Faith and Beauty (41 page)

This was inadequate, but the only answer Clara could summon while her brain moved at lightning speed to explain away the code.

‘A list of numbers. What should we deduce from that?’

‘It’s probably a telephone number. Fans pass me their numbers all the time. They push notes into my pockets.’

‘Good try, Fräulein. We rang it already. Or tried to. That doesn’t work.’

‘Then, I’m afraid . . .’

‘Perhaps you need to take a closer look?’

As Clara bent to examine it, Riesbach moved abruptly forward, reached over and swatted her upwards, across the face. The impact of the ring on his knuckle sliced the skin on her cheek. The blow took her by surprise and she reeled backwards.

‘Perhaps that will refresh your memory.’

‘It hasn’t.’

‘You’re an actress, Fräulein. You’re supposed to remember things. Another one might help.’

A second blow, this time on the side of the head, making her ear ring and forcing her to clench her teeth.

‘That’s not a helpful technique.’

‘What innocent person walks around with a list of numbers in their pocket?’

She decided to keep her head very still, as though facing an aggressive dog, in an attempt to forestall another attack. They had taken away her watch but the clock on the wall opposite told her it was five am.

‘As I said, Herr Kriminalsekretär, people put things in my pocket all the time.’

The door clanged and another man entered the room. Although Clara did not turn, she could tell that he was senior, by the way that Riesbach half rose, before the newcomer jerked his head abruptly and leaned against the wall, arms folded.

‘Carry on, Dieter.’

Riesbach’s tone modified, marginally, and took on an air of aggrieved bureaucracy.

‘I was asking the prisoner the significance of a list of numbers found on a piece of paper in her jacket.’

The newcomer interrupted.

‘The charges before you are very serious, Fräulein.’

Clara did not look round. From the corner of her eye, she could make out that the senior man had a hard face and a toothbrush moustache. His voice was more educated than Riesbach’s, exuding the deep tedium of the early hours.

‘Charges?’

‘Allegations, precisely. The charges will come later. You need to talk to us. One way or another, we are going to require some answers.’

Clara continued staring rigidly at the clock. She was cold, in her sleeveless evening dress, and her flesh rose in goose bumps, but shivering would look like fear. She wrapped her arms round her in an attempt to keep warm.

‘Not cooperating is not going to help you, Fräulein Vine.’

The senior man’s tone said he was bored, his civility in short supply.

‘Playing dumb might work at the Ufa studios, but it won’t work here.’

‘I have cooperated in every way.’

‘Fine.’ He scraped a chair by its legs across the room and brought it right next to her, his face so close that she could feel his breath on her cheek. He smelt of tobacco and good aftershave.

‘Perhaps you think I’m a little slow.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Only, as Kriminalsekretär Riesbach says, we are puzzled by this piece of paper that was found in the pocket of your evening jacket. Dieter, can you fetch the jacket?’

‘No need. The paper’s right there.’

‘I said fetch the Fräulein’s jacket.’

With sullen menace, Riesbach got reluctantly to his feet and left the room. As he did, the tall officer rose swiftly and moved to the door. He pulled it shut, came back to Clara and put his face even closer. Forcing herself to look at him, she saw two different eyes. One brown, one blue.

Such a distinguishing feature would make undercover work impossible.

That was what she had thought when she passed a man in the corridor of D Section in London. Could it be possible that the same man, with his narrow tawny moustache and mismatched eyes, was standing right in front of her? Could a man trained in the depths of British Intelligence have been transplanted to the Gestapo in Berlin?

As if to confirm it, he spoke in English, very quietly.

‘I’m going to let you out. Go quickly. Find somewhere to stay out of sight. If my senior officers object there’s every chance you will be picked up again.’

Clara could barely move. She was paralysed with fear.

‘Who informed on me?’

His voice was so low she could barely catch it.

‘It must have been someone close to you. I heard Dieter say it was the last person he would have suspected. Now go.’

As she rose, the door clanged open and Riesbach returned, Clara’s evening bag in one hand and her jacket suspended like a rag from his other fist. Springing to his feet, the senior officer snatched it from him, tossed it across the desk to her and turned to his colleague with an expression of barely suppressed fury.

‘For Christ’s sake, Dieter! All your talk of codes. One look at this and I can tell the lady is plainly innocent. Did you even bother to examine this nonsense?’ He picked up the piece of paper, held it tauntingly in front of his baffled colleague, before screwing it into a ball and tossing it out of the window.

‘Have you never in your life seen a line of Reichslotterie numbers?’

Chapter Thirty-five

Dawn had broken as Clara hurried through the east of the city. A sheet of clouds was pulled across the sky, lanced with sunlight that left their vapour pearlescent. Early workers were beginning to arrive at the textile factories and hooters were sounding. A horse-drawn milk cart was making its rounds, awaited by hausfraus touting capacious blue cans for their deliveries, and the first queues for bread and groceries were beginning to form. Here in the east, Albert Speer’s construction work was well underway and blocks of houses were being razed, the dust blooming into the air. Twisted metal and hunks of mortar lay alongside pathetic domestic debris – a stray kitchen sink, a banister, a wardrobe mirror, a cot. Everywhere, it seemed, life had been turned inside out and what was previously concealed was now on full display.

Clara wiped the place on her cheek where Riesbach had hit her and tasted metallic blood on her finger, but she barely registered the injury. Her mind was racing with the question of who might have betrayed her.

I heard Dieter say it was the last person he would have suspected.

Was that because the informant was the wife of a senior Government minister? Had Magda Goebbels reported her, out of a mistaken paranoia that Clara had slept with her husband? Or, more likely, had Conrad Adler decided to punish her, merely because she refused to become his mistress?

Although the Gestapo officer had told her to stay out of sight, she had no idea where to go. She had no desire to return to Griebnitzsee, nor would she dream of seeking shelter with Erich and his grandmother in Neukölln. For a moment she contemplated visiting the Adlon and finding refuge in Mary’s room before remembering that Mary would be far away by now, on her way to London. And that she badly needed a change of clothes. She decided to return to her old apartment in Winterfeldtstrasse and seek at least temporary sanctuary while she worked out what to do next.

In Nollendorfplatz, early morning commuters were already streaming into the station with its high glass dome, the red and yellow trains clanking along the elevated section. Clara walked swiftly along Potsdamerstrasse, but as she turned the corner into Winterfeldtstrasse, a figure stepped out of the shadow of a recessed doorway.

‘Do you have a death wish?’

Conrad Adler was still in the suit he had worn the previous evening at the Führer’s film screening. His coat was draped over his shoulders and, by the look of it, he had not slept all night. He appeared far older than before. His face was shadowed with stubble and his eyes bloodshot.

He gripped her roughly by the arm and pushed her back into the porch, away from the road.

‘You’re a fool, coming back here.’

Anger rose in her. Fury at the treacherous sexual attraction she had felt for this man who, if her suspicions were correct, was prepared to dispose of her at a moment’s notice and consign her to a horrible fate.

‘I’m a fool ever to have listened to a word you said. I expect you’re wondering why I’m walking the street considering you handed my name to the Gestapo. You were hoping I’d be sitting in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse by now.’

As if on cue a car proceeded slowly up the street and pulled to a stop further down the road opposite Clara’s apartment building. The engine died, but no one got out. Adler pulled Clara closer into his arms. In their evening clothes they resembled a pair of lovers who could barely bring themselves to separate after dancing until dawn. His face was just inches from hers and she detected his shock at the purpling cut on her cheek.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I was informed on and arrested. I know the informer was you.’

‘That’s ridiculous. Why would I have you arrested?’

‘There’s no telling what someone like you would do.’

‘Someone like me?’

‘Magda Goebbels told me someone was spreading rumours about me. You must think I’m naïve. Listening to your talk, having dinner with you, riding with you, when all the time you’re working for Heydrich.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Leni Riefenstahl overheard you and Heydrich discussing me.’

Adler’s grip on Clara loosened slightly. Outwardly, he was composed, but his eyes were alive, calculating.

‘I can’t deny that I have undertaken some work for Heydrich. But I promise you, Clara, for what it’s worth, I have not informed on you. I knew nothing whatever about you until we met on the night of the Führer’s birthday.’

‘So how did you know where to find me now?’

‘Goebbels insisted I attend that goddamned film evening. He had the nerve to suggest I might find it educational. When you left the Chancellery in a hurry I followed you, and saw you being picked up. Later I enquired at the police station and was surprised to discover you had been released. I guessed you might head for your old apartment.’

‘And how did you know this address?’

‘I’m a bureaucrat, Clara, remember? I told you. I did my researches.’

He reached his coat round so that it draped over both their shoulders, and arm in arm they turned back down the street.

‘My car is parked round the corner. It would seem you might need a change of plan.’

Adler’s lakeside villa was the epitome of good taste. It was painted a buttery yellow and framed by magnificent Blutbuchen – blood-red beech trees that flamed against the sky. At eight in the morning the air was fresh and still. As she climbed out of Adler’s car, Clara would not have been surprised to find a servant at the porticoed entrance, but it was Adler himself who pushed open the door and ushered her inside.

Even from the outside, she could never have guessed at the sumptuousness revealed within. Everything spoke of long, deep-established wealth. The thick carpet and the carved, mahogany banister. The walls lined with ivory silk and the table bearing a bowl of white roses and a platter of fruit. Even the light felt expensive here, pale lemony sun gilding the burnished wood, glancing off the oak panelling and illuminating the paintings, row on row of them, hung in frames of clotted gold. The air smelt of citrus oils and sandalwood.

A dog came to greet them, a silvery Weimaraner with a coat like polished steel, his body highly sprung, lithe and muscular like the precise canine equivalent of its owner. The dog’s eyes were piercingly pale and amber-coloured, his spine undulating beneath the pelt. When he came to a stop next to his master, the tendons on his legs stood out like strings on a bow and Adler placed a tender, proprietorial hand on him.

‘Most hunting dogs have an unrivalled instinct for prey, but this one is an exception. He doesn’t like to run with the pack. He’s a very individual animal. He goes where he pleases.’

As if in demonstration, the dog trotted off again.

‘Wait here.’

He disappeared down a corridor and Clara heard the distant clink of china. In his absence she looked around her. There was a roll-top desk in the corner on which stood an SS-issue Olympia typewriter, specially fitted with its SS double lightning flash key. There was a stack of official-looking papers beside it, a tortoiseshell inkstand and a brass reading lamp. A glass paperweight like a teardrop, inside which a flower was imprisoned. And the tooled Cartier box containing the diamond earrings she had refused.

She drifted across to the paintings, gleaming like gems in their polished setting, their pigments almost alive. They were portraits mostly, ordinary seventeenth-century citizens gazing out at the painter with inscrutable eyes, enclosed in a soft glow of shining domesticity. The men were playing cards or the lute, and the women were immersed in the simplest of tasks – stitching, pouring milk, reading letters.

‘The Dutch Golden Age,’ said Adler, over her shoulder. He was carrying a tray bearing coffee, rolls and a bottle of cognac. He proceeded to pour a glass and handed it to her.

‘Northern European realism is my greatest love. It was a time when artists moved away from religious painting to the detail of their own lives. Vermeer, of course, is the master.’

He swirled the cognac around in his glass and then swallowed it.

‘It troubles me that Hitler should love Vermeer. Does it devalue the art, do you think, when evil people love it?’

Clara looked up sharply. She had no idea where this was heading.

‘Perhaps Hitler approves of seeing women in a domestic setting,’ he mused. ‘Maybe he thinks the paintings express some time-honoured concept of Germanic tradition. Whatever his notion, he obviously has no real idea of what Vermeer is about. Nor have any of them.’

Adler continued to fix her with an odd, speculative look.

‘I ask myself, is Wagner’s music less ravishing because it is adored by a sadist like Himmler? Is a Vivaldi concerto as beautiful when it is played by a psychopath like Heydrich? Does a vicious thug like Goering sully the Titians and Rubens he professes to adore?’

Adler’s eyes were intently on her own, as though his life depended on her answer.