by Jane Thynne
Eventually she nodded off, only to wake when, with a metal groan and a grunt of brakes, the plane landed and jolted forward, a shimmer of heat on the horizon.
‘I’m sorry,’ shouted Hanna, as they bumped their way along the runway. ‘We had to approach from a greater height than normal.’
Clara peered out of the porthole window to see a swathe of tarmac bathed in dazzling sunlight. In the distance airport workers were driving trucks and unloading luggage and in the foreground, to her amazement, was the outline of a British plane. Next to that was a Junkers 90 and a little further along a Pan American Airways clipper onto which stacks of matching luggage were being loaded. Seeing her astonishment, Hanna Reitsch laughed.
‘There are five airlines operating out of this airport. Portugal’s the only country in Europe where a Luftwaffe plane can land next to a British one. And Lisbon is the only city in Europe that offers flights to both Berlin and London. It’s a special place all right.’ She climbed out of the cockpit, removed her flying cap and handed Clara an envelope.
‘I have to leave you now, Fräulein Vine. There is some Portuguese currency here for your expenses. I’ve been asked to tell you that Herr Schellenberg has been called to Spain so you won’t need to report to the German Embassy until Thursday. The telephone number of the embassy is here.’
‘Thursday?’ Clara had imagined that the summons was urgent, yet now she was being handed a reprieve. ‘That’s two days away.’
‘It’s not a problem, is it? Most Luftwaffe officers love having a stopover in Lisbon. They all visit the casino. And they like to spend the day at the beach at Estoril. Or shopping.’ Hanna Reitsch winked. ‘Perfume for their girlfriends. Silk scarves. And for us ladies there’s a splendid little glove shop on the Rua do Carmo, Luvaria Ulisses, where they make the best gloves in the world. I recommend it.’
Taking the address of the embassy, Clara was engulfed by relief. So she was to have a stay of execution for forty-eight hours. Suddenly the prospect of two days outside the Reich was indescribably exciting.
‘I’m sure I’ll find something to occupy me. And thank you for the flight.’
‘Don’t mention it. Enjoy your trip. Good luck finding somewhere to stay. They say every hotel room in this place is booked at least twice over.’
Lisbon was a world of colour. Puce and magenta bougainvillea tumbled from the balconies, writhing against the delphinium-blue tiles that decorated every façade, and violet clematis, dark as ink, splayed against whitewashed walls. Squat-roofed houses, humped like camels up the hillside, were lit from tan to rose red in the sun’s transit. The cobbled streets were fringed with jacaranda trees frothing with purple blossom, debouching suddenly into little squares where pigeons decorated the bronze statues of obscure statesmen and old men sipped bitter coffee beneath the midday sun. Everything about the architecture, the gardens and the ravishing light was exuberant and sensual. After the darkness of Berlin, Lisbon was a city at ease with itself, revelling in the luxury of neutrality.
Yet Hanna Reitsch’s comment was all too accurate. Not one of those stately buildings or picturesque dwellings, it seemed, contained a free room. Requests for accommodation met with bored faces or simply laughter. Every boarding house was jammed, every pension block booked, every hotel had a waiting list. In the broad, leafy Avenida da Liberdade, Clara went from hotel to hotel, her leather bag making a red dent in her shoulder, until at last one proprietor took pity on her. ‘German, yes?’ he asked, after the standard shake of the head. ‘Try my brother Pedro on the Costa do Castelo. Up by the castle. I heard he had a room come vacant quite recently. Who knows? It could still be free.’
Up a series of winding alleys and narrow streets decorated by Arabic-tiled façades, Clara found a palm-shaded courtyard leading to a tiny pension with egg-yolk-yellow walls and pitted parquet, where Pedro, a man with a tortoise face and small black eyes blinking from its folds, ushered her up a malodorous stairway into a back room.
‘Last vacancy,’ he commented briefly. ‘It’s probably the only one in the city too. I wouldn’t have it but the occupant left in a hurry. That happens all the time now. They get lucky, their feet don’t touch the ground.’ He shrugged towards the closet. ‘This one went so fast they left their clothes. Probably got a ticket on a clipper. Went without paying, what’s more. I’m selling those clothes for recompense.’
The room was almost bare and its casement window more appropriate to a prison cell, but a flood of lemony light washed in through the shutters and the bed sheets looked clean, if shabby. The only other furniture was a closet, a cane-bottomed armchair, a chest of drawers and a rickety table bearing a lamp with a shade of garish stained glass and a tray with a knife and fork on it. And a cracked basin in which Clara took a quick all-over wash with one of the bars of soap she had bought in Paris. As the closet was full, she threw her clothes on the bed before opening the shutters and peering out of the window. A splash of blood-red blossom spilled from a gap in the wall opposite and by dint of craning her head she could see the distant outline of São Jorge castle, a hulking silhouette in the glare of the sun. A blast of heat funnelled up from the street and she had a sudden craving for a sea breeze and the sensation of sand beneath her toes.
Spend the day at the beach at Estoril. Why not?
Drawing the shutters again to keep the room cool, Clara pulled a single, chestnut hair from her head, then went over to the chest and placed the hair precisely in the aperture at the top of the first drawer. Closing the door behind her, she thought for a second then felt around in her bag and found at the bottom the Cartier card that Hans Reuber had given her in Paris. She wedged it into the door jamb, precisely two inches above the hinge, so deep that only its narrow edge was visible. As precautions went, it was basic, but effective. Then she went to the Cais do Sodré station and took a train along the coast.
Estoril was picture postcard perfect, a pretty eighteenth-century town and fishing harbour, with a parade of shops and cafés fringing the beach. Clara sat on the sand, sniffing the oysterish air and staring out to where the twin blues of sea and sky blurred into one horizon and the estuary of the Tagus River merged with the Atlantic Ocean. The tide stacked and shuffled over a lacy fringe of shingle and the gulls wheeled overhead, fighting over scraps left by the fishermen.
A few yards away, a group of German men sat in a bathing cabin, their loud, confident voices carrying out across the sand. To her other side a couple of dark-eyed, middle-aged women, trussed in black clothing, shot wary glances from beneath their umbrella. They were almost certainly refugees, nervous and incredulous that the international situation should have brought them just yards away on the same narrow strip of sand as the people whose country provoked their flight.
Clara adjusted her sunglasses, leaned back in her lounger and felt the tingle of her shoulders turning brown. What a contrast to the beaches of her childhood, the gritty stretches of Cornish sand where you cut your bare feet on the rock pools and huddled by a windbreak as your flesh turned blue. Here the tide sucked softly at the shingle and the air smelled of salt and honey. It was bliss.
Yet she couldn’t settle.
Tension hummed through her body. Her senses were alive with an animal alertness, a heightened vigilance that crawled over her and kept her scanning the horizon for the unexpected. She told herself that it made perfect sense. In two days’ time she would be reporting to the Reich’s chief spymaster and she had no real idea what he wanted from her. That prospect would be enough to terrify anyone.
Taking a novel from her bag she attempted to read, but after a long time in which she had perused the same two pages over and over without absorbing a single sentence, she ditched it as a lost cause. It was impossible to concentrate. An hour later she abandoned the attempt at relaxation and headed to the station.
Back in Lisbon she killed time wandering the steep, cobbled streets, drinking in the food, the smells, the colours and the language. Here there were no troops marching on the street
. Cafés spilled out onto the pavement beneath gaudy neon signs. Pedestrians wore well-fitting clothes and walked with their shoulders back and heads up, free of the watchful stoop one saw back home. The shops were full of local pottery and glassware, rather than the Hitler kitsch – the Führer cards and ashtrays and beer steins – that cluttered shop windows in Berlin. Every grocery shop was an assault on the senses. Clara entered a bakery simply to savour its mingled fragrance of yeast and hot sweet dough, and in an instant the scent transported her to the Bäckerei Balzer in Sophienstrasse where she used to take Erich to buy Streuselschnecken, sugar-glazed yeast buns, and gaze hungrily on squares of butter cake, apple fritters and cheesecake. Another place was selling spices, its interior a glimmering collection of amber and mahogany, sumptuous with odours of cinnamon and cardamom and ginger. At a fruit stall she ran a finger over the suede skin of a fig, then picked out a sun-warmed peach, feeling the sweet juice run into her mouth as she bit into its flesh.
Just as seductive was the Rua do Carmo, where she found a pretty, sprigged-cotton summer dress, printed with roses, and a sweet cream straw hat. In another shop silk stockings were on sale and remembering Mary Harker’s lament she bought two pairs. But her most satisfying discovery was a chemist selling Elizabeth Arden lipstick in her favourite shade, Velvet Red. Such luxuries were thin on the ground in Berlin. Not only did the Propaganda Ministry issue sheaves of pamphlets on the evils of cosmetics, but the high-class brands had vanished from the shelves and women determined to beautify themselves were resorting to hard, waxy replacements that dragged at the lips or concoctions of home-made beetroot juice. Picking out one of the precious golden tubes, Clara delved happily into her purse. What better way to spend the money Goebbels had given her for expenses?
Halfway down the street she did a double-take when she read the name Luvaria Ulisses above a minute shop door squeezed between two baroque pillars and recognized it as the place Hanna Reitsch had mentioned. Through an art deco doorway no wider than an arm’s span, beneath antique glass display cabinets, an old man was bent over a wooden counter. He broke off his work to take her hand and size up her shape and measurements, measuring each finger and the width of her palm.
‘You’re very precise.’
‘But of course.’ His gruff countenance lightened with a smile. ‘We are all different. All unique. You must have heard the saying “to fit like a glove”.’
She spent several minutes poring over the display before choosing a pair of white silk evening gloves fitted up to the elbow. He parcelled them up for her in brown paper and ribbon.
Muito obrigada.
Shopping was a welcome distraction. Yet gradually the shops, with their honey-scented candles, soap, hats and boots, began to blur before her eyes and she was forced to acknowledge the tension that was still running through her veins and along every nerve in her body. What was her instinct telling her? Reaching the street of her pension she conducted a forensic inspection of her surroundings: a man standing at an opened window in shirtsleeves smoking a cigarette, a couple playing chess at a street-side bar. An old woman, cheeks like a withered apple, leaning against a doorway. There was no one suspicious. No sign of any surveillance. Perhaps it was simply the fact of being in a strange place, surrounded by an alien language, that made her every sense alert. Or maybe she was merely hungry. Instead of going straight to her room she doubled back, entered the bar and ordered a sandwich.
At the pension, the hallway was as pungent as before, as if something had died and festered there. She peered into the ground-floor room occupied by the owner. It was grubbily panelled with a dirty glass cabinet stuffed with crockery and a portrait of Prime Minister Salazar on the wall. Pedro was sitting beneath a lamp, his tortoise neck sunk into a newspaper and a beer bottle open, his gnarled feet in their open sandals propped on a seat in front of him. He barely glanced up as she passed. As she progressed up stone steps that dipped in the middle where they had been trodden by a thousand feet, the nonchalance of that glance bothered her. Clara knew never to ignore the subtle signs that suggested an enhanced attention. Something to do with the man’s studied indifference increased her unease and told her that something was wrong.
The door to her room was shut and the Cartier card she had slipped between the door and its frame was still there, just the edge protruding, two inches above the hinge. Pushing the door as silently as she could, she entered.
The room was in darkness, her clothes thrown over the bed exactly as she left them, the closet door half open. Her bottle of Soir de Paris glimmered on the chest of drawers. But in the air she scented faint traces of tobacco, something rich and alien. Moving towards the window to open the shutters, she saw two leather brogues crossed at the ankle, extending from the armchair, and then a shadow that rose suddenly and approached her, resolving itself into a man. In that split second she knew, because the Cartier card had been pushed back into the doorframe as precisely as she left it, that this man was no casual thief, or even a local policeman sent to check up on her, but someone who understood as much as she did about espionage. Someone who had been trained in the same arts and techniques that governed her own life and who lived by the same rules.
In the dim light he had a leonine demeanour, but what was most striking was his face. It was the kind of face you might find carved on a knight’s tomb, inscribed in stone or brass. Thin-lipped and lofty, with a broken nose, twin cliffs of cheekbone and a mouth lifting into a sardonic smile.
‘I don’t think we’ve met.’
His voice was dark velvet. The kind of voice that wore a cloak and dagger and promised far, far more lay beneath the surface. He took two steps towards her and extended his hand.
‘The name’s Fleming. Ian Fleming.’
Chapter Eighteen
The first Saturday of the month was selection day at the NSV home. The officials from the Reich Adoption Service arrived, unburdening themselves of coats and hats and taking a swift cup of coffee with the supervisor while the orphans assembled in the great hall to receive instructions from one of the Brown Sisters. They were to stand with feet precisely four inches apart and face directly ahead as the potential adopters walked in. No whining. No talking. No fidgeting.
The would-be parents, all either childless families of good race, or those who had failed Himmler’s injunction to be kinderreich, rich in children, would walk along the line, smiling and judging. Sometimes, they would even poke or prod a child, or reach forward to squeeze the flesh, like fruit in a marketplace, and if they did, the child should submit quietly, without complaint. They must not address the new parents, except to give an answer, and before answering they must give the Hitler salute. The adoption chief settled himself behind a desk in the corner of the hall and prepared his paperwork.
‘Eyes forward!’ said Frau Schneider, as though inspecting an honour guard.
The little ones always did best in selections. They tended to ignore instructions and make spontaneous physical gestures – one child even laid his head on a businessman’s knee when he bent down to examine the face, and this proved a winning move; the child was picked immediately. Older children, though, had nothing to gain from physical contact. Any pubescent girl who held out her hand would meet with steely suspicion from potential mothers. A prod from a would-be father signalled something ominous for the future too.
Some of the orphans looked forward to selection day. It reminded them they still had a ticket in the lottery, a stake in the game, a chance to return to the Germanic ideal of a family. But others would cry, muffling their sniffs because it was forbidden, yet unable to stop the tell-tale shake of the shoulders.
Cars drew up on the drive outside, disgorging black-uniformed men and their wives, in varying states of excitement, resignation, suspicion or hostility. The visitors began to straggle in. Most of the potential applicants were from the SS.
‘Why do they look so miserable when they’re just about to get a new child?’ Katerina whispered to Heidi. ‘You’d think t
hey’d be excited.’
Heidi rolled her eyes. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? They don’t really want any more children. The SS are supposed to have four kids each but most of them are nowhere near so they have to come here, see? Just as long as it’s not us.’
‘They won’t pick us. We’re almost grown-up. No one wants older girls,’ said Katerina, as though by repeating this mantra she could console herself.
‘The men do.’
‘But the wives won’t like it.’
‘Depends how much they want a skivvy in their kitchen.’
‘They have Polacks for that, don’t they?’
Frau Schneider walked along the line. Noticing that one of the children was sucking his thumb she flicked it expertly from his mouth with her cane, provoking a sharp cry. Barbara Sosemann was chewing her plait, but Frau Schneider only plucked up the end and tucked it back over her shoulder.
At the end of the line Rose, one of the girls in Katerina’s class, was crying silent tears. Her face was swollen like dough, her eyes swallowed up in creases. She had just heard that her brother, posted as an anti-aircraft gunner on the roof of a factory at Siemensstadt, had been killed. He was her last surviving relative. Most children at the orphanage never stopped talking about their siblings, as though to have brothers and sisters was defence against what was coming, and Katerina was no different. Siblings could throw a spanner in the works of adoption. Not only could you protest that you had some family, someone in the world who cared if you lived or died, but when a sibling came of age, they might adopt you themselves. So far Katerina had managed to conceal the fact of Sonja’s disappearance from everyone. It was only discovering the jeweller’s receipt that had prompted her to let Clara Vine into her secret. But what the future might hold if Sonja didn’t return did not bear thinking about. Surely Katerina’s luck could not hold out much longer. To take her mind off it, she tried to think of something nice. Dogs, as usual, came to the rescue.