Faith and Beauty (50 page)

They crossed the bridge, but it wasn’t until they reached the cover of woodland that Leo allowed himself to speak. They walked, clasped close to each other, the filigree of branches above them framing a darkening sky.

‘The night I received that call they told me that two of our agents had disappeared in Vienna. All we knew was that they had arranged a meeting in the Café Louvre with a pair of German officers who were thought to be anti-Nazis.’

‘I know the Café Louvre. I made a film in Vienna three years ago. We used to go there.’

Clara recalled the pale spring light streaming through the big windows, the violin-backed chairs and booths finished in dark brocade along one wall. The Schnitzel and creamy Kaffee mit Schlagobers.

‘I went there straight away. I became a regular and made friends with the barman. A nice chap. Georg.’

Clara pictured Leo faux-drunk, boozily intimate, leaning against the bar late into the evening.

‘Sure enough, Georg told me what had happened. He saw the agents arrive and sit at a table with two other men. And it must have been a set-up because within minutes the door slammed open, there was shouting, and the Gestapo came in with guns and dogs.’

She saw the dogs slavering, pulling against the lead.

‘Our men were taken away, almost certainly to be tortured and shot.’ Leo swallowed and paused for a moment. ‘But Georg had noticed something curious. There was another customer in the bar, not a regular, and he was there as the arrest took place. Georg said to me, “
Something like this happens, everyone tries to hide their face, but they’re looking all the same. They can’t help themselves. But this man, he didn’t turn a hair. Just kept reading his book.
”’

‘What does that prove?’

‘That he knew the arrest was going to happen. That he was part of the set-up. And Georg was doubly curious because the book this man was reading was in a foreign language. It wasn’t English, he said, or French, or Hungarian, any other language he recognized. All he could say was that it was the language you found on tombstones.’

‘Latin?’

‘Exactly.’ Leo stopped and turned to Clara, urgently.

‘And there was only one person I could think of who would sit in a café reading a book in Latin. As soon as I realized, I knew you were in grave danger. I had to get to you before he did.’

It was her turn to astonish him.

‘Hugh Lindsey is dead.’

Jaggedly, she explained about Hugh, and the woman he had killed, and about how he had tried to kill her too. As she spoke, Leo laced his fingers through hers and gripped her tightly, as if attempting some retrospective protection.

‘I should have known,’ he said bitterly. ‘I should have seen through Hugh much earlier. Good old Hugh. Everyone’s best friend. Always the life and soul of the party, even if he did like one too many and was always the last to leave. If anyone had looked more closely they might have sensed a vacancy in him. There was a kind of emptiness, which he filled with drink and liaisons with other people’s wives. But nobody did look closely.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Because Hugh had the most lethal of all qualities. Charm. Charm deflects enquiry. We’re taught about those types in training. They’re dominant. They imagine they can calculate risks and manage them better than anyone else.’

‘You knew him at Oxford, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. I liked him a lot actually, though we were intellectual rivals. We had some of the same friends, but we lost touch afterwards. Hugh lived a peripatetic existence. After Christ Church he travelled to Vienna, then went back to England and took up a job as journalist. At the same time he began working for the Intelligence Services.’

‘Like you.’

‘Only in Hugh’s case, it was a cover for his work for the Soviet Union. He’d formed Marxist sympathies in Austria and began to spy for the NKVD. They managed to infiltrate him into D Section and that way he had knowledge of our entire European network. Hugh knew I was in Vienna, and he let the police know too. I disappeared just in time.’

Leo stopped for a moment and pulled Clara to him, resting his chin on her head and kissing her hair.

‘There was a day a few weeks ago, when I was on the run, that I slipped into a cinema. I had taken to going to matinées because there were hardly any other people there and it meant I could snatch some sleep, but that day the film was one of yours, so I didn’t sleep. And as I sat there in the darkness I felt you were right there, in my arms. It was so real I could almost taste your skin and smell that perfume you wear. It was like . . . a vision. When I came out into the foyer I knew I’d been wrong to enforce that vow of silence on you. But it was part of my plan, Clara. I thought I knew best. It was for your safety. I thought it was essential that we stayed completely secret.’

‘Have you ever told anyone about us?’

‘Never. Or only one person – an old schoolfriend, Ed Russell. I bumped into him back in London, years ago. It was one of those dismal winter evenings when your spirits are low, and I was walking down the Strand, thinking about you, missing you, and I ran slap into him. We went for a drink. He’s one of the nicest chaps you could ever meet. He has a way of getting your secrets out of you – we could probably do with him in the Section – but I knew we had no mutual acquaintance, and I’d probably never see him again. And I never have.’

Clara felt a bewildering prickle of jealousy at the idea of Leo’s life in England without her and the unknown Ed Russell who was sole witness to their love.

‘I’ve kept our secret, Clara, but I don’t want to any more. I want you with me in England. There’s no telling when war could break out.’

She stopped in her tracks.

‘But there is. That’s what I need to communicate. Von Ribbentrop is flying to Moscow imminently to agree a non-aggression pact. The Soviet Union will stand by when Hitler invades Poland. I’ve seen the memorandum. It’s codenamed Operation White. And they’ve set a date. The first of September.’

His face was a mixture of emotions: astonishment at the news, amazement at her skill in the world he had inducted her into and horror at the risks she must have run.

‘Have you told anyone this?’

‘Only you.’

It was darker now, the surroundings becoming more monochrome. They had emerged at the spot where the elegant grey-green steel arches of the Glienicke Bridge spanned the Havel. To the north the land rose up in densely wooded slopes to the landscaped park and fairy-tale turrets of the Schloss Babelsberg. To the east, a few fragile points of light signalled the outlying streets of Potsdam. Leo gestured to a car parked on the far end of the bridge, its engine idling.

‘There was a man I knew in the German Foreign Ministry. I’d met him years ago in London, and I thought he might be sympathetic to us. He was unwilling to cooperate, though I sensed that he was not an ardent Nazi. So I took a chance and called him earlier today. My instinct was right. He agreed to drive me across the border tonight.’

The breath caught in her throat.

‘You’re leaving?’

‘No.
You
are. If we try to leave together we risk attracting attention. You will take my place in the car. I’ll follow.’

‘How can you follow? You’re on a Gestapo watch list. How long could you evade them?’

‘I’m not leaving you here.’

‘You don’t have a hope of escaping them, Leo. This is your best chance.’

He squared his shoulders and wrapped his arms round her waist, closing any distance between them. The movement of his body against hers aroused the old, familiar feelings, the urgency of desire, the recognition that loving each other had become a part of them – the best part perhaps – and that what they possessed was solid and incorruptible. Clara yearned to stay suspended in that moment, for the earth to halt in its orbit and the stars above them to slow.

He said, ‘I’ve spent so much of my life in the shadows. Pretending. Deceiving people. Changing my identity the way other people change their shirt. That’s the job, I know, but I don’t want to live like that any more. I want the most important part of my life to be open, public, dull even. I used to crave excitement and novelty, but now I want my life to be normal, or as normal as it could be alongside the loveliest woman in the world. I want a row of children with your blue eyes. As many as you like. I want to be able to say, “
Look, everyone, this is Clara Vine, who is not only the most beautiful woman you have met, but is also my wife
.”’

She glanced away, down to the river below, remembering her pact with the deity that she would do whatever Leo wanted if only he was alive. That she would be the woman he wanted her to be.

‘What good would it do if you were dead? How could we marry then?’

He carried on, almost as if she had not spoken.

‘When I came away from that moment in the cinema, I sifted through the whole of my life since I met you and I realized the only precious moments were those I had spent with you. I begrudge every day we’re not together. Take my place, Clara.’

He looked at her, as if trying to compress a lifetime’s conversation in a single glance.

‘I can’t leave Germany without saying goodbye to Erich.’

‘Erich will understand.’ The light in his eyes pierced as sharply as the first time she had met him. That same level gaze, that shivering intensity.

‘There are three surveillance teams looking for you. No one’s looking for me. I can take the first train out of Berlin. I can leave Germany tomorrow.’

‘No.’

‘When war comes Erich will be called up and I might never see him again. I have to see him before I leave. And then I will come straight away. You must trust me, Leo. You do trust me, don’t you? There’s no point in anything if you don’t.’

He cupped her face. Although his expression remained controlled, a tremor in his hands betrayed the depth of his emotion.

‘I do.’

‘And you believe I’m capable?’

‘That’s one thing about you that I have never doubted.’

She linked her fingers into his, as tightly as if they had been parachute jumpers planning to fling themselves into the cold unknown.

‘Go then.’

He walked along the bridge. She could see the soft glow of the car’s gauges and the gleam of the leather inside. But whether Conrad Adler saw her, as the door opened and Leo got inside, it was impossible to tell. She stood watching, until the car’s lights dimmed into the distance and finally faded from sight.

Author’s Note

No event was more central to the outbreak of World War II than the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Signed on August 23rd, 1939, it was an enormous coup for Hitler, turning Germany’s greatest foe into an ally overnight and avoiding the danger of a war along the eastern borders of the Reich. Leni Riefenstahl records how she was present at the film evening at the Chancellery when Hitler’s remarks about Stalin gave the first inkling of his intentions.

The Sonderfahndungsliste G.B., the Gestapo
‘Special Search List for Great Britain
, was designed to be given to every soldier. It was a Who’s Who of the British establishment with details of more than two thousand people, complete with photographs, home addresses and private hobbies. It also probed every facet of British life, from political parties, police forces and secret services to newspapers, radio stations and trade unions.

The Rote Kapelle, the Red Orchestra, was a network of seven resistance groups with more than one hundred and fifty members, including the fortune teller Annie Krauss. They sheltered Jews and Communists and provided forged papers for those attempting to flee. More than a hundred and twenty members of the Berlin group were arrested in 1942 and sentenced to death.

Alois, the half brother of Adolf Hitler, ran a restaurant at 3, Wittenbergplatz for many years. He was approached anonymously by the Rote Kapelle with an invitation to join them and circulate a typed flyer denouncing the Nazis’ culture of lies. Instead he handed over the note to the Gestapo, and the leaders were ultimately arrested and executed.

Albert Goering, brother of Hermann Goering, took a different approach. The SS kept a file on him and he was declared a ‘Public Enemy of the Reich’ but Hermann rescinded the arrest warrant. When he was arrested at the end of the war, Albert secured a speedy release by producing a list of thirty-four key figures who would testify to the numerous Jews he had helped. He refused to change his name after the war and died impoverished.

Magda Goebbels’ affair with Karl Hanke came to an end when he volunteered for military service. When
The Journey to Tilsen
was launched in November 1939 in Berlin, Magda ostentatiously walked out of the premiere.

A large amount of the ‘degenerate art’ seized by the Nazis went missing but in 2013 a celebrated haul was discovered in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, whose father Hildebrand Gurlitt had privately amassed more than a thousand works by painters including Matisse, Chagall, Beckmann, Nolde and Picasso while he worked for the Nazis.

Elsa Neuländer-Simon, also known as Yva, was a celebrated fashion photographer in Berlin and gave Helmut Newton his first apprenticeship. She and her husband were deported to the Majdanek concentration camp and murdered in 1942.

Leni Riefenstahl abandoned her film
Germania
on the outbreak of war.

Acknowledgments

Behind the name on the title page, there are many people involved in the appearance of a novel, and I would like to say a huge thank you to them. I am truly grateful to my agent, Caradoc King, for his early encouragement for the adventures of Clara Vine, and to everyone at United Agents. Thank you also to my superb editor, Suzanne Baboneau, and the team at Simon & Schuster UK – Ian Chapman, Clare Hey, Hannah Corbett, Isabel Prodger, Elinor Fewster and Rik Ubhi – to name but a few. I am thankful to many magnificent booksellers I have met around the UK, including all at Hatchards, Wimbledon Books and the energetic Colin Field of Waterstones.

In particular I want to thank John Carey, writer, critic, wit and beloved uncle, for whose inspiration and encouragement I am always grateful.