The Winter Garden (2014) (43 page)

Mary wrote that in the next war, when it came along, air attack was going to be the prime weapon of terror. The idea of wiping whole towns, perhaps even entire cities off the map, was now a
reality.

Yet when she thought about it, there was one thing she could not puzzle out. If it hadn’t been for Pericles, Mary would not have been there. He had known for certain that the Germans were
planning an attack. But at the time she had never asked herself where he got his information from. He was English, not German. So how had he known? What’s more, how had he known that Mary
would be sitting in that bar, on that evening, ready to witness it?

Pericles knew Guernica was going to be important. He guessed it would be the attack that drew the attention of the world. But if he had advance warning, why didn’t he try to stop it? Why
didn’t he alert the townspeople to what was coming? Unless, of course, he thought it needed to happen.

The shock of Guernica had faded quickly. For Mary, writing about Spain presented the same problem she now faced when covering Germany’s troubles. Nobody at home much
wanted to know. Americans were preoccupied by their own concerns. Apparently thousands of people were starving in Cleveland, Ohio. A United Airlines plane had crashed in Utah. The New York Yankees
had beaten the New York Giants in the World Series. No matter how hatefully the Jews were persecuted in Germany, too many people back in America actually agreed with the Nazis. Mary got the feeling
that people back home preferred foreign affairs to stay just that – foreign.

The death of Anna Hansen, on the other hand, was just what the American public liked, according to Frank Nussbaum. A murder story with plenty of photographs of pretty girls. All Mary needed to
do was deliver it. But that was where the problem lay. When she called up the bureau of criminal investigations the police could not be less interested. They admitted, grudgingly, that Hartmann,
the gardener, had been released, but would not reveal if anyone else was under suspicion. Judging by the sleepy tone of the officer in charge, the death of the Reich Bride mattered about as much as
a bicycle collision and a little less than the theft of a bratwurst from a market stall. Yet Ilse Henning had told her the Gestapo was involved. Which meant that somehow, Anna Hansen’s murder
mattered very much indeed.

That was why Mary was impatient to hear what Bruno Weiss had to say. She did not believe for a second that the artist could have had a hand in Anna’s murder, yet he had been distinctly
reluctant to talk to her, all the same. When she approached him on that day in the Bride School garden, it was terror, nothing less, that leapt into his eyes. Even when he had established that she
was a friend of Clara Vine’s and had ushered her away somewhere private, behind the tall pines at the back, he would barely speak to her. He kept looking about him, wide-eyed, as if the very
trees and shrubs concealed devices which might overhear and report him. Bruno Weiss had about him the terrible, feral caution of the hunted animal. Mary recognized that look. She had seen it
before. It was the fear of approaching death, and it needed no translation.

Memories flickered through Clara’s traumatized brain. She thought of her mother, and tried to remember what it was like to be embraced by her, but she couldn’t
recall her face. For a long time she only had a photograph to remember her by and photographs never really told the truth, did they?

Clara wondered if she would ever have a daughter herself, and if she did whether she would fold her in her arms the way her own mother must have done. She couldn’t forget the face of the
tiny baby at the Lebensborn home. More images floated through her mind. Angela with her cool, combative elegance. Her strawberry-blonde hair and wry half smile that always implied Clara was doing
something slightly offbeat, bohemian or plain crazy. Erich, the tears smarting in his eyes as he accused Clara of not loving the Führer. Mary’s anguished face.
‘I’m your
friend Clara. You can tell me!’

She regretted not telling Mary the truth, but friendship these days meant not telling anything. Confidences were dangerous. To love someone, it was necessary to deceive them. How had it come to
this, that the true measure of closeness came in what you concealed? You could know everything about a person, how they brushed their teeth, what perfume they wore, whether they preferred Arabica
or Java, even what position they favoured in lovemaking, but you could not know their deepest secrets. Not if they loved you. To love someone was to lie. And Clara was good at lying. It was her
skill.

She thought of herself with Ralph, their bodies rolling and turning in the tumbled linen, the sheets between their hot limbs like heaped clouds. His hands mapping the contours of her body, her
fingers running through his damp hair and along the deep cleft of his back. His lips, moving towards hers. The days they had spent in his apartment had been like a world apart. Only two days, yet
she treasured that time, in case it never came again. She relived it in her head, hour by hour, as though just by thinking she could block out everything around her.

Clara was in a small white-tiled room, measuring barely six feet across, with a wooden plank bed which was let down from the wall. There was a bare bulb which swung every time the steel doors
along the corridor clanged, throwing wild shadows across the walls. Although there was no natural light, she guessed it must be dawn. She wondered how long she could hold out before needing to use
the bucket in the corner. Her mouth was dry and she could barely swallow, but no one had offered her water. The wash of disinfectant couldn’t entirely mask the stink of ammonia and the smell
of fear. She remembered Bruno telling her about the night classes he had once attended in this building, when it was still an art school. They practised a different kind of art here now.

She tried not to think about what she had heard. Of the tortures, the twisted limbs, the broken fingers. Persuasive measures to jog the memory. The faltering moment when a prisoner’s story
changed. The faces of people who had been interrogated, pulply and swollen, unrecognizable to their own family. She wondered when they would start on her own face.

The sounds were sporadic. The slam of steel doors, the crunch of footsteps, hard and booted, the occasional yell, of fury or fear. An official voice, feigning patience but underlaid with a
steely anger. And in the distance was the clatter of traffic from Prinz Albrecht Strasse outside and the footsteps of people going through the government district towards the Anhalter Bahnhof,
ordinary citizens who, though they had no interest in what happened within, still averted their eyes from the grim, neoclassical façade.

Why was she here? Did Goebbels know? Was it his idea to arrest her? She thought of him, limping down the corridor in his patent leather shoes, which everyone said concealed a cloven hoof, like
the devil. Goebbels had asked her to report back on the Mitford sisters, but surely he was not intending to elicit her discoveries in this setting?

Then she thought of Gisela Wessel, arrested at the studio and brought here for interrogation. Clara knew, though she tried not to think about the lengths to which they would go to get the
answers they wanted. She thought of Gisela’s face plunged repeatedly into freezing water, lungs tearing for air, gloved hands grasping her hair. What other methods would they resort to? There
must be special horrors reserved for female prisoners. Those sadists were as attentive as a lover to the sensations their hands could provoke. Like seducers they took pains to get a woman to
surrender.

Even though she had no clue why she was arrested, it was still essential for her to work out what the Gestapo believed. If there was a suspicion that she might be passing information to the
British, then there was no hope for her. She wondered how long it would be before anyone realized she was missing. Would Mary start to ask questions, even though she had assured her there was
nothing to worry about? Would Albert report her absence from the studio? And Ralph? Clara remembered what Ralph had said about disowning her if she was apprehended. She hoped for his sake that was
true.

There was the sound of boots coming down the corridor. She knew they were coming for her.

Fear ran through her like a steel blade. Terror settled right in the marrow of her bones. She had never pretended to anyone that she was courageous. Not even to herself. She was not abnormally
brave. She was terrified at the prospect of pain and was calculating wildly who, if anyone, could save her from it. She would not even have hesitated to ask her father to intercede, though how she
would get a message to him wasn’t clear. She wondered, perhaps, if the mention of the Mitford sisters might work the same charm on the Gestapo as it had on Adolf Hitler, but the idea would
have been laughable, if she was capable of laughing.

Her flesh felt defencelessly soft, like a child’s. Bruises were appearing on her upper arms, like photographic negatives against the white of her skin, recording the brutality of the
previous night. Her ear was ringing and painful from where the back of a hand had lashed her. She knew there would be several interviews, going over and over the same ground. So far, she had only
survived the first.

Hauptsturmführer Oskar Wengen’s face was cadaverous. It reminded her of an ancient preserved mummy, found in some distant Teutonic swamp. The skin clung to the skull beneath,
perfectly delineating the bones, folding down the throat in ropey sinews. Only the eyes were alive and watchful, like a snake, with the same fathomless depth.

The room smelled of human fear. When Clara was brought in, he had gestured at a wooden chair opposite his desk and with a jolt she saw a manila file bearing her name and the stencilled numbers
6732. What could it possibly contain?

She decided to take the initiative.

‘On what charge have I been arrested?’

Wengen smiled grimly, his thin lips pressed as though they had been stitched together. ‘You have not been arrested, Fraülein Vine. You have been invited here for
questioning.’

‘There’s no point questioning me. I don’t know anything.’

‘I hope you’re not suggesting that we would have brought you in here for no reason. That might be an arrestable offence in itself. Do you know why you are being
questioned?’

‘Of course I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?’

‘I’m waiting for you to consider why you might have been brought here.’

‘I told you. I haven’t the faintest idea.’

‘It might be good for you if you began to have some ideas.’

He didn’t ask her about the burglary. Perhaps they didn’t know about it. She hoped against hope that they had not tailed her all the way from Moabit, because if they had it would
mean discovering Bruno, and perhaps through him a whole circle of brave people manning the printing works. Yet to start with, Hauptsturmführer Wengen seemed more interested in her work at
Babelsberg.

‘We are checking some disturbing information from one of your friends.’

In her pocket her fingers encountered the handkerchief that Ralph had given her. The thought of it was a fresh cause for alarm. God forbid that they should find it, or ask questions about the
person with the initials RS.

‘None of my friends would supply you with disturbing information about me because it would be false.’

‘That’s for us to decide. Who do you associate with at the studio?’

‘Let me think. I see Herr Doktor Goebbels frequently.’ The quip earned her a savage look.

‘Names, please.’

‘I see hundreds of people. It might be easier just to check the cast list of my films, Herr Hauptsturmführer.’

‘I assume you don’t spend your time drinking with a cast of hundreds.’

‘I rarely spend time drinking at all.’

She racked her brains to think who might have denounced her. Gisela Wessel had probably been in this same interrogation cell. Might she have mentioned Clara? It seemed unlikely, they barely knew
each other. It couldn’t be Mary, could it? The Gestapo regularly visited foreign correspondents to question them about their informants. Might someone have seen the two of them together in
the Press Club and jumped to conclusions? To stop the shudder of nerves, she braced her shoulders in a semblance of calm resolve. The calmer she appeared, the more furious Wengen grew.

‘You must have friends there, surely?’

There was only Albert. And she couldn’t mention Albert. Albert’s preference for young men would be enough to have him sacked and in a concentration camp before his feet touched the
ground.

‘I try to be friendly to everyone.’

‘Everyone? It’s difficult, surely, to be friends with everyone, Fräulein?’

‘You forget I’m an actress, Herr Hauptsturmführer.’

He cast her a frosty glance, but there was something else troubling her. A thought that had flickered in and out of the depths of her mind, like a hideous fish in deep water. It might have been
anyone who had informed on her, so why did she have the feeling that it was someone close to her, someone who might know where she was and when? At that moment when Hauptsturmführer Oskar
Wengen asked her about her friends, the answer came. His kind, crinkled eyes. His careful avoidance of direct questions, which she had taken for tact. His dangerous secret that made him vulnerable
to any kind of blackmail.
Albert.
He could not be trusted. Albert must have informed on her.

It should have hurt to think that she had been betrayed by someone so close, who had laughed with her and cared for her and followed every step of her career since she first arrived in Berlin.
The skinny young man who had grown stylish and self-assured, apart from the big secret that made him vulnerable. Was that why he was so loathe to ask her too many questions? Because he didn’t
want to implicate her any more than necessary? Yet he had insisted she keep the red Opel, which meant that her movements were easy to track. Being denounced by Albert should have hurt far more, but
at that moment all she felt was a rush of relief. That she had not betrayed Ralph. Indeed, that they had not even asked about him.