Five Past Midnight (41 page)

"You again, Inspector," Hitler said, the foam parting at his mouth.

"Yes, sir. And General Eberhardt."

"General Eberhardt has been working for me for thirteen years, Inspector, and not once has he brought me welcome news," the Führer said. "What is it this time, General?"

The barber lightly gripped Hitler's head as the blade slid along the cheekbone. The razor was wiped on a towel hanging at the barber's belt, then brought up again. The barber had a high, blank forehead and pinprick eyes, and his face was squeezed in concentration. A fern stand next to the barber had also been brought in for the occasion, and on it were a bowl of steaming water, white towels in a rumpled pile, a lather cup, and a horsehair brush with a silver handle. A strop hung by a metal clip from an edge of the table. The marble bust of Frederick watched the operation dispassionately.

"I must be blunt, my leader," Eberhardt said.

The foam below the mustache moved again. "You always are. I've yet to determine if I appreciate it."

"We believe the American—Jack Cray—has obtained a sniper rifle."

While General Eberhardt informed the Führer how such an event came to pass and how it had been discovered, Dietrich sensed movement to his right, and so risked a glance around the room. This was Hitler's bedroom, one room further into the catacombs than the map room. A Dresden vase and Carlyle's biography of Frederick the Great were on a nightstand near a low bed. Across from the bed was the blue horsehair sofa.

Another person was in the room, standing at a dresser. A woman with hair the color of straw and a flippant nose. She was rearranging tubes of lipstick and vials of perfume on the dresser, taking too long, perhaps with nothing else to do. She had a shade too much rouge on her cheeks, and her eyebrows were penciled darker than her hair. She wore a bright blue dress with white ruffles at the neckline. The dress fit her snugly, showing her figure.

And when Dietrich—feeling like a thief for having glimpsed this woman—quickly turned back to the barber's chair, Hitler startled the detective by raising an eyebrow, just fractionally, but plainly and purposefully nonetheless. It was the silent and common question one bachelor asks of another: she's something, isn't she? Eberhardt continued with his briefing, and might not have seen it.

The familiarity and bawdiness of Hitler's little motion pushed everything useful from Dietrich's head. He stood there at attention, as straight as a shinbone, while Eberhardt talked about the rifle and all that the weapon connoted. The detective wondered if he would be able to escape Hitler's sway this time. Last time—down here in the bunker—it was very close.

"So he will try to flush me out of the bunker?" Hitler was again all business.

Dietrich's attention returned to the conversation.

"There is no other reason to obtain a sniper's rifle." The RSD general spoke succinctly, a professional briefer.

" How will he do it, Inspector ? How will the American try to make me flee to the open air?"

The barber waited until Hitler had finished the question before scraping the blade across his chin. Strip by strip, the Führer's face was emerging from the foam.

"Perhaps a massive bombing raid on the garden above us, and on this structure."

Hitler raised a hand from under the bib to point at the nearest wall. "This place is impregnable."

"The Allies have a new weapon," Eberhardt countered. "A bomb that penetrates several feet of concrete before exploding. It has been used with success on airplane runways. Perhaps it works on bunkers."

"This roof is considerably thicker than a runway, and on top of all the concrete is another ten meters of earth," Hitler said as the barber drew a damp towel across his face, wiping away the last specks of lather.

Eberhardt said, "Perhaps the bombers' goal will not be to destroy this facility entirely, but to chase you from it, to make it uninhabitable and dangerous, so you will be forced to emerge."

"Where Jack Cray will be waiting," Dietrich concluded. "With the sniper's rifle."

The barber used an index finger to tilt Hitler's head, searching for missed spots. Then he snapped the towel to one side, his signal that his mission was accomplished.

Hitler rose unsteadily from the barber's chair. His face was pink and shiny. He pushed aside his forelock using his entire hand, the out- sized gesture of a boy. "My engineers tell me this bunker cannot be pierced by a bomb, any bomb. I trust them to be correct. So I will stay in this place. Forever."

"You are never leaving?" Dietrich asked.

"Last time you were here, Inspector Dietrich, I told you I would never leave Berlin. Now I am telling you I am never leaving this bunker. Even if the terror flyers have a bomb big enough to make the bunker come down around my ears."

Dietrich moved his jaw, his face impassive.

Hitler read it anyway. "I've just made your task easier. Yes?"

The inspector nodded.

"This American . . . what is his name again?" Hitler asked.

"Jack Cray," the detective replied.

The blond woman crossed the room to sit in the blue davenport. She picked up a magazine. She was either entirely bored with this business or superb at hiding her interest.

"Jack Cray won't have a target." The Führer's blue eyes were as flat as paint. "He'll be out there, with his new rifle, waiting and waiting, and he'll never have anything to shoot at. And so all you need do, Inspector, is catch him. You don't need to concern yourself about me."

The barber lifted the chair with one hand and the table in the other. He crisply bowed to the Führer and left the room.

Thinking himself dismissed, Dietrich moved to followed the barber.

Hitler's hand on his arm brought him up. "Tell me, Inspector. Are the Bolsheviks in mortar distance of Berlin?"

Dietrich again was startled. How could the Führer not know this? "Soviet shells are landing on the city, all day and night."

Hitler nodded.

Again, Dietrich found reserves of courage he did not know he possessed. "Don't your generals tell you?"

"Some do and some don't," the Führer replied tonelessly. "It's a matter of who to believe. That's how I've come this far, Inspector. Knowing who to believe."

Dietrich sensed he was witnessing the tide turn, the waning of reason and the waxing of something more dangerous. He had heard rumors of these sea changes. He hastily turned to go, Eberhardt at his heels.

"And amid all the traitors, I can trust you, Inspector." Hitler's voice gained half an octave, and inklings of hysteria were at the edges of his words. A flood was coming.

"They have never told me the truth. They lie to me. And worse, they conspire with each other to lie to me." Hitler's face was turning red in splotches. Spittle formed at the corner of his mouth. His voice rose like a stormy wind. "That's all I hear down here. Lies and more lies."

The Führer caught himself. He shuddered with the effort to control his passion. He breathed quickly, air rattling in his throat. He turned to the blue sofa like a jerking marionette, his ruined body not cooperating in even this small motion.

He said over his shoulder, "Send another one of them in as you leave, Inspector Dietrich. Any one of them, outside the door there, waiting for an audience, sniveling in fear, hoping I haven't discovered their treachery, but of course I have."

OTTO DIETRICH held two corners of the map laid over the car's hood, and Eugen Eberhardt pinned down the other two corners. They were near the Food and Agriculture Ministry's building on Wilhelmstrasse. A company of Eberhardt's RSD troops were cordoning off the intersection and two hundred meters of Behrenstrasse, setting up wooden traffic barricades and giving gruff responses to the few passersby who asked anything. Most pedestrians on the sidewalks hurried along without even a glance at the operation. Camouflage nets hung from lamp poles made Wilhelmstrasse seem like a tunnel.

"It's all a matter of angles, really." General Eberhardt raised a hand to ward off the sunlight, made white and blinding by the high smoke. He stared down Behrenstrasse toward the church. "We'll give Jack Cray a few, and we'll take away a few."

"And you're sure the Führer would exit the bunker only by these routes?" Dietrich was bent over the hood, studying the map.

Also on the car hood, pressed under his left palm, was an aerial photo of the middle of Berlin, from Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrecht Strasse north ten blocks to the Brandenburg Gate, showing the neighborhood that was the Reich's administrative heart.

"He has told us he is not leaving the bunker. I take him at his word. I have overseen his departure from the Chancellery hundreds of times, and these would be his routes were he to leave. He usually gets into the limousine in the Honor Courtyard, and the limousine then exits the complex east through the automobile gate onto Wilhelmstrasse. But occasionally the limousine pulls up in front of the building, where he leaves from the Great Marble Gallery, nearer his office."

"And that exit is on Vossstrasse, to the south of the Chancellery?"

"You aren't familiar with the New Chancellery? Have you ever been inside it?"

"Never been invited." Dietrich smiled ruefully. "And I avoid the government quarter when I can."

"The Marble Gallery is a hundred fifty meters long, twice as long as the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the Führer told me. Boasting a bit, you see."

"General, are you certain you know of all the secondary bunkers, those places the Führer would go if the Chancellery bunker were rendered uninhabitable? Himmler or Goring wouldn't have a bunker you don't know about, would they? A bunker Hitler could flee to in an emergency?"

Eberhardt stiffened, lifting his hands from the map so that it flapped in the breeze. "It's my duty to know these things. The SS bunker across the Chancellery garden would be the first refuge. And the Wehrmacht command bunker in Zossen would be the second."

"How would the Führer travel to them? Could he walk to the SS bunker?"

"Of course. It's just across the garden."

"Would he drive there?"

"It would take longer to drive, especially if it were an emergency and the driver and bodyguards hadn't been given advance notice, hadn't brought the cars up from the garage."

"Can the Führer get from the bunker where he is now—the garden bunker—to the SS bunker through an underground corridor?" Dietrich asked.

"At one time the SS was planning on connecting the two with a fortified tunnel, but it was never completed." Eberhardt repinned the map with his hands.

Dietrich continued, "And to get to the Zossen bunker, he would have to drive, of course. It's quite a distance."

"My men have practiced such an evacuation many times. But the roadways are always a surprise these days. Each day I send a driver to survey the escape route to Zossen. And he never fails to report that he had to take a new route because of new rubble or a new crater."

Cray traced a route with his finger. "So if Jack Cray can force the Führer out of the garden bunker, the only place Cray can count on the Führer being in the open will be as the Führer walks across the garden toward the SS bunker, or when he is at the motor gate or the Marble Gallery entrance. Is that right?"

"Yes, but you are supposing Jack Cray knows these things, that Cray has learned of the bunkers and the Chancellery entrances the Führer uses, knows the Führer's escape routes."

Dietrich said, "We speak of Cray as if he were one person, as if just one commando were closing in on the Führer. But we must presume that the Americans and English have put a vast intelligence machine at Cray's disposal. And so we must assume Cray knows the Führer's escape routes." Dietrich's face creased into a grin. "And you have told me you always anticipate the worst."

The RSD general nodded. Every part of this conversation had been spoken before by these two men over the last two days, and more than once. They acted as each other's cross-examiner, searching for Cray through the power of their intellects, sifting through the meager clues Cray had left behind. And Dietrich and Eberhardt talked to buck each other up. They were working on little sleep and no encouragement and the prospects of a bleak future should they fail.

"And another thing, Otto." Eberhardt had begun using the inspector's first name and the familiar
du.
"These three places where Hitler might emerge—should Cray somehow force him up from underground—are several hundred meters apart. The garden, the Wilhelm- strasse gate, and the Marble Gallery exit. Cray can't know where Hitler will come out, and Cray can't cover them all, not even with the long- range rifle, because it can't shoot around corners."

Dietrich began folding the map. "There's a chance the sniper rifle is a ruse, Eugen." The detective began folding the map.

Eberhardt drew in a quick breath.

"Maybe Jack Cray stole that rifle as a smoke screen. And his plan is something else entirely."

"We can only work with what we've got." The general pursed his lips. "If we assume it's a ruse, what do we do then, Otto? Go home and make a fire in the grate? We simply don't have anything else to work on. And Cray went to a lot of trouble to get that rifle, and was injured in the process. I don't think it's a ruse."

An RSD man blew his whistle twice, then yelled a final warning through a bullhorn. Down Behrenstrasse other whistles sounded, indicating nearby buildings and roads were clear of people. Another RSD man pulled a last sandbag from the back of a truck, and added it to a low wall of them.

The man with the bullhorn called, "Ready when you are, General Eberhardt."

Dietrich pulled at his chin, letting the map flutter. "I'm stumped by that, too, Eugen. Even if Cray knows of the three exits, he can only cover one of them with his rifle."

"So is Cray accepting a thirty-three percent chance of getting the Führer in his crosshairs? Is the American just hoping to get lucky? Or maybe he has accomplices. We know he's working with the woman, Ka- trin von Tornitz. I've got a lot of my men looking for her."

"Nothing in her background indicates she can use a rifle."