Faith and Beauty (40 page)

‘Where do you leave these?’

‘Public places: phone books, cafés, doctors’ waiting rooms. We deliver them at night. We make flyers too. And documents. One of our people has a daughter in the Bund Deutscher Mädel, who takes them around wearing her uniform. It just looks like she’s delivering copies of the BDM newspaper.’

Jochen gestured at the mantelpiece where a bottle of cleaning fluid stood alongside a box of matches.

‘We keep these ready so we can burn them at a moment’s notice if we get an unannounced visit.’

Hedwig’s mind was a blur, the words collapsing before her eyes into tiny heaps of soot.

Germany awake! We are Sleepwalking into War!

‘So why did you bring me here?’

‘I was coming to that.’

He put the stack of papers down and perched on the edge of the table, arms folded.

‘That ball you’re going to.’

‘The dance for the Prince?’

‘The whole idea of the evening is to persuade the Prince of Yugoslavia to stand by while Hitler carves up Europe. There will be guests there from all over the world. Influential people from every country. They need to know that there’s some kind of resistance in Germany – that we’re not all on Hitler’s side – and that if he’s given carte blanche to invade Poland, he won’t stop there. The ball is a perfect chance. I have a friend there.’

The way he said ‘friend’ told her everything. There was an undercurrent of admiration. A whisper of enchantment.

‘It’s Sofie, isn’t it? From the orchestra?’

‘She plays in a string quartet that has been hired to perform at the ball. She will distribute the pamphlets.’

‘So what does that have to do with me?’

‘You have access. You need do nothing more than take the pamphlets in. I’d do it myself but there’s no way they’d let me into the Schloss Bellevue.’

Hoping against hope, she raised a protest.

‘What’s the point? What good can reading a pamphlet do? It’s just a piece of paper.’

She seemed to have hit on an important issue. Jochen was suddenly excited, impassioned.

‘Quite the opposite, Hedy! Reading is everything, Goebbels knows that. It’s why he controls everything we Germans can read. He burns books and censors the newspapers, so people can’t find any voices except his. We Germans have always been great readers. Literature is our lifeblood. But Goebbels would rather people sat and watched variety shows or romantic films than lose themselves in books. He knows that if you control what a nation reads, you control their souls.’

A terrible realization came upon her. Had Jochen only met her, had he only ever told her he loved her, because of what she might do for him? Had everything, from their first kiss onwards, been leading up to this?

Hedwig looked at him, a bright sheen of tears in her eyes, and summoned all her courage.

‘Tell me truthfully. Is this why you were interested in me? Because of what I could do for you?’

He ducked his head to evade her gaze, running his finger up and down the table as if the grain of the wood might spell out an answer. Then he stood up fully and put his hands on her shoulders, his gaze frank and unflinching.

‘It’s true. Robert wanted me to get to know you.’

‘Robert Schultz?’

Her childhood friend. A local boy who would scuffle in the schoolyard with a football and whose tawny hair and good looks had sometimes earned him an admiring glance from Lotti Franke.

‘Robert thought you might be useful to us.’

‘In that case . . .’

‘Stop!’

Misery and hurt pride welled in her throat, but Jochen pressed his hands into her shoulders so hard that it hurt and shook her a little.

‘That may be why he introduced us, but that doesn’t change how I feel. I love you, Hedy.’

A sudden ferocity, a mixture of anger and fear, rose in her. She had always been the one longing for his affection, cravenly seeking his love, but now she felt a new strength, born of bitterness.

‘Do you? Really? I’d say if you loved a person, you wouldn’t ask them to do something as dangerous as this.’

‘I used to think the same. But now I think it’s
because
I love you that I want you to do it.’

Was this what love meant? Being brave, taking risks? Living in fear? She remembered Lotti’s face on the last day she had seen her. Lotti was in love, and love had made her frightened too.

‘Have you gone mad, Jochen?’

‘No. I think we’re the only ones who are sane.’

Chapter Thirty-four

The Barminstrasse women’s prison in Friedrichshain was generally crammed to the rafters, but following an amnesty to celebrate the Führer’s birthday a large number of prisoners had been released in a spirit of joyful reconciliation, with the result that the place was emptier than usual and Clara had a cell to herself. The single bulb was kept on at all times, presumably for the purpose of sleep deprivation, but the light was failing miserably at its job, stuttering and blinking fitfully and casting only a purgatorial gloom around the narrow space. The window looked out onto a courtyard ten foot below. Previous prisoners had left their marks on the brickwork, a selection of clumsily scratched initials all that remained of their individual identities. Attached to one wall was a single wooden bench worn smooth. How many women had sat there before her, wondering what came next?

If the prison guards were surprised at the sight of a woman wearing a couture evening gown and diamond swastika brooch arriving in their cells, they did not betray it. Nor had the men who arrested her been rough, but instead icily polite. There was no shoving or wrenching of hair, yet her wrists had been cuffed, making it impossible to remove the code paper from her pocket, and as soon as she arrived both jacket and bag had been taken away.

Clara was desperately tired. Her eyes were gritty and exhaustion seeped upwards in her limbs, like a draught of sedative, and although she did everything she could to keep her mind alert, it was hard. From time to time she drifted into a light sleep, but was jarred awake when her head hit the wall or by sounds of shouts and crying from the other cells. A deep unflagging terror settled in her guts, yet still she tried to focus through the fog of shock that engulfed her. She dropped her head to her knees, hoping that the blood coursing round her brain would help her to concentrate. It was as though she was solving some dreadful cryptic crossword puzzle, whose clues and half-formed suppositions spun around, split apart and refused to come together in her brain.

How long had she been followed?

She knew now that the young man in the lobby of Winterfeldtstrasse was not a police tail, but an illegal fly poster, who also forged documents for Steffi’s resistance group. Yet the instinct that she was under surveillance had continued for weeks, even on the day she had spent walking through the city. Had the Gestapo been shadowing her all this time? Had they followed her to Paris? And if so, what exactly did they suspect?

Someone has been saying some very unkind things about you.

Leni Riefenstahl told her Himmler had suspicions about Clara’s Aryan status. That meant right now they would be scrutinizing her identity documents. Despite the forger’s skill, who was to say that the fake Ariernachweis would not be just as easily spotted as the one demolished by Conrad Adler? After all, the Gestapo had a string of fine art experts on their books, precisely for the task of examining documents. And yet . . .

To be apprehended for false identity was so much less grave than being arrested as a spy. The penalty for false identity was imprisonment, a camp perhaps. Please God, that they suspected her only of being a Jew. Because to be convicted as a spy was far worse.

But nothing so bad as if they suspected her of an attempt to kill the Führer. There was only one penalty for that.

She turned the problem over and over in her head, looking at it from different perspectives, examining it like a jewel of many facets. Questions revolved in a dizzy, sickening whirr. Would they have actually found the tiny scrap of paper that she had so precisely, carefully concealed deep in her jacket pocket? She remembered Steffi telling her that the Gestapo had become adept at ripping the linings of coats and jackets, running their fingers along the seams in the hunt for hidden valuables. If they found it, what importance might they place on it? Would they suspect Benno Kurtz? She was glad she had not actually had the chance to contact him before they took her away; if he was anything like as resourceful as he sounded, he would be able to bluff his way out. But what would it mean for Erich, and his hopes of SS leadership school, if his godmother was arrested as a spy?

Eventually, she gave up and ran through the store of images that, like a series of glittering stones, lit the path back to her own childhood. Her early theatrical career, the films she had acted in, coming to Berlin and meeting Helga Schmidt and Erich. Loving Leo. In her head she played the adagio of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, the one that Leo so cherished. He said it was the closest that music came to prayer. She teased out each note in her memory, forcing her limbs to relax into its yearning. She thought of the first time she had seen Erich, on an outing to the funfair at Luna Park, and the following years, his voice breaking, his shoulders broadening, his life opening out before him.

Everything hung in the balance now. Her whole existence might soon be unstrung, like a necklace snipped and its pearls sent spiralling over the ground.

The table in the interrogation room was pocked with burns, sending the ominous message that the interrogators were far from cautious about where they stubbed their cigarettes. A low cloud of tobacco smoke, acrid in the mouth like petrol, hung in the air, barely troubled by the draught from an open window. The officer slouched in a chair with his legs crossed had an unhealthy, jaundiced look to him, as though he spent his life in the artificial glare of a Gestapo spotlight. His face might have been plucked straight from one of the cabinets at Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, with skin stretched taut over the cadaverous cheekbones, pale scalp beneath his freshly shaved skull and a yellowish tint of ivory to the eyes. One of his ears was cabbaged, suggesting that physical violence was a familiar medium for him.

He rocked back in the chair when he saw her, and twisted his cigarette to join the others in the ashtray on his desk.

‘Sit down, Fräulein Vine.’

She wondered how senior he was. Not very, or he would have been at home asleep, rather than doing an interrogation night shift. The look of brute malice in his eyes seemed to confirm that.

‘My name is Kriminalsekretär Riesbach.’

Her guess was correct. He was relatively low-ranking, which made it all the more important that she gauge her response carefully. There had been a rash of Ufa performers arrested recently, hauled in for questioning about activities detrimental to National Socialism, and their brash, actorly manner, their namedropping and threats, only served to irritate the rank and file policemen, who treated them more harshly as a result.

‘Perhaps you can explain why I’m here,’ she said quietly.

‘I was rather hoping that you would explain that to me. But maybe you will need some encouragement.’

‘Could you tell me why I was arrested?’

Riesbach made a clumsy play of reasonableness, as though he had decided that because she was an actress, a degree of play-acting was appropriate. He spread his hands.

‘Why not? A loyal patriot advised us that we should keep a watch on you, Fräulein Vine. From your file I see it’s not the first time you have come to the attention of the authorities.’

‘That was a mistake. I was released immediately and without charge.’

A frown descended on Riesbach’s brutish features. He was pretending puzzlement.

‘Have you ever heard of the saying
No smoke without fire
?’

‘Yes. It’s a common cliché.’

‘So what are we to make of this? Another arrest. Another patriot who believes you are engaged in actions against the well-being of the Reich.’

‘Actions?’

‘Espionage, woman!’ His face flushed and his voice rose to an angry bark. ‘This patriot believed you may not be loyal to the Reich. That you may in fact be an English spy.’

Stay calm. Don’t react instinctively.

‘That’s an outrageous accusation.’

Indignation and fear was the only correct response. The response of the innocent.

‘I’m glad you see it like that. I feel the same. But then we found this.’

With a flourish, he reached beneath the desk and pulled out a book, light blue with darker blue lettering, that Clara recognized as her copy of
The Thirty-Nine Steps
. Her lips blanched with fear and reflexively she bit them to force the colour back into them.

Riesbach opened the book carefully at the frontispiece, as though examining some precious, ancient manuscript.

‘You can imagine my colleagues’ excitement when they found an English novel which appears to belong to the library of the Foreign Minister. Unfortunately, when they telephoned the Herr Minister’s home, only Frau von Ribbentrop could be found and she was not pleased to be contacted in the middle of the night.’

The figure of Frau von Ribbentrop in a dressing gown, summoned to the telephone to explain why an actress should be carrying one of her husband’s books, would indeed be formidable. Clara could only imagine her response.

‘My men decided to postpone their questions, for the time being at least.’

So she had been saved. Saved by the foul temper of Annelies von Ribbentrop.

‘But please don’t think that our enquiries have ended there.’

A twist of pure pleasure spread across Riesbach’s face as, like an amateur magician, he produced an envelope and tipped it out on the table. It was Clara’s tiny matchstick of paper, carefully unrolled to reveal the line of numbers. How foolish to underestimate their efficiency.

He poked at the paper with an extended finger.

‘I wonder what this might be?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Strange, when it was found in the pocket of your own jacket.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m very tired. I can’t remember.’