Five Past Midnight (43 page)

Haushofer's words tumbled out. "I wasn't away long, just while I parked the car, and I was still down the street when I saw those two Gestapo bastards leave the apartment, and ..."

His head a furnace of pain, Dietrich waved away the explanation, a flick of his fingers that said it didn't matter. He stared bleakly at the countess's body.

"Egon," he said softly, his head in so much pain his tongue hurt as he worked it, "what am I doing?"

Haushofer hesitated, searching Dietrich's expression. "You all right, Inspector? I'd better get you to a doctor."

Another toss of Dietrich's hand. "Look what they did to this poor woman."

"Do you know where you are, Inspector Dietrich?"

"Yes, I know."

"Your pupils are dilated. I think you've got a concussion." He gently took Dietrich's arm to turn him to the door. "Come on, Inspector. We'll get you patched up, then back we'll go after Jack Cray."

Dietrich touched away dampness at his eyes. "Yes, Jack Cray. The American."

Haushofer tried to lead Dietrich from the apartment, but Dietrich said, "Let's look around here. If he's been here, he's surely left things, left part of himself, though he probably doesn't know it, things the Gestapo would miss."

16

NOT ONCE in his subterranean service had Sergeant Kahr attempted to smuggle contraband into the bunker. The list of forbidden items was long, and included weapons, writing materials, cameras, food and drink, and cigarettes and matches. He was sneaking such a common item, and tiny. Kahr thought he'd be able to calmly walk up to the SS guards at the blockhouse entrance, receive the usual insults as they patted him down, and go into the blockhouse.

He had rehearsed this entry into the bunker a hundred times in his mind. But as he stepped to the SS guard, Kahr's bit of contraband—a box of matches no larger than his thumb, taped high on his right thigh— seemed to expand in size and weight, slowing him down, forcing him to walk peculiarly, and making him glow like a machine-gun barrel. He felt as if all the Nuremberg spotlights had picked him up as he raised his arms for the pat-down. Five other SS troopers milled about. A Red Army shell fluttered overhead, but they were so common no one looked up. Ash spiraled down as thick as alpine snow, and the SS guard at the door wore it on his shoulders and cap.

"I forget," the guard said. "Do you have to go through the toilet room to get to your generators, Sergeant?"

That passed as high humor for the other guard, who laughed mightily, but sobered quickly when a Wehrmacht general with a steel hook for a hand stepped into line behind Kahr. The sergeant held his breath while he was patted down. The guard's hand came close — maybe touched — the matches, but the guard was searching for pistols or grenades, and he searched five hundred people a day, so he missed the matches, just as Kahr had prayed he would. "Go ahead, Sergeant."

Kahr moved toward the door into the concrete blockhouse. He heard the Wehrmacht general growl at the guard, "SS prick. One of these days I'm going to take that probing hand of yours and stick it up your ass."

"Yes, sir." — words dripping with contempt — "I'll be here." Kahr entered the blockhouse and started down the dimly lit stairs. Berlin had fallen into such dark chaos that the bunker no longer seemed so gloomy by comparison. At least he could escape the ash and the hollow rattle of Bolshevik shells and the scent of sewage from the ruptured lines, though the bunker's toilets often backed up, fouling the air. He turned on the landing and continued down, his stomach still tied up.

The SS guard at the antechamber door frisked him. Coat pockets, inside his coat, up and down his sides, small of his back, his armpits Then up and down his pants, all of it rough, the guard not giving a damn about offending. This guard didn't find the matches either. Kahr could hear the Wehrmacht general coming down the steps behind him. To hide his nervousness while the guard studied his identification card, Kahr swatted ash from his shoulders.

"Enter," the guard ordered, passing back the card. Kahr stepped through the door, breathing for the first time in an hour. The bunker was so crowded he could not see the door at the far end of the hallway. And he gasped at the disarray. The SS officers in green- and-gray camouflage were in a corner, sharing a bottle of schnapps. Four untouched dinners on a tray sat on the floor near them. General Gotthard Heinnci was raging at Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, his hand pumping like a locomotive's main rod. The minister's face was professionally blank, but his back was against the concrete wall and he could retreat no further. A card table had been set up outside the Führer's door, and two generals were hunched over it. An eastern territorial official — who were all called Golden Pheasants because of their golden-brown uniforms — was slumped forward on a folding chair, elbows on his knees, an empty bottle at his feet. On another table was a gramophone, playing Brahms. A cake with green frosting was next to the record player. An SS adjutant was wiping away frosting and letting the Führer's dog Blondi lick it off his finger. The ecstatic dog banged his tail against a leg of the table, and when the gramophone's needle jumped, Brahms began the bar over again, then again and again as the needle bounced in time to Blondi's tail. His eyes glassy, a Wehrmacht major general in a soiled field uniform sat on another folding chair, blood seeping down his trousers into his boot, a report on his lap. Sipping tea and chatting, three of the Führer's secretaries stood near the door to his conference room, waiting for their shift to begin. Another general — the rose pink of his greatcoat lapel facings identifying him as being from the Luftwaffe's Corps of Engineers — leaned against a wall, cleaning his fingernails with a pocket- knife.

Kahr pushed his way into the hallway, stepping around a tank crew lieutenant in his black uniform, looking overwhelmed, who probably had been brought underground to receive a medal. Dr. Goebbels was looking up at his wife, his lips pulled back in a rictus showing his yellow horse teeth. Mrs. Goebbels was lecturing him on something, but Sergeant Kahr was afraid of him—and her—so he steered himself along the other side of the hallway.

He squeezed by General Steiner, who was speaking with another general whom Kahr did not recognize, and was lamenting, "My total forces consist of six battalions, including some from an SS police division and the 5th Panzer, and the 3rd Navy Division, but we can forget the sailors, who are great on ships but useless for this kind of fighting, so..." Kahr moved along, out of earshot.

He walked by the Führer's open door, and the nasal, rasping screech coming from the room could scarcely be identified as Hitler's voice, but of course it was. Only one person belowground was permitted to carry on like that. Kahr flicked his eyes right to glimpse the man. The sight startled him. Hitler was bent over the map table, spavined and frothing, his neck and face as red as paint. His head bobbed violently, and his forelock slapped his eyebrows. Hitler's ordeals had shrunken him. His uniform seemed like a tent over him. At his side were Keitel and Bormann. The sergeant could not see who the Führer was denouncing.

Kahr glanced around. Nobody else in the hallway seemed perturbed by the Führer's ranting. Kahr almost bumped into Armaments Minister Speer's back. Speer was bent low in conversation with Berlin's commandant, General Raymann, who apparently had been summoned from his headquarters on the Hohenzollerndamm and, like ail the rest, was waiting his turn for an audience. His chief of staff, Colonel Refior, stood at his elbow. Raymann's burden was such that he always looked as if he had just been beaten up. Holding a clipboard, Gestapo Müller was speaking softly with an SS general, the two leaning toward each other, their faces only inches apart.

The sergeant passed the door to his generator-ventilator room, then exited the main hallway, where an SS guard Kahr recognized was idly flicking his holster's flap. Three pump fire extinguishers were behind the guard on the floor. Kahr climbed the circular stairs and entered the servants' quarters and kitchen wing of the bunker. The central hallway here was used as a dining room, and benches and chairs—including six gilt Louis Seize chairs—and two long rows of tables filled the area. A dozen men and women were eating. Kahr recognized Erich Kempka, Hitler's chauffeur, and Hans Baur, Hitler's pilot, dining on soup and speaking with each other in soft tones. Kahr walked to the end of the dining hall, then turned into the kitchen.

"So you are back again, Ulrich?" A cook smiled over her rolling pin. "Couldn't stay away could you?"

"I'm on business today, Helena."

"You are never on business when you come into my kitchen." She smiled, put the rolling pin to one side, and wiped her hands on her apron. A circle of dough lay on the table in front of her. Baking trays were stacked on a shelf under the table. Six other cooks were working in the room, one holding a wooden spatula the size of a snow shovel, about to remove bread from an oven built along the back wall. Helena Stalla pulled out a tray of chocolate eclairs from a rack next to the pastry oven, then plucked one from the tray and put it into Sergeant Kahr's hand.

"This is why you visit me," she said with mock petulance. "My food. Just my food." Her smile was both flirtatious and long-suffering. She was wearing a white apron, a short-sleeved white shirt, and a white skirt. Her arms were agreeably flabby. Her hair was hidden under a white bandanna. Dainty streams of sweat flowed from her temples down to her cheeks. "I always know when you'll show up in my kitchen, Ulrich."

"You do?"

"Sure. You control the ventilation for every room in the bunker. So you turn off the air in the kitchen. It's hotter than a brick kiln in here now. And then you wander in here, knowing I'll give you food just so you'll turn the fans back on. It's blackmail, is what it is." She smiled, encouraging him.

Kahr normally appreciated Helena's modest attempts at being a coquette, and would linger awhile, but today he had work to do. He ate the eclair in two bites, and mumbled around the pastry in his mouth, "You are stockpiling flour, sounds like."

"All the time. And sausages and cabbage and venison, everything."

Kahr licked chocolate from his thumb and index finger, hoping this little concern with cleanliness would disguise his agitation. "Well, I've been told I've got to share my office with some bags of flour."

She cackled. "You call your roomful of pipe an office?"

"I've been ordered to take as much flour off your hands as I can cram into my room. You'll get another load tomorrow."

She clapped her hands together, raising a cloud of flour. Her teeth showed sourly. "So now we are hoarding? Is it because access to the warehouse on Kremnitz will soon be impossible? Are the Russians that close?"

Kahr swallowed. His fear had given the eclair—the Führer's favorite dessert—a rancid aftertaste. He tried to be chatty. "The end has been near since 1942, but don't tell anybody I told you so, lest I'm dragged before a court-martial. Let me into the pantry, Helena."

She untied her apron and hung it on a towel bar. Her keys were on a cord around her ample midriff. Silk stockings were still available to those who had the keys to the Führerbunker pantry and didn't mind passing out butter tins and jars of preserves and a few links. Helena's thighs swished together loudly as she led the sergeant from the kitchen back into the dining hall. The cut-faced Austrian, Kaltenbrunner, had just arrived, and was placing his coffee cup on a table. At another table Generals Krebs and Burgdorf were huddled over plates of noodles. Krebs eyed Kaltenbrunner uneasily. A few servants were now also eating in the room. Making motor noises, one of the Goebbels children ran along the wall, a toy airplane held over his head.

When Helena came to the supply room door, she inserted her key, pushed open the door, then reached inside for the light switch. He followed her through the door. Barrels and crates and bags and bottles filled the room. Rounds of cheese, racks of wine, casks of olive oil, kegs of beer, shelves of spices, baskets of oranges, and combs of honey Eggs, potatoes, raisins, tea, condensed milk, and peppermints. At the back of the pantry was a door to the refrigerator room.

"The flour sacks are there." Helena pointed. The sergeant stepped around stacked boxes of carrots. He grunted as he lifted a bag. He guessed it weighed thirty kilograms.

"I'll be back for more." He brought the sack up to his left shoulder. The crowd in the dining hall was rapidly growing. Kahr stepped along behind a row of chairs. He did not draw a glance.

At the stairs the SS guard demanded, "What's in the sack?"

"Flour. I was told to store some bags in my generator room. As many as I could get in."

The guard drew his knife, and pricked the side of the cloth sack. He pinched a bit of exposed flour between his thumb and forefinger and put it to his mouth. "It's usually a plate of wurst or pigs' knuckles that the cook gives you."

With that, the guard turned his attention back to the stairs. Kahr carried the sack into the main hall, as crowded as ever. General Busse emerged from the Führer's conference room, his face a mash of chagrined rage. He bolted for the stairway to the garden, a Wehrmacht aide rushing after him. The pretty blond woman — whom Kahr had heard called
die Blode Kuh,
the stupid cow, and whom the sergeant had once seen absently reach for the Führer's hand, which he jerked away as if her hand had been a sizzling brand — was sitting in a chair, teaching the eldest Goebbels daughter how to apply mascara. Kahr pressed the generator room's buzzer with that day's code, three rings then two.

After a moment—always just long enough to irritate him— Sergeant Fischer threw the bolts and opened the door.

Kahr shouted above the whir of the fans, "We've got to keep company with the dry goods Orders."

Fischer did not understand much, but he understood orders. He said sullenly, "First it's canaries, and now it's the stores."

Kahr lowered the sack to the floor, then pushed it against the base of a generator. When he left the room to return to the pantry, Fisher locked the door behind him.