The Pursuit of Pearls (40 page)

“We've met, yes. But it was a while ago.”

“Diana's a Mosley now, of course. She married her husband last year in our apartment in Hermann-Goering-Strasse.”

Magda's face softened as she recalled the occasion. “They wanted a quiet ceremony, you see, because Mosley's first wife had only recently died. So they decided to marry here in Berlin, and the Führer graciously agreed to attend. Diana wore golden silk. Unity and I were her witnesses. Afterwards we drove out here for lunch, down by the lake, and my little girls presented her with posies of wildflowers. We gave them a twenty-volume set of the works of Goethe. It was so romantic.”

At this, it was as if Magda realized she had confided something she shouldn't have. As if she had stepped into some territory that had been declared forever out of bounds. A blush bloomed momentarily in the pallor of her complexion, and her whole body stiffened.

“Anyhow, they're coming over for the day. I had planned a whole day of sightseeing, only…” She hesitated momentarily, as if uncertain about imparting any further information. Clara concealed her curiosity with careful sips of scalding tea.

“…Only I've had to cancel a local outing I had planned for them. I had hoped to show them around the new Bride School just down the road from here, but unfortunately there's been an incident. Well, a bit more shocking than that, actually.” Magda flicked an eye towards the door as though the maid might be eavesdropping. She lowered her voice. “One of the brides was found murdered.”

“Murdered?” The word rang harshly in the tranquil, teatime air.

“Yes. In the garden, apparently. A girl named Anna Hansen. Terrible, isn't it? It's so sad for her fiancé.” Magda grimaced in annoyance. “And rather inconvenient for us. The visit can't possibly go ahead. It's obviously cast a cloud. It wouldn't be the right atmosphere.”

Anna Hansen.
For a second, the name snagged in Clara's mind. Then she realized she used to know a girl of that name, though it could hardly be the same one. The Anna Hansen that Clara knew was an easygoing bottle blonde from Munich who would be more at home in a negligee than an SS Hausfrau's apron. Indeed, when Clara first met her, she hadn't been wearing any clothes at all. Anna had been a life model for the artist Bruno Weiss, whom Clara had met through Helga Schmidt, the small-time actress who had been the first person to befriend Clara when she arrived in the city in 1933. After Helga died that year, Bruno and Clara had become good friends, and Clara would often drop in to his Pankow studio to watch him working and bring him meals he might otherwise forget to eat. Since Helga's death, Bruno had been working with feverish intensity, his canvases becoming bloodier and more grotesque, his hatred for the regime erupting in livid clots of paint. It was on such a visit one day last year, bearing rolls and some sausage, that Clara had first met Anna. Her naked form had been arranged obligingly on Bruno's crusty velvet sofa, her legs splayed and a cigarette dangling from a long amber holder in her hand. She had the flexible, muscular limbs that came from a dancer's training. The idea of Bruno's Anna Hansen marrying an SS officer was too incongruous for words.

The inconvenient death of the Reich bride seemed to have caused a palpable chill in the room. Magda rose with unexpected haste and clacked across the parquet floor. “Anyway, Fräulein Vine, don't let me keep you any longer.”

She held the door open.

“The party will be next Saturday at seven
P.M
. Only twenty or so people. Is there”—she hesitated—“a guest you might like to bring? A fiancé perhaps?”

“No, there's no one.”

“Then we shall be most pleased to see just you.”

With a peremptory nod Magda disappeared across the hall and up the stairs.

Clara walked back to her car, her mind working furiously. She found herself unexpectedly trembling. An invitation, after all this time? Magda had said it was her idea, but could it be, really? Clara tried to analyze the request. There was nothing especially strange about the Goebbelses entertaining English visitors. There were plenty of high-ranking Britons arriving in Berlin, even now, when Germany's march into the Rhineland and Hitler's backing of Franco's faction in Spain had opened the eyes of most British people to the intentions of his regime. Last year, during the Olympics, Berlin had been full of tourists, and last month's Nuremberg rally had attracted another wave of politicians and dignitaries. Yet much as the Nazi elite enjoyed meeting them, conversation could be strained. The truth was, the British were lazy about learning the language. Many of them had nothing more than a few phrases picked up from a Baedeker's guide to help them. They could order a beer in a restaurant and find their way to a nightclub, but that was little use when discussing the extremely delicate matter of friendship between Germany and England in an increasingly difficult international situation.

As she backed the car out of the drive, Clara told herself that her role would be simply to chat with those guests and perform a little polite translation to oil the conversational wheels; she would be no more than an accessory, a party decoration, like those peacocks. Her task would last a couple of hours, at most. How difficult could that be?

Making her way back around the single road that skirted the island, Clara craned her head to glimpse the houses she passed. Most had fences and forbidding gates, or signs announcing that they were patrolled by dogs and security guards. Others had long drives, screened with trees. Between the branches she caught glimpses of handsome, turn-of-the-century villas, with balconies and impressive porches and well-kept lawns. It hadn't taken long for the occupants of this slice of paradise, the Rothschilds and Israels and Goldschmidts, to yield to the offers of high-ranking Nazis and pack up their belongings. One villa had been purchased by the Reich Chancellery and reserved for Hitler's own use. Another was occupied by Hitler's doctor, Theo Morell. Albert Speer, the Führer's young architect, had been seen house hunting on Schwanenwerder, too. It was hard to connect such men with this idyllic place. Now murder, too, had tainted this paradise.

It was fifteen minutes before Clara's Opel Olympia passed through the dense Grunewald, reached the leafy avenues of Wilmersdorf, and moved along Königsallee into the clanging bustle of Kurfürstendamm, Berlin's smartest shopping street, known to all as the Ku'damm. The noise was always what one noticed first at the heart of Berlin. The high-decibel blaring of car horns, the screech of brakes, the wheedling calls of the newspaper boys. Then the smell, the fumes of traffic and hot oil, the spicy scent of a pretzel cart or a wurst stall. Normally the pavements outside the fashionable cafés were crowded with customers, sipping coffee and watching life go by. Today, however, the tables were mostly empty. The cold of the past few days had reminded everyone that another bone-chilling Berlin winter was fast approaching, and shoppers passed quickly, huddled into their coats and scarfs.

At the junction with Wilmersdorfer Strasse, Clara braked as a traffic policeman stepped forward with his hand extended to allow a detachment of soldiers to pass. There was always some kind of military procession these days. Either it was troops or a formation of the Hitler Youth or the BDM, the League of German Girls, with their flaxen braids and navy skirts. The storm troopers, the SS, or the Hitler Jugend, all with their different uniforms and insignia. War was in the air. Even the collecting tins and the banners talked of the “War on Hunger and Cold” as though the most charitable of enterprises must be undertaken with military aggression. There was a stirring of something just over the horizon that people preferred to ignore, and pedestrians, looking forward to the weekend, kept their heads down, their faces as blank as the asphalt underfoot. They hurried on, hoping that no motorcade of Party top brass would be following the soldiers, requiring everyone to halt and raise a respectful right arm. The Führer supposedly trained with an arm expander so he could perform his own salute for two hours without flagging, but most people found even a few minutes a trial. Clara wondered where the soldiers might be heading. These days, that was all anyone was thinking.

She shivered as she recalled the British newspapers she had flicked through that summer. The dispatch in
The Times,
informing the world how a special German flying unit, formed to support the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, had bombed the ancient Basque town of Guernica. For more than three hours Junkers and Heinkel bombers unloaded bombs and incendiaries, while fighter aircraft plunged low to machine-gun those of the civilian population who had sought refuge in the fields. The town was razed to the ground. Hundreds of women and children were killed. Three small bomb cases stamped with the German Imperial Eagle had proved to the world that the official German position of neutrality was a sham. Looking up now at the bone-white sky, Clara tried to imagine the bombers screaming out of the stillness of a spring morning, the terror of the people fleeing as they were strafed from the air. Then she pictured the same happening in England, Hitler's bombers raining their deadly payload on the House of Commons or Westminster Abbey, or Ponsonby Terrace, where her father lived. On Angela's home in Chelsea, or farther out in the quiet suburbs, in Hackney and Greenwich and Barnes. On the Wren churches and Nelson's Column and the National Gallery. She imagined the air-raid sirens, the women and children hurrying out of their houses, the fighter planes diving low to finish off those stumbling figures who had escaped the incendiaries. The horizon lit by the red glow of a thousand fires, gas bombs sending coils of poison into family homes. She shook her head. That could never happen.

As she waited for the traffic policeman to clear the road, she looked across the street, to where a crane was poised like a giant bird, pecking at another excavation. Berlin these days was like a patient under constant operation. Every street was subject to extracting, filling, and fixing. You couldn't move for heaps of bricks, planks laid over holes in the earth, and skeletal steel structures rising into the sky. Everywhere there was the roar of cement mixers and the rattle of drills, erecting the monumental Neoclassical buildings deemed suitable for the new world capital of Germania. There was something grand and futile about these buildings of the Führer, Clara decided. They were like an empty boast, designed to make human beings feel like ants in their long passages and echoing halls. Goering's Air Ministry had seven kilometers of corridors apparently, and it was said that for his centerpiece Hitler wanted Albert Speer to build a dome that rose a thousand feet into the sky, capable of holding 180,000 people. The Führer had also ordered Speer to equip all government buildings with bulletproof doors and shutters, just in case the people should ever lose their enthusiasm for his grand plans.

The Scent of Secrets

The Pursuit of Pearls

J
ANE
T
HYNNE
was born in Venezuela and educated in London. She graduated from Oxford University with a degree in English and joined the BBC as a television director. She has also worked at
The Sunday Times
,
The Daily Telegraph,
and
The Independent
and appears regularly as a broadcaster on television and radio. She is the author of five previous novels. She is married to the writer Philip Kerr. They have three children and live in London.

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