Woman in the Shadows (35 page)

“You can't have enjoyed it. That's not like you. You're a good man.”

“But I did. I adored it. It was the most exciting experience of my life. Euphoria, isn't that the word you used? Dive-bombing made me feel euphoric. It made my pulse race.”

He caught her hand and pressed it to his chest so that she could feel the rapid beating of his heart.

“That old German mythology we studied at school, they probably had a word for that feeling.”

The thought of his schooldays seemed to impassion him further.

“I always believed I would be the Irish Airman.
Those that I fight I do not hate
. But you see, Clara, for that moment, I did hate them. I wanted them to die. I enjoyed killing them. And afterwards I could see what I would become. In fact, what I had already become.”

His fingers were digging into her wrist. It hurt, but she couldn't wrest her hand from his grip.

“Have you ever had that feeling of seeing your life from above?” he continued. “When you're at ground level you can't understand your life, you can't make sense of the twists and turns. But when you see it from above the pattern becomes clear.”

Once again she broke free from his punishing grip. She grabbed her bag and coat. “Let's go and get some fresh air.”

The idea seemed to appeal to him. He followed her mutely out of the restaurant, then stood at the door and winced at the light.

“Arno, you've got to be more careful. You shouldn't be saying these things here. I think it's time to go home.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“No.”

He laughed, a harsh scrape of a laugh.

“I thought not. Well, no matter. I have a test flight first thing tomorrow.”

“I don't think you're in any shape for that.”

“I'm in perfect shape for it, I assure you.”

He caught her in his arms again, and this time he pressed on her a hard, lingering kiss from that twisted mouth, a kiss that felt as much assault as caress, as though he wanted to imprint on her all his pain and fear. Clara pulled away from him, and this time he released her and easily gave a little bow as she turned and walked away into the afternoon.

T
he man was coming after her. That was all Ilse knew. She was going to fall with her face down in the damp grass just the way poor Anna had, so the scent of it would be the last thing she remembered, and the stains would cover her clean apron and she would fall crying to the ground and her tears would disappear into the mossy earth. She ran through the trees, her mouth catching the air, her long hair hanging down her back wet and heavy, like a rope.

Her breath was coming harder as she threaded through the implacable Grunewald. The brambles snatched at her, and the rigid trees with their uniform bark crowded out the light. It was growing dark now, the black tangle of boughs above her even darker as they framed themselves against the sky. Ilse was crashing through the undergrowth, spongy with pine needles underfoot, avoiding the snags of trailing ivy that reached out and grasped at her. She thought she might reach the soft, gray sand at the edge of the lake and follow the waterline where the Wannsee stretched around towards its western edge. But what if he pursued her right to the lake? The water out there was deep and treacherous, rolling and plunging in darkness, flexing its muscles like something alive. There would be no chance of an escape in that direction.

She longed to stop and catch her breath and listen for sounds that indicated he was still behind her, but she didn't dare. The forest seemed to be growing denser now, wild and terrible. She had the strange sensation of being in a book, one she had read a long time ago, in childhood, one of those tales that told of the tenebrous, Germanic forest, the kind of forest you got lost in forever. Stories like that of Hansel and Gretel, wandering deep into the uncharted wilderness. Of Snow White being hunted like a deer by men who wanted to cut out her heart. Forests were places where the ordinary rules of human society no longer applied, where people were turned into animals.

She stumbled and nearly fell. Her breathing had become ragged, and a hoarse note sounded in her throat, like a bird's cry. She should never have left the house. She shouldn't have gone out to see what was making the puppies whimper in their kennel and the geese cackle and call. She had wanted to comfort the dogs and run her hands through their soft fur, but she shouldn't have stepped out of the warmth of the kitchen, where the glimmering stove was reflected in the copper saucepans that hung above the range and the scents of baking spices lingered in the air, only to find the door slammed shut by an unseen hand, triggering a terror that had set her running blindly into the night.

The sweet, pudgy face of Otto came to her. What would her fiancé do without her? His parents would tell him they always knew he could have done better. They thought little enough of Ilse anyway, and to have her die an undignified death would be a further slur on the family name. And what about her own parents, on their farm? Poor Papi and Mutti had never wanted their only daughter to marry a man who lived so far away. And now they would be left with no daughter at all.

Images flashed through her brain. Ilse thought of the American lady and felt glad that she had talked to her. The American lady had lovely kind eyes and a laugh that made you think nothing really mattered. Ilse tried to remember the address on the card she had given her. It was Winterfeldtstrasse, wasn't it? If only she could remember it she could head there, then perhaps Fräulein Harker would look after her. But that was a crazy hope. How could she possibly reach the city from here?

She ran on and on until her thoughts became a jumble, a kind of harsh music. All she had ever tried to do was obey the Führer's ideas on how to honor the Fatherland and behave the way a good German woman should behave. She had been good, hadn't she? What more could the Führer ask of a girl? She began to pray, the new kind of prayer, the Führer's prayer. “Führer, mein Führer, bequeathed to me by the Lord. Protect and preserve me as long as I live…”

I
t was late afternoon by the time Clara got back to her apartment. She sat down, kicked off her shoes, exhausted, and lay back in her chair as the light leaked out of the sky and the yellow glow of streetlights took its place.

After some time she sat up again. She had dumped Anna's case on the floor, but now she took it up and looked at it. Anna had her secrets. Secrets she kept even from her oldest friend. And it was those secrets that had killed her in the end. Because everything that had happened to Clara—being followed, Erich being threatened—had happened since she took possession of Anna's case. Yet she had looked at it a thousand times, she had been through Johann's letters time and again. The theater programs, the souvenirs. If there was anything secret about this case, it was invisible.

She remembered what Strauss had said to her about aerial photography:
Some of the most important things are hidden in plain sight.

Clara opened the case again and shut her eyes. Then she felt around it like a blind person, her fingertips feeling out the sleek plush of the velvet lining, the tooled edge of leather that formed the writing insert, the drawers with their little ivory knobs. She pulled them out again, but they were empty. She ran her fingers along the outside of the case and swept down to the bottom and then up again to the top.

Wait.

Her fingers sensed a dip in the velvet. She opened her eyes and looked again but could see nothing. Her eyes said there was nothing to see, but her fingers told her it was there. A slight depression that ran along the entire upper edge of the case. She pressed experimentally, and the depression rose smoothly to her hand. So that was it! A partition. Concealed in the upright of the lap desk. Heart pounding, she pulled it all the way out.

There were four packages about six inches square, each made from four flaps of brown paper, constructed like envelopes so that the flaps overlaid each other. Opening one, she saw that it contained an old-fashioned glass plate negative. You never saw them now, not since everyone worked with rolls of film.

Now we see through a glass darkly.

Holding the negatives up to the light, she squinted to see what they represented. It was hard to make out at first, but she discerned a group of people, at a party perhaps. Men in uniform, with their arms around each other. Two of them, she thought she recognized: Rudolf Hess, with his beetle brow and lantern jaw, and Ernst Röhm, the commander of the SA, an intimate of Hitler's since he was an education officer in the army, a devoted friend from the days of the Munich beer hall, and the only man who was allowed to address the Führer as
du
. She knew it was Röhm from the way the cap sat on his bullet head, the sleek outcrop of hair, centrally parted, and the dimpled fold of fat on his face. Röhm, who had been slaughtered on Hitler's orders back in 1934, when the Führer feared that the power of his storm troopers threatened the Wehrmacht. In the picture, Röhm had his arm around another man, and something about the composition of the group reminded her uncannily of the picture painted by Bruno Weiss in the Degenerate Art exhibition.

Quickly, she spread the negatives out on the rug and scrutinized the second, then the third. More groups of people in close embraces. It was while squinting at the fourth that she found the most extraordinary thing. This time the man in it was unmistakable. The intense burning eyes, the mirthless grimace that passed for a smile. It was this picture, Clara realized instantly, that held the key to Anna's death.

Kneeling there on the floor, she looked at the photographs in amazement. She switched from one to another as her eyes grew accustomed to the negatives, and adapted to seeing everything in reverse. It was the reverse, too, of what everyone believed. An astonishing opposite. As she looked, a chill crept over her. Anna's old boyfriend cared enough about these pictures to kill Anna. He had pursued Katia Hansen, too, so much that she had fled to the other end of Germany in fear of him. And the same man knew that Clara had these pictures now. How far would he go to get them back?

For a long time she stared in panic from one picture to another, then rocked back on her heels and put her face in her hands. She felt a throb of fear that rose within her and then a plummeting sensation, like falling from a great height. She had no idea what she could do now. Like Arno Strauss, she had seen too much.

THERE WAS A RAP
on the door. Clara froze. Then she heard a woman's voice. An English voice, young and imperious.

“Come on, Clara! Let me in.”

Unity Mitford wore a powder-blue evening dress with a velvet cape draped across her shoulders and a fur-trimmed hat on her shining blond head. Her complexion was powdered alabaster white, and she had quite unusually applied a slick of cherry lipstick, but the elegance of her appearance was diminished by her climb up several flights of stairs. The swastika brooch that was, as usual, pinned to her breast bounced up and down as she struggled to catch her breath. Her eyes were bright with nervous excitement, and she clutched an evening bag, like an eager puppy holding its lead.

“Guess what, Clara. The Führer says yes!”

“Hello, Unity. What on earth are you talking about?”

Unity stared at her petulantly.

“I
told
you. At the Goerings' party. I said I was going to ask him to invite you to the Wintergarten to see
The Merry Widow
. And the Führer said that was fine. So hurry up. We're due at the Reich Chancellery in fifteen minutes. My car is waiting outside. What's all that on the floor?”

For the first time Unity seemed to register the negatives, which Clara had pushed behind her on the rug. She poked one with her foot. “What are all those?”

“Nothing interesting. Just some historical pictures.”

Unity bent and picked one up. “Really? I say. That looks like the Führer.”

“Don't touch them, please, Unity, they're fragile.”

Clara's request was ignored as Unity dropped to her knees and picked up the negatives, staring from one to the next. Her lower lip pushed out in a childish pout.

“And that must be…Ernst Röhm? But…what are they—?” Then she turned to Clara savagely. “Where did you get these?”

“They came from Hoffmann's studio. They were taken a long time ago. Back in the twenties. Before you knew him, Unity. It was a party in Munich. They got up to some wild things.”

“But the men. They're kissing!”

“I know.”

“It's lies. These are lies.” Unity jumped up. Her face had gone from pale to scarlet. Uncomprehendingly, she waved the negatives in the air. “Pictures are manipulated all the time. Goebbels does it nonstop in the propaganda department. These are just shoddy. They're fakes.”

“Of course they are.”

“So what are
you
doing with them!” Anger and bewilderment warred in Unity's face.

“I found them. I'm keeping them safe. You're right. No one must get hold of them.”

“You're planning to use them against
him,
aren't you?”

“Don't be silly. Just the opposite. I want to stop them falling into the wrong hands.”

Unity was still staring at the pictures, but now she started crying, great gulping sobs like a toddler, swiping the tears angrily away. “It's not true. They are a despicable scandal. The Führer is the finest of men. He is a man of the highest emotions. He would never engage in…he would never…”

She was weeping wildly. Her nose was streaming, and her milky complexion was mottled with emotion. With a sudden movement she slammed the negatives down so they rebounded on the wooden floor and splintered into dancing fragments.

“They're
lies
. Lies should be destroyed. That's what the Führer says.”

The glass negatives lay in shards, some of the bigger slivers embedded upright in the parquet. Unity stared momentarily at the splintered glass, as though slightly stunned by what she had done, then turned back to Clara, defiantly. “I don't want you to come to the opera anymore, Clara. I shall tell the Führer you're not coming. And don't worry: I'm planning to tell him everything. He's going to be very upset.”