The ambulances were loaded and ready to go, but Russell decided he had seen enough. Effi's flat was only a ten minute walk away, hidden away in a backstreet, and as far as he could tell, the organizers of this particular exercise were going for large squares and maximum publicity. He chatted to a few evacuated residents outside the KaDeWe until the all-clear sounded, then headed up Tauenzien-Strasse to the Kaiser Memorial Church. As he crossed the eastern end of the Ku'damm he stopped in the centre and stared up the long, arrow-straight avenue. A car was moving away in the distance; barely visible in the dim blue lights, it soon became one with the shadows.
No ARP wardens came knocking at Effi's door, but the Luftwaffe's continuing antics made for a restless night. He was probably imagining it, but many of his fellow-Berliners looked distinctly bleary-eyed as they waited at tram stops on their journey to work. Not everyone had been inconvenienced, of course - Hitler had been enjoying Tristan and Isolde at far-off Bayreuth while the capital rehearsed. And Soviet Ambassador Astakhov, as Russell learned from Jack Slaney, had been wined and dined by Ribbentrop's East European chief, Julius Schnurre, until the early hours.
'Where?' Russell asked.
'Ewest's.'
'They must mean business then,' Russell said dryly. The restaurant on Be-hren-Strasse was one of Berlin's finest.
'You can bet that street didn't get bombed,' Slaney said in a similar tone.
'Anyone know what was discussed?'
Slaney shook his head. 'The trade guy Barbarin was there too, so maybe just that. They all seemed really chummy though, according to one of the waiters.'
'Another straw in the wind,' Russell murmured.
'Or on the camel's back,' Slaney suggested.
Russell headed back to Neuenburger Strasse to write up his ARP exercise article. The smooth modern typewriter he'd inherited from Tyler McKinley was at Effi's place, but he still preferred the brutal mechanics of his old one. Another consequence of living in Nazi Germany - you only felt you were getting somewhere if physical violence was involved.
The ARP exercise had spared Neuenburger Strasse, much to the dismay of both Beiersdorfer and Frau Heidegger. The former was only now removing the black-out sheets from the communal hallway, and both were eager to hear Russell's account of his attachment to one of the mobile units. Frau Heidegger seemed horrified by what she heard, and was only slightly mollified by Beiersdorfer's assurance that London, not Berlin, would be on the receiving end of such bombing raids.
Russell left them to their optimism, and went up to his rooms. He took almost three hours over the article - it was his first major piece for the Tribune and he wanted it to be good. After lunching at the bar under the Hallesches Tor Station he drove back into the old city and sent the story off.
Next stop was the Alex. The duty officer in Room 512 searched through a pile of refused Protectorate visa applications for Russell's, and deduced from its non-appearance that the refusal had not yet been put to paper. When Russell suggested that his application might have been accepted, the man opened a drawer to demonstrate its emptiness, only to find a single waiting permit. He examined it for several seconds, and finally passed it over.
Russell drove back across the river to the American Express office on Charlotten-Strasse. A couple of months earlier a German friend had told him that first class travellers - like army officers and government officials - were allowed to sleep through the border checks, provided they handed their documents over to the carriage attendant with a decent tip. And after his traumas at the same border in March that seemed like a really good deal, especially if the Tribune was paying.
As it happened, the American Express office could sell him a first class ticket and book him into a hotel, but the sleeper reservation required a trip to Anhalter Station.
By the time he got back to the Adlon bar it was gone five. Noticing Dick Normanton hard at work at a corner table, Russell bought him a whiskey. 'Anything I should know?' he asked, placing the glass down on the polished wooden surface.
'Thanks,' Normanton said wryly, and took a sip. 'Just between us,' he said. 'I don't want my fellow Brits to get wind of this.'
'My lips are sealed.'
'Have you heard of Ernest Tennant?'
'English businessman. Friend of Ribbentrop's, impossible as that seems.'
Normanton smirked. 'Not so much these days. Tennant's just been visiting Ribbentrop's castle...'
'The one he stole by putting the owner in Dachau?'
'Do you want to hear this story or not?'
Russell raised his palms in surrender.
'They arrived in Berlin together this afternoon - Ribbentrop had his two private coaches attached to the express from Munich. Tennant came straight here, and I had a chat with him in his hotel room.'
'You know him?'
'My owner does, and Tennant told him he was seeing Ribbentrop. Reading between the lines, I'd say he was hoping to emerge as a peacemaker, but ready to put some distance between himself and the Nazis if Ribbentrop refused to play ball. Which of course he did. Told Tennant that Hitler was the greatest human being since Mohammed, and then started back-tracking when he realized the implication - that the Fuhrer was less important than a mere Arab.'
'The usual nonsense.'
'Exactly. The important part came later. On the train here Tennant got talking to Walther Hewel - know who he is?'
'Hitler's liaison with Ribbentrop, or is it the other way round?'
'Both, I suppose. Anyway, his take on the current situation - and we assume Adolf's - is that Chamberlain and Co. rushed into guaranteeing Poland without really thinking it through, and that they're now desperately looking for a face-saving way out. The Germans think that Hudson's Howler was just the first of many trial balloons, that when push comes to shove the British will provide themselves with some sort of excuse not to fight.'
'Which is bad news.'
'For everybody. The Poles because they'll get squashed, the Germans and the British because they'll find themselves at war with each other without really wanting to.'
'Happy days.'
'Thanks for the drink.'
Russell played poker with several American colleagues that evening, and gave Jack Slaney a lift home in the small hours. They stopped at the all night kiosk in Alexanderplatz for sobering coffees and early editions of the morning papers. 'What did I tell you?' Slaney asked after a few moments with the Beobachter. He folded the paper in half and pushed it under Russell's nose, and jabbed a finger at the editorial. Danzig, it seemed, was no longer enough. Real peace, the editor announced, would require a Polish willingness to discuss self-determination in the Corridor, in the lost provinces, in Upper Silesia. Would require Poland to lie on its back and wave its arms and legs in the air.
'They think they're pushing at an open door,' Slaney said.
'Yes,' Russell agreed, thinking about his talk earlier with Dick Normanton. 'Question is, will it slam shut behind them?'
'You Brits will fight, but your government sure as hell doesn't want to. They should be trying to scare the Germans, not reassure them. And if Ribbentrop's wining and dining Astakhov then they should be taking Stalin out for a meal.'
'He'd probably eat them.'
Slaney laughed, and the two of them sat there drinking their coffee, staring out across the dimly-lit square.
The following morning, soon after eleven, Russell arrived for his appointment at the Soviet Embassy. The thin-lipped Sasha answered the door, and the usual receptionist ignored him while Gorodnikov was appraised of his presence. Up in the office overlooking the boulevard he found the attache fanning himself with a sheaf of papers.