“Let’s get on with it, then,” the Graf said.
The doctor signaled the soldier to open the gate, and then got onto the running board of the Horch.
Peter drove through the gate, which belonged to the middle of the three villas. The doctor signaled him to drive to the right, toward the villa where Claus had his room. The Major stepped off the running board when Peter stopped the car.
“If you will come with me, gentlemen,” he said, then turned to the Graf. “I regret the inconvenience, Herr Generalleutnant.”
The Graf didn’t reply, but the moment they were inside the foyer of the villa, he looked at the Major. “Is Graf von Stauffenberg still in the room at the left corner of the second floor?” he asked, gesturing toward the wide staircase.
“Yes, Herr Generalleutnant, he is. Has the Herr Generalleutnant been here before?”
“You go up, Peter, while I deal with the Munich Area Medical Commandant. I’ll see you in a moment.”
The Major was visibly uncomfortable with that announcement, but in the German Army, as in any other, majors do not challenge general officers.
Peter went up the stairs and started down the wide corridor to the left. A doctor in a white smock and a nurse were in the corridor, about to enter one of the rooms. The doctor looked at him curiously but said nothing.
Peter continued down the corridor to the door that was almost certainly the one he wanted and knocked. When there was no answer, he knocked again, and harder. The door was obviously thick, and would mute the rap of his knuckles.
When again there was no answer, he tried the handle, then pushed the door open.
When Oberstleutnant Graf Claus von Stauffenberg heard the first faint knock, he was sitting in an upholstered chair, facing the door opening to his balcony. He ignored the knock. He was occupied, and preferred not to be disturbed. He was buttoning his shirt. This simple task was now possible, but very time-consuming.
His equipment for accomplishing that task was a three-pronged claw—the thumb and the first and second fingers of his left hand.
The stump where his right hand had been was for all practical purposes useless. Moreover, it was taking an unusually long time to heal. The suppuration had only started to diminish in the last few days, but the bandage still had to be changed at least twice a day, Thus, even trying to use it was painful.
It was difficult to force the button through the buttonhole with the claw, but he was getting much better at it, probably because he had been able to bring the three remaining fingers back to some measure of flexibility by faithfully exercising them.
The surgeons had done a splendid job with his now-empty left eye socket. One of the doc
tors believed an artificial eye might be fitted after another operation or two. But the eye—or, properly, the lost eye—didn’t bother him at all except when he washed his face and the empty socket stared at him from the mirror. There was no pain, and he didn’t have as much trouble with lost depth perception as he had feared. The ugliness could of course be concealed beneath his eye patch, which was in any case necessary to keep the still-raw socket from becoming infected.
There was a second, louder knock, and a moment later Claus von Stauffenberg heard the door quietly creak open. He did not turn to see who it was, primarily because he didn’t care.
Nina, his wife, the Grafin von Stauffenberg, would not be able to visit until the following Friday. A personal appeal to the Munich Area Medical Commandant—he was a friend of a friend—had gotten her a waiver to the No Visitors Rule, but for only four hours every other Friday.
The silver lining to the black cloud of No Visitors was that he was no longer subjected to almost daily visits from adolescent girls of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, who felt it was their patriotic duty to come to Recuperation Hospital No. 15 to stare with pity at the mutilated heroes of the Third Reich.
That meant that whoever was entering the room was staff, which term included everyone from the surgeon-in-charge to a cleaning woman.
“Don’t tell me,” a somehow familiar voice said, “he said ‘shut up’ and you thought he said ‘stand up.’”
He turned in curiosity.
“How are you, Claus?” Peter asked.
Von Stauffenberg held up his claw and stump and pointed at his eye patch. “How do I look, Hansel?”
“Goddamn you, don’t call me that!”
“If you promise to try not to blaspheme, I’ll try not to call you Hansel, Hansel.”
Von Stauffenberg lifted himself out of his chair. After a moment’s hesitation, they embraced. It seemed to embarrass them both. After a moment they stepped apart. “How did you get in?” von Stauffenberg asked.
“My father’s downstairs,” Peter said.
“You’re supposed to be in Argentina,” von Stauffenberg said.