Faith and Beauty (27 page)

‘You met Vati when you were eighteen.’

Mentioning that was a mistake. It was no doubt her own experience that led Frau Holz to warn her daughter off any hasty decisions. That was why Hedwig was at the Faith and Beauty Society, trying to be something she was not.

‘Vati’s not a Communist.’

‘Nor is Jochen.’

‘What is he then?’

‘He’s an artist.’

Mutti started on a turnip, slicing off its sprout with surgical precision and reducing it to dice.

‘You’ll waste everything, Hedwig. Everything your parents have given you. All your heritage.’

Heritage. That word again. The word that seemed to obsess everyone. The word that she heard every day at the Ahnenerbe. Your Aryan Heritage. As though everything in life was about pretending you were a certain kind of person – pure and uncomplicated – when in fact everyone, not just Hedwig, was a glorious mixture of contradictions. Who cared who her grandparents were, that Jochen’s mother was Polish or that Jochen’s grandfather had been a farm labourer?

‘Did you meet him through Lotti?’

Hedwig glared at her mother. Lotti might be responsible for many things, but Jochen was not one of them.

‘No.’

Hedwig wished Mutti could see Jochen for what he really was. She knew at heart that her mother’s true disappointment was in her own life and her chief hope was that her only daughter would do better for herself. Valiantly, Hedwig tried a rapprochement.

‘It’s Irna Wolter’s wedding this Saturday.’

This sparked an interest.

‘It’s going to be a classy affair,’ Hedwig added, presenting the details up like a peace offering, to allay the focus on her own, unsatisfactory romance. ‘It’s at a castle that belongs to the SS.’

‘That sounds lovely.’

The glow in her mother’s eyes was almost enough to make up for her previous disappointment. But not quite.

‘So where were you, then, yesterday evening? If not seeing that boy?’

‘I was visiting Frau Franke.’

It was true. Udo Franke was still drowning his sorrows at the bar down the street, so Marlene was all alone in the stuffy apartment. Hedwig had forced herself to stay an hour, trying to breathe through her mouth so as not to inhale the stink of fried onions and enduring repeated, sweaty hugs from Marlene, who clutched Hedwig to her pillowy bosom as though for a few moments she was able to retrieve her own child. Marlene was so different from her elegant daughter. Lotti had been cool as ice cream but Marlene was blowsy and bulging out of her apron, her face a blotchy mess. She wanted to talk endlessly about the girls’ childhood, their first day at school, their holidays in the little cottage by the lake, and Hedwig didn’t mind that – she wanted to talk about Lotti too – but it was hard when there was so much that Frau Franke must not know.

‘Poor soul,’ said Mutti, wiping her hands on her apron and coming over to scoop Hedwig into her arms. ‘You were good to go.’

Her eyes were bright with tears. Her only daughter might be involved with a Bolshevik, but at least she wasn’t dead.

Hedwig’s visit had not, however, been one of sheer compassion. She might have made a promise to Lotti, but Lotti was dead now and past caring, so after enduring Marlene’s odorous hugs, she had asked to visit Lotti’s bedroom.
Just to be alone with her
.

The bedroom had been preserved exactly as Lotti left it. Utterly tidy, unlike the rest of the apartment, and decorated with the kind of quirky personal touches that gave it style. Her collection of antique perfume bottles on the mantelpiece. A gemstone necklace hanging from the mirror. Five peacock feathers they had found on Pfaueninsel in a jar. In some ways, the room was like a shrine to Lotti, with her notebook laid out on the desk at the page of her last completed sketch. Hedwig ran her hand along the bookshelf, rummaged in a stack of fashion magazines then felt beneath the mattress and behind the bedhead. She leafed through Lotti’s notebook and investigated the drawers of the desk. But it was useless. She found nothing.

Now, standing in the Ahnenerbe library, she came to a decision.

If you remember anything that might be useful, just call me.

She didn’t need to remember anything because there was not a second when the matter was not running through her mind like some dreadful newsreel devoted to a single subject. Several times she had taken out the page from Clara Vine’s leather notebook and looked at the autograph – a tendril of black ink with loops like the petals of a flower – before folding it carefully up again.

Hedwig had made Lotti a solemn promise, but Lotti was dead now so what did it matter? Clara Vine was the only person who had ever shown the slightest interest in her feelings about Lotti’s death, so perhaps she deserved to know. Hedwig decided to call her.

Chapter Twenty-two

For a second, as Clara awoke and stretched out luxuriously on Ursula’s white linen sheets, the day ahead lay sunlit and full of possibilities. Outside, it was an exquisite morning. Wild birds were calling, pale columns of birch trees shimmered around the languorous expanse of the Griebnitzsee and clumps of reeds rose like slender green blades from its depths. The air was studded with pollen and glinting insects were coasting on the warm currents. Then she remembered. She was a Jew, in Nazi Germany, without an ID.

The train journey back from the Gare du Nord had been fraught with anxiety. The possibility of being caught without her documents, not to mention the gun in her suitcase, played constantly on Clara’s mind and she had needed to maintain a careful synchronicity of movement between carriages to avoid the scrutiny of the guards. Shortly after the train left Paris she informed the other passengers that she had a bad headache, necessitating several trips to the corridor for ‘fresh air’. It worked well until they crossed the border into Germany, when she had been obliged to lock herself in the lavatory as a pair of guards came through. But she had underestimated their Nazi thoroughness, and emerged only to run slap into the second of the guards, who was systematically checking the passengers in the final compartment. He was a young lad, not much more than nineteen she reckoned, with a complexion that didn’t need shaving and fair hair cut savagely short. Yet his youth was an advantage, Clara realized at once. He was flustered by their unintended physical contact and he flushed.

‘Documents,’ he snapped, automatically, then looked up with a flash of awed recognition in his eyes. Perhaps he had sat through romantic comedies under pressure from a girlfriend, or maybe he had seen Clara’s war film,
The Pilot’s Wife
, in which she had been married to a lost Luftwaffe pilot, played by the real-life air ace Ernst Udet. Whichever it was, finding himself face to face with an actress from the big screen was overwhelming. For the first time in her career, Clara was relieved to be recognized.

‘My apologies, F-F-Fräulein.’ He had a very slight stammer. ‘Is it . . .?’

‘Clara Vine, yes.’

‘So sorry. Your identity documents please?’

She smiled sweetly, glad that she had just reapplied her lipstick in the train’s narrow mirror and was wearing Steffi’s pearls.

‘I’m afraid I’ve left them in my compartment. And it’s all the way back down the corridor.’

‘I’ll need to see them,’ he insisted, in a starstruck mumble.

She tilted her head, coquettishly.

‘Do you? Really? Even if I promise I am who I say I am?’

The guard gave a nervous laugh, which turned into a cough. Far ahead in the corridor his colleague shouted at him to hurry up.

‘You could come back with me to my compartment. It’s quite a way.’

The young man cast an anxious glance up the corridor at his companion, who was making impatient gestures in the distance. God forbid the older man should return to help his colleague out. Clara moved fractionally closer and lowered her voice to a seductive whisper.

‘Perhaps you want to search me instead? Is that what you’d prefer?’

He leapt away as if electrified, a puce blush suffusing his entire complexion.

‘Fräulein, forgive me! Not at all. It’s just we have to . . .’

‘How about I give you an autograph instead? That should prove my identity. Do you have a pen?’

Hastily the guard reached for his top pocket and brought out a pen and notebook.

‘I’ve seen your movies,’ he stammered, confirming her suspicions.

‘Do you have a favourite?’

‘
The Pilot’s Wife
.’

‘I guessed you’d say that!’

‘With Ernst Udet.’

Everyone loved Ernst Udet. The fact that Clara had starred alongside him was as good as a golden Party badge in most people’s eyes.

‘Well it’s lovely to meet you, Herr . . .’

‘Herr Wolmann. Ludwig Wolmann.’

‘To Ludwig . . .’

Clara scrawled her name, hoping that he would not notice the tremble in her hand, gave him her most dazzling smile and tucked the book back in his top pocket. Then she strolled back down the corridor as slowly as her legs could manage it.

It had taken hours for the shock of the encounter to wear off and she sat staring out of the window, barely able to focus on the countryside as it passed. Rooks sat like musical notes on the electricity lines, and in between the fields gun emplacements had sprung up on city borders. But once the train arrived at the Anhalter Bahnhof and the passengers flowed onto the platform there were no more requests for documents and she felt the tension that had been holding her body rigid suddenly ease, her shoulders slumping like a puppet whose strings have been released.

While she may have escaped inspection of her papers, however, Clara’s inspection of herself was merciless. How could she have been so careless with Conrad Adler in Paris? Why had she relaxed her guard? What impulse made her snatch the documents from his hand, with the result that they ended up in the Seine? The answer, she knew, was that she had allowed Paris to get under her skin. The atmosphere, the food, the alcohol and the sheer foreign beauty of the place had intoxicated her. And perhaps the jousting conversation and bitter, ironic humour of Conrad Adler, too.

Yet the questions about Conrad Adler, the ones she needed to answer, remained. Why was he watching her at the Dingo Bar? And what did he want with her? Above all, how had he known she was not all she seemed?

Climbing out of bed, she pulled a wrap around her, entered the bathroom, looked into the lightbulb-fringed mirror, and switched on the wireless to drown out the thoughts crowding her head.

The smooth voice of the continuity announcer came on.

‘And now, it is with great pleasure that we bring you the Hamburg City Orchestra with Franz Schubert’s
Winter Journey
song cycle.’

The Hamburg City Orchestra
. Where her mother had once played as a concert pianist. If life had been different – if the dashing Ronald Vine had not sat in that audience and fallen in love with the young Helene Neumann as she played a Brahms concerto, and she had not followed him back to England – then it might have been her mother on the radio that day. Except, of course, it wouldn’t, because as the daughter of a Jew, Helene would have been banned from any orchestra in the Reich. She would have been excluded from the Reich Chamber of Culture because she could not show an Ariernachweis. And now her daughter was facing precisely the same predicament.

After applying a light coat of Elizabeth Arden foundation, Clara finished her make-up with a dusting of powder, sprinkled a little salt on her toothbrush in lieu of toothpaste, and pondered her options.

Archie Dyson, her contact at the British Embassy, had been relocated to Rome, a plum promotion that must have thrilled his ambitious wife, Lettie, but left Clara without any direct contact with British Intelligence in Berlin. Even if she got a message to Major Grand through Benno Kurtz of the Ritz bar, and he was able to organize another ID for her, how long would that take? For a second she considered asking Mary Harker if she had any contacts, but such a request could compromise Mary too, and that was a risk Clara refused to contemplate.

A memory flickered. Something Steffi Schaeffer had said.

We have a young man who produces passports and identity papers for us. He turns his hand to anything. His work is superb.

She felt a rush of pure relief, like sun streaking across the lake, and her heart lightened. She made a quick cup of coffee, pulled on a jacket and took up her bag. She needed to find Steffi without delay.

Within an hour she was on a bus, heading down the Königsallee. Thankfully Berlin’s big cream buses, like London’s scarlet ones, had an open platform at the back, making it easy to get on and off in a hurry. Clara sat, as always, at the back, which meant that she could observe whoever got on from behind. The bus reeked of stale clothes and unwashed bodies. The windows were mottled with condensation. Beside her, at eye level, the standard notice had been fixed:
The fare-dodger’s profit is the Berliner’s loss!
Underneath was a line to report to the authorities anyone not paying the twenty-pfennig fare.

The bus was held up periodically by workmen installing the new air-raid shelters. A vast honeycomb of tunnels and shelters was being created beneath Berlin, a dark mirror to the new city rising above it. A rabbit warren of tunnels, cellars and giant concrete vaults with soundproof walls several metres thick as though, if any bombing happened, there was the faintest chance people would be able to sleep through it.

She found Steffi sitting in the back room of Herr Fromm’s shop with a pair of pince nez perched on her nose, almost buried behind a length of field-grey serge.

‘Hold on a moment. I’m just finishing the buttonhole.’

She unwound a length of thread expertly from the spool, and matched it to the material, then continued sewing, her fingers slipping, dipping, tucking and weaving, marrying needle and cloth in a balletic rhythm that was soothing to watch.

‘The Wehrmacht is very particular about its buttonholes. They insist they’re hand-stitched a certain way and they always check. The stitches need be to a certain length and made from the correct thread. There are very precise regulations. Herr Fromm says no one knows as much about the details of a Wehrmacht uniform as me.’