“Right, right. Not sure why I can’t remember that. Your face is lovely. Reminds me of Gerte Wertheimer, who sang the role of Sieglinde in the 1929 performance. She brought down the house!”
My intentions exactly, Alice thought.
“Now you go to stage left and sit on that rock. And you, Woglinde, sit at her feet, and Wellgunde, you go to the right of . . . uh . . . pardon me, Flosshilde.” She paused. “What’s your real name again?”
“Ute.”
“Good. Now when the music begins again, you, Flosshilde, raise your hands—as a teacher might. One finger pointing as if to remind them, not scold them, of their sacred duty to guard the gold at the bottom of the river. You understand, Flosshilde?”
“Yes, Frau Wagner.”
“Perfect. Now try it with the music playing. Cue the music, please,” she said.
A lovely female voice sang out, and Alice opened her mouth slightly as if singing. “Guard the gold! Father warned us of such a foe!”
Alice soon caught a glimpse of Eva Braun, Hitler’s girlfriend, sulking in a corner of the Berghof theater. Eva Braun was pretty, not beautiful—but Alice realized she had honed the skill of sulking to an art form. A talent that was only equaled by her abilities with a curling iron. Gossip had it that Frau Wagner asked her to help with the Rhine maidens’ hair, which was supposed to flow over their shoulders like the curling waters of the Rhine.
The performance would be this evening. Alice had not yet even glimpsed the Führer. But he was expected to attend. So her first view of him might be from the stage. She had settled into her quarters. There was a small narrow window, like the ones in English medieval castles called arrow-slot windows. When she was not performing on the stage, she had been informed by the head housekeeper, Elisabeth Kalhammer, that she would be serving in the dining room and at tea. No one was ever to address the Führer without first being addressed by him. Not even to offer a cup of tea.
“He’s not a talkative man,” Frau Kalhammer emphasized. “He does not like idle conversation.” Alice was informed that his favorite food was a special apple cake baked by the chef. It was referred to as Führer cake. He ate it at all times of the day and night. He even walked down to the kitchens in the middle of the night to have a slice. If perchance one was on late-night kitchen duty, there was no need to ask what he wanted, but to just cut him a slice of the cake and pour a glass of apple juice to accompany it.
Alice immediately made a mental note of this. She must offer to be on night duty in the kitchen. When better to observe him, assess his state? But most importantly, she must do what was called by the Rasa a reverse projection profile analysis, or RPPA. In short, whose image would the Führer possibly be capable of projecting on to her face? What might emerge out of the blankness of her face that could inspire him, excite him, or make him cower in the dark corners of the shredded sleep of a nightmare?
It was rather close to WTS, the wishful thinking syndrome that had made Louise seem like the movie star Rita Hayworth to the flirtatious young man that time in the pub who’d just seen her latest movie. He had projected an image that played in his mind, and essentially had sketched that image on Louise’s blank face. In that way, Alice, or rather Ute Schnaubel, could haunt Hitler’s dreams. It was a mental process as mysterious in a way as reading tea leaves or tarot cards.
Since the invasion on the beaches of Normandy, the Allied troops had met with more success. The Americans and the British were on track to take the French port of Cherbourg. Rome had fallen to the Allies the day before D-Day. On the eastern front, the Russian Red Army’s offensive against so-called neutral Finland was succeeding. And yet, here at the Berghof, the merry lederhosen folk were fiddling with operas as the jaws of war were clamping down in a death grip on Germany.
She recalled last year at summer camp, sitting with a small group of other Rasa kids in a dark room as JoJo McPhee, a veteran Rasa agent, led a workshop on reverse projection profile analysis. On the movie screen was the photograph of one Alfred Stegall, a Rasa during the first World War. “This is Agent Stegall. He successfully defused a line of sapper explosives that were set to go off in Belgium; they would have killed five hundred British soldiers who were part of a key line of defense. The explosives never did go off, and thus a significant battle was won.” JoJo McPhee had paused to let that sink in. “Now, campers, I want you to look at Alfred Stegall’s face and give me your first impressions.”
One hand went up. “Nice-looking bloke,” said Hildy, who had been a tentmate of Alice’s.
“Well groomed,” said another.
“Indeed!” replied JoJo. “No beard or mustache. He followed the fellow for several hours in the town. Saw who and where he went, what he liked. The sapper had attended a movie that featured his favorite actress, Lillian Schon, a star of early silent movies. Alfred had found out that the man had attended this movie at least three times.” The counselor flashed a picture on the screen. “This is Lillian Schon in her movie The Haunting of Margaret, where she played a lost but beautiful young girl in a haunted forest, a fantasy film.”
The photograph showed a young woman with very dark hair and a gauzy black headscarf tied back bandanna style. The counselor then clicked the projector again and two faces appeared—Alfred Stegall’s, with a black rag on his head, and next to it the original picture she had shown of the clean-shaven man.
“Now you can see for yourself, Alfred bears no resemblance to the beautiful Lillian Schon. But with this scarf and a certain tip of his head, he succeeded in evoking the image of her in the mind of the enemy, the sapper. He followed the sapper to the movie theater twice to see the film. The sapper was ripe. The beautiful actress’s image had been impressed on the sapper’s mind somewhat like the image that lingers on one’s retina after a person stares at a bright object. Rarely has a Rasa of a different gender accomplished drawing out an afterimage of the opposite gender. I think there have been only three recorded times in the history of the Rasas! But when Alfred appeared in the tunnel where the sapper was laying the fuse, the man was rendered helpless.
“He made no move against Alfred, who merely asked him to wait for a moment around the next bend. Alfred cut the cable and left. The sapper was waiting for who knows how long before he came out of this fog of confusion. This is wishful thinking syndrome. Buried deep in the sapper’s conscience was the image of the actress. By wearing the scarf, Alfred had manipulated the sapper’s mind until the movie star image came to the surface and he projected it onto Alfred’s face. We call this not simply wishful thinking syndrome but reverse projection phenomena.”
“Did Alfred promise to kiss the fellow?” one kid asked.
“Ooooh!” The campers squirmed.
“Who knows? Maybe. The point is, the job was done. Five hundred lives were saved.” JoJo looked at each Rasa in the small group intently. “This talent that we have, children, although few could match Alfred’s, has to do with the disturbance of neural pathways and certain receptors in the brains of our quarry, the enemy, that we are capable of altering because of the anonymity of our own faces as Rasas. It is, oddly enough, a gift. Rasa seldom require weapons. We can destroy, create havoc, in mostly nonviolent ways.”