Masaryk Station, Downing - B+

                                         This is the sixth novel in the John Russell/Station series.  Russell is an Anglo-American journalist living in Berlin when the series starts in 1939. He's trying to hold together a complicated personal life that involves an ex-wife married to a high-ranking German, a son in the Hitler Youth and a girlfriend who is a noted actress. The first five novels have a Berlin train station as the title; this one though is named after one in Prague. Over the years, Russell has pulled off an incredible and improbable survival act as a part-time espionage agent who works for both the USSR and the USA.  This novel is set in 1948, just as the Iron Curtain falls over Czechoslovakia and the airlift is beginning in Berlin.  The plots are a bit too complicated and intricate, but the background is historical storytelling at its best. You can see the rubble in Berlin, feel the desperation in Prague and the indifference in Vienna.  There's a superb depiction of uranium mining in E. Germany, as well as information about the creation of the new Deutschmark. Russell is a former communist and watches an old friend fall apart as he slowly realizes that Stalin's Europe is not exactly what they had hoped for.  It's not all one-sided though as Downing takes the Allies and the R.C. Church to task for their complicity in running the rat-line that helped thousands of evildoers escape Europe.