Prisoner of Night and Fog (26 page)

Daniel nodded. “The doctor. He could be anywhere after all this time, perhaps even dead. But we must do all we can to find him.”

29

THE NEXT EVENING, GRETCHEN WAS WALKING
back from work along the Königinstrasse and had almost reached the boardinghouse when a car slid to a stop beside her and Reinhard’s voice called, “Gretchen!”

He sat in the passenger seat of Kurt’s Daimler-Benz, beside his friend. Both wore brownshirt uniforms. Reinhard’s arm rested on the open window frame, the swastika armband wrinkling as he tapped his fingers.

What could they possibly want with her? She bent down to the car window. “What is it, Reinhard?”

“A special invitation to dinner at the Führer’s apartment. Get in.” When she hesitated, he added, “Mama already knows, so she isn’t expecting us back anytime soon.”

The thought of going anywhere with Reinhard made her flesh crawl. But they both knew she couldn’t say no; nobody refused the rare honor of dinner at Uncle Dolf’s home. She climbed into the back seat. As the car pulled away into traffic, she watched the boardinghouse grow smaller and smaller until they turned a corner and it was lost from view.

They drove for a few minutes in silence. Fatigue had settled into each of Gretchen’s bones, and she watched without interest as the buildings trundled past. The hour had been midnight when Daniel had finally escorted her back to the boardinghouse last night, and she had risen at six to help with breakfast.

During the workday in Hanfstaengl’s office, she had started every time an adjutant knocked on the door or the telephone rang. Each interruption might mean Uncle Dolf or Rudolf Hess had discovered someone had gone through his desk. But the day had passed without incident.

The automobile rumbled over the Isar River and past the Prinzregentenstrasse. She finally spoke. “You missed Herr Hitler’s home.”

The two boys exchanged a glance. “We didn’t miss it,” Reinhard said. “We have an errand to complete on the way.”

She shrugged and looked out the window, watching the houses wind by. Quickly, the buildings changed from old apartment buildings to family homes fronted by tidy gardens. Why had the boys driven here, to a suburb? Kurt lived in the central part of the city, and the only person she knew here was Hitler’s favorite photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. But they never went to his villa, unless she had been invited for a photography session. . . .

Finally, the car ground to a halt before an apricot-colored stone house on a tree-lined street.

“Wait here.” Reinhard and Kurt left the car and hurried up the front walk. Rather than ringing the bell, as she had expected, they walked right inside. Whoever lived there must be expecting them.

The minutes stretched on. Twilight stretched bluish-black fingers across the street. Somewhere, a dog barked over and over, and a Horch auto glided past. A pair of little girls in matching pink frocks skipped by. What could the boys be doing inside that house? She slipped out of the car. Reinhard would beat her if he discovered her, but she would take the chance. She had to know what they were doing.

She crept across the garden. A bow window bulged from the front of the house. A gap showed between the curtains, just wide enough for her to see through. She stepped over the rhododendron bushes and pressed her face against the glass.

Reinhard and Kurt stood in a large parlor. Sitting on the sofa was an elderly, white-haired man. The small fellow wore only dark trousers, suspenders, and a white shirt, as though he had been interrupted at home when he wasn’t expecting visitors.

“Please,” he was saying, his words muffled by the window, “don’t hurt my wife. Kill me if you must, but don’t harm my family.”

Gretchen recoiled.
Kill?

“You should have thought of them before you entered politics.” Reinhard reached into his jacket. With one smooth movement, he whipped out a gun, aimed it at the gasping man’s head, and cocked the trigger. “Consider this a courtesy of Cell G.”

He fired and the old man fell back against the cushions, then slithered to the floor, leaving a trail of blood on the sofa. He didn’t move again. Somewhere, someone started screaming, horrible, high-pitched screams that seemed to go on and on.

Gretchen staggered back from the window.
No
. Trapped air burned in her chest. She couldn’t push the oxygen out, could only gasp for breath as she moved away, and then she tripped over the rhododendron bushes and fell on the grass.

Somehow, she scrambled up and sprinted across the lawn. She thought she heard the squeak of a doorknob turning—another second and Reinhard would see her—and she jerked open the car door and flung herself inside.

Breathe, breathe
. She sat bolt upright so she wouldn’t curl into a ball. She tried to force air into her straining lungs and coughed hard, her throat turning to fire, tears wetting her eyes. Reinhard and Kurt ran across the lawn. They yanked open the car doors and got in.

“
Go
,” Reinhard said, and Kurt sped away from the sidewalk with a grinding of gears just as a woman burst out of the house screaming, “Murder! Murder!”

Her brother glanced at her in the back seat. “Don’t pay any mind, Gretl. She’s a crazy old woman,” he said, and she nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Hastily, she wiped at her eyes. Her throat still burned, but she resisted the urge to cough. She must make no sound. She must not give Reinhard a reason to look at her.

The ride through the quiet streets was silent. Gretchen watched the houses roll past. Everything looked too sharp, too clear, as though she wore spectacles she didn’t need. Dimly, in a back corner of her mind, she remembered Whitestone’s teachings about trauma. She was in shock.

Kurt dropped them off at the Prinzregentenplatz, by the statue of Wagner surrounded by thick trees and cooing doves. Reinhard took her arm as they walked toward number 16. His hand felt warm and rough on her elbow. The hand that only minutes ago had pulled a trigger. Every nerve in her body screamed to pull herself free and run from him. Somehow, she lifted her feet, pushed them forward, across the sidewalk, into the cool front lobby.

“Mama said that Fräulein Raubal has invited you to the Führer’s mountain home.” Reinhard’s eyes were flat and pale.

She had to swallow twice before she could speak. “Yes. I leave in the morning.”

They started up the tiled staircase. “Being invited there is an honor. Make a good impression.”

They had reached the second story, and Reinhard raised his hand to knock on Hitler’s front door.

“Yes, Reinhard,” she whispered. “I promise.”

Supper at Hitler’s apartment was the same as always: one of his favorite dishes, spaghetti this time, with beer for the guests and mineral water for him, followed by the Austrian desserts he liked so much.

Tonight there were no other guests, and Gretchen sat between Reinhard and Geli, listening to Uncle Dolf drone on about music. He was in a bad mood because he had seen an opera in which he didn’t like the soprano, and he spent nearly an hour dissecting the singer’s performance and humming entire sections to them. Probably note for note, as he was a gifted mimic.

Unbidden, what she had seen through the gap between the curtains of the apricot-colored stone house rushed back to her, over and over: Reinhard raising the pistol, his face emotionless, his voice matter-of-fact. Reinhard running across the lawn, no trace of fear or regret, only a relentless determination to get away. Untouched, as always.

With a fork, she pushed around the strands of spaghetti on her plate. The sauce looked red as blood. Bile rose in her throat. Murmuring her excuses, she hurried to the washroom and rested her burning forehead against the glass, begging the images to vanish.

Psychopaths
. She washed her face in cold water. Unaffected by ordinary human emotions, Herr Doktor Whitestone had said. Unable to feel remorse or sadness. Or love. Locked within themselves, untouched by anyone or anything.

She stared at herself in the glass, pale-faced, eyes haunted. How could Hitler adapt himself so skillfully to every situation, disappearing into the shouting, rabble-rousing public speaker in the Circus Krone, into the hard-faced leader inspecting his SA men before a street demonstration, into the tuxedo-clad honored guest at high-society dinners? He altered himself so perfectly to fit each role, she wondered if he was real at all. Perhaps he was one long, continuous facade. An illusion. He had been the kindly uncle because that was what she had wanted from him, and he knew it.

He had manipulated her as deliberately as he had everyone else.

Tears streamed into her eyes, but she blinked them back. He wasn’t worth them.

Back in the dining room, the dishes were being cleared, and she followed voices into the parlor. Reinhard was putting on his hat, saying something about going to a cabaret, and Uncle Dolf was chuckling, calling him a skirt-chasing scoundrel. Hitler’s housekeeper hovered nearby, clearly waiting to speak. On the sofa, Geli slumped on the overstuffed cushions, fingers fiddling with a ring, head down.

Uncle Dolf turned to Frau Reichert. “Yes, what is it?”

“Herr Amann is on the the telephone and wishes to speak to you,” she said. “Something about going over the account books.”

Gretchen started.
Max Amann
. The dwarfish man from the photograph taken outside the beer hall, who had recently lost his arm in a hunting accident. The same man who might know what had happened to disturb her father during that long-ago automobile ride.

Uncle Dolf looked startled. “What the devil is Amann thinking, calling from his sickbed? Only a fool doesn’t care about his health. Tell him the accounts can wait. If he protests, remind him how completely I trust him.” He smiled at Reinhard, adding, “No one has such a clever head for business as Amann.”

Gretchen knew Amann managed the NSDAP publishing business, the Eher Verlag. And he was Hitler’s personal banker, Daniel had said. What a powerful position for a man so lacking in the Party’s physical ideals, who looked nothing like the Aryan type Uncle Dolf preferred. She thought again of her father’s final car ride.
What might Amann know?

She might never again have the chance to talk to him. She slipped out of the room after Frau Reichert while Uncle Dolf and Reinhard chuckled together.

“Frau Reichert,” she said quietly, “may I speak to Herr Amann for a moment?”

The housekeeper raised her eyebrows but didn’t comment. “Of course.” She gestured to the telephone receiver lying on its side on the hallway table, then retreated toward the servants’ quarters on the other end of the apartment.

Gretchen snatched up the receiver. “Herr Amann? This is Fräulein Müller.”

“Yes?” The voice sounded weak.

She listened to the chatter from the parlor. Still talking and laughing. But Reinhard might come out at any second. She’d have to be quick. “Herr Hitler wants you to rest and not worry about the accounts right now,” she said in a rush. “I beg your pardon for bothering you at such a difficult time, but—”
God, she couldn’t think of an excuse to ask the question
! “—I was wondering if you drove with my father to the beer hall on the night of the putsch.”

“Yes.” The word came out as a sigh. She pictured him lying in bed, propped up on pillows, his shoulder and what remained of his left arm wrapped in bandages. She shouldn’t burden him now, and yet she had to ask.

“Your father made a tremendous sacrifice.” Amann sounded stronger, as if he had caught his breath.

A floorboard creaked. Gretchen whirled around. The hallway was still empty. But someone was coming.

“My poor papa.” She tried to sound tearful. If Amann was anything like the other SA fellows she knew, her tears would make him so uncomfortable, he would eagerly answers any questions just to get her to stop crying. “I understand the auto ride was upsetting for him.”

“He kept cautioning the Führer not to let his nerves get overwrought again,” Amann snapped. “We were all so sick of him yammering on that I’m not sure who first told him to shut his mouth.” He hesitated. “No mind. That time is best buried.”

Reinhard stepped into the hall. He glanced at Gretchen, his eyes questioning. Had he heard anything? Surely not or he’d already be asking her what the conversation was about.

“I hope you feel well soon,” Gretchen said hurriedly, and hung up. The smile she plastered on her lips probably looked ghastly. “I wished to give Herr Amann my wishes for a quick recovery,” she said to Reinhard.

He shrugged and ruffled her hair as he passed. It took all of her strength not to wince. She didn’t watch him leave but traced the sound of his whistling down the hallway and out the apartment door, when it abruptly faded. Whistling. A couple of hours after he had killed a man.

She steeled herself and walked back to the parlor to thank Uncle Dolf and Geli for the lovely dinner.

Later, on the streetcar ride home, she watched the buildings crawl past, trying not to see her reflection in the window, milk-pale and frightened. Trying not to remember Reinhard raising the pistol and firing, his face unchanging as the bullet bit into the man’s chest. Trying not to think about Papa’s comrades yelling at him, when he had only been attempting to soothe Hitler. Trying not to ask the questions torturing her mind.

30

ALL THROUGH THE NEXT DAY, GRETCHEN
thought about the papers under the floorboard in Reinhard’s room. Clippings from the
Munich Post
and the index card she hadn’t had the chance to read. What other secrets did her brother have?

But Mama kept her busy—Mass in the morning, then endless chores in the afternoon: scrubbing the bathtubs, beating the carpets, hanging laundry on the lines between the walnut trees in the courtyard. It wasn’t until the next night, after supper was over and Reinhard had ambled out, calling over his shoulder something about a beer hall with the fellows, that Gretchen saw her opportunity. She crept up the stairs.

She fitted a hairpin into his door lock. A few careful twists and she was inside. The room seemed unchanged: a blank canvas instead of a proper bedchamber, the only clue to its resident’s personality an SA uniform hanging in the open armoire, its shirt damp from a recent sponge cleaning.