Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [147]
"I forget," the guard said. "Do you have to go through the toilet room to get to your generators, Sergeant?"
That passed as high humor for the other guard, who laughed mightily, but sobered quickly when a Wehrmacht general with a steel hook for a hand stepped into line behind Kahr. The sergeant held his breath while he was patted down. The guard's hand came close — maybe touched — the matches, but the guard was searching for pistols or grenades, and he searched five hundred people a day, so he missed the matches, just as Kahr had prayed he would. "Go ahead, Sergeant."
Kahr moved toward the door into the concrete blockhouse. He heard the Wehrmacht general growl at the guard, "SS prick. One of these days I'm going to take that probing hand of yours and stick it up your ass."
"Yes, sir." — words dripping with contempt — "I'll be here." Kahr entered the blockhouse and started down the dimly lit stairs. Berlin had fallen into such dark chaos that the bunker no longer seemed so gloomy by comparison. At least he could escape the ash and the hollow rattle of Bolshevik shells and the scent of sewage from the ruptured lines, though the bunker's toilets often backed up, fouling the air. He turned on the landing and continued down, his stomach still tied up.
The SS guard at the antechamber door frisked him. Coat pockets, inside his coat, up and down his sides, small of his back, his armpits Then up and down his pants, all of it rough, the guard not giving a damn about offending. This guard didn't find the matches either. Kahr could hear the Wehrmacht general coming down the steps behind him. To hide his nervousness while the guard studied his identification card, Kahr swatted ash from his shoulders.
"Enter," the guard ordered, passing back the card. Kahr stepped through the door, breathing for the first time in an hour. The bunker was so crowded he could not see the door at the far end of the hallway. And he gasped at the disarray. The SS officers in green- and-gray camouflage were in a corner, sharing a bottle of schnapps. Four untouched dinners on a tray sat on the floor near them. General Gotthard Heinnci was raging at Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, his hand pumping like a locomotive's main rod. The minister's face was professionally blank, but his back was against the concrete wall and he could retreat no further. A card table had been set up outside the Führer's door, and two generals were hunched over it. An eastern territorial official — who were all called Golden Pheasants because of their golden-brown uniforms — was slumped forward on a folding chair, elbows on his knees, an empty bottle at his feet. On another table was a gramophone, playing Brahms. A cake with green frosting was next to the record player. An SS adjutant was wiping away frosting and letting the Führer's dog Blondi lick it off his finger. The ecstatic dog banged his tail against a leg of the table, and when the gramophone's needle jumped, Brahms began the bar over again, then again and again as the needle bounced in time to Blondi's tail. His eyes glassy, a Wehrmacht major general in a soiled field uniform sat on another folding chair, blood seeping down his trousers into his boot, a report on his lap. Sipping tea and chatting, three of the Führer's secretaries stood near the door to his conference room, waiting for their shift to begin. Another general — the rose pink of his greatcoat lapel facings identifying him as being from