He went back to his desk.
It was Inga who spoke, and not to me. She was standing in front of the desk. Her voice was rough. "Mein Keichsleiter… Let me convince an unbeliever. Let me show him Der Reliquie! "
The man said nothing. He seemed uninterested in her sudden outburst, but he gazed at her for a moment and then moved a podgy hand, granting the request.
She waited for me and I followed her to the far end of the room where I had noticed the curtains. They were a fall of black velvet with the swastika emblazoned on it. She stood erect in her military trenchcoat, the pride shining from her face.
"You asked me to show you the shrine."
Someone must have operated a switch; the velvet was split and its two halves drew apart. The niche was lighted by a single flame in a bowl of red marble. The relics were cradled in a vessel of clear crystal, and were pure white.
There are various reports on this subject. Witnesses were hard to locate in the holocaust of Berlin at the time. The most authoritative evidence was presented by British Military Intelligence in 1945. It was established that the corpses, of Hitler and Eva Braun were burnt in the garden of the Chancellery on the evening of April 30th, but no trace was found of the charred remains. These were removed in secret. A statement by Frau Junge (who was in the Fuhrerbunker during the last hours) said that the cremated relics were collected in a box and secretly taken to the Hitler Youth leader Axmann. The sacred relics would thus be passed on to the next generation, represented by the Hitler Youth.
The light of the small flame was reflected in the crystal, so that the bleached remains were seen as if enwrapped in fire.
Her face was there too, distorted by the curves of the glass and the flame's movement. She was staring into it. I remembered something she had said when she had first spoken to me of her childhood and the later years when she had defected from Phoenix. They had tried to make her go back. "I refused to go back, but I swore on something that they keep there that I would never talk." I had known it must be some kind of shrine, something sacred. She had also said: "The only god I had ever been told about was the Fuhrer."
Here was the holy sepulchre.
I watched her face in the crystal. She couldn't move; she could only stare. I knew how many times she must have come here before, to stand silently in communion with those who had peopled her child's world: the ‘grown-ups’ of the doomed Fuhrerbunker, Uncle Hermann, Uncle Guenther, her own mother… and her god. She had known them and loved them, and they had turned, before her child's eyes, into creatures stranger than the fiends of a fable; and she herself had become as suddenly a changeling, first a child, then a freak, a werewolf with a child's face.
This much remained of all that she had known as home cold bones and bitter ash, cradled forever in the chill of glass.
Then her face was suddenly gone and all I could see was her reflected hand, raised and held palm-flattened. From behind me her voice came, a soft screech – "Heil Hitler!"
There were other voices, breaking to a murmur of approval, and I turned to see the group of men who stood watching her, moved by her cry of faith.
The black velvet came together silently.
Unnervingly, a telephone began ringing. It was the Reichsleiter who answered. He listened for a few seconds and then nodded, saying only: "Good. Very good." He lowered the receiver tenderly. To the others he said "Gentlemen, we must wish ourselves good fortune in our endeavours."
They closed around the desk and one of them took his hand. Oktober spoke to him and was answered. He turned towards me and I watched the steel trap of his mouth open and shut on a shouted order to the man who had never left his post at the doors.
"The prisoner will leave. He will not be molested. The order will be passed on."
I looked at Inga before I crossed to the doors. She said nothing. She turned and joined the throng of men at the Reichsleiter's desk.
The guard stood aside for me to pass, and spoke to others outside. The order was passed on as I went down the ten stairs and crossed the mezzanine, went down the fifteen stairs and reached the hall, took the nineteen paces to the entrance-doors and walked through them unchallenged.
The night struck deathly cold against my face. The lamps cast my shadow along the street as I went my way alone. I was free.
I was as free as Kenneth Lindsay Jones had been on the night he had walked out of that house.
20 : BUNKERKINDER
I walked towards the bridge.
KLJ had been found in the water but they said he'd been shot dead before immersion. Somewhere here, among these shadows where I walked, was the precise spot where he had crumpled to the bullet.
I still believed in my certainties that had led me to make this final single throw, but if some of them were wrong, if only one of them, the smallest, were wrong, my place would be here too: not at home nor down the road at the crossing nor far across the face of the earth – but here, and now.
It is a feeling that we sometimes have, when we've taken a calculated risk. We think: this move could kill me, so if I assume that it will, if I assume I'm already dead and finished, I won't have to worry or be afraid.
Fear of death can worsen the risk of meeting with it, because of stomach-think.
Just as I reached the beginning of the bridge a car came from a side-street and got up speed and as it passed me my nape shrank. The mental (brain-think) decision to assume death and so remove fear is a useful exercise, but the stomach thinks for itself.
The bridge was quiet, a chain of lamps and a gleam of water below. When I heard the footsteps I kept on walking and didn't turn round. There was probably no danger; if they decided to shoot me down they wouldn't hurry to catch me up like this.
They were nearing. I kept on. Then I knew. It was a woman in soft shoes.
"Quill… "
I stopped. She looked up into my face, panting. She said: "I had to make a show in front of them."
"Of course."
She gripped my arm. "It must have sounded terrible to you."
"A fraction embarrassing."
Her eyes flickered beyond me, checking shadows. "Please trust me. It's what I came to ask. Trust me."
"I trust you."
If I survived the mission there would have to be a full report sent in to the Bureau. Under the heading Inga Lindt there would be facts summarised. Give or take a few details the report would read: