by Chris Petit
Tieck was standing with his back to Schlegel, the top hat in his hand now. The man’s footwear matched, he saw. Tieck turned as if expecting him. He showed no surprise but looked strained and exhausted, like a man in the middle of a marathon session at the gaming tables.
‘Hermann Fegelein wants to talk to me,’ Schlegel said while asking himself if this man really could be his father.
‘No surprise there,’ Tieck said flatly. ‘I expect Hermann is being greedy.’
‘He has invited me to the Berghof.’
‘When?’
‘Now.’
Tieck’s mood seemed to improve at that. He clenched his fist, as though ground had been gained. ‘Then you must go. But first come.’
He motioned Schlegel closer to the window overlooking the winners’ enclosure. Sounds of loud drunkenness continued all around. Taking Schlegel’s arm, he held it tight, not in a friendly way, and pointed with the top of his stick.
‘Who down there do you know?’
Schlegel thought how absurd to be standing next to this man, who didn’t know he knew, yet the awful social situation prevented any mention of the fact.
Schlegel recited what he saw. Fegelein. Fegelein’s wife and the Braun sister. Anna Huber and her brother. He pointed out Morgen.
‘So that’s Morgen,’ said Tieck. ‘Not how I imagined.’
‘What do you know of Morgen?’
‘Fegelein speaks of him as a thorn in his side. Do you trust him?’
‘Fegelein, no!’
Tieck, impatient, said, ‘Nobody trusts Hermann. I mean Morgen.’
No more than I trust you, Schlegel wanted to say. ‘To a point,’ he said as he watched Emil Maurice leave the stand and walk over to Fegelein. The man was reeling.
‘Emil Maurice,’ Schlegel said.
‘You don’t need to tell me,’ said Tieck sourly.
‘Wasn’t he supposed to have shot you?’ Touché, Schlegel thought. It was the first indication he had given that he knew the man was his father.
He watched for any flicker of reaction and got nothing.
Tieck remained silent for a long time before saying, ‘There is a book in the Berghof, in the Führer’s study, on the top shelf on the far left. Of sentimental value, a personal copy loaned by me to the Führer which he never returned. I expect it is still there. I doubt he even opened it. Perhaps you could bring it to me, should you have the chance.’
Schlegel looked at Tieck and wondered if the Berghof hadn’t been the man’s real objective all along.
‘Any reason you can’t fetch it yourself?’ he asked, a little cruelly.
‘I don’t qualify for admission. As you have probably gathered, I am not supposed to exist.’
‘So it’s not about delivering anything now. It’s about retrieving an item you don’t have access to.’
‘For the moment, and as you are going.’ It was said with the off hand manner of a man hardly asking a favour, until Tieck’s eyes unexpectedly appeared to well up as he said, ‘It is the only extant momento of my childhood.’
‘And the title of the book?’ asked Schlegel, incredulous at this mawkish turn.
‘An early edition of The Adventures of Pinocchio.’
Schlegel couldn’t help but laugh.
‘Quite so,’ said Tieck, aware of the joke. ‘The puppet master and the paradox of the lie. You must go now. They’re getting ready to leave. Make sure you take Anna Huber. Send Morgen to me. It’s important. I will wait here.’ He let go of Schlegel’s arm.
In terms of lies, Schlegel saw that Tieck had never intended to reveal himself as his father. But he was perfectly willing to betray his former self, Anton Schlegel, through the revelation of the letter. Strange, Schlegel thought, that the son was now entrusted with the errand of retrieving the monster’s one sentimental possession. He suspected that wasn’t half the story.
*
Back in the enclosure Fegelein’s group was packing up. The best races were over and no one was hanging around.
Schlegel went over to Morgen and pointed to Tieck looking agitated in the glazed stand. ‘He needs to speak to you, he says.’
Morgen shrugged and said, ‘He can’t be any worse than this lot.’
‘Don’t bet on it,’ said Schlegel as Fegelein came up and clapped him on the shoulder, enough to make him stagger.
‘There you are!’
Fegelein’s eyes were unfocused. The man was as drunk as the rest of them. He looked at Morgen and sniggered. ‘Your friend’s turn to be invited. Sorry. No more room in the car.’ Schlegel gestured helplessly at Morgen as he was led away. Fegelein gathered the women, the Braun sisters and Anna Huber. ‘Ready girls?’
Anna Huber said she had other plans and wouldn’t be going.
Schlegel drew Fegelein aside to ask if he could persuade Huber to change her mind. ‘I quite fancy her,’ he said. Fegelein made an obscene gesture, sticking a finger into the hole made from the joined thumb and forefinger of his other hand.
Schlegel watched him talk to Anna Huber, who frowned before being persuaded. She stared at Schlegel as Fegelein escorted her to where the sisters, brightly pissed, were waiting and looking none too pleased about the extra company.
Fegelein returned to Schlegel and said, ‘Mission accomplished. Here’s Emil, as drunk as a lord. He’s coming. Big week for the Chamber of Commerce. Have you met?’
Maurice had the inane grin of a man well away. Schlegel avoided giving his name.
The two sisters chattered on the way to the car park. Huber looked downcast. Schlegel decided there was nothing he wanted to say to her in front of the others.
Fegelein ordered, ‘Girls with me. Emil, back to chauffeuring! Drive our friend here. Important guest!’ He shouted to Maurice, ‘Race you to the Berghof!’
*
Whatever Emil Maurice might once have been, it came down to being beyond drunk in charge of a motor vehicle as they headed off in pursuit of Fegelein, who swung from side to side to stop them overtaking, giving long derisive blasts on his horn, and then the houses were gone and they were crossing a silver plain, through the start of the long shadows of the sun’s descent.
Maurice, cursing like the devil, chased in vain after Fegelein’s more powerful motor while Schlegel sat with a rictus grin smashed across his face, thinking there were worse ways to go.
Horn blaring, they shot past a peasant on a bicycle; Schlegel didn’t know how Maurice missed him. He turned and saw the man wobble into a ditch.
‘‘Don’t worry!’ Maurice shouted. ‘I got the Führer out of hundreds of scrapes. Vehicles in pursuit. Roadblocks. Ambushes. We stopped once for a tramp on a mountain road because Ade wanted to give him his coat and the cunt turned out to be hiding a bayonet! You have to keep your eyes about you.’
Ade! thought Schlegel. Did Führer Ade call Maurice Em?
Maurice continued yelling above the roar of the engine.
‘Führer security after my time was a joke. They let someone steal Ade’s Merc while he was in a café! Picture his face coming out to find that! Two of the security commanders were totally shit-faced. I know, I can see you thinking, “Speak for yourself!” ’
Maurice roared with laughter as they slewed round a corner and were hit by blinding sunlight that turned everything white.
Dazzled by the play of light on the windscreen, Schlegel had the brief impression that the road and fading landscape were moving around them as they sat stationary in a time bubble, surrounded by lurking secrets so deep they acquired an air of fabulous worthlessness, the accumulation of all the lies surrounding the Führer amounting to no more than bankrupt stock.
Maurice insisted on a short cut and they climbed into the dark Alpine fastness. A deep ravine lay on Schlegel’s side. Maurice drove with reckless abandon until Schlegel could see only the edge and the drop beyond. He stared in terror-stricken fascination at snow deep below, left from the previous winter, and expected at any second to find himself flying through the air towards
it. How they reached the top in one piece he would never know. For a moment they were above the tree line, with a view of a valley bathed in the last of the soft light. Schlegel wanted to ask if Maurice had shot his father then realised the man had passed from beyond the stage of drunkenness where anything was possible into a state of dumb, white-knuckled desperation.
*
In terms of odd couples, Morgen thought he and Tieck made a pretty good pair but not half as strange as the idea of the man being Schlegel’s father.
Morgen had done as Schlegel asked and approached Tieck who said, ‘Take me to the Berghof.’
He was the strangest creature, Morgen thought, and like a lot of men with an almost clownish aspect probably not to be underestimated. Tieck didn’t strike Morgen as a humorist, but he did make him think of a joke being played in deadly earnest.
Tieck cast around, looking uncertain, leaning on his stick, top hat awry. He wasn’t drunk but from his stumbling manner he could have been as far gone as all the others staggering around. He eventually said, ‘My son. I hadn’t realised the effect he would have.’
Morgen stared at the man’s bulging, toad-like throat, asking himself if it really could be Anton Schlegel he was looking at or someone pretending to be. The thought almost made him laugh – the notion of an impersonator in the way that the Führer had doubles. He found the idea quite in keeping with the strange, haunted world in which they had found themselves since coming to Munich.
Tieck said, ‘I need Schlegel for an errand, which will guarantee my reinstatement.’
‘To what?’
Tieck gave a bitter laugh. ‘The land of the living.’
They left the town and headed south with the setting sun to their right.
Tieck asked who had sent Morgen and he saw no reason not to say, as Tieck probably knew more than most.
‘What exactly is Müller looking for?’ Tieck asked.
‘He believes there is a tell-all diary written by the niece.’
‘Fake.’
‘The so-called Hitler confession, does that exist?’
‘Oh, yes. What are your conclusions about the niece?’
Morgen said he thought her uncle did it in the early hours of the Friday morning after the night out at the Bratwurst Glöckl.
Tieck eventually said, ‘Not bad.’
‘End of story?’ asked Morgen.
Tieck gave a high-pitched giggle. ‘Good heavens, no!’
The man would not be further drawn and with that fell into a disconcerting trance, in which he appeared to sleep with his eyes open. It was not that the pupils were colourless, more that they were beyond the known spectrum, and as Morgen stared ahead at the nearly dark road he decided they were not the colour of night exactly but matched the day’s dying light.
44
Schlegel could describe what he was looking at only as a beggars’ banquet. They were in what Fräulein Braun insisted on calling ‘below stairs’, the Berghof’s huge staff kitchen, which from what he could tell was on the same level as the main reception.
Maurice had driven the last of the journey in a trance, as cautiously as a man who had just passed his driving test and could recite the Highway Code backwards. They were waved through the Berghof’s elaborate security system on Fegelein’s telephoned say-so. By then it was too dark to make anything out and blackout prevailed. Their escorted entrance into the building was round the back, through a cloakroom full of walking sticks and umbrellas and rubber boots lying around in a state of disorder, then down a corridor past a boiler room and locked gun racks, into the big kitchen where they were greeted with sarcastic applause from Fegelein. The rest of the room didn’t bear thinking about. Worst of all – the last people Schlegel expected or wanted to see – were the two thugs from Berlin: the fat man and the cadaver, lounging at the table with bottles of beer and chomping wurst. Schlegel stared, wondering if they had known he was coming. His presence scarcely seemed to register, as though they had already written him off, until the fat man laughed at Schlegel’s hair and lifted his bottle in mock salute while the cadaver studiously ignored him.
The atmosphere was fetid as if the room hadn’t been aired in years. The Braun sisters were squabbling over what record to play. The gramophone looked like it had been dragged in from next door. Eva won and settled for what she announced as ‘hot jazz’. Everyone was smoking. Eva Braun clicked her fingers in time to the syncopated beat, gyrating lasciviously as she started doing a dance of the seven veils that didn’t involve taking off any of her clothes. Fegelein was making eyes at Anna Huber, standing apart. She acknowledged Schlegel with insouciance. Fegelein’s wife looked drunkenly tearful. But most extraordinary was the man sitting at the head of the table with his uniform jacket undone and hair awry, with a cigarette and a drink on the go. A Führer, if not the Führer; Schlegel didn’t know what to call him. He thought of Hoffmann’s endless, boring gallery of photographs, none of which could be labelled: The Führer relaxes with a fag and a drink.
The drunken Führer looked amiable, his mood probably about as far from his master’s as it was possible to get. Some running joke seemed to be going on because everyone called him Bobby, and used the familiar address. The man’s name was obviously not Bobby but whenever it came up it was greeted with hilarity.
Fräulein Braun lost her balance doing her pseudo-strip tease, crashed into a chair and grabbed Fegelein and said she needed someone to hold on to. She stood with her arm draped around her brother-in-law and ordered her sister to find a slow dance record.
Schlegel wondered about the two thugs. He supposed their job was getting rid of human garbage for the likes Bormann and now perhaps Fegelein. They appeared not bothered about him, but Schlegel sensed they were biding their time.
Emil Maurice looked dazed, like he had just been dropped from a huge height. Fegelein had his hand positioned proprietorially on Eva Braun’s arse, noticed by the sister who marched over and removed it. The room was electric. Bobby was muttering to himself in a Führer-like way and staring at Fräulein Braun, leaving Schlegel contemplating whether she took her pick of the understudies when her master was away. As for Fegelein, it would be her choice, Schlegel supposed, doubting that even Fegelein would jeopardise his position with such sexual recklessness; she, on the other hand, was probably too aware of her limitations as unofficial mistress, her current staggering notwithstanding, which was probably about being seen to let her hair down. It was obvious that the man himself was never coming back and Bobby confirmed as much, saying over, ‘The Führer is gone.’
Fegelein stopped dancing with Eva Braun when her sister cut in. Fräulein Braun sat sprawled, her legs stuck out, pigeon-toed, as she kept trying to blow a stray hair back into place, laughing at the facial contortions she was having to make.
Fegelein asked Bobby, ‘Are we doing the Führer walk tomorrow?’
Bobby suddenly didn’t look at all happy.
‘Explain the Führer routine for our guests.’
Bobby mumbled and had to be told to speak up. Then because he seemed incapable, Fegelein explained for their benefit.
‘The Führer’s daily exercise consists of a solitary walk from the main building down to the teahouse where he takes breakfast. Invariably he is fetched and driven back. But, and here is the thing, for around ten minutes, during which he walks alone – as, in the end, we all walk alone – a concealed gunman could shoot the Führer, without even a telescopic sight if he were a good marksman. We know the Führer is bulletproof but this needs to be tested.’
Fegelein produced white powder, which he told them when inhaled ‘concentrates the senses wonderfully’. They took turns snorting it, the giggling sisters perhaps making themselves out to be less practised than they were. Bobby was talked into doing a Cossack kicking dance, to quite the wrong music, which he sportingly performed, to roars of applause, none more than from the two thugs, until he keeled over and lay panting and breathless, and Fegelein clapped his hands over his head and shouted,
‘The Führer conquers Russia!’
Schlegel felt scratchy from the white powder and wanted to talk urgent rubbish to whomever would listen. The women took it in turns to dance with different men after Fegelein announced ‘ladies’ choice’. Even the two thugs were dragooned. Bobby declined, citing Führer protocol. Maurice danced well, sashaying the women around. The Braun sisters avoided Schlegel.
In the end, Huber offered, not looking particularly bothered. She steered Schlegel, keeping her distance.
‘Why did you not come on the train?’ he asked.
‘Hermann invited me to fly down on the Führer’s plane.’ She laughed and said, ‘I missed that too.’
‘Why are you here now?’
Huber shrugged and said, ‘I expect Hermann and I are after the same thing.’
‘Which is what?’
‘You,’ she said enigmatically. ‘Aren’t you the one with what we want?’
Schlegel suspected he had been used as bait all along, but to what end?
‘Isn’t it you that might have something for me?’ he countered, thinking of whatever her brother had passed her at the race track and whether it had really been meant for him.
Huber said she didn’t know what he was talking about but he could see she did. She broke off dancing and walked off without a word, leaving Schlegel standing there, sure that he was right.
The drug had left him feeling uselessly alert and foolhardy enough to ask Fräulein Braun to dance. He thought she was going to snub him but she held up her hands in acceptance. She danced like a marionette. Schlegel could sense from the tension in her body how much effort went into the empty-headed brightness. She chattered on, giving him a potted history of the place and the huge improvements made, before telling him, ‘We can’t use the Great Hall while the Chief’s away but maybe we can sneak in tomorrow and I can show you.’ He sensed she was flirting and couldn’t think of anything witty. He caught her eye and was reminded of salmon in aspic. Behind the fixed smile he saw the shadow of a much easier, more attractive one and he decided she must have been fun once. He thought of smashing down social barriers and telling her about his father and asking what she had really thought of Fräulein Raubal, and what sort despair had driven her in turn to attempt suicide and what she and Ade got up to in bed, if anything; and of course he didn’t say anything.