The American soldiers had stopped obeying orders. Gabriel could hear their NCOs shouting at them and the officers reasoning. He overheard, through the open window of what he still thought of as Lorelei’s apartment. He listened to the news that emerged from the argument beneath. The men had taken a vehicle without authorisation and planned to go to Munich or somewhere swell to celebrate the end of war. The end of all wars, for all time. Then, when they returned from the party, they wanted to be repatriated immediately to the United States. The NCOs blocked the road with their bodies; the officers leaned into the jeep and tried to persuade the men to climb out of it.
‘But sir, you heard the news; we dropped two bombs on Japan and the place ain’t there no more. The man on the radio said the atomic bomb makes war obsolete. So when can we go home?’
Gabriel could feel their impatience coming up from the road outside. He had it himself. Wanting to be away. Wanting to catch a military flight to England with Lavender and then board a troop ship to cross the Atlantic with her to their new life in Canada.
‘When? When? When?’ came a voice from below.
When, when, when? echoed Gabriel’s head.
Everything was in order and in place. Mrs Cambridge had secured a commission for him in the police, who were to be Canada’s new security and counter-espionage service. The West already knew that the Soviets were about to devote a great effort to attempting to subvert Canada, and have an ally sitting on the head of the United States. The call had gone out for experienced intelligence officers and Gabriel apparently fitted the bill.
But Gabriel couldn’t leave yet. He haunted the old Nazi Eldorado of Obersalzberg. Preparations were being made to demolish the Berghof, to prevent it becoming a shrine for those who would wish to worship the devil. Gabriel wandered the deserted and looted building at the same time every day, as agreed at the meeting on the Eagle’s Nest. The bombing raid, while leaving the roof untouched, had blasted out the giant window in the Great Hall. Gabriel stared at the damage and thought it was strange that it was the glass that had made the window remarkable. Without it, the window became a mere hole in the wall. Through it the mountains seemed closer, more threatening, as if they could now get in. A breath of wind did and passed over him like a shadow. And out of its whisper a voice came, mimicking the softness of the breeze.
‘Only the mountains are constant. People will always fail you. How are you, my scarred seraph?’
Gabriel had heard someone enter after him, heard a door creak below. He turned around. The toothbrush moustache was gone, as was the side parting. The hair was now swept back. Gabriel caught a glimpse of pink skin at the top of the head where he had shaved it; the bald patch of a monk, as befitting the robes he wore.
‘Hello, Wolf,’ Gabriel said.
He saw the discomfort in the eyes. His world in ruins, Adolf Hitler would have preferred the rank of Führer to the familiarity of a nickname.
‘You waited.’ Hitler spoke in the same soft, beguiling tone he reserved for manipulation. ‘I knew I could rely on you. I knew you would keep the faith. I was right to trust you.’
A memory like a dried leaf blew through Gabriel’s mind; the Führer in that very room saying something about trusting and dangerous men. Then Hitler was speaking again.
‘How do you like my outfit?’
Hitler, almost effeminately, twirled the habit.
‘A good disguise,’ said Gabriel.
Hitler latched on to the faint praise as the last resonance of a Nuremberg cacophony.
‘Even in the 1930s I was planning for this eventuality. Even then I suspected the German people would let me down, prove unworthy, not iron enough for the struggle. I had foresight; I struck a deal with the Pope. I guaranteed the sanctity of Church property, and they promised to create an underground railway to smuggle the Party faithful out of Europe if the people betrayed us.’
‘What do you want?’
Hitler ignored his question. ‘I moved my command from Berlin on one of the last flights.’
Moved his command, Gabriel thought bitterly. He’d run away, leaving his child-soldiers and elderly men to face the Ivans. He also knew it was the remnants of his old unit, the Nord, that had been fighting to the last around the Führerbunker, a division consisting of foreign volunteers. In fact, the doomed, forlorn hope dying in that rubble had been mostly made up of Frenchmen. Gabriel was suddenly struck by the illogical futility of the battle in Berlin: French soldiers in SS uniforms, protecting an Austrian holed up in the German capital that was besieged by Asiatic soldiers, serving a Georgian who controlled Russia. There had to be, he thought in a moment of levity fuelled by his despair, a better way to promote foreign travel.
Hitler interrupted his thoughts. ‘I made my lair in a monastery.’
‘Who died?’ Gabriel asked.
The blue eyes blinked. ‘Instead of me? Gustav Weler, my double of course – and the silly cow.’
‘Eva,’ Gabriel said, remembering her at his hospital bed. She’d played the great game to the last and lost. Her addiction had killed her.
‘She’d always been expendable. I even married her to validate the supposed suicide pact.’
Suddenly Hitler seemed almost overcome, suddenly pathetic. He stared at Gabriel as if seeking forgiveness. ‘Scar, I had to kill Blondi. Poison.’
The one death that seemed to cause him guilt, Gabriel thought, the death of his dog. Then he brightened again. ‘As you can see, I am indestructible. I survived the fall of Berlin as I survived the generals’ bomb in the Wolf’s Lair. I even used the British to protect my back.’
Now he had Gabriel’s attention. ‘The British?’
Hitler nodded and grinned. ‘When your friends threaten, you must enlist your enemies. After the July plot, a lowly English captain wrote a report to the effect that my generals would prove a bigger menace to the future than me. It landed on my desk courtesy of the Abwehr; I saw it presented me with an opportunity and I fabricated some evidence in support of the man’s theory.’
‘What evidence?’
‘Goebbels called it the Walpurgisnacht Plan, a trifle melodramatic but he had a feel for that sort of thing. It purported to be a document mapping the generals’ sinister intentions if they managed to destroy me. We delivered it to the English captain using our friends in the Irish Republican Army. With that evidence in their hands the British couldn’t afford to let me die. That my turncoats didn’t manage to finish me off is, I’m sure, because of British intervention.’
The grin was back briefly, before Hitler moved on. ‘But enough of the past. The future will be ours, eh? Tomorrow belongs to the strong. We must leave this worn-out continent that has been bled of its spirit by the Jews. The ranch is waiting in Patagonia. From there a new struggle will commence. The Catholic Church is seeding my people all over that continent. That will be my base for a new world order.’
Gabriel almost hit him. The delusion was monumental. He wanted to beat him again and again, chanting it’s over, it’s over, it’s over!
Hitler touched his arm conspiratorially. ‘It’s still too soon for me to attempt the journey, even with this disguise and my false papers. But by next spring the world will be sleeping again and then I will go. I have a Swiss passport. I just need a safe bolthole. I can’t wait out the winter lurking around a hotel every day, and now the Allies have become suspicious of the Catholics and are watching the churches, I daren’t risk another monastery. I want your help, Scar. I need the use of your hut in the clouds for the winter. You’ll take me there and keep us supplied. In the spring, when the world has forgotten me, I will come down off the mountain and fly to Argentina.’
The world would never forget Adolf Hitler, Gabriel thought. It would forget the names of the children who died under the bombs, and the men who fought and died bravely for the wrong side, but the evil icon would live on.
‘When do we leave?’ Gabriel asked.
‘Tomorrow. It’ll be quite a hike from here to Switzerland, but we’re both mountain boys, eh? You the son of a hunter.’
He was the son of a hunter.