A War of Flowers (2014) (2 page)

At first, when the teenager from the neighbouring cabin had begun stealing glances at her, she sighed inwardly. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen, with a wiry boy’s frame just
beginning to fill out and the faintest dusting of hair on his upper lip. Actually his lean, dark-eyed face reminded Ada of her little brother. The lad was on holiday with his grandmother, who had
qualified for the tickets through her job at Berlin’s Charité hospital, and they had been assigned to Ada’s table at breakfast. As she tried to eat her eggs, Ada found herself
machine-gunned with questions. Where did she come from? Berlin? Them too! Weren’t they lucky to have tickets on the best ship of the fleet? And only its second cruise. How had she qualified
for hers? Then the boy noticed the film magazines and an album of movie star cards she had – the kind you sent off for with coupons from your cigarette packet – and he became even more
excited. Did she know his own godmother was a film actress? Her name was Clara Vine and she featured on a cigarette card herself. Perhaps Ada had her picture?

Enboldened at this shared enthusiasm, the boy had skipped his post-breakfast gym session and offered to carry Ada’s coffee up to the sun deck. She groaned inwardly, until she suddenly
realized the boy might actually be an advantage. His name was Erich Schmidt, and he wanted to tell her all about his plans to join the Luftwaffe. That was fine by Ada. She closed her eyes and
instructed Erich to keep talking.

The fact was, it wasn’t just the factory workers who had set Ada’s nerves on edge. Yesterday, she had been lying in the same spot on her lounger when she caught a brief snatch of
scent that made her sit up in alarm. She couldn’t understand why she had reacted the way she did. It was inexplicable. But there was some prickle of danger in that harsh, citrus-edged
cologne, some quality in its musky base notes that left an ominous imprint on the air. It was the kind of perfume that hung on a person, like garlic on the breath. For a second the perfume formed
itself into something mistily substantial – a wraith with an arrogant face, eyes black as olive pits and a smile sharp as a knife – but the image was gone as soon as it had come, like a
puff of breath misting a mirror, wiped away to reveal nothing. Ada tried to conceal her alarm, yet she must have looked worried because a girl in a deckchair near to hers, with pasty skin, lank
braids and thick spectacles, noticed her distraction.

‘Is anything the matter?’

Ada was tempted to ask whether the girl herself had seen anyone, but realized instinctively that this was a matter she needed to keep to herself, so she turned a dismissive, suntanned shoulder
and said rudely,

‘No. Why should it be?’

That morning, after Erich had gone off to fetch the coffee, Ada caught a trace of the cologne again. There was definitely a memory floating there, amid the mix of lemon, amber and moss. Though
the day was perfectly warm, a chill crept over her and she clutched her cardigan to her and sat up, her filmy scarf snapping in the breeze. She looked around at the women, wedged in their
deckchairs with their copies of
Stern
and
Die Dame,
and their husbands with their trousers rolled up, but she could see nothing to account for it. Yet like an animal hearing a note
much higher than human ears can hear, Ada detected in that perfume a note of danger, a high, ringing register of alarm with a bass undertone of fear. Attempting to rationalize the feeling, she
reminded herself how many different thousands of people used the same scent. Kölnwasser, Eau de Cologne, for instance, Germany’s oldest scent, was used by millions. It was said to be the
Führer’s favourite. There was no reason why this one particular scent should mean anything at all. It reminded her of something though, and it was something that made her afraid. It was
a male scent, so it must be a man she was reminded of, but which man?

Was it someone back home? She frowned and chewed her lip as she tried to place it, but all she knew was that the scent made her heart race and the hairs rise on the back of her neck. She needed
to know where that perfume came from, if only for her peace of mind.

Thank goodness for the boy, who was just coming back at that moment, balancing two cups on a tray and two pastries which he must have bought with his own cash.

‘What a darling you are, Erich! Now I have to go somewhere, just for a minute. Could you look after my things? Make sure you keep an eye on them. And don’t let anyone take this
deckchair.’

The boy looked dismayed at having his coffee spurned and she felt a pang of guilt, but there was nothing for it.

Decisively Ada put down her magazine, rose from the deckchair and strode off.

Erich waited an hour watching Ada’s coffee grow cold and ate both pastries himself, before he realized that she did not have an important appointment at all. She had just
been trying to get rid of him. A humiliated flush spread across his cheeks as he imagined all the fat women – friends of his grandmother’s sitting around in their deckchairs –
secretly laughing at him while they pretended to read their magazines. They must assume he had an adolescent crush. He felt a twist of anger. He had never wanted to take a summer holiday with his
grandmother, what boy would? Oma kept going on about what a privilege it was to go on a KdF trip and how the ship would be luxurious beyond their wildest dreams. There was even a library on board.
But what boy in his right mind wanted a library on holiday?

A little after four o’clock that afternoon a squall blew in from the east, pitting the watered silk of the sea and driving everyone from the sun decks inside to play Skat or table tennis
and watch the spray lashing the portholes from the warmth of the recreation areas. Only one hardy passenger, shivering in the spitting rain, remained on deck to witness what followed.

The first thing she noticed was a commotion at the port side of the ship, where a gaggle of sailors were shouting and hauling an object onto the rain-lashed deck. She thought at first it was a
fish, a shark perhaps, or a porpoise, but looking closer she saw it was a young woman’s body, beached like a delicate, exotic mermaid from some child’s fairy story. The dead girl lay on
her back, curly hair plastered across her face like seaweed and skin as white as a fish, her flesh already turning to ice. Water gushed from her mouth and nostrils and ran in rivulets down her
face, pooling around her body as it lay defencelessly still. For a second the sailors stood staring at her until the youngest of them, the one who had first glimpsed the white shape rolling on the
waves and raised the alarm, felt sick and grabbed a tarpaulin to wrap her up. So the woman watching caught only a glimpse of the girl’s face, just enough to see that it was extraordinarily
pretty in the conventional Germanic model, with high, arched eyebrows and blue eyes now fixed and empty, as if their colour had already been washed out by the sea. She wore a halter-necked sundress
that clung to every voluptuous curve, leaving nothing to the imagination except, perhaps, the method of her death. For on the back of her head was a great bloody mess of hair and bone, the kind of
wound that might have been sustained by hitting the side of the ship as she fell, or even, perhaps, a blow from a heavy instrument, if such a thing were possible.

The horrified passenger was moved swiftly away from the scene and later that day received a personal visit in her cabin from Heinrich Bertram, the ship’s captain, who was most solicitous
about her shock. He suggested that she try to forget it as much as possible and enjoy the rest of her holiday. It would be wrong to allow a tragedy like this to mar such a special voyage, let alone
spoil the enjoyment of others by talking about it. Going further, Captain Bertram had to warn the gnädiges Fräulein that any mention of the incident anywhere else at all would have
serious repercussions for her, both at home and in the workplace, and put at risk the chance of any future trips she or her family might hope to make with the KdF.

Paris

Paris in late August, 1938, was a city living on its nerves.

Rumours swarmed like rats around the streets, refugees from every corner of Europe brushed shoulders on the boulevards, and the cafés were a babel of foreign languages, Spanish, Italian,
Czech and, of course, German, rising and falling in anxious disputation. In the city centre the clatter of cream-topped buses, the blare of taxi horns and the shouts of traffic gendarmes were
overlaid with the distant sound of reservists, in hastily assembled khaki, marching along the Champs Elysées. German, Austrian, Polish and Hungarian Jews congregated in the Marais quarter in
anxious exile, scraping a living by day, and drinking it by night. Morsels of foreign news were picked up and ravenously chewed on, then discarded as propaganda or lies. Refugees choked the railway
stations. Native Parisians were packing up and moving their families to the country. Others spent longer than usual in the churches. A dry summer wind blew around the city, chivvying along the
gutters a vortex of leaves and litter and small scraps of newspaper alarm. Hitler was claiming that the German-speaking population of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, just south of the German
border, desired reunion with the Reich. If the Czech government did not agree then he would march in and take it. France and England seemed certain to reject Germany’s demands. Hitler had set
the date of 1st October for military action. The threat of war hung like a distant thunderstorm on a sunny day.

Clara Vine threw open the tall shutters, leaned over the narrow balcony, and gazed down at the Boulevard de Sébastopol below. She only had three days in Paris and the
last two had been spent shooting scenes for her latest film, an adaptation of Maupassant’s
Bel Ami,
but the third, today, was entirely free. A whole day ahead of her and only an
engagement that evening before catching a train at the Gare du Nord early the next morning and heading back home to Berlin. She could visit the Louvre, go shopping, see a concert, or maybe just sit
in a square beneath the dusty trees and drink a café crème. An entire day to herself in Paris. No lines to learn, no character to assume. No takes or retakes, no director’s tiff
or costume fittings. No delays or disputes. After filming almost non-stop for months, a day off in a foreign location felt like a fantasy. And despite the mood of the city, Clara was determined to
make the most of it.

The Bellevue, where the cast were staying, was not everyone’s idea of Parisian chic. Its forty rooms were squeezed into a narrow, five-storey building and Clara’s bedroom on the top
floor was sweltering. The paint on the wrought-iron balconies was flaking, the plaster decayed and the entire building was imbued with the reek of drains. But who cared about that when there was
all of Paris to look at?

The city seemed impossibly beautiful, the elegant precision of its buildings and the classical uniformity of its blocks and streets complemented by a golden light that seemed to saturate the
pale stone. Even now, in high summer, when most Parisians were on their August vacation, the pavements were thronged with people. Immediately below Clara’s window, between the patchy trunks
of the plane trees, a cart of flowers bulged with red, yellow and pink blooms, like a bright shout of colour in the morning air. Vans making deliveries and a porter hauling a crate of baguettes
almost collided with a man bearing a box of oranges on his head. In the fishmonger’s window a chorus line of doomed lobsters waved their limbs helplessly on a tray. Young women with crimson
lips and kohl-lined eyes clipped past wearing Breton-necked tops with wide scarves slung diagonally across them, in keeping with the latest fashion, and little felt hats studded with flowers or
feathers. Some wore printed summer dresses in ice-cream colours and they even managed to make their heavy wooden-soled shoes look stylish. Men in open-necked shirts and berets swaggered past.
Despite the undercurrent of nerves that ran through the city, the citizens on the Boulevard de Sébastopol were doing their best impression of elegant nonchalance.

What a contrast with Berlin. In Clara’s home city the daily round-up of Jews and the sporadic Gestapo cruelties had worsened throughout the year. That spring Hitler had marched into
Austria and found himself greeted not with hostilities but with a carpet of roses;
Blumenkrieg
, he called it, a war of flowers. The lack of international outcry over the Anschluss had only
emboldened him. Hitler was, everyone realized, more confident than ever.

Unlike Clara herself.

As an Anglo-German actress, who had grown up in England, Clara Vine had made a successful career for herself since arriving in Berlin five years earlier. She had seven films to her name, and by
sheer chance had forged connections with many people in Berlin’s high society. Yet despite her acquaintance with the wives of several politicians, Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Propaganda
and Public Enlightenment, had become increasingly suspicious of Clara’s motives. The previous year he had even had her arrested briefly, and interrogated. For Clara, merely thinking of that
day in the Gestapo headquarters, and of the tightrope she trod daily in Berlin, brought a chill to the morning’s warmth and a familiar sick twist of nerves. It was as though Goebbels was
determined to prove what he suspected – that even though Clara’s father was a British aristocrat and Nazi sympathizer, and she herself was working full-time in the Babelsberg film
studios, Clara was an agent of British Intelligence. That she was passing snippets of information and gossip to her contacts in the British Embassy. That she purposefully mingled in Nazi society to
observe the private life of the Third Reich.

It would have been absurd, if it hadn’t also been true.

What made Clara’s position more perilous was her discovery, when she arrived in Germany, that her own grandmother was a Jew. The document of Aryan heritage Clara carried everywhere was as
much a fabrication as the russet highlights in her hair, but infinitely more significant.

Every day she asked herself why she stayed in Berlin. Every day she came up with the same answer. She would stay in Berlin as long as she could because it meant seeing her godson Erich. He was
the only man in her life right now, and for his sake most of all she prayed that war could somehow be averted.