by Thynne, Jane
Eva’s eyes lingered on Clara’s Velvet Red lipstick. ‘I’m glad you don’t refuse to wear make-up like some of those wives. Most of them have faces as wrinkled as custard skin. More lines than the Berlin U-Bahn. I couldn’t bear to let myself go like that. When I was a girl I was never really considered pretty but I learnt to make the best of myself.’ Her smile drooped. ‘Don’t know why I bother though, now. No one’s allowed to take any pictures of me. Wolf has banned Hoffmann from ever having a photograph of me on the market.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘He says no one must know what I look like. The Russians might want to kidnap me.’
‘Are you scared?’
‘Not a bit. How’s any Russian going to get to me, surrounded by all this?’ She waved her arm and Clara followed her gaze, noting the way the other customers hastily averted their eyes, pretending to devote their attention to the coffee cups in front of them.
‘Does it ever bother you? The attention?’
‘A little. But I have my ways of keeping my own confidences.’ Her eyes sparkled secretively. ‘And besides, if I’m ever going to be an actress, I’ll have to get used to people looking at me, won’t I?’
Clara sipped her tea and tried to take stock. Everything the man from London Films asked of her had happened, and so much faster than expected. Within a day of arriving in Munich she was actually taking tea with Eva Braun, who seemed quite happy to entrust her with personal confidences. And yet what confidences was Clara able to pass on? That the Führer hated ballet? That his girlfriend liked make-up and French perfume? Such information was no use to anyone. Clara needed to get onto the subject of the Führer’s intentions for war.
‘It must be hard for you, having to listen to him talking about politics, night after night.’
‘It is.’ She made a sulky pout at the thought of it. ‘He never stops. Especially now. In the early days he used to be so much more romantic – I’d slip little letters into his coat pocket, and he’d reply, but now it’s all politics, politics, politics. The Czechs, the French, the English. In fact, you’ll never guess what he told me the other evening . . .’
She stopped suddenly as a man entered the restaurant and seated himself at one of the tables sideways on to theirs. He proceeded to open a copy of Das Schwarze Korps – the SS newspaper – and bury his face in it.
‘Actually, shall we go? I don’t like this place any more.’
Outside the café Eva made for the road and signalled for a taxi.
‘Sorry to leave so abruptly, Clara, but I can’t stand all those people spying on me and trying to overhear what I’m talking about. Besides, I’m awfully tired. We were up late last night, and there’s another dinner at the Carlton Hotel tonight so I’ll need to get my hair done.’
‘Of course. That’s fine. I’d like to take a walk around.’
‘I suppose you want to see the Bürgerbräukeller. Everyone wants to see the Bürgerbräukeller. It’s where the Putsch started in 1923. They should do one of those historic tours. The Führer’s favourite beer hall, the Führer’s office, the Führer’s apartment block. In fact I could lead it myself. I could reveal a thing or two. That red sofa in his office, for example. That could tell a tale.’
She gave a sardonic little laugh and pressed a card into Clara’s hand. It read Wasserburgstrasse 12, telephone 480844.
‘This is one place no one gets to see, though. If I’m going to create that perfume for you, you’ll need to come to my home because it’s where I keep all my ingredients. If you’re free, we could continue our conversation tomorrow, without everyone listening. Might you be available at tea time?’
‘I’m sure I am.’
‘Tomorrow then.’
Clara had been telling the truth when she said she wanted a walk. She needed to process everything that had happened. She could hardly believe that she had managed to achieve so quickly and easily what Guy Hamilton asked of her. She had made contact with the Führer’s girlfriend and had even secured an invitation to her home all in the space of an afternoon, yet she was increasingly doubtful about what it would yield. Eva Braun might well impart snippets about the Führer’s intentions, and it might even turn out that he was in the habit of confiding his military plans to her, but would she have paid attention? Did she even know where the Sudetenland was? The men back in Whitehall would need something far more concrete to prove the extent of Hitler’s territorial ambitions.
Compared with Berlin’s churning hurry and its oppressive Prussian architecture, Munich’s elegantly proportioned streets and stately neoclassical façades of cream and gold stone were stunning. The city seemed entirely untroubled by the air of crisis which gripped the capital. The scarlet swastika banners draping every building gave off a festive air and every hoarding was decked with travel advertisements: Visit the Rhine! The Perfect Holiday for German Families and Spring in the Spreewald! One billboard bore a gigantic picture of a cruise ship, with flaxen-haired children waving from the deck as their parents pointed joyously at a fluorescent blue sky. Kraft durch Freude. Freude durch Reisen! Strength through joy and joy through travel.
It was impossible to insulate oneself from the admonitions of the Party. There were slogans and exhortations everywhere you turned. As in Berlin, most public buildings seemed to have a loudspeaker lashed to them, alternating between speeches and music, and as Clara passed the State Opera House, the Führer’s voice emerged staccato from a ten-foot pediment.
‘There is no greater honour for a woman than to be the mother of German sons or daughters. That is the highest honour she can attain.’
It was appropriate that Hitler enjoyed Wagner, because what his utterances lacked in lyricism, they made up for in thundering, operatic volume.
As she crossed the Odeonsplatz, trying to ignore the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree bellowing of the Führer, Clara experienced a distinct, subliminal disquiet. It was an instinct she had developed, a prickling between her shoulders that told her she was under surveillance. Accompanying it was the acid twist of fear.
When she had first become an informer for British Intelligence she had been highly self-conscious. The glances of other people were as sharp as sandpaper on her skin, but now that self-consciousness had mutated into something more useful – a kind of heightened perception that told her when those around her were paying her more attention than they should. Peering over her shoulder she scanned passing pedestrians for anyone who might be out of place or have no valid reason to be there. Though a shadow would always aim to blend in, it was useful to look for a solitary figure who was not going purposefully about their business. Her glance snagged on a man crossing the square towards her, the collar of his coat turned up, obscuring the half of his face that was not overshadowed by his hat, but he turned the corner and disappeared from sight. Even while examining every face she passed, she rationalized the feeling she had. It would be entirely logical to be followed after a meeting with Eva Braun. The Führer’s girlfriend was a heartbeat away from the Führer himself and there was every reason to assume that Hitler kept tabs on the people who surrounded her. Surveillance would be utterly reasonable. Yet still Clara needed to know if her instinct was correct.
It was Leo who had given her the only lessons she ever had in evading surveillance. There were the elementary things to look out for – pedestrians you had seen before, anyone who leapfrogged you in the street or avoided eye contact, cars which idled by the kerb with the engine running. Agents might wear a heavy coat which could be removed or a hat which could be changed, so it was vital to focus on those elements of appearance that were harder to change in a hurry – the shoes, for example, or the hair. She had forgotten all the technical terms for surveillance manoeuvres – piggybacking, switching, blocking – but she knew that if you turned a corner the tail would often cross the street to keep you in view and sometimes two or more agents would form a team, with one dropping back while another moved ahead. Yet while she had listened diligently to Leo’s instruc
tions, Clara had gradually evolved her own ways of throwing off potential tails. And now, as her focus tightened and a jittery tension entered her limbs, she decided to make a circuit of the city centre to see if her suspicions were right.
At an unhurried pace she crossed Odeonsplatz towards the Feldherrnhalle, the city’s military memorial, where the lavish monument to the Putsch was flanked day and night by an SS guard of honour. The site had been co-opted by the Nazis as a memorial to the holiest day in their calendar, when marchers staged an unsuccessful clash with police resulting in sixteen Nazi deaths, and on solemn days the site resembled a Greek temple, complete with flaming urns. Even on ordinary days two enormous laurel wreaths were guarded round the clock by steel-helmeted sentries, requiring everyone who passed to make a right-armed salute. Noticing that some pedestrians skirted round through an alley on the far side of the monument to avoid having to give the Hitlergruss, Clara followed suit.
As she walked, she took in every detail around her. A mother dragging two children behind her, a third in a pram. A flower seller, women gossiping in a café, cakes glistening in the window of a bakery, a sweet doughy aroma issuing from the opened door – all the time Clara committed key details about her surroundings to memory. She watched for shapes as much as faces. Postures too. Slouching, lingering, any sense of not being in a hurry. Then there were the signals. Gestapo agents communicated with a rapidly evolving system of signs, like the tying of shoelaces – a single knot or a double, laces crossed or straight – or the way they wore their hats or carried their newspapers. Nothing she saw stood out, though, so Clara decided to employ the ultimate anti-surveillance technique, and the one most perfectly suited to the female agent – shopping.
There was no better place to spot a tail than a large department store. Drifting through dress rails fingering the fashions, lingering at cosmetics displays and sampling the odd perfume was a woman’s natural habit but entirely anomalous to a male agent. In a beauty hall, with its infinite mirrors, glistening reflections and largely female clientele, a Gestapo agent in a leather coat would stand out a mile. And nowhere were men and women more different than in the way they shopped. Men were impatient and impulsive; browsing was anathema to them and most could not spend two minutes in a shop without being bothered by a sales assistant, whereas women could loiter for hours, sniffing, sampling and examining themselves in mirrors, which in Clara’s case afforded an excellent view of what lay behind her.
After several minutes of browsing at a cosmetics counter, trying, then rejecting, Palmolive soap, Pond’s face cream and a few Tosca powder compacts, then going up the escalator and down again, Clara had seen nothing to worry about. Leaving the department store on Kaufingerstrasse she ducked into Loden-Frey, which was all stuffy Tracht and Tyrolean suits in hairy green tweed, as might be expected from the official uniform makers to the SS, then exited right and crossed the central square of Marienplatz, coming to a halt beneath the impressive façade of Dallmayr’s delicatessen. Unlike Berlin, where the signs reading ‘For Display Only’ had been there so long they were bleached white, here the goods were piled high and in pride of place were shining packages of the store’s own coffee, roasted to a special recipe on the premises. Clara paused for a moment, but the window’s reflection revealed no solitary figures behind her, and the siren call of coffee was strong. It was impossible to resist, she told herself, as she counted out the marks. You would never be able to find coffee of this quality in Berlin.
Having left the shop, she returned to the Hofgarten, where the fountain’s splashing water made a gauze veil, suspended in the air. The flowerbeds were packed with colour and butterflies floated above autumnal roses. Clara paused, savouring the dense fragrance of the earth and the deep scent of the flowers, made a circuit of the park, then turned suddenly back on herself and retraced her steps to Dallmayr’s coffee counter, where she enquired anxiously about the possibility that she had left an umbrella. Once the apologetic assistant had confirmed that no umbrella was to be found, Clara headed north past Hoffmann’s photography shop in Schellingstrasse and the smoky interior of Schelling tavern, before finally reaching Maximiliansplatz.
The light was falling as she turned into her pension. Whatever her instinct told her, she trusted her routine. She had taken every precaution. She had conducted every procedure to shake out surveillance and seen nothing untoward. The man she had seen in Odeonsplatz was an ordinary Munich citizen, who was, she hoped, entirely oblivious to Clara’s suspicion of him. So why was she filled with fear, like a musical instrument vibrating with the notes of an invisible player?
She had an early supper in the gloomy dining room – leek and bacon soup, followed by chicken breast and cabbage – during which Frau Altenburger, the owner of the pension, a jovial, uninhibited matron, divined that Clara was an actress and interrogated her on the private lives of the stars like the most ruthless reporter for Filmwoche. Was Zarah Leander genuinely stand-offish? Was Joachim Gottschalk really married to a Jew? Was Lil Dagover Hitler’s favourite actress?
Eventually Clara escaped and closed the bedroom door behind her.
Unclipping her hair she shook it out, releasing the faint fragrance of Soir de Paris.
‘I knew someone who used it.’
She thought of Max Brandt dancing in Chanel’s salon, his arms keeping firm hold of her, smiling seductively as he took his own nonchalant sex appeal for granted, and she wondered if she would be able to resist his advances so firmly if he were here now. Often, as she slid into sleep, she craved the warmth of a man next to her. She yearned for the frank pleasure of sexual fulfilment. Her body ached with emptiness.
Wearily, she stretched out on the bed and reached for her book.
Chapter Fourteen
The first thing Rupert saw, as he stood in the lobby of the National Socialist Women’s League headquarters, was the face of Gertrud Scholtz-Klink glaring from the wall like a leathery gorgon guarding her lair. With the basilisk smile and a face as scoured as a pan, it was perfectly possible to believe that her stare alone, like her mythic doppelgänger, could turn onlookers to stone.
Even as he recoiled from the portrait, the Führerin herself bustled over and shot out a hand like a Walther 6.35. That morning she had foregone uniform in favour of a grey worsted jacket which looked a little warm for the weather and what looked to Rupert Allingham awfully like an Old Etonian tie, though he doubted very much she was entitled to wear one. Then again, if Reich politicians stuck to what they were entitled to, Europe wouldn’t be in the state it was today. Nazi foreign policy was, at bottom, a case of a vast sense of entitlement out of all control.
She led the way into her office, talking as she went. As female Führer she was in charge of all National Socialist women’s organizations, including the Women’s League, the Reich Mothers’ Service and the German Women’s Enterprise. It was her duty to train all German women in accordance with National Socialist ideology. She oversaw the culture, education and training sections and even a propaganda department which produced leaflets for German women living abroad detailing the inferiority of foreign races. At least that’s what Rupert thought she said, but as he trailed behind her the Führerin’s voice was having to compete with an entire, ill-tuned orchestra pounding in his head.
She seated herself beneath an especially hideous poster of a woman and child beneath a sun in the shape of a swastika, emblazoned with the slogan Warriors on the Battlefield of Childbirth and wearily Rupert pulled out his notebook.
He was badly hung over. The previous night had been emotionally wearing and you could have powered a Panzer on the amount of schnapps he had consumed. He wondered why the epicentre of German domesticity had so far failed to furnish him with a cup of coffee.
‘I’m not sure if you were present at my talk to the annual rally, Herr Allingham,’ said the Führerin, sliding a sheaf of paper across the desk.
‘Sadly not.’
‘Then you will have missed our exciting news on tax reductions. I
’ve had some information printed out for you. No income tax at all for families with more than six children. So long as the children are racially pure and valuable.’
‘I see.’
‘You’ll be wanting some statistics, I daresay. The figures are extremely encouraging. Marriages are up, there are only half as many divorces, and births have risen to . . .’ she checked a sheet, ‘1.4 million this year. 19.2 per thousand head of population.’ She rattled off the figures like a Lewis machine gun. ‘That’s up from five hundred thousand births in 1932. So National Socialist ministers have tripled the number of babies being born.’
Some National Socialist ministers more than others, if gossip was to be believed, Rupert thought.
‘More cribs than coffins is my motto, and it seems the birth rate is exceeding all our expectations,’ she added with satisfaction.
Babies, Rupert realized, were just another crop in the new Reich, like potatoes or wheat, to be counted, monitored, improved and lied about. Good one year, free of blight for the most part, a creditable reflection on the citizens of the Reich.
He doodled his pen idly across the page.
‘Could you remind me, please, what exactly the Reichsmütterdienst . . .?’
A flicker of irritation crossed her brow. ‘The Reichsmütterdienst is open to all racially pure women in the Reich. It prepares women for their role as housewives and mothers because the family is the germ cell of the nation.’
Rupert scribbled wearily.
‘We already have hundreds of Mother Schools all over Germany, and so far more than a million and a half women have attended 56,000 courses. There are four million women in all the Frauenwerk organizations. Not to mention the Reichsbund der Kinderreichen, the league for large families.’
Rupert’s head was already reeling. He had given up trying to note down the numbers. When was she going to come out with this scoop Goebbels had talked about? He had planned to give this interview no more than half an hour before proceeding to the Foreign Ministry to hear von Ribbentrop’s latest threats against the Czechs.