“Ah, Fraulein, you’re too late -” A drunken voice called out of the darkness. “You’ve come too late for the party!” The voice broke into coarse laughter.
Pavli looked across the small open space behind what had been the Chancellery building. A garden of some kind, for the private enjoyment of the ministers and their staff. Little of that remained, though; the grounds were strewn with twisted metal and wooden planks, some still smoldering from where a shell’s impact had ripped them from a flat-roofed structure, a square of thick, rough-surfaced concrete.
A soldier lay in the doorway, his back against the slanted edge of the wall. The dim light glinted off the bottle he waved toward Marte. “All gone, they’re all gone… nobody left but me.” His voice turned to sodden self-pity. “And I would’ve gone, too, if I could have.” One leg of his uniform was in tatters, his exposed shin raw and bloodied; Pavli knew that there would be no point in trying to help him stand upright. The soldier took another drink, tilting the bottle nearly vertical. He started to laugh again, the alcohol bubbling out the corners of his mouth. “I’ll just have to do for you, then, won’t I?” He gazed blearily at Marte standing before him.
“There’s no one down below?” She pointed to the steps leading into the darkness. “You’re lying -”
The soldier had slumped onto one arm, the bottle falling from his grip and clinking against the broken cement. “See for yourself,” he mumbled, eyelids drifting shut. His stubbled face grew slack, mouth falling open.
A pocket flashlight lay near the soldier’s outstretched hand; Pavli bent down and scooped it up. It emitted a weak, yellow beam, the batteries close to dead. He pointed it down the steps. “I don’t see anyone.” He turned to Marte. “Maybe he’s right -”
She pushed past him. “Joseph!” Her voice echoed against the walls as she descended.
He followed her, trying to shine the light past her so she wouldn’t trip and fall. The bunker’s narrow corridors were littered with papers and other rubble; with each step, he seemed to kick away another empty bottle. The smell of spilled alcohol in the trapped air choked his breath in his throat.
“He was here…” Marte stopped and looked across the open doorways surrounding her. “I can still feel him…” She stepped closer to one. The flashlight beam revealed a table covered with maps, a few spilling onto the trash-strewn floor. She stepped back into the corridor and closed her eyes, raising a hand before himself.
Pavli felt his chest tightening, his lungs straining for whatever oxygen was left in the fetid air. The walls and ceiling pressed tighter around him than the shelter had. The human smells, and the shouting voices, the screams and hysterical laughter, now reduced to whispers embedded in the earth.
“There -” Marte pointed down the corridor. A spiralling set of stairs curved beyond the door to which she ran.
They were still underground when they stepped into the next level; Pavli could sense the weight of stone and concrete above his head. He followed Marte through a doorway on the left.
At first, he thought the flashlight, slowly growing weaker, had picked out a set of dolls on the beds against the room’s walls. Large ones, but still smaller than adult figures would have been. Six of them, the golden hair of the girls spilling across the pillows.
He tried to keep Marte from touching any of them, but she pushed away his arm. She leaned down, her fingertips brushing the cheek of the oldest girl’s corpse. The younger girls and the boys looked peaceful, but Pavli could see the dark bruises on the one’s shoulders and throat, showing the struggle she must have put up.
“Joseph did this.” Tenderly, she stroked the girl’s hair, a deeper, more sunlike golden than her own. The hair of all the dead children were the same blond shade; that was what had told Pavli that Marte’s child wasn’t among them. “He and Magda… they didn’t want to leave them behind…”
The sight of the small corpses made Pavli dizzy. He had seen so many worse things, in the war-torn streets of Berlin and on Ritter’s surgery table at the asylum, but the peaceful faces in this tomblike chamber, looking as if they were merely asleep, wrapped ice around his heart. Present time ebbed away; Marte was no longer there with him, and he could watch in silence as a woman in a dark blue dress, with hair as golden as that of the children, bent forward to wake each child in turn. The woman of the room’s past placed capsules in their mouths, one after another, telling them to be good and to bite down and swallow their medicine, that soon they would be getting ready to go on a long airplane ride, to go far away, to someplace much sunnier and prettier. Only the eldest girl woke before her mother reached her; she started sobbing in fear as she watched her brothers and sisters fall back into a sleep from which they would never waken. She had sobbed and cried out, her mother had slapped her, forced her mouth open and pressed in the capsule with her thumb, then pressed a hand over her face to make her swallow…
“Joseph!”
His head swam with the images of another’s memory, the deaths of the golden-haired children, as he heard Marte scream the single name. He opened his eyes and saw her standing in the center of the room, looking wildly about herself, as though she expected an answer to the shout still echoing in the bunker. She burst into tears as he placed his arm around her shoulders.
“He was here -” She struck a weak fist against Pavli’s chest. “He knows, he’s the only one who can tell me -”
Marte was still weeping as he led up into the cold night air, still thick with smoke but breathable. She slipped from his grasp and knelt beside the drunken soldier.
“Where is he?” She pulled the man toward her by the front of his uniform. His head lolled back, eyelids fluttering open. “Where is Reichsminister Goebbels? Where did he go -”
The soldier laughed. “He went nowhere, Fraulein. The bastard’s still here.” He reached for Pavli’s hand. “Help me up. I’ll show you.”
Leaning his weight on Pavli, the soldier hobbled with his wounded leg dragging behind. “This way.” He nodded toward the corner of the rough concrete structure.
They had come around the other side when they had entered the remains of the Chancellery garden; if they had gone by this side, they would have stumbled across the two corpses to which the soldier brought them.
“There – you see?” The soldier’s rank breath was right against Pavli’s face. “He wanted to go the same way – they both did, him and his stuck-up wife – the same way the Fuhrer did. We burned that bastard yesterday, broke up what was left with a shovel handle, and then we scattered the ashes all around, so the Ivans wouldn’t be able to get their hands on any piece of him. So of course your precious Reichsminister Goebbels would have to have the same thing, wouldn’t he?” The soldier’s voice sharpened with scorn. “Burn ’em up, soon as he and his wife had killed themselves, those were his orders. But we’d already used most of the cans of petrol on his boss – it takes a lot of fuel to get to ashes. And there wasn’t time to stand around watching these two burn. Just doused ’em and threw the match, and then everybody was gone. Everybody but me.” The soldier’s weight sagged against Pavli; he had to catch himself to keep from falling. “I had to smell ’em all this time, ’til the flames died out.” He spat on the ground. “Made me sick, it did -” His head wobbled, and Pavli let him slip unconscious onto the ground.
More of the clouds parted, letting through enough moonlight to show the two charred bodies. They lay on their backs, one barely recognizable as a woman, the golden hair gone, blackened bone visible through the scalp. Pavli could even see where a bullet had cracked open the skull close to the burnt scrap of ear cartilage. The other corpse, though its skin had turned dark as a piece of bacon that had fallen from the skillet into the fire, was still recognizable as the Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, the Gauleiter and defender of Berlin. Goebbels’ mouth was drawn open in a silent grimace, his eyesockets scorched hollow. Scraps of his dress uniform’s collar and sleeves were still in place above the sunken chest.