Solitaire Read online

  For Rosemary Thynne

  1932–2015

  Love consists in this: that two solitudes meet, protect, and greet each other.

  Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

  I consider it right if small children of Polish families who show especially good racial characteristics were apprehended and educated by us in special institutions and children’s homes.

  Heinrich Himmler

  Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.

  Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

  Prologue

  Lisbon, July 1940

  The Lisbon coastline is famous for its waves. The beaches that stretch along the westernmost peninsula of continental Europe face the full force of the Atlantic Ocean. In winter vast swells batter the rocky outcrops that curl like a jagged spine around the coast, lashing the gullies and roaring up the sandy beaches. Even in summer glassy crests crash against the rocks and send spray arcing into the air, refracted by sunlight into a thousand splinters of quartz. But in the summer of 1940 another kind of tide descended on the city.

  A flood of human beings.

  Refugees were nothing new to Lisbon. Over the centuries, successive waves of Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors and Crusaders had arrived at the farthest edge of the known world, establishing vineyards in the fertile landscape and fishing from the natural harbour. According to legend, Odysseus founded the city after he left Troy and later a young Christopher Columbus studied there, developing an interest in ocean exploration. But in the first summer of the war, it seemed that half the refugees of Europe had fetched up in neutral Lisbon, heading for the freedom of Britain, Africa and America. A million people: Jews, kings and princesses, prisoners on the run, black marketeers, bankers, writers and artists, all desperate to escape as German forces advanced across Europe and the Nazi noose tightened. A jangle of clashing languages filled the streets as travellers waited for exit permits and transit visas to make their tortuous way through lengthy bureaucratic channels. The rich stayed in converted palaces, the poor haunted the shabby cafés and those who couldn’t afford even a roof over their heads slept rough in the docks and alleys of the ancient city, kept alive by soup kitchens.

  And in the midst of this anxious, shifting population were spies of all kinds. Agents from the Gestapo and MI6, double agents and informers, thronging the bars of cheap hotels, supplementing exile with espionage. Alongside the official spies were a legion of unofficial ones – waiters, bartenders, shopkeepers and gardeners – watching, waiting and informing. For everyone in that crowded, turbulent city, Lisbon was the very end of the world.

  Just west of Lisbon, at the plush beach resort of Estoril, at a few minutes after midnight, a young woman was also waiting. Estoril was the destination of choice for the wealthier and more aristocratic of the refugees, with its sapphire waters and well-raked beach festooned with bathing cabins and palm umbrellas. At one end, like an abandoned sandcastle, stood the turreted, mock Gothic folly of a tower. The town was more than just the Portuguese Riviera, it was the Riviera, Biarritz and Monte Carlo rolled into one, a place jokingly known as the ‘Royal Morgue of Europe’ for the number of crowned heads and titled people who flocked there, and the biggest attraction was the Hotel Palacio, a handsome building in white limestone, set on one side of a square that enclosed a manicured park, studded with fountains and palm trees. Although the hotel’s corridors were hung with photographs of royal and celebrity guests, the grand mirrored salons, gold filigree walls and fretted woodwork had very little to do with the hotel’s popularity. That was entirely down to the casino, one of the best in Europe, where the tips were lavish and the rich flocked every night of the week, desperate to wile away their time with roulette, backgammon and chemin de fer.

  The night was rich and dark, dense as a wedding cake, and the sky powdered with stars. The young woman stood to one side of the casino’s pillared door, trying to remain inconspicuous as knots of people drifted through the glass doors and across the thick red carpet to the gaming room. Inside, chandeliers hung on gold painted ropes, bored croupiers raked the tables and a layer of cigar smoke was intercut by musky drifts of Chanel, Lanvin and Worth. The atmosphere was the same as in any casino the world over: joyless, thick with alcohol and moneyed voices. Occasionally the woman would venture out of the shadow and peer past the porters and bellboys, trying to catch a glimpse inside, but each time she hesitated and withdrew again, drawing her silk jacket closer around her. A black, strapless evening gown, decorated with silver faux-Chinese motifs, hung on her like a negligee and a single strand of pearls circled her neck. She had a gleaming drape of charcoal-coloured hair, eggshell skin, a soft pillow of lips, and a face that had broken a hundred hearts.

  The night air raised goose bumps on her flesh and she braced herself, as though she could shrug off the shadows like a sable stole. On the opposite side of the square the red neon sign of the casino expanded and contracted like an artery and a short way away the shivering glitter of the sea was advancing and receding, tugging the shingle outwards to America and back to Europe again. Raucous laughter and the crash of bottles rattled from a nearby bar. The splayed branches of pine trees fractured the dark sky and as she stood there shivering, a momentary waft of resin transported her hundreds of miles, back to the pine-scented Grunewald of Berlin.

  Berlin. Nothing about her life in that city could have predicted her presence here, all alone, in an unfamiliar town on the far westerly edge of Europe. Not the ranks of teachers at school or the marching and massed parades and gymnastics in the Tiergarten. Not the dancing and singing, nor the nightclubs, nor the stint at the Haus Vaterland, draped across a grand piano, trying to be Marlene Dietrich. At the thought of it she instinctively flexed a leg with the toe pointed and circled it slowly, as though she was warming up for a performance.

  It was love that had brought her here. Damned, inconvenient love. She had always imagined herself immune, as though she’d had an injection against it, like you had for a disease. She prided herself on her indifference. Her heart was as hard as a Wehrmacht helmet. Melting eyes and tender protestations glanced off her like raindrops from the windshield of a pale blue Mercedes convertible, the kind she had always dreamed of owning. But somehow, love had undermined her defences and left her stranded here, three countries away from home, frozen, uncomfortable and very afraid.

  She shivered again, shuffling toes that were growing slowly numb in her high heels, and tried to calculate the time. She was, in fact, perfectly used to high heels and late nights; back in Berlin, midnight was nothing. Usually, two o’clock in the morning was her favourite time, when everything slowed down and the harsh edges of the city relaxed. Often she would still be out at dawn, when the housewives first appeared at their doors, clutching their dressing gowns to their necks, looking for the milk cart. But on this particular night, the waiting was a strain. A numbing exhaustion was seeping through her body, up from her legs, coaxing her into a waking doze, forcing her to shake herself awake. She wished yet again that she could find a cigarette, but smoking might draw unwelcome attention. Coffee would help, and the bar across the square was still open, its light fizzing over a few plastic tables, yet she dared not desert her post. Instead she took out a chunk of chocolate from her jacket pocket and let it dissolve slowly on her tongue, staring restlessly at the casino from her vantage place in the shadows. It helped that her performer’s training had instilled a certain vigilance in her, a hypersensitivity to her surroundings, and she told herself that standing here was no different from waiting in the wings, poised to enter the stage for her moment of action.

  It was past three in the morning before there was any sign that her long vigil might not be in vain. A group of men in dinner jackets and patent leather shoes, ladies in gowns and jew
els emerged from the casino and stood chatting. She stiffened to attention. They were like a flock of exotic nocturnal creatures, the trill of female voices and the gruff bark of the men rising and falling as cigars were lit up and the women drew furs around their shoulders. Floral perfume carried faintly on the night air. She studied them intently for a while, checking their faces against the image she carried in her head, running through the options, until they broke apart and began to amble across the close-cropped lawn. Now was her moment. She slipped from the shadow and started to move towards them, but even as she did, at the far edge of her peripheral vision she registered a flicker that resolved itself into the shape of two men approaching in her direction. The sight stopped her dead. There was no question who they must be. She knew at once, from the sleek cut of their plainclothes suits, so different from the shapeless grey-green uniform the ordinary Portuguese policemen wore, that they were secret police. The only issue was whether they been watching her and, if so, for how long?

  She hesitated for a second, then spurred by panic quickened her pace towards the group in evening wear, down the steps of the casino to the carefully tended lawn, her heels sinking into the grass. Her movement prompted the men in suits to break into a faster walk. They were coming diagonally towards her, seemingly aiming to intercept her long before she managed to meet the people she had come to see.

  Rattled, she turned and darted back into the shadow, but the men were only twenty yards away now, jogging in her direction with obvious intent. Where to go? To one side of the casino an alley of stained concrete led down into deeper darkness and on the spur of the moment she gambled and headed in, praying for an escape at the end. But several yards down she found a twelve-foot chain-wire fence that would be impossible to scale. A bad call.

  Heart racing, mind flooding with possibilities, she made a swift reverse out of the alley. The two men were nearer now and one of them was walking with his right arm held close to his chest, as though holding something. It was a technique she had heard of. It was helpful in concealing a gun.

  She ran blindly, as well as she could in heels, feeling the circle on her back where the bullet would penetrate. In her mind’s eye she could see the flash of the gun’s muzzle before she heard it because she knew that light travels faster than sound. She could sense her life exploding, far from home, far away from everything she held dear.

  She ran into the square, hoping to camouflage herself in the dense shrubbery to one side of the park, but it was too late. Her foot slipped on the grass, still damp from its nightly watering, and she fell awkwardly, hitting the back of her head on an ornamental rock. The men were upon her.

  Light spasmed into her eyes, and she raised a hand to cover them. She dabbed a wet streak on the back of her head and tasted the sharp, metallic tang of blood. Pain was beating a tattoo across her temples. She felt the life force leaking from her like champagne from a broken bottle.

  Struggling to her feet she stood transfixed, wondering if the palpitations of her heart were visible beneath her silk jacket, and found herself looking into a vulpine face with pockmarked skin and sunken eyes.

  ‘And there was I thinking you were pleased to see us.’

  The policeman rocked backwards on his heels. He was smoking a cigarette and stank of cheap tobacco. He spoke bad German. She wondered how he knew.

  ‘I’m in a hurry. I need to get home.’

  The second policeman was fat with blackened teeth, pebbledash complexion and a low brow. His face was glossy with the sweat of pursuit and the whites of his eyes were threaded with a red filigree of veins. The pair had the air of a variety act. Fat and thin. Playful and intensely pleased with themselves.

  ‘No time for conversation?’

  ‘Not at this time of night.’

  The first man spat out his cigarette stub sideways.

  ‘But you’re out at night. What kind of lady is out alone so late?’

  ‘The kind who’s been working late.’

  ‘Papers.’

  ‘I don’t have them on me.’

  ‘That’s a crime, you know. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Just waiting for someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My boyfriend.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Why do you need to know?’

  ‘Normally, lady, it’s us who ask the questions.’

  The double act continued. The fat policeman was dull, meat-faced, relishing the repartee.

  ‘So we have a girl with no name and a boyfriend who doesn’t have one either. What do you have then?’

  ‘I have this.’

  She fumbled in her pocket and pressed something into his palm.

  ‘Take this. It’s better than any papers.’

  The policeman stared for a moment at the object in his hand.

  ‘What the hell is it?’

  ‘Show it to your superior. He’ll understand.’

  The man laughed and handed it to his colleague. From the casino door, a ribbon of music unravelled in the night air.

  ‘That’s if it’s yours to begin with. If you’re up to what we think, lady, it’ll take more than that.’

  With a force out of all proportion to the young woman’s size, the fat man seized the tender flesh of her upper arm in one meaty fist and wrestled her past the incurious casino guests to a waiting car across the square.

  Chapter One

  Berlin, June 1940

  Berlin was in darkness. Darker than it had any business to be at ten o’clock on a summer night. Darkness that was more than just the absence of light, but was dense and sooty, composed of folded layers of shadow that collected at the base of buildings and shrouded the narrow alleyways and courtyards. Darkness that blackened the granite icebergs of the government ministries in Mitte, with their tunnels and their bunkers and torture cellars that penetrated deep beneath the street. Darkness that had shuttered the shop fronts along the Kurfürstendamm, doused the jittery fluorescence of the theatre district, and extinguished the beacon on the Funkturm, Berlin’s famous radio tower. Darkness so thick it felt heavy to breathe. It obliterated the tenements in the outer suburbs and closed every window in the city like the eyes of a corpse. It rolled like smoke across the canal and over the railway tracks that led westwards to Potsdam, eastwards to Lichtenberg and further to the most distant outposts of the Reich.

  Berlin in the first summer of the war was drowned in a darkness that penetrated the eyes and tunnelled right to the very recesses of the soul.

  Clara Vine came out of the station at Potsdamer Platz and made her way confidently through the gloom. Until recently Potsdamer Platz had been the busiest intersection in Europe, a five-way maelstrom of honking buses and screeching trams, blazing with multicoloured neon, but since last autumn when war broke out, it had been a very different square. Quieter, because the petrol ration had driven almost all private vehicles from the streets, yet much more perilous at night. Soft curses could be heard as people stumbled on cobbles trying to navigate their way by the phosphorescent paint on the kerbstones, or bumped into lamp posts and fire hydrants set in the centre of the pavement. Buses lurched past like ships, their windows painted blue in the funereal murk, their headlights veiled to show the merest crack of light. The only illumination came from the sporadic violet sparks off tram rails and the dancing circles of torchlight that preceded people along the pavement.

  Most pedestrians had a pocket torch, its light obediently muffled with turquoise filter paper. You were only supposed to use it intermittently to check the path, and if you left your torch on for too long you would be shouted at for violating the rules of the blackout. But Clara didn’t bother with a torch because the route was as familiar to her as her own face. First left from the station, across the canal, past Lützowstrasse and right at Bülowstrasse towards the arched dome of Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn, then right towards a street that ends in a tree-fringed square, where a red-brick church tower stands like a ship’s mast. She knew every turn and p
aving, and exactly how many paces it was from the end of her street to the door of her block. She had followed this route for seven years, yet still it felt strange walking through these silent streets. This neighbourhood in the Nollendorfplatz area – known to everyone as Nolli – was once famous for its risqué nightclubs and cabarets, and even after the Nazis arrived it was crammed with restaurants, bars and cafés whose customers spilled out onto the pavement in summer, beneath the rattle of the elevated S-Bahn, chatting until the early hours.

  Yet now the only nightly music to be heard was the air-raid siren. For months everyone in Berlin had assumed that enemy planes would confine themselves to military targets, and could never, even if they tried, penetrate the city’s formidable battery of anti-aircraft guns. Yet the first raid had come that month, provoking flak like terrible fireworks and searchlights dancing frantically across the sky. Since then, Clara had spent several evenings huddled in her block’s damp, odorous shelter, a deep concrete space lined with wooden benches and sandbags. There was a desultory attempt at furniture, a few tables for card games, coarse, itchy blankets that smelled of mould and space for Jews in the hall outside. A couple of times a local stray cat had crept in and found Clara’s lap, a skinny black and white creature quite threadbare compared to the plump, assured beasts that had stalked her childhood home – yet the feel of his fur between her fingers was intensely comforting and she unconsciously looked round for him every time the siren sounded.

  The only other diversion was her neighbour Franz Engel, a doctor from the Charité hospital, who would entertain her with stories of his patients. Clara would reciprocate with gossip from the Babelsberg film studios where she was under contract as an actress. Never politics – no one speculated about that, and besides, what was there to speculate about? With all foreign news stations and newspapers banned, everyone was of the same opinion. Germany, protected by its alliance with Russia to the east and to the west a neutral America, had marched across Europe at lightning speed. Belgium and Holland had dropped into the Nazis’ laps like ripe plums. France had fallen in six short weeks. Now the Luftschlacht um England, the air invasion of England, was only weeks away. Hermann Goering, it was said, had the plans for the attack all mapped out. Virulent anti-British propaganda was everywhere. A tide of feverish hatred rose in the city. The British were Krämervolk – a nation of shopkeepers – and when troops marched down Unter den Linden they sang the most popular song of the day, Wir fahren gegen Engeland. We march against England.