The Pursuit of Pearls (17 page)

Clara felt the blood freeze inside her, but on the surface she was merely cool. “Really? Scandal?”

“You want to watch out…” Magda smiled cruelly. “People are keeping an eye on you. Somebody has been saying some very unkind things about you.”

“I wonder who?”

“I can't tell you. And I'd be lying if I said I cared. But for the sake of our long acquaintance, I'd advise you to be careful. Unless you want to spend more time enjoying your own company.”

AT THE BAR MARY
was still deeply ensconced with Hugh, and he had taken her arm to emphasize some point, making her flush with unexpected pleasure. Clara's encounter, however, had not escaped her notice.

“I didn't realize you and Magda Goebbels were such great friends.”

“It was just a friendly chat.”

“I've seen friendlier Alsatians.”

“She says some of the regime are consulting a fortune-teller about their military plans.”

“Astonishing,” said Hugh.

“You'd better believe it,” said Mary. “Most of them are intensely superstitious. Even Hitler had his own astrologer until the SA discovered the man was Jewish and shot him in a field outside Berlin. Goebbels was joking about it for years afterwards.”

“Our minister enjoys jokes, doesn't he?” said Hugh drily. “I heard today that he's appointed his own joke writer in the ministry.”

“He certainly needs something to improve those speeches.”

“It's not for the speeches. It's rather more ingenious than that. The idea is to create jokes about the senior men and then track their spread across the country. Apparently it's an effective way of monitoring dissent.”

“Aren't these people incredible?” Mary shook her head. “They're more of a joke than any cabaret act.”

“If the Nazis are a joke,” said Hugh, “I'd hate to hear the punch line.”

CLARA MADE HER WAY
back through the shadowed streets.
Someone has been saying very unkind things about you.
The shock of Magda Goebbels's remark only heightened the anxiety that had first prompted her to move out of Winterfeldtstrasse. The fear that she was being watched and that her every movement was under close scrutiny was all-pervasive. Yet still she had no clear idea who might have ordered such a surveillance, or why. To distract herself from these circling fears, she turned her thoughts to the fortune-teller Annie Krauss. Berliners were indeed famously superstitious. The city was thick with psychics and palm readers. Their advertisements peppered every newspaper and advertising column. Nor was a tendency to superstition limited to the general populace. Not only Hitler but Himmler firmly believed that psychic forces controlled his destiny. How perilous that the future of Europe might hinge on the prognostications of a palm reader or an astrologer.

And yet, thought Clara, as she boarded the last S-Bahn and sat in the warm, rumbling darkness, was she not herself in thrall to a kind of superstition? Wasn't she also longing to believe her own personal faith? That unexplained sixth sense, like a quiet flame in her heart, that told her that while Leo was missing, while he had disappeared without a trace, he might yet not be dead?

H
edwig was sitting in the cramped front room of the apartment with all five of her brothers, quizzing Reiner on air raids. It was his homework, but all the boys were listening—all of them except one-year-old Kurt, who was drifting to sleep on her lap. Kurt was too young to understand about bombs or fire or death, and when he had been given a picture book about air raids, he had torn it up and cheerfully stuffed the pieces into his mouth. Hedwig wished she could do the same with Reiner's quiz.

As she ran through the list of questions, she was trying to keep order while all three of the other boys attempted to compete. Wolfgang, who at eleven was younger than Reiner but brighter, kept butting in. The oldest, Peter, bent over his schoolwork, contributing answers in a tone of bored superiority that infuriated his younger brother. Even little Ludi, who at five was too small for the Pimpf, but who had regular air-raid lessons at kindergarten, kept jumping up and trying to interrupt.

“Stop it, Ludi. It's my homework!” shouted Reiner, with a mounting flush on his cheeks. “I need to get it right because there's a big test coming up!”

Reiner always found himself left behind by his cleverer brothers. He was hopeless at school. Perhaps that was why the HJ meant so much to him. It played to his strengths, which were running, fighting, and swimming. Placing a soothing hand on Ludi's head, Hedwig continued.

“What do you do if you see a fire, Reiner? Who would be the right person to tell? What do you do if someone's injured? How would you deal with poison gas?”

War was by far her brothers' favorite subject. It occupied all their thoughts. Even when they weren't studying it, the boys were playing it in a variety of military board games, Tanks Forward, Without a Propeller, We Sail Against England—a new one involving U-boats—and Bombs over England, a game where Heinkel bombers attacked London Bridge. That was Wolfgang's favorite, and when Hedwig told him she had seen the real London Bridge and hoped it wouldn't be bombed, he'd stared at her in disbelief.

But who needed board games now that the whole of the city had turned into one big practice site? Mock air raids and black-outs went on all the time in Berlin. In a recent drill, soldiers trussed up in decontamination suits had hosed down the streets as if clearing poison gas. The Luftwaffe had been co-opted to drop smoke bombs for a more realistic effect, and fire engines raised their ladders up the sides of buildings to stage rescues. The Hitler Youth dedicated a couple of evenings every week to air-raid drills, and Reiner's battalion had a large-scale exercise coming up. When war came, it would be the HJ that the city would rely on to coordinate the air-raid precautions, check blackouts and sound sirens, and cope with casualties. That was why Reiner's homework mattered so much, and why Hedwig needed to drum the answers into his head.

She was devoted to her brood of brothers. Sometimes she felt she was never happier than when settled in this drab, untidy, cramped apartment, parrying their backchat and adjudicating over their squabbles. There was Peter, at seventeen serious and ambitious; Reiner and Wolfgang always fighting; Ludi, a burly miniature of their father; and tiny, boisterous Kurt, who called for Hedwig before he called for his mother and whose care Mutti seemed quite happy to delegate. In the evenings when she was not taking Faith and Beauty classes, Hedwig cooked and washed the plates, and after her father departed for the nearest
kneipe
bar, divided her time between homework, storytelling, and keeping order. Not to mention patching Kurt's clothes, which had been shed by four brothers before him like the skins of a snake. This humdrum existence could not be less like the gracious, elegant life that the Faith and Beauty Society was preparing her for. Here in Moabit there was no art, or dancing, or conversation to speak of, unless you counted their father bellowing at the children or Mutti moaning about the amount of washing she had to do. There was no music, apart from the light dance music on the radio, which Mutti used to drown out the squabbling of the boys. And yet it could not suit Hedwig better.

Plowing through the pages of questions on Reiner's list, she felt a pang of sympathy for him. It had been the same for her in the BDM—endless lists of questions that she could still reel off like some leaden poetry imprinted forever in her mind.
What is the date and place of birth of the Führer? What are the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles? What is the date of the Beer Hall Putsch? What is the significance of November 10—
the answer to that was Martin Luther's birthday, rather than Kristallnacht, which had raged through the city last year.

At times it seemed citizens of the Reich spent their entire lives answering questionnaires. At the Faith and Beauty Society they marveled at the form issued by the office responsible for maintaining the racial purity of the SS to women hoping to marry. It was seven pages long and spelled out cumbersome requirements of the hopeful girl, including the precise date that she learned to walk, and photographs of herself in a bathing suit taken from three angles. Worse, some of the queries seemed as daunting as a university examination.

“Is the woman positively addicted to housework?” was one. How did you answer that?

“Does she hold fast to the values of German womanhood?”

And the one that had particularly floored Hedwig. “Does she cherish the high ideals of German philosophy?”

God knew how she would ever answer them, yet with any luck there would be no need. The only question she was interested in just then was the one that Jochen had mentioned the other evening in the restaurant. And if it was what she guessed, then it would be both thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.

P
aris in the spring had a reputation to live up to. The air was soft as a peach. The sunshine had obliged, and the smart ladies at the Auteuil races showed off that season's striped silk suits. Hats were worn flowered. Eau de Nil, sorbet, champagne, and sky blue were the colors of the moment. The bateaux mouches slid beneath the bridges of the Seine, the used book sellers set up their stalls on the parapets, and artists in broad-brimmed hats propped their easels as ever beneath the façade of Notre Dame. The chestnuts were blooming in the broad boulevards, and in the exquisite spring light the elegantly peeling façades of soft mushroom stone and the bleached shutters with their window boxes of tumbling scarlet geraniums seemed almost impossibly beautiful.

Paris, above all cities, was good at putting on a show.

If the French were preparing for war, it was with all the elegance and nonchalance that only Parisians could muster. Young men at café tables still whistled and tried to catch the glances of passing girls in imitation silk dresses, who stalked the pavements as haughtily as fashion models. Policemen still wore brass-buttoned jackets, flat-topped caps, and white cotton gloves to conduct the traffic round the Place de l'Opéra. Even the air-raid precautions were undertaken with a view to appearances, and the statues and monuments were fringed with spotless lines of sandbags. Perhaps the French thought the great Maginot Line would protect them from anything the Germans could attempt, or perhaps they trusted that no one, not even Hitler, would dare sully the splendor of their most elegant city.

Clara was wearing a silk day dress—white zigzags on a dark pink background—and the Chanel scarf that Erich had given her the previous year knotted casually round her throat. She rarely risked bright colors in Berlin. The ideal demeanor for a spy was nondescript, which translated as workday, inconspicuous clothing or at the very least muted shades, but here in Paris she felt more relaxed, and besides, didn't it make sense to look as glamorous as possible when you were expecting, or at least hoping, to feature in the pages of French
Vogue
?

At the Gare du Nord she had parted with seven francs for the latest edition of the magazine.
Vogue
was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Eiffel Tower and featured a startling photograph of a model named Lisa Fonssagrives wearing a Lucien Lelong dress, balancing on the tower's very summit, the city spread beneath her like a glorious map. Flipping through, Clara saw that the shadow of war had not been permitted to darken the magazine's pages. The chief international crisis of the day was the fact that Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Joan Crawford were now being dressed by American designers. And a forthcoming movie called
Gone with the Wind
was to bring back the fashions of the American South. Was New York about to inherit Paris's crown? France was fighting back with a Tyrolean style from Mainbocher and blue tulle veils from Jeanne Lanvin. The only inkling that anything more serious might be on the horizon was the news that Schiaparelli was calling her latest vivid shade Maginot Line blue.

Clara stuffed the magazine into her bag and made her way across town. It had been a long train journey, and the narrow bunk in the sleeping car had allowed only minimal rest, but she wanted to walk. She was longing for the brief respite from Berlin and the chance to savor a different city. She wanted to drink in the sight of ladies taking coffee at marble tables and peer through shutters the color of verdigris into courtyards with ivy-covered fountains. To hear the church bells, with their charming lack of synchronicity, sound out across the rooftops and wander into the shadowy medieval spaces, glimmering with candles and thick with incense. She wanted to absorb everything from the birds roosting on the windowsills to the sun piercing the wrought-iron balustrade of the Pont Alexandre III, lacing the pavement with a dark tracery of shadow.

THE RUE LÉOPOLD-ROBERT LAY
in Paris's Fourteenth Arrondissement, between the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard du Montparnasse. The list of artists who frequented this district might have been especially composed to enrage the Führer. Picasso, Cocteau, Duchamp, Léger, Modigliani, and Dalí were locals, arguing all day in Le Dôme, La Rotonde, or La Coupole and carousing in the bars all night. Above the streets, rickety apartment buildings were packed with artists' studios, and beneath them lay the bone-stacked catacombs. It was as though Death stretched beneath the feet while Life danced above them.

She was early, so Clara stopped at a café called La Closerie des Lilas and sat inside, beside a dark wood and button-leather bar beneath a picture of Lenin. She ordered an apple tart, reveling in the rich, flaky pastry that melted in her mouth while observing the vignettes of Left Bank life all around. An elderly woman was passing with a baby carriage containing a minuscule dog with a ribbon in its hair. A flock of nuns, wimples lifting in the wind like somber gray wings, prayer books in hand, were on their way to mass. A toddler stretched out her hands at a falling leaf. Clara's eye was caught by a girl a few seats away who casually took out her compact and applied lip rouge from a pot with her little finger. It was a startling sight—no woman in Berlin would dare apply cosmetics in public.

Clara tried and failed to read a report in
Paris-Soir
about the imminent trial of Herschel Grynszpan, the young Jewish boy who had shot Ernst vom Rath, a German cultural attaché, in Paris the previous year, but it was hard to focus. Bit by bit, the tensions of life in Berlin fell away from her and she relaxed into the sensations of Paris. The French language, with its slick warp and weft and softly undulating vowels, flowed like silk around her.

She finished her coffee, paid, and walked the short distance to the Rue Léopold-Robert.

Number Eleven Rue Léopold-Robert was a dingy stucco, wooden-shuttered building with ornate balconies of latticed iron and a set of bells beside a peeling green door. Pushing the outer door open, Clara walked up three flights of a stone staircase with a twisted iron banister. The hall stank of urine and fish, and behind one of the doors a couple were carrying on a heated, uninhibited argument. When she reached apartment four, she found the door wide open, revealing a man half a head shorter than her, wearing a stained white shirt, horn-rimmed glasses, and red spotted cravat. He had a mass of gleaming dark hair, a beaky nose, and alert, intelligent eyes. He removed the Gitanes from his mouth long enough to say, “Mademoiselle Vine. I felt sure you would come. And so prompt. Would that all my models were so punctual.”

Clara stepped into an atelier filled with pure northern light that poured through the long windows and glanced off the parquet floor. A few pieces of furniture were assembled randomly as in some avant-garde art show—a chaise longue, a table, various lamp stands, and a bed, beside which stood a glass ashtray overflowing with stubs. A white screen lit by four spotlights covered one wall. The others were filled with giant blow-ups of Epstein's work; bodies striped with light and bisected by operatic shadows and a life-size torso draped in wet silk. Through a doorway she glimpsed a bidet and a basin with nickel taps, on the side of which hung a single woman's stocking. A Siamese cat on the windowsill stared at her with indifferent grandeur.

Epstein opened the shutters with a rattle, prompting the cat to bolt, and switched abruptly from French to German.

“I hope you don't mind coming here. I could use the
Vogue
studios on the Champs-Élysées, but this place is miraculously cheap. A hundred francs a month, and the only catch is I vacate it between five and seven every day so the landlord can sublet for amorous purposes. Please. Sit down.”

He gestured to the grubby chaise longue, and Clara sat uncertainly, still unsure what this meeting entailed. She knew Epstein would convey her message to Major Grand, but was the fashion feature in
Vogue
magazine genuine, or simply an elaborate façade?

“Are we actually going to do a photograph?”

“But of course! I love to shoot beautiful women. I live for elegance. It is a religion to me. The more elegance we have in the world, the less horror.”

He picked up a length of silk and draped it experimentally over her face, then removed it, muttered to himself, and disappeared for a moment behind a Chinese screen, reappearing with a piece of material trailing dark ribbons.

“Here, Miss Vine, is your costume.”

She gave a sharp intake of breath.

It was a corset. A piece of blush pink silk with inky black ribboned laces and stiff bones. The only corsets Clara had ever seen came from the Ufa costume department and were generally stained with old makeup and sweat from repeated use in historical epics, but this one was exquisitely stitched, like a piece of haute couture, and the silk shimmered in her hands.

“Just this?”

“Certainly. It will be subtle, of course. I like to strike a balance between modesty and eroticism. To both reveal and conceal. And this is not just any corset. Mainbocher showed it in this year's collections. Please.”

He motioned Clara behind the Chinese screen, where she took off her dress, folded it carefully, and wriggled into the corset. It was a sensation she had never had before, to be so transformed by a single item of clothing, to feel the material enfold her, cool and liquid against her skin.

When she emerged, Epstein fussed about, leaving the top of the corset unlaced, and then positioned Clara with her back towards him, her face inclined slightly away.

“You mean you're going to take a picture of my back?”

“Precisely. We don't want to see your face, delightful though it is. We only want a glimpse, half in shadow and half in the light. That seems appropriate, doesn't it? In the circumstances? And please don't move. Hold that position. I want you emerging from that corset like a rose from its bud.”

Not for the first time, Clara wondered how her sister had ever managed a career as a fashion mannequin. Acting came instinctively to her, but modeling seemed so much less natural. She could practically feel her limbs seize up in self-conscious stiffness. Epstein fiddled with his camera and tripod, muttering to himself all the while, the cigarette perched permanently in the corner of his mouth, dropping ashes.

Yet while Clara's body was rigid, her mind was in perpetual motion. She had arrived here with an important message to convey. She was going to stay in Germany in the event of war. Yet Thomas Epstein seemed not the least bit curious. How long would it be before he got to the substance of their meeting, rather than merely requiring her to sit still and not fidget?

Epstein continued photographing, issuing terse instructions to turn slightly or raise her shoulder and occasionally darting out from behind the tripod to twirl at the corset's laces or reposition Clara's arm.

“The corset is a miraculous garment, don't you think? There is something so enticing about it. It implies at once revelation and concealment. Freedom and restraint.”

Not to Joseph Goebbels, it wouldn't. God only knew what he would make of the photograph if he ever happened to see it. Being a Reich actress, the representative of the Reich Chamber of Culture, and posing for a French magazine dressed only in a corset could probably land her in jail. Only the previous year Goebbels had clamped down on actresses who portrayed themselves as “vamps.” Women like that were a poison to the German nation. Goebbels's favorite costume for an actress was an apron.

Clara consoled herself with the thought that the picture was only a ruse. It would probably never appear in
Vogue
at all. After all, what had Leni Riefenstahl said?
The September issue! That's ambitious. Who knows what will be happening when September comes?

To divert herself, Clara asked, “You're a Berliner too, aren't you, Herr Epstein?”

“My accent, of course. That part of the identity is impossible to erase. You're right, I was born in Dahlem. A wonderful artistic family. They gave me my first camera at the age of ten—a nine-by-twelve with an ultrarapid anastigmatic lens, since you ask—and I began my career at sixteen working as an assistant to Yva. Have you heard of her?”

“Everyone's heard of Yva.”

“She was a superb teacher. She encouraged me to follow my instincts, wherever they led me. Not to be crushed by the narrow morality of the brown plague. Unfortunately, that was almost my undoing.”

“How so?”

“I had been working for seven years. I was a confident young man, almost cocky you might say, and I thought no subject was beyond me, no matter what the Nazis might say. I had taken a portrait of a milk-white woman embracing a black man. Very sexy, you know? But it came to the attention of some Nazi, and I received a very unpleasant visit. I would have to leave Germany. Fortunately a doctor friend of mine had a clinic in Paris and agreed to exhibit some of my pictures on his wall, with the result that I received a call from
Vogue.
So I joined the exodus. I hope for the sake of her future Yva will do the same.”

He paused and peered around the camera, eyebrow raised. “But it's
your
future, Miss Vine, that concerns us now. Our friends tell me you have a decision to make.”

“I've made it.”

“In that case…”

He put down his camera and motioned Clara to dress.

“Have you finished? Did you get the photographs you want?”

“I did. Let's talk.”

The flirtatious jollity had vanished, to be replaced with a deadly seriousness. Suddenly, Clara could see what made British intelligence trust a person like Epstein with its secrets.

“You are familiar with the terms
live
and
dead letter box
?”

She nodded. Live letter boxes were places agents met to pass on messages. Stations, cafés, and tourist traps were popular, because it was easier to meet in them without attracting undue attention. Dead letter boxes, on the other hand, were locations known to both parties where messages could be left.