'Why not? It's dark enough.'
Their persistence was rewarded. As the Hanomag drew level with the house the front door swung inwards, spilling yellow light down the steps to the street, and framing two uniformed men. There was a glimpse of shiny boots descending, a muffled shout of farewell. Effi twisted round in her seat to catch them under the streetlight and identify the black uniforms. 'SS,' she said, turning the consonants into a hiss.
'What a surprise,' Russell murmured. 'And emerging, unless I'm very much mistaken, from a brothel.'
'Oh no.'
'It could be a lot worse. If it is a brothel, then there's a good chance that Miriam is still alive.'
Russell woke early on Saturday morning, shut the door on the still-sleeping Effi , and waited heart in mouth as her People's Radio warmed up. When the strains of one of Beethoven's lighter sonatas emerged, he clicked off the set with a sigh of relief. No war had begun.
He went down to the Adlon to find out why.
According to the small coterie of American journalists already gathered in the bar, the answer was far from obvious. There were rumours that Mussolini had abandoned his buddy, rumours that Hitler had offered to guarantee the British Empire in return for a free hand in eastern Europe. If the latter rumours were true the Fuhrer had already had his answer - the previous afternoon the Brits and Poles had finally formalized the British guarantee as a pact of mutual assistance.
All in all, it looked as though Hitler had pulled back from the brink. The British Ambassador had travelled to London, presumably with something new to communicate, and the telephone and telegraph connections with the outside word had been restored in the early hours of the morning. Berlin's foreign press corps could again tell the world that they hadn't a clue what was going on.
There were no Foreign Office briefings to help them out, no press releases to interpret. Russell telephoned several contacts, all of whom proved less than communicative. His colleagues had much the same experience - German officials, it seemed, were loth to confirm or deny the dates of their own birthdays. Russell wrote out his version of what was happening and wired it off, aware that it would be overtaken by events long before it reached the newspaper bins around San Francisco's Union Square.
He had lunch with Slaney - who, for the first time since Russell had met him, seemed subdued by the weight of events - and headed out to Grune-wald for his Saturday afternoon with Paul. The boy was waiting by the gate, dressed, for once, in normal clothes.
'No Jungvolk meeting?' Russell asked as his son got into the car.
'Yes, there was, but it ended early. I had time to change.'
He'd had time before, and hadn't changed, but Russell decided not to probe. 'What shall we do?'
'Can we just go for a drive? Out of the city, I mean. Take a walk in the woods or something.'
'All right.' Russell thought for a moment. 'How about the Brauhausberg?' he asked. They could take the Avus Speedway most of the way, and take one of the southbound exits before Potsdam.
'That would be good,' Paul agreed, though without a great deal of enthusiasm. 'If America comes into the war, will you be arrested?' he asked abruptly.
Russell waited at a crossroads while a line of troop lorries drove past. 'No, I'd just have to leave Germany. Like the British and French journalists have done.'
'They've left already?' Paul blurted out, obviously surprised.
'On Thursday, most of them. The rest yesterday. But they may be back. And in any case, there's no chance of America coming into the war. You really don't need to worry about me.'
'Joachim's already gone,' Paul said.
'When?'
'A few days ago.'
'Where?'
'They won't tell the families that,' Paul said, sounding surprised at his father's stupidity.
'No, no, of course not.' He wondered how Thomas and Hanna were coping with their son's call-up. He should have phoned them.
They were on the Speedway now, and Russell was surprised by the volume of traffic. Cars full of families heading out for a day in the sunshine, anywhere beyond the reach of their radios and the city's loudspeakers. If they didn't get the dreadful news until evening, then that was one more day of peace they'd grabbed from their government.
'Do you think England will really go to war for Danzig?' Paul wanted to know.
'I think they'll stand by Poland.'
'But why? Danzig is German. And it's not England's fight.'
'Maybe not. But the English can't break their word again. And it's not about Danzig. Not really.' He expected Paul to ask what it really was about, but he didn't. He already knew.
'We've been doing a project on the victory in Spain,' Paul said, 'and how important the Luftwaffe was. They'll bomb London, won't they?'
'I expect so.'
'And the English air force will bomb us.'
'Yes.'
Paul was silent for more than a minute, looking out of the window and, Russell guessed, picturing a sky full of English bombers. 'It will be terrible, won't it?' Paul said eventually, as if he'd suddenly realized what a war could do.
Russell didn't know whether to be glad or sad.
'You never talk about your war,' Paul said almost accusingly. 'I used to think it was because you fought for England and you didn't want to upset people here, but it's not that, is it?'
'No, it's not.' He wondered what he should say, what he could say to a twelve-year-old boy and have him understand it. The truth, he supposed. 'It's because, in a war, you see what damage people can do to each other.' He paused for breath, like a man about to walk through fire. 'Exploding bodies,' he said deliberately, 'limbs torn off, more blood than you can imagine. The look in a man's eyes when he knows he's about to die. The smell of rotting human flesh. People without a scratch whose minds will never be the same again. The constant fear that it'll happen to you. The terrible knowledge that you'd rather it happened to anyone else.' He breathed in again. 'These are not things you want to remember, let alone share.' He glanced sideways to check Paul's reaction, and saw, for the first time, pity in his son's eyes.
What have I done? Russell asked himself, but over the next couple of hours, as the two of them walked and talked their way along the wooded paths of the Brauhausberg, Paul seemed more his usual self, as if some sort of burden had been lifted. Or perhaps it was just the sunshine though the leaves, the birdsong and the leaping squirrels, the mere insistence of life. There was no way the boy could have any real notion of the enormity of what was coming, and perhaps that was a blessing. Sometimes knowledge set you free, as one old comrade used to say, but sometimes it locked you up.
During the hours with his son Russell hardly spared a thought for Miriam Rosenfeld or 403 Eisenacher Strasse. Effi , he discovered on reaching home, had not been so fortunate. She had set aside the afternoon for evaluating a film script - an ensemble piece about soldier's wives in Berlin during the Great War - but had found the necessary concentration hard to come by. 'I can't stop thinking about her,' she said angrily. 'It's driving me crazy. I'm sure there are people being beaten to death in the concentration camps all the time, but they don't haunt me. Maybe they should, but they don't. Nor do all the children starving in Africa. But I can't stop thinking about one girl in a Schoneberg brothel. I can't get her out of my mind.'
Russell poured the two of them a drink.
'And you know what else I realized,' she continued. 'They're Jews. The girls will all be Jews. Jews for the SS to fuck.'
'Maybe.'
'No, definitely. Don't you see? Blonde is good. Blonde is worthy. Blonde is about pure love and motherhood and child-breeding. There's no place for pleasure in any of that, no sensuality. It's all about duty. Dark, on the other hand, is bad and dirty and unworthy. Dark is all about pleasure. I see the way most of these creeps look at me, as if I must be able to give them something they can't get at home. And Jewish girls are the darkest of the dark, the ultimate forbidden fruit. Who would the SS want more?'