In the corner of the Friedrichshain Volkspark, beyond the bunkers lying like open graves in the bleached grass, workers were raking dead leaves into a bonfire, as though burning the last of summer itself. The first heavy drops of rain, foreshadowing a storm, dappled the dusty pavements, and the prospect of a Berlin autumn brought a chill to the bones.
As Clara walked she thought of Max. Had Steffi Schaeffer managed to hide him? Berlin had become a city of the hidden. Of refugees, their jewels stitched against their skin in heavy, invisible seams, their lives in their linings, carrying their secrets close. Of U-boats, concealed in back rooms and attics, with forged papers and desperate plans, and of plotters hidden in safe houses, waiting for the moment to strike. Of food, secreted in bags, smuggled to those who were hiding, and of secrets concealed on cards, telling the truths that no one dared speak.
Clara had attempted her own form of concealment.
That morning she had taken her copy of Mein Kampf, a smart edition bound in wine-red leather that had been a personal gift from the Führer to all cast members of The Pilot’s Wife—a film he was said to have especially enjoyed. Turning to Chapter Five, “The World War,” she took a sharp knife and carved a rectangle down through the center of the block of pages. Then she collected the deck of cigarette cards that constituted Eva Braun’s diary and placed them in the space she had created, before covering them by sticking the first page of Chapter Six to the previous page. As she looked around her apartment, wondering where to conceal the book, inspiration struck her. She slid the volume beneath the wobbly leg of her desk. A copy of Mein Kampf was part of the furniture in most German homes, so when one part of the furniture was being used to prop up another, what intruder would give it a second glance?
In her bag she carried a purse, identity documents, and a packet of cigarettes, in one of which the tobacco had been replaced with a rolled cigarette paper, bearing the next day’s date. A veneer of tobacco had been reinserted at the tip. She also had her fallback, the ticket Alois Kassner had given her to his cabaret on Friedrichstrasse. As cover stories went, an invitation to the theater from the great Kassner himself would surely dazzle the most suspicious of policemen.
Missing the meeting at the Siegessäule had been unavoidable, but the plan had always been that she could communicate through a message in the dead letter box, which, Hamilton promised, was checked regularly. With the Munich agreement signed, and so many convinced war had been averted, it was more crucial than ever that the people back in London hear what Eva Braun had to say.
Clara slid her hand into her coat pocket, where a single card remained: the one with her own photograph on it.
Last night Wolf said that after the war he would marry me! When is after the war? I asked. When Poland is subjugated, he explained. Very soon, he told me, Poland will cease to exist.
The Märchenbrunnen, the fairy-tale fountain, was a piece of Baroque whimsy crafted for the children of Berlin in the days when family promenades on Sunday afternoons were routine and children considerably easier to enchant. Situated on the northwestern end of the Volkspark and accessed through a pair of arches, it was flanked by two long stone benches and fenced off from the rest of the park by a parade of pillars. Marble versions of the fairy-tale characters posed joylessly around the water as though some wintry magician had turned them to stone. The tortoises, designed to issue jets of water into the air, were turned off and the tiered pools lay stagnant. Clara waited as an old lady, bundled up spherically against the chill, with an equally rotund poodle on a leash, made a leisurely progress around the fountain before turning out of the gate towards Friedenstrasse. There was no one else in sight, apart from a leaf raker about a hundred yards away, focusing on the grass beneath a group of lime trees. Resolutely, Clara approached the bench on the left-hand side, closest to the pillar, sat down, and let one hand drop. There was the cavity, exactly as Guy Hamilton had described, a six-inch indentation large enough, she hoped, to conceal a packet of Reetsma cigarettes.
She sat for a moment. In the stillness of the park, the noise of the distant traffic was muted like the faint roar of the sea. Taking out her compact, she could see that there was no one behind her and that the leaf raker, having completed his pile of leaves, was moving away. She was about to extract the cigarette packet from her bag when she remembered something that Leo had taught her.
If time allows, perform a trial run.
After rising smartly, she walked back through the stone arch and along a mossy graveled path, fringed with evergreen shrubs. The vegetation was damp from the recent shower, with silver beads of rain trapped in the clefts of the leaves and a dank, loamy smell rising from the earth. She performed a loop of the park, walking at a measured pace right around a small lake, before returning along a different path and reentering the arch. When she did, she discovered that the stone bench was now occupied by a man in a sage-green loden overcoat. He stood as she approached.
She had not seen him in five years, but he had barely changed. He was tall and sinewy, leaner, perhaps, than ever, with the same high cheekbones and strong jaw, but a few more lines around his eyes. His face, though she had half forgotten it, was instantly familiar; that demeanor, so valuable in a spy, that seemed to register expressions with only a flicker before they were suppressed. The delicate Irish coloring, fine red-gold stubble on his chin, and the brush of hair resistant to pomade. The firm mouth, whose lines appeared to be compressing some intense emotion. The shock of seeing Leo Quinn knocked the breath out of her. The noise drained from the world and every lineament of her body quivered, like an instrument touched by a bow. After a few seconds she managed to say, “I might have guessed it would be you, after that message you sent.”
“I didn’t send any message.”
“You must have. Ovid? The man from London Films quoted a line of Ovid. I assumed it was a message from you.”
“It wasn’t.”
Her heart plummeted.
“Shall we walk?” Leo said.
They headed out of the park and turned left, in the direction of Alexanderplatz. He kept his hands jammed in his pockets, eyes straight ahead. He must have seen her approach the DLB the first time and then waited—knowing she would make a trial run, because that was what he had taught her.
“What did it say? This line that wasn’t a message?”
“Good manners and a fine disposition are the best beauty treatments.”
He smiled tightly. “I see.”
“What do you see?” she challenged, almost stepping off the curb into the path of a tram, and feeling his hand lightly restraining her.
“It’s an exercise I set.”
“You set it? Are you a teacher now?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Oh. I didn’t know.”
He fell silent again. There was so much Clara wanted to say, but she could see no way to breach this wall of awkwardness that had grown up between them, consigning them to an icy formality. All the times she had dreamed of being reunited with him. How often she had lain in bed remembering the ecstasy of their love affair, retracing the contours of his body, the feel of his lips against hers. How often in her mind she had replayed their conversations, the poems he had read to her.
And now this.
His eyes avoided her. All the questions she had yearned to ask him over the years hovered unspoken as chill courtesy imprisoned them. Was he married now? In love with someone else? Was he happy to see her, or did the terrible manner of their parting darken his memories, the way it did hers?
Where were they heading? Leo kept his hands deep in his pockets, his steps matching her own in the way she remembered, as though they shared a purpose. As they progressed northwards, through the fringes of Friedrichshain towards Prenzlauer Berg, she realized that their path was taking them down a street that would lead straight past the former SIS safe house—the yellow-painted, turn-of-the-century block with white scrolled detail above the entrance, where, five years ago, he had asked her to marry him. Leo must have recalled it too, because a wince went through him and without looking up at it he turned, sharply, to cross the road.
When they were safely past the block and had rounded the corner, he finally spoke.
“I should apologize. I’m here because of a last-minute change of circumstances. The man who should have been here was diverted. So please forgive me if it seems inappropriate.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Good.” His mouth was still taut, as though he was holding everything back.
“I did go yesterday, to the Siegessäule. But I got waylaid,” she said. “There was no way to warn you.”
“Of course. It doesn’t matter. You found the DLB. I assume you were about to set up another meeting.”
“Yes. There are things I need to communicate. I need to talk to you, Leo.”
“By all means.”
“Not here.”
“Where?”
“My apartment.”
“And that is…?”
“Winterfeldtstrasse. Number 35. Apartment six.”
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
He made an abrupt turn, rounded a corner, and disappeared from sight.
BY THE TIME HE knocked at her door, Clara was still in a daze. As she let him in, Leo took a quick, hungry look around the room, as if he wanted to absorb everything in it at a single glance, because of what it might reveal about her. The photographs on the mantelpiece, the potted geranium on the kitchen table, the oil painting of a saxophone player in jagged grays and browns by the artist Bruno Weiss.
“You said you had something to show me.”
She went across the drawing room, and his eyes followed, taking in the small, blue-covered copy of Rilke’s poems on the desk as she removed the leather-bound Mein Kampf from beneath its wobbly leg.
“I found these.” She pried the page open and took out the stack of cards. He frowned.
“Eva Braun was banned from keeping a diary by Martin Bormann, but Eva couldn’t stop herself. Her diary was important to her—it was the only place she could talk about her real feelings—so she found a way to hide it. All her fears about Hitler, everything he confided to her about his plans. All in her own handwriting. See?”
She handed the cards to Leo, who shuffled through them with growing amazement.
“How did you get these?”
“The album was stolen from Eva, and the woman who took it must have been planning to sell it but she disappeared on a cruise. It was my godson who found it…”
“Your godson?”
“Erich Schmidt. Remember?”
It was the first time she had referred to their shared past. He nodded, head bent, still scrutinizing the cards.
“There’s this one too.”
From her pocket she withdrew the card bearing the portrait of herself. Leo hesitated, squinted at the picture, then turned it over.
Last night Wolf said that after the war he would marry me! When is after the war? I asked. When Poland is subjugated, he explained. Very soon, he told me, Poland will cease to exist.
“This is astonishing,” he murmured.
“There’s more. And so much worse. Hitler talks about the extermination of the entire Jewish race. It’s written proof, Leo. That’s what they need. You must take these back to London. I’ll give you other examples of her handwriting, to verify it. We can’t let the politicians think it’s all over, that Hitler’s demands have been met and he’s no longer a threat. I heard Richard Dimbleby on the wireless saying Chamberlain’s achievement was a triumph. It’s dangerous to assume that Hitler has no aggressive intentions. He intends to destroy Europe. To exterminate the Jews. The idea that people think he will stop at the Sudetenland terrifies me.”
“Don’t be terrified, Clara. No one I know believes any such thing.”
It was the first time he had used her name and the first time she had heard a note of anything in his voice that was like concern. He stood there, in his coat, while his sea-green eyes, unreadable as ever, pulled her in like a tide. The stillness between them was tangible.
She said, “Why did you not come to the Siegessäule?”
“I did. I was right there. You didn’t see me. You were with a man.”
“That was Max Brandt. He’s one of ours. Code name Steinbrecher. I wasn’t expecting him there. He surprised me.”
“You had your arm in his.”
“That was…work.”
“It didn’t look like work”—his voice was bureaucratically flat—“when you kissed him.”
“I was saying goodbye. Max is a good man, Leo, and he’s in terrible danger. He needed to leave Berlin and he wanted to see me before he did. If you were there, you should have come and spoken to me.”
“Should I?”
“Yes. You should. If you were that close, the least you could do was make contact.”
They stood, separated by only a narrow, trembling distance, and he was so quiet that she feared for a moment he was angry. When he did speak, however, his voice was low and level.
“Is that what you think, Clara? The least I could do? I watched the only woman I have ever loved arm in arm with another man. I watched you kiss him. And you think I should have made contact? It was all I could do to walk away.”
She was trying to frame a reply. The words took shape in her mouth, but they died on her lips.
“Are you free, Leo?”
“I haven’t been free since the day I met you.”
When he reached out she felt the tensions of her dangerous existence fall from her like chains. She stepped towards him and ran her hand across his face, discovering the feel of it still inside her fingers, imprinted there. Her body fitted into his perfectly, as though they had been designed for each other.
She wanted to talk, but knew that if she began, she would not stop. Leo was shrugging off his coat and jacket, easing his braces, while their mouths met.
She pulled away. “Wait.”
She undressed, peeling off the layers of clothing and lifting her arms to free the clasp of her silver locket. He took the locket from her, set it down, tenderly kissed her naked neck, and encircled her trembling body with his own.
MUCH LATER, WHEN THE evening sun was a faint glow and a few stars already glimmered in the sky, she brought him coffee and toast and sat naked in bed beside him. He was smiling at her, as though he would never stop. He looked around the room as if every item in it, from the desk, to the red armchair, to the pictures on the wall filled him with indescribable tenderness, because they belonged to her.
Downstairs someone was banging away at a piano, and the dusky light filtering through the leaves of the tree outside cast the room in a greenish tint. Clara felt as though they were suspended in that aqueous light, inviolate from everything around them, and she had the momentary bliss of satisfaction, as when every piece of a puzzle has finally fallen into place.
“I thought about you all the time. I had no idea where you were.”
“I tried to forget you. I deliberately attempted to block Germany from my mind. I involved myself in other areas.”
“And other women?”
His only answer was a shrug, a gesture that seemed to dismiss every woman he had met since she had last seen him, and expressed the absolute irrelevance of her question.
“I tried different ways of thinking about us,” he said. “All sorts of metaphors. I had an image of us as two planets, circling each other from afar but never actually leaving each other’s orbit. Pulled by such gravitational attraction that our paths would always be joined.”
“Did you worry about me?”
“Of course.”
She laid her head on his chest, so his voice was a low rumble, reverberating through his flesh and entering hers.
“Why did you never contact me?”
“I wrote to you. I must have written a hundred letters. But I never sent them.”
“I often thought of telephoning. Just to hear your voice.”
He traced a curl of hair around her ear. “You probably couldn’t have found me if you’d tried. It’s an odd, transient place, the intelligence service. People disappear without a trace, and you don’t know whether they’ve been sacked, or found out, or simply posted elsewhere. That happened to me, until I was approached by a man called Dansey…”
She sat up.
“Colonel Dansey?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Guy Hamilton told me about him. What’s he like?”
“I think he’s very astute. Hamilton probably told you Dansey has firm ideas about the security of our network in Europe. And he’s working on alternatives. He’s looking for people who will be able to move around the continent fairly easily, if circumstances arise. Who are fluent in several languages. With a valid reason to travel.”
“People like me.”
“Yes. He mentioned you specifically.”
“Is that why you’re here then? Because Dansey sent you?”
“It might be why he approached me, but it’s not why I came. I came because war could break out at any time, and I needed to know what you planned to do.”
“If that was all, you could have asked Rupert.”
His eyes gleamed. He caught her in his arms again and kissed her, burying his face in her flesh and inhaling the deep, warm scent of her.
“I came, Clara, because every day away from you convinced me that I shouldn’t live a second more of my life without you. When I insisted on you leaving Berlin if we were to be married, I was a fearful, anxious fool. All I could see was you being arrested, or suffering, and I wanted to save you from that. I thought the prospect of you risking your life was more than I could bear. But being without you entirely was far, far worse.”
She pulled away and regarded him soberly.
“What did Dansey want of me?”
“His idea is to establish an outfit inside Germany who could play an important part when war comes. He’s keen to recruit women because he thinks they have more patience. They pay closer attention to detail. They can read relationships and human motivations better than men, he believes. I suppose that’s true. I was never good at judging you. He wants to know what you might do, if war comes. Whether you would agree to stay here.”
“I see.”
Suddenly she didn’t want to think about the future, or not that part of it. She lay back in his arms, remembering the time they had first met, when he told her about his hobby, translating classical literature.
“Are you still doing your translations?”
“I’m working on Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus right now. Rilke has a wonderful way of making the German language sound soft and fluid.”
“Orpheus was the musician, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he was a beautiful singer—his music transfixed the whole of nature. Animals would come and kneel before him when he sang. He could coax the rocks and stones to dance. And through his music he was able to cross the boundary between life and death to fetch his wife from the underworld. Ovid wrote about him too.”
That reminded her. “What did you mean when you said you set that piece of Ovid as an exercise? A teaching exercise? You’re not a schoolteacher, are you? I assumed you were working for the film company.”
“I am, some of the time. The teaching is part of my other work. I’m training people how to use codes. Anyone who works with us will need to understand codes, ciphers, and all sorts of secret communication techniques. At the moment the outfit I work with is still pretty new. You won’t find us in the telephone directory.”
“So what exactly do you do?”
“I can’t tell you, Clara, not until you need to know. But trust me, we’re soon going to need more secure methods of communication. And codes will be an essential part of that. It seemed important to me that agents have something that would be easily memorized, yet individual. Poems are a common device, but everyone chooses ‘Ozymandias’ or ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ —poems that are easily recognized, even by foreigners. We wanted something entirely unpublished that could never be found in a reference book, so I suggested my translations of Ovid.”
She made a wry face. “Which have still not been published?”
He laughed. “Perhaps someday. But they’re serving a more important function right now.”
He ran a finger down her neck and kissed the hollow at the base of her throat. “What’s this perfume?”
She reached over to the bedside table and showed him the flask with Eva Braun’s meticulous handwriting on the label.
“It’s called Scent of Secrets.”
“It’s lovely.”
Leo removed the stopper, gently anointing her wrist.
“You should let me have the bottle when it’s done. Then wherever I go I can smell the last few drops and remember this moment.”
Clara smiled. How was it possible to feel so happy with all the agony and anxiety that was going on in the city? War might come soon, and what would that mean for Erich, who was so keen to fight for his country? And all the friends she had here in Berlin? Five years ago, Leo had wanted her to leave Germany. Now, it seemed, he was asking her to stay. Perhaps she would not, after all, need to choose between love and duty.
“Your Orpheus. Did his wife ever leave the underworld?”
“She was permitted to follow her husband, unless he looked back.”
“What happened if he looked back?”
“She stayed there.”
He leaned over and kissed her again, deep and lingering.
“It’s a story, Clara.”
She looked out at the dusk. Beyond the window a swirl of migrating birds was massing, wheeling, and turning in the darkening sky. A susurration of starlings, that’s what it was called, she remembered suddenly, a perfect aerial formation, tilting and diving through the early evening mist, changing direction abruptly like the whisk of a living cloak, narrowing to a twisting ribbon, then bulging into a cloud. More and more birds joined the flock so that eventually a great throng bloomed in the sky, massing above the city rooftops, scattering and rejoining, soaring up into the vault of clouds.
Clara tried to picture where the birds were heading. Another continent, it must be, Africa perhaps; some latitude that would provide sanctuary from the gathering winter storms. And she wondered if she and Leo would ever know such an escape. What did the future hold for them? In that moment she had an image of them properly together, without the need for caution or subterfuge, moving out of the shadows and into the pure light of day. She imagined how it might feel, to live in the warmth of a southern sun, and see its colors and flowers. To walk in distant streets and gardens without fear. To breathe the jasmine and smell the soft air of safety on the breeze.