by Thynne, Jane
‘Savile Row, though you wouldn’t know it.’
Rosa smiled nervously. She had no idea what Savile Row was, but she could see that the suit, though decrepit, was beautifully cut.
‘I’ve given up sending my clothes to the cleaners. They’re always out of laundry soap, and once they go I never know if I’ll see them again. But then I suppose that’s a common problem in this city. Unexplained disappearances.’
This rambling discourse, which seemed to be directed at himself as much as at her, was interrupted by a spasm of coughing sounding like a motorcycle engine that had failed to start, and once he had finished Rupert reached across for a cigarette, tilted his chair back and regarded Rosa quizzically.
‘So. The lady from the Führerin’s office. I hope your boss hasn’t sent you to check up on me.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Not trying to get me to one of her charity events?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I wish I had something to offer you but . . .’ He tilted the sausage carton towards her. ‘We’re all out of coffee. And I don’t suppose you fancy a brandy?’
She shook her head.
‘It’s a little early, perhaps, but I won’t tell if you don’t.’
‘Really. No. I’m fine.’
Falteringly she began.
‘When you visited our office the other day, you asked me about the cruise ship I was on this summer. The Wilhelm Gustloff. You asked if I enjoyed it, and I told you I didn’t. But I want to explain to someone why it was. You see . . .’ she shuffled closer in her chair, ‘something happened on that ship, and I saw it, but the Captain informed me that if I told a single soul, I would never be permitted on a KdF cruise again. I would probably lose my job too. So I did nothing.’
Rupert’s posture remained languid but his blue eyes were alive with interest. He flicked a pen between his fingers as she talked.
‘Something happened, you say.’
‘Yes. A bad thing. And I think something should be done about it.’
It was the second time in the last couple of weeks that a woman had sat in front of Rupert with that expression of earnest appeal on her face. He no longer knew what to do about the missing Ada Freitag, but there was something endearing about this young woman. She reminded him of a bird, a mistle thrush perhaps, with her beaky nose and freckles and self-effacing air. Absently, he began cleaning the barrel of his pen with the silk lining of his tie.
‘It’s been weeks, and I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve decided I just have to tell someone. Who do you think I should tell?’
‘Why don’t you start with me?’
‘Do you mean that?’
‘Certainly.’
She fumbled in her bag and brought out a leather notebook, with a handwritten label that read Observations.
‘I took some notes. Would you mind if I read them to you first?’
Rupert winced. The world was teetering on a knife edge and here he was contemplating a story about a girl who had fallen from, or been bumped off, a cruise ship belonging to the Nazis’ much loved Strength Through Joy. Was he out of his mind? He could practically see Winstanley’s face crumpling in distaste. That bland sneer. Those prim Methodist eyes behind their pebble glasses, roving over Rupert’s suit, calculating precisely how many drinks he had sunk at lunchtime.
The thought of it only encouraged him.
‘Please. Go ahead.’
Chapter Thirty-two
For a second, when she woke, Clara opened her eyes slightly, letting the soft grey dawn seep into her soul. Then she sat bolt upright. The apartment was awash with pale morning light. From outside came the customary rattle of shops running up their shutters, trams beginning to clatter and footsteps of pedestrians disembarking at Nollendorfplatz. Everywhere people were waking, dressing and preparing for another, ordinary working day, with no hint of the events that were shortly to unfold. Across Berlin, the raiding party would have been issued with their arms and grenades, ammunition would have been loaded into automatic weapons and final preparations for the coup put in place. She imagined the click of guns quietly loading in rooms and apartments around the Reich Chancellery, the shuffling of boots, the final cigarettes and the last nervous coughs among the plotters while Hitler and Eva Braun slept on unawares.
Her head was throbbing from tension and lack of sleep. She went into the bathroom, blinked in the harsh light at the washed-out face staring back at her from the mirror, then swallowed a couple of aspirin. She dressed quickly in a burgundy wool skirt and jacket, a look that felt smart but unostentatious, and made herself up more fully than usual, in case some form of feminine persuasion was needed, brushing a hint of rouge across the apple of her cheeks and applying a quick spritz of Soir de Paris. Neat pearl earrings and her silver locket at her throat. Picking up her coat, she checked the pockets in a reflex action for anything that might incriminate her and then shut the door behind her.
At precisely two minutes to ten she was crossing Wilhelmplatz, past the Kaiserhof Hotel, and facing the Wilhelmstrasse entrance to the Reich Chancellery, a blaze of banners spilt like scarlet ink across its sombre limestone façade. She paused at the U-Bahn entrance next to a kiosk, pretending to consult that morning’s edition of the Berliner Tageblatt, while she battled back the stage fright that threatened to overwhelm her. She was aghast at the magnitude of what she was about to do. Fear that the plot might go wrong, or that she herself might be arrested or killed, moored her to the spot. She repeated her plans over to herself in her head, the way she used to rehearse her lines when she was standing in the wings during a play. Go directly to Eva Braun’s room. Obtain the key. Open the private door beneath the ballroom and exit through the Chancellery garden.
Here, so close to the seat of power, the tension in the air was palpable. In front of the enormous double doors cars were already drawing up at the front steps, disgorging Wehrmacht officers, foreign diplomats and their entourages. Ministers and Party officials were passing through with a reflex Hitler salute to the waiting sentries, preparing for a day of crisis meetings and military discussions. The febrile atmosphere coming from the Chancellery transmitted itself to passing pedestrians, who glanced across apprehensively as they hurried by. Even the breeze seemed nervous, chivvying the leaves along the gutters and putting the news vendor’s kiosk in a flap.
The eighteenth-century Reich Chancellery, once occupied by Bismarck, was in the process of being rebuilt. Hitler hated the Wilhelmstrasse extension, declaring its dingy grey frontage fit ‘only for a soap company’ rather than the headquarters of a greater German Reich. He wanted a stage set of imperial majesty. A building vast enough to intimidate visitors and reduce foreign diplomats to a sense of impotence and awe. A personal office the size of a football pitch to match the dimensions of his ego. Therefore all the buildings on the northern side of Voss Strasse had been demolished to make way for a monumental, modernist block designed by Albert Speer, with a courtyard and ionic columns hung with iron lanterns and a gigantic golden eagle. Six thousand workers had laboured day and night for a year. The enormity of the enterprise was clearly visible, rising from the last vestiges of scaffolding like a great warship, its granite façade the colour of dull steel. Like everything in the Reich, it combined overwhelming ambition with a breathtaking attention to detail. Inside, an immense gallery modelled on Versailles was hung with Gobelin tapestries, beyond which stretched a Great Mosaic Hall, a kind of pagan chapel for the Nazi regime, resembling a glowing cliff of blood-red marble inlaid with glass and gold. Everything about the severe architecture and seemingly endless corridors was designed to intimidate and disorientate.
Clara crossed the street, passed through the heavy bronze doors and crossed the Ehrenhof, the Hall of Honour. The vast courtyard, flanked by stone pillars, led to a gateway, guarded by twin ten-foot bronze statues, representing the Party and the army. Clara’s heels sounded on the stone flags as she made her way to the reception, where a black tunic-ed guard
waited behind a glass-partitioned desk.
‘I’m visiting Fräulein Braun.’
He extended a hand for her documents, then another guard leaned over. Both wore black uniforms set off by white belts and scarlet Party armbands. They must be, she recalled, the SS special guard. What had Brandt said? They look like ordinary guards but they are trained to recognize people of interest. She fixed her attention on the man in front of her, focusing on the gleam of his head through the shaved prickles of his scalp.
‘One moment, Fräulein.’
He reached over and picked up a telephone, closing the glass partition so that she could not hear the conversation. Clara’s pulse sounded so loudly in her ears she could swear it was audible. It was freezing inside the Chancellery, several degrees colder than outside, and even with a coat and woollen jacket on, she was shivering. She hoped it was not noticeable.
The guard replaced the receiver and continued to scrutinize her cards with a furrowed brow. He gave her a penetrating look.
‘What is your relationship with Fräulein Braun?’
‘I’m a friend.’
‘Is this your first visit?’
‘Here, yes.’ She tried a broad smile, but the cold and the shivering made it harder.
‘And what is the nature of the visit?’
A light-hearted shrug.
‘What do most women do when they get together?’
The guard didn’t know, or if he did, he wasn’t letting on, so she added, ‘We chat! We always have so much to talk about. And she likes to ask me about my films.’ Was that reckless? Did it identify her as a member of the cultural élite, perhaps one of those dangerous free thinkers who might pose a danger to the Führer’s innocent girlfriend? There was a glimmer of suspicion in the officer’s eyes and he seemed poised to question her further, but at that moment a detachment of officers and politicians arrived up the steps, demanding his attention, and he gave Clara a nod.
‘This officer will escort you.’
The second guard detached himself and strode ahead of her, leading the way across the endless polished marble floor.
It would be hard to find a greater contrast to the rustic simplicity of the Berghof than the severe classicism of the new Reich Chancellery. It was like being in a great, marble-lined cathedral to some austere god. The cavernous recesses of the hall bounced the echo of their footsteps back at them like rifle shots. They passed bronzes of athletes rippling with muscles and vases two foot high filled with chrysanthemums. Grand pianos and candelabras groaning with crystal. Everything was finished in minute detail, from the mosaic-inlaid floors, the gilded pillars, and the lintels inset with sculpture, to the wrought-iron mediaeval sconces. At the far side of the hall Clara glimpsed a lavish ballroom abutted by a winter garden, a fixture in every grand German edifice, with tropical leaves crowding the glass. She walked swiftly, hoping to offset her shivering, conscious at every second that a single, routine security inspection might mean the end of her.
Yet nothing, that day, was quite routine. Despite its impersonal size, there was no mistaking the tension that filled the chilly recesses of the Chancellery. The front hall was as crowded as the Anhalter Bahnhof at rush hour. Knots of diplomats and ministers milled in the corridors, and army officers with braided uniforms bustled swiftly past as Clara followed the guard up a wide staircase to the first floor. As they crossed the gleaming halls she craned her head curiously to see into the rooms they passed and glimpsed a dining room being set with cutlery and white napkins, and through another door an antechamber decked with crimson hangings leading to a vast entrance guarded by an SS adjutant standing on a mat to protect the marble floor from his boots and rifle butt.
At the end of the corridor a sleek group of officers stood chatting and as she approached one of them peeled away and Clara saw with a jolt that it was Ulrich Welzer. Their eyes locked for a moment and she discerned in his face an animal fear, that the plot would be discovered, and that before the day had passed they would find themselves chained in the bowels of Prinz Albrecht Strasse, before an ignominious end at the guillotine at Plötzensee Prison. Another second and he was gone.
They marched up another flight of stairs and turned right into the upper floor of the Old Chancellery. In this wing, Clara knew from the floor plan, was the Führer’s private domain, where his bedroom, private study and bathroom, as well as Eva Braun’s own suite, were located. Here the corridors were carpeted and the dark green wallpaper gave off the faded grandeur of an expensive hotel long past its prime. The walls were hung with dull, gold-framed still lives of fruit, half-peeled oranges or blown roses, and landscapes of valleys and village churches, inoffensive reminders of a Germanic past.
At the end of the corridor, the guard stopped sharply at a heavy wooden door and rapped.
‘A visitor, Fräulein Braun.’
Eva Braun loved to dress in bold colours, and the patterned tea dress in vivid yellow and blue she wore that morning was no exception, but it was the only lively thing about her. Her face, beneath freshly bleached hair, was pale and her eyes puffy, as though she had been recently crying. She looked hardly any better than the last time Clara had seen her, slumped in her Munich sitting room with half a bottle of Vanodorm sleeping tablets inside her.
The guard clicked his heels. Eva nodded listlessly and closed the door behind Clara.
‘Well. This is a surprise.’
Clara smiled warmly and took her hands. ‘I’m sorry, Eva. I should probably have telephoned first. But I wanted to see how you were . . . after the other day.’
‘Then I suppose I should thank you.’
Eva led the way into her quarters.
‘See what I mean about this place?’
It was easy to see how this room might have suited the former president of Germany, the octogenarian Hindenburg, who had occupied it until five years ago. Everything in the décor, from the heavy, gilded oil paintings and dull curtains to the massive furniture, was eighty years out of date. It was an old man’s domain, painted in heavy cream, and dominated by a giant portrait of the man himself, with baggy poached-egg eyes, handlebar moustache and chest groaning with medals. Eva’s make-up and hairbrushes, scattered untidily across the Biedermeier dressing table, looked like a doll’s things, and her clothes were a colourful jumble inside Hindenburg’s vast wardrobe. Even her perfume smelt sweetly incongruous in that gloomy air. The bed, its clammy sheets topped with a canopy of tassled emerald damask, looked about as inviting as a funeral bier. The only thing not out of the nineteenth century was the light dance music issuing from the wireless.
Eva went over to the dresser, clicked off the wireless and took up a packet of cigarettes, pausing to light one and offering it to Clara.
She pulled a wry face. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound rude. Actually I’m terribly glad to have a visitor. You’ve no idea how awful it’s been since we arrived.’
She curled up in an armchair, tucked her feet beneath her, and motioned Clara to sit in the chair beside her.
‘I hate it here. He wouldn’t let me bring my friend Herta, so I’m all alone. It’s bad enough being in this horrible room and never seeing Wolf, but I can’t even go out when I please. He says it’s a difficult time and I need to be invisible. Imagine that – I can’t even walk out of the door.’ She pouted mutinously. ‘He got his aide to tell me I had to stay in my room all day today. Cooped up all day! Because there was important political business going on. Anyone would think I was a schoolgirl sent to her bedroom. I feel like Rapunzel in the tower. I wouldn’t be surprised if I died here. I tell you, I used to go to boarding school – it was a horrible Catholic place outside Munich and I loathed it – but this is far worse.’
‘Perhaps you should have stayed in Munich.’
‘He insisted I came. I don’t know why. Because when I get here it’s always the same story. I sit here waiting while my whole life slips by.’ She ran her fingers through her hair defiantly.
‘I’ve a good mind to march
downstairs and start playing the piano in front of the lot of them. That would show them.’
Clara knew she would do no such thing. The fires of rebellion burned weakly in Eva, and any act of mutiny would most probably be visited on herself. No doubt that was why Hitler had brought her here – to keep an eye on her. Just in case she was tempted to have another episode with the sleeping pills.
‘I worried about you, Eva. After the other day.’
‘Thank you for that. I was silly. I shouldn’t have. It was just that I felt so wretched.’
Cautiously, Clara probed further. ‘You said you’d done something terrible. That no one would forgive you?’
Eva picked at the hem of her skirt and did not reply.
‘I wonder,’ said Clara. ‘I mean, I think I’ve guessed what the problem is.’
Eva looked up, startled. ‘You guessed?’
‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’
For a second a jolt of horror crossed Eva Braun’s features, then she laughed, a wild, hysterical laugh, which eventually caught in her throat and made her choke.
‘I’m sorry . . .’ She wiped her eyes as she recovered herself. ‘You don’t know how funny that is. Except it’s not funny at all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s something you don’t know about me.’ She took a deep drag of her cigarette, exhaled sideways and fixed Clara intently, calculating if she could be trusted.
‘I have Mayer-Rokitansky syndrome. It means I have no womb. I was born without one. So I couldn’t get pregnant if I tried.’ Her voice wobbled. ‘I can never have children.’
‘Oh Eva, I’m so sorry.’
She sniffed and blinked away the glitter in her eyes.
‘I’ve hardly told anyone. I take . . . you know . . . precautions like any other woman and I swore my mother to secrecy. But I love children. I adore playing with all the kids of the top men when we’re up at the Berghof, which makes it so much worse.’
‘Does the Führer mind?’
‘He doesn’t know.’
