A War of Flowers (2014) (44 page)

A knock on the door caused her to freeze. Had a security check identified her as a visitor to the Reich Chancellery? Had Eva already mentioned that the actress Clara Vine had borrowed her
private key? It seemed she was about to find out.

She opened the door to find the lean figure of Herr Engel, rimless glasses glinting, and a smile on his smooth, professional thin-lipped face. Faint layers of baroque music, which Clara
recognized as Telemann’s piano suite in A, issued from his opened door. He cast a curious glance round what he could see of her room.

‘I hope I wasn’t interrupting.’

She wedged herself in the doorway, to block his view.

‘Did you want something?’

He looked slightly taken aback at her hostility.

‘I thought I should let you know. Some visitors called for you.’

‘Visitors? Did they say what they wanted?’

‘I didn’t think it was my business to ask.’ A small wince of elaboration. ‘I think they may have been policemen.’

‘Oh? Did they say so?’

‘No.’

‘Then what gave you that impression?’

‘Just something about them.’

Lowering his voice, as if by instinct, he bent towards her.

‘Forgive me, Fräulein Vine, for presuming, but I said you were out. I explained you were probably away filming and I wasn’t sure when you would return, but I advised them not to
bother coming back for the next few days.’

Why had Herr Engel said that? He had seen her only the previous evening.

‘I said if I saw you I’d let you know someone had called. I asked if they wanted to leave a message, but they said it wouldn’t be necessary.’

Clara heart plummeted within her, but she endeavoured to maintain a tone of polite curiosity.

‘So when exactly was this?’

He frowned. ‘It must have been about ten this morning.’

Ten o’clock? That was impossible. It was before she had even set foot in the Chancellery. An hour before the coup attempt. How could the Gestapo have predicted her involvement?

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. I know because I was listening to the wireless. I would normally be at work, but my rounds don’t start today until one.’

‘Your rounds?’

‘I’m a doctor.’

‘A doctor?’ she repeated dumbly.

‘Yes. I’m Doktor Engel actually. I work in the children’s department of the Charité.’

Looking at the gaunt figure with his apologetic smile, she realized that she had been entirely mistaken in Herr Engel. She had taken the thin-lipped, severe-looking stranger for an informer, and
assumed that his arrival in the neighbouring apartment was just another hazard to be watched for, when instead he was a doctor who had fobbed off the policemen who called, who worked with children,
who played Telemann on his gramophone, and gave every indication of being on her side.

Relief, and the stress of the day, came together, and she felt tears spring to her eyes. Politely, he looked away.

‘Are you all right, Fräulein Vine?’

‘Yes. Of course. I’ve been working a lot recently. I’m tired.’

‘Don’t let me disturb you then. I simply wanted to let you know.’

‘Thank you Herr – Doktor – Engel. I’m very grateful.’

‘Not at all. Just being a good neighbour. Any time.’

He smiled kindly, and disappeared. That was the thing about Berlin. Everyone was playing a part, but it was impossible sometimes to know what part they were playing.

At Tempelhof airport, Dansey’s man hauled his brown leather valise into the back of the cab and gave directions to an address in Wilmersdorf.

The flight from London had been full of worried faces. In the rapid ebb and flow of diplomats to Berlin in recent days, it was easy to arrive relatively unremarked. There had been no attempt to
check his credentials as he made his way past the border guards, and he had no concern that he would be followed or taken as anything other than one more international bureaucrat, attempting to
solve the insoluble puzzle that Hitler had set them.

Travelling through the English countryside on his way to the airport, he had seen the last of the summer ebbing away. From out of the train window he had noticed a couple picnicking on a tartan
rug, a farmer and his sheepdog, and two boys up a tree, scrumping for apples, in scenes of such utter ordinariness that the idea of nation states readying themselves for mass conflict seemed quite
fantastical. Even in town, there were sunbathers on deckchairs in Green Park, queues for the Test Match and a full programme at the Albert Hall.

Now, as his cab approached Berlin Mitte, he gazed hungrily out of the window. It was extraordinary being back here, as though Time had folded in on itself. These streets had once seemed as
familiar to him as his own skin, littered with remembered incidents. Berlin had entered and become part of him, its parks and buildings and pavements grey as damp newsprint beneath the gunmetal
German sky. He marvelled again at the enormity of the scarlet banners, pinioned to the giant stands erected along Unter den Linden and draped, with operatic grandeur, between the arches of the
Brandenburg Gate. Pariser Platz was populated by gleaming, patent leather crows with white helmets, strutting their path through the square as if they owned it. As the cab passed Wilhelmstrasse he
glanced down it to see a fleet of Mercedes, sleek and ominous as a shoal of sharks, making their way accompanied by motorcycle outriders, and in an instant he remembered the faces of women turning
towards Hitler when he passed, like flowers to a dark sun.

Berlin was so different, and visually at least, so much more glamorous than the London he had just left. More clean and modern than his Georgian terrace in Bloomsbury where the houses stood like
shoulders perpetually braced. Or the anonymous Edwardian mansion block in Victoria that he now frequented in working hours, and the dingy warren of the offices on the top floor of Bush House in the
Aldwych, serviced by a rattling cage lift. Londoners greeted the prospect of war with weary endurance. Every morning, standing on the Underground platform in a whoosh of warm air, he would join the
crowd shuffling into the carriage, then opening their newspapers with anxious faces as the train hurtled them onwards into the darkness.

The previous weekend he had been at a friend’s house in Wiltshire and at dinner an argument had been started up by another guest, a bold young man who claimed that the British could not
afford another war. They weren’t militarily prepared for one and besides, Hitler was no more than a school bully. He had tried not to respond. With immense forbearance, he had left the room
as soon as possible and gone into the garden for a smoke. Only it wasn’t forbearance, he realized, once the calming nicotine had entered his veins and the evening air had cooled him. It was
weariness. Exhaustion even, for what was to come, and a good dash of fear.

He had a couple of reasons for being back in Berlin. There were new contacts who needed sounding out, a man with an import-export business and reliable routes to Switzerland and a car salesman
from Charlottenburg who might prove useful. He was also preparing to perform a little handholding, because a recent, disastrous arrest had shaken a lot of people, worried that their entire network
might be compromised.

But really, there was only one reason on his mind.

As the cab edged round the southern fringe of the Tiergarten, heading for the Ku’damm, memories ambushed him again, as they so often did, and one memory in particular. A minotaur memory,
hiding in the labyrinthine coils of his brain, that emerged when he was least expecting it. Anything might trigger it – a line of poetry, a snatch of women’s perfume. It was an image
that had sustained him for years, one he ran over and over in his mind the way a pilgrim polishes the image of a saint, and sometimes he frightened himself that the act of thinking might wear it
out, so that like the features of an icon it would be gradually erased.

It was her face. The subtle poetry of her face. Where others might see calm, he saw a bright tension, like a lute string soundlessly vibrating. She was so alert to the world and its nuances, it
was as though there were some register only she could hear. Sometimes it expressed itself as abstraction, the kind of air that led children to be chastized for daydreaming, which he was sure must
have happened to her as a young girl, but really it was a deep, instinctive connection to the world around her – the kind an animal needs to survive in the wild. She had the unpredictable
quality of a wild creature too, like a rare bird that might fly off without warning.

He liked to re-imagine her minutely, as though drawing her from top to toe; the slender legs, with their slight tracery of blue veins across the shin bone, the concavity above her hip bones when
she lay stretched out on the bed, the line on her neck where the sun met the skin and the network of lines around her eyes which testified to her smile. At other times his thoughts were drawn more
by desire and the memory of it, so he thought less of her eyes and more of her breasts pressed against his chest, her legs wrapped around him and her body beneath him.

He remembered with painful tenderness the last time he’d seen her. Coming behind her and encircling her waist with his arms, feeling her slight, instinctive tilt towards him. The warm,
complicated smell of her and her hair, like spilled flowers, on the pillow beside him. Then, when he left, her face framed in the pure northern light that poured in from the window and her wave,
blurring into the distance.

Without her the world had acquired a drabber, more serious tint, unrelieved by any intimacy. He felt as if his life had faded to black and white. Often he watched himself as if from above,
carrying on his work, trying to submerge his own little grief beneath the sea of troubles around him. Work, and yet more work, had been the answer.

He felt sick with anticipation.

The cab had drawn up before a tall, ornately decorated house in Fasanenstrasse. He jumped out, and rang the bell.

Berlin’s Victory Column, the Siegessäule, a two-hundred-foot monument to Prussian military victory, had not escaped the mania for architectural reorganization that
gripped the rest of Berlin. The tower, on its base of red granite, had been hauled up from its position in front of the Reichstag, where it had stood for more than sixty years, and relocated to the
Grosser Stern roundabout at the centre of the Tiergarten. It was all part of Speer’s plan to create a great alley running from east to west in the new Welthauptstadt Germania, culminating in
his giant dome. No matter how grandiose Hitler’s plans though, how durable the steel and granite of his monuments, they were no match for the wit of his citizens. Berliner humour was sharp
enough to undercut the tallest building and the joke going round the studios was that the golden angel which stood on top of the column was the only virgin left in Berlin, because up there on her
tower she was the only one safely out of Goebbels’ reach.

At twenty minutes to seven Clara approached the monument quickly, her coat belted tightly and her hair bundled up beneath an anonymous grey trilby. Under one arm she carried a copy of the
Berlin Illustrated
and in her pocket was her fallback, a ticket to a KdF concert at the Volkstheater Berlin on Kantstrasse. The events of the previous day and the last-minute failure of the
coup had shattered her.

That morning the conference had been held in the Führer’s apartment in Prinzregentenplatz. The
Berlin Illustrated
carried pictures of Hitler, a red carpet rolling out from the
steps of the Führerbau for the signing of the Munich Agreement, and Daladier, Mussolini and Chamberlain sitting on the same scarlet sofa where Hitler and Eva Braun first became lovers. They
agreed that Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland should be permitted. By 10th October Czech troops would evacuate the Sudetenland.

The photograph of Chamberlain waving the paper in the air at Heston Aerodrome had gone round the world. Chamberlain and Hitler had signed an agreement ‘never to go to war again’. The
way he waved it reminded her of the autograph hunters who congregated outside the Ufa Palast after a premiere, waving their books in triumph with the signature of their favourite star. Chamberlain
and his wife had appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and outside the palace people stood ten deep, cheering. Three vanloads of flowers had been
delivered to Number Ten.

Hitler’s popularity had never been higher.

The Siegesäule was a popular meeting place and there were several people milling around the base of the tower, but no sign of anyone who might be from London Films. Clara scanned the faces
quickly, focusing on single men who might possibly be her contact, and fixed on a man with a briefcase looking twitchy, until he was joined by a woman in a trench coat and swung his arm jubilantly
round her shoulders. Although the nights were drawing in and the light falling, there were still plenty of people taking an evening constitutional with their dogs among the Tiergarten’s
winding gravel paths, but she identified no remotely likely candidate. No single figure, hesitating in the shadows.

As the traffic swirled round the roundabout, Clara made a couple of circuits of the monument and checked her watch. It was exactly 6.45 p.m. She would give it another few minutes and then leave.
After a couple more circuits she was about to pivot away when a drift of air from behind caused her to look around.

Her heart turned over.

‘Max?’

‘Clara. I need to speak to you.’

The vigour had left him and he seemed tense and drained. An errant lock of hair fell down into his eyes.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I might ask the same of you. I was on my way to your apartment and I saw you crossing Pariser Platz so I followed you. I hardly recognized you. Are you meeting someone?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Why are you here?’

‘I wanted to see you. It might be the last time. Come with me.’

He drew her away, so they crossed the road and headed into the comparative shelter of the trees. Clara cast a swift glance back at the Siegessäule and decided that the contact from London
Films would have to wait.