by Jane Thynne
“Which is a pretty long list in Berlin right now…”
“Exactly. And they still haven’t found their man.”
“And Anna Hansen?”
“Looks like you were right. She was a dancer. Originally from Munich. Engaged to an SS Obersturmführer, Johann Peters.”
“It must be the same Anna Hansen then. The girl Bruno knew came from Munich and had been a dancer. But she was the last person I’d have expected to find at a Bride School.”
Clara remembered the day she had come to Bruno’s studio and found Anna Hansen, a girl with a ready smile and a calculating look. When Clara arrived, Anna had sat up, reached for a paint-spattered sheet like it was an evening dress, and pulled it lazily over her nude, tightly muscled body. Clara had been cool towards her, thinking Anna was a romantic replacement for Helga, assuming that Bruno had forgotten Helga already, despite everything he said about being heartbroken. As a result, the two women had exchanged barely a few words. And now Anna was dead.
“I suppose knowing that it’s the same girl doesn’t make much difference now.”
“Except…I almost forgot,” said Mary. “There’s this. It was hers. I said you might be able to give it to her family.”
She hauled out the burgundy leather case and passed it over. Curious, Clara fingered the neat tooling and the brass lock. The case was heavier than it looked. “What is it?”
“It’s a lap desk,” Mary explained. “A kind of portable stationery case. Anna used to keep it hidden in the dormitory for privacy. Ilse said she used it for writing letters to the beloved Johann. She seemed to think that the letters are still in there, and Anna’s family might like to have them back.”
“But why on earth did you say I’d give it to her family? I don’t know them. They live in Munich presumably.”
“Obviously I didn’t mean it! But I had to say something. No one else knows it exists. Ilse’s upset that Anna’s death seems to have been swept under the carpet. She wants to believe that someone, somewhere, might care. I thought, If it makes her happy, why not?”
At that moment Mary was distracted by a greeting from the other end of the bar. “If that’s not Mary Harker. Great to see you back! Planning on staying a little longer this time?” A gnarled American in a rumpled raincoat was waving a rolled-up newspaper in her direction, and Mary disappeared for a chat. When she returned, Clara was looking at the case, frowning.
“You know…I think I will take it.”
“To Munich? That’s the other end of the country! Nearly four hundred miles away. Don’t be crazy, Clara. It’s not even as if you know where the family lives.”
“We could find out.”
“How? As you said, Hansen is a common name. There’s probably a hundred of them in the telephone book.”
“Why don’t we look inside?” Clara tapped the case.
“That’s more like it.” Mary grinned. “You read my mind.”
“It may help us find an address. You said she kept all her letters. They may be private, but Anna isn’t here to mind, is she? It doesn’t count as snooping if someone’s dead.”
“Girl after my own heart.”
“There’s no key, I suppose?”
“Pass it here.” Mary had wrenched a bobby pin out of her hair and was applying it to the lock with intense concentration. Within a minute, the lock sprang open with a satisfying click.
“Ha! Little trick I learned as a kid. And much easier than I thought.”
The doors of the case opened out to reveal a miniature desk lined in worn purple plush, with a leather insert on the base for writing. Piled inside was a thick bundle of envelopes and papers, and at the back were small cubicles for pencils and pens, and space for an ink bottle, which was missing. Above were two drawers with ribbon ties, one containing stamps, the other a stash of fresh envelopes. Mary took the bundle of papers, handed half of them to Clara, and began to thumb through the rest.
The cache of letters had been hastily ripped from their envelopes and carelessly refolded. Most bore the address of the Bride School.
“Love letters,” said Mary.
They were written in a regular, unsophisticated, schoolboyish hand, and from one of them dropped a small black-and-white photograph of a group of SS officers, arms linked, standing outside a tavern. None of the men could have been older than twenty-five. There was no indication which was Johann Peters, but Clara could imagine him bending over the letter, the tip of his tongue protruding with concentration, as he tried to communicate with his glamorous new fiancée.
“And she kept her old programs.”
Mary was flourishing a sheaf of theater programs, bundled together with a rubber band. The Friedrichstadt Palast, the Wintergarten, and the Metropol in Berlin. Happy Journey, Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. A production of The Merry Widow at the Gärtnerplatz theater in Munich, for which Anna Hansen’s name appeared in tiny print in the cast list of the chorus. Mary handed one over to Clara, who peered at it, unable to make out any individual figure from the group of scantily clad women posing in a forest of peacock feathers.
“This isn’t much help.”
“But this one could be.”
There was another letter, with a stamp on it, which was sealed but had not been posted. It was addressed to
Katia Hansen
FRAUENSTRASSE 17
München
“Perhaps that’s her sister.”
“That’s good. So I have an address.”
“Seriously, Clara, I can’t imagine why you would bother taking these all the way to Munich. It’s not as though anyone knows we have the case. And Anna Hansen wasn’t your friend, was she? She was a friend of Bruno Weiss.”
Something within Clara, some deep reserve of caution that now governed everything she did, prevented her from telling Mary about the remark she had overheard at Udet’s party, that Bruno Weiss had been seen in Munich at the exhibition of Degenerate Art, standing right in front of his own paintings and observing them with pride. She believed it, not only because the Luftwaffe officer had no reason to lie but also because it was exactly the sort of bold, foolish, unconventional thing that Bruno would do. She could just imagine the satisfied smile on his face, knowing that whatever the regime thought about his paintings, Art always spoke for itself. Yet the officer had reported him to the authorities. And Bruno was the only person in Germany to whom she had confided her own secret activities. Activities that the authorities may now suspect, too.
If there was a chance of finding out what had happened to Bruno, it was a chance worth taking. And she could deliver the case to Anna Hansen’s family at the same time.
“I have no work for the next few weeks. I’ve never seen Munich. Why not? It’ll be like a holiday.”
Mary was looking at Clara with a level gaze. She bent towards her and spoke quietly. “You’ve changed, Clara, since I was last here. You had me fooled then, and it was hard to tell what you were thinking. But it’s worse now. Now, for the life of me, I can’t figure out what’s going on in your head.”
CHAPTER
12
The cold had settled on Berlin. The frost feathered the railings and softened the trees with a fur of brilliant white. The sweet smell of roasting chestnuts eddied from trolleys parked on the pavement. A chill wind whipped around the gray flanks of buildings and iced the walls of the canal. All the iron that made up the city’s bones, the cables that glittered in the sharp air, the girders that screeched and shivered, the tramlines, lamps, bridges, and railway elevations, was freezing to the touch.
And still Clara could not shake off the sense that she was being followed.
The feeling had been there from the moment that Archie Dyson issued his warning. Dyson’s advice had been to lie low, uttered as mildly as a bank manager cautioning against extending an overdraft. But lying low had changed nothing. In the following days the feeling had only intensified. Someone was on her tail, she was sure of it. The next afternoon, after a costume fitting for the ne
w film—all girlish gingham dresses, dirndls, and aprons—Clara decided to find out.
Babelsberg station, a short walk from the studio, was a pretty, red-brick construction of gables and fretted wood. Looking down the tracks beneath her, feeling them grating and humming with the approaching train, Clara forced herself to consider the possibility that this feeling she had arose not from the streets of Berlin but from the depths of her own mind. She had always been self-conscious. Was this merely a sense of heightened alert that had become impossible to switch off?
Twenty minutes later the train pulled into Bahnhof Zoo, and she descended the platform, making her way eastwards along Hardenbergstrasse. She walked fast, the chill slicing into her as she went. She passed peeling posters for Strength Through Joy vacations, with their blue skies, Norwegian fjords, and night sun on Baltic beaches. NOW YOU CAN TRAVEL TOO! The pictures would have been a mockery to passersby, were it not for the fact that scarcely anyone lifted their eyes above street level, keeping their necks huddled tortoise fashion into coats and scarves.
She turned left up Budapester Strasse, stepping purposefully as she approached the Tiergarten. There was a shiver of wind in the trees, and the broad pathways were deserted, save for the dull bronze heroes who punctuated the paths. After a few minutes in the park, once she had assured herself no one was following, she executed a swift U-turn and walked steadily south, dipping into the U-Bahn at Wittenbergplatz and surfacing a few stops later at Potsdamer Platz.
The buildings of Wilhelmstrasse turned their drab, bank manager backs on her as the wind whipped down the streets of the government sector. She passed the Air Ministry and tightened her coat in an unconscious defensive reflex. Ahead of her, rounding the corner of Voss Strasse, where a forest of scaffolding surrounded the new Reich Chancellery, two men in leather coats approached. That was hardly surprising. The Gestapo were everywhere, and this was the very crucible of the Nazi regime. Clara passed them, eyes downcast, like any other citizen, observing them minutely all the same.
The Gestapo had been in existence for only four years, yet it had spread like a cancer through German society. Its aim was to know everything about people, from what they wore, to how they slept, to where they went in their dreams. Its surveillance was legendary. The techniques were equally impressive, but some of them, at least, Clara knew.
They had signals. A man bending to tie a shoelace might be signaling to his partner that he was eager to terminate the observation. A man raising his hat, a woman stroking her hair, a boy leaning against a wall turning the pages of his newspaper—all these apparently random gestures could be code for instructions or communication between one observer and another. Leo Quinn had taught her some of them, but these signals and their meanings changed constantly. What you needed, Leo had warned, was to note more instinctive signals, like the tilt of a head or the direction of a gaze, and above all to develop a sixth sense that you were being watched.
In her mind Clara ran through a constant register of the people around her and studied not just their clothes but their faces, separating them into their distinctive parts—easy elements, like spectacles or a glass eye, and, more subtly, the jut of a jaw, the curve of a nose, the eyes slightly too close together. At that moment, for example, there was a man sweeping the pavement with a large broom. He glanced at her, revealing a mouthful of brown teeth. There was a boy of around sixteen who seemed to be taking an inordinate length of time lighting a cigarette. Parallel to the Propaganda Ministry a fat old woman in a floral head scarf stood complacently while her fat old dog relieved itself against a lamppost. Ahead of her a man in a pale fedora with a dark band and a slight hunch to his shoulders turned a corner to his left. Nothing she could see to raise any suspicion.
At the top of the street Clara jumped on a tram and took a quick glance around. Weary office workers were strap-hanging in the crowded carriage, exuding the stink of unwashed clothes. A boy in a cap and earmuffs stared at her dispassionately. Opposite, a man with a plush black hat and a silver-topped cane caught her eye with a flicker of puzzlement. That didn’t worry her. She was quite used to being half recognized. She knew to counter it with stony impassivity. What she was looking out for was something more covert. Yet no one in the carriage deliberately looked away, or masked their observation behind a newspaper.
By the time she jumped off the tram halfway up Friedrichstrasse, the light was fading. The wide thoroughfare was the theatrical heart of the city. Here the neon of the theater lights reflected off the sides of gleaming Mercedes and BMWs. The street was busy with people beginning their evening out to the theater. An operetta titled Maske in Blau was playing at the Metropol. Past the steel arches of the station, the red neon lights of the Wintergarten announced that Das führende Varieté, the leading variety company, was staging a magician’s act.
As Clara passed she glanced in the shop fronts, looking through the displays of stockings and shoes and handbags to the reflected images of other pedestrians, noting the colors of their ties, or hair, or shoes. Anyone following would look utterly anonymous, so it was crucial to observe the details, the ones they could not easily change.
She wove around a crowd of people laughing and chatting as they waited to enter a cinema. With a jolt of surprise she noted that the film was Madame Bovary. She glanced up to see the dark eyes of Pola Negri looking across at Werner Scharf, the dashing actor who played Léon Dupuis. For once Clara was glad that her role had been so small. There was no chance of anyone connecting the actress of a nineteenth-century French village girl with the slight figure in trench coat and cloche hat now lingering at the glass display cases that showcased coming attractions.
Past the cinema she stopped at a café and ordered a plate of Bockwurst with potato salad and fried onions, which she ate while observing the people outside, watching for anyone who dallied, or lingered without obvious purpose. For a while she kept her eye on a man waiting in a doorway across the street. He seemed restless and on edge, glancing over the top of his newspaper covertly, suggesting he was watching without wanting to be watched. Then suddenly a girl ran up and joined him and they went off laughing, arm in arm.
At Oranienburgerstrasse, she caught the S-Bahn back down towards Nollendorfplatz and headed for her apartment. She had run a great ring around the city, with no sign of anyone in pursuit. Her aim had not been to shake off a potential tail, only to determine if one was there. But everything about her journey had convinced her; the only shadows were the ones in her mind.
Ahead of her, streetlamps hung like a string of pearls in the deepening dusk, casting precise circles of light on the pavement beneath. A man emerged in front of her. As he passed each lamppost his shadow loomed and wavered ahead. He was not a tail. A tail would have melted into the darkness on the other side of the street.
By the time she rounded the corner of Winterfeldtstrasse, she was looking forward to a quiet night in and soaking in a hot bath with a good novel. Her feet were aching from all that walking. She should have worn more comfortable shoes.
The street was very quiet. It always was at night, even so close to Nollendorfplatz. A blind winked at a window, and she became aware of footsteps behind her. Something—perhaps that sixth sense Leo had talked about—told her to stop, and she ducked swiftly into the porch of the building to her right. A cat perched on the roof of a parked car watched her with bored yellow eyes as she shrank into the shadow, waiting for the footsteps to pass.
There were twenty paces between the corner of Nollendorfstrasse and her door. She knew. She had counted them. The approaching footsteps were confident and deliberate. They took ten paces. Fifteen. Then she recognized something. Something she had heard before. A click of steel in the heels of the shoes. That was not unusual in Berlin; no one threw a pair of worn shoes away when the holes could still be patched; indeed, not just patched but mended a dozen times, stitched and heeled and soled with cardboard. But there was something about this tread. Something languid, decisive, metallic. The paces came to a st
op. He must be right outside her door.
She stepped away from the porch. Ralph Sommers was standing beneath the streetlight right outside her door, lighting a cigarette. He looked up at her approach.
“I must say you’re awfully difficult to track down.”
“You seem to be awfully intent on finding me.”
He shook his match, tossed it away, and smiled charmingly. “That’s because, Clara—may I call you Clara?—I would very much like to invite you for a drink.”
Clara was dumbfounded. She felt like she was playing a game whose rules she didn’t know. Had Sommers followed her all the way from Bahnhof Zoo? Had he tailed her all the way around the city? Or had he come to Winterfeldtstrasse by chance?
“You want to invite me for a drink?” she repeated.
“That’s right. I’d be delighted if you could. Do you know the Café Einstein on Kurfürstenstrasse? Why don’t we meet there? Are you free Thursday night? Say seven o’clock?”
CHAPTER
13
Neukölln lay to the south of the city, a poor area of tenements, factories, and cemeteries, crowded with east European immigrants. In the past it had been a Communist stronghold, and even now underground printing presses existed, tucked away on the top floors of shops, concealed in cellars, or hidden in apartments, where the activists who once had written for Communist newspapers now issued crude pamphlets with hand-lettered text containing news of people who had been imprisoned. They would post them at night, wearing gloves so they didn’t leave fingerprints, with brushes and paste concealed in orange boxes. The penalty for distributing these Flugblätter, dissident political posters, was death, and the Gestapo went to great lengths to analyze everything, from the paper’s origin to the brand of paint and the kind of typewriter used. Despite that, everywhere you looked scraps of flyers could be seen plastered on walls and across tram timetables, slapped onto billboards. Their messages were partially legible, where they had not been fully torn off. GERMAN SOLDIERS! FIGHT WITH US FOR THE OVERTHROW OF THE NAZI REGIME! JOIN THE ANTI-FASCIST STRUGGLE! There were stencils, too, DOWN WITH HITLER! and more simply FREEDOM! If you wanted to know the truth about a country, better not to read the newspapers: read the walls.