The Pursuit of Pearls Read Free

most of them carrying black bread sandwiches, bottles of beer, and swastika flags.
    Clara Vine shuffled her feet and looked down at her glossy Ferragamo leather pumps. They were hand-stitched in Florence, had cost the earth, and they hurt like hell.
    Why on earth had she not worn comfortable shoes?
    She was hungry and thirsty and longing to sit down. She had been there since nine that morning, but had only managed to secure a place three deep opposite the Führer’s saluting podium on the Charlottenburger Chaussee. The view to her right was obscured by a large woman with a squashed felt hat, accompanied by two boys of around six and seven. At first Clara had pitied the children, doomed to spend the morning fenced in by a forest of legs, but after hours of their relentless wails, demanding to know when
exactly
the Führer was coming and how much longer would he be, her sympathy was wearing thin. To her left stood a war veteran, medals pinned proudly to his chest, saluting frenetically like someone with uncontrollable muscle spasms. He had come all the way from Saxony, and he was not the only one. Thousands of visitors had poured into Berlin. The stations were teeming, and every hotel from the Adlon down was booked solid. People who couldn’t afford anywhere else had pitched their tents in the parks.
    Like all birthdays, Hitler’s special day had begun with presents, but that was where the ordinariness ended. Vast marble tables had been assembled in the Reich Chancellery to display Meissen porcelain, silver candlesticks, and Titian paintings, alongside rather more modest gifts from ordinary people, largely made up of swastika cakes and cushions. The Pope, the King of England, and Henry Ford had sent telegrams. The engineer Ferdinand Porsche had presented Hitler with a shiny black convertible VW Beetle. Rudolf Hess had acquired a collection of priceless letters written by the Führer’s hero, Frederick the Great, and Albert Speer had given him an entire scale model of “Germania”—the new world capital, with buildings made out of balsa wood and glass and a thirteen-foot model of the proposed triumphal arch. This was, without doubt, Hitler’s favorite present, and he pored over it like a boy with a train set until he could be persuaded to tear himself away.
    On the face of it, Berlin was putting on a magnificent show. Gigantic white pillars had sprouted all along major thoroughfares. The newsstands groaned with souvenir birthday issues. Swastikas sprouted from every conceivable surface. Spring was a riot of color in Berlin, so long as the colors were red and black.
    Beneath the birthday bunting, however, everything was a little shabbier in Germany’s capital. The tablecloths in the restaurants were spotted because there was no detergent, the bread was sawdust, and the ersatz coffee undrinkable. People looked the other way on the trams because there was no toothpaste, precious few razor blades or shaving foam, and the sour odor of humanity and unwashed clothes hung in the U-Bahn. Even high-class nightclubs like Ciro’s stank of low-grade cigarettes, and taxis home were nonexistent because of the gas shortage.
    After the previous year’s Anschluss, when Germany annexed Austria, followed by the bloodless seizure of Czechoslovakia that March, most of Europe guessed a war was on the way. When it happened, it would be Poland’s fault, according to the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, which ensured that newspapers were black with seventy-two-point headlines screaming belligerent revenge on the Poles for their atrocities against Germans in the disputed “Polish corridor.” POLAND , LOOK OUT! There had been murderous attacks on Germans in Danzig. God help any country that stood in Germany’s way.
    Looking around her, Clara guessed that despite the marching and the machines, no one in this great big birthday pageant really wanted war. The ghost of the last war was still in their eyes, and the thought of