David Downing - Zero Station

The next thing he knew he was waking with a sudden feeling of panic. He looked at his watch. Almost three hours had passed-they had to be nearing the frontier. But that didn’t matter anymore, he told himself. His subconscious was obviously stuck on the outward journey.

And then it occurred to him. He had never closed the false bottom. After Borskaya had gone he had just shifted the suitcase onto the floor, and this morning he had simply shoveled all the clothes back in.

The thought of another wrestle with a suitcase in a toilet made him groan, but it had to be done. He took it down from the overhead rack, and carried it out to the vestibule at the end of the car. Shading his eyes with his hands, and sticking his face up against the window, he could just make out the river running beside the tracks.

Inside the toilet he opened the suitcase, threw all the clothes on the floor, and went to close the false bottom.

It was already closed.

He stood there for a few moments, thinking back. When had he done it?

He hadn’t.

Clicking it open, he found several sheets of paper hidden inside. Holding the first one up to the dim light of the cubicle, he found that it contained a list of names and addresses-six under Ruhr, three under Hamburg. The other sheets-there were nine of them-followed a similar pattern. There were almost a hundred people listed, from all the different parts of Germany.

Who were they? No indication was given, none at all. But one thing was certain-the Soviets meant them to be discovered. That was why Borskaya had asked him when he was leaving, Russell thought-they had been inserted while he was downstairs at breakfast or out posting McKinley’s papers. That was why she’d accepted his resignation so easily. And the money-that worked both ways. Such generosity might keep him working for them, but if it didn’t, so much foreign currency would be hard to explain.

The names, he realized, had to be German communists-real or imaginary. Were these men and women whom Stalin wanted culled, but who were beyond his reach? Or was the list a work of fiction, something to keep the Gestapo busy while the real communists got on with their work? A bit of both, Russell guessed. A few real communists to keep the Gestapo believing, and then the wild goose chase.

He shivered at the nearness of his escape, and realized that the train was slowing down. He shoved the suitcase to the floor, yanked up the lid of the toilet, and started tearing the sheets of paper into smaller and smaller pieces. Once these were all in the bowl he reached for the lever, filled with the sudden dread that it wouldn’t work.

It didn’t. As beads of cold sweat multiplied on his forehead, Russell worked the lever again. It coughed up some water, but nowhere near enough.

There was a heavy knock on the door. “We are approaching the frontier,” a German voice said.

“Right,” Russell shouted back. What should he do? Try and swallow all the bits of paper, along with whatever international germs the toilet bowl had been saving for him? Anything but that.

The train was still decelerating. He looked for some access to the toilet’s workings, but everything was screwed down. He tried the lever one more time, more out of habit than hope, and for reasons known only to God it flushed. He stood there, reveling in the sight of empty water, until sweet relief gave way to a nightmare vision of Gestapo officers combing the tracks for all the pieces and painstakingly gluing them back together.

“Get a grip,” he murmured to himself. He picked up the suitcase, clicked the false bottom shut, and covered it with clothing retrieved from the floor. As he left the toilet he caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror, and wished he hadn’t. He looked deranged.

The train was still moving, the lighted platform of the Czech border point unrolling past the window. It was snowing now, thick flakes drifting down through the cones of light. “We are not stopping at the Czech crossing point tonight,” the German railway official was saying to a female passenger. No Czechoslovakia, no border, Russell thought. Did that mean they were not stopping at the German border either?

No such luck.

The passengers decanted onto the platform, a long strip of spotlit tarmac in a sea of darkness. As Russell joined the line, a new and highly unwelcome thought occurred to him. If the sheets were meant to be found, there had to have been a tip-off. The false bottom might be empty, but it was still a false bottom.

One explanation seemed workable, but only if the officials on duty were different from the ones he had encountered the day before. As the queue sucked him out of the snow and into the building, he anxiously examined the faces, but there were none he recognized.

The immigration official took one look at his passport and gestured to a man in plain clothes behind him. Gestapo. “This way, Herr Russell” the man said, without looking at his passport. He walked across to a large table, where another man in plain clothes was waiting.

“Put your suitcase on the table,” the first man said. He had long hair for the Gestapo, and an almost likable face. As he opened the suitcase, Russell noticed that his fingernails badly needed trimming.

“Could I have your name and rank?” Russell asked.

“Ascherl, Kriminalassistent,” he said without looking up.

He took out the clothes with more care than Russell had, and piled them on the other end of the table. Effi’s script was placed on the top. Then he ran his hands round the inside of the suitcase, obviously looking for a way of accessing the false bottom. Borskaya had been behind him when he opened it in the hotel room, Russell remembered.

“How do you open it?” Ascherl asked him.

Russell looked perplexed. “It’s open.”

“The hidden compartment,” the Gestapo officer said patiently.

Russell tried to look even more perplexed. “What are you talking about?”

Ascherl turned to his subordinate. “Your knife, Schneider.”

Schneider pulled out a large pocket-knife. Ascherl looked at the suitcase for a moment, ran his hand along inside it, then abruptly turned it upside down, pressed in the knife, and patiently sawed from one side of the bottom to the other. “This hidden compartment,” he said, reaching in a hand.

His look of triumph faded as his scrabbling hand failed to find anything in it. Two more cuts and he was able to wrench back a section of the reinforced leather bottom and shine a torch inside.

“Where is it?” he asked patiently.

“Where is what?” Russell replied, trying to sound bewildered. Most of the others in the room were watching them now, eager to see how the situation played out.

“Let me put it another way,” the Gestapo officer said. “What reason do you have for carrying a suitcase with a hidden compartment?”

“I didn’t know it had one. I only bought it yesterday, from a Jew in Prague.” He smiled, as if the answer had just occurred to him. “The bastard probably used it to smuggle valuables out of the Reich.”

“Undoubtedly,” Ascherl said.

Russell was still thanking heaven for his inspiration when he noticed a new face in the room-one of the customs officials from the day before. The man was looking straight at him, with an expression on his face that seemed part indignation, part amusement.

“But you are from Berlin,” Ascherl continued. “Did you travel to Prague without a suitcase?”

“It fell apart when I was there. I needed a new one.” Russell braced himself for an intervention by the customs official, but there was none.

“And this Jew just happened along?”

“No, there’s a market, like the ones they used to have in Berlin.” The customs official was still looking at him, still saying nothing. Was it possible that he didn’t remember this suitcase from the day before?