Woman in the Shadows (31 page)

J
oseph Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry was probably the only place in the Reich not lying about its food supplies. Which was ironic, considering the way it lied about everything else. On a trestle table in the conference room, a veritable feast had been ferried over from the Hotel Kaiserhof. Mountains of spicy marzipan
Streuselkuchen, Apfeltorte
glistening with apricot jam,
Windbeutel
cream puffs, and Viennese
Sachertorte
were displayed on a magnificent silver cake stand. There may have been chronic shortages everywhere else in Germany, but here was a spectacular array of fine white bread, not the gritty, black variety that the rest of the population ate, and a bulging heap of cheeses. Waiters with tea towels folded over their arms darted forward to ensure that everyone's glass was filled with sparkling wine. Nazi officials and journalists alike fell on the feast with alacrity, as though, like everything that came from Goebbels's department, it might turn out to be an illusion. Mary, who had not had such a good meal for months, ate ravenously.

The party was in honor of the film that had just been shown in the screening room to mark Joseph Goebbels's birthday. There was not much of a story in it, but Mary was discovering that if you wanted to keep in favor with the Nazi authorities, it was a good idea to turn up when they asked. Despite an onerous workload as the head of propaganda and culture for the entire Reich, Goebbels had made time to oversee every aspect of this production, simply titled Papi's Birthday. It was a work of exquisite, almost Expressionist simplicity. Basically it was a tableau of the minister's life, or at least the life he wanted people to see, with pictures of his family at Schwanenwerder, Magda on the garden swing, little Helmut leading his fat pony across the lawn, Helga with the toy sewing machine Hitler had given her, and Goebbels himself cruising up the drive in his new Maybach sports car, arm resting on the door and a wide grin on his face. The movie was to be screened in all cinemas, after the newsreel and before the main feature.

“Isn't the film absolutely killing? The family look adorable, of course, but the Doktor's risking an awful lot with all those shots of his new sports car, don't you think? The Führer has bet me that people will throw things at the screen.”

“Anyone who does that had better watch out. I dread to think what the Doktor would do if he caught them.”

The singsong cadences of upper-class English rising above the civilized clink of glasses caused Mary to turn. Not far away stood two women with gleaming blond hair, tweed suits, and silk scarves around their necks. They wore Peter Pan collars and pearls, and the taller of the two had a prestigious gold Nazi Party badge on her bosom. They were unmistakably the Mitford sisters.

Unity paused from demolishing a large piece of chocolate cake and laughed. “Did you hear Lord Rothermere has offered Goebbels a job at ten times his current salary? I bet he'll have second thoughts when he sees this.”

“Poor Doktor. Perhaps he's worried there'll be competition for First Family of the Reich when Goering minor comes along. But the Goerings have got an awful lot of catching up to do.”

“Exactly. I can't see Frau Goering managing four little Hermanns.”

Mary was astonished. The lobby was crowded with senior aides, press liaison officers, and officials from Ufa, and some of them, presumably, could understand English. Not even the top Nazi brass dared openly mock the Herr Doktor. He might have a taste for vicious sarcasm, but Goebbels's sense of humor ran out where his own life was concerned. Yet the Mitfords, Mary suddenly realized, could say what they chose, even here, in the minister's own domain. These two young women had the protection of the Führer himself. It occurred to her that this was an incredible story. Had anyone properly considered the influence of the Mitford sisters? Did Americans even have a clue who they were? Europe could be on the brink of war, and the only people who had Hitler's ear were a pair of upper-class English girls. Mary moved nearer, eavesdropping shamelessly.

“Now, Bobo,” Diana was saying. “I want you to come across to the Kaiserhof and see the Reichswehr uniforms that the darling Führer sent for my boys. It will be wonderful to see their little faces when they wear them. And a hoot to see everyone else's faces too. It's the only way I can bear the thought of going back to England. Lucky you, staying here with him.”

“Isn't he marvelous? He's taking me to
The Merry Widow
later this week, and right after that he's giving me a lift down to Munich on his train. I can't wait to get back there. I'm missing my dog awfully. And my rats.”

Did she really say rats? Mary almost choked on her cream puff.

“I'm frightfully jealous,” pouted Diana. “Everyone's so gloomy in Berlin. I can literally think of nothing nicer than sitting in the Hofgarten and forgetting all this beastly talk about war.”

“Actually,” said Unity, “the Führer told me Lord Halifax is coming out to meet him at the Berghof next month. I think it could be good news. I'm going to keep badgering him to make a deal with England. I've decided it's my mission.”

Mary was transfixed. Her first thought was that she was longing to tell Clara about this. Her second thought was to remember that she had something else to tell Clara—something that had been at the forefront of her mind for several days. Something Clara would badly want to know.

The problem was, Clara seemed to have disappeared. There was no answer on her telephone, though that in itself didn't mean much. All foreigners were cautious about using the telephone now, and Clara was always careful in that regard. The day before, Mary had walked over to the apartment and engaged in a friendly chat with her old pal Rudi the block warden, who readily yielded up the information that Clara had not returned home for the past couple of nights. Though Rudi attempted to place a salacious spin on this fact, it probably meant nothing. Clara was no doubt away filming. Yet Mary felt a nagging anxiety. She needed to try again.

Slipping a few sandwiches and a cake into her handbag for later, she left the Propaganda Ministry and made her way to Winterfeldtstrasse. Clara was home, Rudi gestured, but when she had labored up the stairs and knocked on the door, Mary's smile faded.

“My God, Clara! What happened?”

“This?” Clara fingered the bruise on her temple, now going yellow at the edges. “Oh, I fell over in the street. I usually cover it, but I wasn't expecting visitors.”

Mary was worried. She stared at her friend, her eyes brimming with concern, then bustled into the apartment, put the kettle on for tea, and laid out the ministry's sandwiches on a plate, beside the battered cream cake. She had been intending to tell Clara about her visit to Schwanenwerder and the startling discovery she had made there, but the sight of her friend's bruised forehead banished it momentarily from her mind.

“There's something wrong, Clara. What is it?”

Clara wrapped her arms tightly around her chest and looked away. She had no makeup on and was wearing a plain white blouse, which emphasized her pallor.

“It's nothing, I told you. I just fell over as I was crossing the road. You don't need to worry.”

Mary brought over the tea and sat down opposite Clara.

“You've been away. I came to find you yesterday and Rudi said he hadn't seen you for days. Something's happened, hasn't it? I'm your friend. You can tell me.”

Clara sipped her tea gratefully. “You're sweet to worry. I do appreciate it, but really there's nothing to tell.”

“Give me credit for having eyes in my head.”

“Honestly, Mary, it's nothing.”

There was something, Mary knew, but she also knew it was going to take some time to find it out. When Clara decided to keep something private, that was how it tended to remain. She bit down the implied rejection and said, “Okay. You don't want to tell me, so let's start with my news. Because this you
do
want to hear.”

She was gratified to have Clara's immediate attention. “I went back the Reich Bride School to take some photographs, and I talked to that girl Ilse Henning again. She told me the Gestapo has been put on the case. They've taken the investigation away from the Kripo, which seems awfully strange. The Kripo men had been kind to Ilse—she'd found Anna's silver lighter and turned it in.”

“A lighter?”

“Yes. Quite a valuable thing, with Anna's initials on it. But the Gestapo men seemed to think Ilse was hiding something. They treated her like she was working for the Red Front Fighters' League. The poor girl was scared out of her wits.”

“Poor girl, indeed. How cruel they are.”

“Exactly. I can't work out why the Gestapo should have gotten involved, but I've found out something else, Clara. It's something you need to know. That artist friend of yours, Bruno Weiss? He's been working as a builder at the Schwanenwerder Bride School. Ilse pointed him out, so I took him aside and got him to tell me everything that's happened. But he was holding something back, Clara, I could tell. The guy was in quite a state. And he was desperate to see you.”

T
he Moabit area of north Berlin was a grim district of rented flats and tenements crouching under a sullen sky. Clara passed the granite walls of Moabit prison and turned in to Turmstrasse, heading for a high gray building in a courtyard of peeling plane trees. She climbed a dank stone staircase to the third floor and knocked, hoping that Mary had taken the address down correctly. Her heart was in her throat.

She barely recognized the figure who peered through the crack of the door. Bruno Weiss's hair had receded farther from his brow, leaving only thin wisps across the skull, and his face was bled of color. The skin was taut over his cheekbones, and his slender frame looked not so much undernourished as starved. For a man still in his thirties, he could have passed for two decades older. Yet at the sight of Clara, a grin of delight spread across his face and he pulled her inside swiftly and held out his arms.

“Clara Vine!” He hugged her to him, then kissed her formally on both cheeks, the way he always did. There was a pungent surge of the odors of sweat and unwashed clothes as his ribs jutted against her body like sticks.

“My God, I never thought I would see you again! Except on the screen. You're looking well.”

He peered outside nervously to see if they had been observed. “Forgive my precautions. I feared it was other visitors entirely.”

Bruno's room looked as though it had been abandoned by its previous occupant. The floorboards were bare, and a shiver of wind blew in through the cracked window. To one side there was a stained mattress, and a pair of battered suitcases stood by the door.

“I've seen all your films, you know,” he told her.

“And I've been down to Munich to see your paintings, too.”

“You went there? Magnificent exhibition, wasn't it? And free entry too. Such enlightened politicians we have.”

The old, mocking humor came into his eyes. The defiance that told her Bruno's spirit had survived. He held on to her arms and gave her a searching look, as if assessing her motives, and as he did Clara felt a rush of shame at ever believing Bruno would have denounced her under police questioning. The lines scored in his face suggested he had been interrogated, but there was nothing but honest affection in his eyes.

“It's so good to see you, Clara. Are you still keeping an eye on that boy Erich? How is he?”

She shrugged. “Moody. Passionate. Temperamental. The last time I saw him he accused me of not loving Hitler.”

Bruno gave a wry smile. “Perceptive child.”

Clara winced. Since their argument and the threat against him, she'd felt a desperate urge to see Erich, but she didn't dare. She dreaded the possibility that she might have drawn him into danger.

“He's a good boy, Bruno. He adores the HJ right now, but he'll see through them in time. He's very intelligent.”

“Like his mother then.” He shrugged. “I think I know why you're here.”

“Don't worry. You can trust me.”

“How could I ever doubt that?” He gestured towards a table where an ashtray overflowed, as elegantly as if it were a dinner table at the Adlon, and bowed stiffly. “Please, sit. Forgive my less than perfect housekeeping.”

He made her a glass of tea, and as he placed it on the table she noticed his hands were shaking. Bruno had an artist's hands, large and capable, with fingers that had always been stained with paint and even now were weathered and workmanlike. Except for the tremor. She wondered if he would ever be able to paint again.

Brightly, she remarked, “I don't think I've ever seen you when you didn't smell of turpentine.”

He scooped a lank wisp of hair back from his face. “A treacherous fragrance, turpentine. I keep well away from it. It's the kind of perfume that could get me locked up.”

“You think turpentine could get you noticed?”

“They notice everything. Sights, sounds, smells. If there's one thing I've learned, Clara, it's never to underestimate them. Once I was excluded from the Reich Chamber of Art, it meant I couldn't paint. I might have thought I could keep it up within my own four walls, but I reckoned without the ways of the Gestapo. They make lightning raids to see if your brush is wet. They check up at art supply shops to see if banned artists are ordering paint. Eventually I realized I would have to abandon painting completely. Down in Munich I had no way to earn a living, and getting work as a Jew is, as you know, much harder in beautiful Bavaria.”

“So you came back here to Berlin.”

He shrugged. “It's safer here. It's easier to disappear.” He reached for a scrap of tobacco and began rolling out a cigarette, shaping it elegantly, smoothly, like a piece of origami. Hastily Clara drew from her bag the cobalt-blue tin of cigarettes with a picture of Ernst Udet on the lid.

“Take these, please.”

Bruno took the tin, then smiled. “As a matter of fact, a cigarette was how I got back into it. One day, an old friend I had been talking to left a packet of cigarettes on the table, and when I looked at them I found an address written on the inside. It was a place in Rudow, on the outskirts of Neukölln. When I went there I found a couple of guys operating a construction company. A man named Max Grabowski, and his brother Otto. They had a shed with paint, wallpaper, supplies, and equipment, that sort of thing, and hidden inside there was a printing machine. They had been producing some flyers denouncing German involvement in the Spanish war, and they wanted my help.”

Clara remembered the first time she had ever seen one of Bruno's pamphlets. She had been sitting outside Kranzler's café when she found a leaflet on the seat beside her, extolling the German Communist Party, the KPD.

“That's dangerous, Bruno.”

He raised his eyebrows and gave her a frank look. “And you think what you do isn't? But you're right, Clara. It's getting harder. The Gestapo watches everything. They even count the number of office supplies and stamps that people buy. That way they can tell if anything covert is going on. Our people have to be extremely careful. One guy even gets his brother to play the violin to disguise the sound of his typewriter keys. The only problem is, his brother plays so badly he fears the neighbors will have him arrested on account of the noise.”

Bruno laughed delightedly, and Clara wondered how he managed to retain a sense of humor in such perilous circumstances.

“So how long have you been pamphleteering?” she asked.

“A couple of months now. We've been dropping them everywhere you can think of: mailboxes, telephone booths, luggage racks on trains. One of our people is a doctor, and he posts our little flyers on the pretext of making house calls.”

“And you?”

“I only go a couple of times a week. It's something to do at night when I can't sleep. I keep waking up thinking I hear the crunch of boots on concrete outside or kicking at my door.”

“Bad dreams.”

“Usually, thank God. Except when it's real. When I first came to this apartment, I was sharing with another man, but one morning, there was a knock at the door and two policemen arrived. They told me to stay in bed, while they took him. They barely gave him time to dress. When I looked, the policeman shook his pistol in my face. I asked where they were taking him, but they ignored me. I was lucky not to be taken myself. Max Grabowski found out what happened. He was guillotined at Plötzensee prison.”

Bruno blinked and looked away. Clara focused on her tea. Silence hung heavily between them. People here were getting used to these silences in conversation. They observed them, the same way they might observe a commemoration for the dead. They were eloquently emotional, dense with memory. Yet within a few seconds, Bruno assumed a lighter tone.

“Enough of me. It's another sad story you're after today, isn't it? I take it you want to know about Anna Hansen?”

“She used to model for you, didn't she? Way back?”

“Yes. You met her once, I think. Anna was quite a character. She liked to live on the wild side. I can't say I'm wholly surprised she ended up dead. Not half as surprised as I was when she turned up a Reich bride.”

“How did you come to see her again?”

“That's the funny thing, if anything can be called funny in this story. It was pure chance. I had to eat, and there's so much construction work going on in the city that they'll hire anyone, even Jews. I was called up to a job on Schwanenwerder, building a little model cottage in the garden of the Reich Bride School. It was a pleasant job, and I was enjoying myself. Out in the sunshine and fresh air, plenty of pretty girls to look at. Then one day I got the shock of my life because I saw a girl who was the spitting image of Anna Hansen. She was attending a lesson on being an obedient bride, and because it was a sunny morning they were having the class in the garden. I nearly choked. It was definitely Anna. I couldn't fathom what she was doing there, but you don't spend a month painting a woman and not recognize her, even if she is disguised in an apron and a dirndl.”

“Was she pleased to see you?”

“Put it this way: I've had some luck with women in my time, but I've never seen a girl so eager to see me. She could hardly control herself. She passed me a note, asking me to come back that night, and we met up at the back of the garden, behind the trees. I thought she had something else in mind until she told me her story.”

“And what was her story?”

Bruno moved over to the window. He looked down at the street below, then dragged the tablecloths that were serving as curtains across the window and switched on the lamp. Unconsciously, he lowered his voice.

“Anna was a pretty girl, but she always had an eye on the next big thing. She made sure she'd collected a whole lot of secrets that their owners would rather not have publicized. That was just how she operated. She didn't have a lot of scruples. Back in Munich she'd been surviving by withdrawing money from the account of an elderly Jew who had been obliged to emigrate. She claimed he owed her money as his housekeeper. When that money ran out, she needed a new source of funds. So she decided she would have to rely on her artistic talents. She'd been a dancer.”

“At the Gärtnerplatz theater?”

“You know it? Back in the day that place was famous for the after-parties they'd throw.
Decadent
parties, to borrow the Nazis' favorite phrase. Girls dancing naked, men and girls together, men and men, girls and girls…Anything went. I did some paintings based on what Anna told me. You might have seen them if you went to Joey Goebbels's art exhibition.”

Clara recalled
The
Devil's Bacchanal
. The contorted bodies and their naked writhings. “What did Anna tell you about the parties?”

“Hitler and his gang used to attend. Anna claimed she got to sit on his lap and he told her she was a special favorite. But that was as far as the decadence went, she said. She was already sleeping with the darkroom assistant at Heinrich Hoffmann's photographic shop. He was a nasty piece of work, Anna said. It made sense that he worked with chemicals because his face was as bitter as a bottle of acid.”

“What was his name?”

“She never said. But she decided he was her ticket to a better life. The thing was, Hoffmann used to take pictures at these parties. At that time, Hoffmann went everywhere Hitler went, and he took photographs of just about everything. He would snap Hitler in the mirror, making gestures and funny faces. Practicing for his speeches. Whatever Hitler did, wherever he went, Heinrich Hoffmann would be in the background, snapping away. The deal was, Hitler would let Hoffmann have exclusive access to his private life and make him his official photographer, provided Hitler would get to see every single picture he took. That way, he could keep absolute control over his image.”

“Did it work?”

“Like a charm. Hoffmann and Hitler used to spend hours poring over every frame, and any picture Hitler didn't like, the negative would be smashed. They were working with the old glass negatives then, so they were easy to destroy. They smashed thousands and thousands of them. It was important, you see, that the right image should be portrayed. Hitler was clever. You don't want a picture of your Führer looking absurd, though some of us would say he can't help it. Anything unflattering, wearing the wrong clothes, or with his mouth open, or his eyes half shut, or with undesirable characters—which to me would be everyone he knows—those negatives all got destroyed. The trouble was, there were so many that Hoffmann couldn't manage to destroy them all. So he would give this guy, Anna's boyfriend, the job of smashing up some of the negatives, and Anna came too. Well, you can imagine what she did. She helped herself to a couple, without his knowledge. Just for a rainy day.”

“What were these pictures of? Do you know?”

“Anna didn't say. Years later, long after they'd split up, she was in a fix and needed the money, so she went looking for her old boyfriend. By this time she had moved to Berlin and was doing a bit of dancing at the Wintergarten, and this guy had also left Munich and gotten himself a job up here. It was a good job, lots of money, so Anna reckoned it was payback time. She told him what she had and asked him how much he was going to give her for the negatives. If he didn't pay up, she was going to sell them to an American newspaper. That was a big mistake.”

Bruno looked around and whispered: “When she told him, the guy went crazy. Threatened her. She told me she realized he might even kill her, only she didn't have the negatives with her right then, and he badly wanted them back. Not so much because they might cause a problem for his beloved Führer, though they would, but because they would point the finger at him. He'd been the one entrusted with disposing of those things. It would be his fault if they came to light emblazoned across the front page of some foreign newspaper.”