Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [148]
Kahr pushed his way into the hallway, stepping around a tank crew lieutenant in his black uniform, looking overwhelmed, who probably had been brought underground to receive a medal. Dr. Goebbels was looking up at his wife, his lips pulled back in a rictus showing his yellow horse teeth. Mrs. Goebbels was lecturing him on something, but Sergeant Kahr was afraid of him—and her—so he steered himself along the other side of the hallway.
He squeezed by General Steiner, who was speaking with another general whom Kahr did not recognize, and was lamenting, "My total forces consist of six battalions, including some from an SS police division and the 5th Panzer, and the 3rd Navy Division, but we can forget the sailors, who are great on ships but useless for this kind of fighting, so..." Kahr moved along, out of earshot.
He walked by the Führer's open door, and the nasal, rasping screech coming from the room could scarcely be identified as Hitler's voice, but of course it was. Only one person belowground was permitted to carry on like that. Kahr flicked his eyes right to glimpse the man. The sight startled him. Hitler was bent over the map table, spavined and frothing, his neck and face as red as paint. His head bobbed violently, and his forelock slapped his eyebrows. Hitler's ordeals had shrunken him. His uniform seemed like a tent over him. At his side were Keitel and Bormann. The sergeant could not see who the Führer was denouncing.
Kahr glanced around. Nobody else in the hallway seemed perturbed by the Führer's ranting. Kahr almost bumped into Armaments Minister Speer's back. Speer was bent low in conversation with Berlin's commandant, General Raymann, who apparently had been summoned from his headquarters on the Hohenzollerndamm and, like ail the rest, was waiting his turn for an audience. His chief of staff, Colonel Refior, stood at his elbow. Raymann's burden was such that he always looked as if he had just been beaten up. Holding a clipboard, Gestapo Müller was speaking softly with an SS general, the two leaning toward each other, their faces only inches apart.
The sergeant passed the door to his generator-ventilator room, then exited the main hallway, where an SS guard Kahr recognized was idly flicking his holster's flap. Three pump fire extinguishers were behind the guard on the floor. Kahr climbed the circular stairs and entered the servants' quarters and kitchen wing of the bunker. The central hallway here was used as a dining room, and benches and chairs—including six gilt Louis Seize chairs—and two long rows of tables filled the area. A dozen men and women were eating. Kahr recognized Erich Kempka, Hitler's chauffeur, and Hans Baur, Hitler's pilot, dining on soup and speaking with each other in soft tones. Kahr walked to the end of the dining hall, then turned into the kitchen.
"So you are back again, Ulrich?" A cook smiled over her rolling pin. "Couldn't stay away could you?"
"I'm on business today, Helena."
"You are never on business when you come into my kitchen." She smiled, put the rolling pin to one side, and wiped her hands on her apron. A circle of dough lay on the table in front of her. Baking trays were stacked on a shelf under the table. Six other cooks were working in the room, one holding a wooden spatula the size of a snow shovel, about to remove bread from an oven built along the back wall. Helena Stalla pulled out a tray of chocolate eclairs from a rack next to the pastry oven, then plucked one from the tray and put it into Sergeant Kahr's hand.
"This is why you visit me," she said with mock petulance. "My food. Just my food." Her smile was both flirtatious and long-suffering. She was wearing a white apron, a short-sleeved white shirt, and a white skirt. Her arms were agreeably flabby. Her hair was hidden under a white bandanna. Dainty streams of sweat flowed from her temples down to her cheeks. "I always know when you'll show up in my kitchen, Ulrich."
"You do?"
"Sure. You control the