by Jane Thynne
She lifted a cup of coffee to her lips but the delicate porcelain shuddered in her hand.
‘It was like living in a doll’s house. I had luxury everywhere, but no life. I had begged Gunther for a divorce. I even had him watched because I hoped I might find he had been unfaithful himself. Then Victor came back and, you can probably guess, I started an affair.’ She cast a glance at Clara. ‘You don’t look surprised?’
‘Should I?’
‘There had been another man in between. He was a law student. Very attentive. He sent flowers, he took me on a trip to the Hotel Dreesen at Godesberg. But he was a boy and I was playing with him really. It was Victor I cared for. You can’t imagine how I felt when we met again. But he was a serious man. Tremendously passionate, you know, but intelligent too. He was committed to building a homeland in Palestine.’
Clara nodded, careful not to interrupt her flow.
‘Anyhow, the result was that my husband threw me out. He left me standing in the street with a suitcase in my hand and just enough money to take a taxi to my mother’s house.’
‘This was four years ago?’
‘That’s right. Before I met Joseph. And then, in the exhilaration of love, I told Joseph all about it, fool that I was. He was crazy with jealousy. He raved for days.’
It was all too easy to imagine how Magda, with her strange, humourless candour would have had Goebbels stamping his crippled foot with rage.
‘But, Frau Goebbels, does all this really matter now? You’re married and you have the baby and—’
Magda gave a savage laugh and pulled a fresh lace handkerchief from her sleeve. ‘And I’m so happy, yes? You’ve noticed that, have you?’
‘Men are often jealous of their wives’ past lives. It’s normal.’
‘But this is not my past life. That’s the point.’
From the garden outside came the sounds of the child playing with her nanny. The child was toddling across the lawn, pushing a wagon full of dolls, but the wagon hit a stone and overturned, throwing the dolls in a froth of lace dresses out onto the grass. The little girl began to wail and at the sound Magda rose and stood at the window impassively. Then she turned away, drew the shutters and began pacing restlessly round the room.
‘A few days ago I received a call. We were giving a dinner and I happened to be passing the telephone in the hall so I picked it up. You can’t imagine how fortunate that was. It was Victor. I recognized his voice at once.’
‘And what did he want?’
‘How would I know?’ she spat. ‘I put the phone straight down again. I was actually shaking. How could he not be aware that our telephone line is listened to by others? What if Joseph had answered, or any of the staff? Rudolf Hess and his wife were in the next room.’
‘So did he call again?’
‘I received a letter.’
‘He sent you a letter!’
‘Not here. To my mother’s house. He evidently has enough sense not to post it here. And it was hand delivered, so obviously someone has told him about the censors. He is back in Berlin and swears his love for me.’
Involuntarily, Clara put her hand to her mouth. The shock must have registered on her face because Magda reached over to her arm. It was the first time Magda had ever touched her, other than to shake hands. She gripped so tightly Clara could feel the fingers digging into her flesh.
‘You must promise me solemnly that you will tell no one. If Joseph finds out he will kill him. I wouldn’t be surprised if he killed me too.’
‘Surely not.’
Magda dragged another cigarette from the box, snatched up a table lighter and lit it with shaky fingers. She inhaled, the tendons standing out on her neck like wires, then she resumed pacing the room.
‘Nothing is sure.’
‘But your husband . . .’
‘Would not hesitate to end the life of someone who stood in his way.’ There was a contemptuous edge in her voice, as though Clara was being deliberately obtuse. ‘With some people . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Well, killing is not a difficult thing for them.’
A clatter in the distance caused them both to startle.
‘It’s all right. My husband’s at his office. It can’t possibly be him.’
She leaned towards Clara, and spoke in a low, urgent tone. ‘There is something I need you to do. I want you to take Victor a letter.’
‘But . . .’
‘I ask you this from the bottom of my heart. You have to do it. The fact is, there is simply no one else I can ask. There’s no one here I trust.’
‘And what will you tell him?’
‘That is between me and Victor. It’s better for you not to know. Will you do it? For me?’
As Clara stared at her, the words stalled on her lips. She was being asked to act as a courier between the wife of the Propaganda Minister and her Jewish lover. It was hard to imagine a crazier risk to take. What punishment might be devised in the dark recesses of Goebbel’s bitter heart for a crime like that?
Magda observed her hesitation impassively.
‘There’s nothing for you to gain from this. Unless you choose to betray me. But you have always struck me as a sympathetic person.’
Clara didn’t reply.
‘Will you at least think about it?’
Clara nodded. Magda rose and the breach in her glacial surface was healed, like the surface of an icy lake, as though it had never been.
‘Good. If you decide to help me you must come back next Wednesday evening at seven and I will have a letter for you to collect. You can take it to him the next day. I will tell you where to meet him. And I want you to promise me. No one must know.’
Clara was not needed at work that afternoon, so she got off the bus at the end of the Tiergarten and walked for a while as the conversation with Magda churned in her mind. People and traffic passed by without her seeing them. Eventually she stopped in a coffee shop and sat in a trance as the bright chatter of Berlin housewives rose and fell around her. Sunlight strained through the windows catching in the glitter of cutlery and glancing off the little tin tables. Clara envied these women their gossip and confidences. She longed to unburden herself of the events of the last few days, but there was no one in the world she could talk to. How could she utter a word about Magda’s request? Who could she tell about her day with Klaus Müller? She felt desolately alone. For the first time since she had arrived in Berlin, Clara missed her own family. She missed Kenneth saying ‘Chin up!’ in his jovial English way, and Angela, with her familiar impatient frown. Her mother, lost so long ago, now felt more distant than ever. For a moment Clara even contemplated contacting her cousin Hans Neumann in Hamburg, before dismissing it from her mind.
The only person she could confide in was Leo, and she had no idea when he would contact her again. Even when he did, how could she possibly tell him about her day with Müller, the details of which were now engrained in her mind? The dense bulk of his torso as he rose above her and his shuddering groan of release. The sentimental memories of childhood he told her over lunch, the jokes and stories he shared as he drove her home, planning their next encounter.
Shaking herself out of her trance, Clara paid the bill and looked out at the street. Directly opposite was an optician’s shop that had been desecrated with anti-semitic slogans, the usual combination of threats and warnings about the danger of buying from Jews. It was not the graffiti, however, but the contents of the shop, that caught her eye. Behind the paint-spattered glass were rows of spectacles, men’s and women’s, wire and horn-rimmed, tortoiseshell and pink plastic, bottle-thick and bifocal, packed on shelves that filled the entire window. There must have been hundreds of spectacles in there, jammed indiscriminately together, ranked from floor to ceiling, all staring emptily ahead. Something about the dinginess of the display meant the spectacles on sale didn’t even look new. They looked as though they had been abandoned by their owners, who no longer had any use for them.
Chapter Forty-four
; ‘Doesn’t he just look like a waiter carrying a tray?’ said Rupert. ‘Every time a Nazi gives me that salute, it makes me want to order a Martini.’
Mary snorted with laughter. It was true that many Party officials, in trying to emulate as much as possible the way the Leader flipped his arm upwards to his shoulder, made the gesture look ridiculous, as if it wasn’t ridiculous enough already. No matter how demoralizing they were, the morning press conferences at the Propaganda Ministry always contained a merciful element of humour.
Having given his salute, Goebbels sat at the red-cloth-covered conference table, and Putzi Hanfstaengl, Dr Boehmer, chief of the Foreign Press department, and a bevy of officials and bureaucrats, variously attired in brown shirts, army uniform or suits, deposited themselves around him.
‘They always remind me of an identification line-up,’ she murmured.
‘Only difference is, they’re all guilty.’
Goebbels proceeded to announce a long and boring report on improvements to domestic and social policy, rounding it off with a reprimand for the press for focusing on invented stories about Jewish atrocities, when they should be writing about radical innovations such as the new law for the encouragement of marriage, which would offer couples a thousand-mark gift as a wedding present from the state. Eventually, he drew to a close and the journalists dispersed in relief to write their reports.
‘Thinking about it, I really could do with that Martini,’ said Rupert, as they headed out. ‘How about a quick drink at the Adlon?’
It had become their routine. The Adlon bar was a favoured watering hole for foreign journalists and reliably full of people they knew, downing a whisky or several before heading off to the office to file. Mary thought that some of her happiest times here in Berlin were ensconced in the Adlon’s capacious leather armchairs, staging a mock quarrel with Rupert or sharing the latest political news with the other correspondents.
As they made their way down the steps of the Ministry she saw a face she recognized amongst the Ministerial staff.
‘Isn’t that the guy we saw the other night? The one with Clara Vine?’
‘Doktor Müller, you mean?’
‘What is she thinking of?’
‘He’s pretty handsome, isn’t he? Quite a beefcake.’ Rupert assessed him with interest. ‘I’m not a woman and I wouldn’t like to presume what goes through your heads but . . .’
Mary aimed a mock blow at him with her notebook. ‘Please, Rupert. Give us some credit.’
It was a short walk down the Wilhelmstrasse and round the corner to the Adlon. The bar itself, across the lobby, up a flight of marble steps and through a pair of leather doors, was a place of discreet luxury, thickly carpeted and smelling of expensive tobacco. They ordered their Martinis and armed with a bowl of nuts, wandered over to Sigrid Schultz, who was deep in a red leather chair, leafing through the international newspapers that were provided.
‘Hello, stranger,’ said Rupert, handing her a press release. ‘You missed this morning’s press conference.’
‘But I didn’t miss it that much. How was it?’
‘Oh, another chance for Goebbels to rail at “fake Jewish atrocity stories”. He was really needled by the reaction to his boycott of Jewish shops.’
‘Says it was propaganda spread by international Jewry,’ added Mary.
‘He’s getting into his stride now. He wants complete control of the press, and once he’s got the domestic press under his thumb, it’ll be our turn. The Foreign Office is already complaining we’re unfairly prejudiced against Germany. If it goes any further, they’ll start to expel people.’
‘He’s started already actually,’ said Sigrid languidly. ‘Didn’t you hear about Angus MacLeish? He was summoned to the Propaganda Ministry and they told him he had to leave because Hitler had read his book and couldn’t stand it.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said he’d read Hitler’s book and couldn’t stand it either.’
They laughed, but it was laughter tinged with apprehension.
‘You’ll be all right though, won’t you Sigrid?’ asked Mary.
Sigrid Schulz was so petite and pretty that a lot of the German officers fell over themselves to please her. Goering was rumoured to be especially smitten.
‘Oh sure,’ Sigrid said with a laconic wave. ‘I can take care of myself. But listen. Have you seen this?’
She held up a copy of the Berliner Morgenpost and adjusted the glasses which hung on a gold chain round her neck. ‘A body has been found in a field. It is identified as that of Erik Jan Hanussen.’
Mary felt the hairs rise on her neck. Rupert whistled through his teeth.
‘A farmer discovered the remains near Staakower woods north of Berlin. Two bullets in the head and nothing on the body but thirty marks.’
‘But we saw him only the other night!’ gasped Mary.
‘He was arrested at his home in Bendlerstrasse and taken to the SA barracks at Pape Strasse in his own red Bugatti,’ read Sigrid. ‘It says here he wrote a last letter in invisible ink.’
‘But why would they kill him? He was Hitler’s favourite!’
‘He was a Jew, apparently,’ said Rupert, taking the paper. ‘This report says he was born in a gaol cell in Vienna to a father who was the caretaker of a synagogue. The rumours have been going round for months. Eventually someone mailed a copy of his Jewish marriage contract to the Führer’s office.’
He drained his Martini, ate the olive it came with, and picked up his jacket.
‘Thank God I haven’t filed my piece on the House of the Occult yet. This is going to make a fantastic feature. High society, sex and violence, a cameo appearance from Herr Hitler himself. And plenty of pictures to go with it. Just the thing the Daily Chronicle reader wants to read over his toast and marmalade in Tunbridge Wells. If I hurry I can do two thousand words for the morning edition.’
Mary took the paper from Rupert and looked at the picture of Hanussen. It was a stock publicity shot, the hypnotist intense and swarthy with his veiled, far-seeing eyes, as though he was able to perceive something hidden from ordinary folk. He looked, she realized, like a character from Dr Caligari, one of those old Expressionist movies that Ufa didn’t make any more, full of mysticism and magic and other dark forces. But his look reminded her of something else too. She recalled the front page of Lotte Klein’s Bunte Wochenschau, which that week featured an image of Hitler, eyes straining mystically into the distance, as though he perceived a future that no one else could see.
‘So much for fortune-telling. That man was reckless,’ said Sigrid coolly, lighting her pipe. ‘He bragged about his sessions with the Führer. All that stuff about being able to foresee the success of the Reich. Too bad he didn’t foresee he was about to be shot in a field by a bunch of brown-shirted thugs.’
Chapter Forty-five
Clara didn’t see him at first. She remembered what he had said about looking confident and natural; as though you belonged in a place, so that staff or authorities wouldn’t bother you. And he did. Leo was standing in the courtyard of Charlottenburg Palace, Frederick I of Prussia’s baroque fantasy with its egg-yolk façade and copper cupola. He was sketching a towering bronze of the emperor on horseback, as if pencil drawings of corpulent equestrians were his speciality. He was wearing a shabby old tweed jacket and brushing his hair out of his eyes as he squinted up in the sunlight. Anyone looking at him would assume he was an art student, entirely devoted to his aesthetic efforts. Indeed, he seemed so absorbed, Clara even wondered if he would notice her approach, but as she drifted towards him he dropped his pencil and she stepped forward to pick it up.
‘Thank you.’ Leo acknowledged her with a cool nod and turned towards the palace. She wandered in alongside him and presented her ticket. She wondered if he had been thinking about her day with Müller and how it had turned out.
The ticket had been waiting for her when she got back to Frau Lehmann’s from the studio the previous night.
&n
bsp; Schloss Charlottenburg. Admit one. And underneath, scrawled in ink, 4 p.m.
There had also been a message from Helga, but as Clara never used Frau Lehmann’s telephone any more, she decided it would have to wait until she was out the following day. She had tried to call her from a telephone cabin on the way here but there was no reply from Helga’s number so she hurried on. Since her friend Bruno had been freed, Helga’s happiness was entirely restored. Indeed, her celebrations had tipped into risky exuberance. Two days ago she had appeared on set stinking of alcohol and much the worse for wear. The next day she had failed to turn up entirely. Clara, however, was too preoccupied to worry about Helga’s self-destructive tendencies. She had barely been sleeping. Her outing with Müller, and Magda’s request, drove everything else from her mind.
‘So how are Beauty and the Beast?’ Leo asked now.
‘In quite a state at the moment.’
‘Squabbling?’
‘Not really. They’re hardly speaking to each other. She can’t bear the sight of him.’
‘A lot of people feel like that.’
They entered a room in the east wing lined with glass cabinets featuring decorative objects that had belonged to Queen Louise. Clara was getting used to the way Leo would glance about him, rarely making eye contact, the way he always found the guidebook terrifically absorbing. “The construction of Schloss Charlottenburg, designed as a summer residence for Sophie Charlotte, wife of the Elector Friedrich III, began in 1695.”
For a Thursday afternoon, the Schloss was fairly busy with tourists, craning to see the trinkets and china shepherdesses in their glass cabinets. A swift head-count told Clara there were five other people in the room, so she knew she needed to tell Leo in a way that would not cause him to react overtly.