Solitaire

by Jane Thynne

  ‘I don’t have any plans.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure that puts all our minds at rest.’

  For a second Magda remained silent, a pensive scowl on her face, and Clara wondered what she really believed. Did she see Clara as a convinced Nazi, a loyal follower of the Führer like herself, or did she suspect there were depths that Clara kept well hidden, secrets far below the surface, just as Magda did herself?

  True Berliner humour was black as tar and sharp enough to cut yourself on, but that kind of joke was in shorter supply than petrol now and instead the evening was dominated by anodyne jests about Neville Chamberlain ‘the umbrella fella’, Winston Churchill ‘the drunk’ and anti-Semitic clichés. The crowd, fuelled by fine wine and coaxed by the presence of celebrity, laughed easily and BDM girls, dressed as usherettes, only with WHW tins instead of cigarettes in the trays round their necks, barred the end of each row until every guest had made their contribution.

  As the curtain fell, most of the audience held back to make way for the top brass and senior Nazi officials, who processed like clergy leaving a church before the congregation. Joseph Goebbels left by a side door, followed at a short interval by a brunette with a high flush on her cheeks who had not yet mastered the art of an inconspicuous exit. Eventually, as the vast throng of guests streamed into the damp evening air, Clara spotted the person she had come to see.

  Emmy Goering.

  The Reich Marshal’s wife was, as Clara had expected, only too happy to grant her request.

  ‘Of course I will. After all it was me who gave you the idea in the first place. I’m glad you’ve come round to my way of thinking. We all have to do what we can. Where have you been, anyway?’

  ‘I was in Lisbon.’

  ‘Another of Goebbels’ entertaining missions?’

  ‘Only a short stay. I bumped into some old friends of yours. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor.’

  ‘Did you! What a charming couple they are. How were they?’

  ‘They’re off to the Bahamas.’

  ‘Thank God. At least they’ll be out of England and well away from the first phase, though, as the dear Duke said, a short burst of heavy bombing will be exactly what England needs to see sense.’

  ‘The Duke said that?”

  ‘His very words. Now if that’s all, my husband will be waiting . . .’

  ‘Actually, Frau Goering . . .’ After everything Emmy Goering had done, it seemed almost greedy to ask more, yet in the matter of influence, as well as intelligence, Clara had learned that the more one asked, the more one generally received.

  ‘I hate to mention this, but there is another matter I wanted to raise with you. I have a godson called Erich Schmidt. He’s almost seventeen, a very bright boy, an intellectual really, right at the top of his class – and he absolutely worships the Herr Reich Marshal.’

  Emmy Goering’s face softened in an indulgent smile. There was nothing unusual in that. Such was her own adoration for her husband it was impossible for her to envisage anyone not sharing it.

  ‘Working for the Luftwaffe is Erich’s greatest dream. Ernst Udet gave him an autograph once and Erich still has it posted on his wall. But the thing is, Doktor Goebbels has made some remarks about my godson – comments that make me think perhaps he might look . . . unfavourably . . . on Erich if at any time I didn’t please him.’

  Emmy Goering’s face changed in precisely the way Clara had hoped. Her entire body seemed to shudder at the womanizing tendencies of Joseph Goebbels. Anyone who knew the Propaganda Minister would understand Clara’s insinuation: that he was perfectly prepared to use an innocent boy to bend an actress to his will. And every bit of what she had said was true, after all. Yet it helped that the Goerings and the Goebbels were hardened rivals from a private feud that had simmered since the early days of the Reich and any opportunity to thwart the Propaganda Minister would be seized with relish.

  ‘That man! Will nothing stop him! I will see what I can do. If your lad comes under the protection of the Luftwaffe, there’s very little Goebbels can do about it. Give me his name and address.’

  Clara took out her pen.

  ‘And if he’s a bright boy, as you say, we don’t want to waste him on the front line. There’s a Luftwaffe leadership school right here in Berlin. They take them in the Air Ministry. He’d be round the corner from you. At least to begin with. And then . . . Well, who knows what’s going to happen in the next few months? Now that’s an interesting pen you have. So pretty.’

  Ignoring Emmy Goering’s outstretched hand, Clara bundled Ian Fleming’s fountain pen quickly back into the bottom of her bag.

  Mission accomplished, she was almost at the door when Irene caught up with her again.

  ‘What did you think? That was about as funny as a night in the cells, wasn’t it? Thank God it’s over.’

  They clattered down the steps and towards the doors together.

  ‘By the way, did you see Max? Did you get your coffee?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Thank you for fixing it. Melitta coffee on prescription!’

  ‘Max is an amazing doctor. Such a clever man. Though to tell the truth he frightens me rather.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘He’s so intelligent you feel him working out every thought in your mind, don’t you? At least, I do. When I saw him I said, if you’re looking for something deep in my soul don’t bother, Max. My soul’s as deep as a puddle.’

  She gave a little, self-deprecating laugh.

  ‘He’s Walter’s oldest friend, though, so I suppose we’ll be seeing more of him. Walter actually lived with his family for a while, and he totally adores him. He even took Max on that operation he did in Venlo last year.’

  ‘Venlo?’

  ‘You must have heard about it. Last November? It was Walter’s finest hour. Venlo’s a little town on the Dutch border and Walter masterminded an operation there to catch two very important British spies. They were posing as businessmen from The Hague. Captain Sigismund Payne Best and Major Richard Stevens. I only know their names because Walter loves boasting about them. His plan was so ingenious. He led them to believe he was a disaffected officer wanting to plot a coup against the Führer and when they came to the meeting place they were arrested and brought over the border to Germany. It was a triumph. Walter did the interrogations himself and the men confessed everything. They gave away the entire British network in Europe. Every single name. Can you imagine? It’s going to be impossible for the enemy to rebuild. The Führer was delighted. That’s why he awarded Walter the Iron Cross.’

  A peculiar stillness, like the moment before a detonation, overcame Clara.

  ‘Max got one too. He had to go in disguise, of course. He impersonated a military officer. He called himself Colonel Martini, isn’t that funny? After the cocktail! Walter thought it would be useful to have a psychiatrist there when they met the enemy spies. You know, so he could tell what they were thinking. And it was useful, apparently. Walter thinks the world of Max. When I mentioned I’d suggested you see him, he agreed it was a wonderful idea. It was he who managed to get your appointment brought forward.’

  Beneath Clara’s rouge, all colour had drained. The old feeling, the sensation that had haunted her through the years, returned with savage intensity. A high, singing note of danger.

  What a fool she had been.

  It was evident to her now that Schellenberg had been on her trail all the time. Before Paris. Before Lisbon. Right from the time of his career triumph last year when he had captured two British agents and brought them back in glory to the Reich. Clara pictured the men in their prison cell in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, tied to their chairs as the beatings rained down. Necks squeezed repeatedly to the point of strangulation. Blindfolded. Fingernails pulled. Muttering names, choking out their contacts, their faces draped in blood.

  The honey trap in Paris had not been Goebbels’ idea. It had been Schellenberg’s all along. The oldest espionage tactic in the book. Set a spy to catch a spy. It was not
Reuber’s allegiance he suspected – no doubt the Gestapo already had concrete proof of his treachery – it was Clara’s. Probably even the watchers Hans Reuber had seen in the streets of Paris had been there for her and not him. For a moment the horror arose that she might have led German agents to the safe house above the café in the Rue Vavin and compromised the brave Frenchmen hiding escapees there. She tried to reassure herself how careful she had been to follow all procedure. How silent and empty the streets had been the morning she met Ned.

  Yet all the time Schellenberg had known.

  Black with one sugar?

  He knew far more than her coffee preferences; he knew everything about her. She thought of his face like a priest’s, calm and patient, presiding over more horrors than most people ever had the misfortune to witness. A man who had spent so long peering into the abyss that now it looked back at him.

  How idiotic to imagine that she might have outwitted him. How credulous to accept his blandishments; the fanciful idea that he had wanted her to join his intelligence service. That they were going to work together. That he would run her as his agent. He had known her name for eight months. Even before he met her, he had her grilled by his personal psychiatrist. He would always find her. She would always be in his mile-long shadow. How long would it be before he brought her in?

  A light rain was falling and there was a scramble for the limited number of taxis available as the guests dispersed into the nocturnal gloom. Declining Irene’s offer, Clara decided to walk. Her entire body was racing with adrenalin, and the need to process what she now knew. Her mind dashed through the possibilities, searching for the right course of action like an animal trapped in a maze. There was nowhere to hide or escape. She could do nothing, immediately, but make for home. She pulled her hat down, turned up the collar of her evening coat and hurried west, past the Schloss, the historic residence of Prussian emperors, across the Schlossbrücke and over the Spree with its greasy waters and soot-blackened walls.

  The streets were dipped in shadows. Silence slid along the pavement and through the blackout blinds, while inside the apartments all ears were listening for what might lie beyond it: the distant drone of bombers, the thud of the propellers, the drums of metal beating against the sky. Others lay in bed dreading different sounds, of sudden shouts and boots on the stairwell. Yet everything was quiet for now. The only voices on the streets belonged to advertising posters proclaiming Berlin raucht Juno! or the slogans of Party propaganda, Smash the Enemies of Greater Germany! Victory is with our Flags!

  A sharp wind had got up, slamming into the trees on Unter den Linden, sending sheets of rain scurrying across the street. A cat passed, like a shadow. At the top of Wilhelmstrasse Clara turned left, past the British Embassy, now boarded and abandoned, alongside the Reich ministry buildings looming oppressively, their blinded windows sweeping upwards, crowding out the sky.

  Past Voss Strasse and the Air Ministry, she miscalculated, deviated right and was aghast to find herself approaching the dingy, five-storey edifice that formerly housed Berlin’s School of Arts. The building where Berlin’s students had once studied Holbein, Dürer and Caspar David Friedrich was a forbidding, Wilhelmine construction, a warren of corridors with doors leading off and the high vaulted halls of a railway station. Except that this was a place no traveller would voluntarily visit and the destinations of those arriving were generally grim. For in an act of horrifying remodelling, 8, Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse had been transformed into Gestapo HQ and darker arts were now practised within its sombre walls.

  The building was blacked out but still alive. It was the one place that never slept, beating on through the night like a malign heart. Even at that hour people were coming and going in the gloom, rifle-bearing sentries standing like statues flanking the doors. It was too late to turn round. As the click of Clara’s heels rang unnaturally loud on the paving, she could not help but be conscious of the deep underground beneath her feet, the subterranean network of tunnels like mediaeval catacombs linking Heydrich’s headquarters next door with the central office of the Sicherheitsdienst behind. Directly beneath were a series of tiled cells, claustrophobic dungeons where she had herself once been briefly imprisoned. The thought of it quickened her steps, as though the pavement itself might abruptly crater and send her spiralling down into darkness.

  She passed the front doors and could not help glancing sideways at one of the guards. The soldier’s face was a flat, impassive shield but his Weimaraner dog registered her presence and cocked its ears, nose sniffing the air.

  At the end of the street a clanking and hissing sounded in the air, emanating from the network of railway tracks alongside the Anhalter Bahnhof. The rails were singing as a series of covered wagons rattled along the track; a freight train perhaps, bearing weapon parts or troop supplies to the distant outposts of the Greater Reich. Clara heard the groan of metal and the clicking of point switchings. The air was acid with dust.

  She felt a throb of danger she could not explain. Diverting into an alley she became aware of something behind her, a scratch on the stone, too slight even to be a tread. A rush of something intangible spiked the air but when she looked round, the street was empty.

  Nothing at all.

  All the same, she checked and rechecked her surroundings with practised care. What reason was there for anyone to be around here, in the governmental centre, well past midnight? A snap that sounded like the breech of a gun accompanied the rustle of movement and her gaze slipped past the entrance to an apartment block, froze for a second then doubled back. There it was. A shift in the texture of the darkness. A smudge of deeper grey against the gloom.

  Fear soaked like grime through the pores of her skin.

  How long had this man been there, gliding behind her? Since the moment she left the cabaret? Or since last November, when Schellenberg had first heard her name on the lips of two British agents and set about finding the truth?

  Clara quickened her step but another glance behind revealed that the man was keeping pace. His face was not visible but there was something about him, some aspect of his demeanour that clung in her subconscious.

  She strained, as though her memory was a muscle, to reach the part of her brain that said where she had seen this figure before. His shape had snagged in her brain, unpinned to any location, date, or name. In her mind she heard Leo Quinn’s voice.

  ‘You should always encode the memory. It’s basic training.’

  One of the first things an agent learned was to create context. To make connections in the brain so that a name belonged to a face, and if not to a face then to a location, an object, or anything that meant when they were encountered again they could be categorized. That was how memory worked, after all. Proust needed that madeleine to bring the story of his younger life surging back to him. Songs, names, tastes and smells were all ways into memories that might otherwise be wiped out. But with this person Clara had neglected the basic steps. She had not provided context. She knew she knew the man, but she didn’t know why or how.

  She tried to reason. This man knew how to remain invisible, which meant that he minded about being seen. That in itself was strange. The Gestapo didn’t much care if their surveillance was detected; in fact it was better that way. They liked their prey frightened because frightened people were more likely to make mistakes.

  Besides, if Schellenberg wanted to arrest her he had an army of SS men to do it here in Berlin, complete with cars and dogs and the dungeons of Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in which to inter her. Why put a tail on her?

  It was not until she had neared the canal that a gap in the clouds allowed a sliver of moonlight to reach down and pick out a speck of light.

  A luminous swastika.

  Instantly the shape fitted into the jigsaw in her brain and realization dawned with a fresh horror. That anonymous cast, the lean, pale face. The regular features. Dark hair with a widow’s peak. He could have been anyone – a bank clerk, a shop assistant, a low-ranking ministerial off
icial overburdened with orders for Wehrmacht supplies and making his way home after working late. Yet while he may have appeared unremarkable, in fact he was quite the opposite. He was the man on the train, the one who had accosted her in the street outside her apartment. The S-Bahn man.

  He had emerged from the railway sidings by the Anhalter Bahnhof. He had almost certainly been loitering by the train tracks waiting for a woman to pass. It didn’t even need to be her. He had seen a lone female and she was his prey.

  Incredulity bubbled in her mind. How ironic, that a life lived in the shadow of a murderous regime might be ended by an act of random violence. That despite the attentions of Germany’s head of counter-intelligence, she should become the ultimate quarry of an amateur, dying alone on the street, blood inking the cobbles. That after years of evading imprisonment and pursuit in the Third Reich she might face death by a lone psychopath, rather than at the hands of Nazi thugs.

  There was no time to think. Hands shaking, fighting the panic, she ran. The man followed, a hundred yards behind, picking up speed with long, loping strides. He was younger than her, and she was in heels.

  Running was hard. The air seemed to have a clogged, distorted texture so that she was moving in slow motion. Sweat was trickling down her back and between her breasts and fear was humming in her blood. Panic dulled her senses.

  She reached the Tirpitzufer, where the serried buildings of the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, stretched behind a length of chain-linked wire. A litter of white fragments scattered the street in front of her like torn-up tickets, and she realized they were petals, remnants of the roses that had been thrown at the Führer’s car during the recent celebratory parade. The BDM girls had been drilled to cast flowers in a spontaneous act of enthusiasm and tiny children had been permitted to break through the police cordon and approach the Führer’s car with posies. Now the flowers were brown at the edges and soaked by the rain into a treacherous mass of decay.