The Pursuit of Pearls (32 page)

“I'm going to get you out of this. Go quickly. Find somewhere to stay out of sight. If my senior officials object, there's every chance you will be picked up again.”

Clara couldn't move. She was paralyzed with fear. “Who informed on me?”

His voice was so low she could barely catch it. “It must have been someone close to you. I heard Dieter say it was the last person he would have suspected. Now
go
.”

As she rose, the door clanged open and Riesbach returned, Clara's jacket suspended like a rag from his fist. Springing to his feet, the senior officer snatched it from him, tossed it across the desk to her, and turned to his colleague with an expression of barely suppressed fury.

“For Christ's sake, Dieter! All your talk of codes. One look at this and I can tell the lady is plainly innocent. Did you even bother to examine this nonsense?” He picked up the paper and held it tauntingly in front of his baffled colleague before screwing it into a ball and tossing it out of the window.

“Have you never seen a line of Reichslotterie numbers in your life?”

D
awn had broken. A sheet of clouds was pulled across the sky, lanced with sunlight that left them pearlescent and marbled as mother-of-pearl. Early workers were beginning to arrive at the textile factories and whistles were sounding. A horse-drawn milk cart was making its rounds, awaited by hausfraus toting capacious blue cans for their deliveries, and the first queues for bread and groceries were beginning to form. Here in the east, Albert Speer's construction work was well under way. Blocks of houses were being razed, the dust blooming into the air. Twisted metal and hunks of mortar lay alongside pathetic domestic debris: a stray kitchen sink, a banister, a wardrobe mirror, a cot. Everywhere, it seemed, life had been turned inside out. What was previously concealed was now on full display.

Clara wiped the wound on her cheek where Riesbach had hit her and tasted metallic blood on her finger, but she barely registered the injury. Her mind was racing. Who had betrayed her?

I heard Dieter say it was the last person he would have suspected.

Was that because the informant was the wife of a senior government minister? Had Magda Goebbels reported her, out of a mistaken paranoia that Clara had slept with her husband? Or, more likely, had Conrad Adler decided to punish her, merely because she refused to become his mistress?

Although the Gestapo officer had warned her to stay out of sight, she had no idea where to go. She had no desire to return to Griebnitzsee, nor would she dream of seeking shelter with Erich and his grandmother in Neukölln. For a moment she contemplated visiting the Adlon and finding refuge in Mary's room before remembering that Mary would be on her way to London by now. And that she badly needed a change of clothes. Clara decided to return to her old apartment in Winterfeldtstrasse and seek at least temporary sanctuary while she worked out what to do next.

In Nollendorfplatz, early-morning commuters were already streaming into the station with its high glass dome, the red and yellow trains clanking along the elevated section. Clara walked swiftly along Potsdamer Strasse, but as she turned the corner into Winterfeldtstrasse, a figure stepped out of the shadow of a recessed doorway.

“Do you have a death wish?”

Conrad Adler was still in the suit he had worn the previous evening at the Führer's film night. His coat was draped over his shoulders, and by the look of it, he had not slept all night. His face was shadowed with stubble and his eyes bloodshot.

He gripped her roughly by the arm and pushed her back into the porch, away from the road.

“You're a damn fool, coming back here.”

Anger rose in her. Fury at the treacherous sexual attraction she had felt for this man who, if her suspicions were correct, was prepared at a moment's notice to consign her to a horrible fate.

“I'm a fool ever to have listened to a word you said. I expect you're wondering why I'm walking the street, considering you handed my name to the Gestapo. You were hoping I'd be sitting in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse by now.”

As if on cue a car proceeded slowly up the street and pulled to a stop farther along the road opposite Clara's apartment. The engine died, but no one got out. Adler pulled Clara closer into his arms. In their evening clothes they resembled a pair of lovers who couldn't bring themselves to separate after dancing until dawn. His face was just inches from hers, and she detected his shock at the purpling slash on her cheek.

“You don't know what you're talking about.”

“I was informed on and arrested. I know the informer was you.”

“That's absurd. Why would I have you arrested?”

“There's no telling what someone like you would do.”

“Someone like me?”

“Magda Goebbels told me someone was spreading rumors about me. You must think I'm naïve. Listening to your talk, having dinner with you, riding with you, when all the time you're working for Heydrich.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Leni Riefenstahl overheard you and Heydrich discussing me.”

Adler's grip on Clara loosened slightly. Outwardly, he was composed, but his eyes were alive, calculating.

“I can't deny that I have undertaken some work for Heydrich. But I promise you, Clara, for what it's worth, I have not informed on you. I knew nothing whatever about you until we met on the night of the Führer's birthday.”

“So how did you know where to find me now?”

“Goebbels insisted I attend that goddamn film evening. He had the nerve to suggest I might find it educational. When you left the Chancellery in a hurry, I followed you. I saw you being picked up. Later I inquired at the police station and was surprised to discover you had been released. I guessed you might head for your old apartment.”

“And how did you know this address?”

“I'm a bureaucrat, Clara, remember? I told you I did my research.”

He reached his coat round so that it draped over both their shoulders, and arm in arm they turned back down the street.

“My car is parked round the corner. From the looks of it, you might need a change of plan.”

ADLER'S LAKESIDE VILLA WAS
the epitome of good taste. Its shutters were painted a buttery yellow and it was framed by magnificent
Blutbuchen
—blood-red beech trees that flamed against the sky. At eight in the morning the air was fresh and still. As she climbed out of Adler's car, Clara would not have been surprised to find a servant at the porticoed entrance, but it was Adler himself who pushed open the door and ushered her inside.

Even from the outside, she could never have guessed at the sumptuousness revealed within. Everything spoke of long, deeply established wealth. The thick carpet and the carved, mahogany banister. The walls lined with ivory silk and the table bearing a bowl of white roses and a platter of fruit. Even the light felt expensive in this room, pale, lemony sun gilding the burnished wood, glancing off the oak paneling, and illuminating the paintings, row on row of them, hung in frames of clotted gold.

A dog came to greet them, a silvery Weimaraner with a coat like polished steel, his body highly sprung, lithe and muscular like the precise canine equivalent of his owner. The dog's eyes were piercingly pale and amber-colored, his spine undulating beneath the pelt. When he came to a stop next to his master, the tendons on his legs stood out like strings on a bow, and Adler placed a tender, proprietorial hand on him.

“Most hunting dogs have an unrivaled instinct for prey, but this one is an exception. He doesn't like to run with the pack. He's a very individual animal. He goes where he pleases.”

As if in demonstration, the dog trotted off again.

“Wait here,” Adler commanded.

He disappeared down a corridor and Clara heard the distant clink of china. In his absence she looked around her. There was a rolltop desk in the corner on which stood an SS-issue Olympia typewriter, specially fitted with its double lightning flash key. There was a stack of official looking papers beside it, a tortoiseshell inkstand, and a brass reading lamp. A glass paperweight like a teardrop, inside which a flower was imprisoned. And the tooled Cartier box containing the diamond earrings she had refused.

She drifted across to the paintings, gleaming like gems in their polished settings, their pigments almost alive. They were portraits mostly, ordinary seventeenth-century citizens gazing out at the viewer with inscrutable eyes, enclosed in a soft glow of shining domesticity. The men were playing cards or the lute, and the women were immersed in the simplest of tasks—stitching, pouring milk, reading letters.

“The Dutch Golden Age,” said Adler, over her shoulder. She turned. He was carrying a tray bearing coffee, rolls, and a bottle of cognac. He proceeded to pour a glass and handed it to her.

“Northern European realism is my greatest love. It was a time when artists moved away from religious painting to the detail of their own lives. Vermeer, of course, is the master.”

He swirled the cognac around in his glass, then swallowed it.

“It troubles me that Hitler should love Vermeer. Does it devalue the art, do you think, when evil people love it?”

Clara looked up sharply. She had no idea where this was heading.

“Perhaps Hitler approves of seeing women in a domestic setting,” he mused. “Maybe he thinks the paintings express some time-honored concept of Germanic tradition. Whatever his notion, he obviously has no real idea of what Vermeer is about. Nor have any of them.”

He continued to fix her with an odd, speculative look.

“I ask myself, is Wagner's music less ravishing because it is adored by a sadist like Himmler? Is a Vivaldi concerto as beautiful when it is played by a psychopath like Heydrich? Does a vicious thug like Goering sully the Titians and Rubenses he professes to adore?”

Adler's eyes were intently on her own, as though his life depended on her answer. “What do you think? Tell me, Clara. It's a question that torments me.”

“Of course not. An object can't be accountable for who loves it, any more than a person can.”

“I'm glad you think that. Because that's their crime as far as I'm concerned. It matters far more to me than their politics or their ambitions. I'm not a political man. In my opinion Germany is the greatest nation on earth, and she deserves her empire. No empire is achieved without the spilling of blood. But these men have committed a crime against civilization. They have no respect for Art, no true understanding of it. Art is a commodity to them, like iron or steel. The masterpieces they squabble over are pearls before swine. Goering, that fat sentimentalist, may profess some scintilla of cultivation, but he's no better than a greedy child running his fingers through a jewelry box, picking out the biggest, most glittering stones. Hitler is a peasant, and has a peasant's appreciation of Art. Goebbels may have the wit to perceive, dimly, the value of some work, but he has become a vandal. You heard about the bonfire? Four thousand artworks? Irreplaceable. All in an attempt to impress the Führer.”

“And how do you propose to stop them? By advising Rosenberg on which works are the most valuable?”

If this barb struck home, Adler barely flinched. He seemed distracted, as if some long-suppressed confidence was now tumbling unstoppably out of him. He refilled her glass.

“I've never spoken about this before. Or only once, and that was during my stay in London. I was with a man from British intelligence, as it happens.”

A tremor went through her, and she hoped that his sharp eyes had not detected it.

“Why would you meet with British intelligence?”

“It wasn't my idea. A colleague named Erich Kordt, one of von Ribbentrop's entourage, had put feelers out. Kordt's an Oxford man and a convinced Anglophile, and he engineered a meeting. The fellow I met seemed to think I would want to work with them. He told me I was too intelligent not to.”

“And what did you say?”

“He was right, of course, about my intelligence. It's impossible to avoid the fact that the National Socialists are by and large a group of ignorant thugs. There's no real intellect among them. Cunning perhaps, in the case of Goebbels, but a notable lack of brain cells elsewhere. That's why Frau von Ribbentrop is so dangerous. Annelies has all the intelligence her husband lacks. I often wonder what she suspects of me.”

It was very still in the villa. Only the distant ripple of birdsong pierced the air.

“So…did you accept his offer?”

“Of course not.”

The anguish left his face, and he gave a dazzling smile. “What a suggestion, Clara! Can you imagine the penalties for that kind of thing? In fact, Kordt must be a quivering wreck now, imagining that I will report him, but so far I haven't felt the need to tell anyone.”

He cast his evening jacket aside and wrenched off his tie.

“Eat something, won't you?”

She took a roll, helping herself to the thick pat of butter and wondering where it came from.

He scrutinized her as she ate. “Are you tired?”

“I think nerves are keeping me awake.”

He came in front of her, touched the abrasion on her cheek left by Riesbach's ring, and turned over her wrists to reveal where the handcuffs had left sore red bracelets of skin. Then, to her astonishment, he bent and kissed them.

“I can't imagine what they did to you in that prison. I would like to kill the brutes who put their clumsy hands on you. Do you want to sleep?”

“I'm not sure if I could.”

“In that case, we'll have to decide what to do with you.”

She gazed at him directly. The air between them seemed to shimmer with expectation.

“Do with me? What do you mean?”

A small smile lifted up the corners of his mouth. “There's something you should see.”

He pulled her towards a door. Inside was a small windowless, wood-paneled room, like the chapter house of some medieval castle. The burnished walls were hung floor to ceiling with paintings, every surface covered and canvases stacked two or three deep. Yet it was not the number of canvases that surprised her but the paintings themselves. They were portraits mostly, almost all of them women. An ocher nude of a woman reclining in a posture of luxuriant abandon. Another woman, her neck sharply turned away, skin pale and luminous as a pearl. A couple, clinging to each other in the wreckage of a world, unsettled and utterly alone, both fascinating and repelling. The figures were spiky and angry and their quality intense and stunning, unlike anything she had seen before. Adler's personality flared out of them savagely, in bold brushstrokes and angular lines.

“I come in here when I need to escape. Whenever I have attended meetings with Heydrich or wasted my time with von Ribbentrop, I know that I can return here and shut myself away. I find it useful to immerse myself in Art. It cuts me off from the ugliness of everyday existence.”