Kurt peered between the curtain and the right side of the closet door. Linge came into view first. Martin Bormann next, staggering slightly. Kurt recognized the doughy balding man from the newsreels. He was followed by a sad-eyed blond fellow in his mid-twenties wearing an SS uniform. “Gunsche,” Bormann said to the sad-eyed blond man. “You’d better tell the others.”
After Gunsche left, Bormann and Linge stood looking at the bodies. “It is the end of it,” said Bormann. “The end of it all.”
After a few moments, Linge said, “My God.”
“What, Linge?” Bormann sounded just a touch sloshed.
“On the floor. Isn’t that the pistol you gave him when the French surrendered?”
“Yes. And?”
“For God’s sake, Bormann, look at the wound. I know a 9mm entrance wound when I see one.” He picked Hitler’s gun up off the carpet. “This is a 7.62.” He sniffed at it, then held it out. “It hasn’t even been fired!”
“What are you saying, Linge? The Fuhrer is not really dead?”
“Don’t be absurd! Someone killed him.”
“Linge. Linge!” drunkenly insisted Bormann. “So he had a little help. So what?”
“We should tell Rattenhuber.”
Bormann held up both palms. “Don’t be an idiot. Think, Linge. Think. You know how the Fuhrer’s hands shook. It was not certain he could handle a gun by himself. Perhaps he needed a little help.”
“But the man who killed him—”
“What if it was Eva Braun? Are you insane? You want to have an investigation? The world is coming down around our ears, Linge, and you want to wait around, form a committee, hold hearings? Perhaps Marshal Zhukov will be kind enough to preside.” Bormann pushed Linge’s arm. “Go. Get blankets to wrap these bodies. Go!”
“The skin around the wound,” persevered Linge. “There’s no powder burns. You’ve seen people shot at close range—”
“I tend to be elsewhere.”
“Look at the spatter on the wall, Bormann! Look at it! The one who shot him had to be standing right where you are now!”
“Go. Get the blankets. Put this nonsense out of your head and go!” urged Bormann. As Linge reluctantly moved into Hitler’s bedroom, Martin Bormann looked down at the body of his fallen leader. He bent over and looked more closely. He straightened, rubbed his eyes, and slowly turned toward the vestibule, his face in a frown.
Kurt looked down at the pistol in his hand. He couldn’t kill everyone. He placed the weapon on the shelf. Perhaps Hitler was right. Perhaps saving his life did make Kurt responsible for everything that followed.
Bormann walked over to the closet and swept the curtain aside. He frowned, turned on the light, and walked through Kurt as he went to the back of the closet to look behind the clothing rack.
“Bormann?” called Heinz Linge.
“Back here,” he answered. “I thought someone was back here.”
“Well?”
Bormann stood, shrugged, and said, “Nothing. My god, it’s cold in here.” He turned and walked through Kurt as he returned to the living room. Linge handed Bormann a blanket and himself began wrapping Hitler’s body with a second blanket. Bormann straightened out Eva’s legs and covered her.
Linge and someone from the RSD carried out Adolf Hitler’s body. Bormann carried out Eva Hitler’s. Soon they were all gone.
The ghost held his hand up in front of his face and looked through it. Hitler had been right. In that hospital outside Berlin after they’d been gassed in 1918, Kurt Wolff had died. If he had been responsible for the lance corporal’s life he’d saved in 1918, he wondered, would he now be responsible for the lives he saved by killing his old comrade?
Kurt left the apartment and moved toward the stairs to the surface, the pungent odor of tobacco smoke joining the music and other odors in the air. No problem with communications, he mused. Word of the Fuhrer’s death, apparently, traveled swiftly.
Copyright © 2010 Barry B. Longyear