The City of Fading Light Read online

  THE CITY OF FADING LIGHT

  Jon Cleary

  TO GEORGE GREENFIELD

  Copyright © 1985 by Jon Cleary

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First ebook edition 2013 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-817-9

  Library ISBN 978-1-62460-145-3

  Cover photo © TK/iStock.com.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  MORE JON CLEARY EBOOKS

  THE CITY OF FADING LIGHT

  Life, as Mistinguett said, for once trying to take attention away from her famous legs, is a music-hall. And history, like truth, is a juggler’s ball. It has been tossed this way and that by historians, politicians, generals and other assorted entertainers. Since this book is fiction, I have ventured to join the music-hall act.

  The first major plot against Hitler took place in the summer of 1938; I have tossed it into the summer of 1939 and used my own characters.

  By coincidence the missing sections of Dr Joseph Goebbels’ published diaries are those covering the period of this story. I have supplied them from my own imagination, an illusionist’s trick.

  I can only hope that the reader in the stalls does not think my dexterity and deception is too clumsy. Please take your seat in the music-hall that was Berlin in August-September 1939 . . .

  1

  I

  “I AM always puzzled,” said Dr Goebbels, “which part of you is Irish and which is American. Are you sure there is no German in you? You speak our language so well.”

  “Not really, Herr Reichsminister. But I grew up in Yorkville, the German section of Manhattan. I picked it up from the other kids. Then, since I’ve been working on this picture, I’ve had a dialogue coach.”

  Cathleen O’Dea was a good actress: she disguised the fact that she was telling less than the truth.

  “There is a very strong Bund in Yorkville. All good Germans.” Goebbels, too, could act: he made an expatriate group of Nazis sound like latter-day Pilgrims.

  Cathleen had been at ease with most men ever since she had become aware of their interest in her; their admiration had never gone to her head but only into her bank of confidence. Joseph Goebbels, however, made her feel she was walking on thin ice, that beneath the veneer of casual conversation there was a deep black lake into which she had to avoid falling. He was smiling, his dark watchful eyes focused on her as if they were alone and not surrounded by his bodyguards and all the studio crew and executives. He had charm, of a sort, but she knew too much about him to be taken in by it. She had spent six years in Hollywood, where charm was a manufactured product; any girl who had been stroked, even if only on a film set, by Clark Gable and Robert Taylor was not about to fall on her back for a Nazi lecher. Her mother, an enemy of both Nazis and lechers, would not have approved.

  The Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was a notorious stud ram, the Ram of Babelsberg: there was no lying propaganda about that. Cathleen had been told, by someone who had professed to have the exact figures, that Dr Goebbels had bedded no less than 38 actresses from the UFA film studios at Neubabelsberg; there was no count on the number of actresses from the legitimate theatre whom he had serviced, though, being legitimate, they may have been harder to seduce. He was short, plain almost to the point of ugliness, and had a club foot: he was, in short, a most unlikely Don Juan. And now, Cathleen realized with queasy qualm, he was pursuing her.

  “Do you like your role in the film?”

  “It is a good part for an actress. I wouldn’t like to have been her in real life.”

  “Why not? Lola Montez had the world at her feet.” For a split moment he looked as if he wished he had chosen a better image; she noticed the almost imperceptible withdrawal of his right foot with its surgical boot. “The Emperor Ludwig idolized her. Surely any woman would welcome an emperor who idolized her?”

  She wondered if Hitler saw himself eventually as an emperor; if Goebbels wanted to be seen as the Crown Prince. Though people had told her that he would never be the Fuehrer’s successor, that he would always be the outsider. “Times have changed. There aren’t any emperors any more.”

  “King George of England is known as the Emperor of India.”

  “I can’t see Lola as being a piece on the side at Buckingham Palace.”

  Goebbels laughed and his bodyguard and the UFA executives echoed him; Cathleen felt she had just uttered a Mae West witticism. But in the background she saw Melissa Hayes roll her eyes and behind her Helmut von Albern turned away in disgust at the cheap crack.

  Shooting had stopped when the Reichsminister and his entourage had come on to the set. It was a set representing a wing in the Emperor’s palace in 19th century Munich; Ludwig I, who had been the most flamboyant if not the maddest of Bavaria’s monarchs, had built it in the style of Venice’s Palazzo Pitti. The lath and plaster walls and ceilings towered over everyone on the sound stage; carpenters rather than courtiers stood back in the shadows. Despite the workmen’s overalls and the motley dress of the film crew, the set had a grandeur to it that impressed; the art director had let history go to his head. He had also been influenced by the fact that half an hour’s drive away in Berlin similar monuments to a ruler's ego were being built. Though they, the boast went, were being built to last a thousand years and not, like this set, to be struck next week.

  Goebbels lingered and Cathleen tried to keep up her part of the conversation. She knew it was banal, as bad as the dialogue she had been speaking for the past three months. Lola und Ludwig would never win an Oscar and she knew it would do nothing for her career; but she had not come to Germany to further her career. The picture was a big lavish production, sponsored by Goebbels himself as the minister responsible for films; it was the most expensive film so far produced in Germany, done in English and German, and aimed at the world market. Since the advent of the Nazi regime, German films had not done well in the foreign market and Goebbels, so rumour said, had taken it as a personal slight. He and Hitler were the two film enthusiasts amongst the Nazi hierarchy and both men considered themselves educated critics of what was good and bad in the cinema. It was no secret that Goebbels had great admiration for the Hollywood product, but the scriptwriters and the director on Lola und Ludwig had let him down badly, though so far he did not know that. It might have been better if they had forgotten Ludwig I and somehow linked Lola Montez with his mad grandson Ludwig II; that way some of the ludicrous dialogue might have sounded, if not believable, at least entertaining. Cathleen knew the picture was turning out to be a real turkey, a messy mix of second-rate Busby Berkeley and third-rate Ernst Lubitsch. What it needed, she had decided, was Laurel and Hardy: they might have succeeded in turning it into a comedy classic.

  At last the Reichsminister decided he had to go. He had sensed that Cathleen was not flattered by his attention; his mouth had turned sullen and his dark eyes had lost their gleam of humour. He slapped his gloves against the palm of one hand, then pulled them on, despite the heat of the day; he was never seen in public without them and, though the image was ridiculous, he reminded Cathleen of the convent girls she had gone to school with; gloves had been an obligatory part of their uniform. Goebbels had once been a Catholic: if he had worn gloves as a schoolboy, that was all he had left of his religion.
/>   “Goodbye, Fräulein O’Dea. We must meet again soon.”

  The invitation was there, but she chose not to recognize it. He gave a curt little bow and was gone, his staff marching away after him like a pack of well-drilled guard dogs. They were all bigger than he and once they closed in behind him he was lost to view; he left no ghost of his presence. Small men should choose martial midgets as their entourage or, if they must have big men, be borne aloft on a ceremonial chair. But that, of course, would be too papal and, unlike Ludwig, he had no liking for things Italian. Except, of course, Machiavelli.

  The studio executives breathed their collective sigh of relief and they, too, departed. Karl Braun, the director, came across to Cathleen. Plump, pink-faced and pretentious, given to gestures larger than his talents, he was everything that she despised in a director; it had taken all her control not to fight him from the very first day on the set. In Hollywood he might have held a job on the Republic or Monogram lots; here at UFA, which had once employed men such as Lubitsch and Lang, he was now one of the leading directors. Being a Nazi Party member of fifteen years’ standing had its advantages.

  “We may as well break for lunch, darling.” He always spoke English to her, in a thick guttural accent that made him sound as if he were speaking through a mouthful of porridge. “The Minister, I think, has spoiled the mood for all of us.”

  “Doesn’t he always?” she said and walked away before Braun, a fawning Party man, could protest that he had meant something entirely different from what she had inferred.

  She left the set, went out of the big dark stage into the bright hot sunlight and walked up towards the building that housed the stars’ and leading players’ dressing-rooms. The UFA lot was the largest in Europe, but it did not match the size or the facilities of M-G-M in Culver City, where she had spent the last six years. Louis B. Mayer, who had sent for her and expressed his vitriolic disgust at her for wanting to go to Germany and had promised her that she would never work in Hollywood again, would have been pleased, if still not forgiving, to know that she missed all the advantages of the Culver City studios. For the first time she was a star, but she had done better as a contract supporting player on Mr. Mayer’s roster.

  Fritz Till was setting out his lunch on a camera dolly as she passed him. He looked up and smiled at her, bowing a little without rising from his seat on the small wheeled platform; he always treated her with a courtesy that she found old-worldly and charming. He was the gaffer, the head electrician, and in terms of experience he was the oldest man on the lot. He had worked on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis and other classics of the German cinema and, a man of quiet but direct words, he had expressed to her his opinion of Lola und Ludwig. It tallied with her own.

  “Fräulein O’Dea, we are fortunate to have so much sunshine. It has been a good summer.”

  “Has it?” Always careful of what she said, she had occasionally discussed the international situation with him. “What’s the latest news?”

  “The Italians are worried we are going to drag them into the war. Mussolini has sent Ciano up here again to talk to our leaders.” He had a harsh dry voice that he could use to sardonic effect. He was a big man with a big lugubrious face like that of an overfed bloodhound. The lunch he had laid out in front of him would have made three meals for Cathleen.

  “No one here seems too worried.”

  “The young ones don’t know what the last war was like and the old ones have convenient memories—they don’t want to lose their jobs. I spent three years on the Western Front and I remember every day of it.”

  “Did you ever see Lewis Milestone’s movie?” Back in Hollywood she would have called it Lew Ayres’ movie, but here one always called them directors’ movies.

  He nodded, looked more lugubrious, sounded more sardonic than ever. “It was a film, that was all. Nothing like the real thing. Nothing ever could be.” He squinted up at the sun through fearsome eyebrows. “Still, let’s enjoy the sunshine while we have it. Maybe if our leaders keep talking, it’ll soon be winter and then we’ll be safe till next year.”

  “You’re a cynic, Fritz,” she said and was glad. Up ahead she saw Melissa, who was not a cynic but a new, untried friend and therefore less reliable. She left Fritz Till to his huge lunch of knackwurst, sauerkraut, potato salad, pumpernickel, two bottles of beer and several pieces of fruit. The inner man, if not the innermost, would be made happy.

  Melissa held open the door for her and they went into the hallway off which the dressing-rooms were set. After the heat of the morning, first on an outdoor set, then on the brightly-lit indoor set, the air in here was cool but not refreshing. The smell of grease-paint, sweat-soaked costumes and exhausted bodies hung in the hallway and dressing-rooms and assaulted one like bad memories.

  “That Goebbels man gives me the creeps,” said Melissa in a low voice. Doors were open along the hallway and one never knew whose ears were open for the wrong sort of opinions. “I can’t understand why you sucked up to him.”

  “If you’re going to make a career in pictures, honey, you better learn you can’t thumb your nose at the boss.”

  She had learned in Hollywood that men, and men only, ran the picture business. There was only one woman in Hollywood who had any power and she did not work in the business itself: she was Louella Parsons, the gossip columnist. There were, admittedly, Queens of the Silver Screen: Garbo, Shearer, Colbert; but their domains were only in the audiences’ imagination. Men had the power in the real, matter-of-fact empires of the movie world: they controlled the money, owned the shares, owned, indeed, the cattle that were the queens and the stars and the contract players. Here in Germany the situation was the same; except that here, bigger than Mayer or Warner or Zanuck, there was a supreme emperor, kaiser, czar, call him what you liked. His name was Joseph Goebbels.

  “In any case I wasn’t sucking up to him. He knew it, even if you didn’t.”

  Cathleen led the way into her dressing-room. “You want to have lunch with me? I can have it sent over from the commissary.”

  Melissa hesitated, then nodded. “That would be nice. I thought I was having lunch with Helmut, but he’s gone off somewhere.”

  “How’s it coming along with him?” Cathleen took off her costume and put on a robe.

  Melissa sighed, a sign that she had matured; she had not been a sigher when she had arrived in Germany four months ago. She had begun life as Alice Hayfield, but all through her adolescence she had lived in her own mind under a dozen noms-de-théâtre: she had been Claudette, Greta, Sybil, even Shirley; none of them, somehow, had seemed to go with Hayfield. At seventeen she had got a job with a provincial repertory company and a stage manager, with a flair for names and an eye for a nice piece of crumpet, had suggested Melissa Hayes; she had lost her given name and her virginity in the same week. For the next four years her new name had made little impression on anyone, not even the randy stage manager, who had moved on to another repertory company and other ambitious virgins. Then six months ago she had entered a competition run by an ultra-right-wing weekly that believed in Anglo-German friendship; first prize had been a contract with UFA and a part in Lola und Ludwig. She had won the contest and come to Germany determined to be the new Lilian Harvey, another English girl who had made good in German films. She had no politics, was naïve almost to the point of stupidity; she knew the Nazis were supposed to be nasty, but they had done nothing to her personally and she believed in live and let live. She had read the headlines of what Adolf Hitler was doing to Europe, but she had read nothing of the accompanying stories: too much education destroys illusion, though it was laziness and not cynical philosophy that had dictated her reading habits. She had only discovered the right-wing weekly and its contest because someone had told her it had an article on Repertory, the Breeding Ground for Stars. Lately she did not read even the headlines, since they were in German, but she had begun to listen to conversations, which are often more illuminating than newspaper talk, even if specu
lative. All she had listened to previously was gossip, but that is a notorious habit amongst actresses and is sometimes even educational.

  “Sometimes I think Helmut doesn’t give me a thought when he’s not with me.” She looked in Cathleen’s big mirror, as if to reassure herself of her own presence. She was pretty and would always be so; but she would never be beautiful, in the way that some pretty girls can become beautiful women in middle age. She was blonde, blue-eyed and wet-lipped and Helmut’s camera liked her, even if he didn’t. “It’s a terrible bore, being in love. I thought it would be thrilling, but it’s boring.”

  “Not when the man’s in love with you, too.” Cathleen had been in love three times and each time the man had been in love with her; it had just been bad luck that the men had either been married or their careers had taken them away from her. She had been heartbroken for a week or two and philosophical ever since: one should not fall in love with actors, who can never give their undivided love. Not if they believe in themselves as actors, a faith that requires a good deal of self-love. “Have you slept with him?”

  “Four times.” She said it as if she would always keep count. Twenty times, thirty times: point scores in a game that she wanted to turn serious. “But afterwards it’s always as if he has something else on his mind.”

  “That’s the way it is with most men. They’re never very interested or interesting once they’ve got the dirty water off their chest. Even the ones who truly love you.”

  “How are things with you and your Aussie newspaperman? Does he sound as if he’s in love with you?”

  “Who knows? The only other Australian I ever knew was Errol Flynn and this one is nothing like him. I’m not sure whether he’s a gentleman or just doesn’t know how to approach a girl.” She did not really care how Sean Carmody felt about her. She had not come to Germany looking for romance; it was the last thing she wanted, for it would only cause complications. But Sean was pleasant, if quiet, company, and having one regular man on hand kept the others at bay. It was not always true that there was safety in numbers. She smiled, put a hand on Melissa’s. “Don’t get too upset about Helmut. If war breaks out, it’ll be better for you to go home and fall in love with a nice Englishman.”