‘This should never have been allowed to happen.’ The Führer was treading angrily across the rubble and debris in the wrecked auditorium. In the prompt box Gabriel could hear but not see him.
Eva Braun’s voice joined Hitler’s, ‘Darling, it’s no one’s fault; you can’t control the snow. The theatre just needs a new roof.’
‘Plus the replacing of wrecked and ruined equipment,’ he said, making the obvious sound like insight.
‘The stage is undamaged.’ Gabriel heard Eva climb onto it.
‘And that’s the important thing,’ he said, ‘because the stage is the battlefield where the great deeds are done; tragedies are enacted, and victories unfold. Everything in a theatre points to the stage. It’s the soul of the building, the way a great leader is the focal point and soul of the nation. Drama and leadership are both realised in conflict; all endeavour feeds this elemental need for struggle and triumph. First comes reality, history, where the real man tosses his hat into the maelstrom of events and asserts his destiny against weaker, punier men. Then, in the centuries that follow, come the great plays and operas, as the talented but lesser men, the artists, take inspiration from the great man to make great art.’
Gabriel could feel Eva’s confusion coming down through the stage. ‘But it’s a children’s play you’re planning, isn’t it, for the kindergarten and the Goebbels children?’
‘Yes.’
Gabriel heard their feet above him, the hollow clomping, so different from the drum-tight beating of his own heart. He stood rock still in the shadow of the box, cradling a Kar 98k.
‘What’s it called again, dear?’ she said.
‘The Shepherds’ Play, but I might have it rewritten as something more relevant, more twentieth century, more total; not just peasants but engineers and draftsmen, modern men waiting for a modern messiah.’
As they talked, the pair moved, unaware, into Gabriel’s field of fire. He was going to take them both out and drag the bodies down to the chorus dressing room on his own. Lorelei had disappeared. She hadn’t been in her apartment but, as the curtain had still been pulled across the window of her bedroom, Gabriel knew there was no emergency. These things happened in the fog of war but the good soldier still tried to carry out his original orders, even under changed circumstances. Hitler and his woman were going to die and perhaps, by the time he’d stowed their bodies away in a costume skip, Lorelei would turn up and they could escape together. Otherwise he’d open her bedroom curtains to warn her and hope she’d follow him.
Now both the targets were before and above Gabriel, side by side, heads floating together like balloons on string, the perfect target. Gabriel breathed out, cradled his rifle and lined up on the Führer. Hitler was chattering about the legend of Barbarossa, how Barbarossa was supposed to live under the Obersalzberg, waiting to be recalled to life at Germany’s greatest moment of peril. ‘The old man under the mountain.’
There was never going to be a better time. Gabriel’s finger began the gentle squeeze to bring about the end of the monster.
‘There you are, Gabriel!’ Lorelei’s head suddenly appeared, framed in close-up by the box. His finger sprang from the trigger; he dropped the rifle to his side, masked by Lorelei’s mop of hair.
‘Hauptsturmführer Zobel?’ he heard the Führer say.
‘I’m here, sir,’ Gabriel called out, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be secreted in a prompt box.
Lorelei moved to one side and Adolf Hitler glared down at him. ‘I know what you’re doing, you can’t fool me.’ The Führer’s heavy brow lightened and he turned to the women. ‘This is the good Hauptsturmführer doing his conscientious duty. He’s being my bodyguard. He knows I hate the claustrophobia of close protection so he tries, out of sight, to do his duty and protect his leader. Good man – of course I’d already seen you. I decided to spare your blushes.’
Gabriel heard hurrying feet on the rubble.
‘Sir?’ came Heinz the valet’s voice.
‘What is it?’
‘Sir, Field Marshal Model is here.’
‘Right, I’d better see him,’ he said to them and left with his valet.
Eva’s pink face appeared before Gabriel. ‘What a cosy sentry-box, but you can come out now. He’s gone and I want some tea and toast.’
Without the considerable curves on her sensual body it would almost be, Gabriel thought, like being invited to tea by a child. But the last thing he wanted was tea; he wanted to know what was going on.
Lorelei’s head appeared by the smiling Eva’s. ‘Come on, soldier, time for tea.’
Her smile inflamed his confusion. He’d been to the edge, put his life on the line, pointed the weapon and then been blown with a grin, with a simper, with an invitation to tea.
‘I’d love to go to Japan.’ Eva was trying on a silk kimono that hung from the wall of Lorelei’s apartment, almost as a decoration. She sighed. ‘Perhaps after the war is won. Mr Hitler has been invited, you know, when General Oshima, the Japanese ambassador, was here in May.’
Eva thought it was sweet to refer to her lover as Mr. She always did, never the Führer. It was her nickname for him: Mr Hitler. On a good day it amused Gabriel, but today it added to his anger.
Lorelei came in with a tray of tea things and Eva cleared a space for it. Gabriel wanted the charade over, he wanted to be alone with Lorelei. He was desperate to find out what she was playing at, but Eva wasn’t going anywhere. Instead she held out her arms, heavy with the kimono, so she looked like a flowery letter T. ‘It almost looks art deco,’ she said.
‘It is,’ Lorelei said. ‘Japanese ladies love to copy the West, but when then do, they do it better.’
Eva lifted the hem and inspected the embroidery. ‘Red camellias.’
Gabriel found his impatience moving towards anger. They were talking flowers. He needed to know why he had been prevented from completing his mission. Why was Hitler still alive?
Lorelei joined her at the silk and stroked it. ‘The red camellia is a special flower; it signifies dying with grace – for love.’
In his mind, Gabriel crushed teacups under his heels and incinerated satin frocks with a flame-thrower.
Eva inspected an Eastern print on the wall. ‘How did you come to be born in Japan?’
Lorelei explained as she handed out the tea things. ‘My father was in the Kaiser’s navy in the Great War. In the Pacific his ship was sunk by the Japanese Imperial Navy and he was taken prisoner.’
‘Didn’t he come home after the war?’ said Eva.
He knew these women could talk forever. Their chatter was stoking his confusion. He needed answers.
‘There wasn’t much to return to. The British blockade was still in place, even after the armistice. People were starving. In Tokyo the Japanese were so kind to the released prisoners of war that my dad and a lot of other Germans decided to stay on. He sent a ticket for my mother, and she left Europe for a new life. He opened a beer cellar in Kyoto and the locals loved it. I was born there and I was lucky, I had a happy childhood. I didn’t realise it was exotic until I left it behind.’
Eva slipped the kimono off and hung it back up. She took her tea. ‘You know, I’m surprised at Mr Hitler getting so excited about Christmas.’
‘Especially as it’s only September,’ said Lorelei.
And they’d still be talking come the New Year, Gabriel thought bitterly.
‘Normally he hates that time of the year. Clara, his mother, died just before Christmas – he was very close to her. Usually he just shuts himself up, or walks that bloody dog, endlessly. I think this Christmas is different. I think he has plans.’
‘Yes, the play,’ said Lorelei.
‘That’s the icing, the celebration I think. He has a bigger plan, I’m sure. He believes his luck is turning again; the July plot against him failed, and the Allies in Normandy are not as tough as they were in the desert and Italy. He thinks they’ve become cautious, that they lack the political will to take the sort of casualties outright victory will require. So he has a plan, which he won’t tell me about, but he’s chuckling again, and he’s sent for Field Marshal Model.’
More reason to kill him now. Gabriel fumed. Why had he been stopped?
There was a pause in the babble.
‘More tea, Eva?’
‘Thank you, more tea. Golly, hark at me; I just rattle on.’
Another awkward pause followed, as each of them sought to find a subject that might draw the silent man into the conversation. Lorelei glanced at Gabriel, whose sullen presence was suffocating the ambiance. It was Eva who took up the burden of small talk again. ‘So, where did you two meet?’
Lorelei responded gratefully with a gush of words. ‘Platterhof Hospital, here. Gabriel was on the general surgical ward I help out on some nights. He was as helpless as a newborn babe, weren’t you?’
Gabriel met her look the way a boulder meets rain, but inside he remembered his despair, the black cloud, of not wanting to die but also of not wanting to go back to the Eastern Front. And of a darker shadow still, that he had made an error: he had served the ghost, but he was not his father, he was different. The women waited for an answer, but as Gabriel tried to find clumsy words to contribute, he had a sudden moment of clarity. It terrified him. He’d made a mistake. That had to be it. Everything was unravelling. Hitler’s death would have been his death as well. They were closing in. That was why Lorelei had come between him and the target. Abandon the mission. Escape. He had no words.
Lorelei tried to cover. ‘I had to do everything for you, didn’t I?’ she said.
Silence, his tea growing cold. He wasn’t in the room. He was back on the ward. She had rescued him from that despair, by teasing and flirting with him, by her scent and smile and touch. But it was the things they talked of that finally saved him. Apparently sometimes, with special women, a man could talk, open his heart and be understood. The trust that came from treachery was stronger than that of pure affection. Now he needed to talk to her again. What had gone wrong?
Having tea with a stuffed male was becoming increasingly embarrassing, so Eva tried to do her bit. ‘And how do you like being an Old Hare?’ said Eva.
Eva looked him in the eye. She was the Führer’s mistress. Gabriel knew he couldn’t be rude to her. He needed to play his part again. He reached for his lukewarm tea, poured it down his throat and said, ‘I’m not an Old Hare yet. Not accepted.’
Those were the only words that came to him. The women waited for more but there wasn’t any. Eva worked with what she’d been given. She gave a small laugh, and said, ‘They’re such poppets. They’re just like honorary uncles; they make such a fuss of me.’ She lowered her voice as if to impart a state secret. ‘And they don’t like Blondi, either.’
‘Ah,’ said Gabriel, finally.
The tea party was dead and Eva stood and continued with her dog theme. ‘Well, I must go and walk the boys.’
She meant her Highland Terriers, which she adored and the Führer didn’t. They were like a couple who had children from previous marriages, Gabriel thought, where neither cared for the other’s offspring.
Alone at last, Lorelei said, ‘We need to walk as well.’
‘And talk,’ he almost screamed at her.
But she made him wait until they were outside. Away from people.
‘What’s happened? Do we need to go? To get away?’ Gabriel felt the relief of finally demanding some answers. Lorelei tried to walk on. He boiled over and grabbed her. ‘Why didn’t you let me kill him?’
‘Let me go.’ Lorelei squirmed from his grip and stepped away. It was another sun-swept day in the false peace of the mountains. She turned from him and scanned the horizon, seeming to take it all in; the peaks, the taste of the air, the warmth of the sun baking her skin through her thin cotton dress.
She looked over her shoulder back at him, as if fearing that to face him fully might heighten the confrontation. ‘Our orders have been changed; that’s why I had to go to Munich suddenly.’
This confused Gabriel. ‘You don’t meet.’
She turned, and sought to placate him with detail. ‘Ordinarily, no. But this was an emergency and the usual delivery system was considered too slow. London’s in a panic, they’ve changed their mind; we’re no longer to kill Hitler. In fact, our orders have been reversed: we’re to spare no effort to protect the Führer from any further assassination attempt by the German generals.’
Gabriel felt as if he was falling off the mountain. As if he was slipping and sliding into nothingness.
‘What?’
‘They have their reasons I suppose.’ Lorelei turned to walk on, hoping to take Gabriel with her. But Gabriel was going nowhere.
‘I don’t understand.’
Lorelei spoke impatiently. ‘It’s official, you really are to become the Führer’s bodyguard.’
Gabriel took it in. They hadn’t been found out. There was no need to escape. But instead of relief came rage. ‘I’m here to kill Adolf Hitler and I will kill him, whatever you or London want.’