The Pursuit of Pearls (16 page)

“Not exactly.”

“What is it then? Don't keep me in suspense!”

“I can't tell you quite yet.”

“How mysterious!”

“It is. Shall we meet at the usual time next week?”

“Any time. I can tell Mutti I'm needed at work. There's a lot going on at the moment. They're making a film about the Ahnenerbe. Leni Riefenstahl is to direct it.”

He gave a whistle. “Riefenstahl! Will you be in it?”

“I certainly hope not. I'm going to keep well away.”

“You're far too shy.”

She took off her spectacles and began absently cleaning them on her skirt. “I'm not exactly film star material.”

“Don't say that.” He grasped her hand. “You know what? I spend my whole day beautifying the Führer, straightening his nose, giving him a bit of color in his cheeks, touching up his hair. So it's nice to come out in the evening with someone who doesn't need any beautifying.”

He reached up to brush a curl from her eyes.

“You're perfect, Hedy. You know I think that.”

E
rich Carow's
Laugh In
was a celebrated comedy act staged at the Valhalla theater in an appropriately cavernous cellar on Weinbergsweg, north of Rosenthaler Platz. Just a few years ago Berlin had been the nightclub capital of the world, a neon-lit, champagne-fueled extravaganza of singing, dancing, and most of all sex. Sex for every taste, no matter how specialized or how depraved, could be found in dimly lit caverns off the Friedrichstrasse and openly in the rooms above. For two decades straight, nighttime Berlin had been a dazzling, decadent, nonstop party, played out at the Wintergarten, the Admiralspalast, and the Residence Casino. But the party stopped abruptly in 1933, and most of Berlin's cabarets closed down. The risqué acts were replaced with musicals, and the only variety on offer was the choice between folk singing and operetta. Jazz was degenerate
Entarte Musik,
and Goebbels issued all musicians with instructions on how to hold their instruments so they didn't resemble Africans. All the dangerous glamour had been swept up by the broom of National Socialism, and the only traces of it were left in a few dark corners, one of them being the Valhalla. Everyone went there—actresses, journalists, artists, politicians—and while the comedy survived, the laughter was darker and more bitter. At a time when blackout paper and black material were everywhere, black humor was the only kind in vogue.

Navigating down the stairs, past an enamel plate reading
JAZZ
DANCING
FORBIDDEN
, Clara made her way into the shabby cellar and looked around for her friends. Immediately in front of her a table of soldiers were amusing themselves by trying to shove ice cubes down the cleavages of a pair of buxom waitresses. The waitresses, struggling with large trays of beer and trapped amid the knot of young men, were laughing, but Clara glimpsed the alarm in their eyes. The soldiers' faces were lean and savage, as though they were already inured to cruelty. Anyone of their age had already spent years in the Hitler Youth being trained to ridicule, taunt, and bully, and their sport with the barmaids was no different from that of cats playing with a mouse. These women existed for entertainment, and their distress was simply part of the fun.

Clara prayed that the same did not happen to Erich.

The foreign correspondents were up by the bar. She detected the lanky frame of Charles Cavendish towering over an animated Bill Shirer, who was jabbing with his pipe to emphasize a point. Hugh Lindsey, a Burberry coat slung across his shoulders, was deep in conversation with Mary Harker. As Clara approached he caught her eye and winked, but she had no intention of interrupting, so she approached Cavendish, who swiveled towards her, sweeping an oiled hank of hair from his eyes and baring his tombstone teeth in a patronizing smile.

“The lovely Clara Vine.”

She guessed that he disliked her, and that was to be expected, given what he must assume. What else should he make of an Anglo-German actress who mingled in the top circles of the Nazi Party and whose father was one of Britain's most prominent Nazi sympathizers? When you looked at it like that, it was a wonder that he was even prepared to welcome her as a drinking companion.

“How are you, Charles?”

“As well as can be expected for a man who has sat through two press conferences and an interview with Robert Ley.”

“You've come to the right place, Cavendish,” said Shirer. “Apparently Himmler has decreed that an evening at the cabaret counts as therapy. He's recommended it for any German soldiers suffering trauma inflicted during their role in Czechoslovakia.”

“Maybe he should suggest it for some of his colleagues.” Cavendish smiled. “They're a dreadfully unhealthy bunch. The Führer is said to be suffering from appalling digestive problems. Goering's diabetic, has sciatica, and is always exhausted. Von Ribbentrop is in constant pain because he has only one kidney. And Himmler suffers from the most agonizing abdominal attacks and lives in terror of stomach cancer.”

“Even Goebbels is fresh out of a clinic,” added Shirer.

“One thinks one knows what caused that. Or rather
who,
” said Cavendish knowingly, and following his eyes Clara saw a figure she recognized.

Joseph Goebbels may have censored all the cabarets in the city and even dictated which dances could be performed in them, but there was one thing in the Third Reich he could not control: his wife. Magda Goebbels, thirty-eight-year-old mother of six, was seated at a table in the center of the club in full, embarrassing view. Around her, a circle of dazzled young men clustered, topping up her glass, lighting her cigarettes, and hanging slavishly on her words.

“Apparently Goebbels was forced to spend Christmas in the guesthouse,” remarked Shirer. “She won't have him in the house.”

Since her husband's affair with the Czech actress Lida Baarová the previous year, Magda had resorted to her own style of revenge. It involved the conventional combination of a makeover, an affair, and an awful lot of alcohol. Her wheat-blond hair was now ashy and stiffly strained into rolls against her head. Her slinky plum dress—an elegant design by Paul Kuhnen—was ostentatiously modern, though its slender silhouette did her bulky form no favors. And the Elizabeth Arden foundation she had always used was now painted as thickly as a Van Gogh sunflower.

“She's in nightclubs several nights a week around town,” murmured Cavendish waspishly. “She likes to invite young men to share her table. She even asks sailors home.”

There was a malicious gleam in Cavendish's eye at Magda Goebbels's predicament—a malice that was, thought Clara, not too far from the savage laughter of the SA youths with the barmaids. She thought back over the years she had known the propaganda minister's wife, a brittle, nerve-racked, unsympathetic figure, locked into the gilded cage of a Nazi spouse by her own disastrous choices. So what if Magda chose to play out her misery on the public stage? Who could blame her given the horror of her marriage and the remorseless barbarity that her husband's regime perpetrated? Clara was about to reply when Magda Goebbels turned in her direction and lurched to her feet.

“Bad luck,” murmured Cavendish. “Looks like she's seen you.”

Magda, it was immediately clear, was drunk. Very drunk. Drifts of powder had collected in the crevices of her face, and her lipstick might have been applied by one of her own little girls. The depths of her cleavage glistened with sweat. Yet beneath the blowsy exterior she was more agitated than Clara had ever seen her. A gold-tipped Sobranie trembled in her hand, and her address was far more familiar than she would allow herself in daylight hours.

“Fräulein Vine. Our own little actress. Fancy seeing you here.” She swayed to a stop. “I wouldn't have thought this was the kind of place you frequented. They tell jokes against Party leaders here, didn't you know? I always had you down as a loyal member of the Chamber of Culture.”

“As I am.”

“Not so loyal as to sleep with my husband, I hope.”

“Certainly not.”

“Well, you can always join the queue,” Magda said with a harsh laugh, which brought a sour gust of schnapps and tobacco. “Though there's quite a waiting list.”

A hush had descended. Most of the customers had turned in their direction, their faces agog with expectation, if not surprise. Magda Goebbels had, in recent months, become an alternative cabaret. She was a living, breathing one-woman stand-up comedy show, firing off unspeakable quips about the Nazi leaders. An act like that by anyone else would be closed down instantly, and the performer sent to a camp the same evening, but who would dare denounce the propaganda minister's wife? In what newspaper or magazine could the allegation be printed, and what court would hear the accusations? Besides, why denounce her, when you could laugh at her instead?

Clara felt a wave of sympathy. “Why don't we sit down? There's a seat over there. In that alcove.”

“Don't let me take you away from your friends. Especially not that handsome young man,” commented Magda, eyeing Hugh Lindsey.

“They're not really my friends,” said Clara hastily. “Just some journalists.”

She hoped the mention of journalists would be enough. Surely Magda was not so reckless that she would risk getting drunk in front of the cream of the foreign press? God forbid she should ask to be introduced to Hugh, or invite him back to the Goebbelses' villa for a drink.

“I barely know them,” Clara added.

But Magda's interest had flagged, and all her attention turned inwards again, to her own troubles. She plumped herself down on the banquette with a noisy sigh.

“I have a terrible headache. You have no idea how much I suffer, Fräulein Vine.”

“I have aspirin—” Clara began to fumble in her bag, but Magda waved her away.

“It's a spiritual suffering. There's no pill for that, no matter how much my husband keeps booking me into clinics and sending the frightful Doktor Morell around with his prescriptions.”

Theo Morell was Hitler's own doctor, who had been slavishly taken up by all the senior Nazis and as a consequence enjoyed lavish premises on the Kurfürstendamm and a country villa on the Wannsee. The contents of his pills were top secret, but generally thought to be amphetamines, designed to combat the sleepless nights of the top men.

“God knows what he has in those pills. I wouldn't be at all surprised if I ended up poisoned one day. At least Joseph would be pleased.”

So they had reached the heart of the matter, in one easy step.

“How is the Herr Doktor?”

“How should I know? He's barely speaking to me. The Führer might have ordered him to break up with that marriage wrecker, but you wouldn't know it. He went on a grand tour of Europe to ‘soothe his wounded heart,' but when he came back it was just as bad. Do you know what he's done now?”

Clara could only imagine.

“He's commissioned a film from Veit Harlan to tell the story of his affair.”

It was, of course, the talk of the studios. Veit Harlan, an actor turned successful director, had been allocated an eye-popping budget for his latest project,
Die Reise nach Tilsit.
The movie told the story of an honorable man torn between his exquisitely beautiful mistress and his dumpy wife, struggling to resolve the conflict between head and heart. The lovelorn Goebbels was constantly popping in to watch the action or examine the rushes with manic attention to detail.

“Joseph denies it's about himself, of course. And he refuses to discuss our marriage. Whenever I complain he stuffs his ears and shouts, ‘It's the same old song! Even Bormann is allowed a mistress!' Apparently Bormann has taken up with one of your little actress friends. I expect you know her.”

Clara did, slightly. Manja Behrens was a dental assistant whose aspirations to a film and stage career had undergone a meteoric rise since she had come under the eye of Hitler's enforcer, the vicious, bull-necked Martin Bormann. In a grotesque parallel of Magda Goebbels's own plight the previous year, it was rumored that Bormann was planning to move Manja under his own roof. Only the browbeaten Gerda Bormann might prove more amenable than Magda, who had tolerated her husband's ménage à trois precisely one week before storming off to Hitler and demanding a divorce.

“Joseph may have a broken heart, but it hasn't stopped him of course. He's built a new villa for his whores, out at Bogensee. It cost three million marks and it's supposed to be the property of the German Film Industry. Though I suppose that makes sense, given the number of German actresses who pass through.” Magda's face hardened. “In a few weeks it's our annual trip to Salzburg for the Wagner. I can see it already. All that operatic passion, and Joseph snuffling away next to me, moaning about his wounded heart.”

Magda sniffed, blinking away the tears of alcohol and self-pity in her eyes. Despite her prickle of sympathy, Clara knew she must not pass up the opportunity of this confessional mood.

“Have you heard much of Frau von Ribbentrop?”

“Unfortunately, I never hear the end of her.”

Since their first encounter in 1933, Magda Goebbels had not bothered to conceal her view of Annelies von Ribbentrop as a nouveau riche social climber, and despite the fact that she had now achieved the dizzy heights of Wilhelmstrasse, Magda saw little reason to revise her opinion.

“I went on tour to Italy with Albert Speer. I was desperately in need of a break. We went all round the Doric temples of Sicily and southern Italy. It should have been so fascinating, but all anyone could talk about was the von Ribbentrops. Joachim is bordering on insanity, they say, and Annelies is goading him on to all sorts of rash decisions.”

She leaned forward confidentially. “In fact, they worry that von Ribbentrop's advice is badly misleading the Führer in his military planning. Some of the senior men have been consulting a psychic to find out if the auspices are right for what Hitler has planned.”

Clara could barely believe it. “They're asking a fortune-teller?”

“A good one. Her name is Annie Krauss. She has a place up in Wilmersdorf. She read my palm once actually, and it was completely accurate. Every bit of it! She said if I stay with Joseph I'll be dead by the age of forty-five. I can well believe it. I feel half dead already.”

The clatter of percussion and a roar from the audience alerted them to the beginning of the cabaret. As the performers made their entrance onstage, Magda rose unsteadily to her feet.

“My friends will be wondering where I've gotten to.”

Clara picked up her bag. “Of course. Mine too.”

“I thought you said they weren't your friends.”

Magda lurched forward and gripped her wrist so hard that Clara flinched. Flushed and sweating, she loomed in Clara's face.

“What is it about you, Fräulein Vine? I've known you on and off for what is it, six years, and I don't think I have ever seen you with a proper boyfriend. Not even my husband, which is quite an achievement, given his penchant for brunettes. And I've never heard scandal attached to your name until now.”