‘Don’t think you’re escaping me, Clara. Or that because I’m going away that I won’t be able to keep an eye on you. I will be keeping the closest of eyes on you. As will the Herr Doktor, I fear. So think of it this way. You need me now.’
He kissed her, pushed her away, and strode off down the corridor.
Leo went straight to Xantener Strasse, let himself in and proceeded through the unlit hallway and up the stone steps. He noted that one of the pigeonholes that held the post for each resident of the block had been emptied. Evidently, the owner of the flat downstairs, the proprietor of the Munich ceramics factory, was in town. With a resident in the flat below they would need to be careful.
Closing the door behind him, he took a look around the flat as if seeing it for the first time. This place was meant to be anonymous. Everything about it from its matted carpet to its chipped bathroom and tired furniture covered with dingy chintz had been chosen for precisely that effect. The kitchen, clumsily partitioned from the living room, with its single-ring cooker and nicotine-stained walls. The dreary view of rooftops and a brick wall advertizing Lufthansa, featuring an aeroplane escaping through grimy clouds to sunnier climes. The wallpaper, with its pattern of flowers imprisoned between bars of stripes, which no one with an ounce of taste could ever have chosen. It was a transitional place, where people met and passed like ghosts, and yet now this space of nothingness was filled with her. For him, the flat was resonant with images of Clara. She stood at the basin and leant against the pillows of the bed. The sheets bore her imprint. Her face laughed at him in the mirror.
He threw himself down in the armchair, lit a cigarette and waited. It would be the last time they could use Xantener Strasse. If Clara was being followed it was compromised now. But for one afternoon, for just a few hours, Leo wanted to indulge himself. To pretend that they were ordinary lovers, meeting for the reasons that ordinary lovers do.
Precisely at three the bell rang and he went downstairs. Opening the door, he put his finger to his lips, and brought her inside. It was raining outside and minute beads of fine rain powdered her coat. The damp air had caused her hair to curl and framed a few crystalline drops in the tendrils around her face. Her skin, bearing the remnants of studio make-up, had an absurdly healthy glow. Once in the apartment Leo caught her in his arms for a deep, lingering kiss.
She pushed him to arm’s length and scrutinized him.
‘This is a bit reckless, isn’t it? I thought we were supposed to be following procedure?’
His hands were running through her hair, stroking down over her hips and thighs. He began to slip her clothes off, first the coat, then the blue dress he liked with the polka dots.
‘I’d only just got back from the studio. Frau Lehmann thought it rather odd that I should be needed urgently for a poetry reading at three o’clock in the afternoon.’
‘She’s right.’ He was kissing her neck. ‘The poetry reading is postponed.’
‘So why did you need to see me?’
‘Do you need to ask?’
He flicked apart the clip of her bra and tugged her slip so that it rode up to her waist. She felt his fingers, probing and caressing, and the excitement of being with him beginning to overpower her. She pressed herself closer and inhaled the warm musk of his skin as he dipped his face to her neck, then her breasts, then lifted her up, with her legs around his waist and carried her through to the bed.
After they had made love, he lay and studied her with the close, meticulous attention that was part of everything he did. His lust for her extended to every physical detail. He wanted to capture and swallow everything about her, from the delicate shoulder blades, to the flicker of the pulse in her throat, right down to the violet network of veins on the arch of her foot. Every curve and hollow of her body. He would have liked to study her close-up, as you would in a film, without making her self-conscious or embarrassed. Seeing her naked made it easier for him to imagine that they were somewhere else entirely, somewhere uncomplicated and dull, where people laughed and argued and loved without subterfuge. But as he looked at her he noticed a faint purple line of bruises along the top of each arm.
‘What happened here?’
She rubbed her arms instinctively. ‘Müller came to the studio this morning. He said Goebbels was furious with me. He seemed to think I had something to do with a man being killed the night I delivered Magda’s message. He warned me Goebbels might have me arrested.’
‘A man was killed?’
‘A police agent, apparently. I have no idea what why Goebbels should think I’m involved in it. But I’m worried, Leo. He knew I was in Steglitz, so I think he must know about Magda’s lover.’
Leo’s throat constricted. He felt the words stall in his mouth, as if reluctant to emerge and change everything.
‘He does. That’s why I got in contact. I needed to warn you.’
‘But how could he possibly have found out?’
‘Head Office let him know.’
‘Head Office? You mean you told him!’
‘Not me. People I work for.’ Leo was about to launch into some kind of defence of their strategy, but why bother? One look at her face, cheeks scarlet with shock and betrayal, and he felt the same.
‘But why, Leo?’
‘They thought it would be safer for you if Goebbels believed you were helping him. That you had felt some kind of moral conflict about Magda’s affair. They did it without telling me, Clara. You know I wouldn’t have agreed to it.’
She moved away from him and stared straight ahead. ‘Exactly what happened?’
‘Goebbels received an anonymous note about Magda and Arlosoroff I only discovered this morning. I needed to tell you straight away.’
She looked at him, comprehension suddenly dawning. ‘So that’s why.’
‘Why what?’
‘Goebbels had asked me to keep an eye on Magda. He must have had his suspicions. Then a few days ago at the Fashion Show he thanked me personally. For everything I’d done.’
She sprang out of bed, shattering the spell of her nakedness, covering herself again, clipping on her stockings and pulling on her blouse.
‘I need to warn Arlosoroff.’
‘How can you? Do you even know where he is?’
She picked up the watch she had left beside the bed.
‘He’ll be at the Anhalter Bahnhof in one hour.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’
‘I just do.’ She pulled on her coat and buckled her shoes, the transformation complete.
Leo sprang up and caught her arms urgently. ‘Clara, you can’t go. If they’re following you, they’ll pick up your trail and you’ll lead them straight to him. It’s exactly the wrong thing to do. It places you both at risk.’
She was buttoning her coat. ‘I have to warn him. I owe it to him.’
He wanted to restrain her, but she was pulling herself from his arms.
‘Listen to me. You don’t owe Arlosoroff anything.’
‘But I do, you see, Leo. It’s my fault. He sent a message to Magda and I didn’t pass it on. He’s expecting to meet her at the station. If she doesn’t turn up he’ll stay on in Berlin, trying to get her to leave. He’s a stubborn man. An honourable man. He’ll seek her out and try to persuade her. He’ll get in touch, only this time, Goebbels will be waiting. It’s me who has put him in danger and I need to tell him he must leave straight away. Tonight.’
‘If you go, I can’t protect you. Müller is right. It would be, very, very bad for you if you were arrested.’
He saw himself as if from above, naked and white-faced with rumpled hair, pleading with her, trying to make her understand.
‘They could lock you up. They could torture you. You know about torture, don’t you? I couldn’t help you. I wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it.’
A thought ran through her head. It was the question she had asked herself on her first day in Berlin.
What is the worst that could happen?
‘I know what I’m doing, Leo.’
‘And I couldn’t bear anything to happen to you, because . . .’ He caught her face in his hands. ‘I have known from the day I first saw you and every second since that you are the most remarkable woman I’ve met. I’m thirty-three years old and I’ve never felt like this about anyone.’
He saw her falter, and her eyes fill, but she didn’t reply.
‘What was the first rule I told you, Clara? Keep yourself safe. Otherwise you endanger other people too.’
‘And the second rule was, sometimes you have to abandon the rules.’
She reached up and kissed him. Her face was intent and removed in that completely focused way he had seen before. Though he watched, agonized, as she walked out the door, he still marvelled at her resolution. Whatever had made him think she was unsuited to this life?
Dusk was falling as Clara approached the Anhalter Bahnhof. The crowd flowed in one direction on the pavements. Commuters with briefcases and determined expressions were making their way from the office and back to the suburbs, no doubt thinking about the supper that waited for them, and the children to be played with and the pleasures of the weekend ahead.
A few streets away she got off the bus, merged into the crowd and walked briskly, head down and lost in thought. She was a shop girl, anxious to get home after a day spent on aching feet.
She might not have noticed them at all if it hadn’t been for the woman’s shoes. Her suit was a dull brown, just the kind of thing any office worker might wear, but the shoes were a contrast, a rich claret colour, accessorized with white daisies stitched into the leather and a midsize heel. Lovely shoes, they were, suggesting a frivolity quite at odds with the utilitarian suit. Helga would have liked those, Clara thought, keeping her eyes to the ground. The shoes clipped along in front of her in the crowd, but paused as their owner stopped to look in a shop. Then, to Clara’s surprise, a few minutes later, the shoes appeared ahead of her again. How did that happen? Looking up, her senses tensed and she realized she had company.
From what she could make out there were two of them, one in front and one behind. The woman was young, perhaps her own age, with a headscarf and glasses. The man wore a black fedora above ginger hair. He carried a briefcase and had a languid stride, just fast enough to suggest purpose, but slow enough to change tack if necessary. He had a scar on his face, which drew down the side of one eye, like a perpetual wink. They kept a couple of yards’ distance, dodging the people in their way, weaving in and out of the crowds in a determined manner. From what she could tell they seemed to be moving in a co-ordinated fashion, one falling back as the other overtook. Leo had told her about this strategy. A box, it was called. For all she knew there was a trio, with another in a car cruising by.
In the hope of losing them Clara took an abrupt right off Stresemannstrasse, and found herself heading away from the station down Prinz Albrecht Strasse, past the new Gestapo headquarters, where political prisoners lined the cells and the names of thousands more Communists, trade unionists, Jews, freemasons, religious leaders and other enemies of the state were imprisoned in a vast, automated filing system. She wondered if there was a file on her, with instructions perhaps on surveillance, and details of her habits and associates. Instinctively she crossed the road. No one walked past that place now without a shudder. She took another right at the end of the road and then right again down Anhalter Strasse, which brought her in a circle. She didn’t dare glance at her watch. What better way could there be of signalling that a meeting was planned?
At the end of the street the tall portal of the Anhalter Bahnhof loomed into view, with its twin figures above the entrance, Night and Day, one with its eyes closed and the other staring out into the distance. Her diversion had been pointless. By now the woman was at two o’clock and the man behind her at seven o’clock, and despite the crowds they were keeping increasingly close, boxing her in and restricting her movement as if trapping her in a net. Clara’s heart was pumping and fear was slicing through her, settling in the marrow of her bones. Did they want her, or Arlosoroff? She needed to lose them quickly, but how?
The station was no more than a hundred meters away on the other side of Stresemannstrasse when she passed a stately building that she recognized with a jolt of surprise as the Hotel Excelsior. The very same hotel that had featured in
Grand Hotel
. The place Greta Garbo made famous when she said she wanted to be alone. Well, Clara knew exactly what Garbo meant. She wanted to be alone too, so she ducked through the revolving doors and looked around.
She really didn’t have the first idea what she could do there, other than achieve a moment’s respite from her followers on the street. There was an air of hushed luxury in the lobby. Receptionists in gold-braided jackets manned a vast desk and bellhops in navy uniforms with brass buttons pushed expensive cases around. She knew within seconds the tails would be making their way through the revolving doors.
As she glanced across the expanse of chequered black and white tiles, a sign caught her eye, “
Verkaufsladen Im Tunnel
”, and beneath it the mahogany doors of an elevator. The famous tunnel! She remembered now. Because the Excelsior was designed for business travellers, a tunnel had been built to run directly beneath the street through to the station opposite. It was all part of the five-star experience. It meant guests could go straight from their hotel to their train without having to negotiate the chaotic traffic above them. Clara almost sighed with relief. Walking across to reception, she asked in English for Herr Winkelman in room 368.
‘I’m sorry Fräulein. There is no one of that name in that room.’
‘But he told me! Room 368! Fourth floor.’
‘You must be mistaken, I’m afraid. For a start that room is not on the fourth floor.’
Leaning closer towards the receptionist, in a confidential tone she said, ‘But he’s waiting for me. Fourth floor, he said. I remember exactly. And it’s very important that I see him.’
The man licked a finger and began running through the register.