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“I have the morning.”
“Excellent!” her uncle said.
Putzi Hanfstaengl grinned and asked, “Are you aware that morning generally comes before noon?”
But Hitler kissed the girls’ hands and insisted, “You have my word of honor that I will be at the Königshof Hotel for you at nine a.m. tomorrow!”
Instead Geli was met in the hotel lobby by a shy young man in a trench coat who introduced himself as Herr Julius Schaub, Hitler’s adjutant. A former shipping clerk at the Eher Publishing House, Schaub was a tall, sullen, old-seeming man of twenty-six with slicked-back hair, ears like handles, and staring eyes that he kept focused on the floor as he shook her hand and told her, “My job is to do whatever the leader asks. And he has asked me to give you a tour of München.”
“But he promised me he would do it himself.”
Schaub flickered a smile and asked, “Did he swear to God when he said that?”
“He gave me his word of honor.”
Schaub shrugged. “It’s the same thing. It means he strongly wishes he could oblige you. He cannot; I can. Shall we go?”
Hobbling through the lobby and outside, he told her that his feet had been frozen on the Russian front in 1917 and that he’d lost his toes. “You are so young you may not know it, but the German army was undefeated on the field. Yet we lost the war. We were sabotaged by the higher-ups at home.” Schaub considered her jacket. “Are you going to be cold?”
“No.”
“Don’t complain then.” He held open the passenger door to an old green Selve automobile. “Your uncle’s old car,” he said. “Herr Hitler is so generous that he gave it outright to me when he got his Mercedes eight-seater from his friends, the Bechsteins.” She sat inside, and he added, “I hope you aren’t bothered by the smell. The front seat is stuffed with seaweed.”
“In case you get hungry later?”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“I was teasing, Herr Schaub.”
“You are glib, Fräulein Raubal,” he said as he got in the car, and then he hunted for what he was. “I am—”
“You are prickly, Herr Schaub.”
Concentrating hard, he frowned through the windshield and finally pronounced, “I find life a chancy and tragic affair, worthy of serious attention.”
She smiled. “You can say that while sitting on seaweed?”
Schaub was so offended he hardly looked at Geli again as he headed to the famous sites in München. “We are called ‘the City of Good Nature,’” he said as he drove. “The Capital of German Art,’ ‘the Athens on the Isar,’ ‘the Moscow of our Movement.’ We are nearing eight hundred thousand people, and less than four thousand Jews.”
She gave him a strange glance that he ignored. Schaub took her first to the Feldherrnhalle, where, as he put it, “our Nazi martyrs were killed in 1923” and then through the woods and meadows of Englischer Garten, which was “five kilometers long from north to south,” he said, “and the first public park on the Continent.” Then it was the Glaspalast, which housed industrial exhibits and had been constructed by King Maximilian II in imitation of the Crystal Palace in London. There was little to see now at the fairgrounds of Theresienwiese, he told her, but in mid-September it held Oktoberfest, the largest public festival in the world.
Schaub saw that she wasn’t paying attention, so, just for something to say, he asked if her singing went well, then failed to listen to her reply. At the botanical gardens, he confessed he’d given up cigarettes to please her uncle, but he badly wanted one now, as if she’d brought on that terrible craving. She walked through the huge Cathedral of Our Lady on her own, and when she came out, Schaub had been stewing f
or too long. Getting up from the cold stone steps, he told her, “You have heard of religious zealots, Fräulein Raubal? Well, Adolf Hitler is my religion.” And that was all of his conversation for another hour. Often he simply put on the brakes and with gravity pointed to a building as he named it—the Egyptian Museum, the Pinakothek, the Wittelsbach Residenz—then heavily stepped on the accelerator again. His tour ended northwest of the city at the huge baroque palace and five hundred acres of parkland built by the Wittelsbach royalty at Nymphenburg, where he was as silent as a bodyguard as they strolled through the villa and galleries and around a green lake where children played with sailboats. Taking out his pocket watch, Schaub frowned at the time and said, “I have orders to take you to Maximilianstrasse.”
“Why?”
“We have to buy you finer clothes. My leader says you look like a waif.”
Maximilianstrasse was the high-fashion district and full of the Italian shoes and haute couture dresses she’d seen only in glamour magazines. She was so giddy with the hundreds of choices that she tried on fourteen pairs of shoes while Schaub sighed in the chair beside her, and she later felt him simmering as she finally let a shop-girl decide which of the five elegant gowns she was fretting over she ought to buy as Hitler’s gift. To pay for it, Schaub got money out of a dirty envelope with NSDAP printed on its front, stingily put one bill at a time on the glass countertop, and when he carried the box outside he took off the string and saved it in his trench coat pocket.
“Well, that was fun,” Geli said.
“Was it? We are National Socialists, not National Capitalists.”
“I have been poor all my life, Herr Schaub. My uncle gave you a car.”
Schaub failed to find a reply until she got into the green Selve again. Then he faced her and with half-throttled misery said, “I have no friends.” And then he turned to start the car.
