Prisoner of Night and Fog (25 page)

But her legs shook as she crept down the stairs. All of the lights in the front hall had been extinguished, transforming it into a pocket of shifting shadows. For an instant, she paused on the bottom stair, listening, holding her breath. Still nothing. It must be now.

She darted across the hall. The enormous front door groaned when she shoved it open. A lone figure stood on the sidewalk, its back to her.
Daniel
. He had come, as he had sworn he would.

When she had rung him up yesterday morning, whispering her newest suspicions and her plans to sneak into Hess’s office, he had insisted on accompanying her.
You mustn’t be alone
, he had said.
I want to help you
. And she couldn’t stop the warmth flooding her heart. He
cared
.

“All clear,” she whispered.

He sprang up the steps and, together, they ran up the grand staircase. A long corridor lined with closed doors spread the length of the second story. Hess’s office stood beside Hitler’s. Locked, but a few seconds’ work with Daniel’s pick solved that problem.

The curtains hadn’t been drawn, so silvery starlight sprinkled across the room. A desk, a few chairs, a couple of filing cabinets: an ordinary-looking office.

Daniel yanked open a drawer. “A stack of envelopes tied with a pink ribbon, right?”

“Yes. They were all written by my father to my mother, so they’ll be addressed to Liesel.” She darted a glance at the door. Still no sound. Hitler’s office was only a few feet away. . . . She might never have another chance.

“Go,” Daniel said. With rapid fingers, he flipped through the papers in the drawer, then eased it shut and opened another. He didn’t stop searching to look at her, saying only, “Hess is a methodical man. If the letters are here, it shouldn’t take me long to find them. And you mightn’t have another opportunity to go through Hitler’s office.”

How could he understand her so completely? She barely had time to wonder, just nodded in gratitude and rushed out.

The door to Hitler’s anteroom was unlocked.

She hurried into his office. She’d been in here so many times, playing the part of prattling pet whenever Hitler was in a poor mood and needed cheering up.

The room looked different in the moonlight. Quieter, less ostentatious. The highly polished wood and brass gleamed. Across the room stood his desk, small, plain, a flat table with several drawers. Overhead, a chandelier hung darkly, its unlit bulbs covered by miniature green lampshades. Formal red upholstered chairs lined the walls. A bouquet of yellow roses in a cut glass vase sat on a round table. On the wall opposite hung a portrait of Hitler’s idol, Frederick the Great.

She rushed to the desk. The drawers opened easily. But the memorandums and copies of official letters she had expected weren’t there. A fountain pen, a razor-sharp letter opener, a handful of thumbtacks. Nothing hinting at the desk owner’s personality. Her breath caught. A blank canvas. Like Reinhard’s room . . .

She closed the drawer and opened another, filled with receipts from an auto garage. Details of repairs to Hitler’s precious red Mercedes. Scribbled notes about used cars he was interested in buying . . . She tidied them and slid them back in the drawer.

A thick manila folder lay inside the last drawer. More car receipts, most likely, or some other meaningless papers. She opened it and froze.

A smudged charcoal drawing . . . of
her
. Although the portrait was clumsily done, she recognized the high curve of her forehead, the long length of her nose, the wide shape of her mouth, the childish braid.

Shock blanked her mind. Like an automaton, she looked through the drawings. All head portraits, done in charcoal or pencil, without a trace of color. Pictures of her, laughing, smiling, frowning pensively. Two pictures of her and Eva, her oval face close to Eva’s round one, as though she were confiding a secret. And a dozen portraits of Geli. Gazing down, eyes shadowed, dark curls dusting her shoulders, or staring off into the distance. Never looking directly at the artist.

She closed the folder. Somehow, she felt as though she had seen something indecent. As though she had pushed open a door into Hitler’s mind, one that he wanted to keep closed. But she couldn’t understand what lay beyond the door.

Why had these drawings been concealed in his desk, and why had he never confided that he had drawn her portrait so many times? He always said he had wished to become an artist, but the Academy of Arts in Vienna had been against him. Was he somehow ashamed of his sketches? At their lack of fine skill? Or was art now beneath him, since he had become a well-known politician?

Somewhere, a door opened and closed.
Please, let that be Daniel
. Her shaking hands placed the folder back in the drawer and closed it.

She hurried out. Daniel was stepping into the anteroom as she entered. He held a pack of white envelopes tied with a pale pink ribbon. “You found them.”

“Yes.” Daniel looked grave. “We should leave.”

Together, they checked the offices a final time, making sure everything had been put back precisely, then jiggled the locks back into place. They raced down the stairs and outside, into the still-warm night. At this late hour, no cars cruised the avenue and no pedestrians walked its sidewalks. Gretchen’s heart throbbed against her ribs.
They had done it
.

They said nothing until they had walked several side streets and reached a streetcar stop. No one else waited on the corner with them, and only the lighted windows in the nearby buildings’ top floors indicated anyone else was awake in the city.

Then Daniel grabbed her shoulders, grinning widely. “You were amazing! I’ve never met anyone as brave as you.”

She opened her mouth to say he was more courageous than any boy she had known, but he leaned down, pressing his lips on hers, capturing her half-gasped-out breath of surprise at his abruptness.

She had been kissed before: flat pecks on the backs of her hands, quick caresses against her cheek, an awkward series of fumbles last summer when one of the SA boys walked her home from the cinema, the soft pressure of Daniel’s lips two nights ago.

But she had never been kissed like this. His mouth, warm and insistent, and his arms, wrapping around her so tightly she could feel his heartbeat pounding through his clothes, and his body shaking as though he stood in a windstorm, and the blood roaring through her veins, and the sudden desire to feel his bare skin on hers. The world narrowed to a single point, his lips on hers, and she wound her arms around his neck, letting the soft strands of his hair brush her fingers, sharing a breath she wanted never to end.

28

THE STREETCAR CARRIED GRETCHEN AND DANIEL
to the Englischer Garten, where they moved quickly along the winding pathways. Ahead, the Chinese Tower rose into the night sky, a giant, hulking shadow spearing up from the grassy clearing. A massive pagoda-shaped structure, it looked more like a foreign temple than like one of the city’s most popular beer gardens.

Daniel drew her down to a park bench. The scent of summer flowers had faded long ago, and now all she smelled was rich, damp earth, tinged with the bite of decay. Overhead, the moon hung low in the sky, and up ahead, Müncheners laughed and drank at tables clustered around the Chinese Tower. None turned to peer at them.

w

Sadness, heavy as a rock, lay on her chest. Maybe the father she had loved and worshipped hadn’t existed at all.

Silently, Daniel slipped the packet of envelopes from his suit coat pocket. The first five letters Gretchen skimmed quickly before handing them over to Daniel, glad for a distraction from her depressing thoughts, passing over the descriptions of bad food, long marches, and streaming rain. The sixth, though, she read twice. It dated from November 1914, when the war was still new enough to be exciting, and Private Klaus Müller still naive enough to believe that Germany would emerge victorious before the new year.

My dearest Liesel, she read,

You complained in your letter that I scarcely tell you anything about my comrades and my new daily life in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, so I shall satisfy your curiosity. Most of the men are dependable, steady fellows from Munich, but there’s one man in our midst who is a definite oddity—a funny little Austrian called Adi Hitler who had been living in Munich before war broke out
.

He’s a courier, so, as you can imagine, he takes tremendous risks to deliver messages when our company lines to command and battalion posts are knocked out by artillery fire. He’s a peculiar fellow—skinny, sloppy, bombastically pro-German and patriotic, but generally well liked. He never abandons a wounded comrade and frequently sketches amusing caricatures of the other soldiers
.

He is quite alone in the world, I gather, for he never speaks of his family or, indeed, his background at all, and he receives no care packages from home. You know how hungry I would be if I could not count on the food you send me!

I write these words sitting beneath some trees in the countryside outside Messines. I keep hearing the scream of the exploding shells, although now there is comfortable quiet all around me. It makes me wonder if my mind is beginning to fail me
. . . .

The letter went on, but there was no further mention of Hitler, so Gretchen pressed it into Daniel’s waiting hand. She hurried through three more months of letters: rain-soaked trenches, decreasing food rations, forests thick with smoke. Occasionally, her father mentioned Hitler: He had adopted a white terrier that had leapt into their trench; he drew cartoons of the other soldiers; he survived dangerous messenger runs while other couriers died all around them, which made some of the soldiers say he must lead a charmed life or a higher power was protecting him.

The wartime years rushed past: skirmishes in the French countryside, days hunched in the muddy trenches, shells and smoke and screams.

And then she came to the last letter, written in a shaky hand she could scarcely read, let alone recognize as her father’s.

9 November 1918

Pasewalk, Pomerania

My dearest Liesel
,

An elderly pastor came to our hospital today to break the news. Germany has become a republic, and our surrender is imminent. Corporal Hitler—the Austrian soldier I have written you about—cried that everything had gone black again before his eyes and staggered back to the dormitory, where he flung himself onto his bunk and begged me to leave him alone. But I couldn’t, for we are the only soldiers from our regiment who have been sent here and are quite alone otherwise, so I tried to make him listen to reason
.

Gretchen looked at Daniel, who was reading over her shoulder. He sat so close she could smell the mint of his shaving cream. “This is odd. Why were my father and Uncle Dolf the only ones from their regiment at this hospital?”

“Were they the only ones injured?”

She shook her head. Papa had rarely talked about the war, but he had told her bits and pieces about his last battle. “Their regiment suffered a gas attack in France in mid-October. Some men died instantly, but the rest were blinded—all but one, who could still see faintly and led them to a first-aid station. Why go to the expense of separating my father and Uncle Dolf from the others and sending them all the way to Pomerania when there must have been several closer hospitals in Belgium?”

“Perhaps he explains later on,” Daniel suggested, and they returned to the letter.

Adi sobbed that his eyes burned like coals and all was black. He became hysterical, and finally, in desperation, I searched for Herr Doktor Forster, a consulting specialist from Berlin, who has been most helpful in my recovery. I found the doctor in a nearby corridor, and when I mentioned Adi’s name, he quickened his step toward our dormitories
.

“Herr Müller, wait a moment,” he said when we came across another doctor in the hallway, and I moved back several paces as the two medical men consulted. Their low murmurs reached me, but only a few words were intelligible
.

And yet, they weren’t. I am not an educated man, and perhaps I flatter myself by thinking I am as clever as most, but the two words I caught have perplexed me. I can guess at their meaning, and yet I cannot believe they refer to Adi, this small, intense, peculiar, and yet kindly fellow whom I have fought alongside for four long years
.

I shall not write them down; to do so is a disservice to a comrade
.

Herr Doktor Forster went to the dormitories and calmed Adi and is, I believe, planning some sort of new treatment for him. Once we have returned to Munich, I shall take Adi under my wing, and I shall ask you to do the same, Liesel. Time and again, I have seen him risk his life to deliver a message along the front lines. He does not lack courage, and now he shall not lack a friend
.

I shall return to you as soon as I am able, dearest Liesel. Kiss the children for me
.

Your loving Klaus

Gretchen set the paper down. Confusion had turned her mind a blank, empty white. She had expected something monumental, not an overheard conversation in a corridor.

“I don’t understand,” Daniel said. “What could Herr Doktor Forster have said that was so awful?”

“I don’t know. None of it makes sense.” Nearby, a sudden shout of laughter sounded from the Chinese Tower. A few men wove drunkenly down the steps toward the trestle tables, their beer steins held aloft so they wouldn’t spill a drop. “There’s only one person we can ask.”