by Thynne, Jane
Examine the territory.
It was a lesson he had drawn from birdwatching. Most people see only a fraction of what they look at – a few outstanding features of a street or a room. They see what they think they will see, but the spy must look for what she is not expected to see. Like the dappled feathers of a bird that have been designed through eons of evolution to blend precisely into a tree trunk, or the speckles on its breast which match the flinty texture of a ploughed field, the spy must focus on whatever blends into the environment. Because it will be there that the anomaly lurks.
Once she started looking it was easy to see him. He was directly opposite her on the other side of the street, lost in a crowd of people at a stand-up noodle bar, with a carton of food in hand and a clear line of sight to her. She had no idea if he realized she had caught sight of him, but a truck momentarily obscured her view and when it had passed he had disappeared.
She forced herself to concentrate, staring at the menu while her mind ordered its version of events. Everything that Sabine had warned of had come true. She was being followed – almost certainly by a man sent from Heydrich – but if Heydrich suspected her of spying, why did he not simply arrest her? It must be that they were still waiting and watching, checking who she met, where she went, what she did.
She half-turned her back on the window, took out her compact and applied a layer of Velvet Red, watching the street behind her in the mirror. She repeated the action regularly over the next half hour, revealing nothing, but a man on the table next to her who, perhaps assuming her regular cosmetic checks were for his benefit, began to grin over the top of his newspaper. He was reading about the failure of the talks at Bad Godesberg and seeing her glance flicker over the headlines, he commented softly,
‘We have bad luck in our leaders.’
Clara didn’t answer. If the man was genuine, he would soon find himself arrested for remarks like that and if he was a plant and she responded, she would be the one to be arrested for treasonous comments. It was safer to say nothing, so she gathered together her things and left the café.
By the time she made her way back up Leipziger Strasse she was shattered. She had walked miles. Her feet hurt and she was shivering in the flimsy dress and cardigan she had worn for the beach. Approaching Potsdamer Strasse she became aware of something strange – a distant rumble in the air – and tilting her head she detected a murmuring din from the direction of Unter den Linden. The sound rose and people began to turn in its direction. It must be a motorcade of some kind, or a rally. There was nothing unusual about a rally in Berlin – they were almost a daily occurrence – yet it was odd that one should take place so late in the evening. Generally motorcades were staged in the daytime for full public display. As the shoal of people moved forward, she allowed herself to drift in their wake.
The sight that greeted her, as she rounded the corner of Wilhelmstrasse, was astonishing, even by the standards of war-ready Berlin. Rank upon rank of soldiers were marching in a seemingly endless line down the street, field guns mounted on motor trucks, followed by motorcycle outliers and heavy motor-drawn cannons. Rows of Panzers, engines roaring and tracks clattering on the asphalt, made their way up past the British Embassy to the spot where a couple of hundred people were gathered in the square outside the Reich Chancellery, its boxy frontage lit up with spotlights, swastika banners fluttering like standards at a mediaeval tournament. Burying herself in the crowd, Clara watched as the seemingly unending parade rolled by, a frank, propagandist statement of a regime readying itself for war, brashly illuminated by arc lights from an Ufa Tonwoche crew. As she tried to fix on individual soldiers’ faces, white blurs against their black and field-grey tunics, the sky darkened and in deafening counterpoint squadrons of Luftwaffe planes were roaring above them, causing heads to crane upwards at the sky and a shudder to pass through the crowd like wind through the leaves of a tree. Staring at the tanks, imagining the contrast between their steel and iron and the fragility of the human lives inside them, Clara pictured the troops in their helmets and the planes overhead spreading through Germany in a vast wall of men and metal, rolling and gravitating inexorably towards war.
Generally crowds in Berlin were pumped up and feverishly excited, but this one was dejected, mutinous even, like a football crowd whose team is losing, and whose supporters begin to slink away early. If this display was designed to intimidate the populace, or prepare them for an imminent war, then it was failing miserably.
Once the troops had passed, leaving only a ghost of exhaust fumes and clatter in their wake, the crowd began to break up, but Clara remained, watching the last vestiges of the motorcade disappear down the street. Beside her, two drunks who had stumbled out of a bar to see what all the commotion was about stared openmouthed at the vanishing parade, then shook their heads. Behind them, a man with a pot of glue was posting up an advertisement for the Winterhilfswerk, the winter relief charity. It was the usual kind of picture, little children at their mother’s knee and a slogan reading,
No one will feel hunger or cold.
‘So even that’s verboten now,’ quipped one drunk.
The poster-painter ignored him.
‘Call it relief?’ added his friend. ‘The only people relieved are us and we only get relieved of our money.’
A few people around them exchanged glances, as if daring each other to say something, but no one had the inclination and within minutes everyone had drifted away.
Chapter Thirty
A rattle at Clara’s door revealed a small girl with a red bucket and a tray of Nazi Party lapel pins. Every Sunday householders could expect callers asking for a ‘voluntary’ contribution to Party funds. They would have the names of every occupant of an apartment block, and beside each name, the sums that they had given on previous occasions. Often the sheet of paper would be proffered so that you could compare how much you gave in comparison with your neighbours. The youth leaders chose Sunday for these collections because it meant the children would be too busy to attend church. Christianity was not approved of – Erich had earnestly advised Clara in the past that Christ was a Jew – and now only a trickle of elderly people attended services while children were sent on marches, or collecting missions. Yet the strange thing was, Clara thought, that their earnest, shining-eyed insistence on the HJ gospel, and their unrelenting commitment to proselytizing it, was exactly the same as those missionaries who once used to knock on apartment doors, Bible in hand, in an effort to save your eternal soul.
On that day the girl’s tray held small round wooden pins of the Reichsmütterdienst, formed in the shape of an alpine flower. Clara picked one up, gave a mark for it, and watched the child move on to the next door to rouse Herr Engel.
Nerves had dulled her appetite, so after drinking a quick cup of tea – black because she had forgotten to buy milk – Clara headed out. In the streets, sandbags had been piled up, and a couple of children were playing with one that had split, scooping handfuls of it into their own little fortresses. The railings alongside had been removed, for melting down into aeroplanes.
The city was at its most beautiful that day – the trees were flushed with gold and the first autumnal edge had entered the air – but beneath Berlin’s distinctive smell of buses and trams, asphalt and pine, there was another scent now – the smell of fear. It was pressed into the walls and trapped in the streets, lurking behind the impassive faces. It was there, although everything was doing its best to look normal. Even though the Ku’damm still hummed with the bustle of people out on a Sunday stroll, girls window-shopping the smart stores, ancient men with cracked leathery faces and fur rugs over their knees, sipping steaming coffee with pursed lips, sparrows bobbing on and off the tables, bicycle bells ringing and Zoo station rearing like a great botanical greenhouse behind them. It was there in Clara herself, who forced herself to walk at the same, unhurried pace as the Sunday strollers, hoping that yesterday’s shadow had not resumed his task.
As she walked, Clara th
ought about the message she had sent to London Films and calculated what she had achieved in the past couple of weeks. She had done what they asked her to do. She had got close to Eva Braun, and even rescued her from suicide. She had learned that Hitler was intemperate, liable to wage war at any moment, but other than that, she had no valuable detail. Now she was about to be drawn into a plot against Hitler staged by Germans themselves. What would the men back in London make of that?
Clausewitzstrasse was a tree-lined street leading off the smartest end of the Ku’damm in Charlottenburg. The expensive, nineteenth-century buildings with their white stucco faces and mahogany-panelled halls housed doctors and lawyers, many of them Jewish, judging by the Meyers and Grossmanns on the brass nameplates by the bell which Clara rang. At the top of the block a curtain twitched at a window.
Max Brandt opened the door, but he was no longer the passionate, seductive figure who had wooed her with oysters and champagne in his Munich hotel room. His eyes were bloodshot as if he hadn’t slept and a bluish tinge of stubble darkened his cheeks. He wore a crumpled, open-necked shirt and braces and smelt of alcohol and cigarette smoke. For a moment he hesitated and she thought he would embrace her, but instead he waved her inside to the drawing room where a man in immaculate field-grey uniform was standing in the centre of the room.
‘Ulrich Welzer. Clara Vine.’
Welzer stiffened with Prussian instinct and clicked his heels. He must have been around forty, with features finely chiselled by generations of Prussian breeding and a wave of immaculate blond hair.
‘Ulrich wanted to meet you briefly.’
Welzer grasped Clara’s hand and fixed her with a penetrating stare. She could sense him taking her in, his eyes sweeping over her cotton blouse and tweed skirt, noting the cut of her hair and the colour of her eyes. He even glanced down at her shoes – black leather T-bar – and then up again to the silver locket at her throat. She had the impression that he was committing every part of her to memory and she returned his gaze unwaveringly.
‘All too briefly, I’m afraid, Fräulein Vine,’ he spoke with precise, upper-class diction. ‘I’m due to drive out to the country for lunch with my mother today, and she will not look kindly on me if I’m late. But believe me when I say, I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.’
‘And I yours.’
‘Ulrich works at the Abwehr, with Colonel Oster,’ said Brandt.
Clara frowned, uncomprehendingly.
‘I’m sorry, Clara. We’ve been up half the night talking. I forgot that you know nothing of this. I’ll explain.’
‘And perhaps we can make a better acquaintance when this enterprise is over,’ said Welzer gallantly. ‘I have seen many of your films, Fräulein Vine. In happier times. I would far prefer to discuss movies than army manoeuvres.’
With a nod at Brandt, he crossed to the door and was gone.
‘Did I interrupt something?’
‘He just wanted to get a good look at you. So he’ll recognize you when he sees you again.’
He turned on the wireless – an act which had become automatic for any Berliner planning a private conversation. It was one of the ‘People’s’ sets, the Volksempfänger, which were universally dubbed Goebbels’ Snout. A blast of dance music drifted out.
‘In England they have a record label called His Master’s Voice. I suppose the Goebbels’ Snout must be Our Master’s Voice.’
The orchestra was playing a sweet, lyrical ballad called Adolf Hitler’s Lieblingsblume which was wildly popular just then. Adolf Hitler’s favourite flower. It had the tendency, once heard, to embed itself in the listener’s mind for hours.
‘High on steep cliffs blooms a flower,
To which the Chancellor turns his thoughts.
Adolf Hitler’s favourite flower
Is the simple Edelweiss.’
Brandt listened for a moment.
‘Do you like this one?’
‘No. It’s dreadful.’
‘You’re wrong, my dear. It’s brilliant. Goebbels thought of it. Adolf Hitler’s favourite flower. Hitler doesn’t give a damn about flowers of course, I know for a fact, but Goebbels thinks of everything. Whatever else you say about him, Goebbels is a tailor. He tailors people to be the way he wants them. Sit down or take a look around while I fix you some coffee.’
Clara walked slowly round the apartment. It was luxuriously equipped, the antique furniture burnished and gleaming, the walls covered in paintings she could tell were valuable; an engraving of a hare, a still life of flowers, and one of a dead partridge. Another wall was devoted to bookcases and the floor was covered in deep Persian rugs. A bronze copy of the Brandenburg Gate’s quadriga stood on the mantelpiece and there was a low Chinese lacquered table piled with more books. In the corner, a cabinet of burled walnut was clustered with bottles – brandy, cognac, vodka – and a cocktail shaker, and above it hung watercolours of a German lake. Behind the radio on a chest of drawers was a photograph of two small boys in sailor suits, accompanied by a young woman in white lace, whose dark curls and shy smile marked her out as Brandt’s mother. Beside it was a glass bottle containing a ship in full rig spreading its sails. Clara bent down to inspect the meticulous modelling of the decks and the steelwork. Tiny passengers could be seen on deck and through the windows of the cabins. Like all German products, it was engineered to a high standard, a perfectly reproduced nineteenth-century sailing ship, correct in every detail.
Brandt returned with two cups of steaming coffee. It was the real thing, Clara could tell from its aroma. He flung himself down onto the sofa and spread his arms across the back.
‘That’s my mother you were looking at. I miss her every day. Do you miss yours?’
‘It’s been more than ten years, but yes, I do.’
‘Were you alike?’
‘Physically very much, and I think in some aspects of character too. But my mother kept her cards close to her chest and that meant I never felt I knew her properly. The reason I came to Berlin originally was because I wanted to feel closer to her and understand the country she’d grown up in but . . .’ Clara scratched a pensive fingernail along the sofa’s arm, ‘though I miss my mother, it sounds wrong, but I feel angry at her too.’
‘For dying?’
‘I’ve never told anyone this, but her death left me feeling abandoned. That’s monstrous of course to my dear mother, but her dying when I was sixteen left me with a sense that you can’t ever rely on anyone. Or that anyone you do love will desert you. And in some ways, that’s become true in my life.’
Brandt was gazing at her fixedly.
‘It will only be true if you allow it to be. You can protect yourself from love, Clara, or you can take a chance and risk being hurt.’ He touched her hand fleetingly. ‘And everything I know about you tells me you’re brave enough to take risks.’
She blinked and turned away, fixing her attention on the ship in the bottle.
‘It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it? My father was in the Navy and he made that ship for me. I loved it as a child – it symbolized the idea that one day I might escape.’
‘You mean travel?’
‘Travel, certainly. But escape too. It’s why I joined the Foreign Service – the idea of other countries was always appealing to me, no matter how much I loved my own. I never wanted to be tied down by national boundaries. But now, I suppose, is no time to be talking about travel . . .’ He leant forward grave-faced, suddenly businesslike. ‘Things are moving fast. There’s no time to lose.’
Clara replaced her coffee untouched, and sat attentively.
‘Remember when we last talked I told you that it was crucial for us that Chamberlain takes a strong stand against Hitler’s threats to the Sudetenland? So that Germans understand their Führer is a warmonger? Well Chamberlain’s back in London and it seems Hitler has no intention of backing down from his plans. Welzer has just informed me that Hitler has secretly moved his troops into attack formation along the Czech border. The r
esistance has decided it’s now or never.’
A chill ran down her spine.
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I need to give you a little more information about our plans. This has been a long time in the preparation. A few weeks ago Ludwig Beck, the Chief of Staff, resigned as a Wehrmacht officer in protest at Hitler’s plans to take Czechoslovakia by force. Since then, an entire provisional government has been drawn up. Under the plan, Beck will be regent in the post-Hitler regime. The plotters will arrest and try Hitler. They’ve compiled a file of Hitler’s crimes and will prosecute him in a people’s court. They’ve lined up a neurologist to testify that he’s insane and they’ve found that he and his parents are descended from a line of highly psychotic people. The plot goes right up to Canaris, the head of the Abwehr.’
‘Canaris? You mean German Military Intelligence is behind a plot to oust Hitler?’ She stared at him, trying to grasp the magnitude of the endeavour.
‘Canaris has all the files on the Nazi leaders, he knows everything, but it’s too risky for him to play a leading part, so he’s promoted a young colonel to be his deputy, Colonel Hans Oster. Oster is a Christian. He hates the SS. He’s obsessed with getting rid of Hitler, so he will mastermind the coup.’
‘How will it happen?’
‘They’ve been planning this for a long time. They have a string of safe houses around the Reich Chancellery, stashed with arms and ammunition. The aim is to occupy the government quarter, take over the government communication centres and neutralize the Gestapo and the SS. The Gestapo has camouflaged its buildings well – they’re mainly quite innocuous outposts but Arthur Nebe, the Gestapo’s head of criminal investigation, has provided a map of all the Gestapo bases in Berlin. Count von Helldorf, the head of the Berlin police, is also involved.’
