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A tall, fierce, officious man in loden-green hiking clothes looked out from the room where Hitler was talking. “You are the Raubals?”
“Yes.”
Angela briefly saw Adolf holding forth before the man softly shut the door behind him. He held out his hand to her. “Herr Rudolf Hess,” he said. “His personal secretary.” He shook her hand hard once while formally bowing. And then he did the same to Geli.
They felt like Prussian officers just in from the front. They both gave their first names.
“The leader is conferring with Count Rudinski,” Hess said, as if they’d surely know the name. “Won’t you please sit?”
They did, as did he, effeminately crossing his legs at his thighs but holding himself firmly upright with an air of stiff-backed confidence, his square-jawed head tilted high. His hairline was receding, but his black hair flowed back from his forehead in waves that women got by marcelling theirs with hot irons. Angela had never seen eyebrows that were so much like heavy objects, that so darkly shaded his deep eyesockets that his irises were as obscured as brown pebbles dropped in snow. His mouth was a wide, thin line and tightly shut in order to hide the buckteeth and overbite that stole from him the look of high intellect he wanted. Ill at ease with their silence, he offered, “Would you like some food?”
“Shall we hire a truck?” Angela asked.
Geli giggled behind her hand.
Hess faintly smiled, as though he’d missed the humor, and then he lifted and seemed to weigh a Thüringer cervelat in his hand. “We get these gifts, and I know we aren’t finished. The party is forbidden in Germany now, Hitler is forbidden to speak, the hierarchy is in disarray; and yet we find such public sentiment in our favor that we can only look at our prison stay as a mild interruption in our heroic march toward destiny.”
“You sound like Adolf,” Angela said.
“You flatter me,” said Hess. And then, in the Nazi way, he began talking at length about himself, saying he’d been born in Alexandria, Egypt, five years after Hitler, the son of a wholesale importer. He had gone to business school in Switzerland, and had worked in Hamburg for his family. Then the archduke and his wife had been killed in Sarajevo and he’d become a lieutenant and shock-troop leader in the First Bavarian Regiment before joining the air corps. Losing interest in commerce after the armistice, he had enrolled at the university in München and had had the good fortune to have as his mentor Herr Professor Karl Haushofer of the Geo-Political department, the author of the theory of Lebensraum.
She hadn’t heard of it.
“Simply that the future of a culturally dominant but land-starved country like Germany necessitates the annexation of states in eastern Europe.”
“I see.”
To make a long story short, in 1920 a German millionaire who’d fled to Brazil but still had great love for his country had offered a significant cash prize to the most worthy essay on the theme: “How must the Man be constituted who will lead Germany back to her former heights of glory?”
Angela got up and took an orange from a basket. She began peeling it.
“Eat, yes. We have so much,” Hess said. And then he continued, “It was precisely that question that was preoccupying me in my political studies, and so on paper I constructed a messiah who would lead the Aryan race to its rightful place in the world. He would strike one at first as an ordinary man and have his origins among the masses so he could understand them psychologically, but he would be a genius, of course, with superb talents and intellect, and would have nothing in common with them. He would be a fantastic public speaker, all fire and personality. Currents of electricity would flow from him. Worrying about nothing, not even the fate of his friends, he would not shrink from bloodshed but would unhesitatingly march forward with hardness and an iron will, trampling whoever blocked his path in order to achieve his goal in all its purity.”
“Did you win the contest?” Geli asked.
“Certainly, Fräulein Raubal. With much praise.” And then Hess fell into distraction as he watched her licking the sugarcane.
She smiled. “What did you buy with the money?”
Hess shook his head free of the question and got back on track. “The point of the story is that quite soon after the competition, I happened to attend one of Herr Hitler’s speeches for the first time ever, and I was absolutely stunned. He was sheer genius, pure reason incarnate, everything I’d hoped for and imagined—but here, now. Tears streaming down my face, I ran home to my fiancée and screamed in ecstasy, ‘I have found the man!’”
Then the office door opened. Hess hurtled to his feet. Count Rudinski was chuckling as he walked out of the office in a sable coat and hat, wrapping his neck twice in a long orange scarf. Hitler was just behind him, in knee-high woolen stockings, leather lederhosen, and a collarless white shirt, his hands holding the gift of The Collected Poems of Stefan George. “Rudi, you must listen to this,” Hitler said, then stiffly held the book far out from his face to try to read the front-matter inscription without his glasses, but couldn’t. “Well, you read it,” he said.
Rudolf Hess announced, “From Frau Winifred Wagner in Bayreuth: ‘Dear Adi, You are the coming man in spite of everything. We all still depend on you to pull the sword out of the German oak.’”
Count Rudinski smiled. “A lovely sentiment from a great lady.”
“It’s a glorious inscription,” said Hess.
“You think? And true, too. Count Rudinksi just now brought it to me.”
Hess took the book from him and shoved it among the others. The good-bye lasted a full minute more, during which time Hitler offered no acknowledgment that his half-sister and niece were there. Only when the count was gone did he grin at Angela and give her his hand. “Good evening, Frau Raubal!” Then he gently touched Geli’s light brown hair. “And to you, Fräulein. I’m happy you’re here.”
“We like your pantry,” Geli said.
H
itler winced and held his hands to his soft belly. “Oh, it makes my stomach ache! Look at how fat I’m getting! I can’t fit into my pants!”
