‘The local forger?’ Russell asked flippantly. He was curious as to whether Crowell would come clean about the Rat Line.
‘No, the papers are official,’ was all the other man said.
Russell raised an eyebrow.
‘You don’t need to know,’ Crowell said shortly.
‘Okay.’
‘Just get to Udine, the Hotel Delle Alpi, and babysit the man for one night. Someone will collect him the following morning.’ Crowell reached for the briefcase beside his chair, and extracted a large envelope. ‘You’ll find a DP passport in there, some supportive papers, fifteen hundred US dollars for Father Kozniku, and some lira for your own expenses. When you pick up the visa, check the details against the passport, just in case someone fucked up. We’ve asked the Army for a jeep, but they haven’t got back to us yet. Someone’ll contact you.’
‘Who is he? Or do I call him Mr. X?’
‘His name is Maksym Palychko.’
‘That sounds vaguely familiar. And not in a good way.’
‘I’m told some of the tales about him have been exaggerated,’ Crowell said. ‘But that’s neither here nor there. He’ll be more use to us in America than he would be gumming up a tribunal or rotting in a Soviet grave. So our job is to get him there. Right?’
Russell nodded, and drained the last of his beer. The sun was still shining in a pure blue sky, the clouds all in his mind.
Later that evening, Russell was early for his appointment with Shchepkin. The Russian, when he arrived, had instructions for Russell-he would be meeting a Comrade Serov ahead of his trip to Belgrade. A note would be left at his hostel with the time and place.
Russell nodded his agreement, and asked Shchepkin if he’d heard of Maksym Palychko.
The Russian gave him a look. ‘What a name to drop on such a beautiful night.’
‘So who the hell was he? I know I’ve heard the name before, but I can’t remember where.’
‘He called himself a Ukrainian nationalist, and I expect he still does, even though most Ukrainians would be as happy to shoot him as I would. I don’t know exactly where he came from-somewhere in the western Ukraine-but as a young man he fought for the Whites in the Civil War, and in the ’20s he joined the group that became the OUN-the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. They made no headway in the USSR, but they grew quite strong in Poland, and Palychko was one of the men who assassinated Pilsudski’s Interior Minister in, I can’t remember, was it 1934? He was caught, given the death penalty, but then reprieved-he was still in jail in Krakow when the Germans arrived. They released him, and he joined in the celebrations-several thousand Jews were tortured and murdered over the next few weeks. And he must have stood out, because the Nazis sent him to Gestapo school. When the Germans invaded us, the OUN went in with the einsatzgruppen, and did more than their share of the killing. They were expecting to be put in charge of Ukraine, but Hitler didn’t trust them that much, and those OUN leaders who complained were arrested. Not Palychko, though. He managed to stay on good terms with the Germans, mostly by selling them information about us and his former friends. He put together a small army of his own, and waged a parallel war against our partisans. You’ve heard of Lidice, Oradour?
‘Villages the Nazis destroyed?’
‘Along with their inhabitants. Everyone has heard of them,’ Shchepkin added, a rare hint of bitterness in his voice. ‘But Olyka, Mlinov, Grushvitsy, and at least ten others … no one in the West knows about them, but they were all villages accused of helping our partisans, and then destroyed by Palychko and his men. The OUN tortured and raped whenever the mood took them, and they left no one alive.
‘When the Nazis retreated, Palychko went with them, and somehow managed to disappear, though half the world was looking for him. Until this moment I assumed the Americans would feel honour-bound to hand a man like that over.’
Russell winced. ‘They don’t. I’m one link of the chain passing him out of Europe.’
They walked on in silence for several seconds.
‘I can tell you where …’ Russell began.
‘Don’t,’ Shchepkin interjected. ‘I don’t trust myself, and we can’t risk it. We’ll have to let him go, at least for the moment. But you must be careful. The Americans are hopeless at keeping secrets, and word may be out.’
‘Oh good,’ Russell murmured. Crowell, he remembered, had assured him there was ‘nothing dangerous’ involved in this particular job.
A Walk into the Future
Effi arrived at the RIAS building on Winterfeldstrasse a few minutes early, which would have surprised most of her friends. She had taken the U-Bahn from Zoo, and her dress-one of her finest-had drawn several admiring glances on the train. ‘Why do you care what you look like,’ Rosa had asked with her usual maddening logic, ‘when it’s an audition for radio?’
Which was true enough, but the man conducting the audition-it was bound to be a man-wouldn’t be at the other end of a wireless connection.
His name was Alfred Henninger, and she assumed from his accent and fluency that he was an American of German descent. He was about forty, with short but untidy blond hair, and a habit of flexing his fingers as he spoke. ‘Have you done any radio?’ was his first question.
‘Never,’ Effi answered cheerfully.
‘But you’re willing?’
‘Eager, you might say. I really liked the outline and script you sent me.’
‘Oh, good. We have a name for it now: “The Islanders”. In a Soviet sea,’ he added in explanation.
‘I got it.’
‘Of course. I’m always spelling it out for the people back home-they don’t understand what it feels like here. Anyway … the part we have in mind for you is the portierfrau, Frau Dorfner. It’s not the most glamorous role, of course …’
‘It’s the one I was hoping for,’ Effi told him truthfully. Trudi Dorfner was a character that most Berliners would instantly recognise, but the writer had managed much more than a stereotype.
‘Oh excellent. Well, let’s go through to the studio and have you do a reading.’
Ensconced in front of a microphone, Effi went through one scene, with Henninger voicing the other part.
‘Excellent,’ the producer said again once they were finished. ‘You, I mean, not me. We’ll be broadcasting live, of course. You’ll be okay with that?’
‘I’ve done a lot of theatre,’ Effi assured him. The hours might be a problem-she wanted to spend more time with Rosa, not less-but there was no point in worrying about things like that until there was a contract to sign.
It had all been a little too easy, she thought. After three years of dealing with DEFA and their Soviet backers, Henninger had seemed refreshingly straightforward. Famous last words, she told herself.
She was back home just in time for the DEFA studio car-asking it to pick her up at RIAS had seemed like tempting fate, and she’d resisted the temptation to say she’d make her own way. Journeys through the Soviet sector were normally safe, although women were still sometimes assaulted by drunken Red Army soldiers, and more lasting abductions were far from unknown. Before signing up for this film, Effi and the other Western-sector-based actors working on Anna Hofmann had insisted on being chauffeured to and fro, and the Russians, rather to everyone’s surprise, had conjured up a fleet of old government cars to do the ferrying. The one she was sitting in now had probably taken Goebbels on philandering expeditions.
They reached the new Weisensee studio complex just as the cast and crew broke for lunch, and Effi spent the next hour in makeup, having the years added on. When the girl was finished, Effi smiled at herself in the mirror. This was how she had looked for long stretches of the war, when the world knew her as Erna von Freiwald, dressmaker and milliner. In those days she had applied the makeup herself.