Clara sat in stunned silence, the expensive engine purring beneath them, desperately trying to assess her situation. How much did Brandt know about her? And why should he want to prevent the police arresting her? Was it because he desired that pleasure for himself? And if so, where the devil was he taking her now?
She glanced around the car in confusion.
“It’s an 853A Horch cabriolet,” said Brandt tersely. “I borrowed it.”
“I wasn’t thinking about the car. I was thinking about Eva.”
“Eva will be fine.”
“What did you mean when you said that his girlfriends keep trying to kill themselves?”
“It’s a habit they have. One of his first girlfriends tried to hang herself in the garage. Mimi Reiter. Then his twenty-three-year-old niece, Geli, shot herself in the heart with his Walther pistol. Eva tried to do the same with a gun, although not very convincingly. She had another try with pills a few years ago. The Führer has not been lucky in love. It’s one of the perils of mixing with women half your age.”
Clara gnawed her lip. She had known Eva Braun for a matter of days, and what had she deduced? There was a gaucheness about the girl, and a devastating naïveté. Eva was not like Magda Goebbels, who had become infatuated with the National Socialist creed, or Annelies von Ribbentrop, who was more of a Nazi than her husband. Least of all like Lina Heydrich, who shored up the cruelty in her husband’s soul. Instead, the woman closest to Germany’s Führer seemed to have no political interests whatsoever. Yet how could that be possible?
Clara wondered if Brandt shared her own suspicions about Eva’s suicide attempt. That she was pregnant with Hitler’s child. “Do you know why she did it?”
“Could be anything. She’s unbalanced.”
Clara stared out of the window to avoid his eyes. “How did you know where I was this morning?”
“A stroke of luck.”
“You can’t expect me to believe that. You turned up minutes after I had called the police.”
“I happened to be at the police station when you called.”
“You happened to be there? Why?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps I lost my dog.”
“Don’t joke.”
“All right. I was on official business.”
Official business. What kind of official business did a cultural attaché have at a Munich police station? Clara didn’t bother wondering because the truth was perfectly evident to her, as sharp as a knife to the heart. Brandt, the man who had danced with her so tenderly in Paris, whose charm had been so seductive, and whose kiss she had dreamed of, was the instrument of Heydrich she had been warned of. The man who had been sent to check her movements and build a case against her. Why else should he have appeared, out of the blue, at the home of Eva Braun, ordering her into his car? And, most damning of all, why should he now be wearing the uniform of the SS, when he had told her he was an attaché in the German diplomatic service?
Stealing a glance at him, she saw the tense jut of his jaw, and his eyes, which she had once considered melting, were now steely. Brandt looked old. Perhaps he didn’t like what he was doing. What honorable man would? Maybe he regretted deceiving her. Perhaps he hated himself for the task he was carrying out, and for what was about to happen to her. Clara shut her eyes, dreading what lay ahead. A year ago she had been interrogated in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, the headquarters of the Gestapo. The memory of that night and day, the casual brutality meted out by Hauptsturmführer Oskar Wengen, a man with the eyes of a snake, still woke her regularly with a racing heart.
Yet the thought of that night also served to focus her. If Max Brandt was Heydrich’s man, she was now in his car, powerless, so the best she could do was to give nothing away. He could have no idea that she had been warned of surveillance. She must remain resolutely in character—an actress with no conceivable interest in politics.
She shuffled herself deeper into the cream leather seat, smoothing her dress over her knees and checking her face in the overhead mirror.
Then she stared out the window as the Munich buildings with their cream and gold stone slipped by and the powerful car purred southwards, through the outskirts of the city, until the houses gave way to fields and the autobahn stretched before them. Waves of panic flooded over her, knowing that she was trapped without hope of escape in the custody of Max Brandt. What dreadful fate did he have in mind? And how cynical were his jokes, his smiles, when he must know what lay in store for her. The SS were professionals. Brutality was part of their work. All she could do meanwhile was arm herself with as much information as possible.
“So what’s this official business that brings you to Munich?”
“It’s to do with a cultural celebration for the SS.” Casually, he added, “As it happens, Himmler has awarded me an honorary rank in the SS. I’ve had to change uniforms.”
“I noticed.”
“What do you think?”
“I preferred the other one.”
The roads had emptied out now and they had passed into the Bavarian countryside. The air was fresh and clean. Pockets of forest were intersected with fields of intense, luminous green, and here and there white-faced houses with painted shutters and red slanting roofs stood, bursts of crimson geraniums frothing at their windows. Cows gazed indifferently at a gate. It was a landscape of idyllic calm, but it was not enough to soothe the anxiety thrumming through Clara’s body.
“So where exactly are you taking me?”
“Not far. I found myself invited to a lunch, so you may as well come too.”
“And where is this lunch?”
“The Berghof.”
The address, uttered so casually, snagged the breath in her throat. The Berghof. Hitler’s mountain residence. The heart of his domestic base and the place where, above all others, the Führer felt at home.
Scarcely trusting herself to talk, she persisted. “Do you have any idea who will be at this lunch?”
“Hardly anyone. The Bormanns. Himmler obviously.”
“And Heydrich?” she asked, before she could stop herself. He shot her a quick, curious glance, as if assessing her interest, and replied, “Perhaps. If he’s not detained by other business in Munich.”
Clara shuddered. The thought of Heydrich’s eyes, gray and pitiless as a frozen North Sea, meeting hers across the lunch table terrified her.
Eventually the road began winding upwards and the landscape became mountainous. Ahead, the crags of the Bavarian Alps were silhouetted against the morning sky, lilac and gray, towering into a light net of mist. Snow lay in the folds of their peaks, and, in their valleys, deep silver lakes were captured. Despite her apprehension, Clara was awestruck. These mountains had inspired so many artists, from Caspar David Friedrich to Richard Wagner. They encapsulated the sublime and lent themselves to the wildest flights of fantasy. King Ludwig had built his fairy-tale castle, Neuschwanstein, among their southern foothills, determined to re-create the Germanic legends of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, and Hitler was merely the latest leader to be transported by their romantic grandeur. This was a landscape that tugged at the heart of the German soul, even if the feelings it aroused were not to be trusted. Something lay deep within these daunting cliffs, something as sharp and unforgiving as the crags themselves, which dwarfed ordinary human beings and made them seem utterly insignificant.
The road narrowed and they passed into a pretty little town, with a sign announcing it as Berchtesgaden. Brandt gestured to a freshly built station, furnished with grand pillars in monumental Third Reich style. It looked freakishly out of place in the quiet alpine surroundings.
“The Führer’s architectural tastes always tend towards the grandiose. His offices look like railway stations and his railway stations look like churches.”
“What do his churches look like?”
“Heaps of rubble, if our leader has anything to do with it. He doesn’t like churches at all. He prefers rally grounds to cathedrals.”
Past Berchtesgaden the road began to wind upwards, beneath a banner that read FÜHRER, WIR DANKEN DIR, and out towards more fields. Walkers alongside the road waved and gave the Hitler salute, peering avidly through the windows of the gleaming car on the lookout for celebrities. The men were dressed in traditional leather jackets and Bavarian hats, with knee breeches and socks, the women in starched dirndls, aprons, and white, knitted socks and hobnailed boots. Some carried baskets of flowers.
“They’re hoping for a sight of the Führer. He always comes out when he’s here. Sometimes the women tear open their blouses as he passes.” Brandt grimaced.
“I take it the Führer averts his eyes.”
“I’m sure he does. Unfortunately, it’s been known for girls to throw themselves at his car in the hope of being injured and then comforted by him.”
Eva Braun’s pallid face came again into Clara’s mind. Once it might have seemed astonishing to her that women would risk physical injury, let alone their lives, for their leader, yet this man carried death around him wherever he went. Suddenly, the thought of where they were headed caused fear like a surge of nausea to catch in her throat and she wound down the window to gulp the fresh air. It was as sharp as diamonds. The bright alpine sun made everything shimmer with iridescence.
“The air’s extraordinary here, isn’t it?” Brandt commented. “It’s to do with the salt deposits in the mountains, apparently. The Führer says it makes him feel well again. Ah, here we are.”
They had come to a ten-foot-high double layer of barbed wire surrounding a roped-off area of the mountainside. The car crunched over the gravel to a stone guardhouse, where the guards stiffened to attention. One ducked his head in, and Clara and Brandt showed their identity cards. Beyond them she glimpsed more guards, patrolling with dogs. They passed a barracks and several parking lots until the road wound round and the house itself came into view.
The Berghof might once have been a charming country home, a white-faced chalet-style construction set into the slope of the hillside, yet now the simple mountain house had been extended to form the hub of an entire Nazi complex, a gated community for the National Socialist elite. All villagers who had lived within sight of the house had been forcibly removed and their chalets and farmhouses transformed into luxury homes for Goering, Goebbels, Hess, and Speer or, if they were too humble, into barracks for soldiers. The entire compound was ringed with antiaircraft guns, and deep underground bomb- and gas-proof bunkers had been built.
The entrance to the house itself was preceded by a steep flight of wide steps. The same steps, Clara remembered, that just a few days ago Neville Chamberlain himself had mounted.
For a moment, as Brandt pulled the Horch to a stop, Clara froze. What was his true motive in bringing her to this place? Being here, in the jaws of the Third Reich, had never seemed so real, or so intimidating. There was no escape here, no refuge from scrutiny. She wasn’t in the middle of a city, where she could turn and disappear, or in a film studio, surrounded by people who cared only for their work. She was not among friends but at the beating heart of the Nazi regime, with officers who were trained to look on strangers with particular scrutiny. And she was with Max Brandt, whom she now knew she could never trust. Fear moored her to the seat. She wanted to beg Brandt to turn the car around and drive back fast the way they had come. Then two SS guards leapt forward, black jackets with swastika armbands attached, opened the doors, and gave the Hitler salute. Brandt raised his right hand, turned to Clara, and said softly, “Ready?”
“I’m not sure.”
His expression was strange, unreadable. “Relax. You of all people know how to put on a good show.”
EVERY CITIZEN OF THE REICH was familiar with the vista from the terrace of the Berghof. Every cinemagoer had seen newsreel film of the Führer, strolling with Himmler or Speer, playing with the flaxen-haired children of his aides, sitting beneath a striped parasol with his loyal dog at his heels while beyond him lay the panoramic vista of Untersberg Mountain with Salzburg Castle in the distance. Some ways away was the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s own teahouse, perched on the summit of Kehlstein Mountain and accessed by an elevator that rose through the granite. Immediately beneath the terrace, meadows rolled into distant forest, above which soared the mountains, veined with snow like a garland of blossom at their peaks. In that mountain range across from the Berghof, Charlemagne was said to sleep, waiting to restore the glory of the German empire. This craggy, romantic landscape could not be less like the military geography of Berlin, with its squares of stone and steel and its ranks of marching soldiers. Yet in different ways both expressed the indomitable ethic of the Nazi soul.
The terrace, which wrapped itself around three sides of the house, was furnished with cane sunloungers, white wooden chairs, and tables. The pale stone shimmered in the sharp alpine air, and lounging against the wall on the far side was a group of men, some in SS uniform, others in field gray, and a couple in suits, chatting to women over pre-lunch drinks. Two little girls in perfectly smocked dresses and braids like chunks of woven corn played with an Alsatian, hanging garlands of daisies around its neck as the dog patiently endured the little fingers digging into its fur. As she watched the knot of people, chatting and laughing, Clara’s only consolation was that all the women were wearing dirndls. What luck that in her blind panic that morning she had chosen the dress with puffed sleeves and dirndl neckline to wear. And her silver necklace with the picture of her mother inside. Her clothing, at least, would not give her away.
Brandt strode confidently towards the group. He clicked his heels before dipping his head to hand-kiss the female guests, and then gestured to Clara.
“Fräulein Clara Vine, you may know, from the Ufa studios.” His tone implied that even if they had not heard of her, they should have. He introduced the entire group, the men giving Clara a curt bow and clicking heels, the women a handshake. He ended with a buxom blonde.
“And this is Frau Mimi Kubisch.”
Kubisch. Clara recognized the name immediately. She knew, as Brandt did, that this was Hitler’s first girlfriend, the one who had been Mimi Reiter, yet Clara also knew that this woman had visited Hitler at his apartment just days ago. And if Eva was to be believed, had been told by Hitler that his relationship was ending. Like the others, Mimi wore rustic, Bavarian fashion, which on her translated as a tip-tilted red hat, a puffed-sleeve blouse beneath a black bodice, thick white socks, and brown lace-up brogues. She gave Clara a broad smile.
“Have you been here before, Fräulein Vine?”
“Only in the Ufa newsreel,” responded Clara lightly.
“Then you’ll be longing to look around! Would you like a tour while the men talk?”
The Berghof might have been inspired by Hitler’s passion for Wagner, but there was nothing Wagnerian about the interior. Everywhere stolid bourgeois taste prevailed, with fretted wood, fringed lampshades, and slightly threadbare sofas piled high with embroidered cushions. Mimi followed her gaze.
“There must be fifty cushions with Ich Liebe Sie and Heil Mein Führer! stitched on them. He won’t throw a single one away.”
Mimi led the way through a vaulted corridor into a vast room, fit for a medieval banquet, with a gigantic window to one side giving a panoramic view of the mountains. It was more formal here. The walls were covered in Gobelin tapestries and the floor laid with red velvet and Persian carpets. Paintings of nude women hung over the fireplace, and a gigantic eagle crouched above the bronze clock. At one end a grand piano was clustered with silver framed photographs of foreign royalty, including a shot of the Duchess of Windsor, smiling up at Hitler as he took her hand on the steps of the Berghof the previous year. Like so much of Third Reich architecture, the main function of the room was less comfort or convenience, than making everyone feel small.
“This entire place was rebuilt a couple of years ago,” Mimi explained. “He’s terribly proud of it. All the swastika tiles on the floor are hand-painted, and that tapestry over there lifts up to make way for the movie screen. They show films every evening; several, usually.” Mimi smiled merrily. “Nothing’s allowed to get in the way of the Führer’s screenings. When Mr. Chamberlain came here, the Führer cut the meeting short so he could watch an Ingrid Bergman movie!”
“I heard he liked The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.”
“Liked it? He’s seen it ten times! He’s made it compulsory viewing for the SS because it shows how Britain gained her empire. And every night when the movie’s finished, he gives his opinion to an adjutant who wires it over to the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin.”
“That sounds amazingly efficient.”
“It’s terribly important, the Führer says. He’s been watching a lot of American films recently—Tarzan, Laurel and Hardy, and so on, because he wants to learn about American culture. He loved Laurel and Hardy. Gave them a standing ovation, actually. Oh, here they come…”
The door opened at the far end of the room and Clara froze. Five men entered, deep in conversation. Their German was harsh and guttural, and Clara was able to catch only the occasional word or phrase. Rabble was one and essential preparations was another.
Clara shivered.
“It’s always freezing here,” said Mimi. “You need to bring a fur coat, even in the warmest weather.”
The group at the end of the room erupted in laughter, and Clara nodded at them. “What are they talking about, do you suppose?”
Mimi shrugged. “What do you think? They say Adolf Hitler is the guest at every party. Even when he’s not here. Want to go outside? I’m dying for a cigarette.”
They lit up and leaned over the balustrade. In the driveway below Clara could see a soldier polishing Brandt’s gleaming Horch, buffing its sleek lines as meticulously as if it were one of his own jackboots. The little girls were throwing the Alsatian’s ball into the flower beds and watching the animal trample the blooms while a guard, rifle slung over his shoulder, tried ineffectually to prevent them.
“What do you think of the view?”
“It’s breathtaking.”
“We have Bormann to thank for it.”
Mimi pointed behind her to a squat man with a darting, wary gaze. He had no neck and clothes that hung on him like flabby skin.
“Bormann ravaged this place,” said Mimi, more softly. “Fifty houses were razed, and a sanitarium. He burned down a farm to make way for a place big enough to accommodate his ten children. It was pretty hard for the families who lived here. My own family knew a lot of them, but even if they’d been here for generations, Bormann wouldn’t let them stay. Security reasons.”
She turned and rested her elbows on the terrace ledge as she surveyed the men in the hall, pointing at them with the tip of her cigarette.
“I don’t suppose you know many of these people. That one’s Julius Schaub, the Führer’s valet.” She indicated a man with bulging eyes. “He limps because several of his toes were amputated for frostbite in the war.”
Clara had heard of Schaub. All the actresses knew him. He was in charge of visiting theaters and cabarets to handpick actresses and dancers for quiet evenings with Hitler.
“And that’s Albert Bormann, Martin’s brother. And my husband, Georg,” Mimi added, a trifle dismissively, pointing to a horse-faced man with broken veins spidering his cheeks. “Herr Brandt, of course, you know.”
As she looked across, Brandt caught Clara’s eye and winked. It was dreadful to think that this man, with his dark jokes and teasing smile, was in Heydrich’s pay.
At that moment the doors of the dining room were opened to reveal a phalanx of white-jacketed waiters carrying silver trays.
“At last!” Mimi exclaimed. “Lunch is here. I’m famished! Come on, sit next to me, Clara.”
They seated themselves around a long table set with a white linen tablecloth, crystal glasses, and solid gold cutlery, engraved with the initials AH. Despite the lavishness of the table settings, there was distinctly little alcohol. No cognac or champagne was in evidence. Instead the men were served beer and the women made do with the Führer’s favorite Fachinger mineral water.
The company applied themselves to their meal with zest, but Clara had no appetite. The situation was so bizarre that she felt dazed. She was at the Berghof and sitting at the Führer’s dinner table, though fortunately without the host. His seat at the end of the table had been left conspicuously empty.
“Bad luck that he should be away on your first visit,” remarked Mimi, following her gaze. “He may come later this evening, though. Are you staying tonight?”
“No,” said Clara, a little too quickly.
“That’s a shame. But even if you did, you might miss him. He doesn’t normally get up till noon.” Mimi leaned closer with a smile. “Even then, the servants always have to let us know what mood he’s in. And there are some advantages to him not being here.” She picked up her fork and turned towards the servant behind her bearing a tray of warm ham. “It means we can eat meat without it being called carrion. And we don’t have to listen to endless descriptions of the insides of slaughterhouses. Ugh.”
“What does the Führer like to eat?”
“Hardly anything!” Her face mimed disgust. “His favorite dish is Hoppelpoppel, fried eggs with potatoes, but there are so many things he won’t eat. Mushrooms, for example, because he’s scared of being poisoned. Like a Roman emperor, you know? And of course, he drinks apple peel tea, never alcohol.”
A stiff brandy was the only thing Clara longed to consume just then, but Mimi prattled on, seemingly oblivious of her companion’s silence.
“Of course, him being away also means we don’t have to have any after-lunch entertainment. The Führer likes to get Blondi, his dog, to sing. It’s so funny, watching this dog howling away, but we have to keep straight faces. I’m laughing just thinking about it.”
Even the image of the Führer’s singing dog failed to relax Clara. Any moment she expected the phone would ring, bringing news of Eva’s suicide attempt and summoning her in for questioning. Yet there was nothing.
The waiters were just clearing the first course when the conversation suddenly hushed and faces turned towards a door at the back of the room. A slender figure had entered and was surveying the company impassively. He was wearing gray woolen trousers, hanging wide at the thigh and tucked into black jackboots, beneath a gray tunic with a thick black belt. On his collar three silver oak leaves glittered. He seemed, in his uniform, like a dark silence, a hole in the air drawing all the laughter and ease and energy from the room.
Clara realized who she was looking at. Party member number two, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.
It would be hard to find a more unlikely physical specimen of the Aryan race than Himmler, unless you counted Hitler himself. His blinking eyes behind round wire-rimmed glasses gave him the appearance of a malevolent owl, and only a narrow outcrop of hair survived on his severely shaved skull. The pudgy face and weak, receding chin were in ironic contrast to the stiff silver death’s-head gleaming from the cap of his uniform.
Acknowledging the lunch guests with a curt nod, he sat down, calling over a servant who brought him a humidor, shaped like a little hunting chest and decorated with stag horn tips. Removing a Cuban cigar, he lit up with hands that were strikingly delicate.
Himmler’s arrival cast a chill over the lunch. Like a sinister, invisible toxin in the air, his presence poisoned the company and changed the tenor of the conversation. The men ignored the women and competed with one another to entertain the SS Reichsführer, while the women censored the gossip from their discussions, as if conscious that they must dwell on more serious matters.
Clara knew she should linger and listen to their chat, but as soon as lunch was over, she escaped back to the Great Hall. The shadow of the mountain had fallen across the house, and the servants had lit a fire to combat the autumnal chill. Trays of coffee and cake were placed on small tables. Clara buried herself in an armchair by the fireplace and stared into the flames, wondering what the next few hours might hold. She felt paralyzed by uncertainty, both about the intentions of Max Brandt and about just how much he knew. She was entirely certain now that Brandt’s motivations were not romantic ones. But as to his agenda, and how she should respond, she was frighteningly unclear.
A shadow fell across the fire. She looked up to see a figure gazing speculatively down at her. Clara sat upright and tensed. Heinrich Himmler stood with a cigar in one hand and the other hooked in his pocket, rocking back on his heels, regarding her quizzically.
“Is it true, Fräulein Vine, that the English upper classes always eat porridge for breakfast?”
Of all the things she could have imagined Himmler asking her, this was most certainly the last.
“I don’t think it’s a hard-and-fast rule, Herr Reichsführer.”
“I understand that’s the reason for their good figures.” He paused, perched on the arm of the chair opposite, and crossed his legs. “I think it’s a good idea, actually. I have instructed porridge to be served at every one of my Lebensborn homes.”
The Lebensborn institutions were Himmler’s pet project. A series of homes where unmarried women who could prove Aryan descent through four generations could bear their babies. After birth they were encouraged to donate them to the SS.
Himmler took a draw on his cigar and exhaled, allowing a miasma of smoke to coil around him. Other guests had gathered, and Clara felt their eyes on her, as if trying to divine how she had drawn Himmler’s attention.
“Producing high-quality children is a science, like any other. Nutrition is just one element in a precisely calibrated process. I know this from my own experience. Some years ago I used to breed chickens at my farm in Waldtrudering. It was enlightening matching poultry, mating the correct bloodlines, improving the stock; it taught me a good deal. Sometimes one needed to make firm judgments to attain the highest quality of birds. If one wants to create a pure new strain from a well-tried species that has been exhausted by crossbreeding, then one needs to be selective. Eradicate inferior material that could taint the flock. Pick out the unhealthy ones, the weaklings, those whose diseases render them incurable. Be ruthless in purging the flock of mutant elements. There’s no place for bleeding hearts. We can learn a lot from livestock.”
He had a low, insidious voice, quite different from the Führer’s guttural tones or the harsh scrape of Goebbels’s speech. Cruelty came off him in waves, like body heat.
“Or examine, if you will, the actions of a nursery gardener. If he wants to reproduce a strain of plants that has been corrupted, he will weed out all those which are stunted or malformed. And we are grateful to him, because we will all enjoy finer flowers and fruit. It is my conviction that a well-conceived breeding plan must stand at the center of every civilization. Unless one plans a population with scientific exactitude, that population can never be truly, morally pure.”
Clara’s silver locket, with its photograph of her Jewish mother, burned on her throat. She found her hand gripping the arm of her chair with unnatural rigor and forced herself to relax. It took everything in her to meet that cold, penetrating gaze and hold it.
“This is very interesting, Herr Reichsführer,” she managed.
“The biological laws that operate with animal and plant life also apply to humans. Animal breeding and plant cultivation can teach us much about racial hygiene. Nature is perfectly unsentimental. It expels the degenerate and the alien because it understands that they weaken the species.” He blinked. There was a dreadful dissonance between his manner and the ugly substance of his speech.
“Sometimes, our human instincts get in the way. Our senses tell us that we should pity the weaklings. Empathize with them. So one of our greatest tasks will be to harden ourselves against the soft language of sentiment and follow what we know to be right. The sentimentalists would argue for sparing the young, but nature knows that it is better to start with them. The earlier that the degenerate young are eliminated, the more resources remain for the healthy stock. And once you have that healthy stock, it becomes imperative to increase it. Childbearing is a woman’s highest duty to her Fatherland. It is only when our childbearing is both scientific and sacred that the nation will flourish with eternal life.”
He ground out his cigar in a cut-glass ashtray and tucked the stub in his pocket. Outside, the shadow of the mountain crept further across the Berghof, casting the terrace into deeper shade, and inside the glimmer of the fire enclosed the pair of them in its glow.
Himmler’s eyes traveled over Clara’s breasts and legs, as though assessing her sexual potential.
“You have no children, Fräulein Vine?”
“I’m not married, Herr Reichsführer.”
“That need not be an impediment in a woman of good blood.”
For an instant she was puzzled. Then she realized. Himmler was suggesting that it was her duty to Germany to bear a child. Husband optional.
“What age are you?”
“Thirty-one.”
“And still single.” He waved a hand in a slight gesture of concession. “Perhaps you serve the Reich in other ways.”
“Thoughts of the Reich are at the very heart of my work.”
Himmler gave a colorless smile. “Of course. You are one of Doktor Goebbels’s protégées, I understand. I’m sure he appreciates…well, everything you do for him.”
The only safe response was impassivity.
“The minister has been kind enough to ask me to voice a documentary about Gertrud Scholz-Klink. There’s an announcement he wants to make concerning the birth rate and a reward for prolific mothers.”
At this, a flicker of irritation crossed Himmler’s face. “Does he indeed? That must be my new decoration for kinderreich mothers. I didn’t know the Herr Doktor had taken it upon himself to publicize it already.”
He turned crossly, knit his hands behind his back, and stared out of the window where the distant mountain loomed purple and indigo in the lengthening shadows. After a few moments, in which he seemed to be collecting his thoughts, he said, “So what do you make of the Berghof, Fräulein Vine?”
“It’s very beautiful.”
“We made it that way. It was a mess before we took it in hand. Squalid little huts and chalets everywhere. It had to be cleared, but I must say that was no easy task. One resident had the impertinence to approach the Führer himself and hand him a letter begging to be allowed to keep his hut.”
“And was he allowed?”
The ghost of a smile twitched Himmler’s thin lips. “Let’s just say we found him alternative accommodation. Two years in a camp.”
Max Brandt had come up to them and was watching Clara. Her eye caught his; she held it without a flicker.
“Ah.” Himmler turned. “It seems your Sturmbannführer Brandt is eager to leave, Fräulein Vine.”
“So soon?” Clara managed.
Brandt’s smile was as jocular as ever, but she noticed that beneath the black tunic, his shoulders were rigid.
“Indeed. Again, my apologies, Herr Reichsführer.” He bowed slightly, reached for Clara, and gripped her arm, his fingers digging into the flesh. “You remember, my dear, I have a dinner engagement back in Munich.”
He clicked heels to the assembled gathering, and Mimi Kubisch, beaming, grasped Clara’s hand in farewell.
The SS valet brought the Horch round to the front. Brandt ushered Clara in and drove sedately down the mountain, but once he had turned the corner out of sight of the Berghof, he sped recklessly along the winding road as if pursued by Valkyries.