Solitaire

by Jane Thynne

  If two girls go into a shop selling vanilla, strawberry and chocolate ices, what is the probability that at least one of them will choose vanilla?

  Roulette was even simpler than that. There were thirtyseven slots on the wheel, eighteen of them red, eighteen black and one zero. In terms of probability, each roll there would be an 18/37 chance of red or black. Not much of a winning strategy there. But then Clara remembered another theory her father had told her.

  ‘I do know a strategy, sir, but I wouldn’t want everyone hearing it.’

  The croupier was calling for bets, spinning the wheel in one direction and preparing to spin the ball in the other. All eyes were on the Duke, willing Clara to disappear and allow him to continue his losing streak. He rose decisively.

  ‘Right you are, then. Don’t want to give the game away, do we? Better come over here and tell me quick.’

  They moved over to a tall window that gave onto the square of Estoril. In the distance, through the palm trees, the implacable tide could be glimpsed, dragging up the shingle like a heavy cape.

  Lines of worry were carved deep on the Duke’s face. His fair hair was threaded with grey and the movie-star looks that once made him the heart-throb of a thousand young women had faded, like a magazine left open in the sun. As he fixed a cigarette in his holder, Clara noticed that his gold cufflinks still bore the cipher EVIII. It was as though having given up his kingdom and country he could not quite bear to give up his regnal title.

  ‘So. Let’s hear this strategy you have then.’

  ‘It’s called the doubling-up strategy and it goes like this. If I put a pound on red and it goes to black, then I double up with a two-pound bet on red the next roll. So if it goes red, I have cancelled out my pound loss and I’m still a pound up. If it goes to black again I double up again with a four-pound bet on red. So that way I will still be a pound up. If it’s black again I double-up to a stake of eight pounds on red. The theory is that I will always win because eventually it will land on red and I will end up with a one-pound profit.’

  ‘You think this will save my bacon?’

  ‘It could. But there’s a problem with that theory. It doesn’t ask how far you are prepared to go. If black wins a certain number of times in a row, your stake must eventually rise to a million. It’s very unlikely that you would ever lose as much as a million, but the most likely event is that all you will win is a pound. It’s what’s called False Thinking. So you have to ask yourself, sir: how much are you prepared to lose?’

  ‘How much am I prepared to lose, eh?’ The Duke’s expression darkened and he took a swift, savage swipe at his cigarette.

  ‘I rather think that’s the question of my life, wouldn’t you say? Same thing Baldwin and Churchill and the damned Archbishop of Canterbury and every other Tom, Dick and Harry has been firing at me for years. I would have thought my answer was plain to see.’

  His gaze strayed out of the window, towards the inexorable ocean beyond, but Clara could tell that he was gazing much further than that. He was gazing out to the cold lawns of Windsor Castle and the London streets where newspaper vendors shouted the scandal of Mrs Simpson to an eager crowd. To the years of agony and indecision, the shuttered faces of royal officials, the fury of his family, the disdain of the English establishment. To a cocktail party past that had turned into a diplomatic disaster. To a life that had been maimed, marked and ultimately exiled by Love. It was Love that had beached him on this distant shore, cost him a crown and denied him any dignified way of escape.

  ‘You think I haven’t lost enough already?’

  ‘I think perhaps you have. But you need to know what’s at stake. And, sir, I didn’t come here to play roulette.’

  The Duke’s face fell. Suspicion of others’ motives came naturally to him now and here was yet another person trying to get him to do something he wouldn’t want.

  ‘What are you talking about, Fräulein Vine?’

  ‘It’s extremely important.’

  He gave a jaded smile.

  ‘More important than roulette? I’ll need some convincing of that.’

  ‘This afternoon I had a conversation with Walter Schellenberg. He’s the chief of the counter-espionage wing of the Nazi intelligence service.’

  ‘I know who he is.’

  ‘I discovered that the Germans are working on plans to abduct you. When I was in his office I saw a telegram from the Foreign Office to that effect.’

  ‘Seize us? Where on earth would they take us?’

  ‘To Spain, first. Then Germany, I’d guess.’

  The earlier jocularity had gone, to be replaced with illdisguised hostility.

  ‘What an extraordinary idea. Look, Fräulein Vine, I don’t really know who you are, or who you speak for, but if I had a pound for every wild rumour that’s brought to me, I wouldn’t need to waste my time playing roulette.’

  How could the man be so slow-witted! At last Clara understood the stubbornness that had the whole of the English establishment up in arms and Winston Churchill wringing his hands.

  ‘Please, sir. You must take this seriously.’

  ‘Must I indeed? Perhaps I should lodge an enquiry through official channels . . .’

  ‘No! There’s no time. The abduction is already being planned.’

  ‘And I’m to take your word for it, am I? That some madcap scheme is being hatched in Nazi headquarters to seize my wife and myself and carry us off to the German Reich.’

  ‘Yes. It’s not madcap. They’re in deadly earnest.’

  ‘And for what reason, pray?’

  ‘So that you can serve as President of the Great British Republic after the conquest of Britain.’

  There was a flicker in those faded eyes. A glimmer of recognition of that wording, as if he had heard this proposition before. Most likely just three years ago when he had visited the Führer’s Berghof for a private conversation. When he had been the toast of Germany, a young Apollo on honeymoon with his attractive wife. How admiring Goebbels and the other Nazis had been of England’s dashing ex-King, and how astonished that his own country was so quick to discard him. Perhaps, Clara realized, the Duke had agreed. Maybe the allegation in the Gestapo’s file was true. He agrees to cooperate at a suitable time in the establishment of peace. He has agreed a code word, on the receiving of which he will immediately come back over.

  Maybe he had signed that document the Nazis prepared for him, making him head of a British Republic in return for Britain’s colonies. If so, that document was now safely stashed away, waiting for the moment that the Nazis needed to remind him of it.

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but . . .’

  His tone was terse, bordering on rude.

  ‘You’re being foolhardy!’ Clara insisted.

  Urgency lent her voice a strident note and immediately there was a warning flash from those washed-out eyes. A frown that said nobody spoke to an ex-King like that, not even if they were trying to save him from kidnap. The Duke was a vain man who had been destined for the throne and did not intend anyone to forget it. While he may have lost his crown, he had not abandoned his kingly airs and, Clara realized belatedly, she had not larded her message with sufficient deference.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  He glanced over at the nearest card table, where a losing hand had just been thrown down, a queen and a king lying like corpses on the green baize. Tapping the ash from his cigarette into a stand, the mouth a stubborn line, he said, ‘I accept the apology, Fräulein Vine, but I’m afraid I can’t leave just yet.’

  ‘I know. You’re waiting for something. The Duchess told me. She said you were expecting a consignment of valuables from your villa in Paris. She had tried to persuade you to leave but you were adamant. But I think you were waiting for something else.’

  Clara had tucked a packet of cigarettes into the leather bag and now she brought it up to rummage in it, as if searching for a smoke.

  ‘In the pension where I’m staying I found this kn
itting bag. It belonged to a young woman who was arrested by Portuguese police outside the casino. She’s currently in the cells, and refusing to speak, but I think she was trying to contact you. Perhaps she was trying to arrange a way of getting it to you.’

  ‘A knitting bag?’

  ‘It contains more than just knitting.’

  The impassivity with which the Duke accepted the bag told Clara everything. He did not remark on its weight or question its contents. He barely even glanced at it.

  ‘I shall have to speak to Her Royal Highness.’

  ‘Please do. As fast as you can. You need to find her and leave.’ She tried to recall precisely what Ian Fleming had told her. ‘There’s a ship in the harbour waiting for you. An American Export Lines passenger ship called Excalibur. It’s been ready for days. With every hour you delay your freedom is at stake.’

  Now that he had the bag, the Duke no longer seemed interested in her. He assumed the dismissive tone of one at a function or on a receiving line, edging away from some local dignitary.

  ‘I appreciate the risks you have taken on my behalf. But now you’ll have to excuse me. I have a losing streak to put right.’

  Gambler that he was, he tucked the bag under his elbow, turned on his heel and walked back to the roulette table.

  Mist had rolled in from the Tagus, enveloping the square and casting a milky halo over the streetlamps. Along the shoreline Lisbon was a distant necklace of bright lights. Stars like seed pearls pricked the violet sky. A sense of sheer nervous exhaustion came over Clara as she exited the casino. She had done what she could, and completed what must have been Sonja Klimpel’s mission before she was arrested and thrown into a cell. All that mattered now was to return to the pension as quickly and unobtrusively as possible.

  Around the square everything was shuttered, the last bar closed and the lawn in front of her a hushed lozenge of black. In the shrubs the cicadas hummed, and above her head the cones of the umbrella pines hung like bullets suspended in the dim light. A lush earthy scent rose from the watered grass and the waft of mimosa moved on the breeze.

  Suddenly she felt a prickle in the air, a tingling sense of some human presence and, instinctive as a bird or animal, she looked around, searching for a suspicion of movement against her peripheral vision. Her stomach tightened in a knot.

  Then the needles of the pines crunched underfoot and the shadows formed into a face.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The disaster, when it struck, could not have seemed less alarming. Indeed Katerina did not at first recognize it as a disaster at all. It was Sunday afternoon and the orphans were crowded into the assembly hall watching a cine film called Hitler at Home, a short documentary of the kind that were regularly provided to NSV homes by the Youth Ministry for the purposes of entertainment and instruction. Hitler’s main home was the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, but it was at the Berghof, the perfect, almost magical mountain house perched amid lush alpine scenery, that the Führer liked to rest from the cares of state. The film didn’t have much of a story – mostly it involved Hitler conferring with his generals or frowning at maps in the Great Hall – but there were also scenes of him staring out at the majestic panorama with his dog by his side, and the jostling crocodile of pilgrims who climbed the road leading to the Berghof where, if there hadn’t been a barrier preventing them plus a couple of guards, they would have been knocking at the front door. When the Führer emerged into the daylight, at precisely the same time each day, the crowd surged forward screaming with delight and the guards would go into the throng and pluck out an appealing child to meet him. Every child wanted to be the one, of course. As the commentator said, ‘Thousands of people arrive at the Berghof each day to greet their Führer yet he makes time for every child. Truly our Führer is the Children’s Friend.’

  Katerina’s viewing was interrupted by Heidi, who yanked her out of the hall, pulled her into a doorway in the corridor, and hissed in her ear, ‘They’ve taken your poster down.’

  ‘Who cares? I didn’t like it anyway.’

  ‘It’s because of your leg.’

  ‘But Doktor Goebbels has a crippled foot.’

  ‘Katerina! You can’t say things like that.’ Heidi’s face was tight with anxiety.

  ‘It’s true.’

  Joseph Goebbels. If Heidi felt allied to Heinrich Himmler, because she was born on his birthday, then Goebbels was Katerina’s own dark twin. It was knowledge she had buried deep inside and had never articulated. She had seen him once, when she was walking with Papi and they came upon a military parade. The Minister was standing on a saluting platform alongside Hermann Goering, like a stringy white goat next to a hippo, and the tip of his built-up boot was just visible beneath his trouser leg. Goebbels reminded Katerina of Krampus, the Christmas demon, though without the beard and horns, or the bundle of sticks to whip people. Krampus had one normal foot and one deformed, and Katerina always used to be given a chocolate figurine of the little devil on Krampusnacht. You could get figurines of Goebbels too, but in plastic, not chocolate, and if Katerina had ever been given one she would have chucked it in the canal.

  ‘I heard Frau Schneider tell Fräulein Koppel you should never have been put forward for the orphan scheme. She was quite angry. You’re to be withdrawn from the adoption list immediately.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  This was unexpected good news. Katerina recalled the kindliness in Fräulein Koppel’s eyes when she had selected her for the photo-shoot. Perhaps someone nice will see your picture. As though she was hoping that advertising Katerina in a celebrity charity campaign might save her from the scrutiny of those steely SS wives. She could have no idea that Katerina never wanted to be adopted. That the thought of being taken into the family of some hatchet-faced woman like the one she had met the previous Saturday, to help with her housework and please her husband, was appalling.

  ‘Yes, because Frau Schneider said you were a deviant.’

  ‘A deviant?’ The word grated like barbed wire on the skin. ‘In what way?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ On Heidi’s face the struggle between friendship and orthodoxy was plain to see. She was grappling with the uncomfortable realization that Katerina was not the right kind of friend.

  ‘Does it mean I have to stay here?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Heidi was thinking hard. ‘But then what happens to those children who don’t get chosen at selection? Eventually they’re sent away. Like Barbara Sosemann.’

  It was true. In the last week little Beata had disappeared, along with two other Polish orphans.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll be sent wherever they go.’

  Sent away. Already her initial optimism was clouding over with doubt. Her dog, Anka, had been sent away to a farm, but whenever Katerina thought of this farm she saw a dark door, with a long shadow behind it.

  Heidi fell silent as someone appeared behind her. But it was only Fräulein Koppel, who smiled reassuringly and stooped so that their faces were level.

  ‘Please don’t worry Katerina about this, Heidi.’

  ‘But I’m right, aren’t I?’

  You could talk this way with Fräulein Koppel. She was never going to report you.

  ‘Heidi, I’m sure you have recreation to attend. Katerina, come with me.’

  The film was finished and the new radio show, The Voice of the Front, was on. Katerina could hear the announcer’s voice, breathlessly hectoring the nation, like an officer on a parade ground. ‘The nation must draw together in the struggle and form a community of fate, which is tied together for life and for death . . .’ The show was supposed to be relaxing, a sentimental hiatus of entertainment before the working week began, full of heartwarming favourites like Warum ist es am Rhein so schön?, but the announcer’s voice reminded Katerina of a dog barking endlessly in a locked room. It set her nerves on edge.

  Fräulein Koppel led her down a long, tiled corridor, and into the nurses’ office. It was more like a store room than an office, with manila f
iles piled on shelves all up the wall, on top of gunmetal filing cabinets and in a tower against the murky, iron-framed windows that looked down into the yard. On the desk an Anglepoise lamp was switched on, illuminating a pile of papers that even from upside down, Katerina could see were Reichsführer-Fragebögen. These were hefty questionnaires to be maintained regularly on the orders of Himmler for every child under the care of the NSV. The nurses had innumerable boxes to check on behaviour and development, academic attainment, health, attitude and conformity to National Socialist ideals. No one questioned the need for it. Every citizen of the Reich was accustomed to being monitored and accounted for by the state. Nothing existed without being quantified. The Reichsführer-Fragebögen were no different from roll call, or having your rations weighed, or your height measured.

  Fräulein Koppel pulled the door shut behind her and gestured to a chair.

  ‘What Heidi told you is true. I had hoped that participating in the fundraiser would lead to something,’ her voice tightened and she cleared her throat, ‘but it’s been decided you won’t be put up for adoption any more.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Katerina automatically.

  ‘You’ll probably want to know why.’