Potsdam Station by David Downing Read Free Book Online Page A

my family. Can you understand that?
    Leselidze shrugged. ‘We all wish to protect our families,’ he said blandly. ‘But I fail to see how helping you protect yours will benefit the Soviet Union.’
    ‘Because I have something to offer in exchange,’ Russell told him.
    ‘What?’
    ‘My knowledge of Berlin. Whatever your generals need to know, I can tell them. Where everything is, the best roads, the vantage points. I can save Russian lives in exchange for my family’s.’
    Even to Russell himself, it sounded dreadfully thin.
    ‘I would be very surprised if we did not already possess this information,’ Leselidze told him. ‘I will of course pass your offer to the relevant authorities, but I am certain that the answer will be no.’
     
    Alighting from the tram at her Bismarck Strasse stop, Effi checked that her building was still standing. Reassured, she scanned the rest of the wide street for fresh bomb damage. None was apparent. The smoke still rising away to the north-west suggested that the latest British attacks had fallen on that area of the city, where many of the larger war industries were situated. Which made for a pleasant change.
    She walked up to their second-floor apartment, feeling the tiredness in her legs. She also felt emotionally numb. Had she grown accustomed to living with fear, or more adept at suppressing her feelings? Was there a difference? She was too tired to care.
    Ali wasn’t home, but a note on the kitchen table promised she’d be back by four. There was no mention of where she was, which caused Effi a pang of probably unnecessary anxiety. For all her youth, Ali was never careless of her own safety, and only the previous day had lectured Effi on the importance of not growing over-confident. It would be so terrible to fall at the very last hurdle, after all they’d been through.
    Ali had left her some soup in a saucepan, but there was no gas, and Effi didn’t feel hungry enough to eat it cold. She nibbled on a piece of bread instead, and walked through to her bedroom, thinking she’d lie down for however long it took the Americans to arrive overhead. It would probably make more sense to go straight downstairs, but the idea of spending any unnecessary time in the basement shelter was less than appealing.
    She lay down on the bed, closed her eyes, and wondered what Ali would do after the war. Marrying Fritz would be a good start, and no less than she deserved. The girl had lost so much – her parents deported and presumably killed, her first boyfriend the same – but she’d grown into such a resourceful young woman. She had certainly saved Effi’s own life. When the two fugitives had run into each other in the Uhlandeck Café in June 1942, it had been Ali who had put Effi in touch with the forger Schönhaus, and he who had documented the fake identity that had served her ever since.
    Where was he, she wondered. In 1943, he’d been recognised and almost caught by one of the Jewish greifer – ‘catchers’ – that the Gestapo employed, and had taken off for Switzerland. No one had ever heard from him again, which was probably good news – if the Gestapo had caught him, they would have gloated. His story would make a good film, she thought. A final pan-out filling the screen with Alps…
    She was woken by the air-raid sirens. Was she imagining it, or were they sounding increasingly the worse for wear? How many air raids did the average siren last?
    She walked quickly downstairs, out across the rear courtyard and down the narrow stairway to the large basement shelter which served her own building and four others. There had sometimes been as many as a hundred and fifty people camped out down there, but lately there seemed about half that. The Volkssturm call-up and evacuation programme had taken most of the remaining men and children, and several women had fallen prey to the bombing. Many of the latter had recently lost a husband or son, and had, in their grief, stopped taking any