“I had stopped listening though because her offer was considerable. I could have married well when I was younger. To marry for comfort was probably the last good offer I was ever going to get. I wondered if it would be different if I was in love with her. I’ve never been in love so I had no point of reference. People talk about love with the same hysteria as politics, so I don’t really believe in either. It was the first time I felt unsure about the explosives under my bed, not sure that I wanted to go through with it. I wished I could tell her about it so she could talk me out of it. I had no doubt that she could have. But she had stopped talking. She was looking at me and waiting. I continued my thoughts aloud, which is always a mistake. ‘I don’t know, but as I grow older, I’m beginning to think that courage can’t be separated from vanity, because the one essential to courage is to think that you’re a little better than the people around you; so, if something’s to be done, it’s up to you to do it.’
“Her mouth fell open. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ she said it loud enough for the cashier to turn at us and frown.
“I stage whispered, ‘I’m not the stuff of which heroes are made.’
“Her brow furrowed, ‘I’m not asking you to be a hero. Does it really take that much courage just to be seen with me?’ She was speaking quietly but her voice kept breaking; I realized I was making the situation more complicated than it should have been.
“‘I didn’t say that.’ I spoke in an unnaturally deep voice and it slowed her down. We sat looking at each other from out of the silence.
“Finally she said, ‘I wanted to touch you but I was afraid. Why was I afraid to touch you?’
“My thoughts were still elsewhere. ‘I don’t want pity,’ I said and she slapped my face, insulted. She had a wiry strength that caused my ear to hurt and my sinuses to fill. It felt like someone had stuffed a pillow up my nose but I didn’t blink; I’d been expecting it ever since Fritz had been arrested.
“‘You want to marry me or not?’ Her voice jiggled the silverware. Everyone in the pastry shop was trying not to watch us. Even the cashier had turned his face away.”
Brandt pressed his hands to his temples as if trying to hold the hemispheres of his brain together. Nolte had begun to pace in agitation. “OK, we get it, he had other plans.”
Nebe closed and opened his eyes slowly, deliberately before turning back to the prisoner. “But, what did you say, Georg?”
“Ugly things; terrible things …” Under other circumstances such sensitivity might have been admirable in some way, but not here.
“What for? A simple ‘No’ would have been enough.” Nebe’s fingers traced the schnapps bottle in his drawer with longing.
Georg looked from one to the other as if seeking support. “It seemed better that she thought she was walking out on me.”
Nebe’s tone grew stern. “But there was no need to insult the girl. Couldn’t you have claimed to be going queer?” Yet again he longed it were a bad movie so he could walk out. Walking out on a stage play would be even better. Someone actually might notice. He yearned for some way of drawing his superiors’ attention to the fact that he was aware that the whole mess was a poorly staged farce from the very onset. That he knew it was an abomination with no solution. It was like one of those hideous dreams in which you are naked but all around you stubbornly refuse to even acknowledge that you are there.
Georg tilted his head. “I didn’t think of that.”
Nolte hissed, “No, you wouldn’t have.”
“So what did you say, Georg?” Nebe prompted, motioning with his hands. Georg looked down.
“I had to end it, to force her away. … I was grasping. So I said, ‘It’s not that. It really doesn’t matter whether I do or don’t. You’re the best friend I’ve had in a while and we’re good as lovers but, well, you’re just not presentable.’”
“That is pretty ugly and terrible, Georg,” said Nebe.
“And you said you were trying to be kind,” Nolte guffawed. “Maybe you are queer.”
Brandt was somehow offended by that. “Why does everyone feel competent to advise everyone else on their sex life?”
“Point noted, Brandt.” Nebe was glaring at Nolte. “Please go on, Georg.”
“Hannah, she was about to start screaming but settled on a penetrating stage whisper that carried to all corners of the room. The other customers were trying to do a three-quarter turn away from us.
“‘You hate me.’ Her whisper was like a wind tunnel. ‘And you hate yourself for being with me because I’m not pretty enough.’
“‘Maybe I love you. I said so …’ I really had said that, or at least I thought I had.
“‘No you didn’t.’ She was finally screaming, but no one heckled us, for a wonder.
“‘I am saying it now. Maybe I love you. But that’s not enough, is it? It’s never enough, is it? That’s why you should never even talk to an ugly girl. If you don’t find out what nice people they are you don’t have any conflicts.’
“‘Why do I put up with you?’ she said in a real whisper.
“‘Because I’m from somewhere else and you don’t know how you should act toward me and you feel a little nervous about that. You only think you’re in love.’
“Hannah sat very still with a look in her eye that would scare an executioner and then she said very softly, ‘You deserve everything that’s going to happen to you.’ Which was entirely true, then she marched out of the pastry shop, her long legs striding. The door slammed so hard behind her that the glass cracked, but no one looked up. They didn’t want to mess with her and I didn’t blame them.
“I don’t know, Georg,” said Nebe. “But when you found yourself acting like a pig in the name of honor, maybe, you should have rechecked your calculations.”
Nolte put in by way of conciliation. “What happened to her?”
“Oh, she took up with the podiatrist she’d been seeing when I first met her.”
“Good for her!” Nolte shouted and clapped his hands.
Georg nodded. “Yeah, I did at least one thing right.”
Nebe raised an appraising eyebrow. “You actually believe that, Georg?” He waited a second, but wasn’t really looking for an answer. “Now that that’s over with, let’s get back to building our bomb.”
Georg’s face contorted as if he were turning the reels of his memory to get to that part of the story. “I had started to dress differently, less like a manual laborer and more like a junior manager. I saw myself in a bakery store window one day, my reflected head sitting among the kuchens. I was wearing a black bowler instead of a worker’s cap so it had to have been sometime after my promotion. I was passing a news stand when I saw a front-page photo of Hitler standing on a podium in front of two white-washed pillars. It was the Völkischer Beobachter, Hitler’s official newspaper. I bought one and read it carefully, awkwardly; it wasn’t a habit. I had never felt compelled to be informed in that way, the radio was more entertaining. I always liked to read books, in fact reading can be nearly as much fun as masturbation, but the language used in that paper was somehow high-flown yet sub-literate. I don’t know how they did it but it was almost painful to read. The article went on and on, something about Hitler always speaking on November 8th, in commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch.
“A platoon of Bunde deutscher Mädchen marched by. It was some national girls’ club. They were marching in military formation but what they were up to was unclear. The uniforms were innocent enough: shapeless black suits with white gloves and pilgrim collars. They wore narrow-brimmed black fedoras. It took a second glance to see that it was a uniform. They looked dressed for a funeral and they marched in a trance. One of the girls in the last rank turned and gave me a quick look. When I smiled at her, the squad leader shouted, “Eyes front!” The girl snapped her eyes away and they marched off. I was walking slowly, holding the Völkischer Beobachter in front of me with both hands, studying the picture of Hitler chanting himself into comic strip r
apture. I folded the paper and put it under my right arm, away from my heart. Abruptly, I started walking very fast.
“I’d gone into a library and a motherly woman in a dress like a priest’s chasuble handed me bound volumes with back issues of the Völkischer Beobachter. I checked the front pages for the ninth of November for the previous years. On each one, there was a photo of Hitler speaking in the same place, at the same podium in between two pillars. And they weren’t the same photograph. In each one, Hitler’s face was contorted in a different twitch, his arm jerking in a different direction. ‘But they all might have been taken the same night,’ I had said it aloud and the librarian looked up. She asked if I had said something. I must have looked embarrassed and scared. The librarian smiled understandingly.
“‘If it helps to move your lips when you read, you go right ahead,’ she said, consolingly.
I went back to comparing the photos. Two of them showed part of the table in front of the podium. There was a flower arrangement on the table and the two arrangements were different. The pictures had been taken in different years. In 1933 and 1934 Hitler had been in front of the two pillars, speaking at the BürgerBräuKeller at precisely 8:00 p.m. on November 8th. My eyes fumbled through the texts, looking for confirmation, trying to untie the black knots of bureaucratic prose. I found it on the front page for November 9, 1935: ‘The ceremonies of 8/9 November 1935, honoring those who had fallen in 1923’—in the Beer Hall Putsch—‘have taken up the Eternal Watch creating the basis for the National Socialist Procession.’ The thick, squat Gothic letters were blurring and I had to stop to rub my eyes. ‘Therefore, ceremonies in all future years must be arranged exactly as in 1935.’
“‘Exactly.’ I said it out loud, almost like a reflex, because at precisely that moment I knew it could be done. With ponderous and creaky condescension, the librarian smiled in my direction so I returned the bound volumes and rushed out.”
The pause was thunderous as Georg looked from one man to the other with the expectant anticipation of one sure they had just shared a great revelation. He could not understand his auditors’ lack of enthusiasm.
Nebe’s fingers wound themselves around the neck of the schnapps bottle slowly and Brandt’s clackity clacked to halt as he finally caught up with the verbose narrative. Nolte’s expression broadcast a nearly homicidal exasperation.
“Gentlemen, that will do for now. …” Nebe nodded to Nolte, who rushed to call the turnkeys while Brandt massaged his fingers with the expression of a child wondering why he’s being sent to bed without supper. Georg sighed as he was airlifted from the room once more. Nebe knew that the longer this dragged on the harder it would become for them to suppress the urge to kill him.
Nebe waved his underlings out, lingering behind on some pretext. He desperately wanted a slug of that schnapps, but most importantly he didn’t want his colleagues to see in which direction he opted to depart that evening. He craved release and desperately needed it in order to maintain his composure. This situation was testing them all and he certainly didn’t want to have to explain having shot one of his colleagues or the prisoner. He had lived through this process hundreds of times but there had always been some point to it. At least it had been possible to convince oneself there was because the extenuating circumstances favored some conclusion. In this debacle there seemed to be nothing but extenuating circumstances, and they all appeared to be lethal.
This wasn’t an interrogation, it was a penance, for what he wasn’t sure but he would have preferred the Hail Marys and Our Fathers to this interminable nonsense. A smile crept over his lips as he thought about his plans for the evening and he actually licked them as he lifted the bottle from his drawer. Seeing as he was already paying penance he might as well enjoy the sin.
The reception at the brothel was cordial but not enthusiastic. He was law enforcement, which meant “pro bono” service, and he was too low in the hierarch to be an extravagant tipper. That night however he was looking for something particular to satiate his urge, so he pulled out all the stops and teasingly slid an unassuming yet respectable banknote along the madam’s throat before tucking it into the snug crevice formed by her ample décolleté. For this “treatment” to be effective the girl would need to exhibit the same unnerving innocence as Elser. The ingénue that the madam presented was perfectly cast to type, the question was whether she could play the role convincingly.
Her initial choice, to play it reluctant, nearly ruined the whole thing but Nebe had been sufficiently stirred by her to wave an admonishing finger and she took the cue like a pro. She suddenly became wide-eyed and docile, completely trusting: just like Georg. She waited to be told, to be led, to be used as he wished.
The sting and tingle on the palms of his hands was restoring Nebe to jolly good humor and the girl’s rosy buttocks were delightfully hot to the touch. Her lithe form squirming over his knees had inspired an insistent erection, which, despite his Lutheran ethics, he felt was a shame to waste. He decided to compromise: he would remove her gag and have her suck him off.
NOVEMBER 14TH, 1939
GEORG WAS DAYDREAMING WHEN HIS keepers came to collect him. The effects of hunger and sleep deprivation were beginning to show so he seemed to slip in and out of reality with considerable ease. He was still daydreaming as they led him out and down the hall. He was remembering a night with Hannah, having skipped the part of how he had gotten there, he was enjoying the feel of her deft slender fingers as they worked their way down either side of his spinal column. She was naked and as she leaned over him to work on the corded muscles in his lower back her muff was at eye level. She had done away with the perfume and he had marveled at how women often just pick things up instinctively. It seemed men needed to be told a thing flat out over and again and most times still didn’t get it.
He was still enjoying his massage when he was placed in the familiar chair.
“Shall we start with what were you doing in Munich, Georg?” Nebe gazed at him, then at the guards. The shook their heads, indicating that he hadn’t been given any more methedrine.
At that moment in his daydream Hannah’s bush was suddenly replaced by Fritz’s head teetering on the edge of the blood-soaked basket and Georg went rather pale. He wore no expression to speak of and Brandt looked almost concerned. “Has he had a stroke?”
Nebe shook his head while Nolte began to twirl his blackjack. “Can’t we just torture him already; if we keep this up we’ll all be catatonic before long.”
Time had passed and Nebe sighed to indicate that he was being patient. “It’s been three minutes since I asked the question, Georg. Perhaps, you don’t remember it. The question was: Why did you go to Munich?”
Georg’s eyes went wide as he suddenly emerged from his stupor like a drowned man revived. “The BürgerBräuKeller …”
Nebe urged him on. “Yes?”
“I wanted to go see it a week before. I mean, a week before a year ago, a week before the November 8, 1938 speech. I had read those newspapers but I wanted to see for myself, to be sure. There were SS men everywhere, like they were waiting for a parade, and police in every doorway. But …”
Nebe nodded. “But there were none inside, did that surprise you?”
Georg shook his head. “I didn’t really think about it like that.”
“You didn’t think about it? Adolf Hitler was going to be giving a speech there in one week and the ballroom was completely unguarded. Why didn’t you think about that?”
“Because it didn’t pose a problem.”
His answer caused Nebe alarm. “That’s too logical. It’s even kind of scary. … Perhaps I’m just getting tired of this.”
Georg looked at him candidly. “What is it you want?”
He should have been near collapse. He wasn’t. Don’t answer, Nebe thought; let him drive himself crazy trying to figure it out.
Georg stared at him expectantly. “You keep asking questions about all these tiny details. Aren’t you interested in the bomb
ing.”
Nebe smiled. “The bombing is the main course; I want to know how you decided to set the table. So, what if the room had been guarded?”
“Then I would have done it before they got there, a month before or even a year before. I knew that he had to be there.” Georg’s frustration almost looked like resolve.
Nebe smiled again. “You went alone?”
Georg answered without thinking. “No, I went with Hannah so we’d look like tourists.”
Nolte stared at him. “I thought you’d stopped seeing her.” Nolte’s tone was almost prissy and Georg looked at them sheepishly.
“I thought I had too. We were walking down Ludwigstrasse across the Odeonsplatz during the Fohn, the south wind, and the air was full of minute particles of greasy junk. The square was full of sticky golden light and visibility was as bad as in a heavy fog. We passed under the statue of crazy King Ludwig II, who stared down with a stern look that said he wasn’t going to put up with anymore nonsense. I nodded agreement. We walked along Theatinerstrasse, full of streetcars and department stores, button-hook street lamps and sidewalks too narrow for two people to walk side by side. Pompous, ponderously rococo buildings were wedged so close together that they had lost all dignity, like a costume party crammed into an elevator. I had to look away.
“Hannah was wearing spike heels and a long, overly fashionable raincoat. The result should have been disastrous but she was tall and leggy and it looked perfect on her. I turned to look at her. She was shockingly attractive. We passed Perusasstrase to Marienplatz and circled our way through Munich, following the parade markers, through Tal and Isartor, to the Isar. It used to be more of a river; it had once washed entire villages away. Now, it was turning on the Ludwigsbrücke to Rosenheimer Strasse and from there it was a straight line to the BürgerBräuKeller. I felt slightly groggy. I still had my fighting heart and all the best intentions but was about to lose on a TKO.
“Hannah smiled, very shyly, and asked me, ‘Care to take back any of the horrible things you said?’ I tried to make up for being such a louse the last time I saw her by saying, ‘I never take back anything I have said, but sometimes I might really mean something I didn’t say.’
The Führer Must Die Page 9
