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His free hand forced her chin up and he frowned with dissatisfaction. “You needn’t worry,” he said. “I won’t remember you like this.”

“Don’t,” she said.

“The Japanese who have betrayed their leaders commit a suicide of honor,” he said. “And now I would like you to kill yourself.”

Wide-eyed, she scrutinized his face in the hope of finding out that he was kidding. But she knew he was not. She cried, “No, Uncle Adolf! No, no! Please!”

Calmly he said, “Aren’t you pathetic. Suicide is just a flash of pain, a fraction of a second, and then there’s nothingness. All problems vanish into the void.”

In fury, she yelled, “Then you do it! Shithead!” Holding her hurting nose she flailed a fist at him, but she felt him catch her hair in one hand and yank her still as he held the Walther pistol just above her heart, then fired down.

She jolted with the force of the bullet slamming through her and saw his hands fly up to his ears to quell the gunshot noise. She fleetingly thought, The canaries, and fell unconscious to the floor.

Worriedly, Hitler looked to the hallway, then reminded himself that only Frau Dachs was still there with them in the flat, and she was deaf. Locking the bedroom door from the inside, he squatted above his niece as if she were horticulture he couldn’t quite name, his hands loose but for the gun, his forearms on his knees, his face fascinated. She was still breathing, but wi

th great effort, a watery sigh as she exhaled, then a faint screaking noise in inhalation, as of an old, unoiled hinge. Leaning farther over, he saw that blood bubbled up from her lung wound as she breathed, staining maroon the front of her taupe afternoon dress. A frail tear formed in Geli’s right eye and trickled down her cheek. Hitler wiped it away with his thumb, then stood, his back aching, and sat heavily on the sofa with the gun still hot between his thighs. She was strong. She was hanging on to life, like his mother. Watching her faint twitching movements, he was sure she was dying. And then he was sure Angelika Raubal was dead, and there was nothing further to do but cry with self-pity for his loss and love and misfortune.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

AFTERWARD

Waking at sunrise on September 19th, he realized it was time to act, so he put the gun on a sofa cushion, gingerly stepped around the wide pool of blood, walked out to the hallway telephone, and called Rudolf Hess at home. “I shot my Princess,” Hitler told him.

Shocked out of sleep, Hess was silent for a few seconds, assessing what had been said, and then he asked, “Where are you?”

“In the flat.”

“Is she dead?”

“Yes.”

“Am I the first to know?”

“Yes.”

“Wait for me,” Hess said. And he added, “You have done the right thing, my leader.”

Hess got to the flat within twenty minutes, and found that the führer had already awakened Maria Reichert in order to have her make tea. Questioning her in the kitchen, Hess heard that she’d returned from Oktoberfest around two. She’d been beschwipst with drink and had gone straight to bed.

Was she aware of what had happened to Fräulein Raubal?

She said she’d been told she’d committed suicide.

“It’s sad, isn’t it,” Hess said. And then he saw old Frau Dachs standing at the kitchen door in a hairnet and quilted robe.

“I’m deaf but I felt it,” she said. “Around midnight. Windows shivering, and the whole flat shaking when she hit the floor.”

Hess turned to the old woman’s daughter. “Will you please see that she gets dressed and goes to a friend’s? We don’t want to further upset her.”

“Mutti,” Maria said. “Out.”

Hess hurried to Geli’s bedroom. She was lying facedown, with her legs folded off to the right as if she’d fallen from a kneel. She seemed to be fingering the confusion of her brown hair with her right hand, while her left arm was flat on the floor, as if straining for the Walther on the sofa. She was stiff with rigor mortis and the front of her dress was flooded in the darkening blood that widened out from the sofa to the four-poster bed. There were no shoe prints. A skeleton key was still inside the door, which was good. Walking down to Hitler’s bedroom, Hess got the skeleton key from his door, found out that it fitted Geli’s, and locked her door from the hallway.

Watching the Saturday traffic on Prinzregentenstrasse and sipping orange peel tea, the führer seemed fairly placid, but there was a shocking, crazed look to his eyes when Hess handed him the skeleton key. “Where are Schaub and Hoffmann?” Hess asked.

“Nürnberg,” the führer said. “The Deutscher Hof Hotel.”

“We’ll take you away,” Hess told him, “just as soon as the others arrive.”