End of Spies Alex Gerlis (cat reading book .TXT) 📖

camps. He even arranged for him to stay in a school the Red Army had taken over, one of the few large buildings still standing in the city.

The next day, he took a bus to Berlin, but at a checkpoint on the edge of the city, an NKVD officer was a bit too diligent.

What was your address in Reinickendorf?

Give me the names of some neighbours.

Which synagogue did you attend?

Where did you work?

Explain your presence in the Soviet zone.

Steiner worried he’d been more hesitant with his answers than he ought to have been, and decided he had to take matters into his own hands.

‘How dare you question me like this – don’t you think I’ve been through enough? The Nazis murdered my family and now I’m returning home to try and see if there’s anyone I know who’s alive, and you behave like one of them!’

He’d raised his voice, and the officer appeared taken aback and apologised: he hadn’t meant to upset Herr Stein, but he hoped he understood…

Max Stein said he didn’t understand. He certainly didn’t understand why he was being treated like a bloody criminal, and he shouted so loudly that a senior officer came over and asked what on earth was going on. He was most apologetic once things were explained to him.

‘You say your home is in Reinickendorf – you realise that is in the French sector?’

Max Stein asked whether that mattered.

‘Is that where you want to go?’

‘I want to find some family – maybe my brother’s family, my wife’s sister may still be alive, cousins perhaps: I doubt it, but I need to know.’

The officer said he had the perfect solution. ‘You know the old synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse?’

Max Stein said that of course he did. ‘My uncle used to worship there.’ The officer was being so pleasant to him, he wondered if he was Jewish himself. He’d heard the terrible rumours that half the Red Army officers in Berlin were Jews. That was all he needed.

‘It’s where Jewish refugees go. We’ll take you straight there.’

It was the last place Wolfgang Steiner wanted to be, and as he self-consciously entered the building, he worried that people were looking suspiciously at him. He asked to be shown to the toilets, and further down a corridor found a side door that led to the street. It was mid-afternoon but getting dark, and a bitter wind whipped around him. He wondered whether he should have stayed for a few minutes to get a warm drink and something to eat, and maybe some papers, but he decided to hurry away from Oranienburger Strasse. At least he was in Mitte, which was not far from his destination.

The destruction of Berlin was quite beyond anything he’d imagined. He’d seen what the bombing had done to Munich and Dresden, but as bad as that was, those were cities he was unfamiliar with. Berlin was different: it had been his home for seven years and he’d grown quite fond of it. In many ways he’d felt it had more soul to it than his native Vienna, lacking the latter’s suffocating formality.

Now it felt as if it wasn’t just the city’s buildings that had been destroyed but its heart too. There was no atmosphere; it was as if the remains of the place had been transported to an alien landscape.

The destruction was so bad he had trouble finding his way round. He’d got to know the city very well: during the curfew, he’d enjoyed strolling around it in the dark, enjoying the privilege of being able to do so thanks to his rank. But now it wasn’t just the street signs that were missing; it was the streets themselves, and the buildings and other landmarks that had helped identify them. He was reluctant to ask other pedestrians for directions: no one seemed to be in a mood to talk.

Eventually his instinct led him in what he hoped was the direction of Prenzlauer Berg. The house he was looking for was in Grenadier Strasse, just off Horst-Wessel Platz. But along with the name of the square, the house was missing too, as were half its neighbours. The street was like an old man’s mouth: foul-smelling, half open, with unsightly gaps between the teeth.

He spotted an old woman watching him from the doorway of a nearby house.

‘Frau Schulze…’

‘What about her?’

‘Do you know where she is?’

The woman was chewing something black, and her teeth were stained the same colour. She leaned forward and peered at the gap where the house had been. ‘She seems to have popped out!’ This was followed by a bitter laugh and a bout of noisy coughing. When she had recovered, she asked him why he wanted her.

‘I was a friend of hers.’

‘You don’t look like one of her friends.’

‘Do you know where she is?’

Another cackling laugh, followed by more coughing. She pointed to a high pile of rubble blocking the end of the street. ‘Somewhere in there, I imagine, what’s left of her. Her house took a direct hit. What’s your name anyway?’

He thanked her and hurried away. He hadn’t asked Bormann how he knew Frau Schulze, though the connection seemed strange. She wasn’t his kind of contact, not beautiful or an obvious Nazi. She was just an ordinary woman, a war widow with two sons on the Eastern Front. Maybe that was why he’d chosen her: because no one would suspect her of a connection with a prominent Nazi.

She was one of four contacts Bormann had set up across the city.

If I manage to leave the bunker, Wolfgang, and can’t get out of Berlin and down to you, I’ll try to leave a message with one of these people. I may even be able to hide there – or at least tell them where I am. That way you will know where to find me.

Steiner had had his doubts about the plan but couldn’t think of anything better. The idea had been to find contacts in different parts of the city, thus