Effi was long gone when he woke. After a quick breakfast at the Cafe Kranzler he stopped off at the Propaganda and Foreign Ministries to see if any briefings were scheduled for the day - there were none. He found out why from Slaney, who was downing his usual milky coffee in the Adlon breakfast room. 'The bastards have had their bluff called,' the American said jubilantly. 'The Nazis in Danzig issued the Poles with an ultimatum, and the Poles issued one right back. The Nazi leader blustered for a bit, the Poles held firm, and he just threw in the towel. Last thing I heard he was trying to convince the Poles that the original ultimatum was a hoax.'
'So it's all blown over.'
'Looks like it. For the moment anyway. I don't imagine Adolf will let things lie for long.'
'Have you wired it off already?'
'No point. "Small crisis in Danzig fizzles out" isn't much of a headline, is it?'
'True.' Russell got up to go. 'I'm off to find some petrol.'
'Good luck.'
As he started up the Hanomag, Russell had an idea. 'You're going home,' he told the car, directing it up Luisen-Strasse towards Invaliden-Strasse. A short drive through the maze of industrial backstreets beyond Lehrter Station brought him to the garage owned by Zembski's cousin Hunder, where he had bought the Hanomag six months earlier.
The garage yard was full of automobiles, most of them taxis. A line of lorries was parked along the far wall, under the noxious cloud of smoke provided by the adjoining locomotive depot. Hunder was doing sums in his office, small piles of bills rising from his desk and floor like ancient stones.
He greeted Russell with evident relief, and an apparently bountiful supply of petrol. Since they were friends, he would let the Englishman have a full tank at only twice the usual price.
Russell grinned and accepted - what else were expenses for? Outside, Hunder summoned one of his young apprentices to siphon fuel from the nearest taxis.
'What are they all doing here?' Russell asked.
Hunder smiled. 'In for repair, every last one of them.'
Russell got it. 'And they'll all be ready for the road the moment the manoeuvres end.'
'What a cynic you are.'
Ten minutes later he was on his way. A tap on the fuel gauge brought it springing to attention, like a fourteen-year-old in a brothel, as his old sergeant had used to say.
Berlin's other motorists seemed to be conserving their fuel, and the trip out to Dahlem took him less than half an hour. Thomas was digging in the garden, and as grateful for the interruption as Hunder had been. He took Russell into his study, poured them both a generous glass of schnapps, and listened, with increasing anger, to his friend's account of the final meeting with Kuzorra.
'What can have happened to her?' he said when Russell was finished. 'I can understand her falling prey to some criminal, but that wouldn't explain the police threatening Kuzorra.'
'Here's his bill, by the way,' Russell said, fishing it out of his pocket and handing it over.
Thomas looked at it briefly, and put it to one side. 'What more can we do?' he asked. 'Find another detective?'
'We could try.'
'Whatever we do, we should do it discreetly. I don't want the Kripo out at the factory. Or here come to that.'
'We could give up,' Russell said. 'It would be the sensible thing to do. One girl, who may or may not be in trouble.'
'That's just it,' Thomas said. 'I've been wondering why I care so much about what happened to this girl. It's because she is just one girl. Not a nation or a race or a class - I've given up thinking that we could save any of those, but surely we should be able to save one person. Or at least give it a damn good try.'
His ex-brother-in-law never ceased to surprise Russell. 'All right,' he said.
'Another detective?'
Russell thought about it. 'Not yet. You still haven't heard anything from her family?'
'Not a word.'
'I'm going to Silesia for work,' Russell said, having just decided as much. His paper wanted him there, so why not take the opportunity? 'I'll go and see the family, see if they can provide any clues. There may be other relatives or friends in Berlin that we know nothing about - something as simple as that.'
Thomas doubted it, but agreed it was worth trying. Driving on to Grunewald to collect Paul, Russell tried to put Miriam Rosenfeld out of his mind. He understood - even shared - Thomas's reasons for wanting to find her, but the task itself might be beyond them.
His son opened the door of the Grunewald home in his Jungvolk uniform, Ilse hovering behind him. 'I've just got back,' he said. 'I need to get this glue off my hands,' he added, holding them for inspection before shooting off upstairs.
'They've been making model planes all morning,' Ilse told Russell. 'It's one of the things he likes about the Jungvolk.'
'He likes a lot of it. Everything but the propaganda, really.'
'I think they're all bored by that. Paul has a whole pile of information folders in his bedroom, but I don't think he's read any of them.'
'Good.'
'They don't know what they think at that age. Paul has that badge he got at the World's Fair pinned above his bed - "I have seen the future".'
'I saw it in New York,' Paul said, rattling down the stairs. 'I got most of it off,' he added, meaning the glue.
Paul wanted to go boating on the Havelsee, an ambition shared by several thousand others. The queue for a boat was interminable, but out on the wide lake water their fellow-Berliners were soon left behind, mere dots in the distance, barely discernible against the wooded shorelines. Russell had hired a hat to shade himself, and when Paul insisted on rowing he sat back and watched as his Jungvolk-uniformed son came to grips with the oars. He was getting older, Russell thought. A trite realization perhaps, but one with some meaning. The trip to America had given the boy something, and the return to Germany hadn't taken it away.
He asked Paul about the Jungvolk meeting, but all the boy wanted to talk about was the World's Fair. 'Remember the Life Savers tower?' he enthused, referring to the 250-foot parachute hoist they'd both gone up in. The plunge before the chute opened had certainly taken several years off Russell's life. At the moment of release he'd been reading the quote from Lenin which topped the Soviet exhibit, and had been left with the impression that the bottom had suddenly fallen out of socialism.
'And Elektro,' Paul said, 'wasn't he fantastic?'
The Westinghouse robot had been amazing, though teaching him to smoke seemed a poor use for futuristic technology. General Motors' Futurama had been just as incredible - a gigantic scale model that took fifteen minutes to traverse in a moving armchair - but its vision of express highways policed by radio towers seemed less than heart-warming. Russell had agreed with Walter Lippman's assertion that the Fair demonstrated man's inability 'to be wise as he is intelligent, to be as good as he is great.' When Russell had showed his son the relevant article in the Herald Tribune, Paul had given him a withering look and said, 'I bet he didn't go up on the Life Saver.'
When Russell got back to Effi's he found her wearing the red dress he'd brought back from America. 'I feel like dancing,' she said, and after a quick snack in the Old Town they scoured the streets around Alexanderplatz for a suitable venue. Before the Nazis there had been a dozen dance halls in the area, some boasting orchestras with a real feel for the new American jazz. Six years on, the pickings were much slimmer, but they found one joint under the Stadtbahn station with a floor and a band that were just about passable. It was full when they arrived and kept getting fuller, but both were laughing with exhilaration when they left two hours later. Berlin had life in it yet.