“You haven’t changed your mind about Hitler?” Frade challenged.
“My position on that is a pox on both their houses,” Hanfstaengl said. “Goebbels and Himmler tried to have me murdered, as I suspect you know.”
“But I thought you were a good Nazi,” Frade said.
“Presumably you know what Lord Acton had to say about power. ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ What happened in Germany is unequivocal proof of that.”
“Then you would say that Hitler and the people around him are corrupt?” Graham asked.
“Well, if the bastard hadn’t murdered his niece, with whom he was having an incestuous relationship, I would say that Hitler is probably less personally corrupt than those around him. He’s paranoid, of course. And an egomaniac. Those around him are corrupt beyond description.”
He paused and looked at Frogger.
“You are a professional soldier, Herr Oberstleutnant?”
Frogger nodded.
“Then certainly you must be aware that your peers hold the ‘Austrian corporal’ in deep contempt?”
Frogger didn’t reply.
“Let me put it to you this way, Herr Oberstleutnant: Germany has lost the war. The sooner it’s over, the fewer soldiers—and civilians—will be killed or mutilated for life. Have you heard that Goebbels has gone on Radio Berlin and advised people to leave? So the sooner Germany surrenders, the better for Germany.”
Hanfstaengl looked at Frogger for a response and got none. He shrugged as if he expected that reaction.
Then he coldly added: “Herr Oberstleutnant, if whatever Colonel Graham here is asking you to do will hasten the end of the war, then it is your duty to do so.”
“What they are asking me to do has nothing to do with ending the war, Herr Hanfstaengl,” Frogger said.
“Perhaps you can’t see how whatever he’s asking you to do has to do with hastening the end of the war, but I know Colonel Graham well enough to know that unless he thought it was about ending the war, or something nearly that important, he wouldn’t have brought you here to me.”
Frogger did not respond.
Without breaking eye contact with Frogger, Hanfstaengl said, “May I ask him a question, Alex?”
“Discreetly, Putzi.”
"Herr Oberstleutnant, does the term heavy water—”
“Stop right there, Putzi!” Graham said sharply.
“—mean anything to you? Because if it does, and you’re not giving Graham what he wants—”
“Shut up, Putzi!” Graham ordered loudly and furiously.
Graham looked at Frade. “Get Frogger the hell out of here. I knew this was a bad idea. . . .”
Hanfstaengl threw both hands up in a gesture of surrender.
“Herr Hanfstaengl, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Frogger said without conviction as Frade reached for him.
“Putzi, you sonofabitch!” Graham said bitterly.
The door from the corridor suddenly opened.
A burly man stepped inside. He held a Smith & Wesson revolver in his hand, the arm extended parallel to his leg. He looked quickly around the room.
“You can put that away, Dennis,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said as he rolled his wheelchair through the doorway. “I know both of them well enough to know it’s mostly bark without much bite.”