‘Why?’ Effi asked. ‘You still haven’t told me why they brought you here.’
He went through the story – the American decision to let the Russians take Berlin, his own trip to Moscow, the offer of inclusion in the Soviet team seeking out atomic secrets. He told her what had happened to Kazankin and Gusakovsky at the Kaiser Institute, and how he and Varennikov had hidden out in Thomas’s house.
‘There are plans for an atomic bomb buried in Thomas’s garden?’ she asked incredulously.
‘In Hanna’s vegetable patch, to be precise.’
‘Okay.’
‘And I’m the only one who knows where they are,’ he added. ‘Varen-nikov was killed a few days later.’
‘How?’
Russell sighed. ‘A train fell on him.’
‘A train fell on him,’ she repeated.
‘I know. But that’s what happened.’
‘All right. But what’s the problem? You just hand the plans over to the Russians – no one else need know.’
‘That might be the sensible thing to do. Or it might not. I can think of two good reasons why it wouldn’t be. First off, the Russians might want to make absolutely sure that I don’t tell anyone else. Like the British or the Americans.’
‘But that’s silly,’ Effi protested. ‘You could never tell them that you’d just helped the Russians to an atomic bomb. They’d put you in prison.’
‘Or hang me for treason. I know that and you know that, but the NKVD doesn’t like loose ends.’
‘I suppose not.’ She felt crestfallen. Overnight it had seemed like the worst might be over.
‘I’ve been thinking I need to bargain with them,’ he went on.
‘The papers for your life,’ she guessed.
‘Yes, but more than that. If Paul and Thomas survive, they’ll end up in Soviet camps. Zarah might be arrested too – she is the wife of a prominent Nazi, and the Russians are certainly feeling vindictive. So I thought I’d offer them the papers in exchange for the whole family.’
Effi smiled, but looked dubious. ‘You know the Russians better than I do, but won’t they think that a bit of a cheek? And what’s to stop them beating the location out of you? Or just agreeing and then reneging on the bargain once they have the papers?’
‘Nothing, at the moment. But that’s where your Swedish friend might be useful.’ Russell outlined what he had in mind, and she began to see a glimmer of hope. ‘But first we wait,’ he said. ‘The Soviets gave me a letter to use when making contact, and I hope it’ll offer us – you – some sort of protection when the ordinary troops arrive. Once the battle’s over, I’ll find someone senior to approach.’
‘That sounds good,’ Effi agreed. When they woke up that morning, she had half expected him to set off in search of Paul.
‘I thought about heading over to the Zoo Bunker,’ he said, as if reading her mind. ‘But even if I got there safely, and no one arrested me on the spot, what could I do? I can’t order Paul to come home. He’s not fourteen anymore, and he’ll have a much better idea of the situation down there than I have. If he wants to desert, and he thinks he can get away with it, then he will.’
‘He has this address,’ Effi reminded him.
It was soon after eleven in the morning that an overheard conversation in the soldiers’ canteen pointed Paul in the direction of escape. There were, it seemed, over five hundred corpses in the two towers, not to mention a vast and growing collection of amputated limps. All needed burying, but finding men willing to leave the safety of the walls and dig the necessary graves, while Soviet gunners cratered and re-cratered the area concerned, was far from easy. Why risk the living for the dead?, was most people’s response to any such request.
A few thought differently. Some were claustrophobic, others beaten by the smell or undone by the stress of waiting. Some, like Paul, saw no point in dying to defend a last fortress when everything else was lost. If they were going to die, then better to die outside, where at least you could move and breathe. And where there was always the chance you might slip through a crack and keep on living.
There were around twenty of them all told, lined up outside the packed mortuary with rags across their nostrils to keep out the appalling smell. Each pair carried a bloody stretcher, but Paul, finding himself odd man out, was given two large sacks of arms, legs and heads to carry. He tried to keep the sacks off the ground, but they were simply too heavy, and once outside the walls he settled for dragging them across the grass.
The plot chosen for the burials was just to the north of the Zoo, around two hundred metres from the Gun Tower, but no one had thought to bring digging implements. A few men went back for them, and while Paul and the others awaited their return a shell struck the Control Tower, gouging a hole a metre deep in a wall three times as thick. He supposed the towers might eventually be battered into submission, but the food would run out long before that.
All the men were privates or corporals, and the only deterrents to walking off were peer pressure and a calculation that life on the streets would prove even more hazardous than life in the tower. Paul had intended burying his two sacks, but as more and more minutes went by with no sign of spades, he felt his sense of obligation fade. When others started back towards the tower, leaving their stretchered corpses on the grass, he abandoned his own bag of body-parts and hurried off towards the nearest bridge across the Landwehrkanal.
It was broken, and so, he could see, was the next one up. He retraced his steps and headed for the Zoo, whose geography he knew by heart from many childhood visits. Using one of several new gaps in the boundary wall, he worked his way between wrecked cages and cratered enclosures in the general direction of the nearby railway station. Several eviscerated antelopes were spread across one area, and a dead hippopotamus was floating in the pool. A few yards further on, he almost tripped over a human corpse, a man with a Slavic face in a tattered suit. They were about the same size, and Paul hesitated for a moment, considering a switch of clothes. He was, he realised, reluctant to shed his uniform. He told himself he’d be safer with than without it – if the SS caught him in civilian clothes they wouldn’t waste time with questions.
Walking on, he found another convenient gap in the boundary wall and emerged onto the road that ran alongside the railway embankment. Zoo Station’s glass roof was gone, or rather it was dispersed in a million shards. On the far pavement a group of civilians were walking eastward in close formation, like an advancing rugby scrum. Paul crunched his way across the square where he’d often met his father, and turned up Hardenberg Strasse. The railway bridge was still standing, but a gaping hole showed through the tracks.
The occasional plane flew low overhead, and only seconds went by without a shell exploding somewhere nearby, but today he felt strangely immune. It was ridiculous, he knew – maybe the concussion had left him with delusions of invincibility. Maybe the Führer had received a bang on the head in the First War. It would explain a lot.
He heard himself laugh on the empty street, and felt the sting of tears. ‘No one survives a war,’ Gerhart had told him once.
There was a barricade up ahead, so Paul headed back down to Kant Strasse. At the farthermost end of the long straight street a tattoo of sparks split the gloom. Muzzle flashes, he thought. The Russians were closer than he’d expected.
He worked his way around Savignyplatz, turned the corner into Grolman Strasse, and came to an abrupt halt. On the far side of the street, around thirty metres in front of him, a tall SS Obersturmführer was facing away from him, holding a rifle. His uniform seemed stunningly black amidst the ash and the dust, his boots insultingly shiny. Red hair peeked out from the rear of his cap.