by Jane Thynne
One of the loveliest things about dogs was that they were all a little bit different. You could get a purebreed and still there was an individual quality to how the animal stared at you, its eyes either curious or dull, some with noses wetter than others. What most distinguished dogs from each other was not their looks but their personality. It should be the same for people, shouldn’t it? What could any potential parent tell about a child, just from looking at her eyes or teeth?
Katerina’s reverie was interrupted by the approach of a couple. The woman was in her late forties, complexion the colour of sour milk, bulging out of a hairy green suit. The husband beside her was so fit and sleek in his SS uniform he might have been her son. Together they surveyed the orphans, checking the clarity of skin, the whites of the eyes, posture, strength of limbs. The man halted in front of Katerina and she felt his eyes travel down her body, as though he was trying to see what lay behind her frumpy blue NSV uniform or wondering how soft the skin might be beneath the rough texture of her smock. She clenched her fists and drew in her stomach as he reached forward a hand and tipped up her chin. Scenting his interest, Frau Schneider sped over.
‘This is Katerina, Herr Sturmbannführer Hagan. A very intelligent girl.’
Hagan gave a snort of satisfaction, his gaze flickering greedily over Katerina’s figure.
‘A girl is what we are looking for, to complete our family.’
Frau Hagan had already passed on but now she returned, eyes narrowing as she scanned Katerina. She crossed her arms.
‘She doesn’t need to be intelligent. Any willing and obedient girl will suit us.’
‘You have the right girl here then. Katerina is such a hard worker.’
‘Is she teachable? I need a girl I can shape. We want one who can get accustomed to our ways, rather than a little Fräulein with ideas of her own.’
‘Katerina has nothing of her own,’ said Frau Schneider, encouragingly. ‘She has been with us since December.’
‘December?’
The implication hung in the air. Why had no one taken her in six months? Might there be some hidden depravity?
‘How is her moral attitude?’
‘Exemplary.’ Frau Schneider hurried on. ‘She was of good family before she was tragically orphaned.’
Katerina felt her cheeks bloom. She couldn’t help herself.
‘I still do have a family! I have a sister.’
‘A sister? Is she here?’ said the husband, his interest spiking, looking round.
‘No, she’s grown-up. Sonja is a singer. She’s very well known.’
‘Is she indeed? Would I know her?’
‘You probably do. She’s famous. They call her the Songbird.’ Despite herself, Katerina couldn’t help the swell of pride. ‘Mostly she sings at the Café Casanova.’
If Sturmbannführer Hagen knew the Café Casanova, he was never going to admit it in front of his wife. The nightclub was not much more than a louche cellar, from which the degeneracy of the old days had not been entirely purged. The air was musky with sex and sweat, the tired banquettes stained with stale beer. The thought that this girl was the little sister of a nightclub singer may have interested Sturmbannführer Hagen, but it was the kiss of death for his wife. Frau Hagen winced as if physically soiled and turned away, her eyes focused down the line, towards the little blonde Poles.
‘That one is more the age we were thinking of.’
Frau Schneider took the hint and hurried on to where Barbara Sosemann was quivering like a rabbit.
‘This child was recently orphaned in the Greater Reich . . .’
Katerina allowed her limbs to relax. Another escape. But it was more obvious than ever that she needed to find Sonja. Sooner or later the NSV would start asking questions about this elusive sister of hers.
A face came into her mind. Cool elegance and luminous skin like the edge of a pearl, bisected by the faintest trace of crow’s feet at the eyes. The cloud of scent called Soir de Paris that must have come from the semi-circular blue glass bottle on the mantelpiece. Katerina wondered if Clara Vine would really do anything to help, or if she was just like all those other adults who promised the earth so long as they never had to deliver.
Chapter Nineteen
‘Two dirty Martinis. A splash of olive brine. And stirred, please, not shaken. Shaking bruises the gin.’
The bar of the Hotel Avenida was heavy with mahogany and scarlet leather. The walls were hung with crimson silk wallpaper, the marble tables dotted with fancy gilt lamps and brass-potted ferns and the entire décor was as blood red and busy as a butcher’s shop. Ian Fleming returned from the bar and established himself on the scratched chesterfield sofa with a sigh of satisfaction.
‘Isn’t this the most extraordinary place? Like a gypsy’s funeral parlour.’
He glanced around him. The Portuguese love of excess, which decreed that no single mirror was enough where two would do, meant that every surface glimmered with infinite reflection. A whole bevy of Ian Flemings, an entire cocktail party’s worth, sipped Martinis around them.
‘Did you know that this hotel has a tunnel that runs under the road directly to the station?’
‘How extraordinary,’ said Clara, shifting in her seat at the thought. ‘Why would that be needed?’
‘So people can come and go without being noticed. It was installed by the Germans, so presumably they’re planning on staying. This is their place. We’re very diplomatic about our watering holes here. The Germans like the Avenida and the Café Chiado in the Rua Garrett and Gambrinus restaurant, which they’ve tricked out as a Bavarian beer cellar, whereas the Hotel Aviz belongs to us.’
He gestured to the copies of the London Times, the Daily Mail, the New York Times and the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung lying side by side on the table beside them. ‘Some people think that’s Lisbon all over. Every nationality under the sun rubbing along together. But it won’t last. This city will be under Nazi rule in no time.’
With his single-breasted suit of dark blue worsted, Old Etonian tie, and crowded, nicotine-stained teeth, Fleming’s own nationality could not have been more evident if he had hung a large Union Jack round his neck. His jacket, Clara noticed as he leaned forward, bore the label Benson, Perry & Whitley of Cork Street. Shirtsleeves were double folded with Cartier cufflinks. Whereas many of the Englishmen she knew back home wore suits their father had owned, she reckoned that Fleming, in his impeccable tailoring, was entirely his own invention. He appeared supremely, almost superciliously, relaxed. His craggy features, with the help of a broken nose, had the angular quality of a Cubist portrait.
‘You seem very sure.’
‘I give it months.’
If this was a Nazi place, why had he brought her here, unless he was so brazenly self-confident that he assumed he could outwit any surveillance? Yes, she realized as he passed her a glass, deliberately brushing her fingertips, that’s exactly what it was. Ian Fleming loved the idea of speaking English in a bar that had been co-opted by the Germans. For him drinking Martinis was war by other means.
The cocktail was as sharp as a knife, briny as a sip of seawater, with an after-kick of alcohol that would go straight to her head. It was folly to drink when she needed her wits about her, but there was no way Clara would let this man know that.
‘Too strong for you?’
‘Not at all. It’s perfect.’
‘Didn’t think you looked like a sweet sherry girl, but in my experience most ladies find these a bit hard to handle. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vermouth, large slice of lemon peel. This is the only place in Europe you can get a Martini made with English gin.’
‘So refreshing.’
‘Isn’t it? I always imagine I’ll create my own cocktail one day, but the trouble is, I require perfection. And perfection is so hard to find, in drinks as much as in women.’
He winked and Clara put her glass down. The gin was already entering her bloodstream and she needed to end this flirtation right now
before her senses were blunted in a pleasant alcoholic haze. She had been far too curious to refuse Fleming’s suggestion of a drink, but despite the small talk they had exchanged on the way here, she still had no idea exactly who he was or why he had staked her out. She did not know how he had entered her hotel room, whether he was who he claimed to be or, most importantly of all, who he was working for. All she knew was that her instincts that she was being followed that day were justified.
‘Why were you tailing me, Mr Fleming?’
A wolfish grin.
‘What a suggestion! I wasn’t. At least not to begin with. I was out in Estoril because I was planning an evening at the casino. I had just enjoyed a long lunch at the Hotel Palacio. Gulls’ eggs, quenelle of sole, crêpes Suzette and half a bottle of Chablis as a matter of fact. Just about my ideal meal. I went along the promenade to walk it off and almost as soon as I saw you I knew I was going to have to forgo my evening’s cards.’
‘Not on my account, I hope.’
‘It’s probably for the best. My long-term plan is to strike a blow against the Germans by winning as much money from them as possible, but the casino here can be pretty dull. On weekdays there’s usually no one but a few fat Nazis and low-level Portuguese and the stakes are dismally low. Even in the salle privée. And the smoke and the sweat can be quite nauseating. However, it’s worth keeping one’s hand in. You can learn a lot from cards. The whole trick is to work your way into somebody’s head and then think fast to get yourself out of trouble. It’s not the hand you’re dealt, it’s how you play it.’
‘I take it you’re not in Lisbon to improve your gaming technique. Did you come here specifically to find me?’
He gave a laugh drier than the Martini he had just drained.
‘Forgive me if it sounds ungallant, but as I say, running into you was the last thing on my mind. It was more of a happy accident. Discovering a pretty girl at a loose end is always a boon, but to find someone of my own persuasion was sheer serendipity. I followed you as far as your pension, and when you diverted into a bar, I walked up to your room.’
Clara crossed her legs and took a swift look around her. The place was empty, apart from a fat man with a fine sheen of perspiration ordering a double in decelerated German. She cupped her chin in her hand to avoid any risk of lip-reading.
‘And what makes you think I’m of your persuasion, as you put it?’
‘A million things. That card, for instance. The one you left in your door. That was how I knew it was your room. Strictly you should have torn that card into pieces and burned it in an ashtray. It says too much about you.’
Clara shifted in her seat, annoyed at herself. He was right and she knew it. She had trained herself never to keep any tickets or receipts – they were valuable little sources of information that enabled anyone to pinpoint your movements – but the Cartier card had slipped the net of her own scrutiny.
‘Not to mention your other little burglar alarm – the hair in the chest drawer. It’s a standard precaution. No trace of talcum powder on the closet handle, but then you’d not bothered to shut the closet.’
‘I hope your curiosity was satisfied.’
‘I wasn’t particularly curious, as it happens. I already knew you were no ordinary little tourist. I could tell what you were about within about ten minutes of watching you.’
‘Is that so? What could you tell?’
‘What kind of woman spends an afternoon at a beach alone?’
‘Hard though it may be for you to imagine, there are some women who are capable of enjoying their own company.’
‘You were reading Gone with the Wind.’
‘Where I live, in Berlin, it’s a bestseller. The Führer himself recommends it because he admires the racial hierarchies of the American South.’
‘Your copy was in English.’
‘Ah.’
In Berlin Clara was exceptionally careful never to be seen with a book in anything but German. She had removed almost all the English novels from her apartment and deposited them in the empty home of a friend out in Griebnitzsee. But she missed reading in her mother tongue and in Lisbon, she had calculated, an English novel would raise no eyebrows. In Lisbon no one would judge you by your reading matter. How foolish she had been to let down her guard.
‘What else?’
‘Where shall I start? You were nervous. You looked around every time someone came near. You asked about the train times at the station so I knew you weren’t local. It was obvious you were English.’
‘Perhaps I was American.’
‘Do me the credit of being able to tell an Englishwoman from an American girl. From someone who has known plenty of both.’ He stretched his arms behind his head and flexed his entire body in a gesture that reminded Clara suddenly of a cat she had owned as a child, a powerful, half-feral creature, who made up for his solitary and unfriendly nature with his unrivalled predatory prowess.
‘An English girl is painted in watercolour, whereas an American is always in Technicolor.’
Clara had tried, even harder since war broke out, to Germanize herself. To overlay the pastel wash of Englishness with the oils of her German ancestry. With every gesture and move and meal, she buried the English half of herself deeper. She joked in German, thought in German, even dreamt in German. At home she never spoke a word of English, except to Mary Harker, and even then only out of earshot. Yet, perhaps, Fleming was right. No matter how you tried to whitewash it, nationality could not be erased; its traits would still protrude like stubborn Braille, its instincts as ingrained as deeply as the urge to use the right or the left hand.
Fleming raised his glass and signalled to the bartender for another.
‘Why were you nervous? Has there been someone on your tail?’
‘No.’ She twirled the lock of hair at the side of her head.
‘You should watch that. Habits are an agent’s enemy. Being distinctive is what you need to avoid.’
‘So this is what you believe then. That I’m an agent of some kind?’
‘Precisely.’ He cocked an amused eyebrow. ‘But as with cards, a little foreknowledge is always helpful. I did have a perfectly good guess who you are. We have an acquaintance in common.’
He took a long draw on his cigarette, paused to exhale, then grinned like a poker player who has just laid down a winning hand.
‘Your sister. Angela.’
Angela. Her beguiling, glamorous elder sister. Who had posed as a Nazi sympathizer among the British upper classes, while covertly informing on them to British intelligence. Who, long before that, had acted as a substitute mother to Clara, coaching her in the ways of English society – how to tip a maid, which neighbour to converse with at dinner, how to pass the port. The effortlessly elegant Angela, golden hair pushed back from a flawless brow, hair that had in childhood been brushed fifty strokes every night with a Mason Pearson brush until it gleamed. As glamorous in a Barbour with a pair of Labradors as in a Hardy Amies evening gown. How would Angela have adapted to wartime strictures? Certainly not by wearing clothes refashioned from a blanket or run up from a magazine sewing pattern the way everyone else did. Clara pictured her sister in a belted gabardine jacket with wide lapels, teamed with a velvet pillbox hat, full skirt and unexpectedly high heels.
The image seemed so real that she could barely restrain herself from a rapid glance around the bar, as though Angela might be about to materialize from behind one of the potted palms.
‘You know my sister? Where is she?’
‘In London, as far as I know. Helping that husband of hers fight plans to turn his golf club into a cabbage patch.’
Gerald Mortimer was a Conservative MP whose right-wing views seemed closely aligned to their father’s. He had a bluff manner which he liked to call direct, but was in fact merely rude.
‘The tennis courts in Kensington have already been ploughed up for an allotment by the Dig for Victory people. They have rows of carrots there now. Apparently your brothe
r-in-law has written a letter about it to The Times.’
Although that would be entirely typical, anyone could see a letter in The Times. It was no proof that Fleming knew Angela at all.
‘Did she tell you I was here?’
Angela would have no idea that Clara was in Portugal.
‘She never mentions you at all. I wouldn’t have known Angela even had a sister if I hadn’t seen the photograph of you in an Asprey’s frame on the grand piano in her drawing room.’
A little glance of triumph. He was aware that he finally had her trust.
‘I knew I’d seen you before. It only took a few moments to place that face of yours in context. And when I did, I’ll confess it did set my imagination running.’
A barrage of questions rose in Clara’s mind. What was Angela really doing? Since war broke out, it had been impossible to receive letters or calls from England, yet even if they had communicated, Angela would never have discussed her true activities except face to face.
‘Is she happy? What’s she up to? Do you know?’
‘Probably missing the job I fixed up for her with Noël.’
‘Noël Coward?’ Clara remembered the playwright from Angela’s parties. An elegant figure in his smoking jacket, always equipped with an acid rejoinder, sharp as Angostura Bitters in a pink gin.
‘He’s a good friend of mine. Last September he was desperate to do something for the war effort so they gave him a job running the British Bureau of Propaganda in Paris, liaising with the French. I suppose they thought a man like Noël would be good at getting on with people, and he was. He got an apartment in the Place Vendôme and held quite riotous dinner parties, all sorts of writers, actors, journalists, personalities. Claimed he was dining for England. I suggested Angela might like a spell as his secretary but she only had a couple of weeks there before Noël got fed up with it. He said the British idea of propaganda seemed to go no further than dropping copies of entire speeches by Neville Chamberlain over Germany.’ A languid chuckle. ‘He said if the British plan was to bore the Germans to death, we didn’t have quite enough time. So Angela went back to London and Noël sailed off to America. The idea was that he should persuade the Americans to come into the war. Noël’s terribly popular there, only he can’t explain the real reason for his presence of course so everyone thinks he’s just like Auden and Isherwood.’