Woman in the Shadows (18 page)

Emmy gave Clara a beady look, whose subtext Clara tried to ignore.

“So? What about your love life, then?” Emmy was always voracious about the details of other people's private lives. “Any handsome Obersturmbannführers on the horizon? Any romances I should know about?”

Modestly Clara averted her eyes. “Well…”

“There is? Go on! Tell me at once!”

“It's not a romance, but I did meet an interesting man. A Luftwaffe Oberst.”

“Name!”

“Arno Strauss. A friend of Ernst Udet.”

With almost comical speed, the excitement on Frau Goering's face turned to dismay. “Not the one with…?” She performed a little mime, as though drawing a zipper up one side of her face. “The scar?”

Clara nodded.

“I don't think Strauss likes women. I've never seen him with one.” Emmy frowned dubiously. “Not that I'm suggesting he's…you know…I just thought he was a man's man. But I daresay he's perfectly pleasant underneath…well, underneath the skin. In fact, I've had a thought.”

“What's that?” asked Clara, hoping it was the right thought.

“We're having a reception at Carinhall next weekend. For the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. I think Oberst Strauss will be there. Would you like to come?”

Clara remembered Archie Dyson's warning. The instruction, almost an order. The insistence that she avoid danger at all costs.
Lie low. Do nothing
. Then Ralph Sommers's request,
cultivate him.

She smiled at Emmy Goering. “I would love to come, thank you.”

T
he cleaver glinted in the morning sun as the man, a bloodstained apron straining over his enormous belly, held it aloft. Then he brought it down with a
thwack
on the flesh below, causing the blood to gush and spurt from the glutinous flesh, then slide into a glassy pool. Ilse felt herself gag.

Saturday usually offered a more relaxed regime at the Bride School. Lessons were replaced by simple household tasks, and there was more time allotted to cultural pursuits. That morning, after her chores, which were laying the fire and bringing in the baskets of chopped wood, Ilse had gone to the kitchen to hear the lecture about how to get the most out of a cheap cut of meat. The butcher showed them how to slice through a chunk of pork, swiftly and decisively, splitting it up into chops and smaller scraps for mincing. The blood leaching from the pale flesh coagulated into a dense crimson puddle on the table, and the metallic smell made Ilse want to vomit. She had never been so squeamish before Anna was killed.

Afterwards, the pork was carried off by the brides on cooking rota to make lunch, and the others had their cups of coffee in the garden. Some of them played with the Bride School's newly arrived puppies, two squirming German shepherds with baby teeth and claws, jumping at shadows on the dappled lawn. Everyone wanted German shepherds now, mainly because the Führer liked them, yet the arrival of Prinz and Wolf at the Reich Bride School was more likely an unspoken response to the recent crime. A couple of lively guard dogs would be just the thing to help the girls feel safer.

Anyhow, Ilse recalled, it was in all respects a perfectly ordinary, normal weekend morning. Which made everything that followed all the more unpleasant.

They were different men this time, standing in the hall wanting to speak to her. The fact that they were wearing leather coats and full SS uniform meant it didn't take Ilse long to figure out that they were not the ordinary criminal police, the Kripo. These men were Gestapo. The secret police. The thought of it made her feel sick again. Ilse had never even met a policeman before. Now she had been interviewed by four of them in just days.

Once they had been ushered into the supervisor's office, the two Gestapo men introduced themselves and told her that they had taken over the investigation from the Kripo, so there were a few questions they needed to go over. Kriminal Inspektor Wiedemann was a short, bald man, wearing glasses with thin steel frames, behind which his lashless eyes had a reptilian appearance, like those of an iguana Ilse had seen at the zoo. Kriminal Kommissar Decker was older and more tired, a chain-smoker with a face gray as a wrecked battleship, craggy with frowns and angles. His mustache sloped down his mournful face as if trying to leave it. There was no coffee and biscuits this time, no gentle joking, no comments about Otto being lucky to have a pretty bride.

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 inquired. Why was she covering up? What could she tell them? Anna had smuggled in her own lighter, despite the antismoking rule at the Bride School. What other secrets did Anna have?

Ilse gave a panicky glance around her. Through the window she could see a bride in the yard, beating a carpet as though she wanted to beat the truth out of it, the dust flying 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 replied, “Anna didn't have secrets.”

“Come now. Everyone has secrets, don't they?”

“I don't know,” Ilse muttered miserably, 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 that the supervisor especially treasured and stared at it with distaste before returning it to its place. “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 makeup 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 coloring that was kept expressly for creating the swastika designs on wedding cakes. But Anna had smuggled in her own lipstick. She'd used it daily.

“I know one secret she had, sir! She kept her lipstick. Guerlain. She used makeup 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 delighted 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 was organizing it. The Peterses were a little stuffy, Anna 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 that 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 mustache 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 might 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 wealthy and powerful 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 turned 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.

“F
räulein! 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 medieval 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 to sleep for a few minutes and made her vulnerable. She was dreaming she was back in England, in a performance of
The Merry Widow
at the Haymarket theater, and she had completely forgotten her lines.

“Fräulein! Wachen Sie auf!”

Now the man opposite her was giving her a gentle nudge, and the first things she saw as she snapped back into full consciousness were the curious eyes of his wife upon her. 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 had arrived in Germany, four years ago. How much had changed since then! She studied her reflection and thought of the Clara Vine who came, 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 with mysterious speed.

She thought of Ralph Sommers's proposal. It was one thing to be gathering gossip from the wives and girlfriends of the Nazi elite. 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 squabbles, their differences of opinion, their private doubts. And it was not just the men who had feuds. The women were the same. If only the men knew what anger and passion churned 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 because, being half English, she seemed not entirely of their world. Yet 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 secretly watching her. 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 inviting glances in her direction, as if eager for some conversation. Sure enough, they took little encouragement to start chatting. They were traveling to Munich to visit the Führer's Grosse Deutsche 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 works had been submitted, and Hitler had helped to make the final selection, 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 color 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 were 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 Deutschen 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. It was easy to see the appeal of the place, compared to the somber 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, neo-Gothic 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 suspenders, and green hats. She began to relax a little, dallying along the parades, looking into the shop windows, 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 watched had gone. Here, there seemed little chance she was being followed.

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 bombproof marble-lined Chancellery. Munich was his playground. Here he could relax, attend the opera, eat at the Osteria Bavaria restaurant, or have 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.

Clara had no trouble finding the Haus der Deutscher Kunst. It was unmistakable. A spectacular neoclassical temple whose pale stone columns rippled with the blood and black of Nazi banners. It looked like a railway station might look, if it had been built by ancient Greeks. Designed by Hitler's architect Paul Ludwig Troost, it had taken four years to construct and had been opened in a grand ceremony that July. A sweep of steps promised gleaming halls and immense vistas of blood-red marble. Clara had no interest at all in seeing it.

Instead she turned to another building a short walk away, where a banner above the door read
DEGENERATE ART, ENTRY FREE
.

A long queue snaked up a narrow wooden staircase, skirted around the first sculpture, a menacing evocation of Christ on the cross, and funneled into a series of gloomy, low-ceilinged rooms crammed with exhibits, chaotically assembled. Everything was deliberately jumbled together, pictures hung askew and unframed on the walls, suspended by string or rope. Cubists, Fauvists, Impressionists, and Expressionists were side by side. Beside each work was the price that a museum had paid for it, and some of the paintings were daubed with Nazi epitaphs. The walls, too, had slogans scrawled all over them.
A THREAT TO THE GERMAN NATION! PURIFICATION AND EXTERMINATION! WE DESPISE THE OPTICAL ILLUSIONS OF THE JEWS!
A pair of SS guards presided like the opposite of museum guides, contemptuous backs to the exhibits, casting bored glances over the throng. Clara scanned the crowd rapidly. Could Bruno possibly be here?

The place was jammed. Clara fell in step with a tour guide shepherding a goggle-eyed group of Munich matrons around the room. They passed a group of Kandinsky watercolors, hung in chaotic series beneath a sign reading
CRAZY AT ANY PRICE
. Despite the dim lighting, the colors burst like fireworks from their frames. The guide pointed a disdainful baton and explained. “The Führer tells us that degenerate artists cannot see colors or forms as they are in Nature. That is a sign of racial inferiority.”

It was at that moment that Clara sensed again the feeling she had had in Berlin. The distinct yet irrational impression that someone was following her. The invisible brush of eyes on the back of her neck. She waited until the group was moving on and turned abruptly to see, at the far edge of her vision, the whisk of something rounding a corner. Then a large-bosomed woman in a flowery hat sailed into view, and when Clara looked again, whatever she had seen was gone.

Could that be a tail? Or was Clara merely being stalked by her own overheated imagination? Was it a person, or merely some figment knitted from the interplay of light and shadow? The room was so ill-lit it was impossible to tell. Shaken, she tried to focus again on the paintings themselves. How shocking and energizing they were. Bodies that looked less like people than like the raw carcass of some animal's kill, yet were still electrifying in their impact. She stared up at them, marveling at the alchemy by which base pigment seemed transformed into the very living substance of flesh.

The next room was entirely devoted to the depravity of women, and the first painting she saw gave her a jolt of recognition.
The Devil's Bacchanal
by Bruno Weiss. She had last seen it propped in the corner of his room in Pankow, and now it was here, a vast six-by-six-foot canvas, cheek by jowl with Van Gogh and Emil Nolde. The painted scene was surreal; the composition had the garish texture of a nightmare. In the foreground the earth seemed convulsed and malign, as if it had engendered the evils perpetrated on its surface. Above it a naked woman was surrounded by licentious scenes of men cavorting with each other, including, in the background, one who closely resembled the late Ernst Röhm. The woman herself, for whom Anna had been the model, her white flesh gleaming like a piece of meat on a butcher's block, appeared both beautiful and inhuman. Above the painting a Nazi curator had scrawled:
AN INSULT TO GERMAN WOMANHOOD!

So this was where Bruno had stood, appraising his own work. Clara had to smile. He was right to be proud, and no wonder he was gratified to be exhibited in the company of artists he admired so much, even if the presentation left a little to be desired.

She stayed in front of the painting for several minutes, allowing the tour group to move on and hoping against hope that Bruno would materialize. Yet as the minutes passed, the sheer futility of her search became apparent. Even if Bruno had been here, even if the Luftwaffe officer Fleischer had seen him, what on earth would persuade him to return? No Jew in his right mind could feel comfortable in this place, or anywhere in Munich for that matter. Bruno must have been aware he was a living target. As a Jewish Communist agitator, who had already been arrested in 1933 on suspicion of pamphleteering, he would surely feel as relaxed in Munich as a deer in a forest full of wolves.

Suddenly some sixth sense, prickling on the surface of her skin, caused her to look around. It was a flicker at the far edge of vision, as slight as a tree's leaves frisked by a passing wind, and as she wheeled around she glimpsed something. A man with his back towards her, his face obscured by the tilt of a hat's brim. About five foot eight, with a suitcase in one hand. He was on the far side of the room, observing Otto Dix's
War Cripples,
a vista of hideous, skeletal veterans selling matches in the street. There was something familiar about the man. But even as Clara tried to scrutinize him, he stepped around the corner and was gone.

Quickly she followed, turning left into a vaulted corridor lined with glass cases and then into the next room, a cramped, low-ceilinged space, where people stood three deep to view the exhibits. As she pushed through the crowds, she received several angry reprimands, but the man had disappeared. After threading as fast as she could through the rest of the rooms, she clattered down the wooden stairway and looked right and left along the street. A bus crawled past, blocking her line of sight to the other side of the street. She dashed across the road, narrowly missing a truck whose driver craned his head, mouthing inaudible imprecations behind the window. There was no sign of the man. Either he had vanished into thin air or he could perform optical illusions as well as any degenerate artist.

Retracing her steps along the broad thoroughfare of Prinzregentenstrasse, Clara tried to analyze her suspicions. She had learned to trust her instincts over the years, and her instincts told her that something about the man in the gallery was familiar. Yet she could not, for the life of her, think why. Added to which, nobody, except for Mary Harker and Ralph Sommers, knew she was here. And even if the Gestapo were observing her in Berlin, what was the chance they would have tailed her all the way to Munich? On the other hand, if the man had been a genuine visitor, why would he simply vanish?