Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [106]
"How long has this bunker been here?" Dietrich asked, spreading his arms.
"State secret." The guard grinned as he searched Dietrich's coat. "That and everything else about the place. You may go in."
Dietrich stepped through a door that must have weighed more than a Panzer, must have been ten centimeters thick, solid steel. An SS orderly was on the other side of the door, checking his wristwatch as the detective entered.
The orderly said, "One moment, if you will, Inspector."
Dietrich stared down the hallway, recognizing people he had seen only in newsreels and on posters and in newspapers. Dr. Goebbels was speaking with General Keitel. When Goebbels turned toward the hallway's rear door, Dietrich noticed that the man walked with a limp. One of his feet was turned in. The detective wondered if Goebbels had been to the front, and been wounded in the leg. He looked at the little man, with the slicked-back hair and choppy chin and terrier's eyes. No, never to the front. The minister of propaganda—the most visible man in the Reich now that the Führer had largely disappeared from public view— had a club foot, was born with it, and Dietrich had never heard of it. Again Dietrich was disturbed. What else had he missed?
Also in the hallway were Minister Ribbentrop and a tall, hatchet- faced man Dietrich knew to be Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich Main Security Office, who had replaced the assassinated Heydrich. And he recognized Friedrich Hatzfeldt, who had replaced Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach as head of Krupp industries when Krupp had been arrested by an American patrol a year ago. Hatzfeldt was bent in conversation with Theodor Steinort, director of the Mariupol electro-steel works in Breslau. All appeared to be waiting. The hallway also contained a dozen senior SS officers and Wehrmacht generals Dietrich did not recognize, and a number of lower-ranking personnel Dietrich took for valets and orderlies. A high-pitched whine seemed to come from all directions. The air was dank.
After two primly dressed women carrying secretarial pads emerged from a door on Dietrich's right, the orderly at Dietrich's elbow pointed at the same door and said, "Go in, please."
Kaltenbrunner's eyebrows rose, and others in the hall turned to examine Dietrich, a man in plain clothes who apparently had precedence over all the rank in the hall. Dietrich walked into a small study, filled by a table covered with maps. Dietrich was alone with Adolf Hitler.
The Führer was wearing reading glasses, which Dietrich had never seen in posters or photographs. The detective knew Hitler was fifty-five, but he looked two decades older, shrunken, the skin on his face mottled. Hair hung down across his forehead, and it appeared greasy, needing to be washed. The mustache was uneven, bitten and dull, with speckles of gray. Hitler's left hand rested on a map, and it trembled with enough force to make the map rattle.
The Führer looked up. "Detective Inspector Dietrich." Not a question.
"Yes, sir."
"Would you like some refreshment?" Hitler removed the spectacles and put them into his uniform pocket.
"Yes, sir."
"Come with me."
Hitler led the detective into a back chamber, a sitting room. The Führer motioned to a blue-and-white horsehair sofa set against a wall under a portrait of Frederick the Great that was framed by two ventilation grates. Below a grate was an oxygen bottle on wheels, its mask resting on the controls at the top of the bottle. A small marble bust of Frederick rested on a burnished wooden stand near the door. Dietrich lowered himself onto the sofa while Hitler reached for a silver teapot. He poured tea into a tiny engraved silver cup, then passed it to Dietrich.
Dietrich sipped it. "What is this?"
Hitler smiled. Never had Dietrich seen a photograph of Hitler smiling. The man had bad teeth, yellow with some green, and small.