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“Well, that’s changed now, hasn’t it?” Göring said. “We’ll have our sweet and lasting revenge.”
Carin tilted forward. “Young lady? I didn’t hear your name.”
“Geli.”
“A pretty name,” she said, as though it wasn’t. Carin sat back. “We’ve found a fantastic villa in the Schöneberg district that we can afford now. I have a white harmonium and other fine furniture that we hocked, and I have already put in an order to have it returned. Another woman can appreciate what that means.”
“More housework?”
Emil shot her a look.
Carin turned to her husband. “Who is she, Hermann?”
“Hitler’s niece.”
“Ah,” she said, and held her tongue until they got to the grand ballroom of the Hotel Kaiserhof.
Doktor Goebbels held aloft a glass of champagne as soon as he saw them walk in. “And here’s to Deputy Göring and his five hundred marks per month, free railway tickets, and immunity before the law!”
“Only the beginning!” Göring hollered back, and he grinned as though they were good friends.
A hundred far more solemn party members were there in their finest clothes, the majority of the wives glumly sitting against the wall as a string quartet played all too plaintively at the far end of the ballroom and their husbands conferred in funereal tones about a party that, even with a late infusion of money from northern industrialists, had lost one hundred thousand votes since the last election.
“Looks like fun,” Geli said.
Emil just surveyed the room, hunting for Hitler.
Wishing she were back in the car kissing Emil, she hopefully asked, “Are you bored yet?”
“We’ll get away soon,” Emil promised.
The Hohenzollern Princes August-Wilhelm and Prince Eitel-Friedrich were announced at the grand ballroom’s entrance and waved to the partygoers, then gave way to their host. Wearing a white tie and tails and a peculiarly buoyant expression, Hitler strode in behind them and soaked up the roars and applause from all sides before falling into his habit of torrential talk. The partygoers circled around him. Congratulating the newly elected deputies, Hitler predicted that journalists would call them the Reichstag’s twelve black sheep, but in fact they would be wolves, continually hunting for and sorting out Germany’s enemies. Without a financial or political crisis in the country, the party would not find more adherents, he admitted, but in the Weimar Republic such crises were inevitable. They would just need to have patience. And though he felt the gloom they had felt when he’d first heard how the voting had gone, he’d noticed that their losses were not to the centrist parties but were to those on the far left and right. So the people were welcoming extreme solutions. The party would simply have to concentrate on teaching the public that National Socialism was the only extreme that would not ultimately fail, and would persevere and finally triumph over all opposition. And then, with his voice hinting at the strain of overuse, Hitler ceased talking, and to shouts of joy and thunderous applause he waded into the crush of party members to shake hands and hear their praises.
Emil escorted Geli toward a flourishing bar at the far end of the ballroom, but he was called by a joyless, healthless, chinless man in his late twenties who was wearing pince-nez and sitting with his older fiancée at a big round table, and Emil, for some ungodly reason, felt obliged to go to them.
And that was how Geli met Heinrich Himmler. She would later learn from Göring that Himmler had been born to a Catholic family in Landshut, near München, in 1900, the son of a much-esteemed teacher in a Gymnasium that served high society and the Bavarian royal court. An orderly-room clerk and officer cadet in the final year of the war, Himmler had never found his way to the front and would often say he regretted that, though Emil thought it likely he was just trying to fit in with the other former soldiers around him, for he fainted at the sight of blood. In 1922 he had graduated from the Technische Universität in München with a bachelor of science degree in agriculture, and with a prized dueling scar on his cheek. A job selling fertilizer for a firm in Schleissheim had enabled him to buy his own chicken farm and join a Blood and Soil group called the Artamanen, farming men. And that in turn had led him to join the occult society that was called the Thule Gesellschaft, and through it become friends with Dietrich Eckart and Captain Ernst Röhm, whose adjutant he had been in the putsch.
Emil had first met Himmler in 1925 when he’d been named the party’s deputy Gauleiter and Obmann, or propaganda director, for Upper Bavaria and Swabia. Quietly hardworking and shrewd, highly organized and suspicious, Himmler had found Hitler’s favor over other party officials through his loyalty, his freedom from scandal, and his methodical accumulation of facts about the friends and enemies of the führer. In 1927 Himmler had become deputy Reichsführer of the few hundred men in the Schutzstaffeln, the SS, which functioned as the party police; and now he’d invited Emil Maurice to his table in order to recruit him as an officer, and Geli was of no interest to him.
His glazed hazel eyes were vacant, his handshake moist, his face as bland as a thumb as he officiously introduced himself as Deputy Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. His dark brown hair was all but shaved from the sides of his head, but was scruffed on top, like a squirrel’s tail. Geli was a few inches shorter than he but her shoulders were wider; he seemed without muscle, as soft as eiderdown, ineffectual and passive, but beneath the coldness and dullness of his face she felt she detected a fearsome seething and contempt that he was holding under fierce control. “You are from Wien, Fräulein Raubal,” he said.
“I am.”
“Have you visited the Treasury?”
“With my uncle, yes.”
“And how did you feel about the Holy Lance?”
She shrugged. “It was nice. I was just eleven then.”
His face twitched and he turned from her to Emil. She felt she’d flunked his test. “Shall we sit?” he said, and they did. And then he told Emil about the Aryan criteria he was establishing for those who wanted to join the Schutzstaffeln, strictly judging each applicant on the basis of his family origins—including proof of Aryan forebears for a minimum of three generations—and hereditary biology, health, physique, and physiognomy. The deputy Reichsführer himself would subject each applicant’s photograph to his famous magnifying glass to ensure conformity to his rigid standards. The SS insignia would be a skull and bones, signifying its sworn loyalty and obedience to the führer, even if that meant death. “We’ll be an elite,” Heinrich Himmler said. “We’ll be like Jesuits without Jesus.”
“Aren’t you flattered, Emil!” Geli falsely gushed. “The high honor of even being considered!”
“Are you being humorous?” Himmler asked.
“Apparently not.” She leaned forward to find Emil’s eyes. “What day did we get here?”
