Solitaire

by Jane Thynne

  ‘Fräulein Vine! I can’t imagine what you must think of me!’ Reuber grinned, but she sensed an underlying scorn at the suggestion that a man like himself would need to pay for the attentions of women.

  ‘Don’t answer that. I know what they say about me. A philanderer. An incurable womanizer. But I flatter myself that I am a little more discriminating than the clients of Salon Kitty. Even if they do include Headrich himself.’

  Even while he said this, Clara’s mind was calculating rapidly, trying to work out why Reuber was confiding in her.

  ‘You have a lot of detail.’

  ‘And from an impeccable source.’

  ‘So you got it from another client?’

  ‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘Not at all. In fact, it came from a British agent. He’s posing as a press attaché at the Romanian Embassy.’

  There was a hiatus as he glanced sideways at her from beneath the brim of his hat, his keen eyes probing her reaction. Such an admission was devastatingly dangerous. To voice such information – to go so far as to identify an agent of a foreign power – was to put himself at immense risk. If Clara was not what he took her for, then his knowledge of British spies effectively sealed his fate.

  ‘Every day this man’s morning walk takes him past the brothel and one day he happened to notice that there was some cable work going on in the pavement outside. Yet curiously, all the workmen had clean overalls. When he probed a little deeper he discovered that the cable workers were SS employees rerouting an extension to SD headquarters. After that, all the British had to do was get a technical expert into the brothel and tap the interior wiring and all the secrets of Salon Kitty were available to them too. Including the fact that they had doubts about me. So you see,’ Reuber stroked his moustache ruminatively, ‘it would be foolish of me – or anyone else – to underestimate Herr Walter Schellenberg.’

  His voice dropped further and the easy smile that danced on his lips vanished again, to be replaced with a deadly seriousness.

  ‘What made you tell me, Clara? That you were here to check up on me?’

  ‘Perhaps I like you.’

  ‘And I like you. But that’s not enough to take such a risk. So I ask again. What brings you here? What makes you do it?’

  Clara knew what his question meant. He was convinced that she herself was working for another power. He had laid himself bare, and in return he required that she be absolutely level with him. Yet still she was reluctant to give away any more of herself than she needed to.

  ‘I could ask the same of you.’

  ‘That’s easy. I’m married, you know.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘My wife Cici is a performer too.’

  ‘I think I knew that.’ Clara tried to summon the picture of the rangy, dark-eyed beauty who had appeared in publicity shots of Reuber’s home life before the Reich Chamber of Culture had deemed a wife and family inconvenient accessories for one of their A-list stars.

  ‘Most people don’t. Cici’s French actually. She has family here in Paris. That was one of the reasons I wanted to come. To check that they’re all right. They’re Jewish, you see, so you can imagine how that complicates things.’

  ‘I certainly can.’ The fact of Clara’s own Jewish heritage was something she had kept even from her closest friends. She knew that Hans Reuber would have no idea.

  ‘Cici has some protection being married to me, but there’s no way she can perform in public. She hasn’t worked for years. And there’s no doubt she affected my career too. Until a few years ago, I flatter myself I was a favourite of Doktor Goebbels. I received chocolates and flowers by the cartload, as many as any of those women he chases. He would call me regularly to remind me how valuable I was to the Reich. But after a while the calls and the gifts began drying up, and so did the film roles. It’s been an age since I had a contract to top the bill at the Wintergarten. All I’ve had in the past six months is a provincial tour. Then came a piece in that SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, saying I was married to a “full-blown Jewess”. The message couldn’t be clearer if Goebbels broadcast it on the nightly news.’

  ‘What message?’

  ‘Divorce Cici, of course. Or lose my career.’

  ‘What can you do?’

  ‘I’ve tried everything I can think of.’ He grinned ruefully. ‘You imagine me a lothario. A lot of people do, and perhaps there’s some truth to it. I’m a vain man and I’m getting older. The smiles of pretty women are a powerful drug for me, though that doesn’t mean I don’t love my wife. But it also suits my purposes. I do my damnedest to make people forget that I’m married at all. I only wish Joachim Gottschalk would do the same.’

  Gottschalk was a fellow actor who had come under intense scrutiny from the Propaganda Ministry for refusing to divorce his Jewish wife, a proposition the uxorious star refused to countenance. So far his high profile and popularity had kept him safe, but who knew how long that would continue? Already the roles had vanished for him in a war of attrition that would only end when the actor finally buckled and agreed to a divorce.

  ‘So for the moment Cici stays home with our children and I tread the stages hypnotizing young women.’

  Reuber’s mouth curdled in disdain.

  ‘A hypnotist. What kind of profession is that? Blinding people to the reality of what’s around them.’

  Suddenly he looked from left to right and focused on the spot, a hundred yards away, where the balustrade ended and a winding path, shaded by a dense clump of laurel shrubbery, led down to the next level of the terrace. Clara sensed him stiffen, then he took her arm and strolled languidly in the opposite direction, back up the steps.

  ‘A watcher,’ he murmured, once they had crossed into one of the narrow streets leading away from the basilica. ‘I should have guessed.’

  ‘Are you sure? Even here?’

  His grip on her arm was painfully tight.

  ‘I’m a German with a French wife, whose family are not, you might say, overjoyed at the prospect of a Nazi occupation. No secret service worth its name could ignore a person like me. I already guessed I was being watched. I knew about Schellenberg’s suspicions, and though I’m amazed that they would follow me here, what you told me tonight only makes me more certain.’

  As if in confirmation, footsteps crunched purposefully on the cobbles behind them. Against all her instincts, Clara glanced behind and saw a squat blond man with a fleshy face half hidden beneath the brim of his hat, coat belted and collar upturned, and eyes trained on the ground in front of him.

  Reuber slid his arm round her waist and drew her towards him, like a man hoping to accelerate the romantic promise of his date.

  ‘Every day I’ve been here I’ve expected to open the newspaper and discover I’ve been stripped of my German citizenship. To be honest, it will almost certainly happen, but in the meantime, a cloak is as good as a dagger. And performance is the best cloak that I can think of for my current enterprise.’

  ‘You haven’t explained. What exactly is that?’

  His hand dropped down and took hers and she felt him push something into her palm. Instinctively she plunged her hand deep into the recesses of her jacket.

  ‘After the show tomorrow evening, come to this address. There’s someone I want you to meet.’

  There was no chance of a taxi at that late hour, but it didn’t matter because Clara wanted to walk and walk. She needed to assimilate the information Reuber had relayed. So Schellenberg’s suspicions were right. Reuber disdained the Nazi Party, plainly despised Joseph Goebbels and was indeed in touch with agents of an enemy country. But what exactly was he engaged in? And what was the meaning of the meeting he proposed for the following night? It might be foolish to consider agreeing to such an encounter, especially now that she knew Reuber was being shadowed, yet she also knew that she would go. After all, Goebbels had ordained this honey trap and a late-night assignation was no more than he would expect.

  As she reached the Avenue Foch she passed number
84, a stern-faced building, its windows shuttered and the biscuit-coloured stone tiered with wrought-iron balconies. Despite the lateness of the hour a door was open, giving a glimpse of high chandeliered ceilings and a bevy of black uniforms coming and going, like malevolent bees into the darkness of a hive.

  She waited until she had returned to the hotel and closed the door behind her before she took the card from her pocket, unfurled it where it had been clenched in her fist, and looked at it.

  Cartier

  13, Rue de la Paix, Paris

  Chapter Eight

  It was an extraordinary thing to see your own face staring out at you from a ten-foot hoarding opposite your home, but it was the experience Katerina Klimpel had when she woke up and made her way to the breakfast room that Monday, and it was not a nice one. A poster of herself with the famous actress Jenny Jugo, heads pressed together and matching smiles, above the legend Freude durch das WHW, Joy through the Winterhilfswerk, had been pasted up all round Berlin, including the spot directly across the street from the NSV home. As Katerina queued for her porridge she realized that every child in the home had seen it, not to mention all the supervisors. The children in line elbowed each other and giggled. The smallest ones looked at her with awe. Reactions ranged from envy to hilarity and outright dislike but the one sentiment the poster did not inspire was joy.

  It made a change from looking at the Führer, though. Every child was handed a picture of him when they arrived at the NSV home. To hang above your bed so you can see him whenever you want. A line of Hitlers scowled down into the girls’ dormitory and when they woke and stretched out in the scratchy sheets his face was the first they saw. It was a bit like the crucifix that had hung on the wall at home with its little Jesus, his kindly face dripping minuscule drops of crimson paint – only religion, Katerina now knew, was Jewish and unGermanic, whereas it was quite all right to kiss your Führer picture reverently every night and most girls did.

  Except for Heidi. Heidi was the sole friend Katerina had made at the NSV home and going on fifteen she was almost too old to be there. She was large-boned and well developed, with milk-white hair and eyes pale as water. She spent most of her time talking about boys. Although she worshipped Hitler as much as anyone else, Heidi reserved a special adoration for Heinrich Himmler because she had been born on his birthday, which meant, when she entered the NSV home, that the SS-Reichsführer became her official godfather and gave her a silver cup with his name on. It was also why her mother had given Heidi a name with the initial H in the first place, though she got off lightly, Katerina pointed out, because girls born on Hitler’s birthday were often named Adolfine. But after the pride of producing a child on Himmler’s birthday, disaster had followed. The next baby had been born imperfect, and the hospital had not allowed Heidi’s mother to keep it. They had strongly suggested she be sterilized as soon as possible so as not to risk any further mistakes. Shortly afterwards Heidi’s mother was found stone cold with a bottle of pills by her side. The father went to pieces and Heidi was sent to the NSV home because he could not look after her, though she insisted this situation was only temporary. It was not like she was an orphan or anything.

  Despite the banter and jokes resulting from the poster outside, the picture was not uppermost in Katerina’s mind that morning. Monday was the night of her weekly BDM meeting, and it was what might come after that occupied all her thoughts.

  The day seemed to last for ever. It was a struggle to concentrate. In maths her head was swimming.

  An aeroplane flies at a rate of 240 km an hour to a place at a distance of 210 km to drop bombs. When may it be expected to return if the bomb dropping takes seven and a half minutes?

  The construction of a lunatic asylum costs six million marks. How many houses at 15,000 marks each could have been built for that amount?

  The numbers on the page twirled and drifted in her head like fragments of ash. Maths was her worst subject; a monochrome world where everything was either wrong or right and there was an answer for everything if you looked hard enough. She ploughed along, her hand aching. Naturally, Katerina was left-handed and wrote very fast, her pen racing along with her fingers crabbed around it, but any child here attempting to write with their left hand got it rapped with a stick. The teacher, Herr Rauch, would patrol the rows of desks, eyes fixed on their papers, and if he caught a child out would summon them to the front of the class and allow them to choose the cane that would punish them. This he brought down on the offending hand with a couple of sharp cracks, so if the child tried again, the wrong hand would be too sore to write with. Katerina knew why – left-handedness meant deviance or idiocy and left-handers would never get a job. ‘What employer is going to employ someone who uses their left hand?’ Herr Rauch would demand, yet in truth it was neither the pain nor the job prospects that kept her careful. Using her right hand was all part of creating a new identity for herself. It might be effortful and fraudulent, but it meant that she would no longer stand out any more than she did already.

  By five o’clock, she was knotting her Jugend scarf and tugging her hair into tight plaits, calculating furiously. The BDM meeting usually lasted an hour, but there was to be a careers talk that evening so she could quite easily explain that the session had lasted far longer than normal. That would give her time to slip away to the apartment on Fischerstrasse. It would mean making her way through the darkened streets and coming back late on the S-Bahn, which frightened her. The carriages were so dark, and you needed to be absolutely sure to find your way in the blackout. But it was the perfect opportunity and besides, she needed to find Sonja, didn’t she? Without Sonja, there was the danger of being adopted and that didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘It’s time to consider what you will do when you come of age.’

  Frau Hofmann, the Reichsfrauenschaft leader giving the careers talk, had a navy suit, matching fedora, red triangular badge identifying her rank and eyes like a prison searchlight. They travelled over the assembled girls, freezing them to their seats and drilling down into the soul.

  ‘What does a young woman do if she has no husband and no ambitions for an office or a shop?’

  The girls swapped uncertain glances. The problem with questions from officials was that you needed to give the right response, but what was the right answer in this case? Frau Hofmann couldn’t be genuinely interested in their ambitions, could she?

  Fortunately the question turned out to be rhetorical.

  ‘If when you come to choosing a future, you cannot think what to do . . .’ Here Frau Hofmann paused, and an expression of inspired delight spread across her features as though the ideal solution had only that moment occurred to her. ‘Why not consider giving a child to the Führer?’

  This suggestion met with blank looks and knitted brows.

  It was so simple, Frau Hofmann explained. An organization called the Fount of Life Foundation had been established to support racially valuable families. The enterprise was directly overseen by SS-Reichsführer Himmler himself, who had been kind enough to take care of every detail. He had ensured that food for expectant mothers was plentiful and every residential home had a programme of lectures and entertainments.

  ‘What better way could there be of serving the Reich?’

  Having a child for Hitler had never been Katerina’s idea of a career choice, but she noticed that several of the girls perked up with interest and raised their hands with questions.

  ‘What kind of girls are required?’

  ‘How do you qualify for the Foundation?’

  ‘Can I keep the baby myself?’

  Frau Hofmann smiled broadly. It was a pleasant surprise to find this level of interest from a BDM Mädelschaft in Berlin. Country areas tended to be more fruitful recruiting grounds for the Foundation of Life. The girls there were simpler and expected less from lives that would be dominated by strenuous and unrewarding farm work, whereas city girls had education and expectations. They wanted to be secretaries or at the very
least work in a factory. In some districts the very suggestion that young women might become breeding partners for SS officers met with incredulity and frank distaste. But Frau Hofmann was not in this job for nothing. She had dealt with enough young women to know the way their minds worked and had evolved the perfect skill set for this recruitment exercise. It was all about presenting the concept in the right way.

  ‘We are only interested in the very best young women. The finest Aryan girls. And we like to preserve total anonymity. Not even your family need know you are undertaking this valuable service. Anyone who is interested will be given a series of medical tests and have their background investigated and if all of that goes smoothly, will be introduced to SS officers at one of our residential places. You might be surprised at the quality of our premises. One of them is a real castle! The only proviso is that the girl should choose a man whose hair and eye colour correspond to their own.’

  Katerina had already lost interest. This enterprise was suspiciously likely to involve sex and for all her intelligence, she knew very little about that. The book they had been issued with, Mädel von Heute, Mütter von Morgen, Girls of Today, Mothers of Tomorrow, tended towards generalities. There was a lot about keeping your body pure and holy for the Führer, but little precise information about the alternative. Everyone knew that the BDM was nicknamed the Bald Deutsche Mütter – soon to be German mothers – but Katerina still had little idea how the state of motherhood came about. She thought of the physical pleasure provided by everyday sensations: soft air buffeting the skin, the aroma of baking bread, the sweet, pungent fragrance of the linden blossom pervading the city, and imagined that sex must be a hundred times as intense. Sex was just another subject she had been relying on Sonja to explain.

  After the session ended Katerina made her way to Fischerstrasse and took the clanking elevator to the top floor, peering through the tiny diamonds of its iron gates at she rose up through the unlit hallways to the apartment that her sister shared with Bettina Beyer. When she opened the apartment door Bettina’s face fell, as though she had been expecting someone else. Bettina was dressed in a shift of frothy silk that barely reached the tops of her stockings, with slightly grubby lace embroidery around the bust area. Her dyed orange bob had a tigerish stripe of darker hair at the roots and she smelled of tobacco and the musky scent of old bedsheets.