Kurt entered the stifling space. “Don’t you have a backup generator?”
“No.”
“Alternate fuel source?”
“My friend,” he shouted at Kurt, “fallback positions prepared by those who never expected to have to fall back are not very well done.” He nodded toward Kurt’s tool bag. “Anything in there for me?”
Kurt dropped the cloth bag on the table and opened it. “A few light switches, receptacles, some fusing wire.”
“I have two switches that need repair. I can use all the fusing wire you have.”
Kurt took the items out and placed them on the table. “Do you have a flashlight I might borrow? My batteries are kaput.”
“Here.” Hentschel handed him a light.
Kurt checked the diagram Hentschel had drawn. His eyebrows climbed. “The electrical panels are next to the showers?”
“This facility was designed by either a dungeon commandant or a suicide, my friend, not an engineer.”
A return visit to the front bunker and three hours of crawling around and tracing cables confirmed that for some inexplicable reason the ventilator power for the Fuhrerbunker came from the air filtration room in the older system, which in turn came from the generator room in the Fuhrerbunker. The canteen party had grown in population, volume, and lubrication. It was near ten in the morning when Kurt moved back through the couples as though he were invisible. In the lower bunker he turned left off the stairs and entered the toilets to try and locate the lower bunker’s fan motor.
As he walked to the rear of the WC, Kurt could hear someone in one of the stalls retching. There was no one in the shower room but the floors were wet. The strong odor of mildew overpowered even the scent of diesel fuel. The door beyond the shower room was slightly open and there was a light on behind it. There was a man in there and he was very, very still. Kurt pushed the door open with one finger and saw the figure of an SS general hanging by his neck from a wire strung from a pipe. His neck and face were swollen and deep red—signs of death by slow strangulation.
“Who is he?” Kurt asked the man retching in the shadows.
“How should I know?” the man answered, his words a mix of anger and nausea.
“Who is he?” Kurt repeated, using the tone he’d used on thousands of suspects in Berlin’s police interrogation rooms.
“That is General Fegelein, Himmler’s deputy. You heard the traitor Himmler tried to surrender the western armies to Eisenhower, haven’t you?”
“I have now.”
“Well, then, let me tell you. Gen. Fegelein had a bundle of loot and was on his way to join his boss to sell out our beloved Fuhrer.” The voice laughed. “The poor bastard paused in his apartment, though, to finish off a couple bottles of schnapps so the Russians couldn’t get them. That’s where they arrested him. Waste not, want not; that’s what the general always said. What do you always say?”
“Get while the getting is good,” answered Kurt without humor.
“Words to live by,” said the voice quietly. “Indeed,” he said more loudly. “Well, I guess the general doesn’t want for anything now. You wouldn’t happen to need a driver, would you?” asked the voice.
“Before that, my friend, I would need a car and then someplace to go. Could you stand some free advice?”
“Write it all off to Fuhrer and Fatherland?” answered the voice.
“The words I would’ve used are simpler,” said Kurt.
“Oh?”
“There is a storm on, son. Shut up, find a hole, get in it, and pull it in after you.”
The anonymous driver chuckled once then fell silent. He was quiet for a long time. At last his voice said quietly, “Gen. Fegelein was married to Gretl Braun—Eva Braun’s sister? He was the Fuhrer’s brother-in-law for almost seven hours.”
“It’s good to know people in high places,” remarked Kurt.
The toilet flushed, a stall door slammed, the echo of a few footsteps, and there was only the steady background rumble of the generator across the hall.
The electrical panel was behind the dangling corpse. It was not like dangling corpses had been anything like a novelty in Berlin lately. Somewhat startling, however, to find out how democratic the hangmen were becoming. “Given enough time,” muttered Kurt, “maybe they’ll start stringing up each other.”
Pushing his feelings aside, Kurt placed his bag on the top of a rickety metal shelf. Putting himself between the hanging general and the electrical panel, he pushed the corpse away from the wall with his back. Once the panel door was open, he let the general swing back. Kurt turned on Hentschel’s flashlight. There were some labels scribbled in pencil on the inside of the metal door roughly corresponding to a set of fusing-wire posts in the main box. None of them referred to a ventilator fan motor. There were only four cables that went up after leaving the main fuse box, and one of them had to power the lower bunker’s ventilator fan. That would be the line that had power but no load. The burned fusing wire should have been the clue, but most of the posts had been wrapped with copper wire, eliminating the need for all those pesky fuses.
Every electrician gets caught with the need to tell if a line is hot but without the proper tool. A quick way to tell if current is in a line is to momentarily short the circuit to ground with a piece of wire or a metal tool. Some hardy souls even use a finger. A quick touch and spark: the line is hot. Kurt preferred the wire or tool. Insulated, too, when one is standing in water.
He turned and looked up at the corpse. Gen. Fegelein was not standing in water. In fact he was standing on nature’s best insulator: air. Kurt turned the corpse, untied the twine binding the General’s wrists, and held the corpse’s sleeve as he directed a lifeless claw of a finger toward a pair of contacts. “Forgive me, general. It’s for the Fatherland.”
There was an open circuit, hot on one side, dead on the other, which meant no load. The cable led to a conduit which angled and led through the concrete ceiling above the rooms on the opposite side of the panel room’s east wall. The fan motor had to be up there and access to it had to be on the other side of the wall. According to Hentschel’s diagram, on the other side of the showers and the WC’s eastern wall were the apartments shared by Adolf and Eva. Leaving his assistant hanging in front of the electrical panel, Kurt went to the generator room and told this to Johannes Hentschel. The engineer took Kurt to see a slender balding fellow with a round face and squinty eyes who was Hitler’s orderly, Heinz Linge. The three of them met in the large conference room in front of the Fuhrer’s office as Wolff explained the problem to Linge.
Hitler’s attendant wore his SS uniform as though he might be promoted to field marshal at any moment. Everything that could shine shined, everything that could gleam gleamed. Not a speck of dandruff anyplace and of his remaining hairs there was not one out of place. Linge half listened to Hentschel, the majority of his attention nervously on the door to the office of Hitler’s personal secretary, Martin Bormann. Kurt sensed momentous things under way against which Linge regarded minor bunker maintenance less than significant.
“It is not a problem,” he interrupted all of a sudden. “At present Miss Braun—Frau Hitler—is visiting with the Goebbels family in the Vorbunker. The Fuhrer is in the map room. You have time.” He faced Kurt. “Will the repairs take long?”
“I can’t tell.”
Linge stole a quick glance at his watch. “As quickly as you can, then.” Hitler’s attendant lowered his wrist, turned abruptly, and went through the door into Bormann’s office.
“I’d best get back to the generator,” said Hentschel. He held his hand out toward Hitler’s apartments. “The place is yours.”