Gabriel stared out of the huge picture window of the Berghof, across the valley to the mountain of Untersberg opposite, and then let his gaze drop to the foot of the Obersalzberg, to the small town of Berchtesgaden. Down there was another world, a fairy tale land of cobbled streets and houses painted with luftmaleres frescos, the village at the bottom of the beanstalk. Gabriel was viewing it from the castle of the giant and he was Jack with a giant to kill.
The man by his side spoke. ‘My father used to say you can’t eat scenery.’
Gabriel smiled; his memory jogged. ‘Mine said the same, sir.’
‘It’s hard to be a parent when you live in the shadow of these gods. Never underestimate geography.’
‘I won’t, sir,’ said Gabriel.
‘These mountains enter a man’s soul and draw him up. It’s why the desert peoples will only ever be the grit and dust of history.’
Even this proclamation was delivered gently, softly, in the warm accent of an Austrian. Gabriel thought this was a different Hitler from the one in the newspapers. He’d seen the press photos; the close-up, the famous face always wearing the same expression, as if someone was at that moment stamping on his toe. In newspaper print, in black and white, the eyes were always dark, but in real life they were blue. He’d recovered well from the generals’ attempt to blow him up in the Wolf’s Lair, his headquarters on the Eastern Front. The failed coup. That had been in July, but a couple of months later and the Führer seemed as confident and in control as ever. Was the man indestructible, Gabriel wondered?
In the month Gabriel had been at Obersalzberg, he realised there were two Hitlers, sometimes literally. He knew there was another Hitler in Berlin at that moment, his photograph appearing in papers giving out gallantry medals to servicemen. But Gabriel didn’t mean the Führer’s use of doubles, rather his two personalities. There was the Hitler of the mass rally, of Barbarossa, of blood and fire and iron. Then there was the Hitler of the Berghof, his home, surrounded by his close staff and bodyguard. The gentle Hitler who would appear unannounced in the kindergarten to watch the children play and smile, while the teachers adored him. Hitler was the second world leader Gabriel had met and he preferred him to the Holy Father. Pope Pius didn’t connect with people. The Führer made it his mission to do just that.
‘Call me Wolf,’ the Führer said. His intimate name, reserved for friends; not the Führer, not Adolf Hitler, but Wolf. Wolf, with his Alsatian, Blondi, in the conference room above the world; Wolf like an Alpine shepherd watching out for his flock. The room was decorated with regional beer steins, the odd atlas indicating grand strategy, and, on an SS drum used as an occasional table, there was a copy of Mein Kampf bound in gold and Moroccan leather. A massive, six-metre-long, marble-topped table gave out rumours of meetings that dealt with destinies. On the walls were paintings of very naked women, and, Gabriel was distressed to note, one where a swan seemed to be raping a woman. The Pope had better paintings, he decided. Like an orphan interested in other children’s homes, Gabriel decided this was not a room he’d ever be comfortable in. One picture did draw his eyes and call to him; it was of a woman holding an ermine. Gabriel had a peculiar feeling that the animal was him; the whiteness of it like him with his white-blond hair, and the feeling that under its camouflage of fur the mask would be scarred. It was a predator, a killer, but it was controlled by the woman, her pet. Just as he was owned.
Blondi sniffed at Gabriel’s crotch, and he resisted the temptation to ruffle the dog’s ears. Bruno Gesche had warned him, ‘Leave the dog alone. Wolf’s a jealous man and he loves that dog more than any woman. The umbrella-man made too much fuss of Blondi and Wolf didn’t like it.’
The umbrella-man: Neville Chamberlain. Gabriel speculated that had the British prime minister preferred cats, then a world war might have been averted.
Heinz Linge, the Führer’s valet, slid in with coffee and toast, and a plate of Mohnklosse – poppyseed cakes, Hitler’s favourite.
Hitler took Gabriel’s arm and guided him to the refreshments. ‘Usually I breakfast at the tea-house, but this morning – he fired twice you know. He had two goes at murdering me. I heard the first shot pass my ear and I knew what it was immediately. You never forget.’
The Führer indicated that Gabriel should sit at the low drum table where Heinz had left the tray before silently departing. As he sat, Hitler reached out and touched the scar on Gabriel’s face. It was something Gabriel noticed and didn’t like; the scar made his face common property, the way a pregnant woman’s stomach is patted by complete strangers, he thought. Old ladies would cluck in concern and stroke it. He wanted to slap those hands away but he tolerated it in silence.
‘My scarred seraph,’ said Wolf. ‘It’s a mark of the warrior. Another medal.’
The hand came away, and Gabriel breathed out.
The German leader served Gabriel tea and toast. Then with the sly smile of guilty indulgence he gave them both a poppyseed cake.
Suddenly, and alarmingly, he declaimed; ‘Here thou, great Anna! Whom three realms obey, dost sometimescounsel take andsometime tea. The English poet, Pope; my old schoolmaster gave it to us as an example of anticlimax. It’s typically English and typically wrong. There are no anticlimaxes in history and Pope was a homosexual, yet he was almost right about those of us with special duties; sometimes counsel we give and sometimes tea.’ He handed a cup to Gabriel.
Hitler pointed to a ribbon on his own chest. ‘I got mine on the Western Front. Yours?’
Gabriel knew Hitler was tying them together with the bonds of comradeship. ‘I was awarded my Iron Cross on the Eastern Front, at Karelia.’
The Führer smiled. ‘You would have known what it was, that drone in the ear, like a lazy bee – but…’ he pushed the sugar bowl in Gabriel’s direction, ‘but if the assassin had been shooting at any of my bodyguard, my Old Hares, then the target would be dead, flat on his back with a hole in his forehead, his last thought: that’s a bee with a punch.’
They both laughed, one of them politely, as the generators whirred and the clouds went by.
Gabriel had a sudden terrifying suspicion that he was being toyed with. That Hitler knew he was an assassin. That after the poppy cakes would come pain.
But the Führer continued without accusation. ‘They’re good men, my Old Hares, they’ve been with me since the beginning of my struggle, but they’re sad in their way. Too young for the first show and now too valuable to serve in the front line in this one. They’ve not been there like we have, Gabriel, none of them.’
Gabriel nodded and nibbled his Mohnklosse.
Wolf, with a sigh, abandoned his. ‘The truth is I spoil them – like Blondi.’ The dog wagged her tail at the mention of her name. ‘I sack my generals and spare my Old Hares and that’s a mistake. They’ve got fat and slack. Kurt Gildisch – do you know where he was this morning while a sniper was attempting to end the life of his leader? He was unconscious, drunk, intoxicated at eleven in the morning.’
Gabriel put down his plate as Hitler continued.
‘He’s going. Gildisch is going, one of my oldest friends, been with me since the beginning, a founder member of the Leibstandarte, but he’s going. I cannot tolerate this dereliction of duty. He let me down so he’s out. But who is to replace him as officer commanding the bodyguard? The others aren’t drunks but neither are they sharp and I need someone sharp, someone who has been there, someone who, if it became necessary, would put the life of the Führer before his own. Obersturmführer Zobel, I’ve read your service record, I know what you’ve done; in Spain and in Russia. It was me who ordered you to be treated in the military hospital here on Obersalzberg. I wanted to take a look at you. I wanted to see at close quarters this man who twice has put his body between his superior’s and an enemy. Well young man, I liked what I saw and had you transferred to my close bodyguard. Even your name is appropriate; Gabriel, the angel charged by God to lead the angelic war host.’
The leader slowly rose and, across the table, Gabriel mirrored him. ‘I want you to be the commanding officer of the Leibstandarte, with the rank of Hauptsturmführer.’
It was absurd, insane. Gabriel had told himself that he was on Obersalzberg to assassinate Hitler, not to protect him. The berserker in Gabriel wanted to laugh and tell the Führer the truth.
‘It will be an honour, sir,’ said Gabriel. He remembered what the sergeant in charge of ceremonial duties at the Vatican had said: Some say Michael Angelo designed our uniform, some say it’s older, I say it doesn’t matter. What matters is how deep it goes. For some a uniform is a set of clothes you wear, but for us inthe Guard it should go deeper.It should become our bones. Gabriel had worn the uniforms of three nations and each had gone so deep it had almost suffocated him. While part of him celebrated the knowledge that the most elite soldiers had always been guards and he had just been appointed the duty of guarding the Führer, down at the bottom of the well was a man who was finished with uniforms, and this man was going to kill Adolf Hitler.
Heinz was showing in another man, a Luftwaffe major. Like Gabriel this man’s holster was empty, his sidearm handed over before entry. No guns were allowed in the Führer’s presence. Gabriel read the other man’s blue-grey uniform; not a pilot – no wings, an artillery flash – so an anti-aircraft gunner, but a gunner wearing a cloth edelweiss on his cuff and a Silver Class Close Combat Clasp on his chest, signifying the major had taken part in thirty hand-to-hand battles. Gabriel’s own Close Combat Clasp was gold.
From the doorway the major saluted Hitler and approached. As he came, he limped. Gabriel studied the major’s uniform; the edelweiss, the sign of an elite Gebirgsjager, a mountain soldier, on the cuff of a gunner. Like Gabriel the man had been wounded and he too had been given a cushy number, transferred from a front-line unit to a support arm in a rear area; an anti-aircraft gunner somewhere that had never been bombed.
‘Major Max Adler,’ said the Führer, ‘Hauptsturmführer Gabriel Zobel.’
Gabriel replaced his cap and responded to Max Adler’s salute. They were of equal rank but Gabriel was SS and that gave him the seniority. Honours done, they waited. The Führer didn’t invite them to sit and Gabriel knew that, for this meeting, he was no longer Wolf.
‘Hauptsturmführer Zobel is a hero, Major Adler.’
The Major listened to the Führer’s words impassively. Gabriel got the impression that he had met many heroes but had yet to be impressed.
‘Not once but twice he has placed his body between a bullet and a superior. He has paid the blood price for his medals.’
This time Gabriel was rewarded by a slow glance from the major. It was a look that still reserved judgement. Hitler had no such reservation.
‘This is the sort of man I want by my side.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the major dutifully, but the Führer wasn’t listening.
‘Gentlemen, do you know who the most dangerous man in the world is?’
They decided they didn’t and stayed silent.
‘The man you trust.’
The Führer walked to the huge picture window. He stared out silently. Max and Gabriel stole a glance at each other and glided as smoothly as staff officers to stand by him.
‘The mountains are full of legends and superstitions. One of them gives us the expression turncoat. It’s an Alpine superstition. The story goes that on a dark night a lonely traveller in the high passes, finding his footsteps dogged by an evil spirit, took off his coat, turned it inside out and convinced the evil spirit his rightful victim was someone else. He reversed his luck by turning his coat. Certain elements in the Reich have decided that I am that evil spirit and that to save themselves they must turn their coats, as the Italians have done, as the Finns are about to and as the July plotters did.’
The Führer turned from the view and looked at the two junior officers.
‘I thought I was safe here in my home mountains, surrounded by my friends and comrades, but I was wrong; there is a turncoat here. What to do? To open up the investigation would bring in outsiders and we would have tittle-tattle. The assassination attempt is not only attempted murder but bad for morale. It tells the folk that, even here, the Führer is not universally loved, that there is dissent, weakness, betrayal. That even one of those closest to me has decided it is time to turn his coat.’
They waited while Hitler gathered his thoughts. It was a pause the world knew well; as if he were conducting a deep trawl to places further inside him that shallower men could only imagine. He mined what he was looking for and brought it to the surface with a long exhalation from his nostrils.
‘I need a detective. My people would like me to believe that the assassin is the missing French waiter. They’d like that, they’d like it to be him; French, different, not one of us. But I knew this man, he served me coffee and cake every day; he was as intelligent as a house brick. He might have been a traitor, but if so, he was the sort of traitor who obeyed orders; therefore even if he was the trigger man, the brains of the gang are still at large, still out there.’
Gabriel found his eyes drawn to the huge window as if the chief assassin might be floating by, ready to try again.
The Führer continued, ‘The brain is someone I trust, one of us. He will be almost certainly a member of the SS, and a party member, so I don’t need the service of the Gestapo, who will be inclined to trust their own comrades; I need the services of someone outside these organisations.’
‘Someone who might even be antagonistic to the Party, sir,’ said the Luftwaffe major.
The Führer studied him for signs of insubordination as he contemplated Major Adler’s choice of words before continuing, ‘And men of that description are few and far between in Obersalzberg. Only in the batteries of anti-aircraft guns do I find men who are not in the Party. So I look through their records and what do I find?’
The Führer turned his eyes on to Major Max Adler, flicked a switch in his head and made those blue eyes twinkle. ‘Before joining the Gebirgsjager the major here was an inspector in the Bavarian State Police. So he is going to lead the enquiries, and you, Gabriel, as head of my Leibstandarte, are going to assist him.’
Breakfast was over.
The ex-Bavarian detective clumped along by Gabriel’s side as they retraced the Führer’s footsteps that morning. The limp didn’t prevent Max from moving across at a mountain soldier’s pace. The fast step of the Jaeger.
‘Did you inspect the rifle?’
‘Yes, Major.’
‘What about if you call me Max? We’re the same rank. I know you’re SS but he put me in charge of the investigation – so honour is even I reckon. If we’re going to work together, standing on ceremony isn’t going to help. What do I call you; Scar, like the other Old Hares?’
Gabriel said, ‘Gabriel.’
‘I can manage that. How did you get the scar?’
‘Gardening accident.’
Max came to a halt on the track and looked at Gabriel as he might have once given an uncooperative suspect the once-over. ‘You’re a real pin-up for the SS aren’t you? Six foot?’
Gabriel decided to be exact and hold his ground with inches. ‘Six foot one.’
Max mocked him with a nod of acknowledgement. ‘Lean and mean, hair ash blond like a Swedish whore. Dye it yourself?’
Gabriel had been born with this colouring. The only anecdote that had come down to him about his mother had her saying, as she held her newborn son, that his head had touched the clouds. Shortly after, her soul had gone in the same direction.
Gabriel spoke. ‘Do you want me under your feet? In spite of what he said, I’m SS and as such I’m here to watch you. Wouldn’t it be best for me to knock the Old Hares into shape and let you do the detecting?’
Max turned his attention from Gabriel and plucked a tuft of grass from the hillside as Gabriel had done earlier, tossed it into the still air and watched it catch in the warm föhn wind from the south. He turned to inspect its source; the pass in the hills. He turned to Gabriel.
‘The Old Hares, bit of a joke, eh? I know them better than you, Gabriel. I knew them back in the old days, before the world took a shit without a shovel. To get into the Mountain Jaeger you have to pass climbing and skiing tests. To be one of the original Leibstandarte you also had to pass a test. They had to display an aptitude for murder. There’s not one of those jovial bastards who isn’t a killer. There isn’t one who hasn’t shot, stabbed or strangled a personal enemy of the Führer. We knew them all back in Munich, and so does Hitler. Sharpening the guard might just mean training up an assassin. He doesn’t trust them; the Führer doesn’t trust them any more. They’re survivors; they killed to get into the Leibstandarte, which kept them out of the front line. Now maybe, they’re thinking, How can Isurvive the war? SS membership, a member of Hitler’s close bodyguard, it doesn’t look good. It’s not the ticket it once was. So – they killed to get in; not such a big jump to kill to get out. Wolf is frightened one of them is starting to find the coat itchy.’
Max started to walk again, and Gabriel followed. ‘I’m an Old Hare?’
Max shook his head. ‘Not yet, sunshine. Not until you’ve killed a personal enemy of the Führer. Once we’ve identified the would-be assassin the Führer will want you to kill him. Then you’ll be an Old Hare. Until then he wants you on the outside, working with me. Watching me.’
‘And if you fail to unmask the traitor?’
Max gave him a happy smile. ‘Then you’ll be on hand to kill me; it’s how he punishes failure. Either way you’ll end up an Old Hare, good and proper.’
They continued uphill until they reached the place the rifle had been found, Max whistling, Gabriel silent.
Finding a natural break in the tune Max stopped and spoke. ‘Tell me about the weapon.’
Gabriel made his report. ‘A British Lee–Enfield number 4 with sniper modifications.’
‘With Australian modifications; they were the sods who turned it into a sniper’s weapon. Did you serve in the desert?’
Snow, not sand, had been the stuff to soak up Gabriel’s blood. ‘Eastern Front.’
Max tasted the air as if it were champagne and he was dying of thirst. Then he said, ‘Got posted to the Sahara after Crete; bloody stupid place for mountain soldiers but you serve where you’re sent. The best soldiers the Allies had in the desert were their Australian troops, the so-called Diggers. At Tobruk their snipers took out more of our officers and signallers than was feasible, bloody bastards.’
Gabriel nodded. ‘We all hate snipers.’
Max bobbed as well, as they both considered their private experiences with the invisible men who had taken their friends suddenly, the sound of the shot lasting longer than the last breath of their comrade.
‘Weird bastards,’ said Max. ‘You can put a soldier on a small arms course, but just because he becomes a marksman, that doesn’t mean he’ll have the cold hands of a sniper.’
Gabriel possessed those cold hands. He knew the target in the crosshairs couldn’t become a real person with a wife or mother. A sniper needed the heart of a hunter. That was the heart he had inherited from his father.
His thoughts were broken when Max swore under his breath. ‘Shit. So here we are at the sniper’s den and of course it’s been trampled to buggery by the Old Hares. How long have you been with the clowns?’
Not long, Gabriel thought, but it had seemed longer. Waiting for acceptance from men who didn’t like strangers. Now he was their commanding officer and that wouldn’t make things easier. They’d watch him, waiting for a mistake. They just might see something worse. The best opportunity is the first opportunity, and he’d failed to take it. Trying for a second shot while being watched would just about make the job impossible.
He snapped to; Max was waiting for an answer. ‘A month. Discharged from Platterhof military hospital and ordered to stay on here. Thought they were serving me up some healthy mountain air.’
Max snorted. ‘Convalescence and easy service for us cripples. Unfit for further active service?’
Gabriel knew he’d recovered from his wounds – he’d made sure of it, running up mountains and swimming lengths in Albert Speer’s swimming pool. ‘I’m battle fit,’ he said.
Max circled the site slowly, looking into the centre, then he reversed the journey looking out.
‘Mmm,’ he said.
‘A clue?’
‘Not a thing.’ Max turned his stare to Gabriel again. ‘So why you? Why would Wolf choose you?’
‘Does he let you call him Wolf, as well?’
‘No, he doesn’t like cops, especially not the Bavarian kind, not after the failed putsch. He calls us police-apes. Mind you, we always called him the Gob.’
Max stared at Gabriel as if trying to divine how deep the blood oath to the Führer went under the field-grey Waffen-SS uniform. Then he swept his eyes over the peaks that circled them, the three mountains surrounding the Obersalzberg Plateau: Kehlstein to the east, north of them Untersberg and the mightiest of them to the south, Watzmann. ‘Throne of the gods. So, Gabriel, once again, why you?’
The air was warm and carried the scent of mown meadow grass up from the valley. Clouds moved the floor in and out of shadow. The bottom lands where the fat farmers lived, Gabriel’s dad had said. The man had sometimes been a shepherd, sometimes a hunter and sometimes a soldier. He knew how to do a lot of things in a way lesser men never could. He used to spit in contempt at the farms and villages below. He carved a living out of an unforgiving world. Gabriel had tried to learn all the skills of his father, those of the shepherd and the hunter and, in the fullness of time, those of the soldier. But he knew he had learned one military skill particularly well.
‘They believe I take my duties as a bodyguard seriously.’
‘Meaning? What’s your crime sheet?’
Gabriel sighed inside and made his report. ‘After national service in the Swiss Army, I joined the Papal Guard at the Vatican.’
‘I had you down as Swiss,’ Max said as he might have said in his previous life, I had you down as a petty thief.
Gabriel ploughed on. ‘As a Catholic I went from Rome to Spain fighting for General Franco. I was in the Condor Legion. Then, because I learned English at school, they moved me sideways to coordinate with the Brigada Irlandes, the Irish Republican brigade fighting for the fascists. One day outside Madrid, a bishop came to bless the Irish. I was escorting him when, out of the crowd of watching peasants, steps this old man with a shotgun.’
‘And you took the shot?’
Gabriel nodded. He saw the old man’s face, the hatred carving it like a church gargoyle. Gabriel knew what he was going to do and so did the Spanish bishop. The bleating prince of the church tried to use Gabriel’s body as a shield. It ended with Gabriel nearest the gun and taking its hit in his shoulder. Then there was the sound of the Irishmen’s rifles as they blasted the old man out of existence. Shot after shot, as if every man in the brigade wanted to be able to go home to the Emerald Isle and boast they’d killed their atheist.
‘Most of the blast missed, but one part of my arm parted company from my shoulder. No permanent damage.’
Max looked out across the valley. ‘And Russia?’
Gabriel moved in his head from the stifling heat of Spain to the paralysing cold of Russia. ‘I was in the Nord Legion, fighting alongside the Finns, sometimes above the Arctic Circle, and I took a couple of rounds in the belly for my divisional commander.’
Max turned his eyes on Gabriel again. ‘And the thing on your face you say happened gardening?’
Gabriel almost touched the scar that ran from under an eye down to where it dissected his top lip. He said, ‘I got hit in the face with a shovel.’
He had a flashback to the Ivan running towards him with a short-handled spade in his hands, already raised, already swinging. He had known these things were called Stalingrad shovels and he had a moment’s indignation as the blade descended that they weren’t in some rat-infested cellar in Stalingrad, but an open snow plain. Somewhere clean where men should fight with clean weapons. Then the razor-sharp blade of the spade had hit his face.
Max spoke, ‘None of us gets a sword through the heart these days; it’s a piece of flying metal here, or the flame from an exploding fuel tank over there. Industrialised death on a grand scale. Nothing personal, nothing poetic. What’s that word our masters love? Total. Nuremberg was total theatre. Blitzkrieg was total war. Now we get total death; death in an instant, no last words or laments or even a body – just a heap of crisped ashes next to a piece of machinery that’s exploded, brewed up. And the tin on your chest?’
It was a question that civilians asked when they wanted a war story in a bar. They knew no better but Max should. ‘Got the Knight’s Cross for saving my Gruppenführer’s life in the land of ice, and a Spanish Military Medal for saving the bishop in the land of fire.’
Max moved closer and touched the medal Gabriel had deliberately ignored. ‘And let’s not forget this little bugger, a Close Combat Clasp in gold; top of the class, good boy. Shit knows what that feels like; the other gongs, well maybe you got lucky, had a good day or buggered your officer, but a Close Combat Clasp – you can’t magic one of them up. In my part of the war it was the tin we all respected, and you’ve got one in gold. Over fifty horrible, nasty, gut-spilling hand-to-hand shindigs with an enemy you can smell. Shit knows what that feels like.’
Gabriel didn’t enlighten him. Max watched him for a beat, nodded in the silence, gave him a smile as wide as an Autobahn and spoke.
‘Two shots. The Leader heard two shots and he should know, he’s been shot at often enough. He heard both rounds pass by close to his head. And that’s confusing.’
‘Why?’
‘The first was an easy pot; plenty of time to get it right, a soft day – so how come he missed? The second shot was at a moving target and yet the sniper still managed to place a round inches from the target’s head. He misses with a shot a geriatric from the Volkssturm could have pulled off and then nearly hits gold with a shot a Stalingrad sniper would win a cigar for. Confusing.’
It wasn’t to Gabriel, but he played along. ‘A lucky shot?’
Max turned to Gabriel.
‘Gabriel…’
‘Yes?’
‘Why did you do it?’
The ice on the mountain tops reached down and squeezed Gabriel’s heart. Max the ex-Bavarian cop stared him down, waiting for a confession.