Prisoner of Night and Fog (21 page)

After dragging the chair into its usual position, she fell onto the bed, still in her clothes, and sank into a gray and dreamless slumber.

It might have been minutes or hours later—at first she wasn’t sure which—when her empty stomach jerked her awake. She discovered that Mama had left a dinner tray for her outside the door, and she was grateful for the soup, even though it had gone cold.

When she had finished eating, she checked her watch—midnight, she had slept for nearly four hours—and was flipping to the next chapter in
Mein Kampf
when she recognized a light step on the stair. Herr Doktor Whitestone.

Carefully she dabbed her still-tender face with a washcloth; then she ran a comb through her disheveled hair and tucked Hitler’s book under her arm. It was time. While she was sleeping, her thoughts had ordered themselves together, and now she knew her next step.

Whitestone was already in his room by the time she entered the hallway, but he answered the door after only one knock. Fatigue or concern had formed dark shadows beneath his eyes. White strands she hadn’t noticed before wove through his thick, dark hair.

“Fräulein Müller,” he said, “are you all right? I have been so worried—”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, feeling for the first time that it was actually true. She held up
Mein Kampf
. “I’ve been reading this today and I have many questions for you, Herr Doktor Whitestone, if you have the time to speak to me now.”

“Of course, of course.” He ushered her into the tiny bed-sitting room. Two days ago, she might have hesitated, knowing it wasn’t proper for a young, unaccompanied girl to enter an older man’s private quarters, but she no longer cared.

There were only two places to sit, so he chose the bed, she the chair. “How can I help you, Fräulein Müller?”

She took a bracing breath. “You said you came to Munich to study Herr Hitler.”

“Yes, he’s a most interesting psychological puzzle.” Whitestone’s face lit up the same way her teachers’ did when they were discussing a favorite topic. “Other psychoanalysts have written about him, but I hope to gain a deeper perspective by seeing him at close quarters.”

“Have you learned much?”

“More than I expected, actually. Watching him in his favorite cafés, holding court for hours, has been quite informative.”

“Good,” she said. “Herr Doktor, I’d like you to teach me everything you know about him. From a psychoanalytical standpoint,” she added as he sat back in surprise. She was expressing herself badly, and she tried again. “I’ve been so disturbed by his behavior over the past few days. I’ve begun reading his book, and I believe I’m starting to see a part of him I never noticed before.”

“I don’t know how much help I can be.” He opened a silver tin and offered her a cigarette. Impatient, she shook her head and watched as he puffed away, the smoke curling in a thin plume around his face. “I don’t understand him,” he said. “I doubt anyone does, not fully. He cloaks his past in secrecy. But there are small clues that give parts of him away.”

Whitestone looked at her sharply. “I’m not sure this is the wisest course to take, Fräulein Müller. I assume you’ve been beaten by your brother—you needn’t look ashamed, child, it wasn’t your fault—but you
must
accept you’ve undergone significant trauma. It would be best if you sought out help for yourself.”

“This is how I’ll help myself.” The mention of Reinhard tightened her stomach into knots. For a second, she wasn’t sure she could continue talking, but somehow she shoved the words out of her battered mouth. “Until my injuries heal, I can’t go anywhere. There’s nothing for me to do but sit in my room. I must do something meaningful with my time, and I want to understand Herr Hitler.”

Whitestone lifted his eyebrows but refrained from comment. “Very well,” he said, and began.

24

AUGUST SLIPPED INTO SEPTEMBER, A MERE TEN
days as the green rains of summer hardened into the red-gold of autumn. In the mornings, Gretchen helped her mother prepare breakfast for the boarders, and in the afternoons she stayed in her room, poring over
Mein Kampf
and the books on psychoanalysis Herr Doktor Whitestone had lent her. Geli rang to invite her on a trip to Hitler’s mountain home in two weeks’ time, and twice Daniel called her on the common telephone in the downstairs hallway—and twice she whispered he mustn’t contact her at the boardinghouse, in case her brother answered. But she couldn’t stop the burst of warmth she felt when Daniel replied he was worried about her and had needed to know she was all right.

The second night she was back, Eva had burst into her room, sobbing, her voice wobbly when she declared
her father had no right to keep her from the friend she cherished most in the world and what on earth has happened to you, Gretchen, turn on the light and let me see your face!

When Gretchen clicked on the lamp, Eva stared for a moment, then wrapped her arms about Gretchen and cried. Eva didn’t ask again what had happened; it was obvious from her expression that she knew, and she promised they would always be friends, always, and someday she, Eva, would have some real power and she would send that beast far away from Munich.

As Eva cried on the bed, Gretchen stared at her reflection. Bruises circled her now-open left eye. Her still-swollen mouth had started to lose its puffy, misshapen appearance, and the cracks in her lips had begun to knit themselves together. The red imprint of Reinhard’s hand on her cheek had faded to pale pink. Bandages still covered her hands and knees. Except for the long blond braid shining down her back, she looked so little like Uncle Dolf’s golden pet.

She wouldn’t be that girl, not ever again.

She seized her sewing kit from the armoire’s top shelf. And even as Eva gasped “What are you doing, Gretl?” she grabbed the scissors and cut through the braid with one hard
thwack
.

She shook her head, enjoying the sudden lightness. Her hair barely reached her jawline. Freed from the heavy length, the strands had already started to curl. She looked like the flappers she saw sometimes on the streets, or in the American film magazines she and Eva liked to read: modern and daring and completely different.

Nothing like a proper National Socialist girl.

She barely heard as Eva started exclaiming over how sophisticated she looked, and insisting she sit down and let her trim and polish up the haircut. Dazed, she sat while Eva fussed and played with her hair, but she couldn’t rip her gaze from the glass. Different and new and completely herself—for the first time.

After Gretchen returned to work at the Braunes Haus, the next six days settled into a strange new rhythm. No one seemed to have noticed her absence—or if they had, they knew better than to say anything. When she left the office, she looked for Daniel in the street, but she never saw him. Perhaps he had understood when she had told him on the telephone that she needed to proceed cautiously. She couldn’t risk attracting her brother’s attention again.

In the evenings, once supper was over and the dishes washed, Gretchen sneaked into Whitestone’s room. She listened quietly while he taught her all he could. First, he said, she must gain a basic understanding of psychoanalytic theory. She learned about hysteria and irrational fears masking real ones and the mysteries locked within dreams.

Only a year ago, Whitestone told her while they sat in his room, lit by a single candle, their voices low as they listened with one ear for Reinhard’s footstep, Sigmund Freud had published an important work titled
Civilization and Its Discontents
. In it, he had tried to answer the timeless question “Why are people unhappy?” and he had concluded that one way people try to lessen their unhappiness is by finding a group to hate.

In her mind’s eye, she saw the passage from
Mein Kampf
that she had read again and again.
The art of leadership . . . consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary
. She recognized the man trying to destroy this world and create another in its place.

The next Tuesday evening, as she was heading to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water, she nearly smacked into a shadow in the front hall. The lights were off, to save on the electric bill, but she knew the broad shoulders hidden beneath brown fabric, and the muscular neck encircled by a plain khaki collar. Reinhard.

“Hello, Gretl,” Reinhard said in his careless way. “I’m heading to Osteria Bavaria to hear Uncle Dolf speak. You ought to come. Holing up in this house like a hermit’s bound to make anyone go mad.” He grinned while she stared at him.
It’s your fault I’ve been holed up here, you monster
.

“Fine,” she said, surprised by how cool she sounded. “I’d love to go.” Some of the men from the Residenzstrasse march might be there. If she was clever, she could question them about the putsch.

“Good.” Reinhard ruffled her hair—in precisely the way she had always hated. As she fetched a hat and pocketbook from her room, checking in the mirror that the bruises lingering around her eye were concealed with powder, a tiny part of her wondered if this was Reinhard’s way of apologizing.

No. Reinhard was incapable of feeling sorry. There was still so much about psychoanalytic theory she didn’t understand, but Whitestone had promised he would start explaining Hitler and Reinhard to her, now that he had taught her the fundamentals.

His voice had been soft when he added,
There is one thing you must understand about people like Reinhard
—
in some ways, they’re all the same. They are utterly incapable of forming natural attachments to others, such as friendships. In the purest sense of the word, they are alone
.

She reached the front door. Together, she and her brother went out into the soft September night.

Osteria Bavaria was one of Hitler’s favorite restaurants. The owner kept a side room reserved for him, a long, low, dark space, the walls decorated with paintings of hunts and pastoral scenes. Typically, the same men occupied the table, laughing and droning on under the heavy iron chandeliers.

Tonight was no different. Some of the usual companions sat with him at his regular table
:
Hanfstaengl, Eva’s boss Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s secretary Rudolf Hess, and several others.

A crowd had swelled to fill the room so tightly that Gretchen almost expected the walls to bow out from the pressure. The typical SA and SS fellows ranged about the room, leaning against the walls and keeping an eye out for any unwelcome guests. There were no women and none of the prosperous burghers or society folks who had flocked to hear Hitler at the Circus Krone.

She had expected to stand in the shadows, but Uncle Dolf saw her immediately and motioned her over, while Reinhard stayed back to talk with Herr Röhm. Dread weighted her feet, and every one of her muscles wanted to turn and run. Feeling Uncle Dolf’s watchful eyes tracking her progress, she threaded her way through the crowded room.

He smiled when she reached him and kissed the backs of her hands. All, apparently, was forgotten. She shouldn’t have felt surprised. She knew Hitler’s method of dealing with people he found unpleasant or embarrassing; he either froze them out or acted as though nothing bad had ever happened between them. He seemed to have chosen the second approach for her.

“My sunshine,” he said. “Your hair! You are quite changed; I shouldn’t have known you! What a lovely young thing you are becoming. Surely the boys are crowding around your door these days.”

Daniel’s image flashed in her mind, and her heart lurched. If Hitler only suspected the boy she couldn’t keep from her thoughts . . .

“No beaux,” she said, trying to sound like her old playful self. “I think the boys worry about impressing you, and so they keep their distance.”

He laughed, slapping his thigh delightedly. “Yes, I am quite the protective papa bear, am I not? Go, sit, eat something, my child. The cauliflower cheese is excellent tonight.”

“Thank you, Uncle Dolf.”

She wove herself through the mass of men again, finding a seat at the table’s far end, beside Rudolf Hess. He gave her one of his shy, close-mouthed smiles.

He was so unlike the raucous, back-slapping, brawling and beer-swilling sort who liked to cluster around Hitler. A quiet, brown-haired man from the gentleman class who rarely spoke and seemed to blend into the walls so effectively that she often forgot he was in the room. She glanced at him now. He was one of the earliest Party members. Perhaps he had known Stefan Dearstyne. . . .

“A wretched time,” he said after they had reminisced about the old days for a few minutes and she screwed up her courage to ask him about the putsch. “I took two ministers hostage at the Bürgerbräukeller and forced them into a car. The plan was to take them to a hideout high in the mountains, so they could be used as leverage if our revolution failed. I was still driving in the mountains when I got word that the putsch had ended in a shoot-out.

“All my dreams were destroyed in that instant,” he continued, staring into his foam-topped beer stein. Around them, men laughed and talked loudly, and Gretchen leaned closer to Hess, straining to hear him. “I escaped along a mountain trail into Austria and lived there for a while in exile. But when I heard the Führer had been found guilty of high treason, I knew I must return and take my rightful place beside him. I was sentenced to eighteen months and, in captivity with the Führer, began to work with him on
Mein Kampf
. What do you know about energy currents?”

The abrupt change in conversation forced Gretchen to bite her lips so she wouldn’t burst into nervous laughter. Energy currents and vegetarian diets were two of Hess’s favorite topics. His alibi would be easy to check. She could cross him off the list.

A voice cut into her thoughts. “Have you heard the news about Amann?” an SA fellow asked Hess. “Poor dwarf’s lost his arm in a hunting accident.”

Dwarf? Gretchen remembered the photograph in Dearstyne’s apartment of her father, Uncle Dolf, and three other men heading into the beer hall minutes before they launched the putsch. One of them had been dwarf-like. Was it possible he knew what had happened during the automobile ride to upset her father? She didn’t dare ask Uncle Dolf, not after he had turned her aside so easily when she’d needed him. Ulrich Graf was still unwell, after being shot during the putsch, and she avoided Alfred Rosenberg and his endless ramblings about the Jews and Communists if she could. Perhaps, though, this Amann could tell her something.