The Pursuit of Pearls

by Jane Thynne

  His smile broadened slightly.

  “Very stirring. And is it your character who is forbidden to love?”

  “You could say so.”

  Liebe Streng Verboten was a romantic comedy of the most frivolous kind. It was set in occupied Vienna, and Clara played a ditsy secretary who fell for her boss. Although the movie was sure to be a cast-iron success, secretly Clara understood the officer’s disdain. Love Strictly Forbidden had as much in common with cinematic art as ersatz coffee had with a rich blend of Ethiopian Arabica. It would take no more than a couple of weeks to film, and the result would be the same as ninety percent of the Ufa output—frothy romance, as light and forgettable as a Haribo marshmallow candy. But although she knew this, Clara was not about to sympathize with this man’s patronizing remarks. She wondered exactly who he was. He must be fairly secure if he was prepared to disrespect Goebbels so airily. She inclined her head.

  “It’s not often you meet someone who never visits the cinema. Presumably you never see the newsreels either. You must feel awfully out of touch.”

  “Sometimes I think it’s the only way to live at the moment,” he murmured; then the supercilious expression returned, and he said, “But you’re right. The cinema is important and I’m attempting to embrace it.”

  “Which films have you embraced recently?”

  “I tried watching Dance on a Volcano.” He paused with a soupçon of scorn, his lips curled. “It was billed as a historical drama, though I’m still trying to work out what it had in common with history. But then, perhaps history is whatever Doktor Goebbels says it is.”

  “A word means what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less,” mused Clara.

  “Alice Through the Looking-Glass,” the officer replied in English. “Lewis Carroll is a much underrated philosopher.”

  Startled, by both his comment and his flawless English, she stared. “Have you read it?”

  “I spent two years living in England. I was an aide to von Ribbentrop when he was ambassador there. So yes, I’ve read it. But I’ve omitted to introduce myself.” He clicked his heels and bent to kiss Clara’s hand. His mouth was softer than seemed possible from such chiseled perfection.

  “My name is Conrad Adler. And you are Fräulein…”

  “Vine.”

  “Vine?”

  “That’s right.”

  Could she be mistaken, or did a transitory frown cross those perfect features, like a shadow momentarily darkening the sun? Clara was used to her name provoking an immediate reaction. Often it caused people to widen their eyes, or refer at once to her films, but the expression that flitted across Adler’s face seemed more puzzlement than recognition. Almost as soon as she noticed it, however, it had vanished, to be replaced with a courteous smile.

  She retrieved her hand. “Clara Vine.”

  “Clara Vine.” He repeated her name experimentally, as though tasting it in his mouth like a fine claret. “Yes. That’s a good name for an actress.”

  The smooth mask was back in place.

  “So if you work for von Ribbentrop, Obersturmbannführer, what are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been assigned to another task for three months.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “I’m afraid not. I’m on loan.” He shrugged. “Like a painting in a museum.”

  A gale of laughter reached them from across the room and Clara glanced instinctively over at the Propaganda Ministry bureaucrats, gathered tightly around Goebbels and guffawing unctuously at his remarks.

  Adler followed her gaze. “And you’re English…”

  “Half English.”

  “Yet you choose to live in Berlin? Why?”

  Could he tell that this was the question she most often asked herself?

  “It’s an interesting time. Germany is changing fast.”

  “I agree with that. To think ten years ago there were soup kitchens and people standing on the streets with boards around their necks and camps for the unemployed outside the city. And now this.”

  He nodded towards the street, from where faint strains of the Horst Wessel song, the informal Nazi anthem, floated up. “No unemployment. Autobahns everywhere. Germany is great again. And all without a shot being fired.”

  “I saw some pretty large guns in the parade this morning.”

  A glimmer of amusement flickered behind his well-sculpted countenance.

  “Ah. We must never forget there’s a narrow boundary that separates the savage from the civilized. So, Fräulein Vine…” Still that teasing, probing smile. “At first glance you could be pure German. You have Aryan features, yet there’s something distinctly English about you, too. A certain look you have—the one you’re giving me now. It’s like fire behind ice.”

  He held her gaze deliberately, provocatively. For a moment, it was as though he was seeing through her, to the Clara Vine who hid behind the carefully composed surface. Heat entered her face, the sounds of the room fell away, and a silent connection sparked between them. It was an unspoken understanding, a charge of sheer energy between a man and a woman. His gaze swept over her body like a physical touch, and Clara found herself speechless.

  “Perhaps,” Adler murmured, moving closer. His uniform exuded an aroma of starched linen and some sharp, citrus-scented pomade. “You might like to help me in my research.”

  “How exactly would I do that?”

  “As you’re evidently the expert on these things, you could accompany me to the cinema.”

  “I’m a little busy right now.”

  “Busy filming Love Strictly Forbidden. Of course.” Amusement glimmered in his eyes like candlelight. “All the same, let me give you my card.”

  He slipped a card into her hand, and she transferred it to her bag.

  “You could tell me if I’m watching high-quality art or low-grade trash.”

  Instantly Clara regained possession of her senses. The presumption, the arrogance of the man, took her breath away. She had told him she was an actress, yet still he was intent on disdaining her profession. She was about to issue a curt riposte when Hugh Lindsey appeared, inserted himself bodily between Adler and Clara, and thrust a glass of sparkling Sekt into her hand.

  “Got you another drink, Clara. Oh, sorry. Am I interrupting?”

  “Not at all,” replied Adler, his mouth tightening slightly.

  “We’re making plans to go to Erich Carow’s cabaret soon. Have you heard of it?”

  “Fräulein Vine is already acquainted with my deficiencies as regards popular culture.”

  “Mary says it’s unmissable.” Hugh turned to Clara. “There’s a whole group of us going. Care to come along?”

  “I’d love to,” said Clara.

  “Excuse me, Fräulein. I should leave.”

  Adler clicked his heels, nodded at her, and melted away.

  “Thought you needed rescuing.” Hugh grinned. “Who was that?”

  “Probably another of Goebbels’s lackeys,” said Mary, coming to join them. “They never leave Clara alone because they’ve seen her onscreen.”

  “Actually, he works for the Foreign Ministry. And he’d never heard of me.” Clara finished her drink and checked her watch. “You know, I’d better be getting back. The S-Bahn will be crammed.”

  Mary’s face creased in concern. “Be careful, after the news.”

  “What news?”

  “It just came through on the ticker tape.”

  The ticker tape of the DNB, the German news agency, was stationed in a corner of the Press Club, from where it spewed out important information at all times of the day and night. Generally this important information concerned improved crop yields and record steel production numbers, but occasionally some actual newsworthy incidents seeped through.

  “Everyone’s talking about it. A girl’s body was discovered by some construction workers close to the studios. They were building an air-raid shelter for the Artists’ Colony. And that’s where you’re living, isn’t it?”

>   “A body?” said Clara.

  “In a shallow grave, apparently. Barely even covered. It was one of the Faith and Beauty girls.”

  “Faith and Beauty?” Charles Cavendish frowned. “What on earth is that?”

  “It’s the Nazis’ finishing school for young women. Hitler’s ideal women. They join at seventeen, and they’re groomed as consorts for senior Nazi men. They have a community building near there.”

  “Extraordinary,” said Hugh, taking out a notebook as though he was about to begin a news report there and then. “They’re groomed, you say?”

  “What about this girl then?” interrupted Cavendish. “Could it have been an accident?”

  “No. She was murdered apparently.” Mary checked the piece of paper in her hand. “Shot. Lottie Franke, aged twenty.”

  Until then, Clara had been silent, but the girl’s name went through her like an electric jolt and she tore the paper from Mary’s hand.

  “It can’t be!”

  She stared at it, but the name was there in stark type. Lottie Franke.

  “Oh, Clara, did you know her?” asked Mary, gently.

  “She’s my student. She was assigned to me from the Faith and Beauty Society to study costume design. I was looking after her. She’s such a talented girl. It has to be a mistake.”

  Mary put a hand on her arm. “I hope so, too, Clara. But I can’t see how it can be. The Criminal Police have announced it. They think the killer took advantage of the Führer’s birthday because he knew everyone would be in town. What was she like, this girl Lottie?”

  “She’s…was…” Clara paused, and conjured up Lottie’s exquisite face, with its wide cheekbones, ivory skin, and pale blue eyes. The slender, feline grace. “She was quite beautiful, but very intelligent, too. When I showed her round the studio she knew all sorts of details about the sets of Metropolis and Nosferatu, and she was terrifically knowledgeable about photographic technique. Hardly any young people in Germany know that kind of detail about Expressionist film anymore. I thought it was pretty daring of her even to talk about it.”

  “Liking Expressionist film may not be encouraged, but it’s not enough to get you killed,” remarked Mary somberly. “The police are telling women to be careful in isolated areas. There’s a dangerous man on the loose.”

  “Will you be okay going back on your own?” said Hugh, laying a solicitous hand on Clara’s arm.

  “Of course. But thank you.”

  Mary looked doubtful. “Remember what I said, Clara. Please be careful.”

  —

  CLARA LEFT THE CLUB and walked north, letting herself be carried in the tide of straggling crowds all the way to the S-Bahn at Friedrichstrasse. The news about Lottie Franke had obliterated all traces of Herr Conrad Adler and their conversation from her mind. As the cool air played on her flushed cheeks, her head filled with images of the girl she had known for just a few weeks, the flaxen hair cropped in a Bubikopf—the short bob frowned upon in these more conventional times—striding along the corridors of Ufa as if they were catwalks, impervious to admiring glances. Lottie had been unusually beautiful, yet her beauty was matched by an exceptional intelligence. Though Clara was supposed to answer Lottie’s questions and show her around, quite often Lottie had been the one to provide information about Ufa’s past, and the films she had seen. What a waste of a life. Clara tried not to imagine that slender figure sullied with earth, the perfect limbs crumpled and askew in a shallow grave.

  At Friedrichstrasse the station was predictably packed, but the crowds that surged onto the trains were different from the normal commuting throng, more jovial and less truculent. Wedged in one of the steamy carriages, jammed with jubilant day-trippers, Clara looked out at the darkness flashing past, the necklace of lamps strung like pearls along the track, and the chill spring night fizzing with neon. Everyone on the train was tired and content. The Führer’s fiftieth birthday had been a moment of excitement, a firework flash against an ever-darkening horizon. Yet for one family, she thought, the day would always be marked by loss. Clara had no idea where the Franke family lived, but she knew the Faith and Beauty building was nearby in Neubabelsberg, and she resolved to call there the following day and ask for Lottie’s address. The least she could do was to visit the girl’s parents as soon as possible.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Lottie Franke’s parents lived in Schulzendorferstrasse in Wedding, an industrial area of cavernous, gray streets and barracks-style, five-story tenement blocks grouped around dank courtyards. The blocks were more than six apartments deep, accessed from the street by a grimy archway and cramming together individual apartments with workshops, shared kitchens, and communal privies. All around, iron-framed chimneys belched smoke and men with cloth caps and collarless shirts trudged by carrying bags holding wurst and sandwiches for lunch.

  As she climbed off the tram, Clara was instantly assailed by the yeasty stink of malted barley, wheat, and fermenting hops. It seemed to permeate everything from the bricks of the buildings to the paving stones beneath her feet. It issued from the Schulzendorf brewery, which provided jobs for hundreds of local workers and barrels of cloudy, sour weiss beer for their relaxation afterwards. Consumption of the traditional Berlin brew had soared in the past few years, and not even the new craze for Coca-Cola could begin to rival it.

  Clara consulted her map and looked around. Wedding was a solidly working-class district, and before Hitler took power it was the scene of regular street fights between Communists and storm troopers. Though the ugly tenements dominated, Clara remembered that Mies van der Rohe’s architecture could also be found here in the form of a series of experimental residential cubes he had designed and built in the 1920s.

  The Frankes’ home was not one of them.

  Three floors up a stone stairwell reeking of urine and cooking, Marlene and Udo Franke’s apartment was three cramped and dingy rooms. Lottie’s father was moored on a sofa, his face stripped of animation and his eyes red-rimmed and pouchy from lack of sleep. A day’s growth of stubble shadowed his chin. Marlene Franke was, by contrast, seized by frenetic activity, rushing in and out to fetch photographs of Lottie and asking repeatedly how Clara took her coffee. It was clear to see where the daughter’s good looks had come from, though Marlene’s blond hair was tied in a lank bundle and her startling blue eyes were crazily bright.

  Everything about the apartment testified to an ardent faith in the Führer. The regulation picture of Hitler hung above the stove in a cheap gilt frame, its lurid coloring giving him a somewhat consumptive air, and set out on a veneer table dressed with a lace doily was the Führer corner. These shrines were everywhere now—in shops and offices, cafés and restaurants, as well as family homes. People believed they brought good luck. Mostly they featured a picture of Hitler and a candle, but the Frankes’ shrine was an elaborate affair, with a copy of the Jubiläumsausgabe, anniversary issue of Mein Kampf, in honor of Hitler’s birthday, and flanking Hitler, head shots of Goebbels and Goering, like the two criminals at some devilish crucifixion.

  Marlene Franke backed into the room with a tray of trembling crockery, set it down, then sat next to her husband, rocking slightly.

  “Lottie was a wonderful daughter. I don’t know how we’re going to cope without her,” she said, twisting a damp rag of handkerchief between her fingers. “She had such promise, didn’t she, Udo?”

  With a twitch of shaggy eyebrows, Udo Franke assented. “She wanted to be a costume designer. She saw all the movies.”

  “I was impressed by how much she knew about film when she came round the studio with me,” Clara told them. “She was very intelligent.”

  “And artistic,” said her mother, with a nod at the wall. “She modeled all her own designs. She had even been photographed by the fashion photographer Yva. Have you heard of her?”

  Everyone had. Yva was one of the most celebrated fashion photographers in Berlin. Her pictures were in all the glossy magazines, Die Dame, Elegante Welt,
even Life magazine.

  “We kept them all.”

  Every wall in the room was indeed plastered with photographs of Lottie wearing dramatic, elongated costumes in shapes that were plainly inspired by Expressionist film.

  “My daughter said fashion was Art,” said her mother, with a touch of defiance. “And Art couldn’t be categorized into acceptable and unacceptable. There’s only good and bad Art. I’m sure we’re not meant to think that—it’s not what the Führer says, is it?—but you couldn’t tell Lottie what to think. The most you could do was tell her not to say such things out loud. Now I’m tormenting myself thinking it was ideas like that which got her in trouble.”

  “I can’t imagine her views on Art could have led to her death,” said Clara gently. “Have the police anything to say about the investigation?”

  “Nothing. They’ve just left. A Kriminal Inspektor Herz and some other rank. They said everyone was out of town. The Führer’s birthday, you see. No one saw anything strange. They asked if our girl had a boyfriend, but I said there was no one.”

  Marlene’s face darkened with misery. “So much for that Faith and Beauty Society,” she spat savagely.

  Clara couldn’t help but agree. When she had called at the Faith and Beauty community home earlier that day, the grim-faced principal, Frau Mann, had met Clara’s inquiries with a transparent lack of sympathy. It was as though Lottie had corrupted the whole idea of Faith and Beauty. If Faith and Beauty girls had to die, it should be gloriously for the Fatherland, not sordidly at the hands of an unknown murderer.

  “They’re supposed to look after the girls. Instead they filled her head with ideas about getting away. They took her to London, did you know?”

  “To London?” Clara looked up, surprised.

  “A couple of months ago.”

  “What were they doing there?”

  “It was a deputation.” Marlene Franke stood and began to scrabble in a drawer. “I kept the invitation. It was so beautiful.” She handed Clara a piece of card—precisely the same kind of stiff, high-quality invitation with embossed black italics as rested on her mantelpiece at home.