The Untersturmfuhrer seemed momentarily upset by the audacity of this request, but managed to recover himself. He opened the door, relayed the request to someone outside, and shut it once more.
'Have you been in Prague long?' Russell asked him cheerily.
'That's no business of yours,' was the surly reply.
'Just trying to be friendly,' Russell said lightly.
'We are not friends.'
No indeed, Russell thought. Silence it was. He sat down in a convenient armchair, stretched out his legs and waited for breakfast to arrive. Thinking was always hard work without coffee.
He suddenly realised that they hadn't provided him with the requisite copy of Signal. Had Giminich slipped up? Surely Grashof would notice if he turned up without one, but what would he do?
The coffee arrived, along with rolls, real butter and real jam. Russell could hardly believe it, but the Untersturmfuhrer, clearly used to such luxuries, left most of his on the plate. The coffee was no better than Berlin's - but then Prague was just as far from Brazil.
Feast over, Russell asked if he could lie down in the adjoining room. Schulenburg took a long look round, presumably to make sure there were no telephones, semaphore paddles or carrier pigeons available for Russell's use. He then granted permission, contingent on the door remaining open.
Russell laid himself out on the bed, closed his eyes, and tried to think. What was Giminich expecting to happen? Grashof would accept the legitimacy of the fake message without query, and perhaps incriminate himself still further by sending an indiscreet message back to Canaris. All of which would be overheard by the SD - a listening device under the table in all likelihood. Knowing which table the meeting was arranged for, they only had to bug the one.
But unless the relevant technology had improved out of all recognition there was no way the SD could record the conversation. So why not just make one up? Why go to all this trouble to get real evidence of guilt? Because, he realised, they needed the real evidence to convince Grashof's 'influential supporters' in Berlin. There would be someone with 'neutral' credentials listening in with the SD operatives, Russell guessed. Someone from the Foreign Office or Wehrmacht.
Once Grashof had incriminated himself, he would be immediately arrested, and the focus would shift back to Berlin. Moving against Canaris would take time - someone of his stature couldn't be arrested without the Fuhrer's agreement, and the latter was notoriously difficult to get hold of, what with his bizarre sleeping hours and penchant for military briefings that lasted longer than the campaigns concerned. And despite Giminich's promise, Russell couldn't see himself being set free until Canaris was beyond warning.
How could he break this chain of events? He would get no chance of warning anyone ahead of time - Schulenburg would be sticking to him like a ginger limpet.
Was there any way of presenting the message that would cause Grashof to smell a rat, yet not cast suspicion on Russell himself? By making faces? Kicking the man's leg under the table? It was hard to imagine that Giminich had neglected such possibilities. There would be people watching, probably droves of them, all with high-powered binoculars. There might even be lip-readers in case the microphones failed.
Could he remain faithful to the script provided, yet undermine the words with inappropriate tones and emphases? It would be risky. An inadequate grasp of the German language would be the only possible excuse, and Giminich knew only too well that he spoke it like a native.
But what else was there? Could he warn Grashof with his eyes? He tried a warning look at the ceiling, and found his mouth was hanging open. Ridiculous.
What was left - telepathy?
There was nothing. Should he have refused? He still could. If he followed Giminich's orders he would, in all likelihood, be condemning a man to death. Against that, Grashof and Canaris were likely to remain firmly fixed in Heydrich's crosshairs with or without his own involvement. Not a noble argument, but a reasonable one. And why should he sacrifice his own future - not to mention those of his extended family - for Grashof and Canaris, who must have known the risks they were taking, and who were apparently betraying a regime they had freely chosen to serve? When it came down to it, he had no real idea whether these two men were enemies of the Reich or just enemies of Heydrich. The evidence for Grashof being a genuine friend of the resistance seemed strong, but Russell still found it hard to imagine Canaris actually working against his own country. The best bet was that Heydrich was using Grashof's real guilt to smear his real adversary.
Not that it really mattered, because Russell had no intention of risking his own future for theirs. There was no honourable way out of this particular predicament. If a risk-free chance to help Grashof came up, he would take it. Maybe even a low-risk chance. Very low-risk. But that was all. He would have to play it by ear, hope that something went wrong, and live with himself if it didn't. The Abwehr was not his family.
He got up off the bed to explore the adjoining bathroom. A turn of the tap produced hot water, and he decided that taking a bath might cheer him up. The suspicious Schulenburg explored the room for secret exits, then left him to it. It felt like a victory, though he knew it was nothing of the sort.
Drying himself off with a huge soft towel, he felt renewed pangs of hunger. With rolls that good, who knew what Prague had to offer in the way of real meat and vegetables? Like all Berliners in recent months he had, he realised, fallen in thrall to his taste buds. 'What about lunch?' he asked Schulenburg.
The Untersturmfuhrer was unsympathetic: 'You can eat afterwards.' Russell went back to waiting, and the search for a flaw in Giminich's plan. None occurred to him. His thoughts wandered, taking him back to his last time in Prague, and his clandestine contacts on Washington's behalf with the still-gestating resistance movement. He had no idea whether those contacts had borne lasting fruit, or whether any of those involved were still alive. The resistance would be hard-pressed now, and those still at large would be lying low, waiting for Heydrich's storm to blow over. He remembered the execution he had witnessed, the lifeless corpse collapsing into the sand.
'Time to go,' Schulenburg said from the doorway.
Collecting the man in the corridor, they went down to the car, where the fourth member of the original party was half asleep behind the wheel. Jerked awake by Schulenburg's sarcastic greeting, the driver started the engine and roughly released the clutch, causing the car to take off like a frightened horse. Russell found himself wondering whether his guards would be stupid enough to drop him off at the cafe door.
The answer was no. They drove to the eastern end of the Legii Bridge, which now bore the name of the Czech composer Smetana. At a quarter to two Schulenburg pulled a copy of Signal from his briefcase, handed it to Russell and set him in motion. He would walk the remaining distance - across the bridge and a short way along the opposite bank - on his own. He would also, as Schulenburg made amply clear, be under constant observation.
The bridge was a long one, crossing two arms of the charcoal-coloured river and the island of bare trees that lay between them. It was on this island that Russell had met his first resistance contact in the summer of 1939, but today the paths were as empty as the trees, and the sun nowhere to be seen. In fact it was beginning to rain, and the dark forbidding castle high to his right was rapidly disappearing behind a curtain of mist.
Once beyond the island Russell could see the line of establishments on the far bank, their illuminated interiors brightly glowing in the overall gloom. The Sramota Cafe was the last in line, its outside terrace covered by an awning of ironwork and glass. Russell felt a faint stirring of hope - the clatter of rain on such a roof might hide their conversation from Giminich's microphones.