Angela failed to argue the point; he looked paunchy. “Aren’t there prison sports in here?” Angela asked. “Or gymnastic exercises?”
“Well, yes,” he said, “but what would it do to ideals and discipline if I joined with the others in physical training? A general cannot afford the affront of being beaten at games by his infantrymen. Anyway, I shall again get the weight off by speaking.”
“What jobs are you forced to do?”
“Oh, I’m far too busy for labor.” Hitler lifted off the lid from a box of marzipan sweets and popped one in his mouth. “Are you in communication with Alois?” he asked.
She tore off an orange section and ate it. “Our brother, Alois? It’s been fifteen years.”
“Well, he’s in Hamburg now, selling razor blades. He married a woman named…” He frowned at Hess.
“Hedwig Heidemann,” Hess said.
“What happened to Bridget in England?” Angela asked.
“You see, that’s the problem. Alois is still married to her.”
To clarify things, Hess gave the word for it: “Bigamy.”
“Thank you,” Angela told him. “I have a tiny brain.”
Hitler found another marzipan, but on second thought put it back. “The office of the lord mayor of Hamburg has called Alois in for questioning. And Alois has written a letter to his first wife requesting that she have their marriage legally dissolved.” Hitler expectantly held out his hand. Rudolf Hess went to the secretary, got out a sheet of typed paper as well as Hitler’s glasses, and gave both to him. “We have his wording from our Hamburg friends,” Hitler said, and holding his folded glasses up in one hand, shook out the paper. “To Bridget Hitler our older brother writes: ‘Don’t think that I am at present a rich man, for to tell you the truth I am not. But I have got the chance to get rich by the aid of my brother’s reputation. This chance will be lost forever if I am found guilty, and if I am sentenced.’ And he goes on, ‘You must help me or they’ll put me in jail. This bigamy charge is mainly embarrassing, for should the newspapers learn about it they’re going to use it against my brother.’” Hitler handed the page back to Hess. “Quite true,” he said. His face was suddenly as red as a beet and his forehead was throbbing with veins. “By the aid of my brother’s reputation!’ And here I am, in prison, fighting for my life! Alois is destroying my reputation! I cannot have this! I won’t! Any member of my family—”
Rudolf Hess had begun whistling an old regimental song about the flower called Erika.
Hitler glanced at him as if he’d forgotten his part; then he glanced at Geli and remembered. “Would you come into my office, Angela? We have to talk further.”
Angela put an orange slice in her mouth as she went with him, and Hess shut the door, then sat with his hands chafing his knees, his face fraught with shyness and discomfort.
Geli inched up the hem of her funeral dress to look surreptitiously at her shins and ankles. She’d shaved her legs for the first time that morning and worried that she’d done a poor job of it. She decided it would do.
Silence seemed to paint the room a bleaker color. And then Hess finally said, “We have them right where we want them.”
“‘Them’?”
“We hear the people in München are still in favor of a parliamentary monarchy.”
Geli told him, “We were in München for only a few minutes.”
“You aren’t interested in politics?”
Geli shrugged.
“Are you interested in astrology?”
She was only fifteen and not quite certain if there was a difference between astrology and astronomy. She said yes, she was interested in the stars.
“I’m the mystic in the party,” Hess said, and he grinned in a way she thought goofy. “Well, no one surpasses Hitler,” he continued, “but I’m perhaps more adept in The Secret Doctrine and contact with the higher spheres.”
She was trying to decide what she disliked more, his shameless deference to her uncle or his sober prissiness.
“Shall I read to you from his book?” he asked.
“You mean he’s writing one?”
Hess got out a diary from an upper drawer in the secretary. “On the frontispiece is his motto, “Hess said. “I quote: ‘When a world comes to an end, then entire parts of the earth can be convulsed, but not the belief in a just cause.’ And below that he has written: ‘The trial of narrow-mindedness and personal spite is over, and today starts—My Struggle.’ We’re thinking that last bit may be the title. Or: ‘Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice.’”
“Couldn’t he be more specific?”