Woman in the Shadows

by Jane Thynne

  Bruno looked around and whispered: “When she told him, the guy went crazy. Threatened her. She told me she realized he might even kill her, only she didn’t have the negatives with her right then, and he badly wanted them back. Not so much because they might cause a problem for his beloved Führer, though they would, but because they would point the finger at him. He’d been the one entrusted with disposing of those things. It would be his fault if they came to light emblazoned across the front page of some foreign newspaper.”

  “So Anna didn’t give him the negatives?”

  “Precisely. The guy changed tack, went all sensitive and told her to meet him and bring the negatives with her, but Anna was scared. She was a tough girl, and it was hard to fool her. She realized she might be signing her own death warrant if she actually turned up like he said. She knew she needed to escape. She had to disappear, and the best way she could think of doing that was to get married. Where could be safer than an SS Bride School?”

  “You usually need an SS officer for that.”

  “Anna did say meeting Johann was a stroke of luck. And to her credit, she seemed genuinely fond of the poor boy, but still she was scared. She felt certain the old boyfriend was going to track her down. The day I saw her she was terrified because there had been a photograph that morning in the women’s pages of Der Angriff. It showed the Bride School girls doing gymnastics right there in the garden, and Fräulein Anna Hansen was standing in the front row. She was certain he’d see it, and work out where she was.”

  “And he did?”

  Bruno shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “I can’t go back to Schwanenwerder. Not now that girl has told the police about her suspicions. The place is crawling with secret policemen. I would be arrested in an instant. I’ll need to find some more papers. And another place to live, of course.” He gestured towards the suitcases. “I was packing when you arrived. I should have gone already, but after I saw your friend Fräulein Harker and gave her this address, I thought I would hang on. Just in case.”

  Clara leaned over and placed her hand on his arm. “You must come and stay with me, Bruno.”

  “You know that’s not possible.” He smiled, wistfully. “I have often thought of the time when Herr Quinn offered me a visa for England, and I have wondered if I should have accepted it. That will have to remain in the realm of conjecture. I have friends. You mustn’t worry.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “What I always do. Daytimes I spend waiting, planning paintings in my head. Drawing with pencil on the backs of paper bags, and pages torn from books. I plan to study the frieze at the Pergamon Museum. I thought I might make a sculpture myself, something about a struggling people oppressed, when all this is over.”

  As he showed her to the door, a brilliant smile lit up his gaunt face and he spread his arms expansively. “Don’t worry, dear girl. This barbarity won’t last. A nation that has produced Goethe and Rilke and Caspar David Friedrich couldn’t endure this state of affairs for long.”

  It was raining again when Clara left, sharp little razor blades of water. She pulled her collar up and made her way back to Winterfeldtstrasse, oblivious to the traffic and the people around her, so lost in thought that she was almost at her front door before she noticed the hulking black Mercedes with its engine running, waiting outside.

  CHAPTER

  36

  Dressed in her long-serving duffel coat because of the penetrating cold, Mary was perched in her habitual pose—nose six inches from her Remington typewriter and eyes squinted in concentration. She was trying to write about the Bride School murder, but it was no good relying on the local press for details. Unlike the journalists at home, who would have pounced on a murder with delight and spent days eviscerating the case in ghoulish detail, newspapers here preferred to focus on the miraculous achievements of the Reich. Mary had flipped through them in vain, finding nothing but the record harvest and the triumph of Mussolini’s visit. The premiere of a new film to be attended by Goebbels. Good news from abroad. In Spain the Fascists had encircled Madrid and a Republican destroyer, Ciscar, had been sunk by Nationalist aircraft.

  Spain. Mary took off her glasses and rubbed her tired eyes. The thought of Spain brought troubling memories. Something had happened there that she could still not properly figure out.

  —

  WHEN SPRING CAME SHE had moved up from Madrid to the north of the country and a small village in the Basque stronghold of Bilbao. At that point this area of the country, including Santander, was still in Republican control, but the Nationalists were launching new offensives all the time. That evening the International Brigades fighters were playing guitars and singing revolutionary songs out in the dusty square, and Mary sat in a bar, watching the bartender flicking dead flies off the counter and moping over the collapse of another love affair. Alfonso had been dark-eyed and charming and utterly useless. His hands smelled of guns, and he spent every evening sodden with drink. He’d told Mary she was too independent. Men were scared of her, Alfonso had explained. Or rather, he had tried to elucidate, in a very unromantic drunken monologue, until the sheer intellectual effort exceeded him and he collapsed in a puddle of Rioja and self-pity. Eventually Mary decided she might as well join him in alcoholic oblivion. She was on her second carafe of rough local wine, mopping the occasional tear, when a young man walked through the door.

  “Pericles!”

  It was the Englishman from the hotel in Madrid. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see her.

  “Hello, Mary. Why are you crying into your glass when you should be filing reports?”

  He slid onto a chair next to her. His curly hair had been bleached in the sun, and his jaw had the beginnings of a beard. He wore a beret and an old blue jacket on top of a collarless shirt. “There was another successful counterattack today…”

  Mary lifted a hand to forestall him. “Stop right there. I don’t want to talk about the war. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of all politics,” she slurred.

  “Fine.” He offered her a Gauloises, and she accepted it quickly. Tobacco was in short supply, and packets were ten pesetas apiece. “Let’s talk about you instead. But before that, let’s find you something to eat.”

  He took her off to another bar and magicked up a hot meal of salami, rice, and olives, which she ate as though famished. Pericles watched her intensely as sobriety descended, and eventually he had coaxed the whole sorry tale out of her.

  “I never meet a suitable man. The interesting ones are either married or mad. The uninteresting ones want me to live in New Jersey and wash socks. I’m no good with men. I don’t think I’ll ever get married!” she wailed.

  “Why would you want to?” he asked, in all seriousness. “Who wants to be hobbled in some eternal three-legged race? You’re better as you are, Mary. You’re free.”

  She stared at him wet-eyed, with gratitude. It seemed, in the lingering haze of drunkenness, as if he had just revealed to her an entirely new way to live.

  “You’re right. Marriage would ruin everything, wouldn’t it?” She sniffed and tilted her glass at him. “How would I continue my magnificent career?”

  She was half joking, but Pericles chose to take her seriously. “Exactly. And on that subject, I have a tip for you. There’s something happening later today, not far from here. It’s something you’ll want to cover. A scoop. The Germans have been holding a military conference in Burgos under Wolfram von Richthofen, the commander of the Condor Legion. You know who I mean?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. The thing is, they’re planning to target Republican troops at Guernica.”

  “Guernica? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “No reason you should have. It’s a market town about thirty-five kilometers away. Why not head out and take a look? I guarantee it will be worth your while.”

  —

  THE FLAMES WERE STILL burning when she arrived on the outskirts of Gue
rnica at dawn the next morning with a couple of local fighters in a ramshackle van. The glow that lit up the sky could be seen from miles away, and as they approached, they encountered civilians struggling along in ox-drawn carts and tractors, all their possessions piled high. Out in the parched fields, bodies were splayed and blackened corpses leaned out of burned cars. Once they reached the town itself, the scenes were even worse than she could have imagined.

  Until Mary had arrived in Spain, she had never seen a dead body apart from her father’s, turning slowly yellow in his mahogany bed back home. She might have said she knew what death looked like, but now she knew it wasn’t true. Guernica was a different dimension of death altogether. These bodies had been wrenched out of life in the middle of it, eyes open and mouths gaping. Some were buried in ash, others burned alive. Then there were the living. They moved as though the souls had been sucked out of them, scrabbling through the smoking ruins with their bare hands, searching for their loved ones. Basque soldiers were lining up the corpses outside the church of Santa Maria, the only building still standing. And everywhere the stench of burned flesh caught in the throat. Standing in the marketplace where bombs had rained from the sky, Mary was aware of an eerie stillness, a kind of outraged silence, broken only by the frantic barking of dogs and cries and shouts as another charred body emerged from the decimated buildings.

  Stunned, she wandered around the market square, robotically clutching her notebook like a doctor with a stethoscope. Houses were still collapsing around her into heaps of glowing debris, sending out showers of sparks and bricks that bounced like tennis balls. She knelt down beside a farmer who was cradling a boy of about fourteen. “My son needs some air! Just let him have some air and sun on his face.” The man snatched at the feathers that were whirling like snow out of a split pillow and grabbed handfuls to prop up the boy’s head. His cries were harsh and jagged, like an animal’s. Mary took one look at the boy and saw he had been dead for hours.

  She met a priest coming out of the church who told her a third of the town’s inhabitants had been killed. All the men and women he had ushered into bomb shelters at the beginning of the raid had been burned alive. He told her he had trained his binoculars on the sky and seen a squadron of planes coming in close, circling high, and by the drone of their engines he knew they were German planes—the Legion Condor.

  It turned out that Mary was one of the first journalists on the scene. She filed yards of copy, which Nussbaum ran on the front page.

  It was instantly clear that Guernica marked a change in warfare. Something grave and terrible was written on the faces of those people in the market square. Though there were Republican forces in the area, the village had never been involved in any fighting. A place like Guernica had no air defenses. What Mary had seen was sheer terror bombing, the strafing of people with no defenses, intended to intimidate and terrify. Children weren’t a military target. They weren’t an industry or a vital infrastructure. The true target of Guernica was the morale of the people who lived there. What kind of monster would do this kind of thing?

  Mary wrote that in the next war, when it came along, air attack was going to be the prime weapon of terror. The idea of wiping whole towns—perhaps even entire cities—off the map was now a reality.

  Yet when she thought about it now, there was one thing she could not puzzle out. If it hadn’t been for Pericles, Mary would not have been there. He had known for certain that the Germans were planning an attack. But at the time she had never asked herself where he got his information. He was English, not German. So how had he known? What’s more, how had he known that Mary would be sitting in that bar, on that evening, ready to witness it?

  Pericles knew Guernica was going to be important. He guessed it would be the attack that drew the attention of the world. But if he had advance warning, why didn’t he try to stop it? Why didn’t he alert the townspeople to what was coming? Unless, of course, he thought it needed to happen.

  The shock of Guernica had faded quickly. For Mary, writing about Spain presented the same problem she now faced when covering Germany’s troubles. Nobody at home really wanted to know. Americans were preoccupied by their own concerns. Apparently thousands of people were starving in Cleveland, Ohio. A United Airlines plane had crashed in Utah. The New York Yankees had beaten the New York Giants in the World Series. No matter how hatefully the Jews were persecuted in Germany, too many people back in America actually agreed with the Nazis. Mary got the feeling that people back home preferred foreign affairs to stay just that—foreign.

  The death of Anna Hansen, on the other hand, was just what the American public liked, according to Frank Nussbaum. A murder story with plenty of photographs of pretty girls. All Mary needed to do was deliver it. But that was where the problem lay. When she’d called the Criminal Investigations Department, the police could not have been less interested. They admitted, grudgingly, that Hartmann, the gardener, had been released, but would not reveal if anyone else was under suspicion. Judging by the bored tone of the officer in charge, the death of the Reich bride mattered about as much as a bicycle collision and a little less than the theft of a bratwurst from a market stall. Yet Ilse Henning had told her the Gestapo was involved. Which meant that, somehow, Anna Hansen’s murder mattered very much indeed.

  That was why Mary was impatient to hear what Bruno Weiss had to say. She did not believe for a second that the artist could have had a hand in Anna’s murder, so why had he been distinctly reluctant to talk to her? When she’d approached him that day in the Bride School garden, it was pure terror, nothing less, that leapt into his eyes. Even when he had established that she was a friend of Clara Vine’s and had led her away somewhere private, he would barely speak to her. He kept looking about him, wide-eyed, as if the very trees and shrubs concealed devices that might overhear and report him. Bruno Weiss had about him the awful, feral caution of the hunted animal. Mary recognized that look. She had seen it before. It was the fear of approaching death, and it needed no translation.

  CHAPTER

  37

  Memories flickered through Clara’s traumatized brain. She thought of her mother, and tried to remember what it was like to be embraced by her, but she couldn’t recall her face. For a long time she’d had only a photograph to remember her by, and photographs never really told the truth, did they?

  Clara wondered if she would ever have a daughter herself, and if she did whether she would fold her in her arms the way her own mother must have done. She couldn’t forget the face of the tiny baby at the Lebensborn home. More images floated through her mind. Her sister, Angela, with her cool, combative elegance. Her strawberry-blond hair and wry half smile, which always implied Clara was doing something slightly offbeat, bohemian, or plain crazy. Erich, the tears glittering in his eyes as he accused Clara of not loving the Führer. Mary’s anguished face. I’m your friend. You can tell me.

  She regretted not telling Mary the truth, but friendship these days meant not telling anything. Confidences were dangerous. To love someone, it was necessary to deceive them. How had it come to this, that the true measure of closeness came in what you concealed? You could know everything about a person, how they brushed their teeth, what perfume they wore, whether they preferred arabica or java, even what position they favored in lovemaking, but you could not know their deepest secrets. Not if they loved you. To love someone was to lie. And Clara was good at lying. It was her greatest talent.

  She thought of herself with Ralph, their bodies rolling and turning in the tumbled linen, the sheets between their hot limbs like heaped clouds. His hands mapping the contours of her body, her fingers running through his damp hair and along the deep cleft of his back. His lips, bending towards hers. The days they had spent in his apartment had been like a world apart. Only two days, yet she treasured that time, in case it never came again. She relived it in her head, hour by hour, as though just by thinking she could block out everything around her.

  Clara was in a small white-til
ed room, measuring barely six feet across, with a wooden plank bed that folded down from the wall. There was a bare bulb, which swung every time the steel doors along the corridor clanged, throwing wild shadows across the walls. Although there was no natural light, she guessed it must be dawn. She wondered how long she could hold out before needing to use the filthy bucket in the corner. Her mouth was dry, and she could barely swallow, but no one had offered her water. The wash of disinfectant couldn’t entirely mask the stench of ammonia and the smell of fear. She remembered Bruno telling her about the night classes he had once attended in this building, when it was still an art school. They practiced a different kind of art here now.

  She tried not to think about the rumors she had heard. Of the tortures, the twisted limbs, the broken fingers. Persuasive measures to jog the memory. The faltering moment when a prisoner’s story changed. The faces of people who had been interrogated, pulpy and swollen, unrecognizable even to their own families. She wondered when they would start on her own face.

  The sounds were sporadic. The slam of steel doors; the crunch of footsteps, hard and booted; the occasional yell, of fury or fear. An official voice, feigning patience but underlaid with a steely anger. And in the distance, the clatter of traffic from Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse outside and the footsteps of people going through the government district towards the Anhalter Bahnhof. Ordinary citizens who, though they had no interest in what happened within, still averted their eyes from the grim neoclassical façade.