The Pursuit of Pearls (36 page)

“Why are you here?”

“I had to get a gun for my boyfriend. He's in trouble.”

“I thought you were going to the ball?”

“I was. I went to the afternoon practice, but I was terribly nervous. I made quite a hash of it. I kept getting out of time. At the end of it, Fräulein von Essen took me aside and said I stood out too much. I didn't stay in line. If I took part in the dance I would let down not just myself but the entire Faith and Beauty movement and probably the Führer himself. She had been considering making the whole group withdraw because of my laziness, but instead she had decided that I should suffer the shame alone. I would not be able to come to the ball and should just stay quietly at home.”

“So you came here.”

“I went to the Faith and Beauty home. I knew it would be deserted, and it was the ideal opportunity to collect my pistol.”

Clara's head was still spinning, trying to piece together everything that had happened.

“Why does your boyfriend need a pistol?”

“He works as a forger. He makes documents for Jews in hiding. Identity documents. Recently he undertook a job and he thinks he was followed. He was providing a document for a lady…”

“A forger you say?”

“Yes. He had a job, and when this lady left, he could tell she was being watched.”

“How could he tell?”

“He saw she was being shadowed.”

Fragments of information were colliding in Clara's head, like shards of a broken vase forming together into a whole.

“But that's not the point,” continued Hedwig. “If this lady was being tailed, then it's likely that they saw Jochen too, so he's worried now that the Gestapo are on to him too. He's already left his job. And he wanted me to get him a pistol.”

“But why come here? To my house?”

“I was on my way back to the S-Bahn and I saw a man ahead of me. I recognized him at once.”

“Because you'd met him in London.”

“Lottie was obsessed with him. I told you. They'd become lovers. As soon as I saw him again I realized it must have been him that Lottie had been meeting. That was the man she was terrified of. The man who must have killed her. But I still don't know why.”

A sudden, sharp clarity possessed Clara.

“I do. You were right about the jewel, Hedwig. He killed her for it. And I think I can tell you where it might be.”

E
lsa Neuländer-Simon's photography studio was in a tall stucco building in Schlüterstrasse, just off the Ku'damm in the west end of the city. For years, Studio Yva had been the most successful studio in Germany until the Nazi regime blacklisted the photographer and obliged her to carry out all her work under the supervision of an Aryan studio manager. It would take more than that to stop Yva working, however, and every part of the house, from its pillared entrance to its grand balconies and winding staircases, continued to be used as backdrop to her dramatic, sensual art. The door was opened by a fey young man in a sleeveless sweater and bow tie, who ushered Hedwig into a parquet hall and yelled, “Yva! Ein Fräulein to see you.”

A reply floated down from several floors above. “If it's another one of those girls collecting for the Winterhilfswerk, tell them we don't want to buy any more tanks.”

The young man gave a camp little shrug and said, “Follow me.”

The studio, a sparsely furnished, open space running the length of the house, had a vacant, abandoned air. It contained only two chairs, a cabinet, and a pile of dust sheets. In the middle a slight woman was kneeling on the floor dismantling a cumbersome tripod.

“You'll have to wait.”

Awestruck, Hedwig looked around. The girls whose portraits hung on these walls were entirely different from the images of womanhood she had seen anywhere else in Germany. Here were no hearty, fresh-faced mothers, none of the wholesome members of the Faith and Beauty Society or the League of German Girls, but glacial blond goddesses who emitted a cool artifice that seemed to say although they might be advertising cosmetics, shoes, or jewelry, their bodies remained their own. Their limbs were hard as marble, their eyes heavy-lidded, and they had a smoldering erotic charge.

One picture in particular caught her attention. It was a young woman, platinum hair rippling in tight waves, fur coat flicked aside to reveal a slash of ivory flesh from the top of her stockinged leg to the snow of her exposed breast. The composition was all geometric lines and oblique perspectives, like an old silent movie, its dramatic lighting and edgy glamour breathing a sense of violence and danger. The expression on the girl's face, the poise of her body, and the cigarette dangling from one hand were at once decadent and rigidly controlled. It was as though all the sex that had been suppressed in Germany was distilled in a single photograph.

The subject was Lottie Franke.

“Everyone loves that one. It was taken by my apprentice, Helmut Newton. He loved big blond girls in high heels,” said Yva, getting to her feet. “Especially naked ones. He's left me now, unfortunately. He could have been quite a talent, but he would insist on emigrating. Perhaps he was right. I had an offer from
Life
magazine to go to New York, but I turned it down.”

“Why didn't you go?”

“My husband hated the idea. Only now that he has lost his job and been given a new occupation as a street sweeper, he's regretting his decision. But there we are.”

Yva finished folding away the tripod and began meticulously dismantling the camera. Her angular, intelligent face, framed by dark brows, looked in no mood to expend any niceties on Hedwig.

“I'm sorry to disappoint you, but this studio is officially closed. They've given me a new job too, as it happens. A technician in the Jewish hospital, working with X-ray cameras. Is that a joke, do you think?”

“I think they have no sense of humor.”

“You're probably right. Anyhow, if it's photography you're after, I'm unavailable.”

“That's not what I came for.”

“Then…” The eyebrows lifted slightly.

Hedwig nodded towards the photograph on the wall. “Did you know her well? Lottie Franke?”

Yva's voiced hardened with suspicion. “Who are you exactly?”

“My name is Hedwig Holz. I was her best friend.”

“Ah.” Yva abandoned her business with the tripod and rose. She made her way to the solitary cabinet. “In that case, perhaps you'll share a drink with me.”

She poured two large whiskeys into cloudy tumblers and handed one to Hedwig, who gulped it like lemonade, the unfamiliar burn causing her to choke. Yva perched on one of the chairs, extended a long, fishnet-stockinged leg, and stroked it thoughtfully.

“I first met your friend Lottie a year ago. Perhaps she mentioned it.”

Hedwig nodded silently.

“She came to me with some sketches for clothes and wondered if I would photograph the finished products. Perhaps I would speed her progress as a designer. But though they were good, it wasn't only the clothes I was interested in. I could see your friend had quite another talent. I said I would only photograph the clothes if she modeled them, and she agreed immediately. She had drive, that girl, and a hard ambition. I recognized something of myself in her. I was one of nine children—my mother was a milliner—so I knew what it was to work hard and graft. To use everything God gives you to succeed. Lottie was not ashamed of using her body if it helped her. Helmut Newton loved her. He said Lottie was his ideal woman. But then, with a body like that, I daresay she was a lot of men's ideal woman. Even the Führer's.”

Her needle-sharp glance grazed Hedwig's own legs, causing her to blush fiercely. But Hedwig persisted. “The last time you saw Lottie, did she seem distracted by anything?”

“If she was, I wouldn't have known it. She was far too professional.”

“The fact is…the day before she died she told me about something she had. And I wondered if perhaps she left it here.”

Yva continued to scrutinize Hedwig for a moment, as if trying to decide whether she was worth trusting. Then she nodded.

“She asked me to look after it. Just for a few days. She wouldn't say what it was, or why she wanted me to take it, and my first instinct was to refuse. You don't hide other people's possessions without a very good reason nowadays. But your friend had the face of an angel, and I was not about to lose a model that good. Unfortunately, the next time I saw that face it was on the front page of the
Berliner Tageblatt
.”

Quietly, so quietly that her voice barely traveled across the narrow distance between them, Hedwig asked, “Where is it now?”

Yva remained motionless for a moment, then she stubbed her cigarette on the floor, ground out its embers with the toe of her shoe, and rose decisively. She crossed to the cupboard where she had found the whiskey bottle and rummaged behind rows of satin dresses until she retrieved it.

It was a light tan leather briefcase, expensive-looking but slightly scratched and worn at the corner, with brass fittings and the gilt letters H S L indented on the front. A smaller monogram on the clasp said
ASPREY
OF
LONDON
. Hedwig's fingers trembled as she unlatched it. The air that escaped smelled of burning, the mustiness of an old fireplace, the ancient molecules of another era. And vacancy.

“There's nothing here.”

“What were you looking for?”

“A book. A manuscript.”

“Oh, that. I disposed of it.”

To one accustomed to handling the manuscripts in the Ahnenerbe with white cotton gloves, Yva's casual comment was devastating.

“You can't have any idea what it was!”

“On the contrary, my dear. I knew exactly what it was. No good German can fail to be aware of the importance of the
Germania
. To me, it is the world's most dangerous book.”

“But where is it?”

“As I think I mentioned before, I'm a Jew, Fräulein. I reasoned that the book belonged somewhere far away from the hands of those who would use it for their own purposes. Last Saturday I was taking a picnic out by Krumme Lanke. We go there to sunbathe and swim, though it is still not quite warm enough for my tastes. Anyhow, at one point I made my excuses and went into the woods. Your manuscript is there, somewhere. Don't ask me where. I forget.”

In that instant, her shock evaporated, and Hedwig almost laughed at the little woman's ingenuity. She was right; it couldn't be more appropriate. The
Germania.
The work that meant so much to Doktor Kraus and SS Reichsführer Himmler and everyone at the Faith and Beauty Society. The key to the German people's past. How fitting that old Roman Tacitus would have thought it, that his work on the ancient forest tribe should remain where it started, deep beneath the must and moldering leaves of the Grunewald.

B
erlin Mitte might have been washed in blood. It was ablaze with crimson pennants, marching troops, and the clatter of drums and brass. There was a greasy swirl of gasoline on the wind, and a sea of eagle-topped banners, glinting in the sun, recalled the triumphal march of a Roman emperor. Percussion shivered in the air, and the thump of snare drums made the ground quiver. An excited crowd of sightseers had gathered to watch, and every so often the monstrous operetta of boots and belts and guns caused them to break into frenzied applause. If something was that good to look at, who cared if it was fake?

The filming of
Germania,
like every other project in the Reich, was proceeding at an extraordinary pace. No obstacle would be allowed to get in the way; every barrier, no matter how great, would be conquered. Not that many people dared put up obstacles to Leni Riefenstahl, even when her work required commandeering half of Unter den Linden and the whole of Pariser Platz and filling it with cameramen, lighting crew, still photographers, and a squad of fifty Faith and Beauty girls.

Several detachments of soldiers from the nearby Lichterfelde barracks had been co-opted—some to march up and down for as long as the director required and others to string up banners, halt traffic, erect barricades, and clear the way for cameramen on roller skates who were filming the troops from street level. The guards participated enthusiastically, agog at the girls, assiduously preventing ordinary citizens from crossing the square lest they collide with extras dressed as ordinary citizens crossing the square. It made a pleasant change from their usual occupation of practicing military maneuvers and endlessly cleaning and reloading their guns.

Leni herself had spent much of the day winched on a minute wooden platform up a ten-meter-high flagpole next to the Brandenburg Gate, squinting up the new East-West Axis with a viewing device and defying the inelegance of the situation with a pair of Dior trousers and her glossy hair bundled tightly beneath a director's cap. Around midday the Führer had dropped by for a viewing, accompanied by Goebbels, who was unable to resist the opportunity for an impromptu speech. “Whoever has seen and experienced the face of the Führer in
Triumph of the Will
will never forget it. It will haunt him through days and dreams and will, like a quiet flame, burn itself into his soul.” Leni, dressed in her trademark white greatcoat, stood by smiling, though everyone knew that inwardly she was seething at the waste of precious time.

The previous day Clara had left Griebnitzsee for good. It was impossible to stay in the place where a death had happened, where she had lugged a man's body down the garden like a sack of rotten cabbages and watched it slip, without a trace, into the dark water of the lake. Since then she had scarcely slept and was grateful for the quantities of Pan-Cake makeup stipulated by Leni to achieve the masklike visage of the Spirit of Germania.

By midafternoon her scenes were finished, and Clara changed into her own clothes to watch the final shot of the day. It was the scene everyone was waiting for, the technically dazzling feat that would showcase Leni Riefenstahl's trademark choreography. Leni had already explained her plans. The shot would form the opening sequence of the film. Accompanied by a soundtrack of Wagner's
Lohengrin,
a Luftwaffe plane piloted by the Führer's favorite aviatrix, Hanna Reitsch, would approach and dip down like a divine messenger from the skies. The onboard camera would record the clouds parting to reveal the whole, glorious city of Berlin laid out and, right in the center, a swastika. As the plane drew closer, the swastika would be revealed as a troupe of perfect Faith and Beauty girls massed in the Tiergarten. In an uninterrupted tracking shot, the camera's eye would come right down to ground level, until the focus was resting on the face of a single girl.

Word of the stunt had spread. Sightseers had been collecting at the west side of the Brandenburg Gate for the past hour, their gaze oscillating between the celebrity director herself and the film of low cloud covering the sky. Soldiers linked arms to control the crowds. From a perch on a viewing platform beside the gate, Clara joined them, looking out at the sea of entranced faces below.

They didn't have long to wait. It was just a sound at first, a low rumble from the distance, growing to a roar as the Junkers appeared, a gray gleam in the air, the swastikas on the underside of its wings clearly visible. The faint buffeting breeze strengthened to a wash of air that flattened the leaves on the trees as the plane descended, like some monstrous bird of prey, wings tilting slightly on the currents. Every face was excited, expectant, enthralled as a crowd of children at a conjurer's trick. Every face was turned upwards.

Every face except one.

She couldn't see his features, because his hat was tilted down over his eyes, but he stood immobile, hands in pockets, pressed into the crowd, staring right at her. Even as she saw him Clara noticed something else—the only moving figures in the throng, two men shouldering their way fast in his direction. They were wearing long, belted raincoats, the unofficial uniform of the Gestapo, and were making a direct line for him. When Clara looked back at the place he had been standing, he had disappeared.

As swiftly as she could, Clara darted through the dense press of onlookers in the direction of the man she had glimpsed. But it was useless. With so much practice waiting in queues, Berliners had gotten used to standing their ground. They moved as slowly and obstinately as cattle. No one was giving way, certainly not to anyone without official ID. Once Clara had fought her way through to the spot where the man had been standing, he was nowhere to be seen. She stood looking around in frustration.

Was it Leo? Or a figment of her imagination? And if it was Leo, where would he go?

To the west of the gate lay the Tiergarten, the largest park in Berlin, dense with trees that could provide cover, but at that moment staked out with cameras and arc lights, as the Faith and Beauty troupe held their gymnastic pose in the open ground. To the left was Potsdamer Platz; behind stretched Unter den Linden. Anyone being pursued would surely be more likely to make his way towards the busiest center of population, where streets and crowds and buildings offered potential escape. Clara turned and pushed her way back through the stolid crowds to Pariser Platz.

Past Wilhelmstrasse she came to the Soviet embassy, a handsome building with high brass lanterns, and she stopped and changed her bag to her other shoulder, giving her the opportunity to glance casually behind her before scanning the street ahead. It was filled with pavement cafés and ambling shoppers, but there was no sign of Leo. If he had headed this way, both he and the men following him had already been swallowed up in the crowd.

On the corner of Friedrichstrasse two policemen were standing, their eyes traveling over the passing pedestrians with more than usual scrutiny. Were they a second patrol on the lookout for Leo? And if so, how many others had been posted to join the hunt?

A couple of minutes later she had the answer. Towards the Lustgarten and crossing the bridge, a ribbon of lights on the dancing waters of the Spree, she noticed a car moving slowly, two men in the front seat, their faces sweeping left and right, scanning the crowds on the pavement as they trudged home from work.

At the same moment, she caught sight of him. A vague shadow, far ahead, moving swiftly, dipping in and out of the throng. A flash of red-gold hair. He turned sharp left, up the Museum Island, along the side of the canal where it was impossible for a car to follow, heading for the maze of streets around Hackesche Höfe. Clara turned too, but once she had reached the elevated S-Bahn arches, she lost him again.

In this area, Albert Speer's redevelopment of Berlin was at its most advanced. In some places entire streets had been flattened, and elsewhere half-demolished homes stood like broken teeth, their debris coated with dust. Cranes and trucks were parked for the evening. She hastened along Spandauer Strasse, past a restaurant whose glass front was shattered and a board hammered diagonally across the door. Inside tables and chairs were overturned, cups and plates abandoned on the tables. A paper was taped to the cracked door.

CLOSED FOR FURTHER NOTICE. BY ORDER OF POLICE

A zealous official had added a handwritten explanation.

I CHARGED EXTORTIONATE PRICES AND THAT IS WHY I AM NOW IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP.

Blood drumming in her ears, Clara looked around her, wondering if she had been wrong, trying to guess where in the maze of streets Leo might go. The streets in this part of the city were narrower, older, more winding than the broad boulevards elsewhere in Berlin. She remembered that Leo had once had an apartment near here, in Oranienburgerstrasse, close to the enormous, gold-domed Neues Synagogue. That meant he knew the local streets well and he knew where best to vanish.

Amid the jangle of trams, a high-pitched, angry shout rang out, and faces turned. The police car that Clara had seen earlier had rejoined the street two hundred meters behind at Dircksenstrasse and was coming in her direction, one man's head craning from the passenger window. Ahead of her, the figure of Leo darted across the road. The occupants of the car had seen him too.

At that moment the air was riven by a clanging bell. A siren wailed like a mournful wraith, and a plume of smoke mushroomed into the street, obscuring the houses on each side. Traffic drew to a halt. Klaxons sounded, and people on the street looked hesitantly around until they saw a patch of waste ground where a row of HJ boys was assembled in a line facing their corps leader, a grown man in shorts with a whistle, issuing staccato instructions through a megaphone. Almost immediately surprise mutated into mild irritation. Everyone knew what this was about.

Air-raid drill.

Practices for the bombing raids were happening every day now, and they always involved the Hitler Jugend. The HJ, Erich had told her, would play a vital part in air-raid precautions. It would be their job to assist in the cleanup, to get casualties to first aid points, and to help relocate bombed-out civilians. Some would act as air-raid wardens and others would help put out fires. The really lucky ones, Erich said, would get to help operate the flak guns.

Amid the swirling smoke, a host of boys with Red Cross armbands dashed forward with stretchers. Others threw themselves enthusiastically on the ground, issuing loud, theatrical groans, enacting the aftermath of a bombing. Further recruits spilled from a nearby building. Others, outfitted in gas masks and fireproof suits, proceeded to spray the ground with water, dragging wheeled canisters behind them as if removing traces of poison gas.

Immediately a traffic 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 troupe carried their pretend casualties on stretchers into an adjacent block decorated with a large red cross. Another boy stood by with a placard that read 2
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 city palace, the Schloss.

Clara hurried on breathlessly, pain tearing at her chest, desperate to slow down, yet terrified 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 ocean liner, with several hundred policemen inside.

Standing at the center of the square, Clara made a 360-degree turn. Leiser's shoe shop—the biggest in Berlin. The Mokka Fix Café. A Ufa movie theater that she saw, with a shock, featured her name on a billboard in a poster for
Love Strictly Forbidden,
due to be released in a fortnight. The effect of it was somehow more than any unexpected, unflattering glance in a mirror. The lighthearted 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 role.

Of Leo there was no sign. As she scanned her surroundings, Clara's 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. The work of 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, sleek with green-glazed tiles and elegant iron banisters, serving both the U5 and 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 amid the green steel arches on a platform 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 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!