Alice spied Frau Bormann’s eldest daughter Irmgard, a fellow Rhine maiden.
“Hello, Irmgard. Ready for tonight? The big one, I guess?”
Irmgard looked at her blankly. “Wh-what are you talking about?”
“Act Three, ‘The Ride of the Valkyries.’ The Führer’s favorite, I believe.”
“Oh! Oh yes, of course . . . and now we are all Valkyries. I’m afraid I can’t recall . . .”
“My name. Ute . . . Ute Schnaubel. The Reich Praktikum student.”
“Oh yes, of course! Now I remember you.”
It was close to ten o’clock in the evening before the curtain rose on the scene of “The Ride of the Valkyries.” The audience gasped as the peaks of Valhalla loomed in the lavender twilight. The whirring of the fans behind the Valkyries, perched on a mountaintop, gave them the cue to spread their wings.
Was it true, Alice thought, that a half dozen swans had been slaughtered for these costumes? Why not? The Nazis were killing humans—Jews, Romá, homosexuals, and god knew who else. What was a swan or two, or a dozen for that matter? The battle cry began, and it was actually Alice who had to open her mouth first. The other Valkyries soon joined her in the battle cry. They moved the wings strapped to their arms and swooped down to retrieve a slain warrior from the battlefield. The “warriors” were in fact rag dolls with torn red scraps of material—the mortal wounds—sewn onto their bodies. The Valkyries transported them to Valhalla.
Alice glanced out from the stage. Adolf Hitler sat transfixed in the front row. His eyes were clasped on her. Was he projecting? Was he imagining himself as the slain warrior she would transport to Valhalla? Could she do what Alfred Stegall, the legendary Rasa spy, had done in the Great War? Could she stop this evil sapper from blowing up the world. The difference here was that Stegall didn’t have to drive the sapper to kill himself. He merely evoked the image of the beautiful movie star and hypnotized the sapper, which allowed Stegall to defuse the explosives without ever lifting a lethal weapon with his own hand. But with the Starling it would be different. She must instill in Adolf Hitler the notion of a valiant death. She would not pull the trigger, but he must. And it was the job of a Valkyrie to ensure that this could happen.
Hitler never blinked. Not once. Eva Braun sat next to him. Her lips pressed into a plump pout of complete boredom. The scene only lasted eight minutes. As the curtain began to slowly drop, there was a roar. The audience was in a frenzy. Hitler jumped to his feet, clapping wildly. A mad light of absolute delirium suffused his eyes. It was not human, this light. It was that of a beast, an animal gone berserk. These are the eyeballs of hell!
That was Alice Winfield’s only thought.
Her fios, Colonel Stauffenberg, had not attended the performance this time. But she wished he could have witnessed that look in Hitler’s eyes as he jumped from his seat to applaud. She had not much to compare it to, for she had not been at the Berghof that long, but just judging from those crazed luminous eyes, the Führer seemed far from stable. There had been two previous performances from Wagner’s operas, but neither had received such an intense response. Was he in fact beginning to unravel with the turn in the tide of the war? It had only been ten days since the Allied invasion. But Alice imagined she saw in those mad eyes a vision of his own destruction—his own death. Or was she becoming delusional?
There was no doubt that the Allies were making advances. The tide was slowly beginning to turn. The American and British troops had launched the largest water invasion in history, and in the scant days since D-Day, they had captured Bayeux and the port of Cherbourg in France. And this came after the German rocket attack on London that they had hoped would somehow deter the onslaught of the Allies. But it had only seemed to further incite their enemy.
No one here spoke of these losses. She needed to report to her secret contact, the child named Hedwig. Tomorrow, when several of the kitchen maids were going to the lake to swim, she would go and look for her. There was a safe word that had been included in the sweet paper, so that they could identify each other. Then Alice would pass whatever information she could give to Hedwig. But certainly there had been madness in Hitler’s eyes as he leaped to his feet three times in the repeat performances. Each time that light of madness grew fiercer.
She could not sleep. Suddenly hungry, she got up and made her way to the kitchen. Until she walked through the swinging door, she had completely forgotten Frau Kalhammer’s words about the apple cake that the Führer often sought out in the middle of the night. And there indeed was the Führer, standing by the pastry table in a plush velvet bathrobe. How could she have forgotten?
He looked at her, somewhat confused. Was he going to ask her for apple cake? Did he call it apple cake or Führer cake? Insane questions danced a jig through Alice’s mind. There was a butcher knife not eight inches from her grasp. If she grabbed it and plunged it into his belly, it might all be over. The war might end.
“Wer bist du?” he asked. Who are you? Then a merry twinkle. “Mit den Zöpfen.”
Zöpfen! The braids . . . her braids. She had forgotten to unbraid her fat Valkyrie braids. “Brünnhilde!” Yes, she was, as he said, Brünnhilde! He clasped his hands now, over his heart. “You have come to save me, you dear child. Dear Brünnhilde has come to save me with some apple cake.”
“Of course, mein Führer,” she replied docilely.
And so she cut a slice of the cake with the dull blade of a cake knife that hung next to the butcher knife. For just a second her hand hesitated between the two knives. He asked her to stay while he ate the cake and drank the glass of apple juice she poured him. He simply stared at her the whole time. He asked her no questions. Not even her name.
She felt for some reason this was significant. It was as if he was still suspended in the fantasy of the opera. The evening was hot. A slight draft, like a sigh, blew through the open window of the kitchen. She almost felt a downy fluff of feathers stir on her arms. She must remain, in his eyes, Brünnhilde—not a Reich Praktikum student or a kitchen servant, but Brünnhilde, a Valkyrie, a chooser of the slain.
When he got up to leave, he looked at her almost pleadingly. Unspoken words hung in the still night air of the kitchen. Auf wiedersehen bis Valhalla. Goodbye until Valhalla.
It wasn’t until Alice returned to her small room that the reality of that scene fully struck her. He had been begging her to choose him. He was, in fact, seeing her as a Valkyrie, ready to plunge down on her swan wings and lift him to Valhalla. He was imploring to be seen in her eyes as a hero warrior.
But when she finally went to bed that night, she thought not of the Führer, or the strange fixation in his eyes as he stared at her, but of the thick slice of apple cake. How David would have loved that slice of cake! She could not wait to return and bring him cake. Not a slice, but a whole cake! Was there ever a braver child, a more heroic child, than David Bloom? Never!
Nineteen
Morð, Murt, Feallmharú
In Icelandic the word is “morð.” In Gaelic, “murt,” and in Irish Gaelic, “feallmharú.” But they all mean the same thing. For Rasas, they are all deadly. For they mean assassination.
“Ja! Ja! Christopher Columbus!” The blond little girl plunged beneath the surface of the lake and came up with the twig. From the shore of the lake they looked like two girls, one older, perhaps her sister, playing the age-old swimming game of diving after a stick. Little would anyone expect they were discussing the planned assassination attempt of Adolf Hitler.