The Pursuit of Pearls by Jane Thynne

Author:Jane Thynne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

22

For a second, as Clara awoke and stretched out luxuriously on Ursula’s white linen sheets, the day ahead lay sunlit and full of possibilities. Outside, it was an exquisite morning. Wild birds were calling, pale columns of birch trees shimmered around the languorous expanse of the Griebnitzsee, and clumps of reeds rose like slender green blades from its depths. Then she remembered. She was a Jew, in Nazi Germany, without an ID.

—

THE TRAIN JOURNEY BACK from the Gare du Nord had been fraught with anxiety. The possibility of being caught without her documents, not to mention the gun in her suitcase, almost paralyzed her with fear, but she had needed to maintain a careful synchronicity of movement between carriages to avoid the scrutiny of the guards. Shortly after the train left Paris, she’d informed the other passengers that she had a bad headache, necessitating several trips to the corridor for “fresh air.” It had worked well, until they crossed the border into Germany, when she had been obliged to lock herself in the lavatory as a pair of guards came through. But she had underestimated their thoroughness and emerged only to run right into the second of the guards, who was systematically checking the passengers in the final compartment. He was young, not much more than nineteen she reckoned, with a complexion that didn’t need shaving and fair hair cut savagely short. Yet his youth was an advantage, Clara realized at once. He was flustered by their unintended physical contact, and he flushed.

“Documents,” he snapped, automatically, then looked up with a flash of awed recognition in his eyes. Perhaps he had sat through romantic comedies under pressure from a girlfriend, or maybe he had seen Clara’s war film, The Pilot’s Wife, in which she had been married to a lost Luftwaffe pilot, played by the real-life air ace Ernst Udet. Whichever it was, finding himself face-to-face with an actress from the big screen was overwhelming for the young man. For the first time in her career, Clara was relieved to be recognized.

“My apologies, F-F-Fräulein.” He had a stammer. “Is it…?”

“Clara Vine, yes.”

“So sorry. Your identity documents, please?”

She smiled sweetly, glad that she had just reapplied her lipstick in the train’s narrow mirror and was wearing Steffi’s pearls.

“I’m afraid I’ve left them in my compartment. And it’s all the way back down the corridor.”

“I’ll need to see them,” he insisted, in a starstruck mumble.

She tilted her head, coquettishly. “Do you? Really? Even if I promise I am who I say I am?”

The guard gave a nervous laugh, which turned into a cough. Far ahead in the corridor, his colleague shouted at him to hurry up.

“You could come back with me to my compartment. It’s quite a way”—

The young man cast an anxious glance at his companion, who was making impatient gestures in the distance. God forbid the older man should return to help his colleague out. Clara moved fractionally closer. Lowering her voice to a seductive whisper, she suggested, “Perhaps you

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