The Pursuit of Pearls (27 page)

T
heir meeting place was the bridge over the Spree just before Museum Island. It was, according to their heritage studies teacher, the place where the first settlers in Berlin, who were fishermen, had erected their wooden huts. Hedwig leaned for a moment, watching the canal as it glittered in bright rings beneath the setting sun, stirred into lazy arrows by the coal-heaped barges making their slow progress westwards. Above, the sky was as luminous and mottled as an oyster shell, and faint traces of linden blossom were carried on the breeze. It was a lovely spring evening, but Hedwig was sick with nerves.

She had barely slept since the evening of Jochen's revelations. Tonight was their regular meeting, but she had no idea what they might do or where they would go. Everything had changed now. She had hurried home after work and pulled on a flowered dress that Lottie had sewed up from one of her own designs. It clung to her curves a little too obviously for her taste, and Hedwig was only wearing it because Jochen had once remarked casually that he liked girls in flowered dresses. And because the memory of the beautiful brunette Sofie, whom Jochen admired, burned in her mind.

A hand on her shoulder made her jump, but the sight of him brought the reflex rush of excitement.

“So where are we going?”

“Somewhere interesting. Up west.”

“Where exactly?”

“I'll tell you when we get there.”

“Is it…to do with what you told me? The other night?”

He grinned. “Patience, Hedy! It's a secret.”

On the tram Jochen seemed lost in contemplation, so she stared out of the window at the glimmering shop windows and the commuters in their office outfits hurrying home from work. How foolish she had been to assume that Jochen was planning to propose! Perhaps it was for the best. She thought of her mother savagely scrubbing, her father looking her up and down in that way he had. They already thought badly enough of Jochen; God knows what they would think if they knew what he was really doing. Since Lottie's murder her life seemed to be spooling out of control, with one terrible surprise following another. She desperately hoped that this evening would not be the next.

She waited until the tram had reached the smart boulevards of Wilmersdorf, and they had disembarked, before she spoke again. Jochen moved fast, hands jammed in his pockets, as if propelled by some urgent inner force.

“I still don't know where we're going.”

“We're going to see a fortune-teller.”

Hedwig so wanted to believe him. It was such a wonderful, imaginative idea, and it might have been planned expressly to delight her. Numerous friends had visited fortune-tellers to investigate their romantic futures. Palm reading and tarot cards were all the rage. Irna Wolter had visited a psychic with her fiancé before they married and had learned they would enjoy a long, happy marriage, blessed with five children. Hedwig had not consulted a psychic herself before, but she never missed her horoscope and she kept a Winterhilfswerk donation pin in the shape of her star sign—Pisces—in her lapel. She had bought one for Jochen, too—Aries—but she had never seen him wear it.

“I thought you didn't believe in fortune-tellers.”

She couldn't keep the excitement out of her voice. Her stars in that month's edition of
Der Zenit
promised dramatic developments in her love life.

“I believe in this one. Her forecasts are impressively accurate.”

After a few minutes they reached a building in Pariser Strasse, the kind that Hedwig sometimes fantasized about inhabiting but had never set foot in. It was a five-story stucco block with fancy scrollwork round a doorframe. A lot of smart houses were having swastikas set into their lintels, but here the plaster was molded into a pretty confection of leaves and squirrels. Next to it a buffed brass plaque read,
PSYCHIC
CONSULTATIONS
.
FIRST
FLOOR
.

The door was opened by a maid, who ushered them into a front room with a vaguely Eastern air, bestowed by drawn tasseled curtains, fringed red lamps, and rich Turkish carpets. Around the room, low tables were clustered with the accessories of the trade—crystal balls, tarot cards, and a china phrenological head segmented into areas with labels like
CAUTION
,
SECRECY
,
ELOQUENCE
, and
ARTISTRY
. A pungent odor hung in the air. Hedwig was quite used to homes that smelled strongly, but unlike the cabbage intercut with rancid fat that perfumed her family's apartment, this scent was exotic and mysterious. Nutmeg, cinnamon, and frankincense, perhaps. Like the incense in a Catholic church or the ancient smells that emanated from the library at the Ahnenerbe.

The door opened, and a short, commanding figure swept in, wearing a cerise kimono-style silk jacket and a beaded cap. She must have been in her late sixties, with a crooked nose and kinked hair, her dark caramel eyes heavily lined in kohl, and her makeup thickly applied. Exactly like a fortune-teller was supposed to look, thought Hedwig, enthralled.

“This is Hedwig,” said Jochen brusquely. “Hedwig, this is Frau Annie Krauss.”

The
Annie Krauss! Everyone had heard of her. All the top people—film actors and singers and sports people—were said to consult Annie Krauss. There had been a feature on her work in
Der Zenit
—“Madame Krauss Prognosticates,” with a picture of her craning over a crystal ball wearing a fringed headband, and reports of some of her predictions, mostly picking winners at the Hoppegarten racecourse. It was impossible to get an appointment without booking months in advance.

Frau Krauss approached Hedwig and seized her hand. There was an unexpected strength in her stringy claw, and Hedwig wondered if the old lady could discern her future merely from the faint impressions of lines on her palm. Frau Krauss squinted up at Hedwig, as if reading the secrets of her soul.

“Good evening, my dear. I've heard about you. I'm so glad to meet you.”

A beady glance up and down. Yet again Hedwig regretted wearing the clingy dress.

“I'm honored to meet you too, Frau Krauss. I've always wanted to.”

“Hmm.” The old woman turned away slightly, allowing Hedwig to whisper to Jochen, “Is this about telling our futures?”

He shrugged, enigmatically. “In a manner of speaking.”

F
rom the pavement tables of the Café Kranzler it was possible to see a line of people stretching most of the way round Pariser Platz to the doors of the American embassy. The queue for visas began before dawn and would still be there at dusk. Not that there was anything interesting about a queue in Berlin. Waiting was a way of life. Along with the ordinary queues for bread and meat and vegetables, there were long, snaking queues for train tickets and visas, and foreigners crammed the stations like walkers desperate to get home before the first drops of a storm arrived. A pair of hard-faced soldiers had been deputed to guard the American embassy queue, but no one seemed remotely likely to step out of line. Disorder was not something they could afford. Occasionally a secretary bearing a tray of tea and sandwiches moved along, pouring cups and asking people if they required sugar. Their faces registered astonishment at the young American's query. It had been so long since they were considered not just names and numbers but humans, with preferences and opinions, even about how much sugar they took in their tea.

A few hundred yards away, Clara was waiting for Mary Harker. She had no idea why Mary had asked to meet, but she was glad of the diversion. The previous evening she had reached into the jar of Melitta coffee beans in Ursula's kitchen and retrieved the derringer, wrapped in a piece of cloth. She had held it for a moment, turning it over and over, wondering if this tiny object would be capable of such a momentous act. Even now she could feel the shiny menace of the pistol imprinted on her palm. Seeing Mary, if only for a few hours, would distract her from the task she was about to undertake.

Mary arrived late, wrenching off her battered felt hat and running her hand through her hair so that bits of it stood up vertically in a tangle of straw.

“I'm trying to calm down.” She threw herself dramatically on a seat, lit a cigarette, and inhaled furiously. “I've just been expelled from a press conference.”

“Not another one.”

“I know. There are two press conferences a day now, so I have twice as much opportunity to get ejected. I wouldn't bother, but with everything moving so fast, you can't afford to miss one in case they let slip anything important.”

“And did they?”

“No such luck. It was ‘Good News About Employment.' The usual mixture of boasts and lies. They said full employment has finally been achieved in Germany.”

“I'm guessing that's not true.”

“I felt obliged to point out that if there was full employment, it was only because all the workers are now producing armaments. Before I knew it, two thugs had frog-marched me out of the door.”

“And you let this upset you?” asked Clara incredulously.

“Don't be silly. I've been thrown out of more press conferences than I've had hot wurst. No, that's not why I wanted to see you. It's about your Faith and Beauty girl. Take a look at this.”

She pushed across the table the latest edition of the
Völkischer Beobachter,
the ultraloyal Nazi newspaper. Clara glanced at the headline:
INVESTIGATION
CONTINUES
INTO
SLAIN
GIRL
. There was nothing new in the report except that it was accompanied by a fresh photograph of Lottie Franke. All the previous shots had shown her wearing her regulation Faith and Beauty outfit, but this was a large, glamorous image of Lottie dressed in a provocatively low-cut dress, eyes smoldering at the camera, one leg propped vampishly on a chair. In the upper right-hand corner was the photographer credit:
Yva.

“What does this photograph say?” demanded Mary.

“That she modeled her own designs. She was artistic.”

“Nope.” Mary thrust the paper away, as if disgusted.

“A picture's worth a thousand words, right? And I know how newspaper picture desks work. If they have a choice of photographs to illustrate a piece—and there seem to have been a hundred pictures of Lottie Franke—then they'll choose the one that transmits the correct message. Most of the
Völkischer Beobachter
might have been dictated by Goebbels himself, and this photograph is not an accident. It says Lottie was
not
the archetypal German maiden. She was not the pure Faith and Beauty girl everyone imagines. She was different, original, a little out of the ordinary. In other words, this girl got what was coming to her.”

“She deserved to die?” Clara was appalled.

“Pretty much.”

“But why?”

Mary frowned. “That's what I don't understand. For some reason the investigation is changing course. Did I mention that they have a suspect now?”

Clara clattered her cup back into the saucer. “Mary! You left it until now to tell me?”

“When I was leaving the Propaganda Ministry this afternoon I bumped into one of the few sane press deputies. He told me they've arrested a man. They're announcing it tomorrow.”

“That changes everything.”

“No it doesn't. Because it's a Pole. If you believe the police department—which of course I don't—Poles have been responsible for most of the crimes in the Reich for the past three months. Whoever this man is, he didn't do it. But it shows that they're tired of the story now. The police are no longer trying to solve the murder. If they can't tar Lottie as a promiscuous eccentric, then they'll pin her murder on a Pole. I'm afraid, Clara, it means they can no longer be bothered to find the right man.”

“Or they don't want to.”

Clara felt again that intuition that had dawned at the Faith and Beauty home: that Lottie's murder was not the act of a lone madman. That it had roots in something far beyond the opportunistic sexual murder of a girl in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it was impossible to explain, and besides, Mary was rushing impatiently on.

“Also, Clara, I wanted to say goodbye. I'm leaving town for a while.”

“Just because you were expelled from a press conference?”

“Much better reason than that.” Mary grinned. “I'm making a trip to England because I've had the strangest request. Jack Kennedy, the son of the American ambassador in London, wants to meet me. He thinks I might be able to give his father a better idea of what the Nazis are like up close.”

Clara smiled. “I bumped into Jack Kennedy when I was in Paris. But I never thought he'd ask you to lecture his father.”

Mary reached over and gripped her arm. “I might have guessed it was you. Thank you, Clara. It's an incredible opportunity. And believe me, I won't hold back. I owe you.”

Clara hesitated…“In that case, there is something you can do for me. There's a girl, Esther Goldblatt. She's fourteen. Jewish. She reminds me of myself at that age. She desperately needs to get out of Germany, and she has a visa for America, but it will take years before her number comes up. She could get an exit visa to travel to England, but only if she has a sponsor there who is prepared to adopt her.”

“That's quite a hurdle.”

“I think I know the right person.”

Clara reached for her notebook. “Here's her address and telephone number.”

Mary looked down at the paper. “Angela Mortimer? Are you serious? I would have thought your sister was the last person on earth to contemplate adopting a little Jewish girl!”

“That was my first instinct, but there's more to Angela than you think. Her views may be reprehensible, but she's a decent person at heart. She was very motherly to me when I was a truculent teenager. And she has no children to mother, so it's perfect. Tell her I'll write and explain but she needs to register as a sponsor as soon as possible. She must contact Bloomsbury House in Great Russell Street. It's the headquarters of the Jewish Refugees Committee. Oh, and something else.” Clara reached up to her neck and unclasped Steffi's pearls. “Take these, sell them for the best price you can, and give Angela the money. Tell her it's for Esther.”

She watched as Mary stowed the pearls carefully in her bag.

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

But Clara knew if anyone was going to need luck, it would be her.