The City of Fading Light

by Jon Cleary

  But guilt about Melissa was not von Albern’s main concern right now; she was asleep, so he put his conscience to sleep beside her. He was more concerned for his father, the man he loved more than any in the world and more than he did Melissa. The general had come to Berlin, something he had sworn to his son and others that he would never do again, and he had not told Helmut he was here. The latter had found out by accident, from an uncle who had let slip that Kurt von Albern had come to Berlin from the family estate outside Hamburg. It was not like his father to try to avoid him; they were too close for that sort of manoeuvre. Something was wrong and Helmut was worried.

  He eased his arm out from beneath Melissa’s head and got out of bed without waking her. She was so violent in their love-making that she wore herself out; she always slept like the dead for an hour or so afterwards, though there was a sly smile on her face that no corpse would ever wear, except perhaps one that had died while making love.

  He slipped on a robe and went out to the living room, closing the bedroom door behind him. He switched on a desk lamp; even its limited illumination was enough to show the untidiness of the room. Though he came of a family with a long military tradition, he had done no more than the compulsory training service and it had done nothing to teach him how to take care of himself domestically. At home there had always been more than enough servants to keep his rooms neat and tidy; he had never had to worry about getting meals or seeing they were served at the right time. The flat was not squalid, but it was a description that might have come to the mind of his father had he ever visited the flat. This week’s dirty clothing and last week’s laundry, still un-ironed, were at opposite ends of a couch; the dishes from what looked like a week’s meals were on a table in the centre of the room; books, newspapers and set sketches littered the floor and occupied all but one of the four chairs. But he never saw any of it: the upper class have a talent for the blind eye. It has helped them survive in worse surroundings than a slum.

  He picked up the phone, dialled a number. He waited, realizing only as he heard its insistent ringing that the hour might be too late; elderly men might retire early. Then a grumpy voice said, “Count von Albern’s residence.”

  “Vogel? This is Helmut. May I speak to my uncle?”

  The old butler’s tone softened: Helmut had always been one of his favourites. “He is in bed, sir. Perhaps in the morning—?”

  “Now, Vogel. It is important.”

  It was a minute or two before Wulf von Albern came on the phone. He sounded even grumpier than his butler: “Yes, what is it?”

  Helmut apologized for disturbing his uncle, then said, “I want to get in touch with Father.”

  There was a moment’s silence at the other end of the line. Then: “It is not possible. I don’t know where he is.”

  “Uncle—” Helmut was a favourite nephew, but he could not tell his uncle outright that he was lying.

  Again there was the silence. Helmut could see his uncle struggling with his loyalties. Wulf and Kurt were the only children of Helmut’s grandparents; Wulf was the elder by ten years and had always been his brother’s protector. Helmut knew he had no sympathy for the Nazis, but he had retired from public life five years ago on the death of his wife and disliked anything that disrupted his routine as a retired gentleman. He would go to the horse races at the Hoppegarten, to tea at the Adlon and to the opera or concerts. Occasionally he entertained women friends, but Helmut had no idea whether he had affairs with them. His money, like the family’s, came from the land and from shipping, but he left the management of it, like a good aristocrat, to managers he trusted. He involved himself in nothing but his own quiet enjoyment of what remained of his life.

  “Helmut, dear boy—” He had gone to Oxford as a young man and still had some English speech mannerisms. “It would be better if you left your father alone for the time being—”

  “Uncle, the fact that you say that only convinces me I should know why he is in Berlin. Now please tell me where he is.”

  Again the silence, then a heavy sigh: “All right, but explain to him that I tried to dissuade you. Try—” He gave a number.

  Helmut thanked him and hung up. He looked at his wrist, then remembered his watch was on his bedside table; making love with one’s watch on was too much like a sporting event. There was a clock somewhere in this room, but it was lost amongst the riotous disorder. As if on cue the bedroom door opened and Melissa, wearing Helmut’s discarded shirt, appeared.

  “Telephoning? At this hour?”

  “What time is it?”

  She looked at her watch. Women, Helmut had noted, rarely took off their watches in bed; but then, he had also noted, they usually closed their eyes when making love. Except, of course, the professionals and they needed to keep an eye on the clock. “It’s 11.30.”

  Automatically she began to clean up the room. He was amused by her passion for being neat and tidy; on Judgement Day she would be tidying up, leaving her world as she had found it. He did not bear to think of her as a wife: neatness and tidiness should be taken only in small doses. He put down the phone: he would call his father first thing in the morning before he left for the studio. Kurt von Albern, still a good soldier, was an early riser.

  “Sweetheart—are you mixed up with the Nazis?” She was picking up last week’s laundry, sorting it out so that Helmut’s cleaning woman could take it away for ironing.

  He looked at her in astonishment. “Mixed up—what do you mean?”

  “You’ve had something on your mind all evening.” She was rolling his socks into balls; playfully she tossed one at him and he caught it gingerly, as if it were a grenade. “You can tell me, if you want someone to confide in. It often helps. So they tell me,” she added less than confidently. She had been confiding in people all her life and where had it got her?

  “I thought you weren’t interested in politics?”

  “I’m not.” They always spoke in English because her German was virtually non-existent; her voice was being dubbed in the German version of the film. “But I’m interested in you. I worry for you.”

  He was touched. He loved her, but he wished sometimes he could fall in love with her; he would hate to hurt her when the time came for them to part. “Darling, I’m like you—I’m outside politics—”

  “No, you’re not. Not like me. I’m stupid about politics, but you aren’t. I’ve watched you—I saw how you looked today when Dr. Goebbels was smoodging up to Cathleen.”

  Love was not always blind: sometimes it kept too close an eye on you. “Smoodging up? Was that what the Reichsminister was doing?”

  “He’s a dirty little man, you know that. He’d be smoodging up to me if I was the star instead of Cathleen. You hate him, don’t you?”

  “If I hated him, why do you think I’d be mixed up with the Nazis then?”

  She began to fold a sheet, pondered a moment. “I don’t know, I suppose that’s contradictory, isn’t it?” She knew nothing of the rivalries and jealousies amongst the Nazis. Then she added stubbornly, belting a crease into the sheet, “But something is worrying you.”

  He took the sheet from her, put his hands under his shirt, felt the smoothness of her, still warm from the bed. “I’m worried about whether war will come, that’s all.”

  “And you get out of bed with me at this hour to talk with someone about that?” She was not entirely without shrewdness; or, he wondered, was it a woman’s vanity?

  “The war will be bigger than both of us.” He wanted to laugh at his reply: it sounded like a bad line of dialogue from a Hollywood film. He was surprised and relieved when she, too, laughed.

  “Let’s go back to bed,” she said, slipped off his shirt, added it neatly to the pile of this week’s wash and led him back into the bedroom.

  During the night he heard air raid sirens in his sleep. He woke with a start, sweating, certain that he had not been dreaming; but there was no sound in the night other than Melissa’s steady breathing beside him and, s
omewhere over to the south, the thin scream of a train whistle. He was shocked that he should have been so afraid, even if in sleep: it smacked of cowardice. He lay on his back and prayed for peace; though peace, officially, was still the atmosphere in Europe.

  He rose early and, while Melissa prepared coffee and toast, he phoned his father at the number he had been given. A man’s voice answered that it was the Hotel London: he had never heard of it, but it was certainly not the Adlon, where his father had always stayed in the past.

  “General von Albern.”

  When his father came on the line he knew he had not woken him: the voice was crisp, wide awake. “Helmut! At this hour?”

  “I have to leave for the studio in a few minutes—”

  “How did you find me?” It seemed that his father sounded more worried than irritated.

  “Uncle Wulf—I pestered him till he told me where you were. Father, why are you here in Berlin?” Melissa was out in the small kitchen; he lowered his voice. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

  “Helmut—” The voice lost its crispness, sounded unnaturally hesitant. “Helmut, please don’t ask such questions—”

  “Does Uncle know why you’re here?”

  “No. You are not to bother him again.” It was an order; the voice was crisp again.

  “When are you going back to The Pines?” That was the family estate outside Hamburg, not its official name but the one by which all the family referred to it. He often thought of it with nostalgia, but it belonged to another age, his boyhood.

  “I don’t know. Please, Helmut, no more questions—”

  “Father, I must see you—”

  The General sighed, then said reluctantly, “Helmut, Romy is here with me—”

  “Oh.” He was embarrassed, but wondered why; he was a grown man, so why should he feel awkward about his father’s affair with a married woman? “I’m sorry, Father . . . Call me when you are going back to The Pines.”

  “Of course. And Helmut—don’t worry.”

  But he was already worrying as he hung up the phone. Why would his father and Romy von Sonntag have their rendezvous in Berlin? Why not some city or town where they were not known? He was infected with suspicion, he could no longer accept things at their face value, not even a reassurance from his father. Germany, since the last war, had become a country of conspiracies and now he was suspecting his father (and Romy?) of being a conspirator of some sort. With war imminent, had his father decided he must somehow get back on to the General Staff?

  Melissa came to the kitchen door, wiping her hands. He knew she would have cleaned up the kitchen before she prepared breakfast. “How’s your father?”

  So she had heard some of the conversation. She had never met his father and he had no plans to introduce her. “He is well. We’d better hurry—my call is for eight o’clock . . .”

  Going out to Neubabelsberg in his small Opel, they were passed by a convoy of seven Mercedes. The cars went by with klaxons screaming and ahead of them the traffic peeled away as if a giant wind were splitting it. Sitting in the rear seat of the middle car of the convoy, clearly visible with the hood down but with the bullet-proof windows up, was the Fuehrer. He was staring straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to the aides in his car and of the pedestrians jumping out of the way of the convoy, some of them still managing to fling up their arms in a mixture of balancing act and Sieg Heil!

  “Was that Hitler?” Melissa said.

  He nodded. He had seen this same convoy before, knew, from what his father had told him, the make-up of it. The twenty SD men who travelled in it, each carrying two 9 mm pistols; the submachine-guns and the light machine-gun in the support cars; the 4500 rounds of ammunition—“Enough to start a small war,” as his father had said. And the Fuehrer, in his armour-plated Mercedes 770K, sitting there stiff-necked under his special officer’s cap with its reinforced steel band that weighed 1½ kilos. All that for a beloved leader.

  “Where’s he going?” said Melissa.

  “To Hell, I hope.”

  3

  I

  THINGS WERE not going well. So far there had been seven takes on this particular scene; Cathleen and her co-star, Willy Heffer, were like strangers who had just met that morning. This was their last scene together in the script and Lola and Ludwig might have been Mary Magdalene and one of the Pharisees. Right from the start of the film Cathleen had felt there was little chemistry between her and Heffer; like Braun, the director, he bowed his knee to the Party, but on top of that he was totally mis-cast as Ludwig. Like Cathleen, however, he was a professional and they had managed to get through their scenes smoothly and on schedule. This morning they were not doing even that.

  “Cut!” Braun sat back in his canvas chair, fanned himself with a mauve handkerchief. He was never invited to parties by Goebbels, who could not stand homosexuals, but he was always a welcome guest of Goering. One could not hope to be everyone’s favourite and life, up till now, had been fun. But he was afraid of the possibility of war, knew when it came all the fun would be over, and his pessimism had spread to his handling of this film. He no longer had control of the way it should go. “Let’s all take a break, darlings. We must hope inspiration strikes us while we’re having coffee.”

  “Not amongst the dregs, I hope,” said Cathleen, and Braun gave her a weak smile.

  She sat down in the shade of a large umbrella and looked at Helmut von Albern, who dropped into a chair beside her. He was a handsome man, reminding her of a less stern Conrad Veidt (all her comparisons of men were with actors but so far she had found no comparison for Sean. He was not to be compared with Errol Flynn). She had looked at him with interest their first day on the set, when they had had lighting tests, but he had shown no interest in her other than professionally. He was unfailingly polite, in contrast to some cameramen she had known in Hollywood, but there was a certain arrogance to him that occasionally unsettled her. She had not been surprised to learn that he came of a family that could trace its lineage back five hundred years. There was a difference between the arrogance of a true aristocrat and that of the Hollywood aristocracy which went back only one generation.

  “What’s the matter with us this morning? Does it look as bad through the camera as I feel it is?”

  “It’s pretty bad.”

  “It’s been pretty bad all along. Why did you come on this picture?”

  She knew his record. She had not been a star, at least not till this picture and even now she felt no sense of stardom, but she had known the thoroughness of some stars and she had followed the pattern. She had wanted to know all about the chief technicians on the picture and she had been impressed by those who had been engaged. Helmut von Albern had started work as a clapper boy on one of Luis Trenker’s famed “mountain” films; he had worked his way up the ladder, through focusing to operating the camera and finally to being the lighting cameraman or director of photography. He had worked for Pabst, Trenker, Hartl and Sierck and she wondered why he had agreed to work for such a hack as Braun.

  “I had no choice.”

  She knew what he meant. There had been the same sort of authoritarian discipline at M-G-M.

  They were some distance from any of the other actors or crew and she dropped her voice. “Helmut, are there any spies in this unit?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Spies?”

  “You know what I mean. All pictures have them, jerks who spy for the front office.”

  “Has someone been spying on you?”

  “I think so.” But she dared not mention the warning about the Abwehr. She was certain that he was not a Nazi, but one could not be certain of anything in Germany. But if he knew of some front office spy, she might have a lead to where to start looking for whoever had sent her the anonymous warning. She looked across at the crew, at the assistant directors and the assistant supervisor and the continuity girl, at the score or more of people working on the picture; altogether, including those not needed today, there would
have been over a hundred on Lola und Ludwig, not counting the extras brought in when needed. “I’m a foreigner, so I’m a marked woman with some of them.”

  “You haven’t put a foot wrong—politically, I mean. Why should anyone report you to the front office? Or are you afraid of the Gestapo?” He laughed softly. “Cathleen, our beloved Reichsminister wouldn’t allow the Gestapo to pester one of his stars. Don’t you know he and Herr Himmler hate each other’s guts?”

  She was not reassured. “I’d heard about it . . . I’ll just be glad when the picture is finished.”

  He looked at her carefully then. “What happens then? Will the Americans let you go back to Hollywood? There’s talk they won’t.”

  “I’ll have to face that when the time comes.” Suddenly she wanted to weep, knew that this morning’s poor chemistry was entirely due to her. She was drained, had nothing to give; it was a pity there was no dying scene in the picture. She conjured up an actress’ smile. “Maybe they’ll give me a job as technical adviser on all those anti-Nazi pictures they’re making.”

  “Maybe. In the meantime I’d be careful.”

  He rose abruptly and walked away, leaving the words be careful ringing in her ears. She stared after him, waiting for him to look back and give her some hint that it was he who had written her the warning note. But all he gave her was his lean back as he disappeared round the fake wall of the Feldherranhalle, Munich’s Hall of Generals.

  “Fräulein O’Dea?” A uniformed chauffeur had appeared from nowhere, was saluting and holding out an envelope.

  Cathleen took it, opened it: there was a note from Goebbels asking her to have supper with him that evening at 9 o’clock. She hesitated, hearing the echo of the warning: Be careful. But she had not been careful in sacrificing her career in Hollywood, in coming here to Germany: she could not afford to be careful in these last few steps, not now with time running out. She took a pen out of her handbag, scrawled an acceptance on the bottom of the note and handed it back to the chauffeur.