The Pursuit of Pearls

by Jane Thynne

  “I suppose whether one likes Stalin or England, Fascism or Communism, it’s all a question of taste, isn’t it? Like the difference between Vermeer and Klimt…”

  He took a swig of whiskey from a bottle on the mantelpiece, then replaced it with the deliberation of the profoundly drunk.

  “I’m not proud of this, Clara. I’ve been a faithful servant of the Soviet Union since my twenties, and if Stalin wants me to dispose of British agents, that is what I must do. No matter how much I might personally like or admire them. I do like you, very much.”

  He reached downwards, and she saw the sudden glint of metal in his hand.

  “But I suppose betrayal is one of those things we English do so well. Like garden parties and well-made gentlemen’s shoes.”

  “You wouldn’t shoot me, Hugh. Think how easily you’d be traced.”

  “As a matter of fact everyone imagines I’m in Prague. I was obliged to leave my car in the care of the Adlon, and I’ll be heading off tonight.”

  She looked down at the pistol. It was bigger than the tiny derringer she had possessed. As Hugh moved the muzzle a fraction, pointing it more directly at her chest, a cold fear clutched at her. She looked over at the pictures of Erich and her mother on the mantelpiece and wished passionately that she had kept a photograph of Leo after all. Yet it was still Leo’s face in her mind as the shot rang out.

  —

  THE NOISE FILLED the room and blasted out into the darkness. Hugh Lindsey staggered, as if surprised, a dark trickle of blood beginning to stain his suit. As his body jerked sideways and backwards, and then crumpled to the floor, Clara looked around. The shooter’s arm was shaking so much that the muzzle of the gun was a blur. The room smelled of gunpowder and perfume.

  “I never thought I could shoot someone.”

  Hedwig’s voice was slightly trembly, but she lifted her chin resolutely. “All those lessons must have counted for something.”

  Clara forced herself to remain calm. She wondered if Hugh might die, and how quickly, but looking at him sprawled awkwardly on his back, she saw that his skin was already becoming chalky, and his eyes were open and motionless, as if he were surprised. She moved swiftly to the front window and looked out.

  “Don’t worry,” said Hedwig. “They’re always hearing shots round here. They’ll think it’s the Faith and Beauty girls having pistol practice in the forest. Either that or someone shooting geese.”

  Clasping her arms around her chest, as if to protect herself from the trauma, Clara walked off into the kitchen. She felt a violent nausea at the sight of Hugh Lindsey lying there, and her own surprise at not being dead.

  Something he had said, a comment she’d barely registered in the fear of the moment, now resounded.

  I was a Greats scholar at Oxford, you know. There was only one man above me. He took the Newdigate Prize. Just pipped me to it. And it still rankles, if I’m honest.

  The Newdigate Prize was Oxford’s great honor for poetry. John Buchan had won it in his time, and Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde. And, more recently, it had been awarded to another gifted student: Leo Quinn.

  Hugh Lindsey must have fostered a grudge against Leo. A grudge that had stretched all the way from the golden stone cloisters of Oxford to the other side of Europe. And finally, decades later, he had found a way to take his long-desired revenge.

  —

  CLARA TURNED ON the tap with trembling fingers and poured herself a glass of water, then turned to face Hedwig.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I had to get a gun for my boyfriend. He’s in trouble.”

  “I thought you were going to the ball?”

  “I was. I went to the afternoon practice, but I was terribly nervous. I made quite a hash of it. I kept getting out of time. At the end of it, Fräulein von Essen took me aside and said I stood out too much. I didn’t stay in line. If I took part in the dance I would let down not just myself but the entire Faith and Beauty movement and probably the Führer himself. She had been considering making the whole group withdraw because of my laziness, but instead she had decided that I should suffer the shame alone. I would not be able to come to the ball and should just stay quietly at home.”

  “So you came here.”

  “I went to the Faith and Beauty home. I knew it would be deserted, and it was the ideal opportunity to collect my pistol.”

  Clara’s head was still spinning, trying to piece together everything that had happened.

  “Why does your boyfriend need a pistol?”

  “He works as a forger. He makes documents for Jews in hiding. Identity documents. Recently he undertook a job and he thinks he was followed. He was providing a document for a lady…”

  “A forger you say?”

  “Yes. He had a job, and when this lady left, he could tell she was being watched.”

  “How could he tell?”

  “He saw she was being shadowed.”

  Fragments of information were colliding in Clara’s head, like shards of a broken vase forming together into a whole.

  “But that’s not the point,” continued Hedwig. “If this lady was being tailed, then it’s likely that they saw Jochen too, so he’s worried now that the Gestapo are on to him too. He’s already left his job. And he wanted me to get him a pistol.”

  “But why come here? To my house?”

  “I was on my way back to the S-Bahn and I saw a man ahead of me. I recognized him at once.”

  “Because you’d met him in London.”

  “Lottie was obsessed with him. I told you. They’d become lovers. As soon as I saw him again I realized it must have been him that Lottie had been meeting. That was the man she was terrified of. The man who must have killed her. But I still don’t know why.”

  A sudden, sharp clarity possessed Clara.

  “I do. You were right about the jewel, Hedwig. He killed her for it. And I think I can tell you where it might be.”

  CHAPTER

  41

  Elsa Neuländer-Simon’s photography studio was in a tall stucco building in Schlüterstrasse, just off the Ku’damm in the west end of the city. For years, Studio Yva had been the most successful studio in Germany until the Nazi regime blacklisted the photographer and obliged her to carry out all her work under the supervision of an Aryan studio manager. It would take more than that to stop Yva working, however, and every part of the house, from its pillared entrance to its grand balconies and winding staircases, continued to be used as backdrop to her dramatic, sensual art. The door was opened by a fey young man in a sleeveless sweater and bow tie, who ushered Hedwig into a parquet hall and yelled, “Yva! Ein Fräulein to see you.”

  A reply floated down from several floors above. “If it’s another one of those girls collecting for the Winterhilfswerk, tell them we don’t want to buy any more tanks.”

  The young man gave a camp little shrug and said, “Follow me.”

  The studio, a sparsely furnished, open space running the length of the house, had a vacant, abandoned air. It contained only two chairs, a cabinet, and a pile of dust sheets. In the middle a slight woman was kneeling on the floor dismantling a cumbersome tripod.

  “You’ll have to wait.”

  Awestruck, Hedwig looked around. The girls whose portraits hung on these walls were entirely different from the images of womanhood she had seen anywhere else in Germany. Here were no hearty, fresh-faced mothers, none of the wholesome members of the Faith and Beauty Society or the League of German Girls, but glacial blond goddesses who emitted a cool artifice that seemed to say although they might be advertising cosmetics, shoes, or jewelry, their bodies remained their own. Their limbs were hard as marble, their eyes heavy-lidded, and they had a smoldering erotic charge.

  One picture in particular caught her attention. It was a young woman, platinum hair rippling in tight waves, fur coat flicked aside to reveal a slash of ivory flesh from the top of her stockinged leg to the snow of her exposed breast. The composition was all geometric lines an
d oblique perspectives, like an old silent movie, its dramatic lighting and edgy glamour breathing a sense of violence and danger. The expression on the girl’s face, the poise of her body, and the cigarette dangling from one hand were at once decadent and rigidly controlled. It was as though all the sex that had been suppressed in Germany was distilled in a single photograph.

  The subject was Lottie Franke.

  “Everyone loves that one. It was taken by my apprentice, Helmut Newton. He loved big blond girls in high heels,” said Yva, getting to her feet. “Especially naked ones. He’s left me now, unfortunately. He could have been quite a talent, but he would insist on emigrating. Perhaps he was right. I had an offer from Life magazine to go to New York, but I turned it down.”

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  “My husband hated the idea. Only now that he has lost his job and been given a new occupation as a street sweeper, he’s regretting his decision. But there we are.”

  Yva finished folding away the tripod and began meticulously dismantling the camera. Her angular, intelligent face, framed by dark brows, looked in no mood to expend any niceties on Hedwig.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this studio is officially closed. They’ve given me a new job too, as it happens. A technician in the Jewish hospital, working with X-ray cameras. Is that a joke, do you think?”

  “I think they have no sense of humor.”

  “You’re probably right. Anyhow, if it’s photography you’re after, I’m unavailable.”

  “That’s not what I came for.”

  “Then…” The eyebrows lifted slightly.

  Hedwig nodded towards the photograph on the wall. “Did you know her well? Lottie Franke?”

  Yva’s voiced hardened with suspicion. “Who are you exactly?”

  “My name is Hedwig Holz. I was her best friend.”

  “Ah.” Yva abandoned her business with the tripod and rose. She made her way to the solitary cabinet. “In that case, perhaps you’ll share a drink with me.”

  She poured two large whiskeys into cloudy tumblers and handed one to Hedwig, who gulped it like lemonade, the unfamiliar burn causing her to choke. Yva perched on one of the chairs, extended a long, fishnet-stockinged leg, and stroked it thoughtfully.

  “I first met your friend Lottie a year ago. Perhaps she mentioned it.”

  Hedwig nodded silently.

  “She came to me with some sketches for clothes and wondered if I would photograph the finished products. Perhaps I would speed her progress as a designer. But though they were good, it wasn’t only the clothes I was interested in. I could see your friend had quite another talent. I said I would only photograph the clothes if she modeled them, and she agreed immediately. She had drive, that girl, and a hard ambition. I recognized something of myself in her. I was one of nine children—my mother was a milliner—so I knew what it was to work hard and graft. To use everything God gives you to succeed. Lottie was not ashamed of using her body if it helped her. Helmut Newton loved her. He said Lottie was his ideal woman. But then, with a body like that, I daresay she was a lot of men’s ideal woman. Even the Führer’s.”

  Her needle-sharp glance grazed Hedwig’s own legs, causing her to blush fiercely. But Hedwig persisted. “The last time you saw Lottie, did she seem distracted by anything?”

  “If she was, I wouldn’t have known it. She was far too professional.”

  “The fact is…the day before she died she told me about something she had. And I wondered if perhaps she left it here.”

  Yva continued to scrutinize Hedwig for a moment, as if trying to decide whether she was worth trusting. Then she nodded.

  “She asked me to look after it. Just for a few days. She wouldn’t say what it was, or why she wanted me to take it, and my first instinct was to refuse. You don’t hide other people’s possessions without a very good reason nowadays. But your friend had the face of an angel, and I was not about to lose a model that good. Unfortunately, the next time I saw that face it was on the front page of the Berliner Tageblatt.”

  Quietly, so quietly that her voice barely traveled across the narrow distance between them, Hedwig asked, “Where is it now?”

  Yva remained motionless for a moment, then she stubbed her cigarette on the floor, ground out its embers with the toe of her shoe, and rose decisively. She crossed to the cupboard where she had found the whiskey bottle and rummaged behind rows of satin dresses until she retrieved it.

  It was a light tan leather briefcase, expensive-looking but slightly scratched and worn at the corner, with brass fittings and the gilt letters H S L indented on the front. A smaller monogram on the clasp said ASPREY OF LONDON. Hedwig’s fingers trembled as she unlatched it. The air that escaped smelled of burning, the mustiness of an old fireplace, the ancient molecules of another era. And vacancy.

  “There’s nothing here.”

  “What were you looking for?”

  “A book. A manuscript.”

  “Oh, that. I disposed of it.”

  To one accustomed to handling the manuscripts in the Ahnenerbe with white cotton gloves, Yva’s casual comment was devastating.

  “You can’t have any idea what it was!”

  “On the contrary, my dear. I knew exactly what it was. No good German can fail to be aware of the importance of the Germania. To me, it is the world’s most dangerous book.”

  “But where is it?”

  “As I think I mentioned before, I’m a Jew, Fräulein. I reasoned that the book belonged somewhere far away from the hands of those who would use it for their own purposes. Last Saturday I was taking a picnic out by Krumme Lanke. We go there to sunbathe and swim, though it is still not quite warm enough for my tastes. Anyhow, at one point I made my excuses and went into the woods. Your manuscript is there, somewhere. Don’t ask me where. I forget.”

  In that instant, her shock evaporated, and Hedwig almost laughed at the little woman’s ingenuity. She was right; it couldn’t be more appropriate. The Germania. The work that meant so much to Doktor Kraus and SS Reichsführer Himmler and everyone at the Faith and Beauty Society. The key to the German people’s past. How fitting that old Roman Tacitus would have thought it, that his work on the ancient forest tribe should remain where it started, deep beneath the must and moldering leaves of the Grunewald.

  CHAPTER

  42

  Berlin Mitte might have been washed in blood. It was ablaze with crimson pennants, marching troops, and the clatter of drums and brass. There was a greasy swirl of gasoline on the wind, and a sea of eagle-topped banners, glinting in the sun, recalled the triumphal march of a Roman emperor. Percussion shivered in the air, and the thump of snare drums made the ground quiver. An excited crowd of sightseers had gathered to watch, and every so often the monstrous operetta of boots and belts and guns caused them to break into frenzied applause. If something was that good to look at, who cared if it was fake?

  The filming of Germania, like every other project in the Reich, was proceeding at an extraordinary pace. No obstacle would be allowed to get in the way; every barrier, no matter how great, would be conquered. Not that many people dared put up obstacles to Leni Riefenstahl, even when her work required commandeering half of Unter den Linden and the whole of Pariser Platz and filling it with cameramen, lighting crew, still photographers, and a squad of fifty Faith and Beauty girls.

  Several detachments of soldiers from the nearby Lichterfelde barracks had been co-opted—some to march up and down for as long as the director required and others to string up banners, halt traffic, erect barricades, and clear the way for cameramen on roller skates who were filming the troops from street level. The guards participated enthusiastically, agog at the girls, assiduously preventing ordinary citizens from crossing the square lest they collide with extras dressed as ordinary citizens crossing the square. It made a pleasant change from their usual occupation of practicing military maneuvers and endlessly cleaning and reloading their guns.

  Leni herself had spent much of the da
y winched on a minute wooden platform up a ten-meter-high flagpole next to the Brandenburg Gate, squinting up the new East-West Axis with a viewing device and defying the inelegance of the situation with a pair of Dior trousers and her glossy hair bundled tightly beneath a director’s cap. Around midday the Führer had dropped by for a viewing, accompanied by Goebbels, who was unable to resist the opportunity for an impromptu speech. “Whoever has seen and experienced the face of the Führer in Triumph of the Will will never forget it. It will haunt him through days and dreams and will, like a quiet flame, burn itself into his soul.” Leni, dressed in her trademark white greatcoat, stood by smiling, though everyone knew that inwardly she was seething at the waste of precious time.

  The previous day Clara had left Griebnitzsee for good. It was impossible to stay in the place where a death had happened, where she had lugged a man’s body down the garden like a sack of rotten cabbages and watched it slip, without a trace, into the dark water of the lake. Since then she had scarcely slept and was grateful for the quantities of Pan-Cake makeup stipulated by Leni to achieve the masklike visage of the Spirit of Germania.

  By midafternoon her scenes were finished, and Clara changed into her own clothes to watch the final shot of the day. It was the scene everyone was waiting for, the technically dazzling feat that would showcase Leni Riefenstahl’s trademark choreography. Leni had already explained her plans. The shot would form the opening sequence of the film. Accompanied by a soundtrack of Wagner’s Lohengrin, a Luftwaffe plane piloted by the Führer’s favorite aviatrix, Hanna Reitsch, would approach and dip down like a divine messenger from the skies. The onboard camera would record the clouds parting to reveal the whole, glorious city of Berlin laid out and, right in the center, a swastika. As the plane drew closer, the swastika would be revealed as a troupe of perfect Faith and Beauty girls massed in the Tiergarten. In an uninterrupted tracking shot, the camera’s eye would come right down to ground level, until the focus was resting on the face of a single girl.