The Winter Garden (2014)

by Thynne, Jane

  ‘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. Curiously Clara fingered the neat tooling and the locked brass fastening. It 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 the sake of 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 was upset that Anna’s death seemed to have been brushed under the carpet and she wanted 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! Are you 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 with concentration.

  ‘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,’ grinned Mary. ‘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 kirby grip 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, 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 of them 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 programmes.’

  Mary was flourishing a sheaf of theatre programmes, bundled together with a rubber band. The Friedrichspalast, the Wintergarten and the Metropol in Berlin. Happy Journey, Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. A production of The Merry Widow at the Gärtnerplatz theatre 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 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 he would do. She could just picture 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.

  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 I haven’t got the first idea what’s going on in your head.’

  Chapter Twelve

  For the rest of that week the cold settled on Berlin. The frost feathered the railings and softened the trees with a fur of brilliant white. The sweet smell of roasting chestnuts issued from trolleys parked on the pavement. A chill wind whipped round the grey 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 frozen to the touch.

  And still Clara could not shake off the sensation that she was being followed.

  The feeling had been there from the moment that Archie Dyson had 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 and she was sure of it. The next afternoon, after a costume fitting for the new film – all girlish gingham dresses, dirndls and aprons – Clara decided to find out.

  Babelsberg Station, a short walk from the studio, was a pretty, redbrick 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 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 holidays, 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 passers-by, were it not for the fact that barely anyone lifted their eyes above street l
evel, 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 Potsdamerplatz.

  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 only been in existence for four years, yet it had spread like a cancer through German society. Its aim was to know everything about a person, 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, she knew.

  They had signals. A man bending to tie a shoelace might be signalling to his partner that he was keen 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 said, was to note more instinctive signals, like the set 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 she ran through a constant register of the people around her and studied not just their clothes but their faces, separating them out 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, armed with a large broom, who 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 an old woman in a floral headscarf stood complacently while her fat little dog relieved itself against a lamp post. 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. There was nothing she could see to raise any suspicion.

  At the top of the street Clara jumped on a tram and took a quick glance round. Weary office workers were strap-hanging in the crowded carriage, exuding the smell 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 beneath 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, where the neon of the theatre lights reflected off the sides of gleaming Mercedes and BMWs. The street was busy with people beginning their evening out to the theatre. An operetta called 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 images of other pedestrians, noting the colour of their tie, or hair, or shoes. Anyone following would look utterly anonymous, so it was important to observe the details, the ones they could not easily change.

  Further on she wove round the back of 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 Leon Dupuis. For once Clara was glad that her part had been so small. There was no chance of anyone connecting the figure of a nineteenth-century French village girl with the slight figure in trench coat and cloche hat lingering at the glass display cases that showcased coming attractions.

  Past the cinema she stopped off at a café, and ordered a plate of bockwurst with potato salad and fried onion 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 opposite. 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 Oranienburger Strasse she caught the S-Bahn back down towards Nollendorfplatz and headed for her apartment. She had run a great ring round the city, with no sign of anyone in pursuit. Her aim had not been to shake off a potential tail, only to determine if they were there. But everything about her journey had convinced her: the only shadows were the ones in her mind.

  It was properly dark now. Ahead of her street lamps 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 and as he passed each lamp post 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 Winterfeldstrasse, she was looking forward to a quiet night in and soaking in a hot bath with a good novel. Her feet were aching with 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 block 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 footsteps were confident and deliberate. They took ten paces. Fifteen. Then she recognized something. It was something she had heard before. A click of steel in the heel of the shoe. 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 stop. He must be right outside her door.

  She stepped out of 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 out his match, threw 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 right round the city, or had he come to Winterfeldstrasse 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 Einstein Café on Kurfürstenstrasse? Why don’t we meet there? Are you free Thursday
night? Say seven o’clock?’

  Chapter Thirteen

  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 people 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 paste them up at night, wearing gloves so they didn’t leave fingerprints, with brushes and paste concealed in orange boxes. The penalties for distributing these Flugblätter, dissident political posters, was death and the Gestapo went to great lengths to analyse everything, from the papers’ 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 advertising hoardings. Their messages were partially legible, where they had not been properly 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 but to read the walls.

  As she made her way that morning Clara wondered if her own allegiance was also evident to anyone who looked hard enough. Last night’s encounter with Ralph Sommers had made her more determined than ever not to relax. Had he followed her round the city? And, if he had, was it purely to ask her for a drink? Was a drink, indeed, all that he wanted? His calm, faintly mocking demeanour, mingled with his undeniable attractiveness, had unsettled her profoundly and caused a night of restless, troubled sleep. She was looking forward to seeing him again, and dreading it at the same time. That lunchtime, however, she was due to meet Erich. They were going to his favourite restaurant, so for just a few hours she would do her best to forget the events of the previous evening and concentrate on something normal.