Black Roses

by Jane Thynne

  ‘You know Magda sent me.’

  ‘Plainly. But, forgive me, you are not the type of woman Magda normally calls a friend. Far too pretty, for one. She must be terrified her husband will make a play for you, if he hasn’t already. Indeed, I’d be surprised if she has many friends. She never used to. You’re younger than her, too. I’m having difficulty seeing where you fit in her life. For all I know, you could be one of her husband’s spies. What’s in it for you? Why are you taking this risk?’

  She thought of telling him about Grandmother Hannah. How since she had arrived in Berlin her own life had become far more closely intertwined with events than she could ever have imagined. But she had determined that her Jewishness would be a secret to be carried close. Just like her mother, though for different reasons.

  ‘I’m doing this because they murdered Helga Schmidt.’

  It was the first time the words had come out of her mouth, though she had played the scene over and over in her head. The moment Helga fell, the dreadful moment of realization, as she plummeted towards the paving, that her life was finished, broken off mid-sentence. And how scared she must have been. Because Helga was not brave. She was foolish, friendly, and life-affirming. But not brave. Her death was so unnecessary, so callous and wasteful. Merely thinking of it brought the tears back to Clara’s eyes. Angrily she blinked them away.

  ‘Helga was an actress, like me. She made the mistake of joking about Hitler and they pushed her out of a fifth-floor window. You might read about her in the next few days and it will probably say she committed suicide because she was depressed, or a fantasist, but that wasn’t the case. Her only crime was laughing at them. I would do anything I could to avenge her.’

  He put an awkward hand out to her. ‘I’m sorry for your loss. There’s an old Jewish saying, “All things grow with time, except grief.” I hope it will prove so with you.’

  He shuffled closer in his chair. ‘But what you say convinces me. The sooner Magda gets away from those thugs, the better. I hope you will agree to take a message back to her.’

  ‘A letter?’

  ‘No. She has specifically asked me not to give you a letter. It’s more of a risk. You will just have to memorize what I tell you. This is my plan. I need to leave Berlin. There’s no way I can stay much longer here before I find myself involved in the same kind of accident as your unfortunate friend. After tonight I am going to move each day from house to house so I cannot be traced. But what I most want is for Magda to come away with me. To make a fresh start. Will you tell her, that if she comes to the Anhalter Bahnhof at six o’clock next Friday evening I will be waiting for her? Just inside, beneath the clock. She can bring her child too, if she likes. I will have tickets for Vienna and we will travel from there to Switzerland. All she needs to do is turn up.’

  ‘And if she doesn’t want to?’

  He shook his head, as if refusing to admit the possibility. ‘I’m sure she will. Once she has thought about it.’

  ‘It would be difficult for her.’

  ‘Not as difficult as her life will be if she stays. This is her chance to escape.’

  ‘You seem very confident.’

  ‘Why should I not be? Magda writes to say she still loves me. She has always been a woman of strong passions. She will follow her heart.’

  He stood up and led the way to the darkened hall, but as they reached the glass-fronted door he hesitated. He seemed unwilling, Clara felt, to let her go. As if with her he lost his last link to Magda.

  ‘I envy you seeing her, Clara. Take my blessing with you. Do you think she’ll come?’

  ‘I couldn’t say.’

  Outside a car backfired, startling them both, then Arlosoroff moved closer to her so that she could smell his breath, slightly rank, and see the open pores in his skin.

  ‘She couldn’t ever be happy with that man, could she?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  He put a hand on her shoulder. The sudden intimacy unnerved her, but he was holding out the Star of David.

  ‘Take it back to her. If she comes with me, she’ll need it.’

  Clara pocketed the necklace, walked out into the cool, evening air and checked her watch. It had been only thirty minutes, but while she was with Arlosoroff she had lost all sense of time. It felt like hours had passed.

  She went down the steps, her mind racing. She had done what Magda had asked of her. She had passed the letter on. And she was glad of it. But Arlosoroff’s proposition astounded her. Would Magda really go with him? She was desperately unhappy with Goebbels, that was certain, but could she really give up the luxury, the clothes, the society evenings, the newspaper features, to scrape a new life in the relentless heat of the Palestinian desert? From everything she knew, Clara doubted it. And then, a second consideration came to her. If Magda did elope with Arlosoroff, what would that mean for Clara? What access would she have? How could she continue what she had started?

  She made a decision and crossed the street.

  It was properly dark now, and the trees made bars of shadow across the road. She took a different, more convoluted route back up the street towards the station, but she was convinced that she had lost the tail before she even arrived on Brucknerstrasse. Leo would be pleased with her. She knew for certain she had been followed that evening, and, though the confirmation terrified her, she felt giddily excited at having given Goebbels’ man the slip.

  She walked quickly, too absorbed by the events of the evening to notice the figure in the trench coat who crossed the street from under the elm trees opposite and followed at a languid pace behind.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  The garden of the Press Club in the Tiergarten reminded Mary of sunlit afternoons at her grandparents’ home in New Jersey. Grandpa was rich – he had his own business manufacturing luxury boats – and they owned a colonial-style mansion near Salem with eighteen acres and a swimming pool. If she closed her eyes she could almost imagine herself back there, a jug of iced tea beside her, and the regular thwack of journalists’ racquets on the Club’s grass tennis court reminded her of the insanely competitive sporting contests that took place regularly between her brother, father and grandfather. No one in the Harker family liked to lose.

  Berlin in 1933, however, was nothing like New Jersey. For one thing, as far as Mary was concerned, summers in New Jersey were a somnolent, unexciting space of time strung between the school semesters of spring and autumn, whereas this city was gripped by a kind of frenetic tension that rippled through the air like an electric current. For another thing, in Grandpa’s garden you saw a relaxing vista of horses snorting in a distant paddock, but when you opened your eyes here you could see right across to the windows of the Reichswehr Ministry which cast their chilly glance on Bendlerstrasse. That wasn’t the kind of place to make anyone feel relaxed. It was behind the vast façade of the Bendlerblock last month that Hitler had apparently told senior generals he planned to exterminate Marxism and conquer more living space in the east.

  Sitting on the terrace in a patch of warm sunshine, Mary drained another cup of coffee and read the letter again.

  It had arrived that morning. In typical style, her mother had devoted several pages to news about her bridge partners and the grandchild (walking already!) and the charity evening she had been organising at the country club, before she got to the point.

  “Daddy had a turn last week, when he was walking round the garden, and Doctor Hillman said it was a stroke. A rather bad one I guess. He can’t talk too well and is very weak down one side. He’s confined to bed and we both of us think it would be a good time for you to come back.”

  This piece of news she put on page five. Why had her mother not sent a telegram in 72 point capitals: YOUR FATHER IS MORTALLY ILL? She had a gift for what Frank Nussbaum would call ‘burying the lead’.

  Her dear father. The first man who had faith in her. The man who when she was just twelve had silenced a roomful of belittling female relatives with the firm declaration,
“Of course Mary can be a journalist. A girl like Mary can be anything she wants.” The man she loved more than anyone else. Thinking of his powerful, craggy form, with its ramrod back and steely sinews, crumpled in a heap on the garden path caused her a vicarious physical pain.

  After her announcement her mother had, with typical insouciance, added an afterthought.

  “I’m sure there’s plenty of journalism to be done in America, after all. You are our only daughter, Mary, and right now, for however long it may be, I think your place is with us.”

  Her mother’s request – ‘demand’ was more like it – couldn’t have come at a worse time. The feature about the labour camp had gone down well. So well, in fact, that it had been picked up by the wire services and syndicated round America. There had been plenty of correspondence about it, many readers suggesting the United States adopt a similar system for the good of the young. Frank Nussbaum had called her piece about the threat to sterilize unfit women “a powerful condemnation” of the regime. The story of Lotte’s sister-in-law Margarete and her mass wedding, which had run the following week, earned Mary a telegram of praise from the editor-in-chief himself. Even down the telephone line, she could hear Frank breaking into one of his rare grins. There was an appetite for this kind of feature, he said. They had decided from now on she should have her own regular column. It would start next week and be called ‘Mary Harker’s Berlin Life’. They would run a picture by-line of her on top. A picture by-line! Mary had needed to clear her throat to mask her gasp of delight. The truth was, Frank went on, Germany was a complex picture right now. In some ways perhaps America had something to learn from it – like the way it had motivated its workforce, for example, and channelled the energies of its young people. But there were horror stories too, and Mary should get on with a piece about how the state was planning to fire all married women on the grounds that they took work away from their husbands. How women teachers would be banned from giving private lessons and how the number of women going to university was being reduced. If she took it carefully and managed not to get thrown out, Frank thought this new column could make her name.

  Absently Mary stretched out her hand and took another of the Lebkuchen the Press Club did so well. And another. Those delicious little gingerbread biscuits with cinnamon and spices weren’t good for the waistline, but who cared about that after her disappointment with Rupert the other night? Rupert, who was now grimly relegated to a long list of men labelled Just Good Friends. She sighed. She had been completely honest when she told him she could never be a hausfrau. What she had come to realize was that as someone who loved chatting to people, gossiping and asking all sorts of nosy questions about their lives, journalism was simply ideal for her. It wasn’t so much a job as a continuation of her natural persona.

  Staying in Germany. Perhaps becoming a great correspondent. Her own column. It was everything she had ever hoped for. Or going home to America and putting everything on hold. What kind of daughter did it make her if she wasn’t prepared to make a sacrifice for her dying father? Should she please her mother, or Frank Nussbaum? And which of those choices would please herself? Her head ached with the effort of trying to resolve the conflicting forces tearing her in two.

  A shadow fell across her face and she looked up to see a waiter standing in front of her.

  ‘Excuse me, Fräulein. There’s someone waiting for you at reception. A lady. She says it’s urgent.’

  ‘Did she give a name?’

  ‘A Fräulein Vine.’

  Clara Vine. Rupert’s little English Nazi-lover. What on earth could she want? Mary hauled herself up and pulled on a cardigan. She supposed she would have to see her. But she seriously hoped it wasn’t a social call.

  Chapter Fifty-two

  When Leo went out into the silver morning and saw workmen spraying the sticky residue of the lime leaves from Unter den Linden he thought of the old song he had heard: “So long as the old trees bloom on Unter den Linden nothing can defeat us, Berlin will stay Berlin.”

  But now they were cutting down the limes to make way for more marches. Not just limes, but maples and planes too. Hitler wanted his troops to be able to walk twelve abreast.

  Leo thought again of Ovid in exile watching the barbarians and wondered if he too was catching a glimpse of what humanity could become.

  He came to a church and quite on impulse stepped inside, walked down the dim aisle and sat on a wooden pew, a few feet away from the altar. There was no one inside but the hunched form of a cleaning woman on her knees, polishing the brass fittings of the lectern. A shaft of light, pure Protestant light, unfiltered by the rich complexity of Catholic stained glass, pierced the gloom. Leo bent his head in a hypocritical semblance of prayer.

  It was the first time he had been in this church, but he had often passed and felt a visceral urge to come inside and pray. Indeed, he almost ached for prayer. What must it be like to unburden yourself like that? To release the straps and buckles that bound your secrecy to you? But he couldn’t do it. Caution and duplicity were engraved too deeply within him.

  The SIS had been right to recruit him. They had seen in him what he had never seen in himself: a combination of immense plausibility masking a profound scepticism which made him perfect for handling the betrayals and blackmail of others. The advantage was that he was never likely to suffer blind fidelity to an ideology. The disadvantage was, between these shifting layers of distrust, it was hard to work out just where his real self lay.

  Sitting there, in the church, the image of Clara came to him. Two nights ago she had come back exhausted to Xantener Strasse and fallen into his arms. She didn’t say where she had been or what she had done. She flung her coat over the arm of the chair, drank the coffee he had prepared for her, and ate a cheese sandwich. Then, just as hungrily, she had made love to him.

  The next morning when he woke she was still fast asleep beside him. He could tell by the trembling of her eyelids, light as a moth’s wing, that she was dreaming. Happy dreams, he hoped, of England perhaps and all that she had left there. Watching her eyelids with their faint trellis of veins, the long, dark lashes, and her face, smoothed in sleep, he felt flattered that she should relax with such abandon in his presence. To surrender yourself to sleep was a form of trust, a faith that he would still be there when she woke up, and that she could drop her guard.

  He remembered her standing barefoot at the mirror and pushing a grip into her hair, and seeing him watching her. Her breasts, milk white where they met the scalloped sunburn of her neckline. The heart-shaped face with angular cheekbones suggesting something faintly exotic beneath the English veneer. The watchful, intelligent eyes. As she stood washing at the basin, entirely naked and unembarrassed, she turned to him and smiled and he thought that was the kind of face he wanted to see every day smiling at him. That was what he wanted. Ordinary life.

  Even now he could still feel the touch of her against his skin, and the memory of that sensual pleasure surrounded him like an invisible embrace. Her body in bed, her curving back and taut loins, had awakened a hunger in him, for the exhilaration of sex coupled with being in love, which he had never experienced before. In the past few weeks he had understood for the first time what poets had always written about. He had changed since he met her. She connected him with everything that was good in his life, and talking to her about poetry, about Ovid, had even brought him back to an idea he once had of committing himself entirely to the world of scholarship and literature, losing himself in some place of learning where he could be Dr Leo Quinn, with leather elbow patches and an oak-panelled study, buried safely in the misty past.

  He tried not to think about her with Müller. Of her body, with its sleek, downy flesh, beneath that brute of a man, perhaps responding to him, the way she had done with him. Her reddened lips, the colour of crushed strawberries, slightly parted. The veined neck arched, the whole body tense and then relaxing as the flush rose into her face and neck. He hadn’t asked her about it, and she h
adn’t told him. She was a skilled actress, he reminded himself.

  As he sat in bed beside her, thinking of everything that lay beneath the vault of her chest, the heart and its secret internal workings, he was reminded of something that had been said to him in that week of training at the country house. One of the chaps there, the effete young man who talked about tradecraft, had told him that an agent needed to think like a schizophrenic might. To imagine his body as something different and separate from the mind, like a piece of wood or metal rather than flesh with nerves and sensations. Entirely disassociated from the self. That kind of detachment was necessary in this line of work.

  Leo had managed that, he thought, but could Clara? Could she ever become what he had become? He knew it was old-fashioned, but he had a deep instinct that women should be protected, rather than put in the way of danger. His mind rebelled at Rumbold’s little epithet, “a spy in silk stockings”.

  And yet, she had proved a fast learner so far. He was proud of what he had taught her.

  He had hoped that Clara had not yet attracted surveillance. They had been so careful every time they had met, and he had never seen any sign of a tail. But on Thursday night it was abundantly clear that Goebbels was having her followed. The tail was a feckless type in standard issue Gestapo clothing with a dark, peasant face, a sweaty suit and rubber raincoat. He had pursued her from Mitte all the way to Steglitz and almost as far as the rendezvous with Arlosoroff himself before Clara became aware of him. Once she did, she had done exactly what Leo had told her. She had waited and watched and taken avoiding strategy and managed to dispose of him. Leo had felt a burning feeling of pride as he observed her.