Sitting on the terrace in a patch of warm sunshine, Mary drained another cup of coffee and read the letter again.
It had arrived that morning. In typical style, her mother had devoted several pages to news about her bridge partners and the grandchild (walking already!) and the charity evening she had been organising at the country club, before she got to the point.
“Daddy had a turn last week, when he was walking round the garden, and Doctor Hillman said it was a stroke. A rather bad one I guess. He can’t talk too well and is very weak down one side. He’s confined to bed and we both of us think it would be a good time for you to come back.”
This piece of news she put on page five. Why had her mother not sent a telegram in 72 point capitals: YOUR FATHER IS MORTALLY ILL? She had a gift for what Frank Nussbaum would call ‘burying the lead’.
Her dear father. The first man who had faith in her. The man who when she was just twelve had silenced a roomful of belittling female relatives with the firm declaration, “Of course Mary can be a journalist. A girl like Mary can be anything she wants.” The man she loved more than anyone else. Thinking of his powerful, craggy form, with its ramrod back and steely sinews, crumpled in a heap on the garden path caused her a vicarious physical pain.
After her announcement her mother had, with typical insouciance, added an afterthought.
“I’m sure there’s plenty of journalism to be done in America, after all. You are our only daughter, Mary, and right now, for however long it may be, I think your place is with us.”
Her mother’s request – ‘demand’ was more like it – couldn’t have come at a worse time. The feature about the labour camp had gone down well. So well, in fact, that it had been picked up by the wire services and syndicated round America. There had been plenty of correspondence about it, many readers suggesting the United States adopt a similar system for the good of the young. Frank Nussbaum had called her piece about the threat to sterilize unfit women “a powerful condemnation” of the regime. The story of Lotte’s sister-in-law Margarete and her mass wedding, which had run the following week, earned Mary a telegram of praise from the editor-in-chief himself. Even down the telephone line, she could hear Frank breaking into one of his rare grins. There was an appetite for this kind of feature, he said. They had decided from now on she should have her own regular column. It would start next week and be called ‘
Mary Harker’s Berlin Life’
. They would run a picture by-line of her on top. A picture by-line! Mary had needed to clear her throat to mask her gasp of delight. The truth was, Frank went on, Germany was a complex picture right now. In some ways perhaps America had something to learn from it – like the way it had motivated its workforce, for example, and channelled the energies of its young people. But there were horror stories too, and Mary should get on with a piece about how the state was planning to fire all married women on the grounds that they took work away from their husbands. How women teachers would be banned from giving private lessons and how the number of women going to university was being reduced. If she took it carefully and managed not to get thrown out, Frank thought this new column could make her name.
Absently Mary stretched out her hand and took another of the
Lebkuchen
the Press Club did so well. And another. Those delicious little gingerbread biscuits with cinnamon and spices weren’t good for the waistline, but who cared about that after her disappointment with Rupert the other night? Rupert, who was now grimly relegated to a long list of men labelled Just Good Friends. She sighed. She had been completely honest when she told him she could never be a hausfrau. What she had come to realize was that as someone who loved chatting to people, gossiping and asking all sorts of nosy questions about their lives, journalism was simply ideal for her. It wasn’t so much a job as a continuation of her natural persona.
Staying in Germany. Perhaps becoming a great correspondent. Her own column. It was everything she had ever hoped for. Or going home to America and putting everything on hold. What kind of daughter did it make her if she wasn’t prepared to make a sacrifice for her dying father? Should she please her mother, or Frank Nussbaum? And which of those choices would please herself? Her head ached with the effort of trying to resolve the conflicting forces tearing her in two.
A shadow fell across her face and she looked up to see a waiter standing in front of her.
‘Excuse me, Fräulein. There’s someone waiting for you at reception. A lady. She says it’s urgent.’
‘Did she give a name?’
‘A Fräulein Vine.’
Clara Vine. Rupert’s little English Nazi-lover. What on earth could she want? Mary hauled herself up and pulled on a cardigan. She supposed she would have to see her. But she seriously hoped it wasn’t a social call.
When Leo went out into the silver morning and saw workmen spraying the sticky residue of the lime leaves from Unter den Linden he thought of the old song he had heard: “So long as the old trees bloom on Unter den Linden nothing can defeat us, Berlin will stay Berlin.”
But now they were cutting down the limes to make way for more marches. Not just limes, but maples and planes too. Hitler wanted his troops to be able to walk twelve abreast.
Leo thought again of Ovid in exile watching the barbarians and wondered if he too was catching a glimpse of what humanity could become.
He came to a church and quite on impulse stepped inside, walked down the dim aisle and sat on a wooden pew, a few feet away from the altar. There was no one inside but the hunched form of a cleaning woman on her knees, polishing the brass fittings of the lectern. A shaft of light, pure Protestant light, unfiltered by the rich complexity of Catholic stained glass, pierced the gloom. Leo bent his head in a hypocritical semblance of prayer.
It was the first time he had been in this church, but he had often passed and felt a visceral urge to come inside and pray. Indeed, he almost ached for prayer. What must it be like to unburden yourself like that? To release the straps and buckles that bound your secrecy to you? But he couldn’t do it. Caution and duplicity were engraved too deeply within him.
The SIS had been right to recruit him. They had seen in him what he had never seen in himself: a combination of immense plausibility masking a profound scepticism which made him perfect for handling the betrayals and blackmail of others. The advantage was that he was never likely to suffer blind fidelity to an ideology. The disadvantage was, between these shifting layers of distrust, it was hard to work out just where his real self lay.
Sitting there, in the church, the image of Clara came to him. Two nights ago she had come back exhausted to Xantener Strasse and fallen into his arms. She didn’t say where she had been or what she had done. She flung her coat over the arm of the chair, drank the coffee he had prepared for her, and ate a cheese sandwich. Then, just as hungrily, she had made love to him.
The next morning when he woke she was still fast asleep beside him. He could tell by the trembling of her eyelids, light as a moth’s wing, that she was dreaming. Happy dreams, he hoped, of England perhaps and all that she had left there. Watching her eyelids with their faint trellis of veins, the long, dark lashes, and her face, smoothed in sleep, he felt flattered that she should relax with such abandon in his presence. To surrender yourself to sleep was a form of trust, a faith that he would still be there when she woke up, and that she could drop her guard.
He remembered her standing barefoot at the mirror and pushing a grip into her hair, and seeing him watching her. Her breasts, milk white where they met the scalloped sunburn of her neckline. The heart-shaped face with angular cheekbones suggesting something faintly exotic beneath the English veneer. The watchful, intelligent eyes. As she stood washing at the basin, entirely naked and unembarrassed, she turned to him and smiled and he thought that was the kind of face he wanted to see every day smiling at him. That was what he wanted. Ordinary life.
Even now he could still feel the touch of her against his skin, and the memory of that sensual pleasure surrounded him like an invisible embrace. Her body in bed, her curving back and taut loins, had awakened a hunger in him, for the exhilaration of sex coupled with being in love, which he had never experienced before. In the past few weeks he had understood for the first time what poets had always written about. He had changed since he met her. She connected him with everything that was good in his life, and talking to her about poetry, about Ovid, had even brought him back to an idea he once had of committing himself entirely to the world of scholarship and literature, losing himself in some place of learning where he could be Dr Leo Quinn, with leather elbow patches and an oak-panelled study, buried safely in the misty past.
He tried not to think about her with Müller. Of her body, with its sleek, downy flesh, beneath that brute of a man, perhaps responding to him, the way she had done with him. Her reddened lips, the colour of crushed strawberries, slightly parted. The veined neck arched, the whole body tense and then relaxing as the flush rose into her face and neck. He hadn’t asked her about it, and she hadn’t told him. She was a skilled actress, he reminded himself.
As he sat in bed beside her, thinking of everything that lay beneath the vault of her chest, the heart and its secret internal workings, he was reminded of something that had been said to him in that week of training at the country house. One of the chaps there, the effete young man who talked about tradecraft, had told him that an agent needed to think like a schizophrenic might. To imagine his body as something different and separate from the mind, like a piece of wood or metal rather than flesh with nerves and sensations. Entirely disassociated from the self. That kind of detachment was necessary in this line of work.
Leo had managed that, he thought, but could Clara? Could she ever become what he had become? He knew it was old-fashioned, but he had a deep instinct that women should be protected, rather than put in the way of danger. His mind rebelled at Rumbold’s little epithet, “a spy in silk stockings”.
And yet, she had proved a fast learner so far. He was proud of what he had taught her.
He had hoped that Clara had not yet attracted surveillance. They had been so careful every time they had met, and he had never seen any sign of a tail. But on Thursday night it was abundantly clear that Goebbels was having her followed. The tail was a feckless type in standard issue Gestapo clothing with a dark, peasant face, a sweaty suit and rubber raincoat. He had pursued her from Mitte all the way to Steglitz and almost as far as the rendezvous with Arlosoroff himself before Clara became aware of him. Once she did, she had done exactly what Leo had told her. She had waited and watched and taken avoiding strategy and managed to dispose of him. Leo had felt a burning feeling of pride as he observed her.
Perhaps that had been his mistake: to ever imagine that he could protect her.
Somehow, shortly before she reached Brucknerstrasse, the shadow had picked up her trail again. As Leo approached the house from a group of elm trees across the road, he could see the shape of Clara behind the frosted glass in the door, by the looks of it preparing to leave. The image of Arlosoroff was by her side. Suddenly, a glimmer of movement caught his eye. A few feet away from him, shrouded in darkness and merged with the shadow of a tree, the man was standing. His outline was barely visible, and his tread was silent on the mossy earth, but in the damp air Leo caught the smell of him, a rank combination of beer and cheap aftershave. And even from behind it was possible to see hanging from his palm the unmistakable shape of a handgun. In the glint of moonlight Leo recognized it as a small Walther PPK, the
Polizeipistol Kriminal
, standard issue to all Nazi undercover agents.
The shock of seeing the pistol, prepared and ready to use, astonished him. Was Goebbels really planning to shoot the messenger? What was the point of that? Unless, in Goebbels’ twisted mind, the death of Magda’s little go-between was intended as a stark message to cease her assignations with other men.
For a moment, it was as though the four of them – Clara, Arlosoroff, Leo and the agent – were suspended outside time. Behind the glass door the figure of Clara and Arlosoroff remained talking. Arlosoroff had extended his arm to Clara’s shoulder. Leo heard the slide of greased metal as the man cocked his trigger.
Was it the crack of a twig or some minute muscular twitch in Leo’s body? Whatever it was, like a rabbit scenting movement, the man sensed him and turned blindly, pointing the gun straight in Leo’s direction. Without hesitating, Leo felt for the Beretta that hung in a leather sheath just below his left armpit and for the first time in his life, in a single smooth movement, managed to fire directly at the figure in his sights.
It was almost startling to see how swiftly the man crumpled and fell. He would never have guessed how easy it was to kill someone. How quickly life evaporated from the body, lifting off into the air like dew, even while his blood darkened the dirt. The man lay on the ground, arm splayed in surrender to his approaching death. Coming closer Leo saw that the shot had punctured his chest directly in the area of the heart. He was an ugly fellow, with a lantern jaw and a brow you could break your fist on. He gave a last cough, bringing a bubble of blood to his mouth, before turning his head aside, as if in a gesture of resignation.
A clean kill
, were the words Leo heard running through his head.
He looked around him. If any local resident had heard the shot, they had probably pulled their curtains a bit closer and turned up the wireless. Turning a deaf ear to nocturnal crime was the best policy in Berlin right now. Shaking himself out of his shock, Leo caught the man by the armpits and hauled him up. He was a bruiser of an agent but the rush of adrenaline coursing through Leo’s veins made the effort almost negligible. He found a spot a few yards away where tree trimmers had left a pile of branches. That was unusual in an area like this. Tidiness was not just a civic but a moral virtue in Berlin. The danger was that someone would be back to clean it up all too soon. He had no choice, though. He covered the corpse as best he could, then followed Clara back to the city.