Next morning they took their usual breakfast in the Tiergarten, and Russell announced that he was probably going to spend a few days in Silesia. 'For the paper,' he added. 'And I'm going to look up Miriam's family. I'll probably be back on Thursday. '
'I've been invited to something that evening,' Effi told him, then hesitated.
'What?' Russell prompted.
'A social gathering,' she said. 'Maybe something more. A friend has asked me to meet some people.'
'Who?'
She hesitated again. 'Christiane.'
Russell looked blank.
'My astrologer.'
'Ah.'
'She's not as wacky as you think she is.'
'That's a relief.'
She gave him the chandelier look. 'I'm going to go.'
'And I'm not invited?'
'No,' she said. 'We agreed to keep these things separate.'
'We did.'
'I can meet you afterwards. It'll be over by nine, I should think.'
Russell didn't like it, but knew he was being unreasonable.
They both sat in silence for a minute or more. It was a lovely warm morning, a breeze shifting the leaves of the trees, the ducks going about their business on the miniature lake. The smell of fresh coffee wafted out from the cafe behind them, the only sounds a train on the distant Stadtbahn and the rustle of morning papers.
'All this,' Effi said. 'It's hard to imagine it ending.'
Russell's first task on Monday was to check that the crisis in Danzig had really blown over. It had. The main item of news in the morning papers was a train accident in Potsdam. The crossing keeper had lifted the gates after a passenger train passed through, only for a goods train to follow. Seven had been killed, the keeper arrested.
He wired San Francisco that he was heading for Breslau and drove back to Neuenburger Strasse. There was another message for Dagmar by the telephone - 'Siggi wants an explanation!!!' in Frau Heidegger's boldest capitals. The portierfrau herself was nowhere to be seen, so Russell left a brief note explaining his absence and walked down to Hallesches Tor in search of a cab.
On reaching Silesian Station he found that the next express to Breslau was not for an hour. He sat drinking coffee on the concourse, wondering if Miriam had ever been there. He kept a look-out for men with grey hair and black eyebrows, but none appeared.
Silesian Angels
Russell had considered driving the 450 kilometres to the Polish border - the autobahn would, after all, have carried him two-thirds of the way - but finding petrol in Silesia might prove difficult, and there was always the chance that some jumped-up uniform on manoeuvres would choose to commandeer the car. Still, as his train slipped further and further behind schedule he began to wish that he had risked it. Passages of exhilarating speed were few and far between; the train spent most of its time either advancing at a steady crawl or wearily hissing to a complete stop.
He had planned to spend the night in the border town of Beuthen, but on arrival in a rapidly-darkening Breslau he and his fellow-passengers were informed that the train's onward journey would be subject to delay. The sight of their decoupled locomotive heading off into the gloom was disheartening, and enquiries at the booking office offered no compensatory encouragement. Russell decided he would rather spend the night in a hotel.
Others had already reached the same conclusion, and the taxi rank outside the station was empty. Asking after trams, he was told that the city centre was only a ten-minute walk away. 'Past the Party House,' the kiosk holder told him, pointing up the street towards a building draped with the usual giant swastikas, 'and turn right.'
Darkness had fallen, and the dimly-lit streets seemed strangely empty for nine in the evening. As he walked his spirits seemed to lift, and he realized that he usually felt safer outside Berlin. Why was that? Because he felt safer in motion? Or because he had only himself to worry about?
The first hotel he came to was the Monopol. The name was familiar, and he soon found out why - a placard attached to the wall in reception proudly announced that Hitler had stayed the night in 1932. The room in question had doubtless been preserved in all its Fuhrer-scented glory, complete with pubic hairs trapped in amber and sheets for sniffing.
His own first floor room was small, but included a private bathroom. After testing the bed for bounce he went back down to the bar, which was almost as empty as the streets. Two men in suits dourly acknowledged his greeting and turned their attention back to their schnapps. Russell tried engaging the barman in conversation, but all attempts to elicit a quotable opinion about anything more serious than football proved fruitless. He left his beer unfinished, ordered an early wake-up call at reception, and wearily climbed the stairs to his room.
He was out of the hotel soon after seven the following morning, having reserved a room for two nights hence. It was another blue sky day, and the sun had long since risen above the thin line of mountains to the south. Russell couldn't recall a better summer, and remembered that that was what everyone had said about 1914. The 'wonderful summer before the war.'
Over coffee and rolls in the station restaurant he scanned the papers for something to follow up, and found exactly what he was looking for. Both carried virtually identical accounts of a border incident the previous day. Polish provocateurs had crossed the border some ten kilometres north-west of Beuthen and attacked a German farmer and his family in the village of Ble-chowka. The farmer had been badly beaten, his wife subjected to unspeakable - but unspecified - indignities. How much longer, the editors asked, could the Reich put up with such outrageous behaviour from its eastern neighbour? About a month, if Slaney was right.
Russell finished his coffee and looked up at the clock above the departure board. He had half an hour to spare - time to do a little preliminary checking. There was a man named Josef Mohlmann on the list which Russell had memorized in New York, and he worked for the railway administration here in Breslau. Half an hour should be long enough to find the building.
In the event, it took only a couple of minutes. A convenient official gave Russell the necessary information - the Reichsbahn Direktion building was only a short walk away, on the other side of the station. He walked through the tunnel and found it without difficulty - a five-storey stone block the size of a small football pitch. Six huge statues were perched high above the colon-naded entrance, three of which bore striking resemblances to Jesus, Cortez and Britannia. All of whom seemed somewhat unlikely subjects.
It was almost eight o'clock, and a steady stream of suited workers was pouring in through the front doors. His target might be one of them, but Russell had no time to introduce himself that morning. He would pay Mohlmann a visit when he got back from the border.
He walked back down the tunnel and up the steps to an empty Platform 3. A short train was soon shunted into the station for Russell and the handful of other passengers. Soon they were out of Breslau and chugging south-eastward towards Oppeln through fields of golden grain. Several rakes of empty tank transporters were stabled in country sidings, but the tanks themselves were nowhere to be seen.
The landscape slowly grew more hilly, and soon after noon the first pits of the Silesian coalfield loomed into view. The train stopped for several minutes in Gleiwitz, then ran on towards Beuthen and the eighteen-year-old border between Germany and Poland, stretches of forest alternating with straggling mining villages.
Before 1918 Gleiwitz, Beuthen, Konigshutte and Kattowitz had been the four principal towns of German Upper Silesia, but once the new borders had been established by the Versailles peace-makers and a local plebiscite, the latter two - along with 80 per cent of the coal mines and industrial installations - had found themselves in Poland. Beuthen had been spared, but now lay in a narrow and decidedly vulnerable finger of German territory. To the north, east and south the Polish border lay less than three kilometres away.