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She did so, and he took the picture.

“Excellent,” he said. “Are you comfortable?”

“Well, I’m not a model.”

He took another. “But you are! You’re an enchantress! With that height, that figure, those Slavic features, that perfect white smile.” Hoffmann hunched forward and she heard the shutter shear closed like a scissors. “And yet I wonder,” he said, mulling it over. “Could you show the camera some more, please?”

“More?”

Hoffmann held the Stirnschen in his right hand as his left instructed her by fiddling his fingers near his thigh. “Hike up your dress just a little higher, my darling.”

“Are you sure about this, Herr Hoffmann?”

“Quite sure.” She complied, but he said, “Higher still. You have panties on?”

She crossed her eyes at him.

“Then please raise the dress just to your panties, Geli. High as a bathing suit would be, so we can see the beauty in that sturdy young thigh, that womanly rump.”

“Womanly’ meaning fat?” She inched the hem of her dress up until she could feel it touching the joint of her thighbone.

“Alluring,” he said. “Enticing to hands. Will you bend over for me a little?”

She did. “I feel like I should be beating loinclot

hs on rocks.”

Hoffmann adjusted his shutter speed and stalked his pictures, walking sideways, crouching, getting up on his toes, even surging ankle high through the Hintersee in his white tennis flannels.

“Are you taking these photos for yourself?” she asked.

“For whom do you think?”

“Uncle Alf.”

She heard his silence, and the shutter again. And he said, “Worse than that. It’s for Röhm’s storm troopers. We’ll put one in every locker.”

She laughed at him then, and he got it on film.

That evening, when Hitler and the houseguests were waiting for dinner outside, Geli’s jackdaw flew down to the terrace and Hitler shouted for his niece to halt food preparations and show Henny and Heinrich one of the jackdaw’s tricks.

She hurried out to the terrace in a white apron and said, “We have flank steaks cooking.” She then got an inch-square piece of red fabric and affixed it to a chink in the wall. She cawed a few times and the jackdaw flew to the fabric and tugged it from the chink.

“Remarkable,” Hoffmann said.

“Shh,” Hitler hissed. “There’s more.”

She cawed again and the jackdaw flew over to the café table where Geli was sitting, hopped within a few inches of her face, and let the fabric fall from its beak. “And now our good-bye, Schatzi,” she said. The jackdaw held up his beak to be kissed, then took half a biscuit from her hand and flew off the terrace.

“Marvelous!” Hitler exclaimed. “Geli, that was fantastic!” And he wildly and thoroughly applauded her as she bowed first to him, then to the hoots and congratulations of Henny and her father, and then again to her uncle, whose hands were striking together long after the others had quit, his overjoyed eyes filling with tears as he raved, “She’s a miracle, isn’t she? She’s so beautiful, so gifted! Even birds have to obey her!”

“I have flank steaks in the oven,” she said, and went inside.

Within a few minutes Heinrich Hoffmann was in the kitchen, filling his wineglass beside her. They both could still hear her uncle praising her. “You’re quite a hit with Herr Hitler,” Hoffmann said.

She got butter from the icebox.

“You gave that jackdaw a name?” he asked.