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With Goebbels gone, Göring called him “Clubfoot,” and grinned hugely, like a boy of eight, as if that were high wit. Geli just stared. She wondered if he was floating on the fall and swoon of Eukodal. Sipping from his glass of Château Latour, Göring saw that Hitler was in the dining room, fully engaged with some urgency with Alfred Rosenberg, and his face changed. “I have something to show you,” he told Geli. And he took her into his walnut-wainscotted study, which he’d stocked with the Langenscheidtsche Bibliothek and first editions of other books he’d never get around to reading. His favorite acquisition, though, was a gleaming round mahogany table whose four legs were sculpted to represent four gigantic and erect penises, with nipples attached to the cannonball testicles on the floor.

“Aren’t you odd,” Geli said. And then she felt Göring shift behind her, felt his huge, soft belly pillow into her back as his hands squashed her breasts. She smelled three different perfumes on him.

“My pretty child,” he whispered. “You have heard the gossip that I am impotent, no? How would you like to cure me?”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” she angrily said.

“Here,” he told her, and his right hand took hold of hers and guided it to the bulge in his pants. “And now, what do you feel?” he asked.

“Disgust,” she said. She freed her wrist and wriggled, and he let her go.

Seemingly worn out, he sat heavily on an ottoman and melodramatically dropped his guilt-ridden face into the open book of his hands. “And you don’t find me at all attr

active?” he muttered.

“You’re a glutton for punishment, aren’t you.”

“I’m such a fool!” he said. “A Hanswurst! A clown!”

“Am I expected to disagree?”

“Could it be that I’m losing my mind? I fear it’s so.” Weeping uncontrollably, he was a planet of grief, and though Geli felt she ought to go, she stayed, sitting far from him, on the edge of a sofa.

With the forearm of his white suit, Göring finally smeared away his tears, staining the fabric with mascara. “You could ruin me, you know.”

She was silent.

The fat man falsely smiled. Only Hitler, she thought, could so abruptly alter his personality.

“Oh, the luxury of power you now enjoy! Aren’t you excited? You could waltz into the dining room right now, give Herr Rosenberg the old heave-ho, and tell your uncle what just occurred here. And I? My face would be bloodied into pulp by the SA, just as a beginning, and I would be finished, homeless, out of a job, without a pfennig for Carin’s medicines. To think you could do all that! Were I in your position, I would. Without hesitation.”

“Aren’t you clever to put it that way. Seeing how little I want to imitate you.”

With difficulty he stood up. “Angelika Maria Raubal! Such a nice girl! With such vicious men around her! But you have grown attached to the good life, haven’t you, darling. And you’re afraid you’ll do something to end it? Would Hitler believe you? Would he question why you were here alone with me?” He took out a handkerchief and blotted his face. “An enchantress, they call you. Affectionate; fun-loving; sexy. Aren’t females always in some way at fault? I was in Wien a few years ago. There were girls your age selling themselves for the price of a packet of cigarettes. They seemed…unhappy.” Göring slicked back his glossy hair and tidied his wide suit jacket as he strode heavily to his study door. And there he turned to sneer, “You won’t tell,” and went out.

She agreed. She would be in some way at fault. She got up and followed him out.

On the first night of Winter Carnival, 1929, she and Henny Hoffmann accompanied Adolf Hitler to a comic operetta at the Münchener Kammerspiele on Maximilianstrasse where his favorite seats in the sixth row of the stalls were reserved. Hitler was at his handsomest in his Rousselet hat, coffee-brown leather trench coat, and tuxedo, and Geli flaunted Elsa Bruckmann’s snow-white mink coat and the gift from her uncle of a slinky, silver-sequined gown that, when they checked their coats, daringly revealed the flawless flesh of her back. She felt men staring, and liked it. She was not sure if Hitler did.

The girls were forced to idle in the Kammerspiele lobby for many minutes as Hitler shook hands with party members and celebrities, then, while escorting the giggling girls to the stalls, Hitler halted and told them he’d forgotten something, but he wasn’t sure what it was. He fussed and fumed about it, ostentatiously feeling all his pockets for what was missing until he seemed to find enlightenment. “Ah-hah! I have it! It’s just as Nietzsche says: “Are you going out with women? Do not forget your whip!’”

Geli sighed heavily while Henny grimaced, but Hitler found himself hilarious, and soon others in the stalls were laughing because the famous man was. Congratulating them all for their good humor, he stiffly bowed from the waist and kissed the hand of a beautiful blond film understudy with Universum Film A. G. who was there with an aunt and seemed titillated when Hitler confided that he was friendly with Herr Alfred Hugenberg, the film and press lord. And from that point on, whenever Hitler thought the operetta was particularly funny, he’d swivel in his seat to find out if the film actress was joining him in the merriment. She was.

At the interval, Hitler fetched Fachingen mineral water for Henny and his niece, then left them to themselves by the box office so he could have some fervent conversation with the film actress, whose name they never got. She had, they heard, a tinkling laugh. She softly touched the silk lapel of Hitler’s tuxedo as she appeared to compliment him on it, and then she winningly sipped from a flute of champagne as he seemed to launch into the subject of formal clothing.

“She’s wearing sheer hose,” Geli said.

“She isn’t!” said Henny, for hose were still fairly rare, and frivolous, and desired. “She is.”

“And lipstick. He hates that.”

“Don’t glare,” Henny said.

Geli spun away from them. “Distract me, then.”

“Are you still taking singing lessons?”

“Indeed,” Geli said.