‘She says nothing about herself,’ Russell noted.
‘I know. It reminded me that I’ve done nothing about Jens.’
Russell grunted his agreement. It all seemed so wonderfully ordinary in London. He wondered if Paul would ever come back to Berlin, because he doubted the Soviets would ever let him leave. He sighed and put the letters put back in their envelope. ‘How was your day?’ he asked Effi.
‘It was good,’ she said, picking up the envelope and holding it across her chest. Hearing from London had clearly made her day. ‘We had another rehearsal this morning, and filming starts next week — Dufring has been cleared by the Americans.’
‘Fantastic.’
‘Isn’t it, especially after last week, when everything seemed against us. Oh, and this afternoon I visited the two synagogues Ellen told me were open. No sign of Miriam, and no more Ottos.’
‘Shanghai Otto and Palestine Otto are probably enough to be getting on with.’
‘Oh, we can’t have too many Ottos.’
‘Maybe not.’
‘And the English Tommy turned up just after I got here. He was a nice boy. What about you?’
Russell detailed his failure to advance Kuzorra’s cause, and the task which Dallin had dumped in his lap. He was well on the way to dampening Effi’s high spirits when Thomas arrived home, triumphantly bearing a radio. They spent most of the evening listening to the BBC, enjoying the music and reminding themselves of all those nights they’d broken Hitler’s law, with one ear tuned to London, the other cocked for sounds outside. But these days the Gestapo was just a bad memory, and the men in long leather coats wouldn’t be coming to drag them away.
Next morning, Russell was in Thomas’s study trying to get something written when the telephone rang. Out of service for the last two days, the line had apparently been repaired.
It was Miguel Robier. ‘John, I’ve got some bad news. Your friend Kuzorra is dead. He was killed last night.’
‘What?’ Russell said stupidly. ‘Who by?’
‘By another prisoner, or at least that’s what they’re saying. I got the news from my friend at Mullerstrasse, the one who told us where Kuzorra was being held. I’m going up there now — there’s something wrong here, I can smell it. Do you want to come with me?’
Russell was still in shock. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘How long will it take you to reach Stettin Station?’
‘An hour,’ he said optimistically.
‘I’ll be waiting.’
Russell fumbled the earpiece back onto its hook, and stood staring at the floor. The man he owed his life to was dead. And he was terribly afraid that he himself had been the cause.
For once the buses cooperated. Robier was waiting on the concourse of the half-ruined station, a newspaper under his arm. ‘Ah, bien,’ he said. ‘There’s a train in a few minutes.’
Soon they were rattling out past the yards, where the remnants of shattered wagons and coaches had been raised into piles, looking like anthills on an African plain.
‘I’m glad I’m with you,’ Russell told Robier. ‘If I turned up on my own they’d just tell me to get lost.’
Robier warned him not to be too optimistic. ‘The people at Mullerstrasse are politicians — they like having friends in the press. The Army couldn’t care less.’
In the event, the authorities at Camp Cyclop seemed eager to display a reasonable front. The major seemed inclined to ignore Russell’s existence, but answered Robier’s questions readily enough. Kuzorra had been found dead in his room that morning — someone had cut the detective’s throat while he slept.
It would have been mercifully quick, Russell thought — a few split seconds of consciousness at most.
The perpetrator was not known, and, if the major’s demeanour was any guide, never would be. They were interrogating other inmates, of course, but there were no fingerprints on the razor blade.
When Russell asked to see the body the major seemed set to refuse, but nodded his acquiescence when Robier demanded the same. They were taken to what looked like an empty storeroom. Kuzorra’s body was laid out on a table, still dressed in his underwear, still wearing an apron of congealed blood. His eyes, still open, looked surprisingly at peace.
Russell suspected that much of Kuzorra’s will to live had died along with his wife Katrin, back in the early years of the war. His own death would probably have worried the old detective less than the fear that Geruschke might profit from it.
He won’t, Russell silently promised the corpse. He didn’t suppose he would ever connect the nightclub owner to this particular murder, but there had to be some way of bringing the bastard down.
He and Robier thanked the still nervous major and talked things over on the Wittenau platform. The Frenchman said he’d try and dig a little deeper into the circumstances surrounding the original arrest, but warned Russell not to expect too much. ‘I know what the line will be — Kuzorra was about to be handed over when he fell victim to some deranged fellow prisoner. Who could we find to prove otherwise?’
Robier got off at Wedding, leaving Russell to travel the last lap alone. As he walked across the Stettin Station concourse he noticed two British military policemen — ‘Red Caps’ they were called — striding towards him.
‘John Russell?’ the shorter of the two asked him.
‘Yes.’
‘Come this way please?’ the man said, shepherding Russell with one arm towards a nearby archway. The other man was at his other shoulder, funnelling him towards the same objective.
Russell went where he was told. ‘What’s this about?’
They were through the archway now, in a part of the station that Russell remembered had once been used by taxis. Now it was empty, save for two men in civilian clothes and a scruffy-looking two-seater Mercedes with its trunk wide open.
‘He’s all yours,’ the shorter MP told the two men, one of whom, almost casually, slid a revolver out of his pocket.
Russell realised why the car’s trunk was open.
‘In’ the man said in English, confirming his guess. The MPs had vanished.
‘No,’ Russell said, playing for time. He could hear other people close by — surely someone else would come through the archway. Or were the MPs making sure that they didn’t?
The man brought the muzzle level with Russell’s head and seemed inclined to pull the trigger. One blast of a locomotive whistle would certainly drown out the noise.
‘All right,’ Russell agreed. The man smiled, and gestured him into the trunk. He was about thirty, Russell guessed, with a long scar on the back of his gun hand and what looked like ancient burns down one side of his face. A veteran of something nasty.
Russell took his time getting into the trunk, and was still arranging his body to fit the space when the lid slammed down, plunging him into darkness. A few more seconds and the car lurched into motion, running straight for a while and then taking what seemed a right turn, presumably onto Gartenstrasse. Maybe they’d be stopped at a military checkpoint, Russell thought — there were few enough cars on the road. If so, he’d make a racket that no one could ignore.
‘Johann’s buried there,’ Scarred Man said as they took another turn. They must be on the street which bisected Wedding cemetery.
‘He was an unlucky bastard,’ the other man said. It was the first Russell had heard his voice, which sounded unusually shrill.