For a second, as Clara awoke and stretched out luxuriously on Ursula’s white linen sheets, the day ahead lay sunlit and full of possibilities. Outside, it was an exquisite morning. Wild birds were calling, pale columns of birch trees shimmered around the languorous expanse of the Griebnitzsee and clumps of reeds rose like slender green blades from its depths. The air was studded with pollen and glinting insects were coasting on the warm currents. Then she remembered. She was a Jew, in Nazi Germany, without an ID.
The train journey back from the Gare du Nord had been fraught with anxiety. The possibility of being caught without her documents, not to mention the gun in her suitcase, played constantly on Clara’s mind and she had needed to maintain a careful synchronicity of movement between carriages to avoid the scrutiny of the guards. Shortly after the train left Paris she informed the other passengers that she had a bad headache, necessitating several trips to the corridor for ‘fresh air’. It worked well until they crossed the border into Germany, when she had been obliged to lock herself in the lavatory as a pair of guards came through. But she had underestimated their Nazi thoroughness, and emerged only to run slap into the second of the guards, who was systematically checking the passengers in the final compartment. He was a young lad, not much more than nineteen she reckoned, with a complexion that didn’t need shaving and fair hair cut savagely short. Yet his youth was an advantage, Clara realized at once. He was flustered by their unintended physical contact and he flushed.
‘Documents,’ he snapped, automatically, then looked up with a flash of awed recognition in his eyes. Perhaps he had sat through romantic comedies under pressure from a girlfriend, or maybe he had seen Clara’s war film, The Pilot’s Wife, in which she had been married to a lost Luftwaffe pilot, played by the real-life air ace Ernst Udet. Whichever it was, finding himself face to face with an actress from the big screen was overwhelming. For the first time in her career, Clara was relieved to be recognized.
‘My apologies, F-F-Fräulein.’ He had a very slight stammer. ‘Is it . . .?’
‘Clara Vine, yes.’
‘So sorry. Your identity documents please?’
She smiled sweetly, glad that she had just reapplied her lipstick in the train’s narrow mirror and was wearing Steffi’s pearls.
‘I’m afraid I’ve left them in my compartment. And it’s all the way back down the corridor.’
‘I’ll need to see them,’ he insisted, in a starstruck mumble.
She tilted her head, coquettishly.
‘Do you? Really? Even if I promise I am who I say I am?’
The guard gave a nervous laugh, which turned into a cough. Far ahead in the corridor his colleague shouted at him to hurry up.
‘You could come back with me to my compartment. It’s quite a way.’
The young man cast an anxious glance up the corridor at his companion, who was making impatient gestures in the distance. God forbid the older man should return to help his colleague out. Clara moved fractionally closer and lowered her voice to a seductive whisper.
‘Perhaps you want to search me instead? Is that what you’d prefer?’
He leapt away as if electrified, a puce blush suffusing his entire complexion.
‘Fräulein, forgive me! Not at all. It’s just we have to . . .’
‘How about I give you an autograph instead? That should prove my identity. Do you have a pen?’
Hastily the guard reached for his top pocket and brought out a pen and notebook.
‘I’ve seen your movies,’ he stammered, confirming her suspicions.
‘Do you have a favourite?’
‘The Pilot’s Wife.’
‘I guessed you’d say that!’
‘With Ernst Udet.’
Everyone loved Ernst Udet. The fact that Clara had starred alongside him was as good as a golden Party badge in most people’s eyes.
‘Well it’s lovely to meet you, Herr . . .’
‘Herr Wolmann. Ludwig Wolmann.’
‘To Ludwig . . .’
Clara scrawled her name, hoping that he would not notice the tremble in her hand, gave him her most dazzling smile and tucked the book back in his top pocket. Then she strolled back down the corridor as slowly as her legs could manage it.
It had taken hours for the shock of the encounter to wear off and she sat staring out of the window, barely able to focus on the countryside as it passed. Rooks sat like musical notes on the electricity lines, and in between the fields gun emplacements had sprung up on city borders. But once the train arrived at the Anhalter Bahnhof and the passengers flowed onto the platform there were no more requests for documents and she felt the tension that had been holding her body rigid suddenly ease, her shoulders slumping like a puppet whose strings have been released.
While she may have escaped inspection of her papers, however, Clara’s inspection of herself was merciless. How could she have been so careless with Conrad Adler in Paris? Why had she relaxed her guard? What impulse made her snatch the documents from his hand, with the result that they ended up in the Seine? The answer, she knew, was that she had allowed Paris to get under her skin. The atmosphere, the food, the alcohol and the sheer foreign beauty of the place had intoxicated her. And perhaps the jousting conversation and bitter, ironic humour of Conrad Adler, too.
Yet the questions about Conrad Adler, the ones she needed to answer, remained. Why was he watching her at the Dingo Bar? And what did he want with her? Above all, how had he known she was not all she seemed?
Climbing out of bed, she pulled a wrap around her, entered the bathroom, looked into the lightbulb-fringed mirror, and switched on the wireless to drown out the thoughts crowding her head.
The smooth voice of the continuity announcer came on.
‘And now, it is with great pleasure that we bring you the Hamburg City Orchestra with Franz Schubert’s Winter Journey song cycle.’
The Hamburg City Orchestra. Where her mother had once played as a concert pianist. If life had been different – if the dashing Ronald Vine had not sat in that audience and fallen in love with the young Helene Neumann as she played a Brahms concerto, and she had not followed him back to England – then it might have been her mother on the radio that day. Except, of course, it wouldn’t, because as the daughter of a Jew, Helene would have been banned from any orchestra in the Reich. She would have been excluded from the Reich Chamber of Culture because she could not show an Ariernachweis. And now her daughter was facing precisely the same predicament.
After applying a light coat of Elizabeth Arden foundation, Clara finished her make-up with a dusting of powder, sprinkled a little salt on her toothbrush in lieu of toothpaste, and pondered her options.
Archie Dyson, her contact at the British Embassy, had been relocated to Rome, a plum promotion that must have thrilled his ambitious wife, Lettie, but left Clara without any direct contact with British Intelligence in Berlin. Even if she got a message to Major Grand through Benno Kurtz of the Ritz bar, and he was able to organize another ID for her, how long would that take? For a second she considered asking Mary Harker if she had any contacts, but such a request could compromise Mary too, and that was a risk Clara refused to contemplate.
A memory flickered. Something Steffi Schaeffer had said.
We have a young man who produces passports and identity papers for us. He turns his hand to anything. His work is superb.
She felt a rush of pure relief, like sun streaking across the lake, and her heart lightened. She made a quick cup of coffee, pulled on a jacket and took up her bag. She needed to find Steffi without delay.
Within an hour she was on a bus, heading down the Königsallee. Thankfully Berlin’s big cream buses, like London’s scarlet ones, had an open platform at the back, making it easy to get on and off in a hurry. Clara sat, as always, at the back, which meant that she could observe whoever got on from behind. The bus reeked of stale clothes and unwashed bodies. The windows were mottled with condensation. Beside her, at eye level, the standard notice had been fixed: The fare-dodger’s profit is the Berliner’s loss! Underneath was a line to report to the authorities anyone not paying the twenty-pfennig fare.
The bus was held up periodically by workmen installing the new air-raid shelters. A vast honeycomb of tunnels and shelters was being created beneath Berlin, a dark mirror to the new city rising above it. A rabbit warren of tunnels, cellars and giant concrete vaults with soundproof walls several metres thick as though, if any bombing happened, there was the faintest chance people would be able to sleep through it.
She found Steffi sitting in the back room of Herr Fromm’s shop with a pair of pince nez perched on her nose, almost buried behind a length of field-grey serge.
‘Hold on a moment. I’m just finishing the buttonhole.’
She unwound a length of thread expertly from the spool, and matched it to the material, then continued sewing, her fingers slipping, dipping, tucking and weaving, marrying needle and cloth in a balletic rhythm that was soothing to watch.
‘The Wehrmacht is very particular about its buttonholes. They insist they’re hand-stitched a certain way and they always check. The stitches need be to a certain length and made from the correct thread. There are very precise regulations. Herr Fromm says no one knows as much about the details of a Wehrmacht uniform as me.’
‘So you’re as particular with your Wehrmacht uniforms as you are with your Chanel frocks?’ Clara smiled.
Steffi would run up exquisite copies of designer outfits at prices even actresses could afford. Chanel, Worth, Lanvin, Patou; there was nothing she would not turn her hand to. She studied the originals and reproduced them down to the finest details so that it was impossible to tell the difference between Steffi’s creations and the real thing.
Now she frowned, and bit off a length of thread.
‘More, if possible. I’ve done so many now it’s become my new speciality.’
‘Some speciality.’
Steffi looked up at Clara over her pince nez. Her face was alive with suppressed meaning.
‘Oh, but it is, Clara,’ she said softly. ‘Did you know there are more than thirty SS cuff-bands and sleeve diamonds? Could you tell me what colour stitching to use for a Death’s Head collar tab and how that differs from the silver flat wire on the SS-Gruppenführer’s collar tab? How the diamond insignia on an SS-Obersturmbannführer’s collar tab should line up relative to the tresse? There may come a day when that kind of knowledge proves very useful.’
She returned to her stitching.
‘Fortunately for me, most officers have their uniforms tailor made, so I’ve had plenty of time to learn.’
Clara felt in her bag for the bars of Menier chocolate.
‘I brought these for Esther. How is she?’
‘Not here, I’m afraid.’
Catching Clara’s alarm she took off her spectacles and lowered her voice.
‘We had to move her.’
‘Where?’
‘There’s a Konditorei – the Konditorei Herschel, do you know it?’
Clara started in surprise.
‘Of course. It’s in Winterfeldtplatz. At the end of my street. I’ve been there with my godson several times.’
It was a typical Berlin place with a finely scrolled ceiling and delicately tiled floor, filled with a fluctuating population of women chatting and men looking for a quiet moment of relaxation with a newspaper. Its cakes, displayed proudly beneath a glass counter at the front of the shop, were true works of art. In the past one might have found Turks’ Heads, sweet, flaky Pigs’ Ears, towering piles of profiteroles, Spritzkuchen and Nusstörtchen. Soft sponge that melted in the mouth and pastries oozing cream and cherries. Now the flour was low grade and the butter was whale blubber, but there was always something on display. The nation’s sweet tooth demanded cakes.
‘That explains it.’
Clara had noticed that certain visitors would enter the café and linger at the glass case, chatting to Frau Herschel, glancing around them at the clientele happily consuming their coffee and then leaving without buying anything. For a close observer like Clara, it wasn’t hard to deduce that the Konditorei Herschel had a second, more secretive line of business.
Steffi stood up and stretched.
‘The proprietor there, Frau Herschel, has helped us in the past. She’s a good woman, but we can’t rely on her for long. We still need to get Esther to England.’
Clara glanced behind her to check the door was closed and said,
‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t just come to bring the chocolate. There’s something I need to ask you. You mentioned you knew someone who could do documents.’
A wary glance.
‘Who is this for?’
‘Me.’
‘You?’
‘I need a new Kennkarte. And an Ariernachweis. Mine have been destroyed and . . . I don’t think it would be possible to get new ones.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘The genealogy records would be lacking. Do you think your man could help me?’
Clara was used to Steffi’s sharp scrutiny. The dispassionate look that came over her face whenever Clara tried on a new dress – arms crossed, lips pursed, eyes raking ruthlessly up and down, taking in all her defects and not sparing honest comment if a line didn’t flatter or a style made her hips too large. But this was one aspect of Clara that Steffi had never seen or suspected. Jewish blood.
Nonetheless she absorbed it swiftly.
‘Go to the zoo. Next Thursday lunchtime. Bring two photographs of yourself.’
‘Thursday! That’s six days away. I have no identity documents at all. What if I’m stopped before then?’
‘I’m sorry. It’s the soonest our friend can manage. Go precisely at one o’clock and you will see a man there.’
‘Where? The zoo’s a big place. How will I recognize him?’
‘He’ll recognize you. When he sees you he will leave immediately and you must follow him. He will take you a few streets away. When he enters a building, wait, and then knock on the door twice. If anyone but him answers, say you were looking for a Herr Vogel.’
‘Herr Vogel? Is that his name?’
‘That’s no one. If our friend is alone, and certain that you were not followed, he will let you in.’
‘Is it safe in daylight? Shouldn’t we meet later?’
‘Our man believes he is far less conspicuous in daytime. Innocent people don’t go scurrying around at night. And Clara . . .’
There was a clang of the bell, and from behind the velvet curtain came the sound of someone entering the shop followed by the unctuous, indistinct tone of Herr Fromm’s voice and the curt male bark of a customer.
Both women stiffened.
‘You should leave,’ said Steffi. ‘By the way, I have something for you.’
She crossed the room and reached into a wardrobe, bringing out a slate-blue jacket on a hanger. It was three quarter length, with gold buttons and a rich scarlet lining. Clara recognized it at once. It was the same jacket she had seen hanging in the window of the Paris store.
‘A Schiaparelli jacket!’
‘I saw it in Vogue and I had to try it.’
‘But where did you get the materials?’
‘That’s the thing. You can’t get the textiles, but I thought, that shade is awfully familiar, and I realized it was close to Luftwaffe blue. And there was a bolt here that we had to reject on the grounds that it was not precisely the right shade. It wouldn’t pass inspection. The Luftwaffe is very strict like that.’
‘You shouldn’t have!’
‘Perhaps. But if war comes, clothes are sure to be rationed and you won’t be able to get hold of a thing. Try it on.’
Clara pulled the jacket on, sank her hands into the deep pockets, and did a little twirl. Steffi stood back, arms crossed.
‘Well, I’ll say this for you. You certainly look like the real thing.’