The Pursuit of Pearls

by Jane Thynne

  Like all birthdays, Hitler’s special day had begun with presents, but that was where the ordinariness ended. Vast marble tables had been assembled in the Reich Chancellery to display Meissen porcelain, silver candlesticks, and Titian paintings, alongside rather more modest gifts from ordinary people, largely made up of swastika cakes and cushions. The Pope, the King of England, and Henry Ford had sent telegrams. The engineer Ferdinand Porsche had presented Hitler with a shiny black convertible VW Beetle. Rudolf Hess had acquired a collection of priceless letters written by the Führer’s hero, Frederick the Great, and Albert Speer had given him an entire scale model of “Germania”—the new world capital, with buildings made out of balsa wood and glass and a thirteen-foot model of the proposed triumphal arch. This was, without doubt, Hitler’s favorite present, and he pored over it like a boy with a train set until he could be persuaded to tear himself away.

  On the face of it, Berlin was putting on a magnificent show. Gigantic white pillars had sprouted all along major thoroughfares. The newsstands groaned with souvenir birthday issues. Swastikas sprouted from every conceivable surface. Spring was a riot of color in Berlin, so long as the colors were red and black.

  Beneath the birthday bunting, however, everything was a little shabbier in Germany’s capital. The tablecloths in the restaurants were spotted because there was no detergent, the bread was sawdust, and the ersatz coffee undrinkable. People looked the other way on the trams because there was no toothpaste, precious few razor blades or shaving foam, and the sour odor of humanity and unwashed clothes hung in the U-Bahn. Even high-class nightclubs like Ciro’s stank of low-grade cigarettes, and taxis home were nonexistent because of the gas shortage.

  After the previous year’s Anschluss, when Germany annexed Austria, followed by the bloodless seizure of Czechoslovakia that March, most of Europe guessed a war was on the way. When it happened, it would be Poland’s fault, according to the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, which ensured that newspapers were black with seventy-two-point headlines screaming belligerent revenge on the Poles for their atrocities against Germans in the disputed “Polish corridor.” POLAND, LOOK OUT! There had been murderous attacks on Germans in Danzig. God help any country that stood in Germany’s way.

  Looking around her, Clara guessed that despite the marching and the machines, no one in this great big birthday pageant really wanted war. The ghost of the last war was still in their eyes, and the thought of what another would do haunted all but the very young. Only the little boys beside her, who now had squeezed between the legs of the storm troopers guarding the route, saw anything thrilling in the inexorable wall of men and tanks rolling past. Everyone else was getting by on an edgy cocktail of hope and denial. Everywhere you went, nerves flashed and shorted, like violet sparks above the tramlines. Tempers frayed. The whole city was as pumped up and jittery as a dog being forced to fight.

  Above their heads, loudspeakers strung along the street barked out radio broadcasts of Joseph Goebbels between bursts of military music. Goebbels was cheerleading the nation as though the Führer’s birthday was synonymous with facing up to the Poles. Enthusiasm for both was compulsory.

  “No German at home or anywhere else in the world can fail to take the deepest and heartiest pleasure in participation.”

  Clara winced. The voice of the short, clubfooted minister for enlightenment and propaganda still got under her skin like shards of glass. Even now, after six years in Germany, hearing it daily on the radio and at the film studios where she worked, Joseph Goebbels’s wheedling tone could make her flinch like chalk screeching on a blackboard.

  Clara was there only because of a solemn promise she had made to her godson, Erich Schmidt, who at sixteen had been chosen to lead his battalion of Hitler Youth in the parade. It was a great honor, he had reminded her numerous times. But from where she was standing there seemed little chance of even glimpsing Erich, let alone of him registering her loyal presence.

  It didn’t have to be that way. As an actress contracted to the Ufa studios, Clara had qualified for a place in the VIP enclosure, alongside prominent personalities in their finery and portly Party dignitaries trussed up in field gray. The viewing stand, garlanded with golden laurels and tented drapes like a marquee at a country wedding, offered a far better view and a gilt chair to sit on. That was why she had risked the Ferragamo shoes, as well as the skirt suit and the tip-tilted hat, which now looked far too smart amid the stolid burghers of the Berlin crowd. Only, when she reached the gates of the VIP enclosure, she realized she couldn’t face it. She spent enough of her life in close confines with Nazi officials without wanting to join them behind a velvet rope with no chance of escape.

  A frisson of excitement ran through the crowd. A posse of steel-helmeted, black-jacketed SS officers had appeared and were elbowing their way through, glancing from left to right. Joseph Goebbels, who was recording this extravaganza for posterity, was clearly controlling every last detail. No one was allowed to take their own photographs, and police were deputed to arrest anyone in the crowd who wielded a camera or failed to perform the Nazi salute. As the SS men barged past, Clara saw an elderly couple at the back of the throng, the man a teacher or a pastor perhaps, and his gray-haired wife beside him, being hustled off to a side street and lined up against a wall to await the police wagon.

  Mirror periscopes swiveled like reeds in the wind, and the yells around her intensified, rising into a wall of sound. The cordon of SA and SS officers linked arms to prevent the surge of sightseers spilling into the road.

  “He’s coming!” The excitement of the moment caused the stolid woman beside Clara to burst into a cry of joy.

  First came a fleet of motorcycle outriders, then Hitler himself, upright at the helm of his seven-liter Mercedes Tourer, with his arm raised in the trademark salute he could apparently hold for two hours straight. His peculiar, impersonal stare traveled like a searchlight across the crowds as his head flicked intermittently right and left, his eyes seemingly seeking out individual faces. Flowers were hurled through the air, hitting the sides of the Mercedes with soft thuds. Surprisingly, only two members of the Adolf Hitler Leibstandarte bodyguard were at the Führer’s side. The usual car of followers was absent.

  How vulnerable he was. All it would take would be a single shot and the leader of all Germany, the object of all this adulation, would be extinguished like a lightbulb, along with the fears of an entire continent. Clara wondered if she was the only person who had such a thought. German civilians were never told about attempts on the Führer’s life, but Clara had heard that in Munich several years ago, during a parade like this, a pistol had been found in a newsreel camera mounted on the roof of a car, the barrel of the gun pointed down the lens. Another couple of other assassination attempts had been averted at the last minute. Each lucky escape only served to convince Hitler more firmly of his deepest belief: destiny was on his side.

  As he came parallel to Clara, a shaft of sun lanced through a rent in the clouds, and a finger of light pointed down towards his car. Hitler’s bright blue gaze turned in Clara’s direction and seemed to penetrate right to where she was standing.

  Clara ducked her head, turned sharply, and pushed her way back through the throng. She had a long day ahead of her and a party to attend that evening. And today of all days she had chosen to move.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Stepping over the bags she had dumped in the hallway and shrugging off her coat, Clara looked around her new home.

  For an actress working in the Babelsberg studios, just a short distance away through the Berlin forest, this place couldn’t be more perfect. It was set in a colony of houses built in the nineteenth century by rich Berliners seeking respite from the city on the bucolic shores of the Griebnitzsee. The villas, all of them by up-and-coming architects, boasted a variety of styles—sweet, gabled cottages in the early nineteenth-century Germanic domestic fashion and turreted mock-baronial palaces, alongside modernist constructi
ons with clean lines and open-plan spaces. Since the 1920s, the original owners—the bankers and industrialists—had given way to film stars, and now the little group of houses was known locally as the Artists’ Colony. It was Berlin’s version of the Hollywood Hills—an oasis of luxury just a short drive from the city center for those who could afford privacy and architectural distinction.

  Not a category that included Clara Vine.

  Although her acting contract with Ufa kept her in regular film work, she was far from the heights of stardom that promised a place in the Artists’ Colony. It might have been her half-English heritage or the rebellious twist to her smile that prevented directors from casting her in leading roles. Or perhaps it was merely that the preferred template for a Reich film star was blond and buxom—a pattern fitted perfectly by her friend Ursula Schilling, who had been one of Ufa’s top actresses until the previous year, when she joined stars like Marlene Dietrich and Billy Wilder in the sanctuary of Hollywood. This was Ursula’s house, and Clara was here only until Ursula decided when, or if, it was safe to return.

  If she didn’t know better, Clara might have wondered how Ursula could bear to leave it. Though small, the house, like every other in the Artists’ Colony, was exquisite in every detail. It had been designed by Mies van der Rohe, with a steep-gabled, red-tiled roof, vanilla-painted façade, and teal-blue shutters on the windows. Beech, oak, and pine trees grew all around, shielding each house from any sight of its neighbor, and giving each dwelling a sense of total rural isolation.

  The front door opened directly into a paneled, open-plan drawing room running the entire length of the house, furnished with bookshelves and a piano. Expensive rugs covered the polished wooden floor, and there was an armchair soft enough to sink into and never get up.

  Ursula had been gone for months now, but the way she had left the house, you would think she had taken a shopping trip to the Kurfürstendamm rather than an ocean liner across the Atlantic. Everything was still there—cushions, lampshades, curtains. The rubble of lotions, stubby kohl pencils, and cratered powders on the dressing table. She had abandoned all her books and furniture, not to mention crockery in the sink and withered rosebuds in a dry vase. Even Ursula’s clothes were still in the bedroom, draped carelessly across chairs, falling out of drawers, and hanging in scented layers of silk and satin like gleaming ghosts.

  Fortunately Clara didn’t have much luggage of her own. She had always traveled light, ever since her days in repertory theater in England. All she had with her was a few changes of clothes, her leather jewelry box, Max Factor makeup, a book of Rilke’s poetry with a duck-egg-blue cover, and the sheaf of mail she had grabbed from her apartment as she left.

  Wandering into the kitchen, she set down a bag containing black rye bread, eggs, potatoes, and an onion. She had stood in line that morning for the eggs and onion and had every intention of enjoying them in an omelet as soon as she had unpacked. As she ran a tap to fill the kettle, she opened a cupboard to rummage for a cup and discovered, with the delight of an archaeologist making an antique find, a gigantic jar of real Melitta coffee beans, shiny nuggets of black gold, almost untouched. The only coffee to be found in Berlin right now, Kaffee-Ersatz, was a gritty concoction of chicory, oats, and roasted barley mixed with chemicals from coal, oil, and tar; so a jar like this was real treasure. Unscrewing the lid, she inhaled greedily. Everyone in Germany obsessed about food now. They dreamed of potatoes fried in butter, crispy chicken, and fragrant roast meat. Of real coffee and cream. Being half English, Clara fantasized about thick wedges of Fuller’s walnut cake and solid chunks of Cadbury’s chocolate, which were even more impossible to find.

  Cradling her fragrant, smoky-flavored coffee—black, no milk—Clara went over to the far window, from where a long sliver of the lake was visible, its hard silver surface marbled by high clouds, and a dark fringe of woods beyond. A narrow jetty protruded into the water and a duck stood on it, frisking a rainbow of water across its back. Shielding her eyes against the dazzle of light, she opened the French windows and stepped outside. She had not had a garden since childhood, when nine acres of Surrey at the foot of the North Downs had formed the limits of her world. There she; her elder sister, Angela; and her brother, Kenneth, had raced snails, collected tadpoles, and played French cricket.

  Resting against the sun-warmed brick, she breathed deeply, inhaling the scent of narcissus and sweet woodsmoke from a bonfire, letting the smell of nettles and grass float through her. In the city a hundred different noises made up silence, like the colors that together constitute white light—the rumble of traffic, the bang of a shop door, the jangle of a milk cart, the whine of a wireless—but out here the silence had a different texture. It was a deep, medieval quiet, the kind you never found in the city. Thick and tangible, oppressive almost. Clara could see why no one bothered locking their doors. The only sounds were the distant chug of a steam cruiser, squabbling squirrels in the high branches of the pines, and her own breathing.

  But it was no good. Whenever Clara relaxed, her mind would return to the same matter. The matter that she tried to keep buried, but that became increasingly urgent as time passed.

  Leo Quinn.

  Leo was the British passport control officer who had first suggested her other—and what felt increasingly like her real—role. At Leo’s urging, Clara had begun to feed details of the gossip and feuds of the senior Nazi women to British intelligence. Moving, as she did, in the regime’s high society, Clara had become a spy on the private life of the Third Reich. For years now she had formed a link in the shadowy chain that stretched across Europe, passing news of the Nazis to her contacts in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, learning from Leo the tradecraft and secrets of a spy’s life.

  And in the process she had fallen in love with him.

  At the thought of Leo, sadness swelled and images of their last two weeks together flared in her brain. They had spent the time enveloped in each other, driving a borrowed car out to the lakes and plunging into the chill water, slippery fronds beneath their feet. Making love in a bedroom, the morning light spangled across his face. Walking in the forest, beneath the shifting leaves. Talking about the future, and Leo’s longing that she should leave Berlin for the safety of England. She thought of his fingertips tracing her face as though committing it to memory. Holding her so tightly she could feel the blood pulse through him, his mouth on hers and his arms encircling her as though he would never let her go.

  And yet he had let her go. Without a second’s hesitation.

  It happened quite abruptly one morning. He had received a message the previous night, requesting that he return to work in London without delay. Clara didn’t even know what Leo’s job entailed—only that it was something to do with encrypted communications and that he was based in a London office block somewhere near Oxford Street but also made frequent trips abroad. Yet as soon as he had told her, he was knotting his tie and glancing at his watch. Then he pulled on his jacket, gave one last look back, and headed out of the door.

  That was six long months ago, and she had not heard a word from him since. Not so much as a postcard.

  Where are you, Leo?

  The questions ran through her head like beads on a rosary.

  Most evenings after she had finished at the studio, she would have a solitary supper and bury herself in the latest novel her sister had sent from Hatchards bookshop in London. Occasionally she would be dragged out by friends, and other times she took Erich to the cinema or a meal. At night she might stretch out a hand across the satin counterpane to where Leo had been, but more often she fell asleep the moment she climbed into bed, exhausted by the constant busyness she had adopted to keep thoughts of him at bay.

  Yet increasingly a mutinous anxiety arose in her, one that she tried and failed to suppress. Why had Leo not been in touch? For someone whose work involved communication, it seemed ironic that he had failed entirely to communicate with her. Agents learned to compress their words into codes, bu
t what code did silence contain?

  On one side of the room a gigantic rococo mirror was angled to reflect a photograph of Ursula on the opposite wall, an icy peroxide fantasy swathed in fur. Gazing into the mirror, Clara tried to see what Leo saw.

  He had always said she had a face that was easily able to conceal her feelings, or to project other emotions entirely. The glossy, dark hair with its russet streaks had been cut short for her current film role, and the effect was to frame her face more closely, emphasizing the widely spaced blue eyes with the brows high and thinly plucked, in the current fashion. Her sleek dress, flatteringly nipped in at the waist, gave her an air of self-assurance, even if it was worn in patches and the cuff was starting to fray.

  Yet that self-assurance, like her identity itself, was a lie. The document she carried in her bag at all times, certifying that Clara Helene Vine was a full member of the Aryan race, disguised the fact that she was, in Nazi terms, a Mischling, with a Jewish mother and grandmother, who under the strict race laws now in place could not marry a gentile, work for one, or even sleep with one without the threat of imprisonment.