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“If you wish.”
“Take your wife and my niece to a movie palace.” And then he grinned as if, in a flash, he’d solved everything; he’d even amazed himself.
She’d heard that Hitler objected to it, so she insisted the Schaubs take her to see M, a Fritz Lang film starring Peter Lorre as a child murderer. Schaub later claimed his wife had noticed Geli was “inattentive, sad, indeed almost tearful.” She’d gotten chocolate with Geli at the refreshment stall and had asked what the problem was, but Geli failed to confide in her, merely replying, “I’m upset.” Schaub himself was forced to return to the Brown House for Hitler, so when the film ended his wife and Geli shared a taxi to the flat at Prinzregentenplatz 16 where Geli seemed not to want to go inside. She took a long time saying good-bye to Frau Schaub and asked “what she was going to do in the next few days because she was alone, too.” Schaub’s wife told her to telephone their flat and, after a handshake, Geli headed into the building, whistling just as Peter Lorre did. She never called.
The Föhn winds continued, and just after breakfast on September 18th, Geli strolled along the Isar river to Karl Müller’s Public Baths. She was wearing a pearl necklace and a taupe, short-sleeved afternoon dress with saddle shoes. She swam a kilometer and lolled in the pool with Elfi Samthaber, who was astonished to find her friend still in München. She told Elfi there’d been a hitch in her plans, but she expected to be in Austria soon.
The heat was wilting, the gray morning air felt as moist as steam, and the avenues were jammed with cars and tour buses filled with watchful people from elsewhere who were there for the first days of Oktoberfest. She walked to the Hoffmann house in Bogenhausen, but she was not invited inside even when the upstairs maid roused Henny from sleep and she appeared on the porch in a red kimono, with sleep-welted eyes and hair as wild as bramble. Camera cases were behind her in the foyer, and as Henny shut the front door and roosted with Geli on the porch steps, she yawned and said she’d decided not to go along and watch her father photograph the führer in Hamburg.
“Would you like to do something tonight?” Geli asked.
She was told that Henny was going to an Oktoberfest party with Baldur von Schirach.
“And Saturday?” She saw the traffic of fear and pity in her friend’s stare, and she got up. “So, your father’s given you instructions.”
“Others, too,” Henny said. “Weren’t you going to Wien?”
“I still am.”
“You should. I hear they’re all uneasy about you now.”
“Why?”
“I have learned not to ask questions.”
“Maybe I’ll stay in Germany just to be an annoyance.”
“Don’t defy them,” Henny said, and then she noticed a Brownshirt slowly coast past on a bicycle, frankly watching them both, and she disappeared inside the house.
At one o’clock Geli ate a lunch of spaghetti and Chianti in the flat’s dining room and was just finishing when she was joined there by Hitler, who’d returned from the Brown House in his Brownshirt uniform to have Anni Winter gather his things for the weekend. Schaub and Hoffmann, he said, would be coming for him at six.
She asked, “Will you go all the way to Hamburg tonight?”
“Well, at least as far as Leipzig. I hate being rushed before a speech. I make oratory look easy, but it’s not.”
She agreed that it must be difficult.
Scoffing at her sympathy, Hitler turned to the kitchen and shouted, “Frau Reichert! Shall I be here all afternoon?” Then he settled in his chair and sighed as he folded his hands atop his crossed thighs. “I have had such nasty feelings today.”
She told him it was the Föhn. The hot winds unsettled people.
Snidely smiling, he asked, “Where would you be now? Well past Linz? A few hours from Wien?”
She didn’t say.
Maria Reichert hurried in with a tray holding a silver tea service and a full plate of spaghetti and meatless tomato sauce. She reminded Herr Hitler that she was off duty from five that afternoon until Monday morning, but she’d hired a friend, Anna Kirmair, for the Saturday housecleaning. And the Winters would be in for half a day tomorrow to polish the silver and handle the laundry chores.
She was boring him, he told her, and she reddened with embarrassment and went out.
“And what about me?” Geli asked.
Quietly rolling strings of pasta with his fork and spoon, Hitler prematurely smiled at his wit and said, “Oh, you are anything but boring.”
“Will you let me go to Wien?”
“I haven’t decided.”
She stupidly asked how he knew she wouldn’t go while he was gone, and he laughed hugely for a while.
