The Pursuit of Pearls (5 page)

Like fire behind ice.

“Alles in ordnung.”

Gracelessly, the man returned her identity card, and she stuffed it back in her bag.

She walked on, remembering Mary Harker's warning.
We have one minder each. They've been appointed to keep an eye on us.
Might that apply not only to foreign journalists but to actresses as well? She thought again of the man in the lobby of her apartment block: the lean, expressionless face, the trench coat belted loosely, the way he avoided her eyes.

In the fortnight before he had disappeared, Leo had talked a lot about the techniques of espionage. One afternoon he had told her about a list that all agents were being trained to memorize, to be used if they believed they were being followed.

Number One: look out for the unobtrusive
. A shadow could be anyone. The young woman who clicked her painted fingernails on the counter beside you in a shop. The newspaper seller who slipped you a friendly remark each day with your change. The runner at the studio, or the parking attendant who joked about how he would always save the best space for you. Or a head-scarfed Frau, like the one a few steps behind, gray-skinned and footsore, weighed down by the kilo of potatoes in her shopping basket.

Number Two: watch for anyone walking at a steady pace
. A shadow would be neither nonchalant nor too purposeful, though as far as vehicles went, the opposite applied.

Number Three: listen for a car that moves either too fast or too slow.

If surveillance was suspected, there was
Number Four: change your appearance
. Find a fresh coat, ditch your jacket, remove a hat. The slightest change could help to evade detection.

But whereas it was simple to put on a head scarf, or abandon a briefcase, a mustache could not easily be shaved off, nor hair color disguised. Thus
Number Five: check for distinguishing features
. A shadow rarely had time to change his shoes. There was also
Number Six: listen for what you don't hear.
And if surveillance was certain, there was
Number Seven: stick to public places.
Finally, in case of arrest or capture,
Number Eight: stay calm. Don't react instinctively.

There were a couple of other points on the list, and Leo had made Clara commit them to memory and recite it back to him. “That list will keep you safe, Clara,” he'd told her. “It'll be more use to you than any creed.”

That was one relief about the trip she was about to make. In London, there was no chance of being followed. And it would not be the Gestapo she had to worry about but Captain Miles Fitzalan, whoever he might turn out to be.

O
f all the beautiful places in Berlin, could there be any lovelier than the sunlit drawing room of the Faith and Beauty community building, with its marzipan-yellow walls, icing-sugar plaster whipped like a meringue, and tall windows propped open to allow a freshening waft of pine from the woods beyond? Outside, a flock of hens pecked in the shade of the orchard and horses were being saddled up for riding lessons. A group of rowers were preparing for an outing to the lake, and on the lawn, two girls in face masks were taking instruction from the fencing master, their bodies as quick and flexible as the sleek silver foils they wielded. The quiet of the morning was punctuated by the solid, comforting
clunk
of the grandfather clock, and the faint scrape of a violin issued from the music room on the other side of the house. It was impossible to imagine that near this idyllic place just a few days earlier, a crumpled body had been found beneath a heap of leaves.

When Hedwig Holz first saw the Faith and Beauty home, she was openmouthed with amazement. She had grown up in a drab apartment, with nothing but a window box to tend and a dank cobblestone courtyard below. Even though their apartment was slightly better than their neighbors' on account of her father's managerial job, it had still taken weeks to accustom herself to the refinement of the Faith and Beauty home. When she told her parents about the classes in Art, home décor, fashion design, needlework, flower arranging, and conversation, her mother could barely contain her amazement.
Conversation!
Who needed classes in that?

Hedwig felt much the same about Art. Sitting in front of her easel, she sighed, squinted at the life model, made some further experimental cross-hatching, then rubbed out the face she had drawn. Already a murky patch testified to the number of times the sketch had been erased—the model was beginning to look like something from one of those old horror films,
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
starring Conrad Veidt, with nothing but a shadowy void where her features should be. Hedwig dreaded the moment Herr Fritzl, the art master, turned up to linger at her easel, twirling his mustache while he tried to think of something constructive to say. Their portraits were supposed to mirror the correct proportions of the Nordic form—every figure must have broad shoulders, a long body, and slender hands—but Hedwig's sketch could have been straight out of Grimms' fairy tales.

The Saturday life drawing class had been Lottie's idea. Hedwig didn't have an artistic bone in her body and would gladly have signed up for skiing, rowing, even high-board diving rather than humiliate herself with Art. Her younger brothers would actually beg her not to sketch them. Hedwig's father, a stolid production line manager at the AEG engineering works, thought art training, like everything else on the Faith and Beauty curriculum, was a lot of effete nonsense, but he deferred to her mother, who had ambitions for her only daughter. Privately Herr Holz told Hedwig to concentrate on her job and think about her promotion prospects. If indeed she had time for promotion, before marriage and motherhood came along and put an end to all that.

Hedwig agreed. She had never imagined getting a job as a librarian, and she loved it. Although her most taxing duty involved looking interested while doing very little, she enjoyed sitting at her desk, greeting visitors, and being the only female in the building. She could think of a thousand better ways of spending her weekends than attending Faith and Beauty art classes, but Lottie had set her heart on it.

It was agonizing to think that Lottie had sat in this class only two weeks ago, sketching costumes, her bold, confident lines delineating impossibly glamorous women, their outfits carefully annotated in her flowing handwriting. Hedwig could picture her now, high, plucked eyebrows arched above aquamarine eyes, chin jutted forward as if she was born to it all. As if, indeed, it was all slightly beneath her.

Hedwig knew Lottie only wanted company, yet where Lottie was concerned she could never say no. Faith and Beauty girls were encouraged to think of themselves as a spiritual sisterhood, but Lottie was more like an ordinary sister. When they were children their two families had sometimes taken holidays together in the countryside outside Berlin, and Hedwig and Lottie had shared a room. Hedwig recalled Lottie's grave face, reciting German poetry or expounding on her ambitions for life, requiring only that Hedwig be a devoted listener. And when Hedwig had confided her most precious memory, of the first time a man kissed her, Lottie had burst into peals of most unsisterly laughter.

Sister or not, she was dead now, and Hedwig felt an utter desolation.

The murder had sent shock waves through the Faith and Beauty community, but although no one could talk of anything else, they were forbidden to talk about it at all. That was useless when it was all over the newspapers and a pair of steel-helmeted soldiers were shuffling their feet on permanent guard outside the front gate. A new set of regulations had been hastily formulated for the girls. Shooting was curtailed for as long as the killer was at large and replaced with rowing. No girl was permitted to walk alone the short distance from the Griebnitzsee S-Bahn through the forest, though that was quite unnecessary advice because being alone was frowned on. The Party disapproved of solitude on the grounds that faithful citizens would always prefer communal life, and privacy in all its forms was strongly proscribed for Faith and Beauty girls.

Hedwig stared out the window and wondered if her mother would agree to her leaving now. Etta Holz adored the idea of her only daughter being here. Faith and Beauty training gave German girls such an advantage. No going to the Nuremberg rally and getting pregnant by the first Hitler Youth you encountered! Hedwig would be invited to parties with senior Party members. She would be cultivated and polished and pass into the top echelons of society with ease.
Once you've finished you'll hold dinner parties for all the top SS men and you'll be able to talk about…
Here Frau Holz had paused, having no idea what top SS men might possibly talk about.
The Merry Widow,
she'd finished lamely, recalling the Führer's favorite operetta. “It will pay for itself, you'll see.”

But the real reason that her mother favored the Faith and Beauty curriculum was that it meant her daughter would grow out of Jochen.

Jochen Falke did not have the kind of looks deemed handsome among Hedwig's friends. His high, Slavic cheekbones and skinny frame were far from the muscular athletes modeled by the Führer's favorite sculptor, Arno Breker. But he had lively hazel eyes that missed nothing and a swagger about him that reflected his inner confidence.

He was an artist, too—in a way. He worked at an art manufacturing plant in Kreuzberg, a humdrum place that carried out all forms of printing and publishing, as well as commercial artwork, signs, and advertising. But the real money-spinner was merchandising the Führer. Hitler souvenirs were big business. Birthday figurines, postcards, ashtrays, medallions, posters, cocktail forks, and bottle stoppers. There was a whole variety of jewelry, and cameo brooches were especially popular because every woman wanted her Führer close to her heart. Jochen's specialty was pictures. On a good day he could reproduce Adolf Hitler a hundred times over.

“What takes the Fräulein's fancy?” he would ask with a laugh, parodying an unctuous shop assistant. “We have Hitler in a gilt frame, Hitler with children, Hitler at the Berghof, Hitler with Bismarck, or would Fräulein prefer the Führer's hands alone?”

He worked with a photograph in front of him, softening the nose and making the eyes larger, adding a tint to the cheeks.
Just doing a little cosmetic surgery
. He brought one back for Hedwig's mother, who hung it proudly opposite her bed. Hedwig thought seeing the Führer's scowl like that last thing at night would give her nightmares, but her parents seemed to like it.

She looked up to see Herr Fritzl approaching. He was bound to say something uncomplimentary about her efforts. Last time he'd claimed Hedwig's approach smacked dangerously of Degenerate art, which was tantamount to accusing her of treason. Apparently in the Weimar period Berlin had been a hell pit of sexual depravity, and obscene nudes by Degenerate painters like Otto Dix had corrupted the morals of the entire nation.

The thought of Otto Dix's nudes only reminded Hedwig of Lottie, her graceful gymnast's limbs askew in the clumsy crush of death. She pictured the diaphanous wings of flies glittering like cut coal in the air above her friend's body. What had Lottie ever done to deserve that fate?

Hedwig picked up her charcoal stick and turned back to the horror on her easel, but found she could no longer see it because of the tears slipping down her face.

O
n London's King's Road there was a queue to collect gas masks from Chelsea Town Hall. Whole families were waiting, the children jumping up and down, wriggling with excitement, the parents, anxiety etched on their faces, keeping up appearances because they were lining up alongside their cooks and housemaids. One little boy kept singing “There's going to be a war!” until he was abruptly hushed by his father. Those who were leaving, already issued with masks, were rather more subdued. Now that they had had their first taste of the acrid rubber contraptions with their bleary glass panels at the front and straps fastened behind the head, perhaps the dangers of the future seemed suddenly more real.

Watching from the top deck of the number 11 bus, however, Clara was transported to the past. She had a vision of herself on this same bus with her mother, sitting in exactly the same spot—front row of the top deck—Helene Vine upright and proper, handbag balanced on her knee, and Clara herself, a small simulacrum, pressed warmly against her mother's side. Angela, meanwhile, sat aloof across the aisle. Clara had always been her mother's daughter—the only one of them named for a distant German ancestor rather than a resolutely English relation—and the only child who resembled her, too. Angela, with her honey-blond hair and long, gangly legs, was already exhibiting the first coltish inklings of the glamorous model she would become.

Now Clara was alone, in a mac and a printed silk scarf with a copy of
Picture Post
unread on her knee. “Miss Penelope Dudley-Ward, the English heroine of the London-Paris–New York hit
French Without Tears,
wears a rose, turquoise, and gold brocade lamé jacket and a full satin skirt in a deep rosy red.”

The bus halted before men hauling sheets of corrugated iron for bomb shelters. Clara wondered if Angela had a shelter of her own, and if she did, whether she would ever need to use it. It was hard to imagine the elegant Angela shivering in a damp construction of earth and corrugated iron that flooded when it rained, or cramped in a basement, with a flashlight and a book. Angela liked a pink gin and a rubber of bridge in the evenings. Listening to Cole Porter at the Café de Paris or visiting the cellar of the Embassy Club in Bond Street, where until recently the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson had danced the quickstep on the tiny dance floor.

Clara had an impulsive, fervent desire to get off the bus and visit her sister, but she knew that was impossible. How would she explain this sudden appearance in London? What cover could she credibly construct that Angela would not instantly penetrate? Despite her long practice in controlling impulsive urges, it still took an almost physical strength for Clara to stay in her seat and not dash down the winding stairs and jump off the back platform of the bus.

After six years away, she scanned the familiar surroundings as though hunting for changes in the face of a long-lost friend. There were the same advertisements for Wrigley's Spearmint gum, Ovaltine, and Eno fruit salts, and Peter Jones had changed its Victorian red-brick frontage to a sleekly modernized tower of glass and steel. But now its windows were pasted with crisscrossed strips of brown paper to protect against potential bomb blast, the curbstones had been painted white, and sandbags, exuding a smell of damp jute, were shored against the side of every building. A giant recruitment advertisement for the RAF, “Salute to adventure!” towered beside Sloane Square Tube, and a group of young men, subjects of the first wave of conscription, sailed past in a National Service truck. There were other changes, too, Clara could not help noticing. Women wore little hats tipped slightly forward and to one side. Jackets were more boxy and defined, coats had puffed shoulders, shoes were tightly laced, and the whole female silhouette had become harder and more definite, as though fashion itself was bracing for what was to come.

Disembarking at Westminster, she made her way across Parliament Square, past Methodist Central Hall, and along the elegant Georgian terraces of Queen Anne's Gate. Bright, luminous bursts of laburnum and wisteria blossom hung over sun-warmed walls. Through the pellucid blue sky, the bells of Westminster Abbey marked four o'clock. The abbey's bone-white frontage of pleated stone was draped with a veil of soot, and placards along the railings announced that it was now open day and night as part of a “Vigil for Peace.” Passing a poster for
The Spy in Black,
Clara was startled to see the movie starred Conrad Veidt. Just a few months ago she had passed the venerable German actor in the corridors of the Ufa studios. Now he was established in a new life and a new career in England.

It could happen to her, too.

As she walked, she felt her body tense and her shoulders knot in the familiar brace. It was impossible to shake the tension that clenched her stomach. She thought for a moment it might be the dizzy rush of nostalgia, set off by everything from the pillar boxes and the plane trees to the copper pennies with the king's head on them. Even the newspaper seller outside St. James's Park underground station, advertising the first sight of the new pandas at London Zoo, prompted a yearning for the city she had not realized she missed so much. In reality, though, Clara knew it was only nervous anticipation of what this meeting might bring.

THE ST. ERMIN'S HOTEL
was a shabby, late Victorian, red-brick mansion block in Caxton Street, set back from the road and only a few hundred yards from 54 Broadway, where the Secret Intelligence Service was based. On a quiet afternoon it was the last place on earth one would associate with espionage. The lobby, all tartan-trimmed upholstery and dusty carpet, was hushed and gloomy. Watercolors of the Lake District hung alongside a painting of the king, and the smell of congealed vegetables and floor polish exuded a distilled essence of Englishness. A couple of ladies in hats and fur capes taking tea at a side table were the only sign of life.

Clara hesitated. It had not occurred to her until that moment how exactly she would make contact with the mysterious Captain Miles Fitzalan, who had invited her to his fictitious ball. She approached a girl reading a copy of
Woman's Weekly
behind the mahogany reception desk.

“Is there a Captain Fitzalan staying here?”

The girl gave an insultingly perfunctory smile. “Can I ask who wants him?”

“Miss Clara Vine.”

Putting down her magazine, the receptionist reached wearily for the telephone. “They're fifth floor.”

“Thank you.”

“The lifts only go up to fourth, but if you press the button to the left, it'll take you all the way up.”

Clara emerged from the lift to find a long, dingy office partitioned by panes of frosted glass and plywood, filled with men in pin-striped suits lounging at their desks. A fug of cigarette smoke hung in the air, lit by broad shafts of sunlight penetrating the murky windows. Though she was dressed quietly enough, in a skirt of houndstooth check, a blouse with scalloped collar, and a small pearl necklace, curious eyes swiveled immediately towards her. One man, with rumpled hair and tie at half-mast, one ear pressed to the telephone, gave her a wink, but Clara barely had time to look around her before an imposing figure with a scarlet carnation in his buttonhole approached.

“Miss Vine. So pleased you could come. What do you think of our offices? None too decorative, but very handy for clubs and so on.” Pumping her hand, he detected her incomprehension and added, “I'm sorry. You don't know me from Adam. I'm Major Grand. Lawrence Grand.”

“Clara Vine.”

“Precisely. Please follow me.”

Anyone who did not know that Lawrence Grand had recently been assigned from the army could have detected it instantly from his ramrod bearing, his tanned complexion, and the military exactitude of his pencil mustache. Clara recognized his type immediately. He wore his politeness like a uniform, buttoned up against the possibility of revealing the merest snippet of extraneous information.

Striding ahead, he led the way to a corner office with a view of budding plane trees and a line of pigeons shuffling along the soot-dappled rooftops of Westminster.

“Do sit down, Miss Vine. Smoke?”

“Thank you.” She took the proffered Senior Service, and he slid across his desk a cut-glass ashtray, studded with ocher stains like pollen in a lily.

“Who are all those people?”

“Ah.” Major Grand fired up her cigarette and assessed her, head tilted. “That, Miss Vine, is a question I can't possibly answer. Not only would it endanger my people if I identified them to you, but it could put you at risk, too. Let's just say we have all sorts from all walks of life. Often the very last sort you would expect.”

“Of course. I'm sorry.”

“On the other hand, seeing as you've been so good as to come all the way here, you're entitled to ask a few questions. You'll probably want to know what we're about.”

Clara guessed this was her cue. “Can I ask who you are, for a start?”

“Certainly. The fact is, we're a bit of a fledgling venture. We're called Section D. Connected to the Secret Intelligence Service. Physically connected, in fact—there's a tunnel that runs under this building all the way to Broadway, not that anyone I know has used it. We've been up and running for a few months—ever since SIS concluded in the wake of the Czech invasion that war is unavoidable—our intention being to establish agents in those countries that face being overrun by the Wehrmacht.”

For Clara it was still a shock to hear, utterly so casually, the idea that war was “unavoidable.” Every fiber of her hoped that wasn't true. She dreaded what would happen to her friends, and most of all to Erich, if war came.

“We've already placed officers in Sweden, Norway, Holland, and Spain, not to mention Austria of course, but infiltrating people into Germany, let alone being able to do anything useful once they're there, is a very different challenge. Which is why, Miss Vine, your name has come up.”

“You want me to apply?”

Grand bent his head to the complex task of extracting another Senior Service from his jacket pocket and fitting it into an ebony cigarette holder, then rose and strode over to the window.

“People don't apply to us, because we don't officially exist. We approach those we think might be valuable. You've been in Berlin now, what, five years?”

“Six.”

“Quite so. They've just been celebrating the Führer's birthday, I hear. What was that like?”

“Not exactly understated.”

He laughed drily. “So I understand. As a matter of fact, Noel Mason-Macfarlane, our military attaché in Berlin, offered to shoot Herr Hitler during the parade. He has a sixth-floor flat on the Charlottenburger Chausee with a clear line of sight to the saluting podium, and he swore it would be easier than bagging a stag at a hundred yards to pick the beggar off. This chap's an excellent shot, so we put the plan forward to the prime minister.”

Grand stared down at the street below as though Hitler was saluting right there on the pavement.

“If you can believe it, the PM overruled it as unsportsmanlike.”

Clara could barely contain her astonishment. So she had not been the only person to contemplate the idea. Hitler might have been assassinated, while the eyes of the world were on him. What would the Ufa newsreel have made of that?

“Unsportsmanlike?” she echoed incredulously.

“That was his precise word.”

“I'm surprised.”

“Good.”

He wheeled round, all jocularity replaced by an expression of intense seriousness.

“Our feeling here is that even at this late hour Mr. Chamberlain badly underestimates the danger of Herr Hitler. I hope if you were ever in the same room as him you would have no qualms. If the opportunity arose, we would not want you, Miss Vine, to be hindered by fears of ‘unsportsmanlike' behavior.”

Her heart bucked with fear, but she replied calmly. “I can't imagine the opportunity would arise, Major.”

“Perhaps not.”

He sat and crossed one leg over the other, stroking his trousered calf and scrutinizing her, as if trying to decide something.

“I'm aware that life in Berlin is not a bed of roses. But it's going to get much worse now that war is on the horizon. We all have decisions to make, but yours is especially acute.”

Clara bent her head and smoothed the skirt on her knees, as though the mere action would help straighten out the questions in her mind. She had guessed that this summons would be a request from the British Intelligence Service—those shadowy men in Whitehall who had over the years been the ultimate recipients of all the gossip and information she relayed. She knew too that, just like Conrad Veidt and a host of other actors, if she chose to return to England she could make a fresh start in the British film industry. Yet mentally she had shied away from the question facing her. That same question which, beneath the penetrating gaze of Major Lawrence Grand, she must now face.

“We need to know, when hostilities arise, whether you intend to stay in Germany. It's going to get a lot more dangerous.”

Something about Grand's patrician assurance suddenly rankled. Who was this man, in his smart suit and comfortable office, to talk of danger? What could he know of what she went through on a daily basis?

“You forget I've already been arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, Major Grand. I've had plenty of opportunity to understand how dangerous Berlin can be. I'm not even living in my own apartment because I believe I'm being watched.”

An apologetic smile transformed his face, and she could glimpse the kindly man beneath the gruff exterior. “Forgive me. So I take it you
have
decided to stay?”

Suddenly Clara quailed at the direct question. The twists and turns that had determined her life had always been impulsive ones. The decision to leave England for Berlin in 1933 had come after a chance meeting at a party. The agreement to spy for British Intelligence came about because of an episode of Nazi brutality she had witnessed in the street. None of the decisive events in her life had ever been premeditated. Ultimatums made her nervous. She remembered how she had shied away from Leo Quinn's proposal of marriage because he insisted that she leave Germany. Was avoiding decisions her own personal form of cowardice?