‘Like I said,’ Youklis almost snarled. He rose and stomped out past the arriving Farquhar-Smith, who gave a fine impression of a matador, stepping sharply aside to let the bull pass.
‘Idiot,’ Russell muttered after the American.
‘Don’t take it too hard,’ Farquhar-Smith reassured him. ‘He’s just got the hump because his latest bunch of freedom fighters were all arrested the moment they crossed the Yugoslav border. Someone must have leaked the names on their documents.’
For a moment Russell thought he’d been rumbled, but there was only the usual well-bred smugness in the Englishman’s expression.
‘So let’s get going, for Chrissake,’ Dempsey drawled from the doorway.
The rest of the working day was devoted to Lieutenant Pyotr Druzhnykov. He was a Russian Jew, and as far as Russell could tell, a genuine defector. He clearly had little love for the Soviet system, but unlike most fake defectors, made no attempt to ingratiate himself by rubbishing it. He had, he said, left no family behind. He had decided Palestine was where he wanted to be, and was willing to buy his passage with whatever information he had that they might find useful. Only a few weeks earlier, this might have caused problems between Dempsey and Farquhar-Smith, but now that the British Mandate was ending they were back on the same page-blithely offering homes to Jews in what was, at best, a still-disputed country.
The only problem with Druzhnykov was that he worked for the Red Army catering corps. As far as Russell could tell, the best they could hope for was a new borscht recipe, but his superiors were more optimistic. ‘Strip their lives down to a daily routine, and you’ll be surprised what you learn,’ Dempsey told Russell once they’d packed up for the day. He was probably quoting from some half-arsed training manual.
With more days like this in prospect, Russell raised the matter of his return to Berlin. ‘Youklis promised he’d consider it when I got back from Belgrade.’
‘That’s between you and him. As far as I’m concerned, we need you here.’
‘My wife needs me there.’
Dempsey grunted. ‘My wife hasn’t seen me for almost two years.’
‘How about a week’s leave?’ Russell asked.
‘Not at the moment.’
Russell took a deep breath. ‘Okay. I quit.’
‘What? You can’t.’
As far as Russell could see, the only reason he couldn’t was the certainty of MGB retribution, and Dempsey wasn’t privy to that. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m a volunteer, not a conscript.’
Dempsey looked worried for the first time. ‘Look, I can’t just let you go …’
‘Okay,’ Russell told him, ‘this is my last offer. Get my wife and daughter down here … no, better still, get them to Venice. For a long weekend. That’s not much to ask.’
Dempsey gave him a measured look. ‘No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.’
Russell held his gaze. ‘No promises, but if you get them down here I might agree to stay.’
Later, back at the hostel, he met his old room’s usurper. Signor Skerlic, as the hosteller introduced him, was middle-aged, plump, and rather too full of bonhomie to meet Russell’s expectations of a philosophy professor, but maybe exile and forced retirement had cheered the man up.
It was early afternoon when someone knocked on Effi’s apartment door. Her first thought was that Lisa had news, her second that the old man downstairs had come to complain about the noise-she had been dancing rather energetically to the band music on her radio.
What she didn’t expect was two men in suits, one with an unmistakably Slavic countenance.
His much younger companion looked and spoke German. ‘Fraulein Koenen?’
‘Yes,’ Effi said, rather than confuse them with her married name.
‘You will come with us, please.’
She felt suddenly alarmed. ‘Why?’
‘We need you to answer some questions.’
‘About what?’
‘You will be told all you need to know at the station.’ He reached out a hand for her arm. ‘Now, come.’
She shrugged him off, and took a step back, which had the unfortunate consequence of drawing them over the threshold. ‘Which station?’ she asked. ‘And where’s your authority? I’m not going anywhere without seeing some identification.’
The German pulled something from his pocket and held it in front of her face. It looked like a police card, but then everyone knew the Berlin police did what the Russians told them. This felt the way she imagined a Soviet abduction would feel, but why on earth would they abduct her? Her husband was working for them, for God’s sake.
‘I have to use the bathroom before I go anywhere,’ she said.
‘Go ahead,’ the German said, sharing a look with his Russian friend that suggested there wouldn’t be trouble.
She locked herself in, turned on the tap in the basin, and quietly opened the airing cupboard. The gun Russell had bought her during a spate of armed robberies two years earlier was on the top shelf, wrapped in an old sweater and hopefully out of Rosa’s reach. As Effi reached up, the German shouted out that they didn’t have all day.
She took the gun in her hand, wondering if she really would fire it. She didn’t know, and there was only one way to find out.
When the German saw the weapon, his jaw almost literally dropped.
She pointed it straight at his chest, and told him she wasn’t going anywhere. ‘I don’t believe you have the authority to arrest me,’ she said. ‘If I’m wrong, I expect you’ll be back.’
The Russian appeared at the German’s shoulder, then almost gently pushed him aside. ‘Fraulein …’ he began, stepping towards her.
She depressed the barrel and pulled the trigger, shocking them all with the noise of the blast, and digging a groove in carpet and floor.
Both men had jumped, and the German looked so scared that she half-expected a spreading stain on his trousers. She took aim at the Russian. ‘Hier raus,’ she said quietly, gesturing towards the door for the Russian’s benefit.
The German looked stunned, but the Russian just shook his head and grinned. He was enjoying her performance.
There were raised voices out in the stairwell now. Any moment now someone would pluck up the courage to put a head around the door.
The Russian gave her a slight bow, and urged his partner out through the doorway, silencing the voices beyond. Once she could hear their feet on the stairs, Effi put her own head outside. ‘An accident,’ she said to the hovering neighbours, before closing the door to ward off further questions.
She was shaking a little, but considering the circumstances, that seemed appropriate. From the window she watched them cross the street, arguing as they went, then climb aboard an unmarked jeep, which the Russian drove off in characteristic fashion, swerving this way and that like a drunken runner.
Would they be back? What should she do? What would she have done if Rosa had been there?
She supposed she should tell someone. This was the British sector, after all, and one of their offices was only a couple of streets away. She put the gun in her bag, and started walking, half-expecting the jeep to roar up behind her.
It didn’t. After listening to her story, the duty-sergeant sternly informed her that Germans weren’t allowed private weapons, and that the gun would have to be handed in.
‘It’s my husband’s,’ she told him. ‘And he’s British.’ Which was true of his birth, if not his current passport. It didn’t seem worth mentioning the fact that the gun was in her bag.
As far as the sergeant was concerned, her marriage to Blighty-what sort of country called itself that? — clearly cast her in a much more sympathetic light. After a long but successful search for the right form, he laboriously took down all the details of ‘the incident’, while loudly lamenting how little he could actually do. ‘But then it sounds like you did what was needed yourself,’ he concluded on a upbeat note.
‘But I can’t sit there with a shotgun across my knees until the Russians all go home,’ she objected.