by Jane Thynne
At times it seemed that citizens of the Reich spent their entire time answering questionnaires. The girls at the Faith and Beauty Society marvelled at the form issued by the office responsible for maintaining the racial purity of the SS for women hoping to marry. It was seven pages long and spelt out cumbersome requirements for the hopeful girl, including the precise date that she learned to walk, and photographs of herself in a bathing suit taken from three angles. Some of the queries seemed as daunting as a university examination.
‘Is the woman positively addicted to housework?’ was one. How did you answer that?
‘Does she hold fast to the values of German womanhood?’
And the one that had particularly floored Hedwig: ‘Does she cherish the high ideals of German philosophy?’
God knows how she would ever answer them, yet with any luck there would be no need. The only question she was interested in just then was the one that Jochen had mentioned the other evening in the restaurant. I’m going to ask you something. If Jochen’s request was what she suspected, it would be both thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.
Chapter Eighteen
Paris in late Springtime had a reputation to live up to. The air was soft as a peach. The sunshine had obliged, and the smart ladies at the Auteuil races showed off that season’s striped silk suits. Hats were worn with flowers. Eau de Nil, sorbet, champagne and sky blue were the colours of the moment. The bateaux mouches slid beneath the bridges of the Seine, the used book sellers set up their stalls on the parapets, and artists in broad-brimmed hats propped their easels as ever beneath the façade of Notre Dame. The chestnuts were blooming in the broad boulevards and in the exquisite Spring light the elegantly peeling façades of soft mushroom stone and the bleached shutters with their window boxes of tumbling scarlet geraniums seemed almost impossibly beautiful.
Paris, above all cities, was good at putting on a show.
If the French were preparing for war, it was with all the elegance and nonchalance that only Parisians could muster. Young men at café tables still whistled and tried to catch the glances of passing girls in imitation silk dresses, who stalked the pavements as haughtily as fashion models, and policemen still wore brass-buttoned jackets, flat-topped caps and white cotton gloves to conduct the traffic round the Place de l’Opéra. Even the air-raid precautions were undertaken with a view to appearances, and the statues and monuments were fringed with a spotless line of sandbags. Perhaps the French thought the great Maginot Line would protect them from anything the Germans could attempt, or perhaps they trusted that no one, not even Hitler, would dare sully the splendour of their most elegant city.
Clara was wearing a silk day dress – white zigzags on a dark pink background – and a second-hand Chanel scarf which her godson Erich had given her the previous year knotted casually round her throat. She rarely risked bright colours in Berlin. The ideal demeanour for a spy was nondescript, which translated as workday, inconspicuous clothing or at the very least muted shades, but here in Paris she felt more relaxed and besides, it made sense to look as glamorous as possible when you were expecting, or at least hoping, to feature in the pages of French Vogue.
At the Gare du Nord she had parted with seven francs for the latest edition of the magazine. Vogue was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Eiffel Tower and featured a startling photograph of a model called Lisa Fonssagrives wearing a Lucien Lelong dress, balancing on the very summit, the city spread beneath her like a glorious map. Flicking through, it was clear that the shadow of war had not been permitted to darken the magazine’s pages. The chief international crisis of the day was the fact that Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford were now being dressed by American designers. And a forthcoming movie called Gone with the Wind was to bring back the fashions of the American South. Was New York about to inherit Paris’s crown? France was fighting back with a Tyrolean style from Mainbocher and blue tulle veils from Jeanne Lanvin. The only inkling that anything more serious might be on the horizon was the news that Schiaparelli was calling her latest vivid shade ‘Maginot Line blue’.
Clara stuffed the magazine into her bag and made her way across town. It had been a long train journey, and the narrow bunk in the sleeping car had allowed only minimal rest, but she wanted to walk. She was longing for the brief respite from Berlin and the chance to savour a different city. She wanted to drink in the sight of ladies taking coffee at marble tables and peer through shutters the colour of verdigris into courtyards with ivy-covered fountains. To hear the church bells, with their charming lack of synchronicity, sound out across the rooftops and wander into the shadowy mediaeval spaces glimmering with candles and thick with incense. She wanted to absorb everything from the roosting birds to the sun piercing the wrought-iron balustrade of the Pont Alexander III, lacing the pavement with a dark tracery of shadow.
The Rue Léopold-Robert lay in Paris’s 14th arrondissement, between the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard du Montparnasse. The list of artists who frequented this district might have been specially composed to enrage the Führer. Picasso, Cocteau, Duchamp, Ferdinand Léger, Modigliani and Dali were locals, arguing all day in Le Dôme, La Rotonde or La Coupole and carousing in the bars all night. Above the streets, rickety apartments were packed with artists’ studios, and beneath them lay the bone-stacked catacombs. It was as though Death stretched beneath the feet while Life danced above it.
Clara was early, so she stopped at a café called La Closerie des Lilas and sat inside, beside a dark wood and button-leather bar beneath a picture of Lenin. She ordered an apple tart, revelling in the rich, flaky pastry that melted in her mouth while observing the tiny vignettes of Left Bank life all around. An elderly woman was passing with a baby carriage containing a minuscule dog with a ribbon in its hair. A flock of nuns, wimples lifting in the wind like solemn grey wings, prayer books in hand, were on their way to mass. A toddler with bright eyes stretched out her hands at a falling leaf. Clara’s eye was caught by a girl a few seats away who casually took out her compact and applied lip rouge from a pot with her little finger. It was a startling sight – no woman in Berlin would dare apply cosmetics in public.
She tried and failed to read a report in Paris-Soir about the imminent trial of Herschel Grynszpan, the young Jewish boy who had shot Ernst vom Rath, a German cultural attaché in Paris the previous year, but it was hard to focus. Despite the reason for her visit, being away from Berlin and its daily fears and dangers was intensely soothing. The French language, with its slick warp and weft and softly undulating vowels, flowed like silk around her and bit by bit tension fell away as she relaxed into the sensations of Paris.
She finished her coffee, paid and walked the short distance to the Rue Léopold-Robert.
Number Eleven Rue Léopold-Robert was a dingy stucco, wooden-shuttered building with ornate balconies of latticed iron and a set of bells beside a peeling green door. Pushing the outer door open she walked up three flights of a stone staircase with a twisted iron banister. The hall stank of urine and fish and somewhere behind several doors a couple were carrying on a heated, uninhibited argument. When she reached apartment four she found the door wide open, revealing a man half a head shorter than her wearing a stained white blouse, horn-rimmed glasses and red spotted cravat. He had a mass of gleaming dark hair, a beaky nose and alert, intelligent eyes. His face was a composition of lines and angular smiles, like a Braque portrait. He removed the Gitane from his mouth long enough to say, ‘Mademoiselle Vine. I felt sure you would come. And so prompt. Would that all my models were so punctual.’
Clara stepped into an atelier filled with a pure northern light that poured through the long windows and glanced off the parquet floor. A few pieces of furniture were assembled randomly like some avant-garde art show – a chaise longue, a table, various lamp stands and a bed, beside which stood a glass ashtray overflowing with stubs. A white screen lit by four spotlights covered one wall and the others were filled with giant blow-ups of Epstein’s work – b
odies striped with light and bisected by operatic shadows. A lifesize torso draped in wet silk. Through a doorway she glimpsed a bidet and a basin with nickel taps, on the side of which a single woman’s stocking hung. A Siamese cat on the windowsill stared at her with indifferent grandeur.
Epstein opened the shutters with a rattle, prompting the cat to bolt, and switched from French to German.
‘I hope you don’t mind coming here. I could use the Vogue studios on the Champs-Elysées, but this place is miraculously cheap. A hundred francs a month and the only catch is I vacate it between five and seven every day so the landlord can sublet for amorous purposes. Please. Sit down.’
He gestured to the grubby chaise longue and Clara sat uncertainly, still unsure what this meeting entailed. She knew Epstein would convey her message to Major Grand, but was the fashion feature in Vogue magazine genuine, or simply an elaborate façade?
‘Are we actually going to do a photograph?’
‘But of course! I love to shoot beautiful women. I live for elegance. It is a religion to me. The more elegance we have in the world, the less horror.’
He picked up a piece of silk and draped it experimentally over her face, then removed it, muttered to himself and disappeared for a moment behind a Chinese screen, reappearing with a piece of material trailing dark ribbons.
‘Here, Miss Vine, is your costume.’
She gave an audible intake of breath.
It was a corset. A piece of blush-pink silk, with inky black ribboned laces and stiff bones. The only corsets Clara had ever seen came from the Ufa costume department and were generally stained with old make-up and sweat from repeated use in historical epics, but this one was exquisitely stitched, like a piece of haute couture, and the silk had a pearly sheen to it which shimmered in her hands.
‘Just this?’
‘Certainly. It will be subtle, of course. I like to strike a balance between modesty and eroticism. To both reveal and conceal. And this is not just any corset. Mainbocher showed it in this year’s collections. Please.’
He motioned Clara behind the Chinese screen where she took off her dress, folded it carefully and wriggled into the corset. It was a sensation she had never had before, to be so transformed by a single piece of clothing, to feel the material enfold her, cool and liquid against her skin.
When she emerged Epstein fussed about, leaving the top of the corset unlaced, and then positioned Clara with her back towards him, her face inclined slightly away.
‘You mean you’re going to take a picture of my back?’
‘Precisely. We don’t want to see your face, delightful though it is. We only want a glimpse, half in shadow and half in the light. That seems appropriate, doesn’t it? In the circumstances? And please don’t move. Hold that position. I want you emerging from that corset like a rose from its bud.’
Not for the first time, Clara wondered how Angela had ever managed a career as a fashion mannequin. Acting came instinctively to her, but modelling seemed so much less natural. She could practically feel her limbs seize up in self-conscious stiffness. Epstein fiddled with his camera and tripod, muttering to himself all the while, the cigarette perched permanently in the corner of his mouth.
Yet while Clara’s body was rigid, her mind was in perpetual motion. She had arrived here with an important decision – to stay in Germany in the event of war – yet Thomas Epstein seemed not the least bit curious. How long would it be before he got to the substance of their meeting, rather than merely requiring her to sit still and not fidget?
Epstein continued photographing, issuing brief instructions to turn slightly or raise her shoulder, and occasionally darting out from behind the tripod to twirl at the corset’s laces, or reposition Clara’s arm.
‘The corset is a miraculous garment, don’t you think? There is something so enticing about it. It implies at once revelation and concealment. Freedom and restraint.’
Not to Joseph Goebbels, it wouldn’t. God knows what he would make of the picture if he ever came to see it. The idea of a Reich actress, the representative of the Reich Chamber of Culture, posing for a French magazine dressed only in a corset, could probably land her in jail. Only the previous year he had unleashed a clampdown on actresses who portrayed themselves as ‘vamps’. Women like that were a poison to the German nation. Goebbels’ favourite costume for an actress was an apron.
Clara consoled herself with the thought that the picture was only a ruse. It would probably never appear in Vogue at all. After all, what had Leni Riefenstahl said? The September issue! That’s ambitious. Who knows what will be happening when September comes?
To divert herself, she asked, ‘You’re a Berliner too, aren’t you, Herr Epstein?’
‘My accent, of course. That part of the identity is impossible to erase. You’re right, I was born in Dahlem. A wonderful artistic family. They gave me my first camera at the age of ten – a nine by twelve with an ultra-rapid anastigmatic lens, since you ask – and I began my career at sixteen working as an assistant to Yva. The illustrious photographer, you know? She was a superb teacher. She encouraged me to follow my instincts, wherever they led me. Not to be crushed by the narrow morality of the brown plague. Unfortunately, that was almost my undoing.’
‘How so?’
‘I had been working for seven years. I was a confident young man, almost cocky you might say, and I thought no subject was beyond me, no matter what the Nazis might say. I had taken a portrait of a woman embracing a black man. Very sexy, you know? But it came to the attention of some Nazi, and I received a very unpleasant visit. I would have to leave. Fortunately a doctor friend of mine had a clinic in Paris and agreed to exhibit some of my pictures on his wall with the result that I received a call from Vogue. So I joined the exodus. I hope for the sake of her future Yva will do the same.’
He paused and peered around the camera, eyebrow raised.
‘But it’s your future, Miss Vine, that concerns us now. And whether you may be able to help our mutual friends.’
‘I’m not sure . . . I hope I can.’
‘Good.’
He put down his camera abruptly and motioned her to dress.
‘But have you finished? Did you get the photographs you want?’
‘I did. Let’s talk.’
The flirtatious jollity had gone, to be replaced with a deadly seriousness. Suddenly, Clara could see what made British Intelligence trust a person like Epstein with its secrets.
‘You’re familiar with the terms live and dead letter boxes?’
She nodded. Live letter boxes were places agents met to pass on messages. Stations, cafés and tourist traps were popular, because it was easier to meet there without attracting undue attention. Dead letterboxes, on the other hand, were locations known to both parties where messages could be left.
‘We have a number of dead letter boxes in Berlin, but in this instance you will use a live letter box. When you have something to communicate to us, you can take it there. Have you ever learned a book code?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘Give me the name of a book you like.’
‘Any book?’
‘Your favourite novel, perhaps. All that matters is that you must have a copy in your possession. And we must have one precisely the same. Do you have a book with you?’
Clara’s hand went to her bag and she couldn’t suppress a wry laugh as she found the copy of The Thirty-Nine Steps.
‘A comedy, is it? Something by your Mr P.G. Wodehouse?’
‘No, it’s not that. You see, this book couldn’t be more appropriate. I’ve had this novel for a long time, but it’s not mine. Years ago, I was invited to the von Ribbentrops’ home. They were ardent Anglophiles at the time and they kept a large library of English books. Frau von Ribbentrop invited me to borrow one and I chose this, but somehow I’ve never had the opportunity to return it.’
She held it out to him.
‘It’s a first edition. Published by Blackwoods.’
H
e gave it a peremptory glance.
‘Good. Now listen carefully. When you have a message to convey, find the words you want to use, select the page number, followed by the line, followed by the place that word occurs in the line. That way your message will be condensed into a set of figures and the figures operate as a code that can only be decrypted by someone using precisely the same book.’
Clara murmured these instructions to herself the way she learned her lines.
‘It should delay any attempt at encryption should our message fall into the wrong hands. It is fairly simplistic, but it’s all we have time for right now.’
‘So where is this live letter box?’
‘The Ritz.’
He laughed at her puzzlement.
‘The Berlin Ritz. It’s a bar in Mulackstrasse. In the Scheunenviertel. Do you know it?’
‘I’ve been there once or twice.’
‘There’s a bartender there. His name is Benno Kurtz.’
‘How will I recognize him?’
‘He’s in his sixties, has a grey moustache. He was a good-looking fellow in his time and he still thinks a lot of himself. You’ll understand when you see him.’ Epstein grinned. ‘Benno’s very useful to us. When you find him, ask for a gin and tonic made in the English way.’
‘I’m not sure what that is.’
‘Something diabolical no doubt, knowing the English and their drinks. But no matter. Benno will understand. In the meantime,’ he turned casually, and hunted for something in a drawer, ‘Major Grand asked me to give you this. It’s a Derringer.’
It was a silver pistol, less than five inches long, gleaming treacherously in her hand as if it belonged there. The handle was made of smooth, burled wood, its silver inlay decorated with elaborate swirls of engraving. It looked as beautiful as an elegant, finely worked piece of jewellery. Simply the feel of it made her shudder. How strange that something so deadly should possess such dangerous glamour.
‘We call it a stocking gun.’
