Berlin was alive with rumours. The British Prime Minister had resigned. The Poles were about to attack. An illegal radio network called the Freedom Station had emerged, moving its transmitter around Berlin to avoid detection. An atmosphere of nervous anticipation stalked the city like a living thing. The proximity of war made every goodbye more intimate, every kiss more intense, every friendship more important. At tram stops, in the bread queues and amid the momentary knots of customers that coalesced round coffee stalls, conversation flowed between strangers. Rumours rose and faded like echoes of sound through static. Yet while the talk was of foreboding, there was also excitement in the air. It eddied down the quiet residential streets of Schöneberg, rippled through the smart boulevards of Wilmersdorf and Charlottenburg, swirled round the dank tenements of Moabit and Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg. People felt part of something, even if it was not something they desired.
At times over the preceding days Clara had felt as though Thursday would never come, but at last it dawned, heavy, the sky stippled with cloud. She had invented an appointment at the Charité hospital to escape her filming commitments for a few hours and even thrown in the name of her former neighbour, Doktor Engel, for good measure. By ten to one she was standing on Budapester Strasse outside the outlandish, spectacular Elephant Gate of Berlin Zoo. The gate, with its green turrets, red and gold arch and kneeling sandstone elephants, could not be more of a contrast to the sombre street architecture around it. It stood freakishly proud, a splash of oriental colour that jarred against the orderly greys and browns. It suggested that merely by entering, citizens could escape the gloom of Berlin for a more joyful, exotic world.
Clara felt it too; the zoo was special to her. It was the place that Leo had first taken her to teach her the art of espionage; when she was a nervous ingénue and he a brusque passport control officer. And anxious, as he later confided, to be inducting a naïve young actress into a peril she could barely comprehend. Since then she had visited numerous times with Erich, who would always head for the Grosses Raubtierhaus, eager to see the elegantly pacing lions and tigers, to marvel at the sleek jaguars and panthers. That was until he announced that he couldn’t bear to see such magnificent animals caged and would never go again.
She bought a ticket and made her way along the meticulously planted beds of begonias and roses towards the animal enclosures. The zoo was a haven of peace in the city’s heart and now, in early summer, it was at its most beautiful. The traffic fumes were replaced by a sweet mingled aroma of straw and dung. Two boys in lederhosen flashed past on scooters, threatening to scrape the shins of anyone foolish enough to get too close. A dog in a little overcoat waddled along importantly. A pair of excitable matrons were being hoisted onto an elephant idly flicking his trunk as he waited to give his hourly ride. Clara threaded through the crowds, wondering what would happen to these animals if bombing came. Were shelters being built for them too?
He will find you.
Clara hadn’t questioned Steffi’s suggestion at the time, but now it seemed absurdly ambitious. Even on a weekday lunchtime, the zoo was busy, and the visitor numbers were further swelled by the arrival of a gargantuan sea lion called Roland, whose appearance on the Ufa Tonwoche newsreel had granted him celebrity status. How could she begin to find a complete stranger here, especially if he was purposefully anonymous? Could she be sure he would recognize her?
Her first thought was to head for one of the more distant animal houses. Surely the elephant house on the furthest edges, or the elegant ostrich enclosure, styled like an Egyptian temple, would be better suited to an assignation. And yet, if he had been seeking privacy, why had the man she was to meet chosen such a public place? Was it, perhaps, precisely because of the crowds? After a moment’s deliberation she gravitated towards the milling throng that had gathered to watch the sea lion being fed.
It was a spectacle of high entertainment. Every time the keeper, armed with a bucket of sprats, dangled a tiny, silvery flicker above the water, the sleek grey mass would rise abruptly, water sheeting from his sides, to a volley of delighted shrieks. The sea lion would then heave his three-ton bulk onto a rock and open his mouth. Predictably he had already been nicknamed Goering.
As Clara focused on the feeding ritual, wondering what to do, a flicker of movement wrenched her eyes upward. A man leaning with his elbows on the far side of the rail, dressed in wide-legged trousers and a nondescript checked jacket, had glanced in her direction and adjusted his hat. He had a sharp-edged face, but the trilby’s deep brim shaded his eyes as he stared, apparently absorbed, into the enclosure below.
At the back of her mind a memory stirred. There was something about that half-shaded profile she had seen before, but where? The image remained frustratingly unknown, floating free, without context, evoking only an uncomfortable frisson of unease.
Then she looked again and recognition electrified her.
When she was a child she had adored puzzle books. Each Christmas her parents would give her a story album that was interspersed with games, crosswords and picture puzzles. As she grew, she progressed to entire books of them and one of her favourites was called Spot The Difference. It featured two scenes with minute changes that forced the eye to focus on fine detail. A Sunny Day, On The Beach, At The Fair. Two versions of Trafalgar Square but in one a man was carrying an umbrella and in the other he was empty handed. Two identical jungles with a missing monkey in the second. You knew if you looked closely, really closely, you would uncover aspects that had not at first revealed themselves. Comparing the man at the railing over and over with the image in her mind, she realized, with a jolt of horror, what was bothering her. That lean face, the eyes which deliberately avoided hers. It was the man she had found standing in the lobby of her apartment block in Winterfeldtstrasse. The man who, she was convinced, was not sheltering from the rain.
Hovering at the back of the crowd, she fought the urge to walk away as fast as possible. Was this the man she was supposed to meet? If so, either the Gestapo had somehow discovered their plans, and replaced Steffi’s accomplice with their own person, or the figure before her was genuine, and her assumption about him was wrong.
Even as she hesitated the man threw his cigarette stub down on the ground and peeled languidly away, as if motivated by nothing more than a casual desire for lunch. As he moved slowly towards the gate, Clara made up her mind to follow him.
Immediately outside, he made for a dark green bicycle leant against the railings, mounted it, and proceeded slowly eastwards, along Budapester Strasse and across the Landwehrkanal, turning right towards Lützowplatz. Almost immediately he turned right again into Keithstrasse. Although the bicycle was proceeding slowly, Clara was forced to walk as fast as she could to keep up and by the time he stopped outside a tall, brick-faced residential block, she was gasping for breath.
She lingered in a porch on the opposite side of the road, assessing the situation. The building was the type of multi-use block that could be found all over Berlin. An office on the ground floor, apartments above. A floating population that afforded a certain amount of privacy from prying eyes, and where unfamiliar visitors would raise no eyebrows. The man dismounted and disappeared inside.
Clara glanced around her. The street was empty and there were no parked cars close by. A burst of laughter spattered out of an upper window, and a radio buzzed further off. Eventually, she knocked twice, preparing to ask for Herr Vogel if any other face answered the door. But it was the same man.
‘You took your time. I was beginning to give up on you.’
He was young, now she saw him close up, and spoke with a rough accent, but his demeanour was shrewd and intelligent.
‘It’s hard following a cyclist.’
‘It’s safer than buses or trams. No one looking you up and down. You’d better come in.’
He led her down a dim, tiled corridor through a door to a back room containing only a couple of cheap wooden chairs and a table.
Clara looked around her.
‘You know what I’m here for?’ she asked.
‘A Kennkarte and an Ariernachweis.’
‘My documents fell into the Seine in Paris.’
He gave a dry laugh. ‘Use that as an excuse and it might get you points for originality.’
‘It’s true, as it happens.’
‘It’s of no concern to me, Fräulein, where you lost them. I’m here to replace them. I’ve got the cards ready. All I need are photographs of you.’
She fished in her bag for the contact sheet shots that had been taken for the publicity for Love Strictly Forbidden. He surveyed them critically.
‘Ideally we’d want one with no smile.’
‘It’s the best I can do.’
‘They’re not too bad.’
She recalled Leni’s words. Your face has a useful quality. It’s a blank canvas. It’s like I can project anything I want.
The young man switched on the desk lamp and bent over a piece of card. An Ariernachweis, on which Clara’s details had already been filled in. He took the photograph and placed it in the corner of the card then fixed it to the pass with brass eyelets.
‘It took ages to get these looking right. Eventually I found a cobbler who supplied me with the tool he uses to fix eyelets for bootlaces. It was perfect.’
He reached for a fine brush and a jar of purple dye and began painting on a separate piece of card.
‘There are twelve long and twenty-four short feathers on the German imperial eagle, did you know? The hardest thing is to get the correct colour and shape.’
He continued working intently, his movements as tender and delicate as if he were creating a Renaissance Madonna and Child, rather than an eagle and swastika. His face was closed, intent, inscrutable in the dim light. When he had copied the eagle he took a piece of newspaper, dampened it with spittle and pressed it down on the newly painted symbol, creating a mirror image on the newspaper. He then took the paper and pressed it onto the photograph of Clara.
‘The stamp needs to project across the photograph. Now we’ll need to give it a few minutes to dry.’
He sat motionless, as if expecting that she too would sit in silence beside him. But Clara had too many questions.
‘Where do you get the passes to copy?’
‘One of our supporters is a church pastor. Some of his congregation drop their expired ID passes into the collection box instead of money. They know how valuable they’ll be. I’ve had all kinds, even Wehrmacht passes. The equipment I get from work. There’s no shortage of brushes or paint there.’
‘You make it sound simple.’
‘That’s only the beginning. Once we’ve given someone a new identity, we advise them to join a lending library and get a card with their new name on it. As many extra pieces of ID as possible.’
‘So you can make anyone into anything?’
‘Not at all. You need to match the face with the occupation. If I have a card which gives the occupation as kitchen cleaner, I can’t hand that out to some smart lady whose husband owned a department store.’
‘Are you busy?’
‘It’s constant. But time’s running out. People are going to need more than ID documents. Jews here are trapped in a net. They need places to hide.’
‘Or they need to leave Berlin.’
‘No. Berlin’s the best place to hide. Did you know almost half of the city is underground? There are a thousand bunkers in Berlin. Speer has built a tunnel running all the way from Mitte to Tempelhof so Goering can ride the whole four miles in his car. The customers of the Adlon Hotel have their own shelter under Pariser Platz. Not so grand for the rest, of course. They’ll mostly be using the U-Bahns. They’ve just finished a new shelter at Alexanderplatz.’
‘I was there just the other day. I didn’t see anything.’
‘You wouldn’t. It’s entirely inconspicuous. You walk along the tunnel to the U5 line and you pass a green steel door. You’d miss it if you didn’t know it was there.’
So that was where they would huddle. Waiting for the explosions. Listening to the muffled boom and the lick of flames as above them the dark blast of bombs flowered into the night sky.
The young man put out his half-smoked cigarette and tucked the stump in his pocket.
‘The Nazis may be driving people underground now, but one day soon they’ll be driven underground themselves.’
He jumped up and checked the card.
‘There. You’re no longer a Jew. But don’t go dropping it into any French rivers again. Don’t allow it to get wet at all. Even a drop of rain might dissolve the watercolour.’
She placed it in her bag and looked at him soberly.
‘Thank you. I’m sorry. I don’t know your name.’
‘I’d be a fool to tell you. If anyone thought this was a forgery, they’d ask where it came from and who forged it. There aren’t many people who can resist answering when they’re having a chat with the Gestapo.’
She made her way to the door.
‘ID forgery is punishable by death, isn’t it?’
‘You ask a lot of questions, Fräulein. Most of my clients are too frightened to do anything but sit in silence.’
‘Just because I ask questions, doesn’t mean I’m not frightened too . . . I do have another question, though. When I first saw you, I knew I’d seen you before. In the lobby of my apartment building in Winterfeldtstrasse. You remember, don’t you?’
‘You’re an observant lady.’
‘What were you doing there?’
He smiled; a quick smile that utterly transformed his features.
‘As a matter of fact I had just posted a flyer on the wall opposite. I had my leaflets and the paste bottle in a suitcase. But a policeman appeared and I needed to leave in a hurry.’
Clara left the apartment as swiftly as she could and got on the first bus she found. As she travelled, the bus rocking under her, she thought how her whole life was like the young man’s painstaking work. The least inconsistency, the tiniest slip, and her entire, carefully constructed identity would unravel, like the silk spooling from a beautiful gown. Yet in a few days’ time the existence that she had crafted for herself over the past six years was facing its greatest test. And whatever happened, she would not be the same person afterwards.