The Winter Garden (2014) (24 page)

Wiedemann took the chair behind the supervisor’s desk as though he owned it and steepled his tight little hands into a sharp point. They had some more questions in connection with
Anna’s killing, he said. Perhaps Ilse could help them. This time the tone was far less soothing. What did she know, Wiedemann enquired. Why was she covering up? What could she tell them? Anna
had smuggled in her own lighter, despite the anti-smoking rule. What other secrets did Anna have?

Ilse gave a panicky glance around her. Through the window she could see a bride in the yard outside, beating a carpet as though she wanted to beat the truth out of it, the dust flying off into
the air. Ilse felt abandoned. There was no supervisor around to help her, not even Fräulein Wolff. The staff here seemed determined to leave her to her fate.

Stutteringly, she said, ‘Anna didn’t have secrets.’

‘Come now. Everyone has secrets, don’t they?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ilse muttered dumbly, twisting her apron between her hands into a damp little rope.

‘Did she confide in you?’

‘I can’t remember.’

Wiedemann picked up a photograph of Gertrud Scholtz-Klink which the supervisor especially treasured, and stared at it with distaste before replacing it. ‘Then perhaps we need to think of a
way to jog your memory,’ he said, levelly.

Decker leaned towards her, as if offering some friendly advice.

‘You must try harder, my dear.’

Ilse steadied her trembling hands against the back of a chair. Through her tears, the sight of Wiedemann licking his dry lips triggered a thought. Anna’s lipstick. Anna had found the rule
against make-up at the Bride School especially hard. The other girls made do with biting their lips, or applying a slick of Vaseline. One girl had resourcefully turned to the red food colouring
that was kept expressly for creating the swastika designs on wedding cakes. But Anna had smuggled in her own lipstick and used it daily.

‘I know one secret she had, sir! She kept her lipstick. Guerlain. She used make-up even though it’s forbidden here.’

Wiedemann’s face purpled, as though she had deliberately insulted him.

‘Are you trying to play me, girl? Lipstick? Don’t give me this nonsense.’

Decker interceded.

‘Fräulein Henning, perhaps I could explain more clearly. All we want to know is what Anna told you about her life. You were friends, you say. You must have talked. All women talk,
don’t they? I know my wife never stops.’ He cast a weary glance at Wiedemann. ‘Anyone tries to bug my telephone, they’ll regret it.’

Then he turned back to Ilse. ‘Just tell us everything she told you about her life.’

Haltingly Ilse stumbled through Anna’s story, or what she knew of it. Anna was a dancer. She had been performing in a revue at the Wintergarten – the kind of revue where you
didn’t keep many clothes on. She met Johann afterwards in a bar. It was love at first sight. (Ilse had always fervently believed in love at first sight, although Otto said it was rubbish, and
she had been pleased when Anna revealed it was a genuine phenomenon.) Then Johann had been sent to Spain. Anna wrote to him at least once a week and he wrote even more than she did. Anna was always
getting letters from Johann.

‘They were going to have a Christmas wedding. Johann’s family were organizing it. The Peters were a little starchy, she said, and rather old-fashioned, but Anna was so charming, she
could make anyone love her. We had already started making her wedding dress. It was going to be embroidered with scarlet swastikas on the hem and—’

‘These letters,’ interrupted Wiedemann, ‘the ones from the fiancé. She kept them in a letter case, I hear. The one you gave the journalist. What other secrets did you
say she had?’

‘I never said she kept secrets! All she had was love letters, I suppose.’

Decker stroked his moustache soothingly, like a pet. ‘This is not helping us, Ilse. I’m sorry that you don’t feel you can help us.’

There was an impasse. Kriminal Inspektor Wiedemann was accustomed to interrogating cowering men in badly disinfected cells at Gestapo headquarters. He was used to getting what he wanted, and he
had a variety of techniques for the purpose. It may be that he would need to select something else from his toolbox, because right now he was getting nowhere with the idiot woman before him, who
almost certainly knew something crucial without realizing that it was important. And orders had come down from the highest level to get this matter sorted out. That annoyed Wiedemann. He was an
egalitarian in matters of crime. He suspected the top brass were outraged that a murder should despoil their little idyll. He had taken a good look at Schwanenwerder’s fancy cars and gated
villas when he arrived, and he guessed the residents regarded the place as their own private island, immune from the murders and violence that permeated the rest of Berlin. Well frankly, they
needed to open their eyes.

‘Perhaps,’ he suggested to Decker, as though it had just occurred to him, ‘Fräulein Henning might be more inclined to help if we interviewed her in another setting.’
He nodded his head in the direction of the car outside.

Horror-struck, Ilse looked from one to the other.

‘No! I’m trying to think. I’m trying to remember everything I can!’

But Wiedemann was bored with her now. He behaved as though she had already been dismissed. He shifted bodily to address Decker.

‘I’m beginning to think Fräulein Henning is not the right kind of woman to be training at a Reich Bride School,’ he mused. ‘Perhaps she will not be able to stay
here, and then she won’t be able to marry and what will happen to her then, eh? Maybe she will have to make a living out on Friedrichstrasse in green laced boots.’

Ilse burst into a torrent of sobs and buried her face in her apron. She could not believe this was happening to her. She had been brought up to think of policemen as good men who looked after
the interests of decent, God-fearing people like herself and her family. It was true that she had seen them shouting at troublemakers in the street, hitting men with sticks or arresting Jews who
had caused trouble, but that was other people. Ilse had always assumed that the law existed for her protection. This was not the kind of thing that happened to a girl like her.

Fortunately, the Gestapo men seemed to have suspended the interrogation.

‘We’ll be coming back.’

Wiedemann rose to leave and brushed roughly past her. As he left the room, Decker looked back and pointed a finger at her like a gun.

‘Keep thinking, eh?’

Much later, when all the brides had gone to bed and Ilse was still issuing great, shuddering sobs into her pillow, she remembered something she should have told them. That builder, the one who
was constructing the model house. She had seen him talking to Anna. Perhaps he was the one who killed her. She should have told them that.

‘Fräulein! Fräulein! Wachen Sie auf!’

Clara had fallen asleep on the train somewhere outside Nuremberg. She had been enjoying the beauty of the Bavarian countryside, the tiny mediaeval villages with their fairy-tale spires, timbered
gables and winding cobbled streets. The flat farming land interspersed with massive blocks of forest. But her early start, and the rhythm of the train which rocked her like a baby, had lulled her
asleep for a few minutes and made her vulnerable. She was dreaming she was back in England, in a performance of
The Merry Widow
on stage at the Haymarket Theatre, and she had completely
forgotten her lines.

‘Fräulein! Wachen Sie auf!’

Now the man opposite her was giving a gentle nudge and she saw the curious eyes of his wife upon her as she snapped back into full consciousness. A guard in a green uniform stood stolidly before
her, waiting to check her papers.

After the guard had left, slamming the steel door behind him, she looked at her reflection in the window, imprinted against the fields flashing past. The image of a young woman with dark hair
floated before her, observing her soberly. In some ways, Clara was always accompanied by a ghostly image of herself, not just the heightened self-awareness that a woman in public has, but a picture
of herself, a constant consciousness of her appearance to others.

She thought back to the time she arrived in Germany four years ago. How much had changed since then. She looked at her reflection and thought of the Clara Vine who arrived, full of hopes for a
screen career, escaping a bad love affair, nervous and more than a little naïve. That Clara Vine no longer existed.

And yet, it was strange how suited she was to this life. As a child she had not seemed especially suited to anything. She was shy beside her gregarious elder sister, one of those quiet, watchful
children who notice everything but tend to be overlooked. Even when she developed a passion for acting, it was less about self-promotion and more about self-effacement. To be anyone, and no one, at
the same time. She had gained in confidence, of course, since childhood, yet this was something she was strangely good at. Perhaps she was like one of those characters Leo Quinn had told her about
in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses.
Those mythic women with the power to transform themselves, blending into their surroundings at mysterious speed.

She thought of Ralph Sommers’ proposal. It was one thing to be gathering gossip from the wives and girlfriends of the Nazi élite. Some of them, like Emmy Goering, could barely be
silenced. She only had to open the door to open her mouth. Whenever they met, Emmy Goering would unleash a torrent of anecdotes about the rivalries of the top brass, their rows, their differences
of opinion, their private doubts. And it was not just the men who had feuds. The women were just the same. If only the men knew what anger and passion lay beneath those floral silk dresses, bodices
and embroidered blouses! If they thought they could contain a woman’s emotions by constricting her in a dirndl they were badly mistaken. Women like Emmy, with a strong propensity to gossip,
found Clara an ideal companion. They trusted her because of her father’s political inclinations and being half-English she seemed not entirely of their world. Yet the idea of cultivating Arno
Strauss was something else entirely. Even though Clara had secured an invitation to Goering’s party, she was still not sure what she planned to do.

She looked around the carriage. The man opposite was sleeping, his head nodding on his chest with the motion of the train. Automatically she wondered if he was genuinely asleep or watching her
from close quarters. Apart from him there was only the elderly couple who had woken her, the man in leather shorts and green loden hunting jacket, his wife in a jaunty Tyrolean hat. They kept
sending eager glances in her direction as if keen for some conversation. Sure enough, they took little encouragement to start chatting. They were travelling to Munich to visit the
Führer’s Grosse Deutscher Kunstausstellung at the House of German Art. Had she heard of it?

‘I have. It sounds fascinating.’

That summer Hitler had opened an art exhibition to showcase what he called the New German Art. Fifteen thousand exhibits had been submitted and Hitler helped to select the final choice, seizing
on Nordic nudes, gentle landscapes and genre painting, weeding out anything obscure or difficult, even kicking holes in some of them. He had his own peculiar standards, which included a ban on any
colour that could not be seen ‘in nature’ and any scenes that depicted anguish or eroticism. Displays of extreme emotion, it seemed, were reserved for the Führer himself.

And why was Clara visiting Munich? the old couple wanted to know.

Why? Because Bruno Weiss was a dear friend, who needed to know that he had been reported to the authorities? Or because if Bruno was arrested, there was a chance he would give her name under
interrogation? Perhaps it was both.

‘I’m visiting my sister.’

Clara chatted about her fictitious sister, and said she hoped she might get a chance to see the Führer’s exhibition too. The old couple talked excitedly and a trifle nervously about
all the sights they intended to cram into a weekend. The Opera. King Ludwig’s Residenz. The Chinese Tower teahouse in the Englischer Garten. For that moment, Clara poignantly wished she was
exactly the person they thought she was, looking forward to nothing more demanding than a leisurely few days sampling the food and the famous Munich Gemütlichkeit.

She disembarked at the Hauptbahnhof and consulted the map she had brought with her. From what she could see, she needed to walk eastwards to Prinzregentenstrasse to reach the Haus der Kunst. The
Entartete Kunst, the exhibition of Degenerate Art, was only a short distance away, in the Archaeology Institute. She had a small leather bag in which Anna Hansen’s stationery case was packed,
as well as a change of clothes for an overnight stay.

Munich was sparkling in the afternoon sun. Immediately she could see the appeal of the place, compared to the sober Prussian cityscape of Berlin. Munich was prettier, cleaner, less frenetic.
Clara walked slowly along the broad boulevards, flanked by handsome white buildings with russet roofs, clanging with blue and white trams, until she reached the town square of Marienplatz, with its
craggy, neogothic Neues Rathaus, stained with soot and encrusted with more gargoyles than Hitler’s cabinet. The town was busy with shoppers, the crowds swollen by tourists attending the
annual Oktoberfest, with their knapsacks, leather braces and green hats. She began to relax a little, dallying along the parades, looking into the shop windows at the displays, thinking about
buying some late lunch from a bakery, or at least a cup of good coffee. The sense she had in Berlin of being continually observed had gone. There seemed little chance that she was being followed
here.

As she walked she looked curiously around her. Munich was where it had all begun. The birthplace of National Socialism and still its spiritual capital, where back in 1923 Hitler and his gang of
associates had led a putsch in a beer hall and ended up in jail. Since then, Bavaria had become Hitler’s stronghold. In Berlin he was always on duty, always formal, in his bomb-proof
marble-lined Chancellery. Munich was his playground. Here he could relax, attend the opera, eat at the Osteria Bavaria restaurant or take Orange Pekoe tea in the Hofgarten with the thuggish group
of ex-storm troopers that Goebbels referred to sarcastically as his ‘Munich clique’ – Rudolf Hess, Putzi Hanfstaengl and, until he was executed a few years ago, the brutal SA
leader Ernst Röhm.