gate, and stood for a while scanning the road for possible watchers. Satisfied, he strode towards the vehicle, anxiously searching for the telltale signs of a painted-out cross on the side of the vehicle. There were none.

He drove the van back across town to the Schade Printing Works. Thomas was in his office, looking as tired as Russell felt. He came out from behind his desk and embraced his friend, a glint of tears in his eyes. Once outside in the yard Russell gave him a blow-by-blow account of the rescue. Finding Miriam in her cupboard had Thomas closing his eyes in anguished disbelief, the appearance of the Standartenfuhrer had him opening them wide with alarm. 'But wouldn't he recognize you again?'

'I don't think so. He only saw us by torchlight, and we were disguised.'

'God, I hope you're right.'

'You're not the only one.'

'Where are the girls?'

'With families in Friedrichshain. Miriam's in a bad way. She hasn't said a word since we found her. I don't think she'll be going anywhere for quite a while.'

'We should tell her parents that she's alive, at least.'

'I will. I'll write to them at the address they gave me.' Russell looked at his watch. 'I have to pick up your lorry in Wedding. I should be back in an hour or so.'

'Where's your car?'

'Around the corner.'

'Then why don't you drive us both up there and I'll bring the lorry back?'

'Sold.'

Half an hour later they parted outside Hunder's gates. Russell followed the lorry as far as Lehrter Station, where he stopped off in search of coffee and a newspaper. The main buffet had none of the former, thanks to a storeroom robbery that afternoon - someone was stocking up for a future black market. The newspaper was full of quirky, inconsequential tidbits, as if the editor was clearing the decks for something altogether more serious.

He drove home by way of Altonaer Strasse. Sarah Grostein's house was bathed in the last rays of the evening sun, a picture of urban serenity. If any of Gruppenfuhrer Hochgesang's friends had come looking for him, they'd had the good manners not to break the door down. And if the body had flopped to the surface of the Landwehrkanal, the police were probably still trying to identify it.

Effi looked up anxiously as he came through her door, but relaxed when she saw it was him. 'Is everything all right?' she asked.

'So far.'

They went out to eat, returning in time to hear a special news broadcast. New proposals had been presented to the Polish Government, the official voice claimed. These were then outlined - Danzig's incorporation into the Reich, a plebiscite to decide the future of the Polish Corridor, extraterritorial roads and railways for the nation that lost that vote. But - and here the voice seemed torn between disbelief and righteous indignation - the German Government had received no reply to these eminently reasonable proposals. The Fuhrer, it seemed, had 'waited two days in vain for the arrival of a Polish negotiator.'

'As if he had anything better to do,' Effi said contemptuously.

When they turned on the radio next morning, they discovered that Germany was now at war. The Polish Army had supposedly attacked a radio station in German Silesia, and the Fuhrer had responded with characteristic restraint, invading Poland from north, west and south. He would be explaining his actions to the assembled Reichstag later that morning.

Three hours later, Russell and his fellow American journalists gathered on the pavement outside the Adlon to watch the motorcade go by. September 1st was another bright sunny day, but only a handful of Berliners had ventured forth to cheer their leader.

'Where's Gavrilo Princip when you need him?' was Slaney's comment.

The loudspeakers were soon crackling, the familiar voice echoing down the wide streets of the old city. The Czechs had turned into Poles, but the plot remained the same. Whoever they were, their behaviour - even their very existence - was intolerable. He had ordered the German armed forces across the border, and had himself donned 'the uniform of a soldier' until victory was assured.

There were chants of Sieg Heil, but the Reichstag deputies were out of practice - there was none of the rhythmic baying that Sportspalast audiences excelled at. It would be an hour or more before copies of the speech were distributed, so most of the journalists headed indoors in search of a drink. Russell called Zembski on one of the public telephones, and was told that his film wasn't ready - he should try again tomorrow.

He drove down to Neuenburger Strasse, where Frau Heidegger was keen to discuss the coming hostilities. It took him twenty minutes to extricate himself, and another ten to help Siggi carry a new mattress up to Dagmar's apartment. He found Sarah reading one of Paul's John Kling detective novels, and told her that German forces were heading into Poland.

'Have the British and French declared war?' she asked.

'Not yet.' He told her that he'd made contact with the comrades, and was waiting for instructions.

He took the long way home, stopping off at the Potsdam and Stettin stations to see what trains were running. There were no international services leaving from the former, but the latter was packed with foreigners trying to get places on the trains still running into Denmark. Domestic services seemed to be running more or less as usual.

He bought several papers at Stettin Station and skimmed through them, expecting the worst. But there were no photographs of missing Gruppenfuhrers, no reports of floating corpses in the Landwehrkanal.

He was about to return home when the sirens sounded. The people on the station concourse looked at each other, wondering if it was exercise, and then shrugged and headed for one of the station shelters. Russell went with them, moved more by journalistic curiosity than any real fear of Polish bombers over Berlin. He found himself in a well-lit underground store-room, surrounded by a hundred or so Germans of varying ages and classes. Those who spoke did so in whispers, and only, it seemed, to people they already knew. Most read papers or books, but some just sat there. There was little sign of anger or resentment, but faint surprise featured on many of the faces, as if each were silently asking, 'How did it come to this?'

Saturday September 2nd dawned without a British or French declaration of war. Notes had arrived the previous evening demanding the suspension of German operations in Poland, but opinions were divided in the Adlon Bar as to whether the attendant threats to 'fulfil obligations' constituted a real ultimatum. Mussolini was rumoured to be organising another Munich-style conference which, the cynics claimed, would provide London and Paris with all the excuses they needed to leave another ally in the lurch. Russell's instinct told him that the British and French were just taking their time, but experience warned him that it rarely paid to over-estimate the honour of governments.

Later that morning, he telephoned Zembski.

'Yes, your pictures are ready,' the Silesian told him.

'That's good,' Russell said looking at his watch. 'I'll be there in half an hour.'

The city's traffic was already thinning with the restriction on civilian petrol purchase, and the drive took only twenty-five minutes. Zembski was with a customer, a woman dissatisfied with her daughter's photographic portrait. The Silesian was insisting on the accuracy of his portrayal, and Russell came to his assistance, leaning over the woman's shoulder and remarking what a lovely daughter she had. She gave him a suspicious look, but grudgingly paid up. The door pinged shut behind her.

Zembski lowered his voice, more out of habit than need. 'Your friend must travel to Bitburg - it's a small town in the west. She should check into the Ho-henzollern Hotel, or one of the others if that's full. There's no time to arrange new papers, so she'll have to register in her real name. It's a risk, but I think the authorities are going to be busy with other matters for a while.'

'Thank God for war,' Russell said dryly.

'Indeed,' Zembski agreed. 'She must wait to be contacted. It may take several days, perhaps even longer. It's impossible to say.' He reached under the counter and came up with an envelope. 'Your photographs of the Havelsee,' he explained.

'Are they any good?' Russell asked.

'Of course. I took them myself.'

Russell decided he had enough time to visit Neuenburger Strasse with the good news, but reckoned without Frau Heidegger. She waylaid him on his way in, and took him to task for 'that woman in your apartment'. It was against regulations, she told him, and 'that idiot Beiersdorfer' was already causing her enough trouble. If he found out, there'd be no stopping him.

Russell promised his friend would be gone by the next day. 'She's just lost her husband,' he added, knowing that a fellow-widow was guaranteed to enlist Frau Heidegger's sympathy. 'She needed a few days of solitude in a place that holds no memories. She's going back to Hamburg in the morning.' He was halfway up the stairs before he realized he hadn't been offered coffee.

Sarah was boiling water for tea on Russell's electric ring. She took the news calmly, and together they searched Russell's atlas for Bitburg. It was close to the border with Luxemburg, which made sense. A night trek through the hills and she'd be on a train to Brussels or Antwerp, long a centre of Comintern activities.

'I'll check the trains and pick you up tomorrow morning,' Russell told her.

'I'll be here,' she said wryly.

He drove across town to Grunewald, arriving only ten minutes late to pick up Paul. His son was in his Jungvolk uniform, but seemed as subdued as the rest of Berlin by the outbreak of war. Strangely for a mostly German boy, he seemed more angered than relieved by Britain's hesitation in honouring the guarantee to Poland. 'Of course,' he added a few minutes later, 'if they do declare war on us, then next year's match at Wembley will have to be cancelled.'

At Paul's request they went to the fairground at the southern end of Potsdamer Strasse. Russell was afraid they would find it closed, but his son's optimism proved justified. It was not only open, but twice as crowded as usual. A good proportion of Berlin's children seemed to be screaming away their unconscious anxieties on the various rides.

Driving back from Grunewald after dropping off his son, Russell found himself wondering how many of those children had seen their fathers for the last time. Paul, at least, was lucky in that respect - neither of his would be sent to war.

He bought a paper when he reached Potsdamer Station, but no corpses had been discovered, no war declared. As for the trains, nothing was certain, but a journey to Bitburg was still theoretically possible. Trains were scheduled to depart for Cologne at nine and eleven on Sunday mornings, and both had connections to Trier and Bitburg. And yes, the clerk replied to Russell's query, both stopped at Potsdam. At twenty-two minutes past the hour.

Russell stopped off at Hunder's garage on the way home, and paid the usual inflated price for a full tank of petrol. Back at the flat, Effi was waiting in the red dress. 'It seems like a good night to go dancing,' she said.

They ate on the Ku'damm and headed east. The dancehall under Alexanderplatz Station was packed with people drinking too much, dancing too vigorously, laughing too loud. Berlin's adults were also saying farewell to peace, and the popping corks of their sekt bottles sounded like an ironic echo of the war unfolding in Poland.

Russell and Effi danced themselves to near exhaustion, then drove up to the Kreuzberg. The moon was yet to rise, the sky bursting with stars, and they sat on a wooden bench for a long time, looking out across the war-darkened city.

Russell arrived at Neuenburger Strasse soon after seven the following morning. He expected to find Sarah asleep, but she was emerging from the bath-room as he came up the stairs. Fifteen minutes later they were motoring south towards the Avus Speedway.

He had thought it better for her to join the train at Potsdam, and so avoid any possible checks at the main Berlin termini. He was probably overreacting - nothing had appeared in the papers to suggest a search was underway - but it was a nice day for a drive, all blue sky and late summer sunshine.

Their destination reminded him of Wilhelm's leaflet and article. He told Sarah about them, and his difficulty in getting them out of Germany. Would she be willing to take them across the border?

'Yes, but how...'

'I'll send them to you at the Hohenzollern Hotel. The post office will be shut today, and I wouldn't want you taking them on the train - there'll probably be spot-searches, particularly as you get near the border. But once you leave Bitburg...'

'It'll be just one more charge against me if I'm caught,' she said dryly.

'Something like that.'

'Of course I will,' she said.

'I'll send them off tomorrow. And if they get there after you've left, too bad.'

They reached Potsdam with almost an hour to spare. Sarah bought her ticket and they shared a mostly silent breakfast in the cavernous station buffet. The man in the ticket office had assured them the train was running, but it was still with some relief that Russell saw it round the long curve and ease in to the platform. It was less packed than some he had seen over the last few days, but still uncomfortably crowded.

Sarah Grostein didn't seem to mind. She climbed aboard with her small suitcase, turned briefly to mouth the words 'thank you', and disappeared into the throng. Russell watched the train pull out, frantic belches of steam giving way to a steady pumping. It wasn't over, he told himself - it wouldn't be over until she was out of the Gestapo's reach. But he had got her out of Berlin, which had to be safer for both of them. Slowly but surely, he thought, the artefacts and people that linked him and Effi to their various crimes and misdemeanours were disappearing. Perhaps they really were going to get away with it.

The two men were waiting for him at Neuenburger Strasse. He had a fleeting glimpse of Frau Heidegger's frightened face in the doorway as they bundled him into the back of the government Mercedes, a surprised look from the returning Beiersdorfer as they drove out of the courtyard. 'Where are we going?' Russell asked as calmly as he could, and wondered whether his abductors could hear the tremor in his voice.

'102 Wilhelmstrasse,' the man beside him said.

The SD? That had to be better news than the Gestapo, unless, of course, Hauptsturmfuhrer Hirth had come to know of his treachery. Russell wondered if the Soviets had betrayed him to the Germans, had added him to the list of gifts they were offering Hitler as part of their wretched Pact. He almost hoped they had, because Effi had played no part in his dealings with them.

Had she been arrested as well? He could see her back in that cell, so frightened and pale... Stop it, he told himself. Keep calm. Whatever they had, it was unlikely to be conclusive. Whatever the Soviets had said, he could always claim that he'd been stringing them along. You can do this, he told himself. A schoolmaster had once told him he could talk his way out of anything.

The car drew up outside SD headquarters, and the two men escorted him through the gardens and in through the main doors. They seemed almost friendly now, or maybe he was mistaking condescension for kindness. The blonde receptionist gave him a winning smile, but she would have blown Jesus a kiss on his way up Calvary.

The two men took him up to Hauptsturmfuhrer Hirth's door, knocked, and ushered him in. The Hauptsturmfuhrer's face showed irritation and dis-dain in equal measures, but that was probably how he got up in the morning. 'Please sit down,' he said, with unexpected courtesy.

Russell began daring to hope.

'There has been...' the Hauptsturmfuhrer began, only to be interrupted by a voice on the loudspeakers outside. He got up and closed the window. 'Do you know what that is?' he asked rhetorically. 'The English have declared war on the Reich. Their Prime Minister made the announcement an hour ago.'

'Ah,' Russell said. It seemed the safest thing to say.

'We've been expecting this for several days, of course. And that's why you're here. You, Herr Russell, have become a victim of your own success. Of the breadth of your connections, shall we say? Your links with the Soviets have proved most rewarding, and for that the Reich thanks you, but the Pact has reduced our need for intelligence from that direction. Your connections with your own country now seem more relevant, and the Abwehr has asked for your services.' He paused, and actually offered Russell a thin smile. 'You know what the Abwehr is?'

'Military Intelligence.'

'Precisely. Well, the SD may want you back at some time in the future, but for now the Abwehr's need is greater. They have your details, and will no doubt be contacting you in the near future.'

Hauptsturmfuhrer Hirth got to his feet, and Russell did likewise. 'Heil Hitler!' the Hauptsturmfuhrer said, and Russell managed a nod of recognition in response. He walked down the stairs and out past the chubby blonde secretary, repressing the urge to laugh out loud. As he crossed the rose-scented garden he made himself a promise - he would prove as faithful to the Abwehr as he had to Hauptsturmfuhrer Hirth.