by Jon Cleary
He choked into his beer. “The what? Darl—” His mother and father had always called each other that, a diminution of darling; it was a measure of his feeling for Cathleen that he should call her the same. Darling, on his laconic tongue, would have been too effusive. “Darl, what makes you think the German Secret Service would have anything to do with me?”
She said nothing, knowing the thought had been ludicrous. She flopped into a chair; the leather gasped beneath her like a flatulent old dog. She felt more depressed than at any time since arriving in Germany; and more afraid. She had got nowhere in her enquiries after her mother; inexperienced in such things, she had been afraid of being too open and had erred by being too cautious. But time was running out and she had become desperate.
“What’s your interest in them?” said Carmody; then looked at her sharply, suddenly apprehensive, “Or are they interested in you?”
“I don’t know.” All at once she decided to take him into her confidence; her secret was eating away at her, weakening her. “I got a note today at the studio, an anonymous one. It just asked what I had to hide from the Abwehr.”
“Do you have anything to hide?”
She took her time, gazing at him as if looking at him carefully for the first time. She had known him two months and up till now she had thought of him as no more than a pleasant companion, someone different from all the other men she had known. His looks were neither different nor outstanding; there was an ordinariness about him that she had found comforting. He was of medium height, had a solid build and broad shoulders; his features were even, though his jaw was a little long; his eyes were bright blue, but were already wrapped in a faint web of sun wrinkles. He had dark curly hair and beard shadow that showed dark late in the day. He had a relaxed air about him, but she had already learned that it was as imposed as much as natural: he did not believe there was anything to be gained by spontaneous excitement. She wondered if it was an Australian habit, a defence mechanism against the corruption of Europe. Whatever he was, a little gauche, a little suspicious of the world, a little afraid of women, he was not naïve nor untrustworthy. Most of all, if he was not the one, there was no one else to confide in.
“I’m here looking for my mother. She is Jewish, born right here in Berlin.”
He put down his glass. He did not like German beer compared to the brew back home; and he had not yet become a wine-lover. He showed no surprise at what she had told him; but that was a newspaperman’s trick he had learned. He sat very still and for a moment she thought she had done the wrong thing: he did not want to be burdened with her worries.
Then he said quietly, “If it’ll help you to get it off your chest, tell me about it. I’m supposed to be a good listener.”
He was, she realized only now. He had listened to her gossip and her complaints about the studio without ever once looking bored, just sitting there quietly smiling and nodding as she had become excited about a particular item. He was not smiling now, but was serious and sympathetic.
“My real name is Miriam Hoolahan—I was named after my mother. My father was Irish—he was born in Galway, but was brought up in the States. He was an engineer and he came to Germany before the Great War to work in the shipyards at Kiel—he was on some sort of training course. He met my mother on a visit here to Berlin—her father was manager of a bank. They fell in love and were married a month after they met—my mother’s parents were very much against it, but Mother was—is—a very strong-willed lady. She and Pop went back to the States and I was born there, in New York City.”
“Where’s your father now?”
“He’s dead. Pop went into business for himself after the war, but he lost everything in the Depression. He got drunk, he always could hit the bottle, and fell in the East River and was drowned. We never knew if it was suicide—” She stopped, drew a deep breath. She had loved Denis Hoolahan and even now, eight years after his death, she still missed him.
“My dad’s Irish,” said Carmody.
“There’s a melancholy streak in them when they’re drunk.”
“I don’t think my dad would ever commit suicide. If he did, he wouldn’t choose any of the usual ways. He’d probably pick on a heavyweight Pom and hope to be pulped to death. He’s only a little bloke and he hates England and the English.”
She smiled at the picture of his father; but she was in little mood for humour. “After Pop died, Mother went to work in Gimbels—that’s a department store,” she explained as he looked blank; even to her, New York now seemed a foreign city. She had lived too long in a make-believe world, first Hollywood and now Neubabelsberg. “She wanted me to be a lawyer or a doctor—all Jewish mothers want their sons to be either of those, but Mother didn’t have a son, so she nominated me. But she didn’t complain—well, not much—when I said I wanted to go into the theatre. I started as a chorus girl—I’ve got good legs and I could dance a bit—” She drew up her skirt, showed him her legs. “They were what got me to Hollywood, them and my red hair. I started out in a show called George White’s Scandals, but I’d always had my eye on going to Hollywood. I’d changed my name—somehow Hoolahan didn’t look right to be up in lights. I couldn’t see people rushing to look at Clark Gable making love to Miriam Hoolahan. It was Mother who picked out my name. Cathleen O’Dea. Be Irish, she said, don’t be half-and-half. And don’t be Jewish. You want to go to Hollywood, you think they’re looking for Jewish heroines out there?” She unconsciously imitated her mother’s accent, was only aware of it when she saw him smile. She returned his smile. “Mother never lost her accent. Hollywood—” She mimicked the accent again. “They want Jewish producers, Jewish directors, maybe even Jewish cameramen. But Jewish heroines? No, be Irish. So Irish I’ve been. Then an M-G-M talent scout spotted me and I went out to the Coast at a hundred and fifty bucks a week, a year’s contract with an option. I thought I was made.”
“When was that?”
“Six years ago, 1933.”
Six years ago he had been working for four pounds, sixteen bucks, a week on the Coonabarabran Chronicle and thought he had had it made.
She shook her head at her dreams. “I never really made it. There were dozens like me, contract players. Ruth Hussey, Mona Barrie, Rose Hobart—always in work but never in lights. My salary went up, but my name never did. Still, Mother and I had a good life out on the Coast. Then she started to worry about her mother here in Germany, when the Nazis started persecuting the Jews. She came back here in 1936 and tried to persuade Grandma to come to live with us in the States—Grandpa had died in 1932, before the Nazis came to power. But Grandma wouldn’t move—she really believed the true Germans wouldn’t tolerate the Nazis for long, that they would boot them out.” She shook her head at the naïveté of an old woman; but statesmen had believed the same. “Mother kept writing to her, but Grandma wouldn’t budge. Then early this year Mother came back again—Grandma was no longer answering our letters. Mother wrote to me to say that Grandma had disappeared—she’d been taken away one night and no one saw her again. Then I heard no more from Mother—I just kept getting my letters back marked Address Unknown.”
“Were you writing to her under your stage name? Maybe that’s how the Abwehr got on to you?”
“Mother and I had worked out all that before she went. She addressed the letters to her own maiden name, Miriam Razman, and sent them to a box number in Santa Monica, one that belonged to a friend of hers. No, they couldn’t have traced me that way.”
“What about your mother—have you traced her?”
She gestured dumbly, suddenly wanting to weep.
He reached across and took her hand. “Have a good cry if you want to. No? Okay, where was she when you last heard of her?”
It took her a moment to recover, but she had held back the tears. She could be as emotional as any, but she had shed too many tears in the past months, she was almost dried out. “She stayed at a hotel in Wilmersdorf, the Ernst. I rang there—I didn’t dare go there—and they said
she had checked out one morning, paid her bill, took her luggage and just went. That was the last week in January.”
“Where did your grandmother live?”
“In Wilmersdorf, not far from the Ernst. Kreugerstrasse, number 33—she had an apartment there, a small one.”
He was still holding her hand, sitting awkwardly as he leaned forward; she leaned towards him, kissed him on the lips and pushed him back into his chair. All at once she was glad she had confided in him, knew he could be trusted and felt a little safer. He might not be able to help at all, but now she did not feel so alone in her search for her mother.
“What about the American embassy?” he said. “Did you go there?”
“They were no help. I told them I was looking for my aunt, Mrs. Mady Hoolahan—I didn’t say she was my mother and I didn’t say she was Jewish—”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Once I arrived here, I couldn’t bring myself to trust anyone, not even the Americans at the embassy—it was the atmosphere in Berlin, I guess. I told them my aunt was born here, that she wasn’t naturalized, and then they seemed to lose interest. They made some routine enquiries or so they said, but they could have been looking for a lost dog or a suitcase. It was almost as if they didn’t want to upset the Germans.”
“Some embassies are like that.”
“I’ve been here four months and I’ve learned nothing. I was too scared to go to the police—I just kept hoping I’d hear something by accident. I had the name of a man here—I got it from friends of Mother’s in California, the same people who had the box number—this man, Wenck, helped Jews get out of Germany. I went to see him the second day I was here, but the neighbours said he’d gone away and left no word where he’d gone. Later I found out the Gestapo had taken him away, so I never went back.”
“There are still some Jews here in Berlin. I don’t know how many or where they are, but Joe Begley tells me they’re here.”
“So I believe, but if they know I’m looking for Mother, nobody has got in touch with me. Maybe they’re too afraid for themselves.”
“You can’t blame them—”
“I’m not!” Then she fell out of her chair at his feet, buried her face against his knees. “I’m sorry, Sean—I didn’t mean to snap like that—”
He stroked the beautiful dark red hair. “Darl, I told you I’m a good listener—that includes listening to the snarly bits.” He pulled her head back gently, lifted her face and kissed the wet cheeks; it was the first time he had ever seen her weep and it touched him deeply. A slow smile spread across his face. “I can’t believe it. I’m in love with a film star.”
She had been afraid of this, afraid for him because she had not wanted to hurt him; but now she did not mind at all. There is a comfort to being loved so long as the lover is not a nuisance. He had not been that so far and she didn’t think he would be one from now on. She felt suddenly comfortable with him, something she had never felt with any of her previous men, even those she had been in love with.
“Don’t rush me, Sean. I like you—a lot—but I don’t think I’m in the right frame of mind for coping with love—”
He was not certain that he could cope with it himself. He had deliberately avoided it when he had been working in Australia, always with his eye on more distant horizons than those around Coonabarabran. In America and here in Europe his life had been too full and peripatetic for any romances to blossom; there had been a girl in Vienna with whom he had been on the verge of falling in love, but he had moved on before the fatal step. Since coming here to Berlin he had been more settled; but it had been no more than a long pause, the resignation of a man who knew that in spite of all that had gone before, the biggest storm of all was yet to break. Being in love might be a weakness and not a strength in facing what had to come. Especially now he had learned she could be in danger.
“Get changed and we’ll go over to the Adlon for dinner.” A good meal sometimes settles the mind as well as the stomach.
“Don’t throw your money around. You won’t sleep.” She, too, knew his fear of extravagance. But she smiled, kissed him, lingeringly this time (gratitude or a promise? She wasn’t sure herself) and went into the bedroom to change.
When they went downstairs the caretaker held out a box of red roses. “These just came, Fräulein O’Dea, special messenger.” He was a little man with a little mind and a big eye, an ideal gossip. “He was in a big Horch, a government car.”
Cathleen took the envelope from the box, but didn’t open it. “Take them up to my apartment, Herr Stumpf.”
In the taxi riding across town she said, “He knows everyone’s business in the building. He’d love to know who sent those roses.”
“So would I.” But he had already guessed and was uneasy.
She opened the envelope, took out the plain card. “I am sure your performance will equal your beauty,” she read. “It’s signed J.G.”
“That’s pretty gushing, isn’t it?” But then he had never written a note or a card to a girl.
“No worse than some of the lines I’ve been saying in Lola. Or maybe Europeans are more poetic than you sheep-shearers from Down Under.”
It was a pity Banjo Paterson or Henry Lawson had never written love lyrics: The Man from Snowy River would never have got a girl into bed.
She was silent for the rest of the ride to the Adlon. When they got out of the taxi she crossed the pavement at once into the foyer of the hotel while he paid the taxi driver. Then he stood for a moment looking down the Unter den Linden. On the opposite side of the street men were working on the new IG Farben building, but even the construction work somehow did not jar in the general impression. The street fascinated him, it had a glamour to it that no other street had for him, not even Fifth Avenue in New York or the Champs Élysées. The Nazis, for reasons of their own, had had some of the trees removed, but enough still remained to give the street its charm and character. Not all the trees were limes: there were maples, plane and chestnut trees as well; but they were all green balloons of summer, now catching the last light of day coming from behind the Brandenburg Gate. People promenaded up and down the broad path in the middle of the street, walking with the slow, almost measured tread of those who knew that, with time running out, an hour or two like this was to be retained and taken out of the memory as something to be treasured. And over it all, the street, the avenue of trees and the strolling, sober people was the marvellous Berlin light. There were lights in some of the windows and they only seemed to heighten the luminance in the sky. There was darkness on the underside of the trees, but the tops were touched with a green brilliance; it seemed to Carmody that he could almost count every leaf on the topmost branches. The light was lime-yellow, theatrical, and though he stood there for only a moment it seemed to him that it suddenly began to fade. More lights came on in the windows and as he turned into the Adlon he walked out of day into evening.
“You always do that,” said Cathleen, who realized only now that she had been observing him better than she knew. “Stand and look up at the sky.”
“It’s an old habit from back home. It usually tells you what tomorrow is going to be like.” But of course governments never took any notice of tomorrow unless it was an election day.
The dining room was full, but the hotel always kept a table or two marked with a Reserved sign to accommodate those whom it felt it could not refuse. Cathleen, being a film star, albeit a foreign one, was worthy of a table.
As they sat down she said, “In a way we owe this table to Dr. Goebbels.”
“How’s that?”
“Emil Jannings told me that up till the Nazis came to power, movie people were ignored—we were on a par with jugglers and vaudeville comics. When Jannings, and he was their biggest star, went to London or Paris, the embassies there would never think of inviting him to a reception. Goebbels changed all that. We’re respectable now.”
“Bully for Goebbels.”
But he said it und
er his breath because a waiter, armoured in his stiff collar and his long formal coat, had come to take their order. With his quick eye Carmody had already noted that the dining room seemed unusually full this evening of top government officials. At a nearby table was Dr. Mehlhorn, who administered the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS Security Service, under Reinhard Heydrich; with him were two young men, one of them with a broken nose which did nothing to soften the occasional arrogant looks he seemed to hurl around the room. The young man looked at Carmody then said something to Mehlhorn, who glanced at Carmody, tightened his lips, then replied to his broken-nosed junior. Carmody decided he wanted no messages carried from this table to that of the SD. All he wanted the waiter to take was their order.
When the waiter had gone away Cathleen said, “I don’t have a call till eleven tomorrow.” She looked around the glittering room, nodded to a few people who gave small stiff bows in reply, then she looked back at Carmody and said conversationally, “I think I may encourage Dr. Goebbels.”
He knew at once what she meant; she was not talking about being made respectable by the Minister in charge of film players. “You want your head read if you do. How can you ask him about your—?”
“I’ll have to think of a way. But if war breaks out, as all you newspapermen seem to think it will, I could be told to pack up and get out of Germany. And I might never find out what has happened to Mother.”
He knew time was running out for her; but he did not want her risking her neck by putting it in Goebbels’ embrace. Besides, the thought made him uncomfortably jealous.
“Let me see what I can do, first. I can afford to take more risks than you.”
“Why should you?” She felt he should because he loved her; but the duty troubled her. Then she put her hand across the table on to his. She had had only actors and directors as lovers and she had never expected anything of them. “Sean, I think it would be best if you stayed out of this.”
