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“Why?”

Wincing a false smile, he just stared at her for a moment. Knives in his eyes. And then he glanced away and asked, “What are you writing?”

“Just a letter.” And though Geli knew she’d only attract further interest in it, she found herself folding her forearms over the page.

Hitler strolled forward like a skeptical teacher on the hunt for insurrection in his class. “To whom? You have a friend to write to far from here?”

“Ingrid. In Wien.”

She shied from him as he sidled around the desk. His flank familiarly leaned against her, and she gave way. “‘Dear Ingrid,’” Hitler read. He tilted away to try to make out her handwriting without his glasses. And he quoted, “‘When I come to Wien—I hope very soon—we’ll drive together to Semmering an—’”

“‘And’ is where you came in.”

“And what?”

“Have fun,” she said.

“Semmering. The health resort?”

“Yes.”

“I was too poor to visit health resorts when I was twenty-three. Where will you get the money?”

She was not stunned that he’d no longer fund her. She was stunned that she’d failed to consider it.

Eyes shining with tears, he asked, “And what will you tell your friends in Austria about me? Will you also tell Professor Otto Ro that your uncle has been molesting you?”

Of course he’d find out, she thought. She was frightened he’d hit her, but his hands were still behind his back. She quickly said, “I’ll say nothing about you. I promise.”

Saying nothing more, he shifted his right hand from behind his back and laid a gun on the letter, his Walther 6.35, as ugly as sin, her mother would say. Collecting attention. Everything else in the room seemed diminished by it.

“Hold it in your hands,” he said.

She fabricated an offhand tone, full of innocence and what he’d think of as feminine wile as she told him, “I’d rather not.” And then she got up and fitted the chair within the kneehole of the desk. She withdrew from her uncle before sitting on the sofa as she’d seen his favorite movie stars do, her left arm angled high on the sofa back and a hand in her hair, as blithe as a girl on a picnic, her face serene in the sunshine. She nonchalantly asked, “Why the gun?”

Without smiling, he said, “It’s a sex toy.”

She giggled out of sheer nervousness. She felt a change in him, a cold, machinelike subtraction of emotion, as if he himself were the gun. “Will you kiss me good-bye?” he asked.

She was amazed. Had she finally won the argument? Was she going? She grinned. Anything now seemed easy. “Of course.”

She walked toward him and tilted her face as his soft belly jellied against her, and he quickly stabbed his pursed lips against her full, pliant mouth before finding formality again. “And now for this one last time,” he said, “I would like you to excite me.”

She tried not to show her dismay. “How?”

Shifting the weight of the Walther in his right hand, he touched the gun’s cold barrel to the neck of her dress. “Undo it,” he said.

Tentatively she undid the collar and then the two buttons below that.

But he said in his soothing, dog-calming voice, “A little further, Princess. Show me your titties.”

She felt insulted but did as he said, widening the front of her dress around her filled brassiere. His face was cold-blooded as he stared, and she flinched when she felt the chill steel of the Walther handgun drawl over the roundness of each breast as if he were sketching a cartoon, even touching the barrel to the fabric over her right nipple while saying “Bip,” and then her left, saying “Bip” again. He seemed to want her to smile, so she did.

And then his free fist flashed out and hit her face hard. She reeled against the sofa and heard a jangle of bells in her brain, and then a fainter ringing. When she felt her nose, hot blood twined through her fingers, and she knew at once that her nose was broken. She was so shocked she did not scream.

“Look what you made me do,” Hitler said. “Talking about me.” He was shaking the sting from his hand.

She was on her knees and thinking irrationally that she could stanch the blood from soaking her dress if she just found a handkerchief. She wondered if it were possible that her beauty was gone forever. And then she realized that it would not end with this.