Free Lehrter Station by David Downing Page B

ruins, and we know it’ll be difficult. But we have food and shelter guaranteed, and you have a movie to make. If that falls through, you can always go back to London.’
    ‘And leave you in Berlin.’
    ‘I’ll fix it so I get back to London on a regular basis. I can always offer to spy on the English as well.’
    ‘John!’
    ‘I know. This is not good. But we’ll get through it somehow. We were in a much worse situation than this four years ago.’
    ‘That’s not saying much.’
    ‘True, but we’ll think of something.’ He gave her what he hoped was an encouraging smile.
    ‘I know the flat was crowded, but I loved having everyone around – the children and Zarah and Paul. Didn’t you?’
    ‘I did, most of the time.’
    ‘I want a big house in Berlin. Not now, of course, but eventually. Like Thomas’s, with lots of bedrooms and a big garden.’
    ‘That would be good,’ he agreed, though how they would ever afford one was something else again. He doubted whether double agents and actresses approaching forty were paid that much.
    The carriage seemed to be heating up, which suggested an attached locomotive. Russell stepped down onto the platform for a better view, and was promptly told to get back aboard – they were leaving.
    The train picked its way through the sparsely lit town and out onto the darkened Flanders plain. Russell waited for it to gather speed, but twenty-five miles an hour seemed the limit of the driver’s ambition. They took to their respective bunks, and Effi was soon sleeping soundly, despite noisy stops in Bruges and Brussels. Russell lay there feeling every kink in the war-worn tracks, and woke with surprise to find light shining through the crack in the curtains.
    He climbed down as quietly as he could, and slipped out into the corridor just as the train rattled its way through a succession of points. Through the window he saw gutted buildings stretching into the distance, row upon serrated row. And then, as the train began to slow, Cologne Cathedral loomed above him, barely touched by the calamity which had engulfed the surrounding city. ‘There must be a God,’ he murmured to himself.
    ‘There must,’ Effi agreed, appearing beside him and taking his arm. In such a sea of debris the cathedral’s survival had all the appearance of a miracle.
    In a cleared space beside it, people were laying out items for sale on sheets and blankets. There were household objects of all kinds, and Russell thought he detected the glint of cameras, but there was no sign of food.
    The railway bridge across the Rhine was still under reconstruction, and the train could go no further. They joined the scrum on the platform, and followed signs to the pontoon bridge for motor traffic and pedestrians. There was little of the former – only a couple of British Army jeeps – but steady streams of the latter were moving in both directions. A cold wind from the north was rippling the water and the Union Jacks that adorned each bank. The wide river was empty of shipping, and the broken skyline of the city behind them made it hard to believe that hundreds of thousands still called it home.
    The morning’s journey did nothing to raise their spirits. Town after town seemed sunk in post-war gloom, many with the same desperate outdoor market, hordes of people glancing glumly up at the passing train as they sought to barter their way out of hunger and cold. The chimneys that were issuing smoke were vastly outnumbered by those that were not.
    They reached Frankfurt early in the afternoon, and eventually tracked down the station’s US Army office. A Colonel Merritt should have been waiting for them, but all they found was a captain. The Soviets had been causing trouble, Merritt had been called away, and a Colonel Dallin would now conduct the briefing in Berlin. Russell groaned inwardly – he had known and disliked Dallin during the war, when the Californian had been attached to the American Embassy.
    And there were