Fräulein Braun is an idiot, thought Alice. But she smiled sweetly and replied, “Of course, Fräulein Braun is a woman of great taste and style.”
“You said it, sister!” He smiled warmly at her. She noticed that his left eye was peculiar. It seemed frozen. Of course. A glass eye. A casualty of the Great War, World War I. More than a fifth of the returning soldiers from that war had lost some body part—arms, legs, and there were horrific eye injuries. This fellow obviously could not afford one of the expensive false eyes that were sold in the more elegant parts of the city. There had actually been a shortage of the kind of glass necessary for those. So this was a ceramic eye, perhaps, glazed and painted. It was very disorienting, for it did not reflect light. It had none of the focusing characteristics of a real eye or a glass eye.
“Sister,” he had said to her merrily. The word was still ringing in her head when something very peculiar occurred. There was a crowd of people streaming by her, and one face seemed to float out. She blinked. The word “sister” was still reverberating in her head. But that face! She turned around to catch another glimpse, but the girl was gone—that face in that crowd could have been Louise. Was it Louise? How could it have been?
She blinked now and craned her neck. The crowd ebbed around her. Where was that face? She felt as if she was a rock in the middle of a fast-moving stream and hundreds of faces were eddying around her like flowing water. Was it a singular face in a crowd or a crowd in one face? Was it her sister’s new face or was it the old face—but here in Berlin? Impossible. What strange refractions in her own eye had caused this? Were the refractions in her eye or in her mind? Was her mind splintering her thoughts like a prism splintered color?
Acute angles of memory, desire and loss were colliding. She had to put this out of her mind. She must not be distracted. She had a mission. Operation Valkyrie. She had committed to memory the messages on the sweet paper she had received from Wotan, her fios—Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. She was a part of Operation Valkyrie now. She could not afford to be distracted.
Fifteen minutes later Alice climbed into the back seat of an official SS automobile, a gleaming Mercedes-Benz. On the latest cover of Filmwelt, Movie World, the haunting eyes of Hildegard Knef peered out. Hildegard was a newly discovered actress but destined to become a star—or so said Birgit from school. Alice had bumped into Birgit just yesterday when she had gone to pick up the cosmetics. But Birgit hadn’t even remembered who she was. Two days she had missed school, and now the memory of her had been completely erased from every atom in Birgit’s brain. She of course was very apologetic when Alice reminded her. “Oh, of course! Ute. And when do you begin your RP?”
“Well, now. Actually.”
“Where?”
“Uh . . .” She decided not to say the Führerbunker. “At the Reich Chancellery, the residential quarters.”
And now today she was riding in the back seat of this luxury automobile. The driver’s name was Hans. She saw him glancing back at her through his rearview mirror frequently. It gave her the creeps. She dipped her head and kept looking at the magazines.
She opened a fashion magazine. The one with the Duchess of Windsor on the cover. The duchess was as thin as a knitting needle and wearing an evening gown that poured over her like cream. Around her neck was a choker of emeralds and diamonds, on her head a tiara. No, that does not work, Alice thought. The necklace is too heavy for that dainty little tiara. It doesn’t balance. It made her look quite silly.
They were clear of the traffic out of Berlin in less than a half an hour and speeding along the newly completed autobahn toward the town of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, the southeast corner of Germany. It was this highway that allowed Hitler to so easily invade Poland and take it over. What would happen now? Alice wondered. That highway that allowed the Nazis to go right into Poland might be a two-way street. Would it give the Russians, who were on England’s side and France’s side and the Americans’ side, a clear path for them to swarm into Berlin and take the city? Wouldn’t that help to win the war? If the Russians came in from the east and the Americans and the English came from the west, they could pinch the Nazis—pinch them to defeat, to death. But Alice knew she was getting ahead of herself. The Americans had only landed on those beaches in France a few days before.
Because Alice was in an official government vehicle, they could travel at a very high speed. The speedometer was registering one hundred and thirty kilometers per hour, at least thirty-two kilometers per hour faster than regular cars. Her own head began to hang heavy as if in fact she was supporting a massive crown and not some teensy tiara. Her lids drooped. She felt the magazine slip off her lap to the floor. But she did not bother to pick it up. Then, less than a minute later, she jerked awake.
That face again. It couldn’t have been Louise. Her sister was back in England. She was working at Bletchley. They had received that deeply coded message weeks ago. There was no way she could be in Berlin. And yet there was something about that face.
She replayed the moments in her head. She softly bit her lip in concentration. Had she smelled the scent? Was there any Laurel Bright perfume in the air? The only odor she could recall was the smell of a burning cigar jammed in the mouth of someone rushing by.
Then a moment within those moments came back to her. It was just before she had turned around. She and that young woman had locked eyes. Alice had gasped, and yet her sister betrayed no sign of recognition. It was as if Louise’s eyes were artificial—ceramic like the news vendor’s, that neither reflected or refracted.
A sort of nausea swept over her. She prayed she wouldn’t be carsick. She clamped her eyes shut. The driver must have glanced at her in the rearview mirror.
“You okay, Fräulein?”
“Uh . . . yes, a bit queasy maybe.”
“Ach! You and my wife. There’s a rest area coming up soon. Very excellent facilities.”
“Yes, that would be nice,” Alice replied.
Within ten minutes they were at the rest area. Alice made her way to the toilet and went through the door labeled Damen. She went up to the sink and splashed cold water on her face. She immediately felt better. After going into a stall, then washing her hands again, she went back to the Mercedes, where her driver was lounging against the front fender smoking.
“Feel better?”
“Yes, yes, I do. Thank you.”
“You can almost see the Kehlsteinhaus from here. That’s almost two hours from here. So that means we’ll be at the Berghof within the hour. Not much longer.”
The Kehlsteinhaus she thought, the Eagle’s Nest. She had heard about it. It was higher up, on the summit of a rocky outcrop. There the highest German officers met with their Führer, where that demonical predator, beaked and taloned, ready for prey, occasionally roosted while planning his exterminations of millions. But he was soon to be prey himself. Alice was unsure of when or how, but she knew she must be ready. There would be a contact to whom she could deliver her observations on the mental state of the Führer and any changes in his schedule.
She also knew that she would be seeing Stauffenberg himself. A sweet paper had come through hours before her departure, saying that he would be going to the Berghof to discuss the Valkyrie plan—the original one, of course, to prepare for a possible breakdown in civil order that might follow an Allied bombing. Wotan was the perfect officer to update the Führer, as he was soon to be promoted to the position of full colonel and chief of staff to the commander of the German army.