The Pursuit of Pearls

by Jane Thynne

  Still Jochen stared ahead, saying nothing. Something intense and dangerous loomed between them. Hedwig didn’t care anymore about the rain that blurred her spectacles and mingled with her tears. She didn’t know where they were heading, or why the man she loved was behaving in this cruel and unfamiliar fashion. Her voice choked in her throat.

  “Jochen?”

  Eventually he replied. “Are you sure you want to hear?”

  She nodded weakly. She didn’t trust herself to talk.

  “All right. I’ll tell you. Her name is Sofie. We meet every Tuesday.”

  “Do you love her?” she asked, in a small, stricken voice.

  “Sofie has nothing to do with you and me.”

  “I asked if you loved her.”

  “I admire her, certainly.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “Some time.”

  “And where do you meet?”

  “Her father has a villa in Dahlem.”

  It was everything Hedwig feared. Her beloved Jochen was in love with a clever, rich, beautiful woman. A woman whose family lived in Dahlem, which was so far from Moabit in its social status it might as well have been Timbuktu. No social graces Hedwig could ever learn at the Faith and Beauty school—no amount of ballroom dancing, or flower arranging or chess—could match the social status of a girl named Sofie who lived in a villa in Dahlem.

  “And does she take you there?”

  “Yes. For dinner. Her family know all kinds of artists, politicians, and priests. Important people. They talk about literature—Brecht, Schiller. Other people I’ve not heard of.”

  A conflict of emotions warred in his face. “A lot of them are aristocrats, bohemians. Not my sort. But their hearts are in the right place. And the main thing is…”

  He stopped, turned to her, and moved his face very close. “They all hate the Nazis.”

  His words floated quietly on the night air, like a hiss.

  “Some of them hate National Socialist politics, but others just consider the Nazis ill-bred. Rich people think like that, you know, but being smart works in these people’s favor. No one believes a family like Sofie’s could have money and still belong to the KPD.”

  The KPD. The banned German Communist Party. Hedwig’s heart sank like lead. Mutti had been right.

  “Are you a Communist?” she whispered.

  It was not a word she ever used. It felt as bitter in her mouth as a lump of shrapnel. Communists were never mentioned at home, except as a curse. Bolsheviks were Germany’s worst fate, it said on the radio. The Jew devil.

  “No. I’m a good German. But we do have Communists. And Conservatives, Social Democrats, Catholics, Lutherans, Jews. Doctors, officers, academics. One of them is a playwright who works in the Propaganda Ministry. There’s a guy named Helmut who’s the official dentist to the Ufa studios. He does all the stars’ teeth. He gets us typewriter ribbons and ink for our newspaper.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Same reason as any of us.”

  Hedwig was floundering. Grappling with her coordinates the way she tried to work her compass in the forest. Trying to reset everything she had believed with this new information.

  “They’re not all smart types. There’s a waiter at the Kaiserhof who reads all the foreign newspapers for us, everything—French, English, Danish, Dutch, Russian—so we get an idea of opinion beyond Goebbels’s lies.”

  Her whole world was shifting on its axis. Everything she knew had turned cruelly upside down, as though an enormous wrecking ball had taken aim and was reducing her life to rubble.

  “But why? What do you want to do, Jochen?”

  “I wanted some way of resisting what was going on, and it wasn’t going to be killing Hitler. I was never going to be able to manage something like that.”

  Killing Hitler? Hedwig’s knees almost buckled beneath her, and she craned her head round in the quick, instinctive glance that was known as der deutsche Blick. The German look.

  “How did you…how did you meet these people then?”

  “Through a friend. He thought I would be useful because I’m a graphic artist, but he still screened me first, to check my leanings. He gave me a cigarette packet, and when I opened it I found a message asking me to make a flyer denouncing the occupation of the Sudetenland.”

  The Sudetenland. Then this must have been last year, Hedwig thought, desperately making mental calculations and trying her hardest to recall the current affairs that generally passed her by. “And did you? Do what he asked?”

  “I did. I designed the pamphlet and someone else in the group printed them. Then another member, who is a Persil washing powder distributor, packed them in Persil boxes and covered them with detergent.”

  “What happened to them after that?”

  “I don’t know. The idea is that we don’t know too much. So we can’t reveal anything if we’re caught.”

  The frankness with which he alluded to this terrifying possibility astonished her. Yet although alarm and horror were churning through her, there remained a residual sense of jealousy.

  “And that girl at the theater? Sofie. What about her?”

  “Sofie’s a professional musician. She’s extremely talented. She studied under a student of Mendelssohn’s.”

  “Oh.” This information did nothing to alleviate Hedwig’s jealousy.

  “At the moment she performs in the orchestra at the Admiralspalast every night, then after the show she takes our pamphlets out in her sheet music portfolio. No one ever suspects sheet music.”

  It was dark now that all the streetlamps had been dimmed to save money, and they had reached the point in Französischerstrasse where an arch supported by giant caryatids flung a pool of deeper shadow. Jochen stopped and drew her towards him.

  “What we do is important, Hedy. One of our members has a brother in the army who supplies him with details of Jews who are scheduled for arrest, so we can warn them in time.”

  “Are these friends of yours Jews?” The word almost choked in her throat. Whenever Hedwig thought of Jews, she imagined the leering figures you saw on the front of Der Stürmer, like crooked shadows with their long black coats and yellow eyes.

  “Some are. Some have been in camps, but we have to be extra careful with those because sometimes people are only released from camps on the condition that they find their former friends and lead the Gestapo to them. They call the people we help U-boats. Submarines. You must have heard of them.”

  Now that he was speaking, it was as though he couldn’t stop. But Hedwig wanted to stick her fingers in her ears. The delightful evening had taken a terrible wrong direction. She wanted everything she had heard to disappear.

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “You asked me.”

  “I had no choice.”

  “And now, my darling, you do have a choice.” His eyes burned into her like acid, so fierce she almost flinched. “You can denounce me, or you can help me. If you denounce me then I will be hauled off to be shot and maybe you too. Perhaps even your dear Mutti and Vati will come under suspicion.”

  Her tears began to stream, and Jochen took her in his arms.

  “Don’t cry. I can’t bear that. I never intended to involve you. I had every intention of keeping you out of this. But you’re going to need to choose. Just like we all have.”

  “I could never denounce you.” She wept.

  He kissed her. A tender, lingering kiss.

  “I knew that, Hedy. We’ll meet next Thursday, shall we, like always? At the usual place?”

  CHAPTER

  27

  A lone hawk hung in the sky. Clara watched as it hovered, then dropped like a stone and slammed through the mist into the leather glove of the falconer below. Beyond it lay the horizon of the Westphalian plain bisected by the river Alme, damp and gray as a photograph slightly out of focus. Stone houses and dairy farms hunkered beneath a low drizzle that was rolling across the sky. On a hill above
them all stood a hulking castle, as brooding, implacable, and ominous as anything from the Ufa studio’s own horror movies.

  Wewelsburg. The spiritual heart of the SS.

  Himmler had discovered the derelict castle of Wewelsburg in 1933, close to the site where an ancient Germanic chief had defeated the Roman army of occupation. With a provenance like that, it couldn’t appeal more to the Gestapo chief. Without hesitation he bought the lease and set about establishing a Reichsführerschule to train the elite ranks of his SS. Yet although Wewelsburg combined German prehistory and mystical significance in one implacable, blank-walled monument, the castle was far more than an officers’ leadership school. It was to be Himmler’s Camelot, the place where he would raise up a new order of Teutonic knights, a blood brotherhood of the racially pure.

  For that reason, much to Clara’s relief, no women would ever be permitted to stay the night.

  They had traveled in Leni Riefenstahl’s Mercedes convertible, past undulating fields plowed in corduroy rows with a film of green hovering over the turned earth and isolated half-timbered houses with casement windows and geraniums at the sills. South of Paderborn they passed a gang of ragged workers, who, judging from their stubbled faces, starved frames, and striped uniforms, must have been drafted in from a concentration camp. Some were digging trenches in the earth, and others were hacking at piles of rocks, cleaving them into smaller pieces. None turned to sneak a glance at the sleek maroon car, with its gleaming brunette at the wheel. Were they afraid, or were they simply used to processions of shiny vehicles whose passengers seemed to look out at them and yet look through them at the same time?

  “What are those workers doing?”

  “They’re building an SS village,” said Leni. “Himmler has bought up a lot of the land around here to provide homes for the wives and children of SS men. Those workers come from a camp.”

  “I didn’t know there was a camp near here.”

  “There wasn’t. Himmler built one, especially for the building work. The only problem is, they keep unearthing old pottery beakers and cup handles, and every time they find a fragment Himmler orders a halt on account of it being part of our ancient Germanic heritage.” She gave a gravelly laugh. “It will take them years at this rate.”

  She turned off the road at a small timbered lodge with a carved wooden exterior and a sharp triangular gable called Ottens Hof.

  “Let’s stop. I don’t think I can manage this without a drink.”

  But one glimpse inside Ottens Hof, and it almost required a stiff schnapps to get over the threshold. The tavern might have been plucked straight out of the sixteenth century, complete with hunting gear, harnesses, and medieval torture implements fixed to the walls. Axes, spears, and animal traps were suspended beneath a high timbered ceiling, from where candles in elaborate wrought-iron holders only dimly pierced the gloom. Sturdy oak tables, set for dinner, stretched the length of the hall, yet at this time of the day, the place was almost deserted, with only a single barmaid mopping the floor. She straightened up as they entered and resumed her place behind the bar.

  “This is Himmler’s private dining club,” Leni told Clara. “All the senior SS men come here to relax after summits at the castle. Look at the benches.”

  Peering down, Clara saw strange symbols carved into the wood. Looking closer, she saw that the intricate letters were runes, worked all around the seats and along the legs of the tables. Identical markings appeared on a frieze at the top of the wall, and carved into jutting timbers between the alcoves. Although the wording was indecipherable, the message from the emblazoned SS symbol was all too clear. No place was too obscure to escape the influence of Himmler’s enthusiasms.

  Leni returned with two glasses of beer, pounced on Clara’s French cigarettes, and leaned back against the death’s-head skull carved on the pew.

  “What a journey! Why does Himmler have to choose Westphalia of all places? Wewelsburg may be the center of the world, but it would help if it was a little more…central.”

  “In what way is this the center of the world?”

  “Oh, it has ancestral energy, apparently. Himmler says it will be the center of the rebirth of the Germanic nation. You know how he is about superstitions. Some astrologer told him an old Westphalian legend says an army from the East will on this very spot be beaten by an army of the West. He adores that kind of thing. You’ve met him, haven’t you?”

  “Once. Last year.”

  At five foot eleven, nearsighted, flat-chested, and with surprisingly delicate fingers, Himmler represented the precise opposite of his Nordic ideal. To look at, he might have been an accountant or a lawyer or a clerk, anything rather than the head of a fifty-thousand-strong terror organization. Though he probably knew more about the atrocities being visited on people in the Reich than even Hitler himself, Himmler was an ardent family man, devoted to his daughter, Puppi, and his scrub-faced wife, Marga—a dour woman seven years his senior who obstinately refused the siren call of Berlin and all its glamour, preferring to stay home on their rural farm. Though Clara hoped passionately that Himmler would not remember her, it was said he never forgot a face. He himself barely needed the rotating file index of fifty thousand names that had been installed at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin.

  “The way he’s behaving you’d think the castle was under siege already. His office has been impossible about the filming. I told him I needed a crew of a hundred and he said no more than thirty. What’s more, we won’t be able to film inside anywhere except a single room where a wedding consecration is taking place. Himmler loves weddings.”

  A sardonic grimace.

  “He’s going to allow outstanding SS men to marry two wives. He calls it a reward for heroes. Apparently there was some custom in the early Germanic tribes, where men of elevated social position were exempted from monogamy.”

  “It’s not that ancient. I know plenty of men who think the same,” Clara remarked.

  Leni grinned. “I’ve met those men too. So we’ll start with you, up on the battlements, the wind in your hair, symbolizing the legion of German ancestors who have repelled the enemy from the East. A tight shot on your face, then we pan out to reveal the entire landscape of Germania spread before you. You saw the costume?”

  Leni’s costume idea for the Spirit of Germania translated to a modified dirndl, a deep green dress with a laced bodice and square neckline, but fortunately without the frill of lace or the spill of cleavage that the true Bavarian costume would demand.

  Clara nodded.

  “Lovely,” said Leni, stubbing out her cigarette and rising to her feet. “Shall we get on with it then?”

  —

  UP CLOSE, WEWELSBURG LOOKED more like a prison than a castle. Its ranks of narrow windows gazed blankly out across the valley, and its turrets were stark silhouettes against the lowering sky. It had a striking triangular design, with massive stone walls oriented in a north-south axis and twin domes garnished with the fluttering black and white lightning-flash flag of the SS.

  As they crossed the drawbridge, Clara realized she was trembling. She kept her hands folded in her lap and her gaze fixed, but her stomach was as clenched as a fist, and she could barely swallow. This was the moment of truth. It was inconceivable that she would be allowed to enter Himmler’s most precious domain without an identity check. Her plan was to say that her identity document was “lost”—a situation that counted as a misdemeanor in itself.

  At the gatehouse there was the sound of dogs barking and a harsh command of silence as two soldiers with helmets and rifles, wearing waterproof capes against the first spattering of rain, approached the car.

  “Don’t look so gloomy, Clara! It’s a tremendous privilege to be here. Himmler is obsessed with secrecy. A big part of him doesn’t want anyone to know that this place even exists—but he recognized that our film would be incomplete without it.” Her face lit up with a slow, crimson smile. “Well, hello, young man.”

  The guard’s chiseled featur
es and hard eyes broke into a grin of surprise when he recognized her. His expression said it all. The Führer’s film director! So that was who all the cameramen and lighting operators and production crew were waiting for.

  “Fräulein Riefenstahl. Welcome to Wewelsburg!”

  “I’m honored.” Her voice was huskily seductive. “I hear you don’t often get female visitors.”

  “Only for wedding consecrations. Today is a special day.”

  “Then we shall have to make the most of it.”

  The guard peered closer into the car, towards the passenger seat. Beside him, his dog was broad and muscular, with dense black fur like the canine equivalent of an SS dress uniform. Clara focused on its flat, uncomprehending eyes.

  “And your companion?”

  Of course the soldier would want to know who she was. Wewelsburg of all places in the Reich would employ dedicated guards with the most scrupulous attention to duty. How could she possibly have hoped that her lack of identity documents would be overlooked?

  “My star, you mean?”

  “Of course!” He registered half recognition, but not enough to deter him from his duty. “I wonder if…”

  At that moment there was an almighty crash, the sound of splintering glass, and a volley of shouts arose from across the courtyard. Furious voices called for help. The guard glanced behind him in confusion and waved them through. Leni drove the Mercedes into the courtyard and the gate clanged behind them. Clara closed her eyes for a second, weak with relief.

  Inside, the forbidding, medieval-style exterior gave way to a triangular courtyard, which contained an unexpected bustle of activity. The crash they had heard was a steel ladder falling from a truck containing lighting equipment being unloaded down a ramp into one door of the castle. It appeared the ladder had only narrowly avoided decapitating a camera operator. Other production staff scurried around, trailing wires and carrying megaphones. Standing arc lights, lenses, and a number of aluminum boxes were being ferried into the building. Against an opposite wall, the drivers leaned, killing time with a cigarette break. A couple of SS officers in leather coats skirted the truck with unmistakable irritation at the intrusion of the film world on their private domain, but Clara was glad for these tokens of normality. Wewelsburg castle was under siege that day, and she didn’t give a damn if the movie world laid waste to it.