Black Roses (42 page)

Sir Horace halted in the dappled shade of a pine tree and extracted a silver box from his pocket. Leo took a cigarette, snapped open his lighter, then stood back to inhale.

‘So how exactly would we go about . . . compromising him?’

‘We shall have to give that some thought. But it’s my feeling that it would help if your source were to let Goebbels know who his wife is fooling around with.’

Leo stared at him aghast. ‘Let Goebbels know! With respect, sir, that course of action seems to me extraordinarily wrong-headed. And terrifically dangerous.’

Sir Horace sighed and Leo divined in the milky vagueness of his eyes a shrewd cunning entirely at odds with his avuncular air.

‘Not at all. Quite the reverse in fact. It’s for her own safety.’

‘I’m not sure I follow your thinking.’

‘If Goebbels believes she has knowingly led him to Arlosoroff, he will trust her. It will cement her position. She will be useful to him.’ Observing Leo’s horrified gaze, he added, ‘It’s only an idea.’

‘It’s too dangerous.’

Sir Horace stroked his moustache thoughtfully. ‘Isn’t that for the girl to decide? It might be she felt, as a decent, morally worthy person, that a husband would want to know his wife was betraying him. Yet she would not want to cause problems in her own friendship with the wife. So she could let him know discreetly. A note perhaps, something like that. Goes on all the time, I would have thought. Marital politics are always damned awkward.’

‘I’m sorry sir. I just can’t agree. Apart from anything else, it would probably cause the Goebbels to separate, and what use is Clara’s friendship then? Just being the daughter of a Nazi sympathizer would never be enough to secure her the kind of access she has now.’

‘That’s possible, of course.’

‘And why would Goebbels believe that Clara would betray her friend’s confidence? What possible motivation could she have?’

Sir Horace ground his cigarette out on the perfect green.

‘What motivation does anyone have to do what the Nazis want? Fear. Pure and simple. Goebbels knows that.’

‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Leo, stabbing a tee into the grass. ‘I can’t ask her to take that risk. With respect, sir, I really must insist that she is protected from anything like that.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Sir Horace mildly, watching Leo flail his shot wildly out into the rough. ‘Just running an idea up the flagpole.’

The ambassador stepped onto the green and performed an exaggerated waggle of his hips before sending his own ball soaring up the fairway. Leo watched him distrustfully. The proposal he had sounded out was suicidally dangerous. The leap from double-crossing Goebbels’ wife to performing what amounted to a triple-cross, was a lot to ask even of an experienced agent. It would require nerves of steel and a sober realization of the consequences. To ask it of Clara was entirely unacceptable. The memory of her sitting in bed beside him, and the horror on her face when he produced the pistol, caused a surge of protective feeling to rise that he must on no account betray. At the same time he felt a stab of tenderness, and a desperate urge to find the opportunity to be with her again.

‘I know her father, of course,’ said Sir Horace as Hitchcock joined them, brandishing a four iron. ‘Ronald Vine. I was at school with him.’

‘What’s he like?’ said Hitchcock.

‘Miserable beggar. A junior minister in the mid-twenties. He was badly affected by the loss of his wife, obviously, and consequently very devoted to the cause of Anglo-German friendship. You know the type. These people who go off on beer-drinking weekends and frightful hiking trips in Saxony. Only in Vine’s case, as we rapidly discovered, it went a bit further. There have been serious, high-level contacts with the regime here. We’ve had an eye on him because of who he is. He’s a name, and the Nazis want names. They’re after the highest society, the best people. Bank directors, members of the House of Lords, influential writers, industrialists. But from the sound of it, the daughter’s cut from a different cloth. She’s obviously got guts.’

‘She has,’ Leo agreed.

‘Curious that the daughter would go a different path from the father. What’s she like, Quinn? She’s sounds an unusual girl.’

Leo considered. In one way, of course, Clara was like hundreds of other girls from her background, who lived in the Home Counties and attended bridge parties and played tennis and worked at small jobs which they gave up the moment they married. But there was something different about her too. To march out on her family and fiancé like that without a backward glance. To step into a different country with no idea of what to expect.

‘I think she is quite unusual.’

‘A cracker to look at, by all accounts,’ added Hitchcock.

‘Well, I hope you’re being nice to her. Access like that can’t be taken for granted. We’re lucky to have found her. And having a woman is a stroke of genius.’

‘In what way, sir?’ said Hitchcock.

‘Oh, the National Socialists are tremendously arrogant, you know. They think an awful lot of themselves. They would never expect a woman to get the better of them. It would be practically impossible for them to imagine that a girl in silk stockings and Elizabeth Arden face cream would be able to outwit them.’ He paused a moment to reflect on his own image. ‘A spy in silk stockings. What about that then?’

‘That’s exactly why we shouldn’t expose her to any unnecessary risk,’ said Leo tersely. ‘As you say, access like that is invaluable.’

‘It was just a thought,’ Sir Horace conceded. ‘Though I’m amazed at what you tell me about Frau Goebbels. Quite frankly, I’ve found myself next to her at a couple of dinners and she seems one of the most godawful frigid women you’ve ever met. You break the ice only to discover a terrific lot of cold water underneath.’

The golf game went exactly as Leo had anticipated. His own performance was disastrous and Hitchcock could not restrain himself from offering tips. Hitchcock himself had enormous difficulty in managing to lose and at first he couldn’t help himself. Sir Horace watched his impressive swings with dismay until Hitchcock got the message and then overdid it, first by hacking out clods of turf, then deliberately mishandling a dogleg and landing in a water hazard, and then getting stuck badly in the rough. He took his frustration out in a heated argument with a caddy. Sir Horace and Leo managed to shake him off as they returned to the club house.

They had reached the terrace when Sir Horace stopped and looked at him levelly.

‘You know I’m leaving next month?’

‘I do, sir. You’ll be much missed.’

‘Thank you. Though I’m not sure how much I’ll miss Berlin. Anyway, I’ve mentioned you to my successor, Phipps. He’s a good chap. Brother-in-law of Bobby Vansittart. He takes a robust view so keep in touch with him.’

By this, Leo understood that the next ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, was under no illusions about Nazi aims or methods. And Sir Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Under-secretary at the Foreign Office who was deeply suspicious of Germany, was known for having cultivated his own secret network of contacts in Berlin government circles.

‘And thank you for a jolly good game. Especially as you don’t get a round in too often.’ His gaze travelled down to Leo’s feet. ‘I must say those are most extraordinary shoes. Did you hire them?’

‘I borrowed them from Hitchcock.’

Sir Horace cast a glance back at Hitchcock, who was hurrying pink-faced to catch them up.

‘Our friend looks in need of a drink. Now, what do you say to a quick gin and tonic here and then back to the house? As far as I know my lady wife is expecting us for lunch.’

The light was falling by the time Clara arrived at the end of Helga’s road, past the water tower. Its gates were just closing and a police car was passing through. She wondered if what Helga had said about it being taken over as a prison was true. Vans bundled with prisoners could be glimpsed at all hours of the day and night she said, and though Helga was prone to exaggeration, there was something about the sight of the sentry standing to attention inside, and next to him a panting dog on a leash, that made Clara fear Helga had got something right for a change.

She felt a little guilty that it had taken her so long to come. She had called by on Saturday, but there was no answer from the bell, so she spent the afternoon walking in the Tiergarten instead and returned to find that Helga had telephoned Frau Lehmann several times again. On Monday she had not shown up at the studios and all of Tuesday had passed without any sign of her. Clara knew perfectly well that Helga only wanted to talk to her about Bruno. She just hoped she had managed to stop herself talking to Bauer about him too.

Her first inkling of alarm came when she saw the huddle of people outside Helga’s apartment. Berlin had become a city of huddles, whether it was buying black market goods or sharing dramatic news, and a cluster of citizens signified trouble. Either trouble or tragedy. From their backs and craned necks alone Clara felt this particular huddle meant something terrible.

And then she saw the shoes. And as soon as she saw them, she knew the truth. With a throb of fear, Magda’s words came into her mind.

“Killing is not a difficult thing for them.”

The old men in the street assumed Helga had killed herself, but this was no suicide. This was what Nazis like Walter Bauer did to people who crossed them. A gun in the night, a battered body that surfaced at a local hospital, or a mangled heap on the pavement. Perhaps they would bother to stage a story. The suicidal actress, the girl of unsteady mental state. There must be plenty of them in Berlin these days.

Once she had sprinted up to the apartment, Clara was even more convinced. Nothing she found contradicted her belief of what had happened. Helga’s coffee still warm in the cup, her fur-collared coat laid out on the bed, and the postcard. Most of all the postcard.

She thought again of the red shoes. Those shoes, which Helga had begged for a ‘special occasion’. Why would she wear them if she was intending to die? Killing yourself was not a special occasion. Helga had not wanted to die. She had tried desperately to get in contact. She must have been in constant fear of Bauer. Perhaps he had even threatened her with what he might do, yet in her time of greatest need, Clara hadn’t been there.

Having seen all she needed to, she walked quickly out of the block and back towards the city centre. At Alexanderplatz she caught a tram up west and made for Frau Lehmann’s, where she went straight to her room, turned the picture of the Führer to the wall, pulled the curtains and got in bed. She clutched herself beneath the mounds of musty green eiderdown, shivering uncontrollably. She thought of Angela and Kenneth and her father back in England going about their lives, waking up each day and having breakfast, taking a bus to the office beneath the unfurling plane trees of Millbank, attending parties, and perhaps even talking about Clara, who had skipped off to Babelsberg and had sent postcards saying she was having a glorious time. She had never felt so alone or frightened in her life. She had come to Berlin to feel closer to her mother, and had found instead danger and death. Magda had warned her what happened to those who crossed the regime, but no warning could prepare her for the shock of that crumpled body or Helga’s piteous face. And if she had been killed for the crime of telling jokes, how would they view Clara’s far greater betrayal?

Poor sweet Helga. With her vanity and her kind nature and her messy love life. What had she ever done to deserve this? And who would tell little Erich that his film-star mother was gone? Lying on her bed, Clara made the only resolution she could – to carry on. She would do anything in her power to impede these people, no matter how small the act, or how seemingly insignificant. She would carry her secret as close as her own shadow. She would find a way to contact Helga’s mother, and assure her Helga had not suffered before she died. She would see Erich, and try to give him some comfort. She would make sure he knew how much his mother had adored him. And as for Helga, she would do everything she could to avenge her.

The following morning passed in a blur. Clara was needed on set to shoot a scene with Hans Albers, and she was glad of it. She rose at seven, stared blankly at her empty face in the mirror and rubbed a dab of rouge into her pallid cheeks. She ate Frau Lehmann’s chill porridge without noticing for once how its starchy globules stuck to the roof of her mouth and she drank her burnt coffee, trying hard to avoid eye contact with Professor Hahn. The studio’s Mercedes saloon collected her at eight, and it took a full morning to shoot a single scene in which she had a conversation with Albers in the hotel. She had tried to learn the script on the way, a task that would normally be effortless, but the words on the page danced in front of her eyes. On set Herr Lamprecht seemed uncharacteristically tetchy, which put everyone on edge and meant an unusual number of takes. At one point, when the film in the camera was being changed, Albers leant over to her and explained why.

‘I shall have to take my leave of you soon. I’ve just told Gerhard I’m going after this film. We’re heading for Starnberger See.’

‘But, Hans, why?’

He spread his hands. ‘It’s Hansi, you see. We’ve no choice.’

Clara understood. Albers’ girlfriend, Hansi Berg, was half-Jewish and had already been forced to leave the studio. Didn’t the Nazis care that they were driving away their best talent? Or did they think they could manufacture brand-new actors, like guns and ships and aircraft?

Clara told no one what had happened to Helga. She was desperate to talk to Leo, but she could not contact him. She wanted to tell Albert, and at one point she looked up from the hall and instinctively sought out the window of his office, but there was no Albert staring back down at her and she was glad of it. It was important that she didn’t break down.

It was late afternoon by the time she had returned to town, changed into her blue polka-dot dress, eaten a quick sandwich, then caught a tram to the Goebbels’ home. Her initial hesitation over the wisdom of delivering Magda’s letter had vanished now. She had no idea what Magda wanted to tell this man and if the penalty for laughing at the authorities was death, then assisting the Minister’s wife in adultery was surely equally grave. Yet she was more certain than ever that keeping Magda’s confidence would be vital if she wanted to continue helping Leo.