Black Roses (30 page)

She beckoned to the barman for another cognac, slapped a note on the table, and waited until he had gone.

‘It’s about Bruno. The other night he told me that someone had come to his room and thrown ink. They also trashed some of his canvases. He was out at the time, but he was worried. He hoped it was just a jealous rival – those artists are always having tiffs with each other – you know, one is Expressionist and the other is a Non-Realist or something. I can’t remember the labels, but you wouldn’t believe the rows they have. Anyway, Bruno hoped it was that but he guessed it was more likely political. And when I called him earlier today, he wasn’t there. I went straight round but he’d disappeared.’

‘Perhaps he’s gone away.’

‘Clara, you don’t see! He wouldn’t go away without telling me. We talk every day. I know everything he does. He’s been taken, I’m sure of it. He must have been arrested. I went up and down all the doors and tried talking to the neighbours, but most of them didn’t want to get involved. They must know something, the cowards. I only found one who would speak to me, an old guy who keeps rabbits on his balcony. Bruno painted him once. Anyway, he said Bruno had been there yesterday evening. So they must have come for him in the night.’

‘Surely they wouldn’t arrest people in the night.’

‘That’s exactly what they do! You know that water tower at the top of my road? The one that looks like some kind of crazy castle? Every night you see police vans turning up, stuffed full of people, and men in uniform going in and out all the time. I bet that’s where they’ve taken him.’

‘Did you call the police?’

‘Of course I did. I ran outside and found a policeman in the street and begged him to help. I explained about the canvases being attacked and he just laughed. He said, “Now the Jews will see that we mean what we say”.’

Clara reached over to her.

‘Helga, you’re overreacting. It’s probably nothing. A family emergency, perhaps, or a customer of his who wanted to see him. He’ll be in touch, I’m sure of it. I don’t see why you’re imagining the worst.’

Helga snatched off her sunglasses, revealing the full purplish yellow of Bauer’s handiwork, and wiped her eyes.

‘You don’t see why? Can’t you see anything, Clara? I love Bruno, that’s why! He loves me too, though he would never admit it. He doesn’t like talking about that kind of thing, but I can tell.’ She replaced her sunglasses and drew herself up. ‘Anyway, that’s why I need your help.’

‘My help? How can I help?’

‘The Frau Doktor. Just a word from her would help.’

Clara’s heart sank, but she took Helga’s hand and smiled brightly.

‘Of course. I can try.’

Leo laid down his Latin edition of
Metamorphoses
and rubbed his eyes. His attachment to the classics was a psychological prop, he knew. The ancient world had a huge pull for him, though whether he was nostalgic for the world of the Greeks and Romans, or for the sunny schoolroom where F. J. Earnshaw had first introduced his thirteen-year-old self to the works of Homer, Herodotus, Ovid and Pliny, he wasn’t sure. Either way, it had sparked something in him that refused to die down.

One vacation he had taken a villa that looked out over the cobalt-blue Ionian sea. As he watched the purple mountains rise unchanging across the bay it was almost possible to believe that two millennia had simply not passed and the four rivers of antiquity, Styx, Acheron, Phlegethon and Cocytus, still moved beneath his feet. Standing in the little courtyard with its ancient cypress tree he had thought himself back to fifth-century BC Athens, the birthplace of democracy, when Solon and his followers first established the rules by which people could determine their own lives. Now, sitting in his apartment bent over his Ovid, he thought how perverse it was to immerse himself in the classical world at a time and in a place where democracy was being systematically dismantled.

The walk-in had found his way to Xantener Strasse that afternoon. He was around forty, a weasely type with a face that had more lines than the Berlin U-Bahn. A sour smell of herrings and unwashed clothes rose off him, there was an angry boil on his neck and the edges of his collar were frayed. He introduced himself only as Heinz and before he uttered a word he had insisted on going round the apartment, poking underneath the radiator, around the ceiling lamp, in the open fireplace, looking for recording devices. Leo had watched him amazed. If he thought they were inefficient enough to allow their safe house to be bugged, why was he even thinking of entrusting them with his information and, in all reality, his life?

Then again, Heinz was illegal, of course. Most of his friends were probably in prison. The Red Front Fighters League was the paramilitary wing of the Communist Party in Germany, the red equivalent of the SA. For years they could be found engaging in street fights in the outskirts of the city, or wielding table legs, truncheons and bottles in the beer halls, giving as good as they got and matching the storm troopers in savagery and violence. Then last year the League was outlawed, and its members had been hauled off to moulder in cells or face firing squads. Since when the existence of people like Heinz had become fraught, and any neurosis on their part could probably be justified.

Leo drew the shutters, sat him down at the table, which was situated on the opposite side of the room from the window, and made coffee. Heinz was smoking heavily, glancing around him at the dull little room with its striped wallpaper and single sofa covered with faded chintz. He had a malnourished look and charmless air, which would suit him well, Leo thought, if he chose the Soviet Union for his adopted home. Were he to opt for England, however, he might need to learn a few courtesies if he didn’t want to frighten the horses.

Heinz didn’t bother with preliminaries. As Leo had accurately guessed, he did indeed want money in return for a list of names who he said were active Communist agents in England. The names would be passed back to Maxwell Knight and checked out. Leo took the list and scrutinized it, then put it in his pocket.

‘So why are you doing this?’

Heinz shrugged. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Why would you want to turn your back on the people you worked alongside?’

Heinz regarded him, as though calculating whether he could be trusted, then realized that he had already made that choice.

‘I joined the Party ten years ago. I was a young teenager, and everywhere here things looked bad. What with one thing and another I decided to go and study in Moscow. When I was there I was recruited by the GRU. The idea was that I would come back to Berlin and set up an intelligence network, training members of the Comintern to prepare for world revolution. I would work under the cover of the Red Front.’

He cast an anxious glance at the window.

‘It worked well. A few years ago I was to be sent to England to meet members of the Comintern leadership there and assess the readiness for increasing party activity. But the trip never happened. The reports were that the English didn’t seem ready for it.’ He waved a disparaging hand. ‘The British are a lethargic people. All that unemployment and hunger, but still they’re suspicious of a political solution.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question,’ said Leo. ‘If you feel the British are beneath contempt, why would you be wanting to help them?’

‘I’m not sure I do want to help them.’

‘Then injure the interests of the Comintern?’

Heinz looked evasive. He stubbed out his cigarette in the saucer and wiped his nose on a sleeve. Leo wondered idly what would happen if he were ever to repeat either of those actions in one of the elegant houses deep in the English countryside that MI5 kept for debriefing agents.

‘A woman . . .’

It was always a woman.

‘A woman I met. Katya Stein. She was my girlfriend for two years and an agent too. We were going to get married. She worked in a bar, one of those smart places up in the West End where rich businessmen go and she would talk to the men there, the foreigners, and report back on what they were doing, what deals they were making. The Party was very pleased with her, it was said. She was so quick, so clever. I was amazed, actually, that she ever looked at me. Anyway, one day last month she was supposed to come back to my place but she didn’t appear. I couldn’t find her anywhere. I searched everywhere she knew.’ He pinched his watering eyes between two fingers. ‘Then she turned up in a back street with a hole in her head. Murdered by the Reds.’

‘How do you know they killed her?’

‘I know the way they work. They had some suspicion she betrayed them. The fact was, you never met a better girl.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Heinz shook his head. ‘Sure. So I had nothing to lose.’ He took another of Leo’s cigarettes. ‘That reminds me. There’s something else.’ His face twisted into a dentist’s nightmare of a smile. ‘A big fish.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Who is coming to swim into your net.’

Metaphor had its place, Leo recognized, in this world of evasions and codes, but sometimes, frankly, one yearned for plain speaking.

‘What exactly are you getting at, Heinz?’

It seemed there was another agent, a Ukrainian Jew, who was known to be active in seeking a link between the Nazis and the Soviets. An alliance there, however unlikely it seemed, would not bode well. London was alert for signs of increasing friendliness between Germany and Russia. Heinz said this man had just arrived in Berlin from Holland. And he was a danger.

‘How is that?’

‘He has a lot of contacts among the Comintern agents in Britain. And he is disgusted by what he regards as the betrayal of Jewish interests in Palestine by the British. He believes they side with Arabs every time. The British don’t fear him because as far as they know, they have high-level contacts with him. He is here only briefly before going to attend a Zionist conference in Warsaw.’

‘Can you give me a name?

Heinz passed a piece of paper. It was not a name Leo recognized.

‘Thank you, Heinz. Your help is appreciated.’

‘And you will help me, too?’

‘Of course.’

‘My life is very difficult already. I think they’re onto me. I’m staying in a different place every night.’

‘We’ll keep in touch.’

Heinz rose and embraced him unexpectedly. Up close he smelt worse, clutching Leo as though starved of human contact. Leo fought the urge to back away and patted him on the back, like a parent comforting a child. There was an unexpected shade of vulnerability in his eyes.

‘If I come to England? Will I like it? Is it very different?’

Leo frowned. How could he explain in any way that Heinz would understand? What kind of life could Heinz look forward to if he came? He would be debriefed first, of course, probably in some secluded rural manor house that smelt like a boy’s prep school, staffed by military types with tweed jackets and poker faces. Then he would be run as an agent domestically, living in some anonymous south London basement flat, holding regular meetings with his controller and continuing to inform on every new friend he made. That was a spy’s life in a foreign country. In a bigger way, Leo supposed, a spy’s entire existence was a foreign country, where they must think before speaking, and attempt to fit in, without ever going native themselves. Still, no need to depress the man.

‘England’s very different.’

‘How?’

Leo racked his brains and attempted a cheery smile. ‘Well, I suppose one difference is, if someone knocks on your door at some unearthly hour in England, you can be pretty sure it’s only the milkman.’

On his way home he dropped into Hoffmann’s, his barbers, as if the act of being washed and clipped and shaved would somehow purge him of the contact with Heinz. He had been using the same place since he arrived in Berlin and always found it relaxing to sit amid the glinting chrome, the clouds of steam and the scents of hair oil and eau de Cologne, listening to the polite conversation of Herr Hoffmann as he went about his shaving like an artist, a snowy napkin draped over one arm. Herr Hoffmann was a cultivated man, who was proud of the fact that his son played the clarinet in a chamber orchestra and had pressed Leo with tickets on a couple of occasions. But this time he was flanked by two National Socialists talking loudly across him about a meeting hall in Wedding that had burned to the ground the night before. It appeared the hall had been a meeting place for Communists.

‘They said Marxism is a fire, so it stands to reason when you stamp out a fire then sparks are bound to fly!’ laughed one.

In the mirror Leo’s eyes snagged on Herr Hoffmann’s for a fraction of a second, before he looked away. They forewent their usual pleasantries.

Even though they were built for the ample German backside, the seats at the Staatsoper were still too narrow for Clara’s liking. They forced her to sit tight up against Klaus Müller, feeling the muscled warmth of his thigh through the dark serge of his trousers. She was wearing the scarlet dress again, and the silkiness of the pearlized satin caressed her bare skin. Before them, ranks of officials sat in a magnificent VIP box, which was hung with tassled crimson drapes and surmounted by a golden eagle. Everywhere was red, from the plush of the seats, to the damask walls of the boxes, to the shades of the gilt lights on the wall. It was like being in a lurid crimson cavern. Inside the dark, beating heart of the Nazi regime.

Before her, rows of men stared with grim determination at the stage. The lyricism of the diva’s love song seemed to leave them unmoved. They looked more like people observing a public execution than an opera. It was a miracle Madame Butterfly managed to keep singing. Hitler, of course, was in the middle, flanked by Goering, and Rudolf Hess. Hess, with his undertaker’s face and clenched jaw, was separating Goering from Goebbels, evidently by design. She spotted Walter Bauer wedged a few rows back, rigid with boredom. The men were in full uniform, decked with ribbons and medals and swastika armbands, the women in their own uniform of evening gowns and competitive jewellery. Frau von Ribbentrop was in a green sheath wearing emeralds the size of walnuts, and to her left was Magda in a crimson gown, her hair like a pale flame lighting up her face, a tight necklace of rubies round her neck, making it appear from a distance as if someone had slit her throat. Even from where she was sitting, Clara could see Magda’s eyes were red and her mouth was tense with misery. Following her gaze she caught sight of the reason. The film maker Leni Riefenstahl sat in the opposite box, languidly beautiful in the soft light, her skin golden and her dress a silky, caramel drape. Clara studied her curiously. It was the first time she had seen her closely. She was exceptionally pretty, with a strong nose, a high clear brow and tumbling curly hair. No wonder Magda suffered.