Inside the hanging lights seemed permanently dimmed, walls and stairs receding upwards into apparently depthless shadow. A uniformed SD officer was waiting for Giminich, and instructions.
'Take ten men from the Cinema,' Giminich told him. 'And make sure there are reports in tomorrow morning's Czech newspapers. A list of names, and the reasons for their execution.'
Russell had a terrible notion of what this was all about. 'You're not going to kill ten prisoners in retaliation for the attack on me?' he blurted out, realising as he did so that protest would only anger his hosts. 'I don't want that sort of blood on my hands,' he added, as if Giminich would care a damn what he wanted.
'It's nothing to do with you,' Giminich snapped, waving his surprised subordinate away. 'Whatever you want and whatever your sympathies, those who tried to kill you considered you a representative of the Reich. Such attacks must be deterred.'
'And you think killing ten innocent men will weaken the will of the Resistance?'
'I do. But I repeat, this is not your concern.' He turned to Schulenburg. 'Willi, take Herr Russell to the reception lounge.'
'This way,' Schulenburg ordered, as Giminich strode away down a corridor. The reception lounge was in the opposite direction, and surprisingly well-furnished for a police headquarters. A place to park visiting dignitaries, Russell assumed, not to mention foreign journalists on the run from the Resistance. 'You will remain here,' Schulenburg ordered.
'One question,' Russell said, although he wasn't at all sure he wanted the answer. 'What is the Cinema?'
Schulenburg smiled, which was scary in itself. 'It's the room downstairs where prisoners wait for their interrogations. The walls are bare, and several months ago one of them told his interrogator that he had seen his worst imaginings projected onto them. Like a horror film. It has been called the Cinema ever since.' He closed the door behind him.
Russell lowered himself into the nearest armchair. A vehicle was in motion outside the blacked-out window, but that was all he could hear - the building might have been empty for all the sound its other occupants were making. The walls didn't look as if they'd been sound-proofed, but they were probably already thick enough for the Gestapo's purposes. For all he knew there were men and women screaming their heads off a few rooms away.
He looked around him. The armchairs, polished wooden table and eighteenth-century desk, the fleur-de-lys embossed wallpaper, ornate cornices and bucolic oil paintings - all the trappings of moderate affluence, anywhere in Central Europe. It all looked so ordinary, in a faded, antiquated sort of way. Like the anteroom to an outmoded version of hell.
His head was throbbing, which might or might not be a good sign. He placed a hand over the wound, and found the bandage was sticky with blood. Not wet, though. He walked across to the mirror, but no amount of twisting his head could provide him with a decent view. Another two inches to the left, he thought, and his brains would have been splattered all over Lepanska Street. Perhaps he was destined to survive the war.
Unlike the ten men from the Cinema. Their deaths were not down to him, not in any real sense. He hadn't attacked them himself, hadn't ordered reprisals. But if he hadn't been seduced by the promise of Swiss weekends with Effi, those ten men would not be living their last few hours.
He shook his head, and pain coursed through it.
The door opened, revealing Schulenburg. 'Come,' he said.
Russell reached for his bag, noticing for the first time the neat line of blood droplets which adorned it.
'Leave that,' Schulenburg ordered.
'We're not going to the station?'
'Not yet.'
They walked down a long corridor, turned left, and descended a flight of worn stone steps. With each step down the weight of the building seemed to grow, and Russell felt the kernel of fear in his stomach begin to expand. He told himself not to worry. What could they possibly want from him? Silence was the obvious answer, one that chilled him to the bone. He had a sudden picture of himself, knelt down, his executioner holding the pistol to the back of his neck.
Two head shots in one day seemed excessive.
They were, he guessed, two floors below street level. A shorter corridor, an ominously reinforced door, and they were entering one end of a long narrow room. It was spotlessly clean, and the metallic smell of blood was probably all in his imagination. Or emanating from his own head wound.
Obersturmbannfuhrer Giminich was waiting, along with two uniformed men with machine guns, several other Germans in plain clothes and a line of Czech prisoners. Seven of them. One was the man who had followed him across the Charles Bridge.
'Do you recognise any of these men?' Giminich asked.
Russell took his time, walking slowly down the line, scrutinising each face with apparent thoroughness. Most were bruised, some cut as well, and a couple of eyes were swollen shut. The open eyes were full of defiance. Not to mention loathing.
The man from the bridge was not the only one he recognised. A second man, younger, with a pugnacious face and longish blond hair, also seemed familiar, but not from today. Russell realised he must have come into contact with him during one of his two trips in 1939, but he couldn't remember which, let alone what the circumstances had been. He was fairly sure that the man had recognised him.
'No,' he told Giminich, 'I don't recognise any of them.'
'Are you certain? Take another look.'
Russell took another slow walk along the line-up. Had the man on the bridge already confessed? Was Giminich using the man to trap him?
He wasn't going to give the man up, but... 'I can't be sure,' he said, hedging his bets.
'But you have an idea?'
'No, not really. Nothing that I'd risk an innocent man's life on.'
'They tried to kill you,' Giminich reminded him.
'Someone did,' he agreed. And I can't say that I blame them, he thought to himself. Judging by the looks on the Czech faces, he would be well-advised to avoid post-war Prague.
Rather to Russell's surprise, Giminich did not seem disappointed. 'Very well, ' he said, consulting his watch. 'You will be taken to the station now. You will be well looked after until the train leaves, and a compartment has been arranged for your personal use as far as Dresden. I'm sure I don't need to remind you of our earlier conversation, about the wording of your report to the Admiral.'
'No,' Russell agreed, 'you don't.'
Walking up the stone stairs seemed infinitely preferable to walking down, as if the weight of the building was sloughing off his back. They collected his bag from the guest lounge and made their way out to the interior courtyard, where a combination of masked headlights and ill-fitting window screens cast everything in a thin blue light, as if the world was wreathed in cigarette smoke.
Schulenburg got in the back with him, but said nothing on the short drive to the station. The concourse was unusually empty, and Russell felt sadly reassured by all the uniforms and guns in evidence - leaving Prague like a Nazi celebrity might not prove a treasured memory, but it definitely seemed preferable to dying in a hail of Resistance bullets.
The train was already at the platform. Schulenburg rapped out a few orders and walked away without a word of farewell, leaving two uniformed Ordnungspolizei to stand guard outside Russell's compartment until the train departed. It began drawing out of the station at precisely nine o'clock. It was his third departure from the Masaryk Station in two years, and all three had been accompanied by a decided whiff of desperation.
He headed for the bar, where the blackout screens had not been lowered. They were just passing the locomotive depot where Russell had witnessed a more successful Resistance execution, and it suddenly occurred to him that the face he had vaguely recognised in the line-up had belonged to the young man standing guard outside the sand-dryer building on that long-ago night.