Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

From this point on, every minute counted.

Fegelein stood up and buttoned his tunic. ‘I’m going out!’ he shouted at the kitchen door, behind which Elsa Batz had taken refuge.

There was no reply.

Two minutes later, Fegelein was striding down the middle of the empty street, which was still littered with chunks of plaster and broken masonry from the most recent air raid, on his way to make his feelings known to Lilya Simonova.

When the droning all-clear sirens reached them in the bowels of the shelter, Kirov and Pekkala had shuffled up the stairs along with all the others, emerging into a night in which the air was filled with dust and a smell like burned electrical wiring from the super-ionised air caused by the detonation of high explosives.

No street lamps had been lit and people made their way about with torches, hands shielding the beams so that their fingers glowed like embers.

Bomb damage to roads along the way, some of which had been cordoned off by civilian air-raid volunteers, forced them to detour several times before they arrived at their destination.

Hunyadi’s three-storey building had sustained some damage, caused by what appeared to be one huge bomb, which had landed in the next street over, leaving a crater some 20 feet deep in the road. The houses on either side had tumbled back into themselves, exposing rooms where beds perched precariously at the edge of splintered floorboard cliffs and clocks still hung upon the walls.

Hunyadi’s apartment building appeared structurally sound, although some of the upper windows were broken, and the main doors had been wrenched off their hinges.

Pekkala looked at the little array of mail boxes located just outside the door until he found Hunyadi’s name and flat number. As he and Kirov made their way inside, they received suspicious glances from some of the inhabitants, but nobody spoke to them. Like Hunyadi at the entrance to the air-raid shelter, the tenants had quickly reached the conclusion that two men in plain clothes wandering the halls of their building could only be members of the secret police.

Hunyadi’s room was at the end of the corridor on the second floor.

Pekkala knocked quietly on the door, but there was no answer.

After waiting until the hallway was empty, Kirov forced the lock and the two men drew their guns as they entered the flat.

The room was clean but the furnishings had all seen better days. In the tiny kitchen, a pot of cold ersatz coffee, black as tar and smelling of chicory root, lay on the single gas ring on the stove. One cream-coloured enamel cup and a matching bowl, its blue rim chipped around the edges, lay in a wooden drying rack beside the sink. With the exception of a few pictures he saw hanging on the wall, which showed Hunyadi at various police gatherings, each one with a date ranging from the 1920s to the late 1930s, Pekkala realised that the flat was almost as spartanly furnished as his own place back in Moscow.

Kirov was thinking the same thing. ‘At least it looks like he sleeps in the bed,’ he remarked, ‘instead of lying on the floor.’

Pekkala glanced at the bed. Made for one person, it was barely wider than an army cot and, like an army cot, it had been properly made, the corners tucked in hospital-style and the undersheet folded over the top of the blanket at precisely the width of a hand.

Then Pekkala noticed a small framed black-and-white photograph on the bedside table. It was the only picture in the room where Hunyadi did not appear in uniform. Standing beside him was a woman with a narrow face and long dark hair. Hunyadi had his hand around her waist. They were standing on a balcony overlooking the ocean. The shape of an archway in the corner of the photo looked Mediterranean – Greek, Italian, he couldn’t quite be sure. In the background, Pekkala could just make out a sailing boat at anchor on the dull grey carpet of the water, and he wished he could have seen how blue it really was.

The picture caught him by surprise. It seemed so out-of-step with everything else in the room. Hunyadi lived by himself. That much was perfectly clear. So was this woman just a current girlfriend? Given that the photograph appeared to have been taken some time ago – the whole of the Mediterranean coastline had been a war zone for the past five years – and since there was no other trace of her in the flat, this seemed unlikely. Was it a relative? Pekkala discounted that, too, based on the lack of physical resemblance and the way couple were standing, hip to hip, his arm around her waist. A former wife? That seemed the least likely of all, not only because of the existence of the photo but also where he had placed it. Or was she dead? The tumblers in Pekkala’s mind clicked into place. That had to be the answer.

Pekkala felt a sudden and involuntary compassion for Hunyadi. He tried to shake it from his thoughts, but the idea would not budge. Before he even walked into this room, Pekkala had already taken stock of the similarities between his own life and Hunyadi’s. Both were involved in the same kind of work. Both were in the service of men who would answer for their deeds for all eternity. Both men walked the razor-thin line between trying to do good in a land which was governed by evil, and in becoming that evil themselves.

Seeing the trappings of Hunyadi’s life had only added to Pekkala’s empathy. For those who did not know better, a life pared down to such a threadbare minimum might have seemed like a negation of its own existence. But that was only an illusion. The contents of this room belonged to a man who knew that, between one day and the next, he might lose everything. And the only way to carry on was not to care too much. During his years in Siberia, Pekkala had learned that the more tightly you cling to everything you value in the world, the less precious it actually becomes. Somewhere along the way, thought Pekkala, Hunyadi had formed the same equation in his mind.

But this photo had struck Pekkala most powerfully of all. If he failed to locate Lilya and to bring her safely from the cauldron of Berlin, she stood almost no chance of survival. And then that crumpled photo he had kept for all these years would transform into a symbol of remembrance, and not one of hope, as it was now.

Pekkala began to steel himself for what he might soon have to do.

If Hunyadi refused to help, they would have no choice except to abandon the search and get out of Berlin as fast as possible. They would also have to kill Hunyadi. Simply tying him up and leaving him here in his flat, to be discovered in a matter of hours by the inquisitive tenants of this building, would not buy enough time to escape. And it was not simply a matter of getting out of Berlin. They had to retrace their steps all the way to the Russian lines, through a countryside crawling with execution squads.

Just then, they heard the rattle of a key in the door.

When Fegelein arrived at the boarding house on Eckertstrasse, where Lilya Simonova rented a room, he found the night watchman asleep, head resting on his folded arms.

It was a dingy place, its walls badly in need of repainting, and the floorboards scuffed to splinters.

Without waking the old man at the front desk, Fegelein made his way up to the third floor. Although he had never actually set foot inside the building before, he knew exactly where she lived. He even knew which room was hers by looking from the street. Many times, he had driven past this boarding house, sometimes with Elsa in the car, and glanced up at Lilya’s window, hoping to catch a glimpse of her.

In sharp contrast to the luxurious surroundings of Elsa’s apartment on Bleibtreustrasse, he found the hallway cluttered with pieces of broken furniture and there were brown stains on the ceiling where water had seeped through from leaking pipes. It smelled of sour milk and cigarettes.