“Here. Right here. Do you see it?” The artist wore glasses, and he tapped his paintbrush against a smeared shadow at the farmhouse’s edge.
“I see… a shadow,” Martin answered.
“In the shadow. Right there!” He tapped it again, harder. “Look close!” He picked up the painting, getting water-colors on his fingers, and thrust it in Martin’s face.
Martin swallowed thickly. He saw a shadow, and only that. This seemed to be important, and should be handled carefully. “Yes,” he answered. “I think… I do see it.”
“Ah!” the other man said, smiling. “Ah! So there it is!” He spoke German with a heavy-some might think clumsy-Austrian accent. “The wolf, right there in the shadow!” He pointed the brush’s wooden end at a dark scrawl that Martin couldn’t make heads or tails of. “The wolf on the prowl. And look here!” He picked up another painting, badly done, of a winding mountain stream. “See it? Behind that rock?”
“Yes, mein Führer,” Martin Bormann said, staring at a rock and a misshapen line or two.
“And here, in this one!” Hitler offered a third painting, of a field of white edelweiss. He pointed his crimson-smeared finger at two dark dots amid the sunny flowers. “The eyes of the wolf! You see, he’s creeping closer! You know what that means, don’t you?”
Martin hesitated, then slowly shook his head.
“The wolf is my lucky symbol!” Hitler said, with a hint of agitation. “Everyone knows that! And here’s the wolf, appearing in my paintings with a will of its own! Do you need a clearer portent than that?”
Here we go, Hitler’s secretary thought. Now we descend into the maelstrom of signs and symbols.
“I’m the wolf, don’t you understand?” Hitler took off his glasses, which few but the inner circle ever saw him wearing, snapped them shut, and slid them into their leather case. “This is a portent of the future. My future.” His intense blue eyes blinked. “The future of the Reich, I should say of course. This only tells me again what I already know to be true.”
Martin waited without speaking, staring at the farmhouse picture with its unintelligible scribble in the shadows.
“We’re going to smash the Slavs and drive them back into their rat holes,” Hitler went on. “Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk… names on a map.” He grasped a map, leaving red fingerprints on it, and pushed it disdainfully off the desk. “Frederick the Great never considered defeat. Never considered it! He had loyal generals, yes. He had a staff who obeyed orders. Never in my life have I seen such willful disobedience! If they want to hurt me, why don’t they just put a gun to my head?”
Martin said nothing. Hitler’s cheeks were growing red and his eyes looked yellow and moist, a bad sign. “I said we need larger tanks,” the Führer continued, “and you know what I heard in return? Larger tanks use more fuel. That’s their excuse. They think of every possible way to hobble me. Larger tanks use more fuel. Well, what is the whole of Russia but a vast pit of petroleum? And my officers tumble back from the Slavs in terror and refuse to fight for the lifeblood of Germany! How can we hope to hold the Slavs back without fuel? Not to speak of the air raids destroying the ball-bearing plants! You know what they say to that? Mein Führer-they always say mein Führer in those voices that make you sick as if you’d eaten too much sugar-our anti-aircraft guns need more shells. Our trucks that haul the anti-aircraft guns need more fuel. You see how their minds work?” He blinked again, and the other man saw the understanding settle back in like cold light. “Oh, yes. You were with us at the meeting this afternoon, weren’t you?”
“Yes, mein… Yes,” he answered. “Yesterday afternoon.” He glanced at his pocket watch. “It’s almost one-thirty.”
Hitler nodded absently. He wore his brocaded cashmere robe, a gift from Mussolini, and leather slippers, and he and Bormann were alone in the administrative wing of his Berlin headquarters. He stared at his handiwork, at the houses built of unsteady lines and the landscapes with false perspectives, and he dipped his brush into a cupful of water and let the colors bleed out. “It’s a portent,” he said, “that I’m drawing a wolf without even knowing it. That means victory, Martin. The utter and total destruction of the Reich’s enemies. From without and within,” he said, with a meaningful glance at his secretary.
“You should know by now, mein Führer, that no one can defy your will.”
Hitler didn’t seem to hear. He was busy returning all his paints and brushes to the metal box, which he kept locked in his safe. “What’s my schedule for today, Martin?”
“At eight o’clock, a breakfast meeting with Colonel Blok and Dr. Hildebrand. Then a staff meeting from nine o’clock to ten-thirty. Field Marshal Rommel is due in at one o’clock for a briefing on the Atlantic Wall fortifications.”
“Ah.” Hitler’s eyes lit up again. “Rommel. Now there’s a man with a good mind. I forgave him for North Africa. Everything’s fine now.”
“Yes, sir. At seven-forty this evening, we’ll be accompanying the field marshal by plane to the coast of Normandy,” Bormann continued. “Then on to Rotterdam.”
“Rotterdam.” Hitler nodded, putting his box of paints into the safe. “I trust that work is going on schedule? That’s vital.”
“Yes sir. After a day in Rotterdam, we’ll be flying back to the Berghof for a week.”
“The Berghof! Yes, I’d forgotten!” Hitler smiled, dark circles under his eyes. The Berghof, Hitler’s mansion in the Bavarian Alps above the village of Berchtesgaden, had been his only true home since the summer of 1928. It was a place of bracing wind, vistas that would have stunned the sight of Odin, and memories that lay easy on the mind. Except for Geli, of course. He’d met Geli Raubal there, his one true love. Geli, dear Geli with blond hair and laughing eyes. Why did dear Geli burst her heart with a single shot? I loved you, Geli, he thought. Wasn’t that enough? Eva would be waiting for him at the Berghof, and sometimes when the light was just so and Eva’s hair was brushed back, Hitler could squint his eyes and see the face of Geli, his lost love and niece, twenty-three years old when she committed suicide in 1931.
His head hurt. He looked at the calendar, the days of March, on his desk amid the clutter.
“It’s springtime,” Hitler realized.
From beyond the walls, out over the blacked-out city of Berlin, came a howling. The wolf! Hitler thought, his mouth opening in a gasp. No, no… an air-raid siren.
The noise built and moaned, felt more than heard behind the walls of the Reich Chancellery. In the distance there was the sound of a bomb exploding, a crunching noise like the smashing of a heavy ax against a tree trunk. Then another bomb, two more, a fifth and sixth in rapid succession. “Call someone!” Hitler commanded, cold sweat sparkling on his cheeks.
Martin picked up the desk telephone and dialed a number.
More bombs fell, the noise of destruction swelling and waning. Hitler’s fingers gripped the desk’s edge. The bombs were falling to the south, he believed. Down near Tempelhof airport. Not close enough to fear, but still…
The crack and boom of distant explosions ceased. Now there was only the wolf howl of the air-raid siren and more answering around the city.
“A nuisance raid,” Martin said after he’d spoken with the chief of Berlin security. “A few craters on the airfield and some row houses on fire. The bombers have gone.”
“Damn the swine!” Hitler stood up, trembling. “Damn them to hell! Where are the Luftwaffe night fighters when we need them? Isn’t anyone awake?” He strode to one of the maps that showed the defensive fortifications, the mine fields and concrete bunkers, on the Normandy coast. “Thank the fates that Rommel is. Churchill and that Jew Roosevelt are going to come to France, sooner or later. They’ll find a warm reception, won’t they?”