On her way to the studio that afternoon Effi remembered she had some shopping to do, and asked the driver to drop her off on the Ku'damm. She had hardly walked ten metres when she noticed Ali Blumenthal stepping down from a tram outside the Universum Cinema. There was no yellow star sewn into her coat.
'I'm going to the cinema with a friend,' Ali explained, once Effi had caught up with her. 'But I'm half an hour early.'
'Let's have a coffee,' Effi suggested. 'There's a place just round the corner.'
'Are you sure?' Ally asked. 'If they ask to see my papers...'
'They won't. They know me, and I'll say you're my baby sister.'
'If only I was,' Ali said wistfully.
The cafe was full, but empty tables just seemed to appear when celebrities arrived, and on this particular occasion Effi decided not to feel too guilty about it. She ordered coffees and cakes, and hoped that they wouldn't be noticeably better than those served at the adjoining tables.
The two of them chatted about films until the women at the next table left, and there was no longer any danger of their being overheard. Effi asked after Ali's family, and received an earful of the girl's frustration with her parents. 'My dad is such an innocent,' Ali complained, 'but my mother's even worse. She knows better, and she's not afraid to say so, but she won't actually stand up to him. When they get the letter they'll just bicker with each other all the way to the train, and they'll still be bickering when they get wherever it is they're sent to.'
'You won't go?'
'Absolutely not. I shall stay in Berlin. You know -' she lowered her voice to a whisper '- I heard a wonderful story yesterday about a Jewish woman who wanted an Aryan work permit. She waited for an air raid, and then looked for a block in which the Party office and all of its records had been destroyed. Then she went to the report centre for people who've been bombed out and gave them a false name, a real photograph and the number of one of the houses which had been destroyed. They had no way of checking her story so they gave her the permit. And some emergency money! The welfare service fed and housed her for several weeks, and then evacuated her to Pomerania. And now she's got a job working as a housekeeper for a Party bigwig!'
Effi couldn't help smiling.
'I know there's not enough bombing at the moment,' Ali went on, 'but Kurt says - he's my boyfriend,' she explained, blushing slightly - 'he says it will get worse and worse once the Americans come into the war. There'll be more and more record offices bombed, and it'll be harder and harder for them to keep track of people. More and more Jews will be living as Christians - hundreds of them, I wouldn't wonder.' She looked at her watch. 'I must go. Do I look all right?'
'You look gorgeous,' Effi said, and meant it. She watched the girl go, thinking of herself at seventeen. She'd been every bit as headstrong, but the possible consequences of her youthful exuberance had not included years in a concentration camp.
The next face Russell saw belonged to Obersturmbannfuhrer Giminich. Someone else's fingers were playing with his hair, causing shooting pains across his scalp.
'Not serious,' a voice behind him said in Czech-accented German. The fingers did one more painful dance. 'Water, disinfectant, bandage,' the voice added. 'That is all.'
'Do whatever you have to, doctor,' Giminich said curtly. 'You have been extremely fortunate,' he told Russell, in a tone that implied someone else would have made a more deserving recipient of such luck.
Russell recognised his surroundings - he was back in the original hotel bedroom. He asked how long he'd been out.
'About half an hour,' Giminich grudgingly revealed.
'This stings,' the doctor told him, a second before dousing his head with what had to be neat alcohol.
He wasn't exaggerating. The shock took Russell's breath away, and for a second he thought he was losing consciousness again. 'Christ,' he murmured, as the pain slowly subsided.
The doctor began wrapping a long bandage around Russell's head. He was younger than he'd sounded, a short Czech in his late twenties or early thirties man with a shock of curly dark hair and a cadaverous face.
'What did you see of your assailants?' Giminich wanted to know. He was pacing up and down, a lit cigarette clamped between finger and thumb. Schulenburg, Russell now noticed, was standing by the blackout-screened window.
'Nothing really. The car was an Adler, but I didn't see any faces.'
'The car was stolen,' Giminich said, as if someone had asked him to explain the motorisation of the Czech resistance. 'It was abandoned outside Hiberner Station,' he added unnecessarily.
Russell was wondering why he'd been so stupid. The men who had tipped off Grashof had assumed that Russell was in league with the SD, and Russell himself had done nothing to shake that assumption. He had made no protest when taken away at Masaryk Station, and he had said nothing at the Sramota Cafe to suggest he was an unwilling participant in the entrapment process. Grashof's friends in the resistance had assumed Russell was one of the enemy, and following Grashof's arrest they had sought the obvious retaliation. He could hardly fault their logic, painful as the consequences still were.
'Did you see anything suspicious on your way back to the hotel?' Giminich asked him.
'I thought I was being followed on the Charles Bridge,' Russell said incautiously. 'But I wasn't,' he added quickly. Think before speaking, he told himself.
'What made you think you were not?' Giminich asked, his pacing momentarily suspended.
Russell went through the story, concluding with the disappearance of his supposed tail in another direction.
'They work in pairs,' Giminich told him.
'There was no one else,' Russell insisted, although it now seemed likely that there had been.
Giminich looked dissatisfied, but then that was who he was. The doctor had finished with his bandaging, and looked only too ready to depart. 'You must see a doctor when you reach Berlin,' he told Russell. 'But you will be fine.' Like Giminich, he seemed less than ecstatic about this outcome.
Russell thanked him anyway.
'You will come to headquarters now,' Giminich told him. 'Where your protection can be assured.'
The prospect of several hours cooped up in the Petschek Palace was appalling, but Russell very much doubted that he could refuse. What Giminich had just said was depressingly true - Heydrich's men in black were all that stood between him and the righteous wrath of the Czech Resistance. Irony was too short a word.
He slowly levered himself off the bed, and was pleasantly surprised by the lack of any sharp reaction inside his skull. The doctor had been right; the bullet had caused little more damage than a sudden blow from a sharp instrument. He had seen many such wounds in Flanders, where they had often been welcomed as a relatively painless ticket away from the front line.
The trip down in the lift made him feel slightly woozy, but the cold night air soon put that right. Night had fallen, and the car waiting outside had the usual thinly-slit covers over its headlights. 'Has Prague been bombed?' he asked his companions.
'Of course not,' Schulenburg told him.
Then why a blackout, Russell wondered but didn't ask. The Resistance was probably grateful.
The streets were virtually empty, only one darkened tram squealing its way past them as they neared the top of Wenceslas Square. In less than five minutes they were drawing up outside what Russell could only assume was the Petschek Palace. He had seen the building by daylight in 1939, a vast block of huge stones which reminded him of the Inca capital Cuzco in Paul's much-loved Wonders of the World book. It had five main floors, with two more in the roof and an unknown number below ground level. Several, if Russell knew the Gestapo and SD. They loved their cellars.