The Pursuit of Pearls

by Jane Thynne

  “Olga Chekhova’s a huge supporter of the Führer. I don’t think there’s anything suspicious about her.”

  “Oh, don’t you?” said Emmy, with a distinct air of affront. “Well, just between us, Hermann has heard some quite unsettling things about La Chekhova. Her brother is a senior official with the NKVD.”

  The NKVD was Stalin’s secret intelligence service. As cunning and brutal as the Gestapo themselves, they formed a fearsome network of ruthless agents stretching across Europe. Yet while this revelation surprised Clara, she had no doubts about her friend.

  “You think it’s strange that a woman whose face is on every billboard in Berlin could be working in the shadows? That an actress could also be a spy?”

  “I do.”

  “Trust me, these times bring out the strangest behavior in people.”

  She paused primly.

  “So what are you doing at the moment?”

  “I’m about to start a film about the Ahnenerbe.”

  Frau Goering rolled her eyes. “Ugh. Heini Himmler’s little passion. All that archaeology and measuring skulls. If men must have obsessions, give me Hermann’s jewelry craze any day. Why on earth do we need a film about the Ahnenerbe?”

  “Herr Doktor Goebbels said the Führer was attaching the highest importance to it.”

  Emmy’s eyes gleamed with mischief. She pounced on this information. “So you’ve seen Goebbels? How was he?”

  Clara hesitated. It was always risky to give Emmy Goering too much detail unless you wanted it to reappear at some future date with your name attached.

  “I thought he looked strained.”

  “Doesn’t he! The man’s a bag of nerves. He’s just been in the hospital with kidney pains, but I’m sure it’s all because of Magda. You can’t imagine the stories I’ve been hearing!”

  Clara guessed she was about to find out. “Are they having troubles again?”

  “Troubles! You have no idea! Far be it from me to feel sorry for the Herr Doktor, but I think it behooves the wife of a senior man to behave in a certain way, and the way Magda is carrying on would try the patience of a saint, which, as we all know, the Herr Doktor most certainly is not. Fortunately my Hermann is in the pink of health. He was up to two hundred and eighty pounds—he seeks comfort in food, you see—but he lost forty pounds on his diet. I know because he was trying on his outfit just this morning. Oh, but of course…”

  Her face brightened.

  “That’s why I was looking for you, Clara. We’re holding a reception for Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. It’s a state visit. There are eight days of celebrations, but our party will be the high point. It’s at the Schloss Bellevue. We’ve had to invite the von Ribbentrops unfortunately, but it should still be great fun. As a matter of fact, we’re having a deputation of those Faith and Beauty girls come.” She grimaced. “We had no choice. It’s Himmler’s wish. They’re being trained up to take their place in polite society. We have to let them loose on diplomatic guests so that they can practice their conversational skills. God help us, but at least they’ll look decorative.”

  “Thank you. It sounds very glamorous.”

  “Don’t thank me. It was Hermann’s brother who wanted you to come, actually. It was his particular request.”

  “His brother?”

  “Albert’s in the film business, but he’s fearfully shy. You’d never believe the pair of them could be brothers. Quite Hermann’s opposite.”

  Clara was astonished. In the world of celebrity, the brother of Germany’s second most powerful man could hardly remain low-profile. Yet she had never heard of Goering having a brother, let alone one in the film business.

  “I had no idea the minister even had a brother.”

  “Nobody does. Albert works in Vienna for Tobis-Sascha. He’s nothing like Hermann, just an ordinary little chap, and he hates these grand affairs. You can keep him company. Stop him being overawed.”

  She gave a small, indulgent smile.

  “We want it to be really special. The Goebbelses are hosting something for the royal couple at Schwanenwerder—the usual gemütlich picnic-on-the-lawn affair—but we thought international visitors deserved something a little classier.”

  Between Goering and Goebbels, competition to entertain foreign dignitaries was fierce. As the visit of Prince Paul was part of Hitler’s plan to pressure Yugoslavia into supporting his moves in Europe, not an inch of red carpet would be spared in the wooing.

  “Prince Paul’s practically English, as you know, Clara. He’s a great friend of the British royal family, and our dear Duke of Windsor, of course, so it will be nice to have some English people to greet them. Anyway, I’ll say goodbye now.”

  Emmy Goering spun rapidly on her heel, and Clara turned to find the reason. Annelies von Ribbentrop was heading in her direction. She aimed a speculative glare towards Clara, and as she swept past, a smile parted her lips, thin as a chink of light through metal shutters.

  “Lipstick, Fräulein Vine? Better hope the Führer doesn’t see you wearing that.”

  “Better hope Goering doesn’t see either,” muttered Mary, sidling up from behind. “I hear Elizabeth Arden’s Velvet Red is his absolute favorite.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  “What you need to understand about Hitler is that he regards himself as first and foremost an artist. His ultimate desire is to sit in the Berghof and paint mountains for the rest of his life.”

  Leni Riefenstahl leaned back, crossed her legs, and blew a plume of cigarette smoke into the middle distance. At the age of thirty-six she was the most famous female film director in the world and, with her deep-set eyes, cascading curls, and full mouth, certainly the best looking. Her form was encased in that season’s Chanel wide-legged trousers teamed with an open-necked silk shirt and chunky amber beads nestling at her throat. Her voice was like gravel dipped in treacle. Leaning back on a pelt of bear fur, she seemed for all the world like some rare and endangered creature herself, svelte and powerful and wild. The Führer’s very own femme fatale.

  She paused for a sip of coffee before adding, “If you want to know how I know what Herr Hitler thinks, it’s because only a few weeks ago he was sitting exactly where you are now.”

  Clara suppressed the urge to leap out of the chair immediately.

  “The Führer comes to your home? That’s quite an honor.”

  Leni gave a slight leonine toss of her head. “He likes to confide in me. He says this house is one of the few places he can properly relax.”

  Leni Riefenstahl’s villa at 30 Heydenstrasse was a modish, low-built, white-faced house in Dahlem, a neighborhood popular with Nazi bureaucrats, high-ranking Party members, and industrialists. Towering hedges screened a succession of handsome villas with stucco detail and mansard roofs, and the leafy peace was punctuated only by the occasional dog’s bark and the low growl of a lawn mower. Owning a villa like this was a testament to Leni Riefenstahl’s success. And, lest anyone forget it, a gigantic self-portrait of the director herself, holding a Leica camera, hung on the drawing room wall, alongside a framed cover of Time magazine on which she posed as seductively as possible on a pair of skis. It was all a long way from her origins as the daughter of a Berlin heating engineer, yet while Leni Riefenstahl may have made her name in the German craze for films about mountain climbing, social climbing was just as much her forte.

  “Here. I bought Linzer torte in his honor.”

  She drew a tray towards her, fingers glimmering with opal and moonstone rings, and cut a fat slice of the tart for Clara. Linzer torte was named after Hitler’s birthplace, but despite its unfortunate associations, Clara could not stop her mouth from watering at the crumbly pastry with lemon zest and ground nuts, filled with plum butter. Gratefully, she took a piece and bit into it. Leni ate nothing but fished out a packet of Rothmans in a battered gold case and lit another cigarette.

  “How did you first meet the Führer?” Clara inquired.

  “I read Mein Kampf cover t
o cover on a train journey and it changed my life. I wrote to him at once, and to my astonishment he invited me to spend the afternoon with him. He told me he had seen all my films and the one he loved best was The Holy Mountain. He said my dance on the shore was the most beautiful thing he had seen in his life.”

  Clara remembered the footage of Leni capering on the beach in a barely-there scrap of gauze. This in itself said a lot about Hitler’s taste in films.

  “He told me once he came to power I would be the person to chronicle his Third Reich. It was a huge honor.”

  “Which you have certainly repaid.”

  She gave a gracious toss of her head. “I can’t deny it. Josef von Sternberg—the director, you know—was in love with me. He asked me to go to Hollywood with him in the twenties. I could have gone, but I sacrificed myself. I felt it my duty to stay and support the Führer.”

  “That must have been a difficult decision.”

  And an ill-judged one. Yet Leni seemed pleased by this idea. She ran a hand through her lustrous mane, stroking it like an expensive pet.

  “It’s true. Loyalty is my weakness. Unfortunately, because I am loyal and the Führer loves me, the Party hierarchy hates me. I’m not one of their drab little hausfraus or neurotic wives. I like Frau Hess, but the rest of them I could take or leave. For Magda Goebbels I feel nothing but pity, I despise Frau von Ribbentrop, and as for that puffed-up actress Emmy Goering, well, the less said the better. You see, Fräulein Vine, I’m not the kind Goebbels can push around. I’m my own woman. If I have any problems I go straight to Hitler himself.”

  Springing to her feet, she crossed to the wall, which alongside the portraits was festooned with advertisements for her work.

  “Tell me, Fräulein Vine, or Clara as I’m going to call you, have you seen all my films?”

  “I’m a great admirer.”

  “Good. I knew I was right to choose you.”

  Leni spun around and beamed at her. “I like the fact that you’re half English. I’ve been to England. I spoke at Oxford and Cambridge. They loved me. How is it you’re living in Berlin?”

  Clara thought of Leo, his green-eyed gaze and the reddish tint in his hair. The day six years ago that she had gone to him in the British passport control office and taken up his offer to spy for the Secret Intelligence Service. The weeks of patient schooling in the arts of espionage, surveillance, and evasion. Then the love affair, which had never been part of the plan.

  “I fell in love,” she answered bluntly.

  “With Berlin?”

  “No.” She laughed. “With a man.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. Besides, he left in ’thirty-three.”

  Leni nodded sagely. She would assume that Clara’s lover was Jewish—an actor or director from the film studios perhaps. The day Hitler came to power an exodus of Babelsberg’s greatest talent—Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, Paul Henreid—had taken the first train across the border.

  “I know how it feels. I’ll probably always be single, even though so many men have been desperately in love with me. My life often feels like a movie itself. They’re always trying to make a film about me. When I was in Hollywood they wanted Marlene Dietrich to play me. I soon put a stop to that.”

  “I wondered, Fräulein Riefenstahl. Leni. Could you explain a little more about my role?”

  The director’s attention snapped back to the present.

  “I’m glad you asked. You see—and please don’t take this the wrong way, Clara—your face has a useful quality. It’s a blank canvas. It’s like I can project anything I want on it.” Her eyes misted, as though the entire storyboard already existed in her mind. “You will be the anonymous German woman who accompanies us from the forests of Berlin, where the original Germans lived, to today’s Berlin, and the new world capital as created by Herr Speer. We begin with an aerial shot of Berlin, and as the plane comes closer we find you, the nameless woman, standing by the Brandenburg Gate.”

  “And the script?”

  Breaking out of her reverie, the director gave a slight, dismissive shrug. “There is no script. You don’t need one. You will project no distinct identity. Basically, you are the soul of Germany. Just like the French have their Marianne. You will be the spirit of Germania.”

  The spirit of Germania? No wonder Goebbels had been astonished at the choice of Clara for the part.

  “Herr Doktor Goebbels did wonder…”

  “Don’t talk to me about Goebbels.”

  Leni Riefenstahl flared her nostrils like a thoroughbred racehorse, came to sit beside Clara, and placed one hand on her knee. Her voice lowered to a husky whisper. “You know he’s infatuated with me.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “My dear, from our very first acquaintance, when he invited me to the opera and shoved his clumsy paw up my gown, he has never let up. In fact he has virtually stalked me. I’ve tried so many ways to put him off, endless chats about Magda, talks about my boyfriends. I once spent an entire evening recalling what a wonderful time I had at his wedding. None of it worked. When I rejected his advances, Goebbels did everything he could to sabotage my career.”

  “That didn’t work.”

  “Thankfully, not. But he banned any reports about me in the press for an entire year. He lied to the Führer about me. My advice is, don’t believe a word he says. I’ve never met a man who lies like him. He was determined to ruin me, but I was bold enough to stand up to him, and the Führer backed me. In fact, that’s one reason I wanted you presenting the film.”

  “Because…?”

  “I knew Goebbels would want some buxom Nordic blonde to do it. Probably some little idiot he was screwing. There’s no end of them, as you well know. So I decided to choose the precise opposite. Which was you.”

  Clara could not help smiling at this display of willfulness. However manipulative and deceptive Leni Riefenstahl may be, it was refreshing to find a woman so different from the downtrodden Nazi wife. That was, no doubt, what Goebbels found attractive, too.

  “There was another reason, of course.”

  “Really? What’s that?”

  Leni sprang skittishly to her feet again.

  “Oh, never mind. You don’t need to know. Besides, I liked the look of you. I’d seen a couple of your films and I thought we would work well together. Did Goebbels brief you at all? We have a scene at the Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s institute. You should take a look around it. It’s a couple of streets from here.”

  Was it visible, the shiver of apprehension that ran down Clara’s spine?

  “Is Himmler often there?” she asked carefully.

  “Whenever he gets the chance. He’s terrifically proud of it. But mostly the place is full of fusty scientists. I’ve arranged for one of them—Herr Doktor Kraus—to show you around the day after tomorrow. I’ve asked him to give you a feel for their work. It’s all rather eccentric, but Himmler has decided that no stone should be left unturned. In fact, he’s just agreed to give this film an unprecedented honor. His most precious project in the entire world is going to be opened up for the purposes of the movie.”

  “What’s the project?”

  “His castle. You must have heard of it. Wewelsburg in Westphalia. It’s marvelously photogenic. Fearfully gloomy and impressive.”

  She yawned like a cat and began flicking through a calendar.

  “So we’ll need to discuss the shooting schedule. Preproduction is well advanced; my location managers have been working overtime. I’ve already hired all the crew and set up the camera positions. We’re on a tight deadline. The Führer wants Germania to be ready for this year’s Nuremberg rally.”

  “Five months! For an entire film? That’s impossible!”

  Leni Riefenstahl sniffed, fished in her bag, and extracted a blue glass atomizer encased in gold net. She pumped a fine sheen of perfume around her.

  “That’s what I said. But the Führer told me we aren’t the only ones. He said the whole world�
�s on deadline now.”

  “The problem is…” Clara hesitated. “I have go to Paris for a couple of days.”

  “Paris? What on earth are you doing there?”

  Clara calculated that now that she had told Goebbels, she may as well establish her cover story as solidly as possible.

  “I’m to be photographed for Vogue magazine. For the September issue. They have a feature on European actresses.”

  A slow smile lit Leni Riefenstahl’s lovely face; then she burst into peals of laughter.

  “The September issue? That’s ambitious. Who knows what will be happening by September! Let’s hope they’re still keen on German actresses by then.”

  —

  MAKING HER WAY HOME, Clara passed a news kiosk by the S-Bahn, and her eye was caught by the face of Lottie Franke, peering out of the front page of the Berliner Zeitung. The newspapers had seized on Lottie’s death with a kind of ferocious delight. Beside the political complexities of Danzig and Poland, the murder of a single German girl was somehow more outrageous and far easier to contemplate. There was a salacious edge, too, to their interest. The Faith and Beauty girls were supposed to be a cut above the ordinary. They were the pearls of German womanhood, being groomed as consorts for the top men. Yet what did that grooming entail? Who knew what went on in these places? Were the morals there any different from the Bund Deutscher Mädel, which everyone nicknamed the League of German Mattresses? Despite everything Himmler said about producing more babies for the Reich, the promiscuity of the German girls’ associations still shocked the more stolid citizens of Berlin. Who was to say the Faith and Beauty Society was any different?

  Clara hated to think of the ponderous, devastated Udo Franke and his distraught wife, anxiously awaiting some fragment of intelligence that could explain the inexplicable murder of their only daughter. She was already regretting having told the Frankes that she would find out what she could. It had been a thoughtless promise, uttered in a moment of emotion. There was nothing Clara could uncover about Lottie’s death and no chance that she would learn anything more than any other regular newspaper reader. No man had been caught. No details of the murder weapon had been given out. No lines of inquiry had proved fruitful. All the police were saying was that women should be careful around the Grunewald at night.