by Thynne, Jane
‘What happened, Eva? Did you drink too much?’
Eva groaned. Yet no telltale smell of alcohol issued from her.
‘Would you like some water?’
Another, softer groan.
‘I’ll fetch some.’
Forcing Eva to sip a cup of water, Clara reasoned, might bring her to her senses, but when she returned, balancing the cup on the side of the coffee table, something else caught her eye. An opened bottle of Vanodorm sleeping tablets, with a few remaining tablets scattered across the table. Eva was not drunk. She had taken an overdose. Just like she had done before.
‘My God, Eva. How many have you taken?’
There was a whispered croak. ‘I didn’t count. I took twenty last time and it didn’t work so I reckoned I’d take more.’
‘We need to get you to hospital.’
‘No!’ The force of her resistance caused Eva to sit up and open her eyes. As she did, her complexion grew greener and she produced a small amount of vomit and some of the pills were ejected.
‘Sorry.’
Clara found an abandoned cardigan on the floor and wiped her mouth with it.
‘Don’t worry. It’s going to be OK.’
Eva sank back against the chair. ‘I’ll never be OK. Never again.’
‘What do you mean?’ Her mumble was barely audible, so Clara drew closer. She reasoned that it was vital to prevent the girl lapsing into unconsciousness again before she could fetch help.
‘He’ll never marry me now.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I do. Not after what I’ve done.’
‘What have you done?’
Eva turned her face away and issued another groan.
‘Besides, I have it from his own lips.’
‘He told you that?’
‘Oh, not directly. That would be too brave. He did it a different way. He told his old girlfriend, and she told me.’
‘Who is this girlfriend?’
‘Mimi. Mimi Reiter. She was his first girlfriend. She was sixteen when she met him and he was thirty-seven. They were walking their dogs in the Kurpark in Berchtesgaden. She said Wolf wanted them to have a host of blonde children and she was his ideal woman.’
Eva gave a choked laugh.
‘It wasn’t true, of course.’
‘Of course not.’
Clara reasoned that the best thing was to keep Eva talking. She scrabbled in her bag for a cigarette, lit it, and placed it between Eva’s parched lips. She inhaled, then coughed, sat up and inhaled again. A flicker of life came back to her face.
‘They broke up years ago but she’s always showing up at the Berghof as if she owns it. And now they’ve met up again.’
‘Why did they break up?’
‘She used to laugh at him. He hates anyone to laugh at him.’
‘So how do you know they’ve met up again?’
‘She came to his apartment here,’ she slurred. ‘In Prinzregentenplatz. She’s married now, to an SS officer, Georg Kubisch, so she’s Frau Kubisch now, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. She had the nerve to call on Wolf in the hope of staying the night. When I accosted her about it she told me Wolf had said he was not happy with me. He’s known from the day we became intimate on that red sofa in his office that it would never last. He’s forty-nine now. He thinks he’s too old for me.’
‘Don’t take any notice of her. She’s jealous. That’s no reason to attempt something silly like this.’
Eva groaned again. Fear darkened her eyes. She buried her head in her hands.
‘It’s not just that. It’s something else. I can’t tell you. Something awful. When I discovered, I realized I might as well be dead.’
‘It can’t be that bad.’
‘It is . . . he’ll be so angry with me. They all will.’ She stared at Clara, then looked dully away. In the vivid sunlight her complexion seemed almost translucent, with a bluish colour around the mouth. She dropped the cigarette into an ashtray and slumped down further in her chair.
‘It would help to talk,’ insisted Clara, attempting to prop her up.
‘It would help to die.’
She retched again and a realization came to Clara in a rush – the haggard eyes, the feeling of doom, the dreadful discovery – they all told the same tale. Eva Braun was pregnant. She must have hoped it would encourage the Führer to marry her, and instead she learned that he was tiring of her. If the Führer really was planning to dispense with her, as Mimi Reiter said, presenting him with an unwanted child would surely only hasten the impending rejection.
With another sigh, Eva’s eyes drooped shut and her head fell back. Clara realized she needed to act quickly. She eased the sleeping girl onto her side, plugged the telephone back in and dialled the operator.
‘I want to speak to the police.’
Chapter Twenty-two
In the apple trees outside, the birds, untroubled by the gravity of the moment, sang their hearts out. The milky morning light had clarified to promise another sunny day and Stasi and Negus, indignant at being confined to the garden, issued a continual volley of barks to indicate that breakfast was long overdue. The minutes passed agonizingly as Clara stood in the small sitting room, watching the slow breaths of the comatose figure beside her and waiting for the police to arrive. It must have been a full five minutes before, with a wave of relief, she heard a car screech to a halt outside and footsteps hasten up the path. When she opened the door, however, it was not a policeman on the step but an officer in black tunic and cap with a death’s head emblem and smartly pressed breeches tucked into jackboots. It took a moment for her to swallow her amazement because the man standing in front of her, kitted out in the full uniform of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, was Max Brandt.
Ignoring Clara’s astonishment he pushed past her into the sitting room, taking in the scene in seconds, walked over to Eva Braun and picked up the bottle of sleeping pills by her side. After a glance at the label he took off his gloves, felt Eva’s pulse for a moment, then let her wrist fall. He strode to the door.
‘Get in the car right away.’
There was no longer a jocular amusement in his eyes. The languid charm had vanished, to be replaced by a curt urgency. Clara’s astonishment at the sight of him mutated to an icy apprehension. There was no doubt about it now. The fears she had about Brandt’s true motivation were justified and his intentions towards her were plainly malign.
‘What are you talking about?’ Clara glanced at Eva and lowered her voice. ‘She’s taken a bottle of pills. She could die if we leave her. I’ve just called the police.’
‘I know. They’ll be here in less than five minutes. That’s why you need to leave.’
‘I’m not going. I have to look after Eva.’
‘They’ll know what to do. They’ve done it before often enough.’
‘I don’t care. I’m going to wait for them.’
‘If you do, you’ll find yourself in custody.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’ll arrest you.’
‘Arrest me? But I was the person who found her.’
‘Do you really believe you’re going to be congratulated for saving the Führer’s girlfriend? This news is going to be rigorously suppressed, especially at a time like this.’
‘A time like what?’
‘Don’t be a fool, Clara. The eyes of the world are trained on Munich! Negotiations to preserve the peace of Europe are at a delicate stage. Even if you’re very lucky and they don’t arrest and charge you with breaking and entering, there’s every chance they’ll keep you in custody until the meetings of foreign leaders are passed. Do you have any idea how serious this would look if it gets out? The Führer’s mistress attempts suicide for a third time. What does it say about a man, when his girlfriends keep trying to kill themselves?’
‘It won’t stop his enemies appeasing him.’
‘There’s no time for this. Did you give the police your name?’
> ‘They didn’t ask.’
‘Thank God for that. We need to get you out of here.’
He held the door open and gestured to a long, streamlined saloon with gleaming chrome and white-walled tyres standing outside. Its engine was still running.
‘Now.’
Clara cast a look behind her to where Eva remained unconscious in the chair. Brandt seized her arm, pulled her out of the house and into the car, shutting the door behind her with a thunk and pulling rapidly away, the expensive engine purring beneath them.
For a moment they didn’t speak as Clara sat, trying to assess her situation. How much did Brandt know about her and why should he want to prevent the police arresting her? Where was he taking her now? She glanced around the car in confusion.
‘It’s an 853A Horch cabriolet,’ said Brandt tersely. ‘I borrowed it.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about the car. I was thinking about Eva. What did you mean when you said that his girlfriends keep trying to kill themselves?’
‘It’s a habit they have. One of his first girlfriends tried to hang herself in the garage. Mimi Reiter, I think she was called.’
Mimi Reiter. The woman Eva had talked about. The one who visited the Führer just days ago.
‘Then his twenty-three-year-old niece Geli shot herself in the heart with his own Walther pistol. People say he never got over that one. He was obsessed with her. And Eva herself tried to do the same with a gun, though not very convincingly. She had another try with pills a few years ago. The Führer has not been lucky in love. It’s one of the perils of mixing with women half your age.’
Clara bit her lip and looked away. She had known Eva Braun for all of a week, and what had she deduced? There was a gaucheness about the girl, and a devastating naïvety. She was not like Magda Goebbels, who had become infatuated with the National Socialist creed, or Annelies von Ribbentrop, who was more of a Nazi than her husband. Least of all like Lina Heydrich, who shored up the cruelty in her husband’s soul. Instead, the woman closest to Germany’s Führer seemed to have no political interests whatsoever. Yet how could that be possible? Was Eva Braun guilty of innocence, or deliberate ignorance? It seemed grotesque that a girl as young and deluded as her should forge a relationship with a man like Hitler. With her girlish, foolish hopes, Eva Braun was like a blonde child in a German fairy tale, who enters a forest and discovers something terrible at its dark heart. Had she felt no foreboding at all when she first encountered the man who introduced himself as Herr Wolf?
‘Why do you think she did it?’
‘Who knows? She’s unbalanced.’
It’s something else. I can’t tell you. Something awful. When I discovered, I realized I might as well be dead. Clara was more certain than ever. Eva Braun was pregnant.
‘Do you think she’ll be all right?’ she asked.
‘Those bottles of Vanodorm hold twenty-five tablets. She hadn’t taken all of them. And I noticed she had coughed up quite a few. So I suspect she’ll be fine once they get it out of her. A little groggy perhaps, but no damage done.’
He gave a sidelong glance.
‘Nothing worse than a few Mai Tai cocktails could do, at any rate.’
Clara remained staring out of the window, trying to analyse the remark he had just made. So Max Brandt knew about the party at the Tiki Bar. Perhaps he had been there too. How could she have missed his distinctive figure in such a confined space?
‘How did you know where I was this morning?’
‘A stroke of luck.’
‘You can’t expect me to believe that. You turned up a few minutes after I had called the police. Who told you?’
‘I happened to be at the police station when you called.’
‘You happened to be there? Why?’
He shrugged.
‘Perhaps I lost my dog.’
‘Don’t joke.’
‘All right. I was on official business. I happened to be there when you made your call.’
Official business. What kind of official business did a cultural attaché have at a Munich police station? Clara didn’t need to wonder long because the truth was perfectly evident to her, and as sharp as a knife in the heart. Brandt, the man who had danced with her so tenderly in Paris, whose charm had been so seductive and whose kiss she had dreamed of over so many nights, was the instrument of Heydrich she had been warned of. The man who had been sent to check her movements and build a case against her. What else could explain why he had turned up at her side in Berlin? Or why she had sensed surveillance in Munich? Why else should he have appeared, out of the blue, at the home of Eva Braun, ordering her into his car? And most damning of all, why should he now be wearing the uniform of the SS, when he had previously told her he was an attaché in the German diplomatic service?
Glancing sideways she saw the tense jut of his jaw, and his eyes, which she had once considered melting, were now steely. Brandt looked old. Perhaps he didn’t like what he was doing. What honourable man would? Maybe he regretted deceiving her. Perhaps he hated himself for the role he was carrying out, and for what was about to happen to her. Clara shut her eyes momentarily, dreading what lay ahead. A year ago she had been interrogated in Prinz Albrecht Strasse, the headquarters of the Gestapo, and the memory of that night and day, the casual brutality meted out by Hauptsturmführer Oskar Wengen, a man with the eyes of a snake, still woke her regularly with a racing heart.
Yet the thought of that night also served to focus her. If Max Brandt was Heydrich’s man, she was now in his car, powerless, so the best she could do was to give nothing away. He could have no idea that she had been warned of surveillance. She must remain resolutely in character – an actress with no conceivable interest in politics.
She shuffled herself deeper into the cream leather seat, smoothing her dress over her knees and checking her face in the overhead mirror.
‘Where exactly are you taking me?’
He glanced at her and said gruffly, ‘It’s a social event.’
‘A social event?’
‘Precisely. I have to go, so you may as well come too. It’s about a hundred miles from here.’
He glanced in the mirror behind him.
‘It’ll take up most of the day, if that’s all right with you.’
‘I don’t suppose I have much choice. Where exactly is it?’
‘The Berghof.’
The address, uttered so casually, caught the breath in her throat. The Berghof. Hitler’s mountain residence. The heart of his domestic base, and the place where, above all others, the Führer felt at home. High in the Obersalzberg mountains where, away from the hustle of Berlin or Munich and surrounded by his inner circle, Hitler liked to relax and plan the next stage in his strategy to enlarge the German Lebensraum.
‘Hitler’s house? Herr Brandt, I can’t.’
He lifted an eyebrow.
‘It’s an honour, you do realize.’
‘I know. I just don’t feel . . . I mean I don’t know if I could cope with that. Just now. After what I’ve seen. I mean, the Führer’s girlfriend.’
‘You’ll cope fine, as long as you give no word of what has just happened. You need to stay completely silent. Don’t let on to anyone – and I mean anyone – about Fräulein Braun’s mishap.’
‘But the Führer . . .?’
‘The Führer’s not there today. He’s in Munich with Doktor Goebbels.’ For the first time, he allowed a terse smile. ‘I’m only going because I have a little cultural duty to perform.’
The familiar ironic lilt entered his voice. ‘I’ve been summoned by Reichsführer-SS Himmler.’
Himmler, head of the SS, the élite of the Nazi party, whose carefully picked members wore the same striking black uniform that Brandt was wearing now.
‘He wants to brief me on his plans for a celebration of Teutonic culture with reference to the operas of Wagner. My task is to appear as enthusiastic as possible.’
‘I thought Wagner was the Führer’s special interest?’
>
‘It is. But Teutonic mythology is Himmler’s passion. He has a castle in Wewelsburg for his SS leadership school dedicated to the Teutonic order. It’s a most extraordinary place. It’s triangular in shape and full of mosaics decked with mythic significance. All the rooms are named after the Grail legend – King Arthur, Siegfried, Parsifal and so forth. The crypt is called Valhalla and there are all sorts of stories about what goes on there.’ He winked. ‘Don’t worry. Women aren’t allowed in. Except for SS wedding ceremonies, and I don’t imagine you’re about to participate in one of those.’ He paused, and a glimmer of the old, sardonic manner returned. ‘Unless Sturmbannführer Steinbrecher has plans, of course.’
Outside, it was brightening into an exquisite morning. Clara sat in silence, staring out of the window as the Munich buildings with their cream and gold stone slipped by and the powerful car purred southwards, through the outskirts of the city, until the houses gave way to fields and the autobahn stretched out before them. Perhaps it was the beauty of their surroundings, but Brandt himself seemed to relax a little; his brow unfurrowed, his shoulders dropped and he stopped checking his mirror.
‘So is that the official business that brought you to Munich? Himmler’s celebration?’
‘Not exactly. I had some other issues to attend to, but I found myself invited to lunch at the Berghof, and as you can imagine, that kind of invitation is difficult to refuse.’
He gave a wry smile.
‘How did you come to be Himmler’s expert on Teutonic culture?’
‘Good question. I was a lawyer before I joined the Foreign Service. I went to law school in Königsberg, then I worked briefly in a magistrates’ court in Berlin and began to specialize in civil rights.’
A dry laugh.
‘Good job I switched professions or I’d have found myself redundant. Civil rights lawyers are about as useful as handlooms or spinning wheels in Germany today. Anyway, I’d always had a hankering for foreign travel. I had an uncle who’d been an ambassador and he struck me as far more civilized and worldly than the dull lawyers populating the other branches of my family. We’re a family of lawyers, all upstanding men, of course, minor nobility, we’ve been running the Prussian justice system for generations and I was all set to follow in their footsteps. But I always secretly cherished the idea of living an exotic life, like my uncle. That was how I saw it, anyway, so I sat the exams for the German Foreign Service and passed them.’ He grinned. ‘Though I realize life as a Nazi cultural attaché probably doesn’t sound too exotic to you.’