Freya (20 page)

On the horizon she spied a small white-walled castle, fussily gabled and turreted, set on rising ground and girded with mature trees.

‘What's that place?' she said, pointing.

‘Where you're headed. That's the schloss.'

Freya blinked her surprise. It looked like a palace out of a Grimm fairy tale. As the jeep turned down a drive into a shrub-lined park Caplan turned to her, shaking his head. ‘This is where the grounds start – can you believe it?' The schloss was still at least a mile in the distance. As the grandeur of the place bore down on them Freya wondered aloud at the wealth that could have financed its construction.

Caplan said, ‘A guy told me the family owned the biggest pencil factory in Germany.'

Freya replied, after a pause, ‘I never knew there was that much money in pencils.'

‘Me neither.'

Up close, the Schloss Vogelsong was almost grotesque in its extravagance, a fantasy of turret windows, heraldic arches and flyaway spires. It was the sort of building a megalomaniac opera producer might have conceived in a dream, and laughed about on waking. Caplan parked the jeep and, perhaps out of curiosity, followed her into the marbled entrance hall. A grand staircase spiralled upwards, echoing the clamour of voices within; but those voices didn't belong to the schloss's usual guests, corseted ladies with their pet dogs and corpulent gentlemen who talked of nothing but money and hunting. Now it was home to journalists whose instinctive reaction would be to scoff. They stood about in huddles, some in urgent converse, others in casual groupings redolent of a cocktail party. Smoking seemed to be their competitive sport.

The lieutenant, by way of taking his leave, pointed out a makeshift sign that read
REGISTRATION
. Freya wondered if she could engage him to drive her into Nuremberg one day, but thought better of it: he might be offended by the presumption.

‘Thanks for the lift,' she said.

‘Glad to help,' Caplan replied, and gave a little mock bow that was his first and last indication of a sense of humour. Then he said, ‘So long,' and turned back out of the entrance hall. As she watched him go she felt a stabbing regret that she hadn't asked him the extra favour. The vaulted corridor down which she stepped would not have been out of place in a national art gallery. Arriving at the office for registration she presented her passport, visa and letters of transit. She asked the clerk behind the desk whether the place was always this busy.

‘Oh, this is only a quarter-full,' said the clerk. ‘The rest of them are at the courthouse. They finish at five.'

She was handed a pass and a key to the women's quarters. This was not the schloss itself but a large Victorian villa in the grounds, which she found at the end of a winding gravel path. The caretaker was a local hausfrau who may have been any age between fifty and eighty. Having inspected her pass, she took her up to the main bedroom, which was now a dormitory: camp beds had been squeezed into every available space. The woman shook her head and explained in broken English that there was no room. Freya replied that she absolutely must have a bed, and held the woman's gaze until she appeared to capitulate: on the next floor, she was shown a smaller room holding six cots, all recently slept in. An exhausted mattress lay in one corner, and from somewhere the woman found unused linen, indicating that this would be her resting place. She went off, muttering to herself in German.

The warmth in the room oppressed her, and she opened a window. It overlooked an orchard and, beyond that, a forest of pines. She surveyed her cramped quarters: even at Plymouth she had always had her own bed. Heaped ashtrays, suitcases flung open, a frowsy smell of bodies. There was something sad about the way a sudden influx of strangers could transform elegance into slovenliness. She made a little tour of the building, and found that every room, without exception, was crammed to bursting with travel cases, clothes, cameras, newspapers. In a bedroom along the corridor from her own she saw a young woman sitting cross-legged on a bed, furiously clattering away at a typewriter. She lifted her head on sensing Freya's presence, smiled distractedly, and bent again to the keys.

At five o'clock she walked back to the schloss and came across, in its cavernous recesses, exactly the thing she was looking for. She might have known that no gathering of journalists would have countenanced digs that didn't include a bar. It was already filling up. She had brought a book to occupy her during the wait,
Pavilions of Smoke
, an early collection of Jessica Vaux's essays she hadn't read before. The stock photograph of the author, reproduced opposite the title page, had always fascinated Freya. It showed Vaux in her mid-thirties, a dark-haired woman whose uptilted gaze seemed of a piece with the stern, unyielding tenor of her prose.

The bar, run by Americans, was bountifully stocked, and she had just ordered a Martini when Stephen appeared in the doorway. He was wearing one of his sober navy suits from Huntsman, with a thin black tie. His tired face creased into a smile on seeing her.

‘I could do with one of those,' he said, nodding at her drink and planting a kiss on her cheek. ‘When did you arrive?'

‘Oh, a few hours ago. And there was nearly no room at the inn. I've got a scrubby old mattress in a room with six others.'

‘It's the trial of the century. Half the world's press are here.' He gestured at the high corniced ceiling. ‘Quite a place, isn't it?'

She nodded. ‘You look like you've come from a funeral.'

‘It's rather like one – a funeral they don't know how to end. Odd thing is, everybody in that courtroom seems bored to extinction, the judges, the lawyers, the guards, the interpreters – even the defendants, if ghosts can look bored. Really, the trial's dragged on for so long you can actually see people yawning through it.'

Freya made an exclamation of disgust. ‘How
dare
anyone be bored?'

‘They've been through the evidence, mountains of it. Now the lawyers are having their turn, which means a great deal of nitpicking. Some argue that the court has no legal validity – that's Goering's line.'

Stephen had completed a few sketches, which he showed to her. They were variations on the Nazi hierarchy seated in two rows, some of them slumped, faces turned away, some staring dead ahead. Freya leafed through them, and shook her head. ‘They all look so … insignificant.'

He nodded agreement. ‘You should see them in the flesh.'

‘What are the chances of you getting me into the courtroom?'

‘Non-existent. I told you that in London. You'd never get past the security.'

Freya paused, brooding. ‘So … was she there?'

‘It's a very full gallery. And to be honest, I'm not sure I'd recognise her.'

She stared at him in disbelief. His vagueness was sometimes unfathomable. She opened her copy of
Pavilions of Smoke
to the page with the photographic plate and held it out for his inspection. He squinted at it for a moment.

‘Ah … I did wonder. The hair's gone grey, but yes – she's been there.'

‘Has she got a room here, too?'

‘I haven't seen her around. She may have rented somewhere.'

That would be just like her, Freya thought, to keep herself apart from the press camp. The woman had spent her whole life going it alone, shunning friend and foe alike. But here she was, in Nuremberg, and Freya was damned if she were to be thrown off the scent now. She considered her options. If Jessica Vaux wasn't staying at the Schloss Vogelsong, and her lodgings couldn't be discovered, the only thing for it would be to intercept her outside the courthouse and positively demand her attention.

Stephen, frowning, said, ‘So you squared all this with the college?'

‘They were fine. My tutor gave me an exeat.'

‘Decent of them, to let you go like that.'

Freya nodded. Her father's vagueness could also be played to advantage. If he was willing to believe that the college would give her time off to travel abroad, just before her exams, she wasn't about to disabuse him. Tomorrow she would accompany him to the city's Palace of Justice, and prepare herself to waylay Jessica Vaux. Such a plan showed initiative, she thought, something that would appeal to the writer's maverick personality. And yet it also smacked of desperation, like a stage-door Johnny waiting to pounce on a famous actress. She might just as easily tell her, in the words of Jimmy Erskine, to piss off, and nobody would blame her.

The next day, a Tuesday, she was back in uniform and on one of the buses that took the journalists into town each morning. The Palace of Justice, with its imposing multi-windowed facade, had been one of the few public buildings in Nuremberg to have survived the Allied bombing. Up the steps swarmed the functionaries, the gowned judges, secretaries, interpreters, lawyers, soldiers, journalists, all overseen by the unsmiling guards, their faces harassed with boredom. Freya found that she was permitted to enter these vast municipal precincts and mill about with other interested parties in the antechambers and corridors. But, just as Stephen had warned her, there was to be no admittance to the sanctum of the courtroom without a pass.

Wednesday and Thursday followed the same pattern. She got off the bus with Stephen, stationed herself in the palace forecourt and searched the incoming crowds for a glimpse of Jessica Vaux, without success. Returning to the schloss, she occupied the daytime with revising Chaucer and reading
The Allegory of Love
until Stephen returned in the evening. Worryingly, he had not seen Jessica Vaux in court all week. On the Friday morning Freya got to her waiting post an hour earlier than usual, reasoning that her quarry might be timing her arrival to avoid the crush. But once again there was no sign of her. Rather than mope all day she decided to explore, catching one of the shabby streetcars that took her into the heart of the old town. From the air the bombed streets had appeared uninhabited, scoured of life. But once off the tram she encountered little pockets of activity, women trundling prams laden with a few pathetic possessions, grey-faced pensioners shuffling along broken cobbled roads, or standing in doorways of blackened shops. There was nothing to buy, anywhere, though there was fuel to scavenge: in an alleyway two young women were breaking up rotten window frames for firewood.

People stood watching her as she continued along the streets; they were perhaps wondering what she had come for. She felt set apart from them, physically, a healthful alien among hollow-eyed spectres – an emissary from the land of the living. Black skeletons of trees peered down on her. What
was
she doing here? In the distance she spotted a church with a twisted spire, its stained glass mostly holed, and she started towards it. Mounds of rubble blocked the way. Her shoes weren't quite up to the task, and she kept slipping on the jagged tumble of pulverised brick and masonry. She soon became aware of a terrible stench rising from the ground, a mixture of disinfectant and something else just below it. She took out her handkerchief and wrapped it around her mouth and nose, like a cattle-rustler in a Western. But the putrid reek had already permeated her nostrils. She gagged a couple of times, and kept clambering, testing for footholds among the chaotic ranges of debris. Perseverance carried her back to level ground, and thence to the bombed-out church.

She walked around the side to its doorless porch, and stepped through onto a carpet of cinders, brick dust and brittle leaves. A solemn stillness held amid the dereliction. The wide nave had been denuded of pews – more firewood? – while the altar and chancel had likewise lost most of their ornamentation. The vaulted roof showed patches of daylight here and there, and a pigeon circled in a frantic flurry on sensing the intruder below. The plaster walls were streaked black where rainwater had seeped in. The tiled floor crunched with every step she took. Turning up an aisle she saw, part hidden beneath fallen brick, a devotional portrait of a saint. Its frame was intact, but the cloudy glass had been cracked to smithereens. She picked it up and shook out the glinting shards; it wasn't even a painting, just a print, but the face of the saint, or whatever he was, reminded her of the picture of Francis de Sales Nancy kept on her mantelpiece. The imploring upward gaze transfixed her: it was a look that asked, humbly, not to be ignored.

The place was dank and rotting. At the end of the aisle a door led into a side chapel; on entering she reared back in surprise, for slumped on a stone bench (one that couldn't be broken up) was a man in a long greatcoat, dozing. Around him were strewn a few tokens of homeliness – a horse blanket, a tiny oil stove, a battered cushion. Raising himself slightly, he smiled a sort of greeting towards her. He dipped into his coat pocket to locate a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, and put them on. He stared at her for a moment, and said something in German; Freya shrugged in apology.

‘
Amerikanische?
'

She lowered the handkerchief muffling her mouth. ‘English.'

‘Ah!' he said, with a rueful laugh. ‘This being a house of God I will not say “Welcome to my home”, for you would think me presumptuous – or mad! But it is my – what do you say? –
dwelling place
, at present. Please …'

He beckoned her forward. He was perhaps in his forties, somewhere around her father's age. His refinement of speech was at odds with his dishevelled appearance: his hair and beard were matted, and the sheen of his coat, she could see on drawing closer, was almost iridescent with layers of grime. Intelligent curiosity danced in his eyes. He introduced himself as Rainer, and asked her about the uniform she wore. She told him, explaining that she had come to Nuremberg with her father, on official business at the Palace of Justice.

‘The trial, of course … The final reckoning for Hitler's henchmen! And do you think in these circumstances that “justice” will be served?'