Alice’s first glimpse of the Führer was when she stepped up to take her bow at the end of the performance. He leaped up from his seat and clapped ferociously. His mouth stretched open, making a dark black hole. The little toothbrush mustache danced up and down above his mouth. There appeared to be something slightly wrong with his left arm. Alice detected some spastic movements, and sometimes his hands could not meet together in clapping. She was so distracted by this she did not notice at first that at the far end of the first row, where the Führer sat, was Wotan! Yes, Colonel Stauffenberg. The colonel was now walking up to the stage with what appeared to be several bouquets of flowers. Mounting the steps, he nodded at the Rhine maidens. He turned toward the audience, which now quieted.
“It is my honor to present each of the lovely young Rhine maidens with a bouquet of flowers in honor of the lovely performance they gave tonight.” He walked toward Elke, one of the serving girls, the one whose hair she had heard backstage had been singed by Eva Braun. Then he came Irmgard Bormann, one of Martin Bormann’s ten children, who was perhaps a year younger than Alice.
Then finally he came to Alice. He smiled tightly, a ghost of a smile really. He seemed exceptionally tense. His single blue eye appeared almost as dark as the eye patch covering his missing eye. How could an eye as blue as a cloudless sky look so dark? But as soon as she grasped the bouquet, she realized that the stems of the flowers were wrapped in sweet paper.
She went directly to her bedroom following the performance. There would be more rehearsals tomorrow for other scenes from the opera that were planned over the course of the next few days. After locking the door, she sat on her bed and unwrapped the stems of the daisies and asters. Smoothing out the paper, she read the first sentence—which was total nonsense, but established the code that the message was written in. Only Rasa codes were used, and they had nothing to do with any of the ciphers used by any of the Allies. This code was written in R-cipher eighty-eight. The same code that had been used by Rasas serving Queen Elizabeth during the war with Spain and the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
It was a great code. It had never been broken, not since the Armada. It was indecipherable to even the most skilled code breakers. There were not simply dots and dashes or inversions of words or nonsense rhymes. No, this code was done with inverted Gaelic script, an “insular script,” a medieval form of writing, that was used by Irish monks in the sixteenth century.
When Alice smoothed the sweet paper and saw the R-cipher eighty-eight, she felt a slight pang. It was Louise who had drilled her relentlessly on this code, three years before. Her sister had won the highest prize in cryptology and, as Louise had put it, her little sister could not let the family down. She must do as well if not exceed Louise’s own score. As it turned out, Alice had tied with her sister, receiving the highest score possible of one thousand in both decoding and encrypting. She read the rather short note immediately. Speed, of course, was of the essence.
Your contact will appear within a very few days. You will recognize her immediately, even though you have never seen her before. Her name is Hedwig. She is about nine years old.
Nine years old! Good heavens, Alice thought.
Any observations you have of Starling—his decline in health, mental state, any talk you overhear—report verbally to Hedwig. She is very young, but fierce. She lives with her parents, long-experienced field agents on a small farm. This will be a kind of brush contact but slightly prolonged. She often swims at the lake.
Hedwig will function not only as a receptor but also as a transmitter.
Interesting! A kind of brush contact but slightly prolonged? She was not sure what that meant, exactly. So this little nine-year-old girl would not only receive Alice’s updates on the condition of the Führer, but also report to Alice vital information that she received.
There was a rough map sketched on the paper that showed the directions to the farm from the Berghof. It was no more than a fifteen-minute walk, not far from a lake called Königssee, a favorite swimming spot for tourists. This entire region of the Obersalzburg must be thick with spies, and not just Rasas like her. Who else might be one? Might there be someone, aside from herself, right here in the Berghof?
Alice sat quietly on her bed for several minutes, tearing the sweet paper into strips, slipping them into her mouth and letting them dissolve on her tongue. She closed her eyes. She remembered Louise drilling her on this code so vividly. Surely Louise must still be at Bletchley in England, deciphering codes. The girl she had glimpsed in Berlin could not have possibly been her.
It struck Alice suddenly that perhaps she herself was falling victim to WTS, wishful thinking syndrome, as she longed for her sister, Louise. Louise with her old face, not the new one. But it simply made no sense whatsoever that Louise could be in Berlin. She had quit. She had undergone hours of surgery so she could leave.
Eighteen
The Chooser of the Slain
The sunshine was brilliant on the terrace as Alice, now dressed in a pink dirndl with a blue bodice and puffy sleeves, walked among the guests with a tray of lemonade. The dark evening service uniform was apparently disregarded for afternoon tea parties. There were platters of pastries set out on round tables. Hitler himself, with his dog, Blondi, a mottled gray-and-black German shepherd on a short leash, strode about the terrace. Eva Braun’s dogs, two Scottish terriers, Stasi and Negus, enjoyed somewhat longer leashes, until one peed on a waiter’s trouser cuff and was instantly yanked away by another waiter. Eva looked at him furiously, as if to say, “How dare you? Don’t you know who I am?” But she merely pressed her mouth shut and stared down at the stone terrace.
Of course they all knew who she was. The Führer’s mistress—not a wife. She was the honorable Fräulein Braun, gracious—which they said scornfully behind her back. Honorable seemed to Alice a very affected term. But in this case it was used sarcastically, which gave more than a whiff of what people really thought about Eva Braun. The very use seemed cruel to Alice. Some, of course, called her honorable directly while smiling sweetly, and that made the sarcasm even worse. It serrated the sound of the word, giving it a stealth-like sadistic edge. It was not as if they hated her. But these people, these Nazis, were in the service of the most fanatical evil human beings on earth. The most dangerous predator. And they themselves honed their own predatory instincts on the small stuff, the less threatening. They could smell weakness, and it emboldened them.
A family of Tyrolean musicians strolled through the crowd, one with an accordion and two with fiddles.
The guests watching and applauding the music and the frivolity were the most powerful men of the Third Reich. The grotesquely fat Hermann Göring, commander of the German air force, the Luftwaffe, was clapping his hands to the music and beaming. Next to him was the minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who was as thin as Göring was fat. By Goebbels’s side was his beautiful wife, Magda. Her hair was luminous in the summer sunshine, and she was the only one dressed not in a dirndl but an exquisite afternoon dress, most likely a Paris design. She would no more wear a dirndl than the Duchess of Windsor would. The only unhappy face was that of Gerda Bormann, wife of Martin Bormann, the head of the Nazi party. She was a large woman, with dark hair parted down the middle. Stuffed into a dirndl, she stood out in the festive crowd as almost defiantly unfestive. Her mouth was set in a grave line. She appeared suffused with a melancholy darkness. She was midnight in the noonday sun. The shadows of her babies and young children slid around the hem of her skirt.