The Austrian: Book Two

by Ellie Midwood

  Still observing Otto and Annalise, I recalled another occasion, when Walther Schellenberg was making one of his usual reports which I was barely listening to.

  “That’s what happens when bosses hire beautiful secretaries.” He smirked, making me jerk my head up from the paper in front of me.

  “What?” I frowned.

  “I said, it’s not a good thing, when bosses, and especially military chiefs or armament chiefs, get themselves pretty girls as secretaries. They fall under their charm, and the girl milks them for information to sell it to the enemy. Both will have to be hanged now, and there’s nothing I can do. Führer’s orders.”

  “Who’s going to be hanged?”

  “The armament chief, who was in charge of all the factories responsible for the production of tanks. He made the mistake of getting involved with his secretary, a very pretty girl, who was hired by the Polish resistance. So, not only was he boasting to her about the numbers of tank production, he was stupid enough to tell her the combination of the safe, where all the top secret maps and blueprints were kept, to show her that he trusted her, you understand? And, of course, she started copying all those blueprints as soon as he was out of the office, because she had the key to it, too… How ignorant and trusting some people can be, really! It’s the intelligence war, one can’t trust anyone here!”

  “Frau Friedmann has the keys to my office,” I blurted out without even thinking. “And the safe combination… and she sorts out all the top secret mail, too.”

  To my big surprise Schellenberg waved his hand dismissively.

  “Annalise Friedmann has proved to be a faithful and loyal worker. She worked as my assistant for quite some time, and, trust me, I would smell a rat at once if she worked for the enemy. She isn’t too ideologically inclined, but… nobody’s perfect, right?” He gave me a rare smile and asked jokingly, “You’re not suspicious that she’s an enemy spy, are you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Was I? I guess I was boring her with my heavy gaze for so long that she finally lifted her head from the map.

  “What do you think, Herr Obergruppenführer?”

  The smile that she presented me with was so sincere that I completely forgot Schellenberg and his tales, my daughter’s tales and the whole world that dissolved into a pair of the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen. I suddenly recollected the words, which my first – friend? Love interest? Girlfriend? – Dalia pronounced in my office in 1938: “It’s a different type of love, when you love somebody, and love that somebody so much that it is impossible to breathe without that person, when the whole world can be found only in one pair of eyes, and nothing else matters when those eyes look at you, because in those eyes you see the reflection of your own soul.”

  “I trust you on this one,” I said slowly, looking her straight in the eye. Her brow barely moved to a frown, but she caught herself at once and beamed again, only there was some falseness in her whole disposition now. She lowered her head barely an inch as a shade of shameful blush touched her porcelain skin, and guilt seemed to make her avert her eyes, back to the map, which suddenly interested her again. I saw it all, and repeated once again, “I trust you.”

  She didn’t smile this time. She looked up at me, tiredly and with silent, painful compassion, and then quickly got up and said something about the coffee. I think that was the day when I finally understood everything. Understood, and yet refused to believe.

  In less than a couple of weeks Otto had already brought the rescued dictator Mussolini from Rome to Vienna, personally escorting him everywhere in front of the flashing cameras, while I was hiding in the shadows behind, and she was with me, as always. She even stayed for the celebration, even though she always detested the drinking bouts, and the Austrian drinking bouts even more. I had more than my fill that night, and found her in the library after the party had finished, watching her sleep – such an adorable little thing curled in a chair – and tried to read her mind.

  She woke up when I brushed her cheek gently, and for the first time I saw fear in her eyes. The predator within me woke up at once, fueled by alcohol and shuttered faith, and I grabbed her chin and yanked her head up, making it impossible for her to look away. Dalia was on my mind recently, all the time I was comparing the two. Was Annalise a Jew? Was she using me like Dalia was? Was she going to reject and betray me, like Dalia did?

  I knew that I was drunk and too far gone. I might have killed her then, snapped her neck without remorse just to shoot myself five minutes later because I couldn’t live without her…

  “Are you lying to me?” I growled at her, even angrier after I realized how I sounded.

  “What?”

  “Are you lying to me?!” I shouted at her with all the hatred of a domesticated wolf, who had finally learned to love his human, when that human had been sharpening the knife behind its back the whole time in order to make a beautiful rug out its fur so as to rest his feet on it.

  “No, of course not. Of course not. I would never.” She was already soothing me with her touch, brushing the hair off my face, and hiding her ‘knife’ for now. With doomed graveness it dawned on me that I didn’t care if she had a ‘knife’ in the first place, and I didn’t care if she stabbed me with it, for once domesticated, a wolf can’t bring itself to hurt its master anymore. She took all the wildness out of me, replaced my independence with devotion, melted all the ice that I so carefully had built around my heart, and made herself indispensable. She was essential for living, day by day, with all her mischievous smiles, with all those treats she was placing on a little plate, hiding an ashtray from me… She would even hide the cigarettes from me! Hide them and make innocent eyes in response to all my stern looks and the interrogatory posture I adopted, with my arms folded and one foot tapping the carpet next to her desk.

  “Didn’t see them. You probably smoked them all. It’s for the best anyway, really. You smoke too much, Herr Gruppenführer. It can’t be good for you.”

  “Biting my nails to the quick in the absence of cigarettes can’t be good for me either, Frau Friedmann! Now, you have two choices: you give me my Chesterfield back, or you go and buy me a new pack! Two packs! It’s the morning, for Christ’s sake! Do you want me to go all day without cigarettes?”

  “Isn’t it a nice way to test your famous SS will?” Annalise smiled with exaggerated brightness.

  I gave her a long, stern look. “Without my cup of coffee and a cigarette in the morning, I’m very far from a joking mood, Frau Friedmann. Where are my Chesterfields?”

  “I broke them and flushed them down the toilet,” she replied nonchalantly, still looking at the document that she was typing, while I gasped at such atrocious treatment of my property. “Sorry. You’ll just have to go without them for a few hours.”

  “No, I will not! You will go and buy me a new pack right this instant! Maybe that will teach you a lesson of how not to disobey your superiors and… violate their private possessions!”

  She snickered at my last words, threw another impish glance at me, shrugged, took her purse from under her desk and proceeded to the exit. I thought that I had finally won the first battle with my wayward secretary, however, when she opened the door to my office twenty minutes later, letting inside a whiff of freshly-baked pastry, I saw a brown paper bag in her hands and realized that I couldn’t be more mistaken.

  “Can you imagine, Herr Gruppenführer, the train tracks got bombed last night, and nobody had cigarettes delivered today! Not a single store around,” she shamelessly lied, placing sweetly smelling delicacies on the platter in front of me. “I got you something better, though. There. You need to get some food inside you, because you can’t just drink your calories, you know.”

  “Why do I have a feeling like we’re married, Frau Friedmann?”

  She sneered and gave me a playful wink. “You wouldn’t be able to handle me as your wife, Herr Gruppenführer.”

  “I still want to try one day.”

  Instead
of replying she broke a piece off an apple tart and stretched her arm tentatively to my mouth. I grinned and took the piece out of her hand. She broke another piece, a little hesitantly, and held it before me like the first one. I took that one too, only this time I caught her hand and licked the glazing off her fingers. She didn’t move away when I got up and stood next to her. She didn’t stop me when I picked up her chin and kissed her, at first slightly and teasingly, and then deeper, on her open mouth, with all the raw lust that I felt for her every goddamn single time that she came up within a foot from me.

  She didn’t push me away when I started feeling every curve of her body through her uniform, probably pressing her into myself harder than I should have. She even let me go much further than she usually did and didn’t protest when I unbuttoned her jacket and, having no patience to struggle with her shirt buttons, pulled it from the inside of her skirt and held it in place at her shoulders while sucking and biting on her small, perky breasts through the sheer material of her bra. In a few seconds I pulled that up, too, finally getting to the best treat she could offer me – her naked flesh. In response to all my biting and even my rough manhandling of her tender breasts, which I held firmly in both hands, when I placed my mouth back to her sweet little mouth she only moaned without any protest. Only when I tried to get my hand under her skirt did she came back to her senses, and she blinked at me, almost in horror at what we were doing, quickly rearranged her clothes and ran away from me, like she always did, probably forbidding herself to even admit that it actually happened. Again.

  Did it really matter then, if she was a Jew and an enemy spy, after she’d gotten so deep under my skin that I would have to peel it all off and have my very heart sliced open to get rid of her? I couldn’t find the answer to that question, no matter how much I tried.

  Chapter 15

  Nuremberg, September 1946

  I couldn’t make sense of all this, no matter how much I tried. For the third day in the row I was pacing my cell in agitation, like a caged tiger. How could it possibly be, that the Führer was alive? How did Otto come across this information? Was it even credible in the first place, or was he just throwing me – and the Americans for that matter – a non-existent bone, making them postpone my execution until… until what? Until he had the means to get me out? Did he have the means to get me out? Or was it all indeed true and… Hitler was really very much alive and in hiding?

  I shook my head at the thought for the millionth time, squinting once again in concentration, trying to picture the world map in front of my eyes with parallels and meridians, and tried to pinpoint his possible location. I even started drawing invisible lines in the air, calculating the coordinates that Otto gave me in his previous message, which were imprinted in my memory forever after I had destroyed the note itself.

  “South America,” I whispered to myself, with my hand freezing over the imaginary map.

  “What are you doing?”

  Henry’s half-amused, half-concerned question startled me for a second. I quickly put both hands back onto my lap and faked a smile at him.

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

  “Are you all right?” my guard asked again, probably wondering if I had started losing my sanity under the pressure of the impending verdict. “Do you want to talk to the doctor maybe?”

  “No, I really am quite fine, thank you.” I nodded in confirmation of my words, and in a second it suddenly hit me: an opportunity that I had to clarify all this impossible mess. “Henry, wait! I want to talk to the priest, though. Can you tell him that I want to attend mass tonight, at six?”

  “Most certainly. I will tell him during lunch.”

  “Henry?” I made my best begging eyes at him. The kind kid could never refuse that look. “If it’s not too much trouble, could you possibly go and ask Otto to come and pray with me too?”

  He became pensive for a moment. “I am quite sure that he will agree, however, I can’t say with the same certainty that the prison administration will allow it… You know… You and him, you have certain history; after all, he was the head of the diversion unit…”

  “Henry, do you really think it’s possible for me, or even for the two of us, to escape from here?” I arched my brow at him with a sad smile. “And even if we did by some miracle, how far could we possibly go?”

  Henry chuckled, and I continued in my best persuasive tone. “Do you see my face? Did you see his face? All of our scars together with our height don’t really make us your average, non-descript criminals, don’t you agree?”

  “I suppose.” He snickered again. “I’ll talk to the commandant during lunch as well. If I give him all the arguments that you just gave me, I think he’ll agree.”

  The hours seemed to drag when I wanted the time to move faster, for the first time in God knows how long. I was twitching my leg, waiting for Henry to bring me my lunch, but it wasn’t the food that I was looking for. When he finally handed me the dish with a sly wink, only then did I breathe out in relief. I never knew before that it was possible for a human being to hold their breath for hours.

  My fellow Catholics, among the highest ranking war criminals, gave me a strange look when I appeared in a cell that was converted into a little chapel, where an American army chaplain was holding daily services. No wonder; I would stare at them like that, too, if they never showed a nose in there before, and now all of a sudden decided to pray for salvation. They spoke quietly amongst themselves while the chaplain, wearing an American army uniform, was preparing for the mass, and I sat alone, in the very back, stealing occasional glances at the door.

  Otto was brought in only a minute before the service started, shook my hand with an absolutely straight face that didn’t give away any emotions, and sat next to me, only asking a formal, ‘How do you do, Herr Obergruppenführer?’ I caught onto that too; the shrewd diversionist deciding to play the part of a former subordinate, who didn’t have any type of close relationship to his former chief. Naturally, I didn’t know if Otto told them during the interrogations about how inseparable we really were, but I sensed from that single phrase that he didn’t, and had instead played the part of a devoted former orderly.

  I occasionally shot glances at the MPs standing by the walls and behind our backs, at the door, and even nudged Otto with my knee slightly. He barely moved his head from side to side, making a closed fist on his lap – a commandos’ universal army sign for ‘wait.’ I started twitching my leg again, but he slightly pressed his leg next to mine, making me stop. I tried to get my emotions under control. Of course, he had all the time in the world, he wasn’t about to get hanged in the near future, I was thinking bitterly, and I closed my eyes when the chaplain invited us to say a prayer. At last I understood what my friend had been waiting for, when I heard his prayer that he was barely whispering under his breath; a prayer completely different from the one Pater Noster was reciting.

  “Our Father in heaven… Hitler didn’t shoot himself, it wasn’t even his body that they burned, it was in fact a radio operator’s corpse from the bunker, who they shot, dressed as him, and poured gasoline all over to make him unrecognizable… Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come… One of my men told me that when he made it from the bunker to the mountains, where I was in the hideout prepared for operation Werewolf… Your will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven… He gave me the coordinates of their destination in Argentina that he learned by heart, because it was his task to burn all the documentation... Give us this day our daily bread, Father… When you talk to the OSS, ask them why the Russians stole his body and never showed it to them for the autopsy… And forgive us our debts, Father, as we also have forgiven our debtors… Because they knew by the dentist records that it wasn’t his corpse and didn’t want to admit that he escaped, they’re secretly searching for him now, but they’ll never find him… And lead us not into temptation… As soon as I learned it, I went to give myself up to give you this information. Tell them that you’ll give them the coo
rdinates only when you’re on American soil, they won’t kill you there. Bargain with them to the last… But deliver us from evil. Amen.”

  Otto crossed himself and straightened out, completely ignoring me for the rest of the service. In the end, he shook my hand firmly, and I saw the familiar scheming light in them.

  “I hope we’ll meet again someday, Herr Obergruppenführer.”

  I barely restrained myself from hugging him tightly.

  _______________

  Poland, June 1944

  I hugged her gently, yet another close person, dying in my arms. Melita wasn’t going to wait for her death, though, she informed me of that in the telegram that she sent from the Eastern front, from the field hospital where she was currently confined to. One of the anti-tank grenades that exploded nearby while she was bandaging one of the wounded soldiers had pierced her whole back with shrapnel, which, when treated in the scarce field conditions which witnessed barely any alcohol or morphine, soon caused sepsis. Needless to say that I dropped everything and rushed to the frontline before she could die.

  “You’ve gotten even more handsome than I remember you being.” Melita, who I’d known for over twenty-five years, who I shared the most sacred thoughts with and who was more of a wife to me than even Elisabeth was, gave me her warm smile.

  “It’s probably all that morphine in your system that makes me look good,” I tried to joke.

  I was surprised to find her sitting up in her bed, far stronger than I expected from a person in her terminal state. She cringed slightly as she fixed a thin pillow behind her bandaged back and waved me off.