Hitler's Boat

by Pierre Turgeon

  “Heraus!” he shouted to the German.

  In the deserted street that led to the wall, Schuppmann turned to face them; they were waiting for him to get into his black BMW, arms pointing outward, hands joined at his belt, he pumped his pectorals and his trapeziums in a hideous tension that reached his bloody face. Then he slipped his black shirt back on and disappeared.

  The weather was cooling down; the sun was setting behind the lace of the wall. A graffiti: “Seele Mörderer.” Killer of souls. The pink flamingo flight of the clouds. And the dead pigeon, on the corner of the street, God, Theos, Deus, Christophe thought, everywhere it is always you that does not appear. Was he not his father’s son, the personification of the mind: the end and the beginning of man?

  They piled up the sidewalk, in front of the door, the pierced plates of the weights, the heaviest ones underneath, in two cone-shaped steel towers. Then on the phone, Christophe explained the incident to Hofer and told him that Schuppmann no longer had a place among them.

  “He only wanted to have some fun!” the other answered, “You should not have turned him away for such trivia. Who will represent me on the site?”

  Christophe hung up. In the yard, the Turks were regrouping in silence.

  “Herr Hofer,” he announced to them, “has just informed me that he is no longer financing the dig. So I have no choice. I have to fire you.”

  That was the moment Fatima chose to go down the stairs and join her comrades.

  NOTEBOOK SIX

  As soon as he was alone, Christophe lifted the tarp that covered the entrance of the well and then went down. Above his head, the concrete had cracked over more than twenty meters. The hoarse, burning breath of the Soviet artillery. But the Führer, he was sleeping soundly. Two floors below.

  Above, they had ultra-sound monitoring systems. Quiet! No pneumatic hammers. Shovels and wicker baskets. Like all the clandestine tunnel diggers. Suddenly his pick, which he was holding above his head, hit a substance as hard as a rock. He looked up in front of him and, in the glow of his lamp he saw a smooth and even surface. Touching it, he checked that it really was concrete. The ceiling of the bunker was six meters thick, but the sides, like this one, were about only fifty centimeters thick.

  He recovered a vial of sulfuric acid, which he splashed the wall with. With a rag, he protected the lower part of his face from the vapors that stank of rotten eggs. Then he attacked. Lying on his back, his airways and his eyes burnt from the sulfur.

  Suddenly, the steel bar slipped from his fingers: it had just come in contact with emptiness. He widened the wound in the dragon’s flanks sleeping there for forty years. He was soon able to slide his torso in through the opening. He found himself halfway up a wall covered in blue and filthy tiles from Friesland. He rolled around on his stomach and let himself fall on the floor soiled in black ashes.

  He inspected about thirty low-ceiling rooms, linked by narrow corridors, painted in rust brown, invaded by mold. He recognized the chancellor’s private quarters: three big rooms grouped around a toilet and a bathroom.

  He was wandering in an empty labyrinth. Before blowing up the access ways, the Russians had taken everything out: plumbing, electric wiring and furniture. The spiral staircase that led to the upper floor was blocked with rubble. The earth was taking back the space little by little, still commanded by Berlin’s ghosts.

  The vastness of the place made it difficult to find the secret bunker close to the Spree, beneath the others, known by historians and that led to the Foreign Affairs Ministry, to the garden, to the new chancellery and to the tower that protected the air vent of the ventilation system. The split that divided the East and the West spread right above his head. He let himself fall to the floor, prisoner of his own heat beat, in the smell of dead rats, contemplating the reflections of his acetylene lamp on the metallic buckles on his boots.

  Statue without any devices or openings to talk, to eat, nothing that came in or out, full up to the top of it’s skull, cold and hard. He was capsizing at the bar of the Helgoland, the hare was smiling against Berlin’s night; he took out his watch and made an appointment with himself in a thousand years. He had forgotten the dice that would abolish chance, he was scratching the Prussian’s belly, and he was c-sectioning Germany, ripping away its Cesar a thousand times deader than a god.

  He swept his face that had fallen in dust in one swoop and he went back to his room in front of the computer Hofer had lent him; the disk was turning – clicks and purrs – and the text appeared on the screen. The absence of a manuscript rendered any handwriting analysis obsolete. These digitalized, magnetized, electronic words actually belong to an 8086 microprocessor, Palo Alto patented.

  Walkman on his ears. In the middle of the labyrinth, the red Buddha was kissing the Goddess Kali. Outside, a garbage man was yelling as he hit the truck’s container where he had just dumped the garbage bins. This story, he would tell it to the end. Like brass, he would let himself flow into the mold of the tale. Electronic Oedipus, he had dialogues with the Sphinx with a screen in front of him.

  The telephone rang. It was Hofer. “Since you have not allowed me to leave Schuppmann on the perimeter to protect my interests, I have invited your lovely friend Fatima to my house. I think she misses you. So notify me when the work is done. Yes, I know the Turkish workers have left you. But Schuppmann tells me you are very strong. So cheer up…And do not forget to write down the story of your exploits. I do want to publish you.”

  Chénier put on his work gloves to avoid splinters. The humidity and the cold caught in his throat. Half crouched, he moved in the gallery that was lit by light bulbs every ten meters, minding the support beams and the electric wire stretched between them.

  His boots made a suction noise on the clay soil. He soon had to crawl. No more extension cords for the light bulbs. He lit his way with a flashlight. In Plato’s cavern, next to Hitler’s tomb, the glaciers’ coldness was numbing him. On his death, nothing would change; the world would stay the same. The camera would continue to roll. Then why was he afraid? Simply put: he was fear.

  On the mirror on the Führerbunker’s wall, he found teeth. This skeleton smiled and looked at him. Here he was in the office. Behind the frieze? They would have covered the joints in cement, which would explain the surreal cement truck on the photos taken by the Russian when they arrived.

  He could not use explosives, which singularly slowed his work down. It was night outside. He would only stop to drink a little bit of coffee he had brought in a thermos. He widened the opening with a rock and climbing pick. His strikes on the wall began to sound hollow. Around two o’clock in the morning, he was able to slide in a crypt that was crossed by two steel bars embedded in the block that fit perfectly in the wall behind him.

  On the ground, his lamp uncovered a rectangle of darkness. The ladder that allowed him to go down the hole had been pulled out and leaned against the wall. He let it slide until it touched the ground. He counted the steps out loud. “Fifty!” The echo sent back the number when he reached the end of his descent. He found himself at the entrance of a vast room: his light lost itself without touching the other side. Above, it illuminated the round arcs from which hung ochre stalactites. From everywhere came the smells of rotting plants, rancid meat: the digestion of earth.

  A few steps, at first on spongy clay soil, then on finer sand were his boots that squeaked while leaving tracks of mud. His left shoulder hit an obstacle: he stepped back to look at an electrical generator. He cut the big rubber wires and came back a few minutes later from the tunnel with an extension cord mounted on a reel. When he was done wiring the dynamo, a few sparks flew and the turbines began to turn with a deep and rough snore at first, then, as they gained speed and the oil that was under pressure spread into the motor, with a regular high pitched whistle.

  DCA floodlights lit up, weak but gaining in intensity, converging on a Tyrolean cottage, with a cathedral roof and a balcony supported by beams made of oak, built against the wall o
f the cave, on top of a slight slant, on concrete foundations. A speaker was playing the first measures of the Ride of the Valkyries.

  He searched every nook and cranny of the cave without finding an exit. The lake was, after examination, actually a river, its subterranean current widening, and then sank into a pile of rubble that blocked the entrance of the tunnel towards the Spree, that could have been navigated with the inflatable boat Christophe was now moving forward on, his torso over the edge of the stern, searching the clear water, where he found no skeletons.

  He headed back towards the cottage that was reflected in the lake. He came in the dining room: a pedestal table buried under empty cans and a gramophone, still playing some Wagner.

  A pencil was placed on top of two notebooks, their black covers wrinkled from the humidity. He opened the first one that read: “I have decided to stop waiting for the opportune moment to talk. Because it will most likely never come.”

  It took a long time for him to finish reading. When he was done, he mechanically looked at the cuckoo clock that hung above the kitchen counter full of canned food, and then he remembered it had not worked in forty years.

  “It really looks like time has stopped here, would you not say, dear partner?” Hofer said who, preceded by Schuppmann, had entered the cottage on the tip of his toes. The Kebek Gauleiter. Pale and shivering. Resembling the character described by von Chénier: perched on a balcony of Chateau Frontenac like a vampire ready to take flight, his chin brandished over a crowd of Quebecers waving flags with swastikas. In gothic on the title cards, his replies twitched in the dark.

  “Where is Fatima?” Christophe asked.

  “She is resting at my villa… I am a little cross with you for not inviting me to the opening of the crypt. Were we not to share the artifacts found in our digs? Will you allow me to read the notebooks after you are done?”

  With a sigh, he sat down on a sofa that nearly collapsed under him. Schuppmann brought him the two manuscripts. He flipped through the first one and let out after a few seconds: “Four million marks!” But the other one seemed to surprise him. He turned and turned it around in his hands, deciphering a few passages here and there. After a long while, he leaned back into the couch and said, “So you already know who I am. A pity, I would have liked to surprise you myself. Only, this manuscript your father left leaves a few questions in the air. Allow me the pleasure of clearing them up for you.”

  He got up, opened a bottle with a molded label and filled two cut Bohemian crystal glasses monogrammed AH, and that had been placed upside down on a Bauhaus buffet, with vodka. Hofer and Schuppmann went bottoms up. Christophe took out a notepad and the pencil left by his father and started taking notes.

  “When the emergency exit blew up, the Führer did not really have a choice. Your father killed Adolph Hitler. By forcing him to commit suicide. We caught up with Friedrich, your dear Lizbeth’s brother. He paid. Your parents, I simply abandoned here, to let them realize the extent of the damage they had caused. And then I sailed with these microfilms that, I thought, contained the writings of our leader, towards Canada, to take care of your uncle Perceval. But again your father had betrayed me. When I recovered them last month, thanks to our common friend O’Reilly, I saw they contained documents of no interest. But here they are now… Finally!”

  He slapped the notebook he was holding against his chest. “Thanks to you! To your determination! You are agreeable to me, Herr Chénier! In another time, we could have worked together. But I will oblige you not to write down what I am saying.”

  Stubbornly, Christophe lowered his head and continued to scribble. Hofer snapped his fingers. Schuppmann moved forward, enormous. “Schuppmann, explain to the gentleman…” Without a word, the other grabbed the pencil and planted it in Christophe’s right palm. Vibrating in the flesh, like the arrow of a Sebastian. He pulled it out and the blood began to flow. The tip of the lead had broken and stayed beneath the flesh.

  “Allow me, dear friend, to explain my method to you like I have previously done with your father. Your enemies, you mercilessly attack them, you scan them to find their weakness, then you push in the pen with precision in the shell’s fault, without forgetting to say with a friendly smile ‘Pardon me, dear neighbor, but I cannot do otherwise!’ That is that famous vengeance that is said is better eaten cold.”

  Without adding a word, he left the Tyrolean cottage with Schuppmann and headed towards the end of the cave, towards the ladder for the steel footbridge. Once over there, he turned and shouted at Christophe who had followed them from a distance.

  “The explosion later on will be that of the tunnel that leads to the hostel. For now, I am leaving you with electricity. Take advantage of it to listen to Wagner.”

  And Schuppmann pulled the ladder away. Christophe tried in vain to pull out the black dart next to his lifeline. The fragment continued to dig further. Pain crossed his arm. The lead was flowing into his bloodstream like the text of his father embodied in his.

  Despite the slight delirium and pain that coursed through him, he kept the edge of reason intact, the sharpness still cutting through the reality in front of him, keeping his integrity between the two clamps. Suddenly, he noticed that the predicted explosion had not occurred. Slipping his father’s notebook under his shirt, he began to climb up one of the steel pylons that supported the footbridge. His heart beat wildly.

  He began to run, noticing as he did the sticks of dynamites that had been placed at the entrance of the bunker but that Hofer had not ignited. When he came out into the yard, he understood why.

  Weighed down by the rain that had soaked his brown felt coat, Schuppmann lay on his back, away from the protection of the roof that hung over the yard. Christophe leaned over him and shook him. He recognized the smell of the hoferium chloride. Rigor mortis. Hofer must have prepared the euthanizing vodka earlier; to remain the sole owner of the notebooks.

  The ascension to death surely had been pure bliss for Schuppmann, if his large smile that showed his and gave the impression he was savoring a huge joke was anything to go by. But why had Hofer neglected to blow up the tunnel behind him?

  He pulled Schuppmann by the ankles. His jaws closed on air. The occipital scraped the gravel, tracing a sandy line up to the well. The rain became heavier, making the soil even more slippery.

  Digging his feet on each side of the other’s torso, he crouched to grab the lapel of his coat. His breath was fogging up. Flexing his biceps, he tore the body off the ground and threw it in front of him. A resounding splash indicated that he had reached the bottom of the flooded tunnel twenty meters below. He removed the ladder.

  The downpour had stopped. In a few months, bulldozers would demolish this abandoned hotel. And they would build on this lot a gigantic German civilization Museum. While digging the foundations, they might stumble upon a corpse, but Berlin’s basement was full of those. In the lavender patch where clouds were fraying, the sun reappeared, hitting the windows of the first floor at an angle and turning them into mirrors. On one of the panes, he saw the fleeting reflection of a face, like a white flash.

  Someone was hiding in a room under the slate roof. Hofer? Someone that had surely been watching for some time, but that would not be able to avoid him when he went up to meet them, not even by going through a window in the façade that was blocked by solid sheets of plywood. Without haste, he followed the path, vaulted in arches and mounted with stone cartridges with bas-relief of the Prussian eagle, and that led to the coach door made of two heavy panels that he had locked. Then, he began his ascension of the spiral staircase.

  Strangely calm. Was a murder what it took to calm him down? Yes, but only one- the one he was precisely about to commit. An execution rather, ordered by the jury of victims from the other side called to testify through his patient research as a lone detective.

  On each floor, he locked the door of the hall that led to the rooms. Everywhere the smell of molding plaster and humid soil had replaced the lingering one of
sauerkraut. He was shivering. He took off his rubber boots. A slash on his left thigh stiffened his leg and forced him to walk by pivoting on his right hip.

  He spied the silence in the empty building: the creaking of a shutter on its hinges, the dull shock of a pigeon landing on a gutter, the howling of the wind beneath the roofing. The risers seemed to close in as a single vertical wall where only the twisted copper rods between the golden eyelets indicated the place you could step on. On the last floor, he moved with difficulty down the hall that seemed to climb according to an exponential curve up to the door of his apartment: scratched, purple and grey, pierced with a peephole. A fist to the plexus bent his torso.

  He imagined Hofer lolled in his tassel armchair, ready to shoot him through the wooden panel as soon as he would see the handle turn. Walhalla would receive him. He would die with a weapon in his hand. He opened it with a jab of his elbow. At the end of his aim, he found his father, sitting on a wobbly chair, in front of the computer. Christophe recognized him from the photos, because of their brief encounter in Paspébiac in 1943, only remained a few words spoken in a foreign language on the beach, as an inflatable raft came out of the darkness into the bay, with two sailors and a Kriegsmarine officer onboard.

  In the glow of the cathode screen, the twenty-five-year-old red head looked like a Pierrot from the moon. His father wore a white uniform decorated with the golden sign of the Propaganda Ministry. He hummed as he typed on the keyboard. From the cigarette hanging on the corner of his mouth fell ashes that were dangerous for the chips logic circuits.

  Christophe got up and walked closer to read what the other was writing.

  “I’m finishing this tale for you. You wanted to know what happened to us, your mother and I. We fled. She was able to meet with her brother. In the last moment’s confusion, the discipline was crumbling. The Führer finally committed suicide. The men in charge of watching me and guarding the entrance of the subterranean river had deserted their post in inflatable rafts. They almost came across Lizbeth and Friedrich who were coming from the opposite direction.”