Black Roses

by Jane Thynne

  ‘What happened here?’

  She rubbed her arms instinctively. ‘Müller came to the studio this morning. He said Goebbels was furious with me. He seemed to think I had something to do with a man being killed the night I delivered Magda’s message. He warned me Goebbels might have me arrested.’

  ‘A man was killed?’

  ‘A police agent, apparently. I have no idea what why Goebbels should think I’m involved in it. But I’m worried, Leo. He knew I was in Steglitz, so I think he must know about Magda’s lover.’

  Leo’s throat constricted. He felt the words stall in his mouth, as if reluctant to emerge and change everything.

  ‘He does. That’s why I got in contact. I needed to warn you.’

  ‘But how could he possibly have found out?’

  ‘Head Office let him know.’

  ‘Head Office? You mean you told him!’

  ‘Not me. People I work for.’ Leo was about to launch into some kind of defence of their strategy, but why bother? One look at her face, cheeks scarlet with shock and betrayal, and he felt the same.

  ‘But why, Leo?’

  ‘They thought it would be safer for you if Goebbels believed you were helping him. That you had felt some kind of moral conflict about Magda’s affair. They did it without telling me, Clara. You know I wouldn’t have agreed to it.’

  She moved away from him and stared straight ahead. ‘Exactly what happened?’

  ‘Goebbels received an anonymous note about Magda and Arlosoroff I only discovered this morning. I needed to tell you straight away.’

  She looked at him, comprehension suddenly dawning. ‘So that’s why.’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Goebbels had asked me to keep an eye on Magda. He must have had his suspicions. Then a few days ago at the Fashion Show he thanked me personally. For everything I’d done.’

  She sprang out of bed, shattering the spell of her nakedness, covering herself again, clipping on her stockings and pulling on her blouse.

  ‘I need to warn Arlosoroff.’

  ‘How can you? Do you even know where he is?’

  She picked up the watch she had left beside the bed.

  ‘He’ll be at the Anhalter Bahnhof in one hour.’

  ‘How on earth do you know that?’

  ‘I just do.’ She pulled on her coat and buckled her shoes, the transformation complete.

  Leo sprang up and caught her arms urgently. ‘Clara, you can’t go. If they’re following you, they’ll pick up your trail and you’ll lead them straight to him. It’s exactly the wrong thing to do. It places you both at risk.’

  She was buttoning her coat. ‘I have to warn him. I owe it to him.’

  He wanted to restrain her, but she was pulling herself from his arms.

  ‘Listen to me. You don’t owe Arlosoroff anything.’

  ‘But I do, you see, Leo. It’s my fault. He sent a message to Magda and I didn’t pass it on. He’s expecting to meet her at the station. If she doesn’t turn up he’ll stay on in Berlin, trying to get her to leave. He’s a stubborn man. An honourable man. He’ll seek her out and try to persuade her. He’ll get in touch, only this time, Goebbels will be waiting. It’s me who has put him in danger and I need to tell him he must leave straight away. Tonight.’

  ‘If you go, I can’t protect you. Müller is right. It would be, very, very bad for you if you were arrested.’

  He saw himself as if from above, naked and white-faced with rumpled hair, pleading with her, trying to make her understand.

  ‘They could lock you up. They could torture you. You know about torture, don’t you? I couldn’t help you. I wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it.’

  A thought ran through her head. It was the question she had asked herself on her first day in Berlin. What is the worst that could happen?

  ‘I know what I’m doing, Leo.’

  ‘And I couldn’t bear anything to happen to you, because . . .’ He caught her face in his hands. ‘I have known from the day I first saw you and every second since that you are the most remarkable woman I’ve met. I’m thirty-three years old and I’ve never felt like this about anyone.’

  He saw her falter, and her eyes fill, but she didn’t reply.

  ‘What was the first rule I told you, Clara? Keep yourself safe. Otherwise you endanger other people too.’

  ‘And the second rule was, sometimes you have to abandon the rules.’

  She reached up and kissed him. Her face was intent and removed in that completely focused way he had seen before. Though he watched, agonized, as she walked out the door, he still marvelled at her resolution. Whatever had made him think she was unsuited to this life?

  Dusk was falling as Clara approached the Anhalter Bahnhof. The crowd flowed in one direction on the pavements. Commuters with briefcases and determined expressions were making their way from the office and back to the suburbs, no doubt thinking about the supper that waited for them, and the children to be played with and the pleasures of the weekend ahead.

  A few streets away she got off the bus, merged into the crowd and walked briskly, head down and lost in thought. She was a shop girl, anxious to get home after a day spent on aching feet.

  She might not have noticed them at all if it hadn’t been for the woman’s shoes. Her suit was a dull brown, just the kind of thing any office worker might wear, but the shoes were a contrast, a rich claret colour, accessorized with white daisies stitched into the leather and a midsize heel. Lovely shoes, they were, suggesting a frivolity quite at odds with the utilitarian suit. Helga would have liked those, Clara thought, keeping her eyes to the ground. The shoes clipped along in front of her in the crowd, but paused as their owner stopped to look in a shop. Then, to Clara’s surprise, a few minutes later, the shoes appeared ahead of her again. How did that happen? Looking up, her senses tensed and she realized she had company.

  From what she could make out there were two of them, one in front and one behind. The woman was young, perhaps her own age, with a headscarf and glasses. The man wore a black fedora above ginger hair. He carried a briefcase and had a languid stride, just fast enough to suggest purpose, but slow enough to change tack if necessary. He had a scar on his face, which drew down the side of one eye, like a perpetual wink. They kept a couple of yards’ distance, dodging the people in their way, weaving in and out of the crowds in a determined manner. From what she could tell they seemed to be moving in a co-ordinated fashion, one falling back as the other overtook. Leo had told her about this strategy. A box, it was called. For all she knew there was a trio, with another in a car cruising by.

  In the hope of losing them Clara took an abrupt right off Stresemannstrasse, and found herself heading away from the station down Prinz Albrecht Strasse, past the new Gestapo headquarters, where political prisoners lined the cells and the names of thousands more Communists, trade unionists, Jews, freemasons, religious leaders and other enemies of the state were imprisoned in a vast, automated filing system. She wondered if there was a file on her, with instructions perhaps on surveillance, and details of her habits and associates. Instinctively she crossed the road. No one walked past that place now without a shudder. She took another right at the end of the road and then right again down Anhalter Strasse, which brought her in a circle. She didn’t dare glance at her watch. What better way could there be of signalling that a meeting was planned?

  At the end of the street the tall portal of the Anhalter Bahnhof loomed into view, with its twin figures above the entrance, Night and Day, one with its eyes closed and the other staring out into the distance. Her diversion had been pointless. By now the woman was at two o’clock and the man behind her at seven o’clock, and despite the crowds they were keeping increasingly close, boxing her in and restricting her movement as if trapping her in a net. Clara’s heart was pumping and fear was slicing through her, settling in the marrow of her bones. Did they want her, or Arlosoroff? She needed to lose them quickly, but how?

  The station was no more
than a hundred meters away on the other side of Stresemannstrasse when she passed a stately building that she recognized with a jolt of surprise as the Hotel Excelsior. The very same hotel that had featured in Grand Hotel. The place Greta Garbo made famous when she said she wanted to be alone. Well, Clara knew exactly what Garbo meant. She wanted to be alone too, so she ducked through the revolving doors and looked around.

  She really didn’t have the first idea what she could do there, other than achieve a moment’s respite from her followers on the street. There was an air of hushed luxury in the lobby. Receptionists in gold-braided jackets manned a vast desk and bellhops in navy uniforms with brass buttons pushed expensive cases around. She knew within seconds the tails would be making their way through the revolving doors.

  As she glanced across the expanse of chequered black and white tiles, a sign caught her eye, “Verkaufsladen Im Tunnel”, and beneath it the mahogany doors of an elevator. The famous tunnel! She remembered now. Because the Excelsior was designed for business travellers, a tunnel had been built to run directly beneath the street through to the station opposite. It was all part of the five-star experience. It meant guests could go straight from their hotel to their train without having to negotiate the chaotic traffic above them. Clara almost sighed with relief. Walking across to reception, she asked in English for Herr Winkelman in room 368.

  ‘I’m sorry Fräulein. There is no one of that name in that room.’

  ‘But he told me! Room 368! Fourth floor.’

  ‘You must be mistaken, I’m afraid. For a start that room is not on the fourth floor.’

  Leaning closer towards the receptionist, in a confidential tone she said, ‘But he’s waiting for me. Fourth floor, he said. I remember exactly. And it’s very important that I see him.’

  The man licked a finger and began running through the register.

  ‘We have a Herr Henkell in room 368.’

  ‘It’s Herr Winkelman,’ she pouted. ‘And he very specifically told me the fourth floor.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ The man gestured at a bank of telephones in little wooden cabins across the lobby. ‘I can’t help you. Perhaps if you would like to make a call?’

  ‘Oh, don’t bother.’

  She turned away, a picture of sulky indignation, then as if on impulse, made a sharp left and walked swiftly up the red-carpeted staircase. When she reached the first floor, she walked along the corridor, waited two minutes, then took the lift back down to the lobby. She hoped Herr Henkell in room 368 wasn’t taking a shower, because he could expect a couple of uninvited visitors ringing his bell before too long.

  Crossing the lobby she entered the tunnel lift and descended to a gleaming underground stretch of marble, lined with shops selling jewellery and cosmetics. A last deluxe retail opportunity for the hotel’s guests before they re-entered the grimy streets of Berlin. There were high class fashion boutiques with stiff-limbed mannequins frozen in their furs and displays of finely stitched leather gloves. The plate windows gave her every opportunity to see there was no one behind her. A hundred metres later she clipped up a flight of steps and emerged in the vast glass cathedral of the Anhalter Bahnhof itself.

  At five minutes to six on a Friday evening the station was a single heaving mass of people flowing towards the platforms and funnelling themselves into the six trains that left every three minutes. The great trains heaved and exhaled, their clanking adding to the cacophony of sound that rose high into the ribs of the sooty glass ceiling. The forecourt was thronged with shoe shine boys, newspaper vendors, flower sellers, men unloading carts and porters hauling luggage. And right there beneath the clock, blinking and looking around him with a distinctly nervous air, was Arlosoroff, accompanied by a stained suitcase and a coat folded over his arm.

  Scanning the crowd Clara realized how difficult it would be to spot her followers if they had managed to catch up with her. The forecourt was a seething press of travellers, milling around the booking halls, cramming the waiting rooms and gazing up at the destination board, which registered services, not just to Leipzig, Frankfurt and Munich but as far away as Prague, Naples and Athens. The train to Vienna, she noted, was leaving from Platform 6. It was the Express, no stops all the way to Austria.

  Her eyes swept the concourse. There was a man sitting on a bench a little way off who was ostensibly reading a magazine but kept glancing at her. An old fellow with a gold watch chain and a bow-tie had her directly in his line of sight. A plump girl in a crimson jacket standing in line at one ticket desk seemed to be staring right at her. But no sign of the pair from the street. The air was filled with the clash of iron on steel and the bitter hiss of gas.

  At that moment her gaze snagged on something familiar. The ginger hair of the briefcase man. He had sat himself up on one of the tall mahogany seats used by the shoe-shine boys, high enough to afford him an excellent view of the passing masses. The wispy ginger locks were visible because the fedora sat on his knee. It looked to her as though he had taken his hat off to conceal something beneath it, and it wasn’t the evening newspaper.

  When Arlosoroff saw Clara approach his knuckly face registered first relief, then dismay.

  ‘She’s not coming,’ said Clara quietly.

  ‘You’re lying to me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t lie.’

  He made to pick up his suitcase. ‘Then I’m going to see her. You don’t write a letter like that and then abandon someone.’

  ‘Listen to me, Victor. Her husband has discovered. His men are following you. You have to leave as soon as possible.’

  His face was incredulous, wounded. ‘He’s told you to say this, hasn’t he? You’re one of his spies.’

  ‘I’m not. But they are here all right. Ten yards away from us there’s a man having his shoes shined. Don’t look. He’s holding a pistol under his hat. The faster you can get on this train, the less chance he has of using it.’

  ‘What is this nonsensical melodrama?’

  ‘I’m trying to explain. Goebbels knows all about you and Magda and he’s aiming to kill you.’

  Arlosoroff’s eyes peered myopically through the furling steam. Clara snatched a glance at the briefcase man and saw him tense for a second before a family of children passed in front of him, obscuring his view.

  Arlosoroff was scratching his densely curled head, as though tackling some obscure Talmudic question.

  ‘Now what I have to ask myself is, why should I believe what you have to say? Magda loves me. She wouldn’t change her mind without a word.’

  Clara remained still, willing him to pick up his suitcase and focus on the train standing at Platform 6 which was issuing the kind of grunts and sighs that generally preceded departure.

  He continued, ‘It may be that she needs some time to decide. Leaving home is a serious business, after all. She’ll need to make plans.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to come, Victor.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She wants to stay with her husband. She urges you to leave immediately.’

  ‘And yet, I have only your word for this. What I am wondering,’ he continued ponderously, ‘is why I should trust you?’

  Clara reached into her pocket and passed something into his fleshy palm. The golden Star of David.

  ‘There.’

  He stared at it for a moment and closed his hand over it. Clara looked round with a start as she was jostled by a passing commuter. Behind the barrier that led to Platform 6 a whistle sounded. But Arlosoroff’s drooping sadness moored him to the spot.

  ‘Does she realize what it means for her if she stays?’

  Clara took his hands in hers. ‘Victor, she’s not coming and it’s not safe for you. Think of all those people you’ve been helping. They need you more than Magda does. Getting people out of Germany and setting them up with new lives, teaching them new skills, helping them to survive in a different country, that’s what matters. Who knows how bad it will get here? Magda can choose what she does, but the Jews can�
��t. You have to go, right now. Please get on the train.’

  Doors were slamming as, with creaks and wheezes, the train began pulling out. Behind them the man on the shoe-shine chair was jumping down. With an alacrity that surprised her, Arlosoroff gave a curt nod, plucked up his case and strode towards the barrier waving his ticket. Once through he sprinted for the final compartment and slammed the door. Clara turned away at once, so she didn’t see the fedora man reach the barrier and conduct a furious dispute with the railway official, as the Express train headed off through the Berlin suburbs into the darkening night.

  She was out of the station and about to hail a cab when she became aware of him. It was the man she had spotted in the station, on the bench by the booking hall, reading the magazine. He was pacing after her now, his hat bobbing above the crowd.

  ‘Wait a moment please!’

  There was no time to wait for the cab. She would have to evade him on foot. She turned from the taxi queue, quickening her step.

  ‘Please. Wait!’

  Hurrying against the flow of commuters, she turned her collar up and walked briskly towards the U-Bahn, her slight figure weaving easily through the thicket of overcoats and mackintoshes flooding towards her. But as she made to duck into the subway a passing woman detained her with a friendly hand on her arm.

  ‘Fräulein, I think there’s someone who wants to talk to you.’

  ‘I’ve never seen him before in my life.’

  She shook the woman’s hand off and clattered down the steps to the underground. Her plan was to insert herself at the far end of the platform, deep amid the thick of the crowd, take the first train that came for a couple of stops and then switch routes. But the man pursuing her was faster than she was. His steps thudded heavily after her until, panting, he drew level.