by Jane Thynne
Immediately a jam formed. Trams slammed on their brakes. Cars bunched up. A cream bus shuddered to a halt, its passengers looking out incuriously. Most pedestrians vanished down side streets, unwilling to be detained by a performance they had seen numerous times before. Behind the bus, the police car revved in frustration and sounded its horn. Inside, the driver banged the steering wheel hard in frustration, but the HJ leader was blocking the road, arms outstretched officiously as his troop stretchered their pretend casualties into an adjacent block decorated with a large red cross. Another boy stood by with a placard that read ‘Two dead’. No one was allowed to interrupt an air-raid drill. The police car reversed, with a screech of gears.
Up ahead Leo was making a U-turn, heading east in the direction of the Schloss.
Clara hurried on breathlessly, pain tearing at her chest, desperate to slow down, yet terrified that she would lose sight of him. She could barely believe the direction he was taking. Of all the places a fugitive might go, why would anyone being hunted by the police head for Alexanderplatz?
The windswept square, intersected with yellow trams, was the home of the Polizeipräsidium, the central police station. The building known as the Alex rose with its towering dome on one side of the square, lit up in the dusk like a great liner, with several hundred policemen inside.
She drew to a halt at the centre of the square, static roaring in her ears, and made a three hundred and sixty degree turn. From one side came the clatter of steam trains pulling into the arched glass vault of the Alexanderplatz Bahnhof. She scanned the shop fronts. Leiser’s shoe shop – the biggest in Berlin. The Mokka-Fix Café. Then a Ufa movie theatre that she saw, with a shock, featured her face on a billboard in a poster for Love Strictly Forbidden, due for release in a fortnight. The effect of it was somehow more startling than any unexpected, unflattering glance in a mirror. The light-hearted smile, calculated to deceive, the head thrown back in joyful abandon, told no truth about her except one. That her life was one long façade of playing a part.
Of Leo there was no sign. As she surveyed her surroundings her gaze snagged on the tall, limestone arch that announced the entrance to Alexanderplatz U-Bahn.
Almost half of Berlin lies underground.
Then she understood.
Berlin’s U-Bahn stations were the envy of the world. Styled by the architect Alfred Grenander, they were little palaces of elegant design with their finely wrought iron fittings, art nouveau lamps and mosaic inlays. Alexanderplatz was no exception, sleekly modern with its green glazed tiles and elegant iron banisters, serving both the U5 and the U8 lines. Clara dashed through the entrance hall and bought a ticket. She hunted fruitlessly for the figure of Leo among the flow of commuters, then at random she followed the signs to the U5 line and arrived onto a steel-arched platform, the dirty yellow light smelling of dust and stale air. A train appeared, emptied its passengers and moved off.
She was torn between leaving immediately and remaining where she was. The U-Bahn was the obvious place to disappear, but if Leo was being pursued, surely he would have taken the train, rather than stay where he was.
Unless he knew that she had followed him.
She looked down into the darkness of the tunnel. The rails lit up with a dim gleam and the tracks hummed in anticipation of the next train, heading east for Lichtenberg, Frankfurter Tor and Friedrichsfelde. In the flicker before it arrived, the crowd on the opposite platform parted and she glimpsed a figure on a bench, hat pulled down over his face. The train passed before her eyes – the driver in his cabin, face set, and the passengers, exhausted by work and soothed by the jolting motion, blinking sleepily at the seats opposite – but once it had disgorged its set of passengers and moved on, the opposite platform was vacant. Only empty benches remained beneath a poster.
Haribo Makes Children Happy!
Clara was frozen with indecision. Another train burst into the station with an upwash of warm air. The crowds swelled and cleared and the train departed. At that point, a hundred yards away at the end of the same platform she occupied, a figure appeared. This time she could see his face. It was not the face of a phantom, but a living breathing man.
Chapter Forty-three
At precisely the same moment, the police she had seen before arrived on the opposite platform, looked across and shouted.
Springing up, Clara signalled to Leo that he should follow her and ran back up the steps the way she had come, along the exit tunnel, trying to recall what Jochen had told her.
Almost half of Berlin lies underground.
She knew now why she had chosen the U5 line. It was not a random choice, but a subconscious memory.
The green door to the air-raid shelter was entirely inconspicuous, just as Jochen had said. A blank sheet of steel studded with iron rivets and a vast handle, newly set into the wall. She pulled it, and found to her relief it was unlocked. Seconds later, Leo caught up and they slipped through the arched entrance into the darkness, pulled the door to and flattened themselves against the damp brick.
Inside, the air was dank and claustrophobic, but a glimmer of light revealed luminous paint outlining doorways and exits, and a long corridor punctuated by thick steel doors. A honeycomb of cells, waiting for occupation. There were signs for washing rooms and lavatories. Bedrooms. And immediately before them an immense, shadowy space like a station waiting room fitted with wooden benches. An entire underworld hotel with accommodation for hundreds.
Leo looked different in the phosphorescent shadow, at once strange and familiar. The light emphasized his finely cut features. He had grown a moustache, which made him seem older, and a triangle of tanned skin showed at his throat. He leaned against her, enfolding her entirely in his arms, and his hands traced her shoulders and spine as though he was remembering her flesh, inch by inch. She felt his heart slamming against his chest and pressed harder into his body – the body she knew by heart – inhaling the warm, familiar musk, feeling the pull of yearning for him, even now, and the answering surge within him. Not a breath of air separated them. His cheek was rough with stubble as they kissed.
They tensed themselves for the tramp of feet in the corridor outside, listening for the stamp of heavy police boots, the hurrying footsteps to halt outside the door. But amid the regular flow of travellers, nothing stood out.
She whispered, ‘How many are following?’
‘Three teams, I think. Two pairs on foot and another two in a car. By now, there could be more.’ His breath was hot against her ear, his entire body tense and alert. ‘I had to come back and find you. I needed to make sure you were safe. I couldn’t go back to England without knowing.’
‘What do you mean, you’re going to England?’
In the darkness she gripped his hand as if to lock him to her, the questions tumbling through her mind.
‘My name’s a priority on the Gestapo watch list.’
‘If you’re on a watch list, they would have stopped you at the border . . .’
‘They spotted me at Tempelhof. They could have picked me up there but they chose not to. I assume they wanted to see who I was meeting. I’ve put you in danger, my darling. We need to keep moving. We have to get out of the Underground.’
The S7 line train was full of commuters travelling home to the western suburbs. Past the Zoo, Charlottenburg, Grunewald, Nikolassee, bodies rocking companionably on the wooden benches to the soothing rhythm of the train. The clattering of the tracks, the stops and starts, the squeal of brakes and the station announcements. Leo insisted that they did not sit or speak together, so Clara chose a spot three rows away and tried to keep herself from looking at him. The tension of being unable to hold or touch him was excruciating and the enforced silence was even worse. There was so much to tell him. About Angela and Hugh Lindsey and the proposed pact between Russia and Germany. But it wasn’t until the train approached its final stop that he rose and she followed him up the steps, out into the prettily gabled station of Berlin-Wannsee.
Wannse
e Station, with its gothic signs and arched windows, might have been straight out of a Grimm Brothers woodcut of a fantasy Germanic past. Even the air was different here, pure and green, infused with the watery scent of the Havel River that lay to one side, pocked with sailing boats making their slow, scenic way in the summer dusk. On the opposite bank, a path ran through dense woodland all the way to Potsdam. On Sundays the route was thronged with hikers, cyclists and families out for a lakeside walk, but now, on a weekday evening, only the occasional dog walker could be seen trudging along the leaf-strewn path.
They crossed the bridge, but it wasn’t until they reached the cover of woodland that Leo allowed himself to speak. They walked, clasped close to each other, the filigree of branches above them framing a darkening sky.
‘The night I received that call they told me that two of our agents had disappeared in Vienna. All we knew was that they had arranged a meeting in the Café Louvre with a pair of German officers who were thought to be anti-Nazis.’
‘I know the Café Louvre. I made a film in Vienna three years ago. We used to go there.’
Clara recalled the pale spring light streaming through the big windows, the violin-backed chairs and booths finished in dark brocade along one wall. The Schnitzel and creamy Kaffee mit Schlagobers.
‘I went there straight away. I became a regular and made friends with the barman. A nice chap. Georg.’
Clara pictured Leo faux-drunk, boozily intimate, leaning against the bar late into the evening.
‘Sure enough, Georg told me what had happened. He saw the agents arrive and sit at a table with two other men. And it must have been a set-up because within minutes the door slammed open, there was shouting, and the Gestapo came in with guns and dogs.’
She saw the dogs slavering, pulling against the lead.
‘Our men were taken away, almost certainly to be tortured and shot.’ Leo swallowed and paused for a moment. ‘But Georg had noticed something curious. There was another customer in the bar, not a regular, and he was there as the arrest took place. Georg said to me, “Something like this happens, everyone tries to hide their face, but they’re looking all the same. They can’t help themselves. But this man, he didn’t turn a hair. Just kept reading his book.”’
‘What does that prove?’
‘That he knew the arrest was going to happen. That he was part of the set-up. And Georg was doubly curious because the book this man was reading was in a foreign language. It wasn’t English, he said, or French, or Hungarian, any other language he recognized. All he could say was that it was the language you found on tombstones.’
‘Latin?’
‘Exactly.’ Leo stopped and turned to Clara, urgently.
‘And there was only one person I could think of who would sit in a café reading a book in Latin. As soon as I realized, I knew you were in grave danger. I had to get to you before he did.’
It was her turn to astonish him.
‘Hugh Lindsey is dead.’
Jaggedly, she explained about Hugh, and the woman he had killed, and about how he had tried to kill her too. As she spoke, Leo laced his fingers through hers and gripped her tightly, as if attempting some retrospective protection.
‘I should have known,’ he said bitterly. ‘I should have seen through Hugh much earlier. Good old Hugh. Everyone’s best friend. Always the life and soul of the party, even if he did like one too many and was always the last to leave. If anyone had looked more closely they might have sensed a vacancy in him. There was a kind of emptiness, which he filled with drink and liaisons with other people’s wives. But nobody did look closely.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Because Hugh had the most lethal of all qualities. Charm. Charm deflects enquiry. We’re taught about those types in training. They’re dominant. They imagine they can calculate risks and manage them better than anyone else.’
‘You knew him at Oxford, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. I liked him a lot actually, though we were intellectual rivals. We had some of the same friends, but we lost touch afterwards. Hugh lived a peripatetic existence. After Christ Church he travelled to Vienna, then went back to England and took up a job as journalist. At the same time he began working for the Intelligence Services.’
‘Like you.’
‘Only in Hugh’s case, it was a cover for his work for the Soviet Union. He’d formed Marxist sympathies in Austria and began to spy for the NKVD. They managed to infiltrate him into D Section and that way he had knowledge of our entire European network. Hugh knew I was in Vienna, and he let the police know too. I disappeared just in time.’
Leo stopped for a moment and pulled Clara to him, resting his chin on her head and kissing her hair.
‘There was a day a few weeks ago, when I was on the run, that I slipped into a cinema. I had taken to going to matinées because there were hardly any other people there and it meant I could snatch some sleep, but that day the film was one of yours, so I didn’t sleep. And as I sat there in the darkness I felt you were right there, in my arms. It was so real I could almost taste your skin and smell that perfume you wear. It was like . . . a vision. When I came out into the foyer I knew I’d been wrong to enforce that vow of silence on you. But it was part of my plan, Clara. I thought I knew best. It was for your safety. I thought it was essential that we stayed completely secret.’
‘Have you ever told anyone about us?’
‘Never. Or only one person – an old schoolfriend, Ed Russell. I bumped into him back in London, years ago. It was one of those dismal winter evenings when your spirits are low, and I was walking down the Strand, thinking about you, missing you, and I ran slap into him. We went for a drink. He’s one of the nicest chaps you could ever meet. He has a way of getting your secrets out of you – we could probably do with him in the Section – but I knew we had no mutual acquaintance, and I’d probably never see him again. And I never have.’
Clara felt a bewildering prickle of jealousy at the idea of Leo’s life in England without her and the unknown Ed Russell who was sole witness to their love.
‘I’ve kept our secret, Clara, but I don’t want to any more. I want you with me in England. There’s no telling when war could break out.’
She stopped in her tracks.
‘But there is. That’s what I need to communicate. Von Ribbentrop is flying to Moscow imminently to agree a non-aggression pact. The Soviet Union will stand by when Hitler invades Poland. I’ve seen the memorandum. It’s codenamed Operation White. And they’ve set a date. The first of September.’
His face was a mixture of emotions: astonishment at the news, amazement at her skill in the world he had inducted her into and horror at the risks she must have run.
‘Have you told anyone this?’
‘Only you.’
It was darker now, the surroundings becoming more monochrome. They had emerged at the spot where the elegant grey-green steel arches of the Glienicke Bridge spanned the Havel. To the north the land rose up in densely wooded slopes to the landscaped park and fairy-tale turrets of the Schloss Babelsberg. To the east, a few fragile points of light signalled the outlying streets of Potsdam. Leo gestured to a car parked on the far end of the bridge, its engine idling.
‘There was a man I knew in the German Foreign Ministry. I’d met him years ago in London, and I thought he might be sympathetic to us. He was unwilling to cooperate, though I sensed that he was not an ardent Nazi. So I took a chance and called him earlier today. My instinct was right. He agreed to drive me across the border tonight.’
The breath caught in her throat.
‘You’re leaving?’
‘No. You are. If we try to leave together we risk attracting attention. You will take my place in the car. I’ll follow.’
‘How can you follow? You’re on a Gestapo watch list. How long could you evade them?’
‘I’m not leaving you here.’
‘You don’t have a hope of escaping them, Leo. This is your best chance.’
> He squared his shoulders and wrapped his arms round her waist, closing any distance between them. The movement of his body against hers aroused the old, familiar feelings, the urgency of desire, the recognition that loving each other had become a part of them – the best part perhaps – and that what they possessed was solid and incorruptible. Clara yearned to stay suspended in that moment, for the earth to halt in its orbit and the stars above them to slow.
He said, ‘I’ve spent so much of my life in the shadows. Pretending. Deceiving people. Changing my identity the way other people change their shirt. That’s the job, I know, but I don’t want to live like that any more. I want the most important part of my life to be open, public, dull even. I used to crave excitement and novelty, but now I want my life to be normal, or as normal as it could be alongside the loveliest woman in the world. I want a row of children with your blue eyes. As many as you like. I want to be able to say, “Look, everyone, this is Clara Vine, who is not only the most beautiful woman you have met, but is also my wife.”’
She glanced away, down to the river below, remembering her pact with the deity that she would do whatever Leo wanted if only he was alive. That she would be the woman he wanted her to be.
‘What good would it do if you were dead? How could we marry then?’
He carried on, almost as if she had not spoken.
‘When I came away from that moment in the cinema, I sifted through the whole of my life since I met you and I realized the only precious moments were those I had spent with you. I begrudge every day we’re not together. Take my place, Clara.’
He looked at her, as if trying to compress a lifetime’s conversation in a single glance.
‘I can’t leave Germany without saying goodbye to Erich.’
‘Erich will understand.’ The light in his eyes pierced as sharply as the first time she had met him. That same level gaze, that shivering intensity.
