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“I don’t like this game,” she said.

“Well, it’s not for you, it’s for me.”

“Don’t you want affection?”

He smirked. His hand knifed between her thighs and found her vagina. She angrily squeezed her thighs tighter and fought off his hand with her own. Whining, he said, “Won’t you make me obey?”

She stropped the whip. “Don’t!”

He fell in a heap and held his head with his hands. “Oh, you’re right! I’m a worm! I’m vermin!” Crouching at her feet, he started to masturbate, his head nodding up and down.

“I hate this,” she said.

“Hit me then!”

“No!” She tried to squirm away from him, but his left hand forcefully held the jackboot at her ankle and she couldn’t free it.

And then he was flat on his back, staring up at her vulva as he feverishly jerked at himself. “Oh yes, oh yes, that’s it. Closer. Squat close.”

She yelled at him, “I hate this!”

And he yelled, “Don’t argue with me! I have the right to you after all these years!” There was an odd change in him that she couldn’t identify; she only knew it was terrifying. She froze and his free hand lifted and fiddled with her labia as he warned, “If you say no one more time…” A finger found its way inside her, and she flinched. “We are lovers,” he said. “And this is how we love.”

She did as he ordered.

On the floor of her room the next morning Geli found his cartoon of himself naked and impotent, a long limp wienerwurst hanging low between his legs while a giant question mark and exclamation point seemed to spring from his head. Geli angrily left the cartoon on her desk so Anni Winter would see it as she cleaned.

She’d hardly slept, so she stayed in her bed, glumly paging through the score of Paul Lincke’s operetta Frau Luna until she heard the hall telephone ring, and then she heard Anni just outside her door, calling, “Fräulein Raubal! It’s your mother!”

She went into Hitler’s office and held the black receiver in her hands until she was confident she wouldn’t cry. She put it to her ear. “Hello, Mommy.”

“Did Adolf tell you?” Angela asked.

She raked hair back from her face. “What?”

“He’s going to buy me a car! A Wanderer! I just can’t believe it! I’m so happy!”

She grimly faced his photograph. “Then I’m happy, too,” Geli said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CONFESSIONS, 1931

She flattered him with imitation: fuming, ranting, weeping, falling to the floor in tantrums, soaring giddily when things went well, sinking into full-day pouts over imagined snubs or neglect. She loathed him. She did not. She feared she was too prudish and timid. She felt sullied and odious. She screamed at waiters in restaurants. She would not pay a shopkeeper without complaining of piracy. She was becoming, she knew, a bitch, and she hated it, hated him saying, “We are so alike,” hated his infatuation, his sticky enthrallment, his cruelty and unnaturalness, his unoriginality in choosing such a vulgar, bland face to offer the world.

In March, Hitler and Geli attended a Bavarian play by Ludwig Thoma at the Kammerspiele Theater, where he fancied his niece in a cloying way, finding reasons to confer with her, to fondle her, to angle his head childishly into hers, to just watch. Tiring of his scrutiny, she put a finger to her lips to shush him, and he folded his arms and sulked for a while before mooning over Geli again. And then he noticed Herr Doktor Hanfstaengl observing him from a side gallery, and his face took on the slaughter-of-the-innocents look of his publicity photographs.

Afterward they all dined together at the Schwarzwälder Café, where a continually yapping schnauzer so annoyed Hitler that he walked to the far table and truculently stared until the schnauzer cowered and was silent. And then he returned to the table, demeaned his niece by feeding pinches of cake to her, and flourished in front of Putzi his latest royalty statement from Eher Verlag. Mein Kampf was then nearly six years old and had averaged sales of just six thousand copies per year, but suddenly in 1930 fifty-four thousand books were sold, and with foreign rights, he boasted, he’d soon be a wealthy man.

“Well, that calls for some glasses of the finest fizz!” Putzi said.

Instead the führer fell into an hour-long monologue on the next elections in 1932, on the “clownish elements of salon bolshevism” who’d drifted into the party and would have to be weeded out, about his forbearance when being tested by the persistent conflicts between the hooligan SA and Heinrich Himmler’s disciplined and increasingly formidable SS force, organizations faithful to him who were vying to be his favorites. “When a mother has many children, and one of them goes astray,” Hitler told his foreign press secretary, “it is the wise mother who grips the child by the hand and won’t let go.”

Even then Putzi Hanfstaengl was aware that Geli was that child, for she was plainly bored by Hitler’s monologue and was flagrant in yawning and tinking her forks and yearningly gazing over her fox stole at all the jolly couples around them.

At closing time

at the Schwarzwälder Café, their still far-from-sleep führer persuaded Herr and Frau Hanfstaengl to join him and his niece in the Prinzregentenplatz flat for cordials. And when there he further persuaded Putzi to favor them with his famous piano playing, for he had the ability to flawlessly perform short pieces in any style or key, and he first entertained them that night by interpreting the trifle “Hänschen Klein” in five different ways, as if it had been scored by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner.