Woman in the Shadows (33 page)

M
emories 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'd had only 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. Her sister, Angela, with her cool, combative elegance. Her strawberry-blond hair and wry half smile, which always implied Clara was doing something slightly offbeat, bohemian, or plain crazy. Erich, the tears glittering in his eyes as he accused Clara of not loving the Führer. Mary's anguished face.
I'm your friend. 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 favored 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 greatest talent.

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, bending 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 that folded 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 filthy 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 stench 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 practiced a different kind of art here now.

She tried not to think about the rumors 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, pulpy and swollen, unrecognizable even to their own families. 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, 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? Had it been his idea to arrest her? She thought of him, limping down the corridor in his patent leather shoes, which everyone swore concealed a cloven hoof, like that of the devil. Goebbels had asked her to report back on the Mitford sisters, but surely he didn't intend 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 the actress's face plunged repeatedly into freezing water, lungs tearing for breath, gloved fingers gripping her hair. What other methods would they resort to? There must be special horrors reserved for female prisoners. Those sadists were as attentive as lovers 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'd been arrested, it was still essential for Clara to figure out what the Gestapo believed. If there was a suspicion that she was passing information to the British, then there was no hope for her. How long would it be before anyone realized she was missing? Would Mary start to ask questions, even though Clara 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. For his sake, she hoped that was true.

There was the sound of boots coming down the corridor. They were coming for her.

Fear ran through her like a steel blade. Terror settled 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 if, perhaps, the mention of the Mitford sisters might work the same charm on the Gestapo that it had on Adolf Hitler, but the idea would have been laughable, if she was capable of laughing.

Her flesh felt defenselessly 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 survived only 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 ropy sinews. Only the eyes were alive. They were watchful, like a snake's, with the same fathomless depth.

The room smelled of human fear. When Clara was brought in, Wengen had gestured at a wooden chair opposite his desk, and with a jolt she saw a manila file bearing her name and the stenciled 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, Fräulein 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 offense 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.”

The Hauptsturmführer 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 they would discover Bruno, and perhaps through him a whole circle of brave people manning the printing press. Yet Wengen seemed more interested in her work at Babelsberg.

“We are checking some disturbing information from one of your friends.”

In her pocket Clara's fingers encountered the handkerchief that Ralph had given her. The thought of it brought a fresh surge of alarm. God forbid that they should find it, or ask questions about the person with the initials R.S.

“None of my friends would supply you with disturbing information about me, because it would be false.”

“That's for us to decide. Whom 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 brain to think who might have denounced her. Gisela Wessel had probably been in this very 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 her nerves, Clara braced her shoulders in a semblance of calm resolve.

“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 fired and in a concentration camp before his feet touched the ground.

“I try to be friendly to everyone,” she replied neutrally.

“Everyone?” The calmer she appeared, the more furious Wengen grew. “It's difficult, surely, to be friends with everyone, Fräulein?”

“You forget I'm an actress, 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. Anyone might have 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 intensely 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, someone 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, except for the dark secret that made him vulnerable. Was that why he was so loath 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. She had not betrayed Ralph. Indeed, they had not even asked about him.

Wengen's voice took on a conciliatory tone. “We cannot always be aware of the secrets of our associates, Fräulein Vine. Sometimes we mingle with undesirable people without knowing it.”

She felt his gaze raking her face, looking for the spark of desperation that said she was ready to break and hand over some information. That suggested she might betray others in the hope of going free herself.

“The activities of those people stain our good name. They land us in all kinds of trouble.”

“What kind of trouble am I in then, Herr Hauptsturmführer?”

The conciliatory tone evaporated as suddenly as it had appeared.

“A lot of trouble if you don't start answering my questions. I want the names of everyone you associate with, Fräulein Vine. You must have some special friends in that crew of Jews and Communists up at Babelsberg. A pretty woman like you.”

She forced herself to stare unflinchingly into the black pits of his eyes.

“The German woman finds her truest friends within the Party. Isn't that what Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the head of the Frauenschaft, says?”

Wengen laughed, a jagged sound that cut through the air like a saw. And that was the first time he hit her.

THAT WAS YESTERDAY.
Now, at dawn, the clanking boots were coming back for her. Clara tried to summon again the energy for the great effort of dissembling, but she began to tremble, involuntarily, and felt her bowels clench within her. This was her second interview, when they would go over the ground they had already covered. Whom did she associate with? To whom might she be passing information? Which of her friends were secret Communists or Jews? And with each question there would be fresh blows, until she gave them some different answers. How long would she be able to hold out? Hours, or even days? There was no lawyer to help her. No one even knew where she was. She had left Ralph's apartment despite her promise to him, and angry though he would be, he would assume she was staying safe somewhere, far away from her own home. No one in Berlin was worrying about Clara, or checking a watch for when she returned, or calling the police to report her missing. She squeezed her eyes shut and wished it was over already, that time had leapt forward and she was already in a truck on her way to a camp. That way she might still have her secrets safe with her.

A key scraped in the lock, and the door swung open. The guard handed her the case and her bag.

“You are free to go, Fräulein.”

“What do you mean?”

Astonishment froze her. For a moment, confusion and disbelief paralyzed her, pinning her to the wooden seat.

“Unless you choose to avail yourself of our hospitality a little longer.”

Clara stumbled out into the cool Berlin air and looked dazedly around her. Everywhere she saw people walking to their jobs, to the station on Stresemannstrasse, to meet friends, to catch trains, as though they were on a different planet, as if the grotesquerie of the building behind her simply didn't exist. She shuddered, then headed away as fast as she could, dizzy with a mixture of excitement and fear. Like the sensation she'd had when Strauss's plane had pulled out of its dive. Relief at disaster averted. Euphoria at still being alive.