Woman in the Shadows Read Free

balustrade, beyond which was a magnificent view of the lake, edged by the gloomy, impenetrable Grunewald. Now, at five in the afternoon, the sun was a molten orb in a streaked caramel sky, turning the waters of the Wannsee into a sheet of hammered gold. At the end of the garden, Clara could see a private beach and a jetty, where Goebbels kept his motor yacht,
Baldur
. Seagulls squawked and wheeled in the sky, and farther out in the lake, a couple of fishermen drifted in their boats, hunched over their tranquil lines waiting for pike, like figures from a nineteenth-century painting.
    Clara crossed her arms and waited, pretending a nonchalance she did not feel, as she tried, yet again, to work out what Magda Goebbels could possibly want with her.
    The message had come that morning out of the blue. A messenger had brought the note to Clara directly onto the set at the Ufa film studios in Babelsberg, where she was filming a romantic comedy called
A Girl for Everything
. He had shouldered his way through the makeup girls and the script man, right into the dazzle of the arc lights, to deliver it. The boy’s face was a picture of urgency and intense curiosity, as befitted a summons from Magda Goebbels, wife of Hitler’s right-hand man and the woman informally known as the First Lady of the Reich. The other actors had looked on avidly as Clara quickly scanned the message, then folded the note and slipped it in a pocket. Her face, she knew, gave nothing away.
    Now Clara walked around the drawing room, assessing the pictures and furniture on display. Last year Goebbels had claimed he was embarrassed to have moved into such a large villa because he hated luxury, yet for the sake of the Reich he could not be expected to receive distinguished guests in his old apartment. One look at this room, however, revealed that his aversion to luxury did not run very deep. The place was furnished in solid bourgeois taste: rich Persian rugs and fat sofas upholstered in satin and watered silk, side tables in restrained nineteenth-century style on a parquet floor polished to a high shine. A Gobelin tapestry hung on the wall, and a Bechstein piano stood in the front window. The standard portrait of the Führer, de rigueur in any Party home, hung above a mantelpiece crowded with family photographs, most of which Clara had already seen in the newspapers. There was Goebbels in open-necked shirt and sunglasses, at the wheel of his motorboat. The four Goebbels children, Helga, Hilde, Helmut, and Holde, the girls in matching white dresses and ribbons, and Helmut in a sailor suit, sitting in their miniature pony carriage. Goebbels, it was said, insisted on one baby a year. Four children may be enough for a string quartet, he joked, but not enough for a National Socialist. He had publicly promised another five babies for the Reich.
    Catching sight of herself in a gold Rococo mirror, Clara scrutinized the picture she presented with a critical eye. She was wearing a buttoned ivory blouse beneath a fitted serge navy suit with a fur collar, her chestnut hair freshly cut in a neat bob. A new, fashionably tilted navy velvet hat. Red Coral lipstick by Max Factor. Lizard-skin clutch bag. Every inch the screen actress whose career was on the rise, though not so successful that she would be recognized on the street. And all of it a façade. Clara was used to a life of deception now. Sometimes deception seemed like an extension of her own being, moving bodily with her as she walked the streets of Berlin or sat with friends in bars or crossed the sets of the Ufa film studios. The Clara Vine she saw in the mirror was both herself and not herself. What the real Clara Vine might look like, she could no longer say.
    Though she couldn’t fault the image, still Clara felt uneasy. The near miss with the peacock had done nothing to improve her nerves. Behind her she heard the creak of the door and the heavy tread of her hostess.
    “You haven’t changed a bit!”
    It sounded