by Jane Thynne
‘Sorry. Just . . . speak more carefully, please, Clara. What I’m asking, what I mean is, the information could be useful.’
Something about the way he said it, made her burst out laughing. How melodramatic he was. ‘Useful! What information? I haven’t got any information. It was only very trivial chat.’
‘What did you chat about?’
‘First we talked about films, and then we talked about clothes.’
‘I don’t mind what it is. Anything. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s important. Just tell me.’
‘Why should I?’
‘As I said, I’d be grateful.’
‘And who could Frau Goebbels’ views on fashion possibly be useful to? Apart from her dressmaker?’
‘To people at the embassy. And I give you my word it would go no further.
Her face grew grave. ‘At the embassy. Why? Why do they want to know?’
‘It’s politics really. We’re trying to build up a picture of these people. The way they think, what they’re like in private.’
‘I can’t imagine I’d be any help.’
‘You’d be surprised. They harbour great hopes for increased friendship with the English. Last year, Winston Churchill and his wife were over here, hoping for a meeting with Hitler, only at the last moment Hitler ducked out of it. But it’s certain to come up again and when it does, they’ll need briefing.’
‘You’re telling me Mr Churchill would need to know the Nazis’ views on fashion?’ Clara said incredulously.
‘Not only that. Anything could be important.’
‘But why me?’
‘They plainly don’t suspect you. And . . .’
‘And what?’
‘And it helps that this Müller is friendly towards you.’
His green eyes held hers unblinkingly. Although it was dark, a flush crept up her neck as she began to divine what he was suggesting. He thought she was having a relationship with Klaus Müller. Images of herself making love with a Nazi official were playing through his mind.
‘He has taken me for a drink. Once.’
‘And back to his apartment.’
‘Once.’ Her voice was tight with indignation. ‘Look, I’d better be going now. I’m in the opposite direction, I’m afraid. I’m going to look for a cab.’ She pulled her coat more tightly around her, as the rain flicked into her face.
‘I’m sorry, Leo. But the fact is, I’d already decided. I don’t want to see these people again so whatever it is you want me to do, I can’t do it.’
He looked down at her, frustration and annoyance warring in his eyes. For a second his expression made her shiver.
‘Let me give you my address. Just in case.’
He threw away his cigarette and bent his head in the darkness to write an address in a notebook. As he did so there was the faintest rustle and scurry in the darkness.
He froze and laid a warning hand on her arm. ‘Quiet!’
As they peered into the gloom they saw a figure had dashed out and taken the still glowing cigarette butt from where it fell. Leo laughed, a short, joyless laugh.
‘Sorry. Sharp ears everywhere these days.’
He tore off the paper from his notebook, gave it to her, and held her hand briefly.
‘Here. Take this. And think about it. Seriously, please.’
Chapter Seventeen
The rain had come on again but Leo decided to walk all the way home to punish himself. He pulled up his collar yet the stinging rain still drenched him and the cold air flayed his face. However warmly he dressed, the freezing Berlin wind still took him by surprise. The English expected their weather to be soft. In weather, as in other things, they disliked extremes. He plunged his hands in his pockets and carried on.
At the end of the Tiergarten he crossed the Platz der Republik and passed the blackened hulk of the Reichstag. It had been more than a fortnight since the fire and the embers were cold now, piles of rubble and masonry shifted into the street. For days passers-by had had to navigate charred planks of wood and sooty bricks, with many of them stopping to stare at the crumbling parts of the stately old building and reflect on everything its destruction stood for. Which was the devastating fires of Marxism, if you thought along National Socialist lines, but for most people, the home of democratic parliament standing in ruins meant something far more ominous.
Leo had been in a bar that night, not far away, eating a pile of noodles with the first of several beers at his side. Alerted by the clanging of the fire engines, he had run out into the street with the rest of the clientele to see the red glow in the west and plumes of smoke coil into the night sky.
The fire had started around a quarter to ten that evening, in five different corners of the assembly hall, where cloths soaked in petrol had been placed at the oak panelling. The glass cupola glowed scarlet and the flames funnelled up it until it burst and crashed to the ground. It was only minutes before two black Mercedes screeched into view, passed through the police cordon and Hitler could be seen running up the steps, two at a time, closely followed by Goebbels and his bodyguard.
Once Hitler had entered the smoking hulk, he stood at a little balcony in the hall, laid his arms on the stone balustrade and peered down into the flames. His voice rising to an uncontrollable screech, he announced, ‘There will be no mercy now. Anyone who stands in our way will be cut down. The German people will not tolerate leniency. Every Communist official will be shot where he is found.’ If it was proved to be the work of Communists, he would round up the murderous pests with an iron fist. The bit about being “proved” was plainly superfluous, because the same night hundreds of Communists were dragged from their beds, given a beating in the local SA cellars, followed by interrogation, imprisonment, and in many cases a bullet in the back of the head.
In the days that followed, even though a young Dutch Communist was quickly apprehended and charged with setting the fire, the reprisals carried on regardless. Squads of Brown Shirts in trucks raged through the Communist districts enacting mass arrests, smashing windows and raiding businesses. Swingeing new measures against personal liberty followed. The German Communist party, the KPD, was banned, and hundreds of people crossed the Swiss border into exile. The result of this fresh fear of Bolshevist terror meant a surge in the Nazi vote in the March 5 elections, since when the euphoria of the Nazis had known no bounds.
Tonight, though, the rubble heaps were being shifted. Labourers had been brought in with spades and shovels, and neither the late hour nor the rain was going to stop them. Hitler had acted swiftly. First thing tomorrow he was to re-open the Reichstag in Potsdam. The old President had been dragged along in his dotage to provide a fig-leaf of respectability for the dismantling of democracy. Deputies would no doubt have to pass through a cordon of SA men and the mandatory cheering crowd. The Day of Potsdam would symbolise the continuity between the Third Reich, Prussia and the German empire. In the evening Hitler and his friends would return to Berlin for a performance of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg at the State Opera. It made sense that the National Socialists loved opera. Presumably it was the only art form loud enough to drown out the shouts of protest on the streets outside.
Leo waited as a lorry bristling with SA men and banners passed, and it was only when he had crossed Pariser Platz and headed up Unter den Linden that he at last let his mind turn to the matter that was troubling him. Not so much troubling him as clanging through his head like a klaxon in a frenzy of alarm and recrimination. Clara.
A young British woman in social contact with the new regime. It was exactly the thing Horace Rumbold had asked him to look out for. Her story of the meeting with Frau Goebbels had amazed him and at the same time seized his imagination. What astonishing access she had. Listening to their conversations, their complaints and their confidences. Entry to social circles that would be closed to almost every foreigner. And a woman on her own, out of contact with her family back in England. After what Rumbold had asked him, he would have been irr
esponsible if he’d passed up an opportunity like that.
And yet . . . he had fumbled it. He had been crazily, disastrously, unprofessionally reckless. On the slightest acquaintance he had been guilty of the most extraordinary clumsiness and broken the first rule of intelligence work. Not to trust anyone. And the second rule, not to give away too much information. And all sorts of rules down to about the tenth, which had to be not to alienate a potential source. The memory of Clara’s pretty, dark-eyed face staring at him with shock and a certain amount of disdain, rose lividly in his mind.
His first instinct had been simply to befriend her. When he asked her for a walk, he had been thinking that a stroll might allow the gossip to flow more naturally. A young Englishwoman alone in a foreign city would probably be glad of some company. If he was honest with himself, he had found her attractive. She had fine, delicate features, and a petulant fullness to her lips that hinted at sensuousness. Her enquiring, intelligent eyes, coupled with a sense of reserve, brought to mind the perennial lover’s question, ‘What are you thinking?’ All these impressions had passed through his mind as she sat before him in the café wondering whether to stay or go.
And then he had to come right out with it and ask her! Something about the intimacy of the evening, the soft, enclosing trees of the Tiergarten, the tenebrous darkness speckled with the pinprick of cigarettes, had provoked his rash confidence. Or perhaps it was the girl herself, all that talk of poetry, or a sudden, unexpected shaft of homesickness. Since he arrived in Germany Leo hadn’t spoken about England much, except in a professional capacity, with people at the consulate. And despite the reserve, she seemed the kind of girl who was easy to confide in. He could have kept on walking with her all night. He still held the memory of her handclasp in his, cold and surprisingly soft.
And now he risked compromising the entire operation. He had behaved like a madman. Heaven knew who she would run and tell. Perhaps even Sturmhauptführer Müller, God forbid. He should never have alluded to her acquaintance with Müller. She was outraged and annoyed, as she had every right to be.
There was another, more agonizing, concern. He had placed the girl herself at risk. If she talked to anyone about his proposal, there was no telling what dangers she was getting herself into. Would she understand how vital it was to say nothing?
He cursed himself and lit another cigarette. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t enough work to get on with at the consulate.
He had reached the end of Orianenburger Strasse when he heard the shouts and a sparkling shower of glass spilled across the pavement in front of him. It was Zimmerman’s, the place he bought his morning paper and tobacco. He liked going into that shop. It was stacked like a tightly packed suitcase, with every surface filled, shelves piled high with tins and the whole place smelling of sugar and newsprint and a deep musty scent of polished wood. Its owner, Herr Zimmerman, was a dapper little man in his sixties with a moustache and a pipe, who liked to ask Leo about English football. He had relatives in north London and he claimed to support Arsenal.
As Leo approached, a pair of Brown Shirts crashed out. They had been drinking – he could smell the beer on their breath from where he stood – and they were cursing the shopkeeper for being a filthy Jew. Herr Zimmerman, though he was half the size of the men, had taken one by the arm and hustled him to the door. His friend had picked a stone from the gutter and broken his window for his pains. Now jagged teeth of glass surrounded a gaping hole.
‘Count yourself lucky that’s all we broke!’
They sprinted off up the street, and Leo fought a powerful urge to give chase. The second man was fat and ran slowly with splayed feet. His lumbering backside reminded Leo of a boy at school who was routinely and universally bullied, and in turn bullied those smaller than himself. Leo could easily overtake him, probably call the cops on him, yet he resisted the idea. For one, he had already caused enough problems for himself tonight. A punch-up with a Brown Shirt and a night in the cells at the Alex were more than he needed. And the sense of inertia that was seeping through the entire population of Berlin was starting to have a paralysing effect on him.
In normal times, when people witnessed a crime, they called the police. Now people knew better. They would avoid the huddled body in the gutter. They slept through shrieks in the night, and the sounds of car engines and door slamming that meant their neighbour was being arrested. It was as though the Nazis were conducting an experiment on the entire populace, hoping with small and regular acts of violence to inoculate them, and as a result, they were all becoming immune.
Herr Zimmerman had already armed himself with a broom and was sweeping the scattered glass. The window was not so bad. He could patch it with cardboard, no trouble. Leo noticed spots of blood on his white shirt, but there was no sign that he was hurt. Herr Zimmerman looked up from the pavement and gave Leo a quiet, despairing smile with a hint of a shrug. As though he was aware of the catastrophe that was coming towards them all in slow motion.
Chapter Eighteen
As it turned out, there was a whole week to kill before the read-through for the new film. Lamprecht needed to edit rushes of his last movie, so Clara passed the time like a tourist, walking through the Englischer Garten in the Tiergarten, gazing at the Brandenburger Tor with the Goddess of Victory lashing her stone horses to war, visiting churches and galleries and roaming round the city, going to cafes and eating sugary cakes swathed in cream.
Sitting in Kranzler’s in the early morning sunlight, sipping her coffee, she took out a postcard for Angela, and wrote in the blandest possible tone, saying she was having a glorious time at Babelsberg and would be in contact soon. What she had told Rupert about her family’s independence was true. Without their mother, she, Kenneth and Angela led quite separate lives and their father, who had never been very communicative at the best of times, found it almost impossible to stray beyond formalities.
Poor Daddy. At a distance his intemperate curtness became possible to explain. He was a widower, robbed far too early of the wife he had loved and he was cursed with more than the usual allocation of an Englishman’s emotional reserve. Thinking about it like that, Clara was almost able to feel sorry for him.
She also forced herself to write to Dennis, telling him she had been offered work in Germany and was not expecting to be back for some time. It had been cowardly of her to leave without explaining, she knew, but she also knew the biggest blow would have been to his pride, rather than his heart. How could she tell him that he was the reason she came to Berlin or that she had wanted to feel closer to her mother, who had died almost a decade ago? Dennis wouldn’t understand and it wouldn’t be kind.
Thinking about Dennis brought into her mind again the question she generally tried to suppress. Why had she never met a man she wanted to marry? At twenty-six most of her school friends were married or engaged. Only Dennis, who had not so much proposed as announced his intentions to a general audience, had ever seriously suggested marriage to Clara. Normally she didn’t let it bother her. She had no shortage of male admirers after all. But yet again she wondered if it was something in herself, some deep inhibition, that deterred true intimacy. Was she too choosy, or was it simply that she had never yet met a man she could imagine spending years talking to?
She left no address and dropped both cards in a postbox before she could change her mind.
Strolling round the city, she found it impossible not to notice how Berlin was changing, even in the short time she had been here. Leaflets and pamphlets fluttered from every railing. Political posters framed harsh warnings in the dense German Gothic script that looked like a thicket of thorns. It was not just Nazi propaganda either. On the sun-warmed seat beside her at the Café Kranzler Clara had noticed the fluttering pages of a pamphlet and, picking it up curiously, found inside a cartoon of a goose-stepping Nazi and the legend “Fight Hitler for our Future”. Underneath was the strapline of the KPD, the German Communist Party. She looked at it for a moment, before quickly putting it d
own again and pushing the seat under the table.
She remembered what Rupert Allingham had said about war, and how Hitler wanted to carve up Europe. She thought of the map they had at home, the countries beautifully marked out, the shape of England like Britannia, the upright old dame, France, vast and sprawling, Italy poking into the sea like a lady’s boot, Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia. Other places in Middle Europe you hadn’t even heard of, towns jagged with consonants, villages with names like anagrams. Then she imagined a great pair of scissors cutting the whole thing up and reassembling it like a giant jigsaw. Except war wasn’t neat like that. War was about deaths, hundreds and thousands of deaths.
Her encounter with Leo Quinn troubled her. What he had asked, though it had surprised her, was not such a great request. It wouldn’t be hard for her to comply. She knew she had acted rudely, rushing off into the night like that. She regretted it almost immediately. It was his mention of Müller, and the implication that she might be having an affair with him, that had caused her to react so angrily. If it hadn’t been for that, she might very well have agreed with his proposal. But then she wouldn’t be seeing much of Frau Goebbels any more, so there wouldn’t be any need for it, would there?
That morning she was planning to visit the Kaufhaus des Westens. When she had first passed the KaDeWe store a few weeks ago, she had pushed through the brass doors and marvelled at the racks of hats and gloves and handbags on display, the gleaming escalators that rose to the upper floors. Exotic perfumes hung and mingled in the air and beautiful assistants stood behind the counters, their countenances as creamy and impassive as Japanese geishas while grim-faced housewives with fur-collared coats and cloche hats rammed on their heads fingered the lingerie and picked over the fashions. Clara had been longing to return for a leisurely morning’s shopping. But when she approached that day, a quite unexpected sight awaited her.