The Pursuit of Pearls

by Jane Thynne

  Word of the stunt had spread. Sightseers had been collecting at the west side of the Brandenburg Gate for the past hour, their gaze oscillating between the celebrity director herself and the film of low cloud covering the sky. Soldiers linked arms to control the crowds. From a perch on a viewing platform beside the gate, Clara joined them, looking out at the sea of entranced faces below.

  They didn’t have long to wait. It was just a sound at first, a low rumble from the distance, growing to a roar as the Junkers appeared, a gray gleam in the air, the swastikas on the underside of its wings clearly visible. The faint buffeting breeze strengthened to a wash of air that flattened the leaves on the trees as the plane descended, like some monstrous bird of prey, wings tilting slightly on the currents. Every face was excited, expectant, enthralled as a crowd of children at a conjurer’s trick. Every face was turned upwards.

  Every face except one.

  She couldn’t see his features, because his hat was tilted down over his eyes, but he stood immobile, hands in pockets, pressed into the crowd, staring right at her. Even as she saw him Clara noticed something else—the only moving figures in the throng, two men shouldering their way fast in his direction. They were wearing long, belted raincoats, the unofficial uniform of the Gestapo, and were making a direct line for him. When Clara looked back at the place he had been standing, he had disappeared.

  As swiftly as she could, Clara darted through the dense press of onlookers in the direction of the man she had glimpsed. But it was useless. With so much practice waiting in queues, Berliners had gotten used to standing their ground. They moved as slowly and obstinately as cattle. No one was giving way, certainly not to anyone without official ID. Once Clara had fought her way through to the spot where the man had been standing, he was nowhere to be seen. She stood looking around in frustration.

  Was it Leo? Or a figment of her imagination? And if it was Leo, where would he go?

  To the west of the gate lay the Tiergarten, the largest park in Berlin, dense with trees that could provide cover, but at that moment staked out with cameras and arc lights, as the Faith and Beauty troupe held their gymnastic pose in the open ground. To the left was Potsdamer Platz; behind stretched Unter den Linden. Anyone being pursued would surely be more likely to make his way towards the busiest center of population, where streets and crowds and buildings offered potential escape. Clara turned and pushed her way back through the stolid crowds to Pariser Platz.

  Past Wilhelmstrasse she came to the Soviet embassy, a handsome building with high brass lanterns, and she stopped and changed her bag to her other shoulder, giving her the opportunity to glance casually behind her before scanning the street ahead. It was filled with pavement cafés and ambling shoppers, but there was no sign of Leo. If he had headed this way, both he and the men following him had already been swallowed up in the crowd.

  On the corner of Friedrichstrasse two policemen were standing, their eyes traveling over the passing pedestrians with more than usual scrutiny. Were they a second patrol on the lookout for Leo? And if so, how many others had been posted to join the hunt?

  A couple of minutes later she had the answer. Towards the Lustgarten and crossing the bridge, a ribbon of lights on the dancing waters of the Spree, she noticed a car moving slowly, two men in the front seat, their faces sweeping left and right, scanning the crowds on the pavement as they trudged home from work.

  At the same moment, she caught sight of him. A vague shadow, far ahead, moving swiftly, dipping in and out of the throng. A flash of red-gold hair. He turned sharp left, up the Museum Island, along the side of the canal where it was impossible for a car to follow, heading for the maze of streets around Hackesche Höfe. Clara turned too, but once she had reached the elevated S-Bahn arches, she lost him again.

  In this area, Albert Speer’s redevelopment of Berlin was at its most advanced. In some places entire streets had been flattened, and elsewhere half-demolished homes stood like broken teeth, their debris coated with dust. Cranes and trucks were parked for the evening. She hastened along Spandauer Strasse, past a restaurant whose glass front was shattered and a board hammered diagonally across the door. Inside tables and chairs were overturned, cups and plates abandoned on the tables. A paper was taped to the cracked door.

  CLOSED FOR FURTHER NOTICE. BY ORDER OF POLICE

  A zealous official had added a handwritten explanation.

  I CHARGED EXTORTIONATE PRICES AND THAT IS WHY I AM NOW IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP.

  Blood drumming in her ears, Clara looked around her, wondering if she had been wrong, trying to guess where in the maze of streets Leo might go. The streets in this part of the city were narrower, older, more winding than the broad boulevards elsewhere in Berlin. She remembered that Leo had once had an apartment near here, in Oranienburgerstrasse, close to the enormous, gold-domed Neues Synagogue. That meant he knew the local streets well and he knew where best to vanish.

  Amid the jangle of trams, a high-pitched, angry shout rang out, and faces turned. The police car that Clara had seen earlier had rejoined the street two hundred meters behind at Dircksenstrasse and was coming in her direction, one man’s head craning from the passenger window. Ahead of her, the figure of Leo darted across the road. The occupants of the car had seen him too.

  At that moment the air was riven by a clanging bell. A siren wailed like a mournful wraith, and a plume of smoke mushroomed into the street, obscuring the houses on each side. Traffic drew to a halt. Klaxons sounded, and people on the street looked hesitantly around until they saw a patch of waste ground where a row of HJ boys was assembled in a line facing their corps leader, a grown man in shorts with a whistle, issuing staccato instructions through a megaphone. Almost immediately surprise mutated into mild irritation. Everyone knew what this was about.

  Air-raid drill.

  Practices for the bombing raids were happening every day now, and they always involved the Hitler Jugend. The HJ, Erich had told her, would play a vital part in air-raid precautions. It would be their job to assist in the cleanup, to get casualties to first aid points, and to help relocate bombed-out civilians. Some would act as air-raid wardens and others would help put out fires. The really lucky ones, Erich said, would get to help operate the flak guns.

  Amid the swirling smoke, a host of boys with Red Cross armbands dashed forward with stretchers. Others threw themselves enthusiastically on the ground, issuing loud, theatrical groans, enacting the aftermath of a bombing. Further recruits spilled from a nearby building. Others, outfitted in gas masks and fireproof suits, proceeded to spray the ground with water, dragging wheeled canisters behind them as if removing traces of poison gas.

  Immediately a traffic jam formed. Trams slammed on their brakes. Cars bunched up. A cream bus shuddered to a halt, its passengers looking out incuriously. Most pedestrians vanished down side streets, unwilling to be detained by a performance they had seen numerous times before. Behind the bus, the police car revved in frustration and sounded its horn. Inside, the driver banged the steering wheel hard in frustration, but the HJ leader was blocking the road, arms outstretched officiously as his troupe carried their pretend casualties on stretchers into an adjacent block decorated with a large red cross. Another boy stood by with a placard that read 2 DEAD. No one was allowed to interrupt an air-raid drill. The police car reversed with a screech of gears.

  Up ahead Leo was making a U-turn, heading east in the direction of the city palace, the Schloss.

  Clara hurried on breathlessly, pain tearing at her chest, desperate to slow down, yet terrified she would lose sight of him. She could barely believe the direction he was taking. Of all the places a fugitive might go, why would anyone being hunted by the police head for Alexanderplatz?

  The windswept square, intersected with yellow trams, was the home of the Polizeipräsidium, the central police station. The building known as the Alex rose with its towering dome on one side of the square, lit up in the dusk like a great ocean liner, with several hundred policemen inside.


  Standing at the center of the square, Clara made a 360-degree turn. Leiser’s shoe shop—the biggest in Berlin. The Mokka Fix Café. A Ufa movie theater that she saw, with a shock, featured her name on a billboard in a poster for Love Strictly Forbidden, due to be released in a fortnight. The effect of it was somehow more than any unexpected, unflattering glance in a mirror. The lighthearted smile, calculated to deceive, the head thrown back in joyful abandon, told no truth about her except one. That her life was one long façade of playing a role.

  Of Leo there was no sign. As she scanned her surroundings, Clara’s gaze snagged on the tall limestone arch that announced the entrance to Alexanderplatz U-Bahn:

  ALMOST HALF OF BERLIN LIES UNDERGROUND.

  Then she understood.

  —

  BERLIN’S U-BAHN STATIONS WERE the envy of the world. The work of the architect Alfred Grenander, they were little palaces of elegant design with their finely wrought iron fittings, Art Nouveau lamps, and mosaic inlays. Alexanderplatz was no exception, sleek with green-glazed tiles and elegant iron banisters, serving both the U5 and U8 lines. Clara dashed through the entrance hall and bought a ticket. She hunted fruitlessly for the figure of Leo among the flow of commuters, then at random she followed the signs to the U5 line and arrived amid the green steel arches on a platform smelling of dust and stale air. A train appeared, emptied its passengers, and moved off.

  She was torn between leaving immediately and remaining where she was. The U-Bahn was the obvious place to disappear, but if Leo was being pursued, surely he would have taken the train rather than stay where he was.

  Unless he knew that she had followed him.

  She looked into the darkness of the tunnel. The rails lit up with a dim gleam, and the tracks hummed in anticipation of the next train, heading east for Lichtenberg, Frankfurter Tor, and Friedrichsfelde. In the flicker before it arrived, the crowd on the opposite platform parted, and she glimpsed a figure on a bench, hat pulled down over his face. The train passed before her eyes—the driver in his cabin, face set, and the passengers, exhausted by work and soothed by the jolting motion, blinking sleepily at the seats opposite—but once it had disgorged its set of passengers and moved on, the opposite platform was vacant. Only empty benches remained beneath a poster, HARIBO MAKES CHILDREN HAPPY!

  Clara stood frozen with indecision. Another train burst into the station with an upwash of warm air. The crowds swelled and cleared and the train departed. At that point, a hundred yards away at the end of the platform she occupied, a figure appeared. This time she could see his face. It was not the face of a phantom but a living breathing man.

  CHAPTER

  43

  At precisely the same moment, the police she had seen before arrived on the opposite platform, looked across, and shouted.

  Springing up, Clara signaled to Leo that he should follow her. She ran back up the steps the way she had come, along the exit tunnel, trying to recall what Jochen had told her.

  Almost half of Berlin lies underground.

  She knew now why she had chosen the U5 line. It was not a random choice but a subconscious memory.

  The green door to the air-raid shelter was entirely inconspicuous, just as he had said. A blank sheet of steel studded with iron rivets and a vast handle, newly set into the wall. She pulled it, and to her relief, it was unlocked. Seconds later, Leo caught up and they slipped through the arched entrance into the darkness, pulled the door closed, and flattened themselves against the damp brick.

  Inside, the air was dank and claustrophobic, but a glimmer of light revealed luminous paint outlining doorways and exits, and a long corridor punctuated by thick steel doors. There were signs for washing rooms and lavatories. Bedrooms. And immediately before them an immense, shadowy space like a station waiting room fitted with wooden benches. An entire underworld hotel with accommodation for hundreds.

  Leo looked different in the phosphorescent shadow, at once strange and familiar. The light emphasized his finely cut features. He had grown a mustache, which made him seem older, and a triangle of tanned skin showed at his throat. He leaned against her, enfolding her entirely in his arms, and she felt his heart slamming against his chest. She pressed harder into his body—the body she knew by heart—inhaling the warm, familiar musk, feeling the pull of yearning for him, even now, and the answering surge within him. There was not an inch of air between them. His cheek was rough with stubble as they kissed.

  They tensed themselves for the tramp of feet in the corridor outside, listening for the stamp of heavy police boots, the hurrying footsteps to halt outside the door. But amid the regular flow of travelers, nothing stood out.

  She whispered in his ear. “How many are following?”

  “Three teams, I think. Two on foot and another one in a car. By now, there could be more.” His breath was hot against her ear, his entire body tense and alert. “I had to come back and find you. I needed to make sure you were safe. I couldn’t return to England without knowing.”

  “You’re going to England?”

  In the darkness she gripped his hand as if to lock him to her, the questions tumbling through her mind.

  “My name’s a priority on the Gestapo watch list.”

  “If you’re on a watch list, they would have stopped you at the border…”

  “They spotted me at Tempelhof. They could have picked me up there, but they chose not to. I assume they wanted to see who I was meeting. I’ve put you in grave danger, my darling. We need to keep moving. We have to get out of the underground.”

  —

  THE S7 LINE TRAIN was full of commuters traveling home to the western suburbs. Past the Zoo, Charlottenburg, Grunewald, Nikolassee, bodies rocked companionably on the wooden benches to the soothing rhythm of the train. The clattering of the tracks, the stops and starts, the squeal of brakes, and the station announcements. Leo insisted that they not sit or speak together, so she chose a spot three rows away and tried to keep herself from looking at him. The tension of being unable to hold or touch him was excruciating. It wasn’t until the train approached its final stop that he rose, and she followed him up the steps and out into the prettily gabled station of Berlin-Wannsee.

  Wannsee station, with its Gothic signs and arched windows, might have been straight out of a woodcut of a fantasy Germanic past. Even the air was different here, pure and green, infused with the watery scent of the Havel River, which lay to one side, pocked with sailing boats making their slow, scenic way in the summer dusk. On the opposite bank, a path meandered through dense woodland all the way to Potsdam. On Sundays the route was thronged with hikers, cyclists, and families out for a lakeside walk, but now, on a weekday evening, only the occasional dog walker could be seen along the leaf-strewn path.

  They crossed the bridge, but it wasn’t until they reached the cover of woodland that Leo allowed himself to speak. They walked, clasped close to each other, the filigree of branches above them framing a darkening sky.

  “The night I received that call they told me that two of our agents had disappeared in Vienna. All we knew was that they had arranged a meeting in the Café Louvre, at the corner of Wipplingerstrasse and Renngasse, with a pair of German officers who were thought to be anti-Nazis.”

  “I know the Café Louvre. I made a film in Vienna three years ago. We used to go there.” Clara recalled the pale spring light streaming through the generous windows, the violin-backed chairs, and booths finished in dark brocade along one wall. The schnitzel and creamy Kaffee mit Schlagobers.

  “I went straightaway. I became a regular and made friends with the barman. A nice chap. Georg.”

  Clara pictured Leo faux-drunk, boozily intimate, leaning against the bar late into the evening.

  “Sure enough, Georg told me what had happened. He saw the agents arrive and sit at a table with two other men. And it must have been a trap. Because within minutes the door slammed open, there was shouting, and the Gestapo came in with guns and dogs.”

  Clara ima
gined the dogs slavering, pulling against their leads.

  “Our men were taken away, almost certainly to be tortured and shot.” Leo swallowed and paused.

  “But Georg had noticed something curious. There was another customer in the bar, not a regular, and he was there as the arrest took place. Georg said to me, ‘Something like this happens, everyone tries to hide their face, but they’re looking all the same. They can’t help themselves. But this man, he didn’t turn a hair. Just kept reading his book.’ ”

  “What does that prove?”

  “That he knew the arrest was going to happen. That he was part of the trap. And Georg was doubly curious because the book this man was reading was in a foreign language. It wasn’t English, he insisted, or French, or Hungarian, any other language he recognized. All he could say was that it was the language you found on tombstones.”

  “Latin?”

  “Exactly.” Leo stopped and turned to Clara, urgently.

  “And there was only one person I could think of who would sit in a café, reading a book in Latin. As soon as I realized, I knew you were in danger. I had to get to you before he did.”

  It was her turn to astonish him.

  “Hugh Lindsey is dead, Leo.”

  Jaggedly, she explained about Hugh, and the young woman he had had murdered, and about how he had tried to kill her too. As she spoke, Leo laced his fingers through hers and gripped her tightly, as if attempting some retroactive protection.

  “I should have known,” he said bitterly. “I should have seen through Hugh much earlier. Good old Hugh. Everyone’s best friend. Always the life and soul of the party, even if he did like one too many and was always the last to leave. If anyone had looked more closely, they might have sensed a vacancy in him. There was a kind of emptiness, which he filled with drink and liaisons with other people’s wives. But nobody did look closely.”

  “Why was that?”