Black Roses (37 page)

‘Müller said underground airports and factories are being built. They’re designing new planes and a school for pilots is being established near Gatow, twenty miles from here.’

‘New planes?’

‘Müller heard rumours that Goering was boasting of having five hundred operational aircraft by the end of next year. And civilian aircraft are being designed so that the baggage compartments can be deployed as bomb bays, if that should be needed.’

Leo made a swift note, then replaced his pad in his inside pocket.

‘Sounds like he’s still sweet on you.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Don’t do anything to discourage that.’

His voice fell as a group of men in uniform passed, looking for a table, and then a waitress approached. Leo ordered herring in sour cream and onions along with a glass of beer. Although it was lunchtime Clara wasn’t hungry. Being with Leo caused excitement to pulse through her, dulling her appetite.

‘So tell me about the Führer’s girlfriend? Do they talk about her much?’

‘Eva Braun? She never mingles with the other women. I don’t think it’s because they refuse to invite her, I think it’s because Hitler doesn’t allow it.’

‘Why not?’

‘I suppose he knows what they would think.’

‘And what do they think?’

‘That she’s not good enough for him. She’s only twenty-one. She wears cheap jewellery, she loves fashion.’

‘You might think she could help out in the Fashion Bureau then.’

‘He never even lets her come to Berlin. She lives down in Munich with her sister in an apartment he bought for her. And she goes to stay with him at Obersalzberg. But really, she wouldn’t fit in with the wives.’

Leo smiled wryly. ‘I can imagine. And how are the Ribbentrops?’

‘He is visiting England soon in a mission to cultivate pro-German feeling. He’s to stay with a man called Ernest Tennant.’

‘Ernest Tennant. A great enthusiast for Hitler.’

‘My father knows him too. They’re hoping he can fix up a meeting with the Prime Minister.’

‘Mr MacDonald? Are they indeed?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘And what about your father? Does Müller mention him?’

‘Frequently. He hopes he’ll be visiting me soon, which is a worry because I haven’t even told my father where I’m staying. I’m going to have to write to him soon, Leo. That is all right, isn’t it?’

‘Keep it vague. But Müller trusts you because of your father, you know that?’

‘I know.’

‘Don’t let him think otherwise.’

She focused on the couples on the dance floor without reply.

‘Have you seen the first lady?’

‘Yes. She’s angry with Joseph.’

‘Again. What’s he done this time?’

‘He’s had her former husband arrested for tax irregularities. But it’s really because Quandt has been restricting access to Harald, his son with Magda. Though I still think there’s something else . . .’

Clara was now certain that some private matter was dominating Magda’s thoughts. Since that day of the row, when Magda had seemed on the brink of confiding in her, Clara had puzzled over her comment
. “There’s something you might help me with. A matter of some delicacy”.
Something was weighing on Magda’s mind, she was sure of it.

‘There must be a problem.’ She traced a line down the condensed pearls of her beer glass. ‘We weren’t due to meet until the day of the fashion show at the Grunewald Race Track a couple of weeks away. But she left a message asking me to call at her house on Tuesday morning.’

Clara looked out across to the other side of the lake, where a border of pine trees ran along the sandy shoreline. The water was corrugated by a brisk breeze. A jetty protruded into the lake and a group of boys were taking turns to curl up into balls and hurl themselves into its silver depths. She watched how they hesitated for a second before plucking up the courage to jump, how the water fractured into a thousand sparkling shards and how exhilarated the boys looked as they emerged icy and dripping, their skin rosy from the freezing lake.

‘Do you think she suspects something?’ asked Leo.

‘No. She trusts me. I’m good at concealing my feelings.’

‘You must be. I can never tell what you’re thinking.’

Clara allowed herself a quick smile.

‘Have you always been that way?’

No one ever asked her that. But then no one had ever spoken to her the way Leo did, or shown an interest in her private feelings. Despite how recently she had met him, the peculiarity of their situation had forged a strange intimacy between them.

‘Since my mother died.’

Her mother’s funeral, at the village church of St Michael and All Angels, was the first time she had ever thought about the need to hide her emotions. It was absolutely essential, Angela had told her, not to cry. It was simply not done.
‘If you feel the tears coming, dig your nails into the palm of your hand’.
And she had managed it. Even though the little country church had been full to bursting with friends and relations. Even at the graveside as the coffin bumped its way into the damp ground and Clara pictured her mother’s tiny, wasted frame jolting against the inside of the box. Even as the family, like terrible conspirators, shared in the act of covering her with earth. So resolute was her self-control that for a few days afterwards she had continued dry-eyed, as if her mother had died merely to inconvenience her.
“My mother is dead”,
she said to herself over and over in her head, as if practising the words of an unfamiliar part. It was days before she found herself lying as if paralysed on her bed as the great continent of grief inside her thawed and the dry heaving sobs turned into tears.

‘I remember my brother, Kenneth, telling someone a few days later that he was over it.’ She laughed, drily. ‘I suppose in the short term children do get over it. In the long term, of course, never.’

Leo nodded. He was still regarding her with a peculiar fixity. She might almost have called it tenderness. She looked at the curve of his lips, which not so long ago had kissed her. She felt a desperate urge for him to take her on the dance floor, and hold her in the circle of his arms. It was a physical longing to be touched by him, to plunge beneath that cool exterior.

‘Why don’t we ever talk about you, Leo? I feel I know nothing about you.’

He shrugged and looked away. That was how it was supposed to be. Let others know as little about you as possible. He had spent so long trying to be unknowable that he barely knew himself.

‘Not much to know.’

He wanted to talk to her. He longed to respond to that quick, inquisitive gaze, but he simply couldn’t. It would complicate matters. Instead he took a long draught of beer and forced himself to the task in hand.

‘Anyway. You say Müller is still sweet on you.’

Her face fell. She focused on the boys on the jetty. There was one, a flaxen-haired boy of around eight, who seemed more nervous than the rest. He was banging his arms against his sides for warmth, his chest concave beneath a ladder of ribs, gearing himself up for the plunge while his friends laughed. At last, unable to bear the jeers he took a run, folded up his knees and hurled himself into the implacable depths, surfacing with an expression of shocked delight.

‘Müller’s going to be making demands on you. He probably already has. You’re going to have to make your mind up about that pretty soon.’

‘Why?’

‘You know why. For the same reason we’re doing any of this. So that we can get valuable information. Like the tip about the pilot school. That kind of thing helps us enormously. You’ve no idea how helpful it is. How vital it might prove if relations between Britain and Germany take a turn for the worse. If the Germans really are rearming, we’re going to need to keep up that flow of information, whatever it might take.’

‘Whatever it might take?’

‘To have someone close to the leadership, privy to all that uncensored chat. Seeing them socially, totally accepted by them. It’s tremendously important, what you’re doing. More important than you realize.’

‘Perhaps I should get a medal for it.’

He ignored the sarcasm. ‘It’s appreciated.’

‘Is it?’

Quietly he said, ‘Look, Clara, this isn’t cricket. Nor is it the kind of game you play in some English drawing room on a wet Sunday afternoon. We can’t always play by the rules. There are more important things at stake than ourselves.’

‘There’s a big difference between ignoring the rules and sleeping with a Nazi captain.’

He cast his eyes around quickly. ‘It’s your call,’ he said quietly. ‘I thought I made that clear. It’s always going to be your call.’

For a second she didn’t say anything. Then in a low voice she said, ‘What would you think of me, Leo, if I did?’

He was saved from a reply when a bird landed on the table right in front of them. It was a sparrow with a bright, enquiring eye, hopping with a delicate frisk of feathers to peck at a crumb. He thought how endearing it was that such a tiny, fragile thing should be unafraid of the larger creatures around it. The laughing soldier in SA uniform and his girlfriend stopped to look at it.

‘It’s beautiful,’ cooed the girl, and her boyfriend leant over and kissed her. ‘So are you.’

The couple smiled at their slight indiscretion, and Leo grinned back at them.

Clara waited until the young couple had returned to the dance floor. The image she had a few moments ago of dancing with Leo had evaporated, supplanted in her mind by the idea of Klaus Müller, and the trip she had arranged with him the following day, to examine the country house he had discovered, just outside Potsdam. She rubbed her arms as a chill breeze blew in from the lake.

Bitterly she said, ‘That’s the thing about this place. It’s like a picture book. Everything looks sweet and clean but inside it’s rotten to the core.’

Leo reached across to her and lightly brushed the back of her hand, then pulled away.

‘Clara, if you’re finding this too hard . . .’

She shrugged, her face set, chin jutting defiantly. Physically she was still right next to him, but he sensed she had receded from him.

She was remembering something Paul Croker said to her when she was tackling a tricky role.

“Whatever you do, Clara, if you really want to do it convincingly, you need to find your motivation”.

“My motivation?”

“The trigger that makes your character act the way she does. The emotion that guides her. The reason that carries her through. If you have your character’s motivation, you have everything you need”.

She had that, at least. Her motivation. It remained to be seen if it would be enough to carry her through.

Klaus Müller’s find was in Caputh, a village on the fringes of a pine forest, a few miles outside Berlin. To get there they took the autobahn in the direction of Babelsberg and travelled past Potsdam into the countryside. Clara wore sunglasses and a red cotton scarf tied round her neck in a way she had copied from Olga Chekhova. It was a fine day and the blue sky was lightly feathered with clouds as Müller’s BMW convertible, freshly waxed and polished, sped along the empty road. He had the hood down and the wind rushed against her face with an intoxicating edge of grass and damp earth. Looking into the dark coniferous forests as they passed, she almost expected to see girls with braids and baskets weaving their way through the trees, the way they did in Germany’s deep ancestral imagination, and would do again, if Hitler had anything to do with it. But it being Sunday, the sides of the autobahn were dotted with picnickers, sitting on rugs watching the cars go by.

The road moved out from the forest to run between wide meadows, waving with great lances of wildflowers, and fields blunt with the stubble of early crops. Clara looked at everything they passed with interest. She fed greedily on the beauty of the landscape, as if by focusing on the journey she could forestall the arrival.

‘When Elsa was alive we always planned to find a place out here,’ Müller shouted to her, above the rushing air. ‘But it’s taken me a while to get round to it. Luckily, there’s plenty of property available right now.’

Caputh was set in a beautiful position between two lakes, in which, he explained, he planned to do some sailing and fishing, should work ever let up enough to give him the chance. But the village’s most notable feature, he told her, was that it contained a house that had been built for Albert Einstein, a two-storey, timber-framed construction looking out over Lake Templin, which had been a fiftieth birthday present from the city of Berlin to its eminent resident. Unfortunately, the eminent resident had recently decided to reside anywhere but Germany and just two weeks ago had turned up at the German Consulate in Antwerp to renounce his German citizenship.

‘So a great use of taxpayers’ money that was.’ Müller waved a contemptuous hand in the direction of the house. ‘I hear the local police had to raid the place the other evening. They were tipped off that they might find weapons left there by Communist agitators.’

‘You’d never have thought of Professor Einstein as the sort to hide machine guns under the bed,’ said Clara mildly.

He cast her a quick glance to assess the level of her flippancy so she shot him a bright smile, glad that her eyes were hidden by the glasses.

‘That’s exactly the point. He may have looked like a crazy professor – no doubt he was – but he was also a lying Jewish Communist and there’s no depths to which those people won’t stoop. We’re better off without him.’

Müller was wearing a leather jacket and open-necked shirt with braces. He looked different in his weekend clothes, fleshier, and less intimidating. He retained his air of jocular cynicism, but he looked more like the businessman he had once been than a Nazi officer. Clara wondered if in normal times she might have been attracted to him, but she doubted it. There was a flatness in his brown gaze, a lack of depth and questioning, that reminded her of a Rottweiler dog that Kenneth had once looked after. She shifted in the seat, her flesh sticking to the warm leather. Part of her was impatient to arrive, the other part hoping the journey would never end.