Kempner and Lidovsky pulled Hirth to his feet, took an upper arm each, and dragged him out through the door. The boy cried out once, a heartfelt wail, and struggled in vain against the arms that were holding him.
The shot came sooner than Russell expected.
Hirth’s son screamed and redoubled his efforts to break free; the man held him for a few seconds more, then abruptly released his grip. The boy hitched up his trousers and half-stumbled out through the door, holding one palm raised before him, as if to ward off evil.
Russell sank down to the floor with his back against the wall. He told himself that Hirth had gone to whatever Jew-hating Valhalla Heydrich’s finest went to, and that most SS Hauptsturmfuhrers probably deserved shooting. But it was the look on the son’s face that he would remember. The dawning of irretrievable loss.
Several hours later, when Lidovsky came round announcing that it was time to go, Russell asked him what they intended doing with the boy.
‘We’ll leave him here. One of the women tried to talk to him — she told him we would take him to the nearest town, but he just ignored her. He’s out there trying to dig a grave with his bare hands.’
‘He’ll die if we just leave him.’
‘Only if he wants to. The path to the road is clear enough.’
Russell walked outside. Hirth’s body was lying on its side in the frosty grass, an angry red hole above the ear. The boy was sitting a couple of metres away, staring out at the lightening sky to the east. His assault on the frozen earth had barely scratched the surface.
‘Come with us,’ Russell said.
‘I’d rather die,’ the boy replied without turning his head.
Some days at Babelsberg, after hours inside the skin of camp survivor Lilli Neumann, Effi would stare at the face in the dressing room mirror and wonder whose it was. Sometimes it would take as much as an hour to claw her own self back, but even with Russell away she never doubted the need — this was a character that could take her over, and drag her down to who knew where.
She was more or less herself again when a knock sounded on the door. ‘Come in,’ she called out, expecting to be told that the bus was waiting.
A man stepped into the room. ‘Effi Koenen?’ he asked, with only the slightest hint of query.
‘Yes.’
‘May I have a word?’ he asked in more than passable German. The accent was American, but he was in civilian clothes, a smart black coat over a light grey suit. He was about thirty, Effi guessed, with straight brown hair, regular features and unusually white teeth.
‘What about?’
‘May I sit down?’ he asked, indicating the easy chair.
She gestured her acquiescence. ‘I can’t give you very long,’ she said.
‘I only need a few minutes.’ He put one leg over the other and brushed an imaginary speck of dirt off his knee.
‘Who are you?’
‘I represent the American Government — your husband’s employer. Or one of them at least.’
‘Do you have a name?’
‘Seymour Exner.’
She went back to the mirror to finish removing her make-up. ‘So what can I do for you, Seymour?’
‘We have a request to make. Well, to be honest, it’s more than a request. Two weeks ago your partner John Russell asked for our help in removing certain obstacles to your participation in this film, and at the time we were happy to oblige…’
‘At the time?’
‘If you had confined yourself to the job in hand we would have no regrets about helping out. However…’
She turned to face him. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘The black market.’
‘What about it? I don’t have time to visit markets, black or otherwise.’
‘The other night?’
The penny dropped. ‘I was helping a friend buy medicines — she’s a sister at the Elisabeth Hospital.’
He brushed that aside with a wave of an arm. ‘The black market is a fact of life,’ he said. ‘You must realise that. People must buy and sell whatever they have to in order to survive, to prevail, and morality doesn’t come into it — not for the moment. And the same is true of politics. The Nazis are gone and people would like to think that there’s an end to it, but we believe that the new enemy is already here in Berlin. And we will do whatever we have to, use whoever we have to, in order to prevail. Do I make myself clear?’
‘You’ll do what you have to. It sounds familiar, but I never took much notice of politics. And I still don’t understand what all this philosophising has to do with me.’
He breathed a sigh of frustration. ‘Nothing, if you confine yourself to what you are good at, and leave crusades to the church.’
Effi smiled inwardly, remembering something Russell had told her weeks ago, that a quarter of the country’s Protestant clergy had joined the Nazis before they even came to power.
‘We intend talking to Mr Russell when he returns,’ Exner said, as if that would make Effi feel better. ‘Perhaps the two of you should talk this through before you take any more unconsidered actions.’
That made Effi angry — receiving an incomprehensible telling-off from a brash young idiot was bad enough; hearing him suggest that she wait for the balm of Russell’s calming influence was downright insulting. ‘So you’re telling me I should come to work each day, do my job and go back home, and forget about everything else.’
‘A dramatic way of putting it, but yes.’
She shook her head. ‘And if I don’t? What are you threatening me with?’
‘Nothing terrible. You will just find that the difficulties you encountered in getting a work permit — those difficulties that we resolved for you — will rear their ugly heads once more, and the film will need a new leading lady. If it proceeds at all, that is. We help those who are prepared to help us,’ he added, his voice turning suddenly colder.
Effi’s first and almost overwhelming impulse was defiance, but she bit back her tongue on the words that were forming. ‘I understand,’ she said, a deal more graciously than she felt. ‘No more crusades.’
He smiled at that. ‘It’s in all our interests,’ he said. Job done, he got up to leave. ‘Have a good weekend.’
Once the door had closed behind him she went back over the conversation. If their trip out to Teltow had occasioned his visit, then there had to be more to it. Neither she nor Annaliese had done anything to suggest they were anything more than buyers, so where had anyone got the idea they were starting a crusade?
There was only one explanation that fitted. The men they had met must work for Geruschke — hadn’t Kuzorra told Russell that the black marketeer included drugs and medicines among his illicit trades? One or both of the men had recognised her as Russell’s partner, and reported it to Geruschke. And he had concluded that her presence at the canal basin was part of a continuing ‘crusade’ on her and Russell’s part.
So Geruschke employed the former Gestapo officer. She had been wondering what to do about the latter ever since she recognised him. She had thought of reporting him to the occupation authorities, but what was the point if she didn’t know where to find him again?
Now she probably did. She had arranged to meet Irma at the Honey Trap on Saturday — she would see if the singer recognised the man’s description.
But — and the realisation brought her up short — she had also learned something else, something much more troubling. If Geruschke was behind it all, how come his envoy was a man from the American Government? Had she just been warned to lay off the black marketeer because he was vital to their war against the ‘new enemy’?
That, she realised, could explain why Geruschke had let Russell go. The Americans needed them both, so first they saved Russell from Geruschke, and now Geruschke from Russell and her.
How crazy was that?
The party reached the transit camp at Pontebba early on Tuesday evening. Since reaching the road on the Italian side of the border, they had endured a day of seemingly interminable waits, first for the lorry, and then for the various Italian authorities to decide on what bribes they were willing to accept. The British had been conspicuous by their absence, but that hadn’t felt surprising — even up here in the northern foothills, Italy seemed far removed from the war and its hangover, from the bleakness afflicting so much of northern Europe.