The room fell into blackness.
Hitler stood at the wall, his hand on the light switch. Moonlight spilling through the long windows painted his face silver. He watched her quietly, then said, “Aren’t you going to come to me, Gretchen?”
She couldn’t move. My God. He couldn’t want from her what she suspected. . . .
A floorboard creaked. Hess. He was still out there. Listening, perhaps, or waiting for her to come out. There was nowhere for her to go.
Like a swimmer walking underwater, she crossed the room. The darkness was so complete that she stumbled into a side table, even though she knew the location of every stick of furniture, since she had been in here so often. A tiny gasp of pain burst from her lips, but Hitler didn’t ask if she was hurt. Unmoving, he continued to watch her.
When she reached for a lamp, Hitler caught her wrist.
“No,” he said. “I prefer the dark.”
Slowly, almost hesitantly, his hand brushed the side of her face. He smelled like toothpaste and sugar. “You are so lovely, Gretchen.”
He moved closer now, a collection of shadows that somehow combined to form a man, arms and legs and head made up of wispy darkness. She couldn’t see him at all, but heard his breath, loud and ragged.
“Gretchen,” he said, “may I kiss you?”
Everything within her recoiled at the words. No. She couldn’t do it. She stumbled backward. In the darkness, she saw the whites of his eyes, which were following her. Fear shot through her veins like adrenaline; she was terrified to say no but unwilling to live with herself if she said yes.
They stared at each other. His expression did not change, remaining impassive. She could not guess what he was thinking. Even now, he had retreated within himself, keeping his thoughts hidden from her.
The silence stretched between them, broken only by his harsh breathing. Then he reached for the leather whip tucked into his belt. It whined through the air as he drew it free.
Her heart lurched. He was going to beat her, here, while Hess waited right outside. Fear locked her in place.
But the whip smacked into his open palm, so loudly that she shuddered.
Agony flashed across his face. Gretchen took a shaky step back, her hands curling into fists. She would fight him. She might not stop him, but she would rake her nails across his face and blacken his eyes, so everywhere he went everyone would wonder what had happened to him. They would whisper about him, and she knew nothing wounded him as deeply as stares and snickers. He would feel punished.
He stepped closer, clutching his injured hand in his other hand. Blood, black in the darkness, trickled through his fingers. The whip had sliced into his skin. The pain must have been excruciating, but his expression had become calm, detached. Revulsion coursed up her throat. He had hurt himself on purpose, and he didn’t seem to care.
With slow, measured movements, he tucked the whip into his belt.
“Good night,” he said, and walked away.
When he opened the office door, lamplight from the anteroom illuminated him for an instant, the bloody hand gripped in the other, the shoulders hunched with pain, the face placid.
And then he was gone, and her legs softened to water.
There was no way out except through the anteroom, and she felt herself stumbling forward. Hitler and Hess glanced at her when she came in, Hitler looking vaguely annoyed.
She heard her voice whispering good evening and felt her hands gripping her suitcase handle, and then she was hurtling down the staircase and into the front hall. It was empty now. For an instant, she wondered if Reinhard and Kurt were waiting for her outside, but then remembered they had been dismissed and were surely gone for the night.
She pushed the heavy doors open. The street was deserted. She took off at a run, the suitcase bumping against her leg, glancing back at the Braunes Haus growing smaller and smaller behind her, shrinking from a mansion to a house to a speck. Finally, she whipped her head around and concentrated on the street ahead. She was free.
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THREE FLIGHTS UP, TWO WINDOWS FROM THE left. Gretchen counted before flinging the pebble. It hit the glass with a solid clink. A face pressed against the pane, and her insides slowly loosened with relief. Daniel. She hadn’t realized how desperately she needed him until she saw him now.
He held up a staying hand, and she nodded. For a moment, she stood in the street, listening to the far-off purr of an automobile. The front door opened, and Daniel stood in the entrance—dark hair mussed, suit jacket tossed on haphazardly over a white shirt, scuffed leather shoes on his feet—so reassuringly solid and normal, and yet not normal at all, but talented and clever and open-eyed and determined, and so wonderfully unlike the shadowy men she had known all her life that she felt grateful tears well up.
“Daniel—” she began, and suddenly they were embracing, his arms warm around her.
“Are you all right?” he asked. His voice was muffled against her hair.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
But that wasn’t true.
“I didn’t think you were due back in the city for another two days,” Daniel said as they stepped apart. Over his shoulder, she saw a suitcase at the foot of the stairs.
“Are you going somewhere?”
Now he smiled. “A lot has happened in the past couple of days. I can’t take time to explain or I’ll miss the night express to Berlin, so I’ll ask instead—do you trust me?”
She had never trusted anyone more. “Yes.”
He kissed her, hard and quick. “Then come with me now, and I’ll explain everything on the ride.”
She didn’t hesitate, but interlaced her fingers with his, and together they stepped into the night.
The central train station stretched out its metal tracks like an octopus spreading its tentacles. At this late hour, the place was nearly empty except for a few bleary-eyed travelers, and Gretchen and Daniel had a third-class compartment to themselves. As the train gathered speed, the lights of Munich fell away, turning first into a twinkling necklace, then into shimmering dots in the distance.
They talked late into the night. Gretchen told Daniel everything that had happened in the mountains. When she spoke of meeting Hitler in his office, she stared out the glass, watching the darkened fields rushing past, too embarrassed to look at Daniel.
He took her hand in his. How different his touch felt from Hitler’s, strong and warm, not hesitant and cool.
“I don’t know what Herr Hitler is, exactly,” she said. “A different sort of psychopath from Reinhard, that’s clear. My brother thinks only of himself, and feels nothing. But Hitler . . . It’s as though he feels too much. And he yearns so deeply to touch the mind of everyone he meets.”
She blinked back tears. She wouldn’t cry for their splintered friendship. She wouldn’t cry for Hitler ever again.
After they ordered tea in the dining car, Daniel told her quietly what he had accomplished in the past three days. He had tracked down Herr Doktor Edmund Forster, the neurologist who had treated her father and Hitler at the end of the Great War. Forster now served as the clinic head and psychiatry department chair at Greifswald University, in a small city by the sea, hundreds of miles from Munich.
Gretchen gripped the teacup with freezing fingers. They could switch trains at Berlin, she supposed, but she couldn’t imagine how long it would take them to reach Greifswald, or even if the trains left regularly for such a remote location. “It’s so far. . . .”
Daniel grinned. “He’s already responded to my telegram. He’s staying at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin through the end of the week for a medical conference. He’s agreed to meet with me.”
Gretchen exhaled in relief. A piece of luck, at last.
The Munich Post, Daniel told her, had made good headway with its investigation into the National Social
ists’ plans for the Jews. Their SA source had supplied additional information, and they hoped to break the story soon.
Finally, Gretchen and Daniel turned to her father’s murder. He had been killed at about noon on November 9. The leaders had decided to march through Munich at eleven thirty. Barely a half hour had elapsed between that decision and her father’s death, but somehow, during those thirty minutes, someone had lured Klaus Müller into the front line and murdered him.
She pictured the men in the front line during the march. Papa hadn’t really known the Munich SA head, or the army colonel. Hermann Göring had been too far away. Hitler’s bodyguard had been intent on protecting his employer, and had been nearly killed. The army general had walked upright through the whizzing bullets, too proud to hit the ground; he was such a famous war hero that many of the bystanders never took their eyes off him. None had had the chance to kill her father.
Neither had Max Scheubner-Richter. He’d been shot through the lung and died instantly. Minutes before the shooting started, he’d linked arms with Hitler, and when he collapsed, he dragged his leader down to the ground with such force that Hitler’s shoulder was wrenched from its socket. That was the story she’d always heard.
Her eyes narrowed. “Herr Scheubner-Richter stood on Uncle Dolf’s right, didn’t he?”
Daniel’s forehead wrinkled in concentration. “Yes.”
Gretchen shot him a swift, searching look. “Then why was Hitler’s left shoulder dislocated?”
Comprehension flashed over Daniel’s face. “Someone else grabbed him. But who? And why?”
“That,” Gretchen said, “is one of the things we must find out.”
Berlin was a polished diamond. Broad boulevards lined with massive buildings stretched in all directions; sleek automobiles and streetcars wound along the roads without any of the horse-drawn carts that Gretchen was accustomed to seeing in Munich. Pedestrians swarmed along the sidewalks, the ladies smart in their suits and gloves, the men professional in business suits and hats, all hurrying to their mid-morning destinations. At a corner, two dark-skinned men waited for their turn to cross the street, and Gretchen stared because she had never seen Negroes except in the cinema.
Everywhere she looked was evidence supporting Berlin’s reputation as a liberal, progressive city: Cubist paintings hanging in the front windows of art galleries; cabarets featuring political comedians whose work would earn them a beating back in Munich; sidewalk cafés where bohemian types sipped tea together, their mix of fine and shabby clothing proclaiming that members of different social classes mingled in this city.
Gretchen had never seen anything like it, and suddenly Daniel made complete sense to her: his openness, his fierceness to learn the truth, his insistence that others see with their own eyes. He had come from another world. Although Berlin and Munich were only a few hundred miles apart, they might have been on separate continents.
Gretchen and Daniel changed clothes in a tearoom’s lavatories, he into his best dark suit, she into a pale blue linen frock dotted with flowers. The dress was the fanciest thing she had in her suitcase, but she worried it wouldn’t conform to the hotel’s dress code.
Apparently it did, for the waiter only ran a brief disapproving glance over her outfit before leading them to a table where a middle-aged man sat alone, chasing peas with his fork. He didn’t notice them until the waiter cleared his throat and said, “Pardon me, Herr Professor Forster, but this lady and gentleman wished to meet with you.”
The man looked up, blinking as though waking from a deep dream. He was a pleasant, ordinary-looking fellow of around fifty. He peered at them through small, round spectacles. “Yes?”
Daniel extended his hand for the fellow to shake. “My name is Daniel Cohen, and this is Fräulein Müller. I sent you a telegram a few days ago. We’re very interested in your work.”
“Ah, yes, I remember.” Smiling now, the man rose and bowed slightly. “Please, sit and join me. You haven’t eaten luncheon yet, have you? A couple of menus, waiter.”
“Just tea for us,” Daniel said as they sat down, and one glance round the large dining room told Gretchen why he didn’t want to order lunch. Ladies in silk and men in fine suits lounged about the tables, and waiters in full livery carried heavy silver platters. She couldn’t even guess how much a single meal would cost.
“It isn’t often I meet someone not in the medical field who’s aware of my work,” Forster said as the waiter poured them cups of steaming, fragrant tea. He pushed aside his plate. “Particularly a young lady.”
Gretchen met his gaze. “I find the study of mental disorders fascinating. I plan to become a psychoanalyst.”
A trio of ladies in silk frocks walked past, trailing a waiter. Their flowery scent wafted over Gretchen, and she felt again that she had stepped into another world, one made of fine clothes and gourmet meals and pearls and perfume. Munich, with its grimy cobblestones and tobacco-choked beer halls and streets teeming with brown and black and red and green and yellow political uniforms, seemed far away.
“Indeed?” Forster picked up his teacup and studied her over its rim. “A worthy but difficult ambition.”
“‘I’ve always wanted to be a doctor, ever since my father died when I was a child.” Gretchen set her cup on its saucer on the damask tablecloth. Although her throat was painfully dry, she wasn’t sure she could swallow a single sip. “But we didn’t come to discuss psychology with you. We need to know what happened at the end of the war in the military hospital in Pasewalk, when you treated my father, Klaus Müller, and his friend Adolf Hitler.”
“Ah.” Behind his spectacles, the doctor’s eyes narrowed. He studied her with the same intentness that she had often witnessed in Herr Doktor Whitestone. As though he could dissect her with a look, slice beneath the skin to the beating heart and learn all her secrets with an unblinking stare.
“You look like him,” he said at last.
“You remember him.” Thank God.
“Of course. But I can tell you nothing about his treatment. The medical field’s code of ethics requires my silence.”
Gretchen glanced at Daniel. He nodded in silent understanding. They must tell the doctor everything.
She leaned across the table, pitching her voice low. “I understand, Herr Professor Forster. But I’m not a weepy, sentimental girl trying to pry into her father’s secrets. I’m trying to solve his murder.”
“Murder?” Forster’s eyebrows rose. “Your father was the sainted Nazi martyr, I believe.”
“That is what everyone believes,” Daniel cut in, “but her father was shot from both the front and the back.” He paused as Forster’s forehead creased in surprise. “We believe something crucial happened in the military hospital in Pasewalk, Herr Professor Forster, and you might be the only person who can tell us what it was.”
Forster sat very still.
Gretchen rose. She bent close to Forster’s ear, whispering so the diners at the next table wouldn’t overhear. “I’m beginning to realize I barely knew my father. But he was kind and good to me, and he didn’t deserve to die in the street like a dog.” When he didn’t answer, she moved slightly, trying to meet his gaze. “Please. If something happened in the hospital that led to my father’s death, I need to know what it was.”
The doctor sat motionless. Then he looked her hard in the face. “Yes,” he said at last. “I shall tell you all you need to know.”
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AS THEY WALKED TOWARD THE BRANDENBURG Gate, Daniel kept his hand lightly on Gretchen’s arm. On her other side, Forster moved jerkily, as though at any moment he might turn around and return to the hotel, and Gretchen feared he was reconsidering his offer to help them.
Ahead, the massive triumphal arch loomed like a great, hulking mountain of stone. It should have looked beautiful to her, but
she remembered Daniel’s words in the restaurant—You never know who might be listening; let us walk in the Tiergarten, where we may be assured of privacy—and she shivered.
Beyond the gate, the Tiergarten stretched out for miles. Leafy trees clustered together on tidy lawns intersected by long paths. The doctor took the nearest one, striding so quickly they had to hurry to keep pace. Gretchen heard the voices of small children, playing somewhere nearby, beyond the trees, their gleeful giggles the sound of a separate world.
In silence, Gretchen walked with Daniel and the doctor until the trees formed a protective green tunnel over their heads. Enclosed in this verdant passage, she felt safe enough to speak.
“Herr Professor,” she began, “my father overheard you talking with another doctor about Herr Hitler when he was a patient in your hospital. You used a word he didn’t understand. I realize this was a long time ago, but it occurred on a momentous day, when the patients learned about our surrender. Perhaps you can remember—”
Forster looked sharply at her. Sunlight pushed through the overarching trees, sending panels of shadow and gold across his quiet face.
“Then you don’t know,” he said. “Of course, you wouldn’t. I’m sure your parents wished to keep the truth from you.”
Daniel’s hand tightened on her arm; she was glad of the steady pressure, a tangible reminder he was there. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“The Pasewalk hospital wasn’t an ordinary military hospital. It contained seven different clinics and sick bays.”
But that still didn’t explain . . .
“For treating hysterical soldiers,” Forster added.
“Hysterical . . .” She remembered Whitestone’s teachings. “You mean mentally diseased.”
Ahead, the path arrowed forward in a straight line. A breeze shivered through the trees. As she walked, she saw a few early leaves on the ground; colored red and orange, crackling like paper beneath her feet, they were already dead.