The Vengeance of Rome

TWENTY-SEVEN

I was never a prisoner at the Villa Röhm. I had simply become nervous of leaving. When transport was available I would go into Munich, perhaps to see the latest films. Röhm never kept much cash, but he would give me enough for my simple pleasures. I no longer felt vulnerable to Frau Oberhauser’s threats. The problem with Mussolini could easily be cleared up once the international situation had settled down. I must admit I had become rather lazy, even euphoric. I had never rested for so long and not had to rely on my own wits. I luxuriated in my situation. I could not return Röhm’s affections in the same measure, but one cannot help feeling warm towards a person who calls you his ‘Latin angel’, his ‘dark-eyed ideal’ and offers you the world if you will stay just a few more days, a few more weeks.

I had the impression that I was to some extent hiding in the lion’s cage. Röhmannsvilla was probably the safest place in Germany at that time. My patron was without question his country’s single most powerful man. I considered it a tribute to his modesty and dedication that he hardly realised it. Even when he boasted of the numbers he commanded, I don’t think he really believed them. Five million is an almost impossible figure to contemplate. The only problem was the isolation. Röhm’s radio did not get good signals because of the surrounding trees.

Unable to find a Völkischer Beobachter on any news-stand I finally had to make do with a Telegramm Zeitung. There, on an inside page, I read of a tragedy which had taken place at an apartment house in Prinzregentenstrasse. A young woman who lived with her mother had shot herself. She had not left a note. The young woman was the eldest daughter of Frau Angela Raubal, a housekeeper.

I did not, even for a second, believe the story.

Geli Raubal had made her last threat, engineered her last scene, attempted her last blackmail. Someone, either Hitler or a friend, had finished off the ‘yowling alley cat’ at last. The Führer was free.

I hold no brief for murder. There are few excuses for taking another human life. The Lutherans and the Catholics were wholly agreed on that. In times of war or during certain national crises the taking of life could be condoned, said the pastors and the priests. Well, whoever killed Geli Raubal might claim those precise reasons. My own view was that it would not have mattered had she lived or died. The important thing would have been to find any incriminating papers and get rid of them. Her word was worthless without some kind of proof.

Had someone shot her while trying to find those pictures? I knew Röhm would probably enlighten me to a degree. He might even know whether Hitler himself had done it or not. If Hitler had killed her, it had probably been an accident. I felt rather sorry for her. She had seemed an ordinary, silly Bavarian Mädchen. As Mrs Cornelius’s youngest son Frank said the other day, she must have felt like Lois Lane being fucked by Superman! The reality was a little bit more than she bargained for. A superhuman, after all, has superhuman needs. This must have seemed very bizarre to a typical little girl from the country! The two of them could never have known anything close to ordinary life. She was, after all, also his niece. The whole thing was perverse, why so many of Hitler’s people had begged him to give her up. They saw nothing but disaster in the situation. One way or another she would not have lasted.

I remember hoping that Hitler’s political ambitions would not be threatened by any scandal. I did not think it his fault, after all, that the strain of being the mistress of a great politician had told on the weaker type of girl.

Since Röhm had arranged to pick me up there, I went down to the Bratwurstglockl where I expected to find an acquaintance who knew me from the villa. Becker was already installed at a table with some of his Hitler Youth chums. The place was alive with gossip. Everyone had their stories to add. The details were often incredibly gory and related with great relish! Eventually I pieced together the account which Hess gave me later. Hess apparently believed that after one of her canaries had died, Geli had quarrelled with her ‘Uncle Alf’. She still wanted Hitler to let her go to Vienna to become an opera singer. Suspecting she intended to keep a liaison, Hitler refused. Geli had threatened to ‘talk to the papers’, let some of his ‘big friends’ in on a few of their secrets. With harsh humour he had reminded her of the fate of Mata Hari. He was busy with intense cattle-trading politics in Berlin. They were on the brink of victory, with a real presence in the Reichstag, backed by an SA now larger than the regular army. Later he would discuss the matter reasonably. For now she must be patient. A subsequent screaming match had aroused the entire apartment house. Witnesses were clear from her urgency that she had another agenda. She planned to embarrass him so badly he would give in. Hess believed she had an arrangement with some SS man she knew, the mysterious Zeiss. She, of course, had denied this. A car called for Hitler. Her uncle had meetings of the deepest importance and secrecy. He left. As he got into his car, she appeared on the balcony. ‘Won’t you let me go to Vienna?’ she cried, for all the world to hear. He answered abruptly, and the car drove away.

The next morning the housekeeper found her in her bedroom. She had been shot through the heart with Hitler’s Walther PPK 38. The gun was near her hand, suggesting suicide. She had been beaten. Her mother’s first thought was that Geli had been murdered by Himmler. She called Hess who had good connections with the Munich police. He arranged for an inconspicuous investigation, a verdict of suicide. Geli had been a good Catholic. No note was found.

‘The strange thing was,’ said Röhm as we drove back to the villa, ‘that all that day she’d been carrying Kutzi around. Like a sort of warning — like fate. Don’t you find that a bit spooky, Mashi? A dead canary? The bird was still there when she died.’

Of course, he said, he had not intended to kill her. She was still hysterical when he arrived. He thought she might have been expecting someone else. They both knew Hitler would not be back. He had gone there to warn her off and collect any letters and other material she might be hiding.

‘I tried to calm her down. She’d go quiet and then start screaming again, and I’d have to slap her. Oh, you know. She was like a mad animal. She never had much reason to begin with. She wouldn’t tell me where the stuff was, so I started looking for myself. I was pissed off with her, I’ll admit.’

While he was looking through her purse for her keys, she had threatened him with Hitler’s automatic.

‘She didn’t even know about the thumb safety,’ said Röhm. ‘You can’t pull the trigger without pressing down the safety at the same time. I took it away from her. I told her she was in a game whose stakes were far too high for her. She should go back to Obersalzberg or wherever she’s from. She was dragging the Chief down. I don’t know. She got hysterical again, and she got shot. She’d made me so jumpy. My own nerves were on edge. I’m not a bastard. I don’t go around killing civilians. I only meant to warn her off. But at least it’s over now, and Hitler can get on with his work.

‘We’ve got less than a month to go. Schleicher wanted to introduce Strasser to Hindenburg, but we have to be sure it’s Hitler. Strasser can’t get the votes in the country. He can’t talk the way the Chief can. That meeting will get Hitler the Presidency or at very least show how Hindenburg is taking him seriously. That alone is worth millions of votes. This is the big moment, Mashi. With that bitch out of the picture we’ve a clear run at it. Still, as you know, I never had anything against her.’

He was genuinely shocked by the accident. Murder was not his style and everyone knew it, which was why so few people ever mentioned his name in connection with Geli Raubal’s death. Those who believed Hitler had somehow sneaked back and killed her, those who thought Himmler was the murderer or that her mysterious lover Zeiss had done it, or that it actually was suicide, never even brought up Röhm’s name casually. He was highly respected in the movement. Only later did Hitler have some suspicion.

‘Nobody was a saint in those days,’ I remind Mrs Cornelius. We are happy to be alone together. She has her scrapbooks out. We see our own youthful, painted faces meeting in a faded embrace while behind us Fokkers and Camels clash in a stunning dogfight. I hardly remember making it. We did so many in such a short time. I find an advertisement cut from one of her film magazines. ‘Ace Peters and Gloria Cornish. The Air Knights. A DeLuxe Serial.’ Who cares for romance and glamour any longer? Every print that went around the world has crumbled to brown powder. We are a mere step away from Wolfit and Irving, whose theatrical performances are now only hearsay, whose records are so disappointing. People cannot believe it, but in our golden years Mrs Cornelius and myself were people of some substance and influence. Stabschef Röhm was proud to be seen with me. People asked for my autograph. Schoolboys pointed me out to their parents. Of course, all this gradually went away as the fashions changed, but that is not to say that we did not once have position and respect. For a while we knew fame again, but those films I made in Germany, while I have no reason to be ashamed of them, were not of my personal conception!

Röhm was especially demanding of my time and strength in the next few days. I was a comfort to him, he said. He had never dreamed of knowing such comfort. A boon he scarcely deserved. He was always saying such things about himself. He once described himself as a ‘cruel and wicked man’ no good for civilian life. But that, I know, was his way of simplifying himself. He was far more complex than that. I believe he was uneasy about Geli Raubal’s death for quite a while after the event. He insisted on playing nothing but Strauss and Lehar on the gramophone. He became sentimental in unfamiliar ways. Offenbach produced an almost wolfish glee in him. He all but wore out the grooves of ’The Nuns’ Chorus’ in an orgy that happily did not involve me in very much activity.

Soon, however, Strasser’s car was at the gates. The big deputy, no longer jovial, was hurrying through the villa, averting his eyes from the things he didn’t want to look at and talking urgently to Röhm. Clearly there was an unusual crisis, since Strasser was making only his second visit to the villa. He didn’t want to have to answer his wife’s questions, he said. He was one of the few in the Nazi hierarchy who did not have scandal attached to him.

I heard Röhm. ‘Well, he was cracking up before it happened.’

Strasser was adamant. Hitler was worse than he had ever known him. ‘I’ve seen that bastard go down on his knees beside his desk and start chewing at the carpet, beating on the floor with his fists and squealing that he is going to kill himself unless we do what he wants, and that was normal compared to the way he is now, Ernst. Believe me, I’ve been with him for almost a week. I’m going crazy myself out there in Tegernsee. Angela’s been there for a bit, but she’s had to go back. You know the funeral’s in Vienna, and Alf isn’t allowed to go to Austria. Too dangerous, anyway, to risk a challenge to his German nationality. We can’t trust anyone else. Even his sister’s beginning to wonder, since he keeps wailing that it’s his fault and that he killed her. He didn’t kill her. That’s one thing I am sure about. Göring or Himmler had her killed. They had the most to lose. Some SS goon, no doubt.’

From Röhm’s troubled expression I understood the problem he was facing. He was a man who hated secrets. Even if the secret protected him, he still hated it. But he controlled himself.

‘Well, what does he need to pull him out of it? You know Alf. He’s all self-pity and blithering needs one minute. The next he’s barking orders and throwing his weight around.’

‘It’s the second Alf we’re going to need for Hindenburg,’ said Strasser significantly. ’I don’t think the old boy will be much impressed by the first. We need our Führer at his brilliant best.’

‘We’ll send someone else.’

‘Me? You have to go — you have to reassure him about the army. He’ll respond well to you. Frick or Göring? He’ll see through them immediately. Goebbels? Hindenburg can’t stand the little dwarf. Nobody has Hitler’s authority. We can’t start changing leaders now. It has to be him.’

‘Fine. Then it will be him.’

‘But he’s a gibbering mess.’

‘Then we have to straighten him out.’

They began a long argument, referring to many things meaningless to me, so I went to have a bath.

When I next went by the room, I heard Röhm say, ‘Well, we’ll get him a whore. These girls know what to do.’

‘Not that specific. And he’d guess what she was immediately. If we trained her, we’d have to let her in on too much. The story would travel faster than a dose of clap in a dugout. It would be all over Germany in three days.’

I heard Röhm murmur something.

‘Oh, certainly!’ Strasser was contemptuous. ‘And what do we do then? Take her into the woods and shoot her? The Munich police are already watching us. They would love us to make a slip like that. I don’t think even Hess or Putzi will be able to keep another dead girl out of the picture.’

Again something from Röhm. Strasser’s reply: ‘I agree with the cure, but I don’t agree on the doctor.’

Soon afterwards Strasser left, cursing the situation and begging his old friend to come up with some ideas. Röhm explained a little to me. Hitler had taken the death of his niece far worse than anyone might have expected. He was utterly devastated and saw his politics as the cause of his loss. His only reason for driving himself as hard as he did was so that eventually he would be able to marry Geli. She was his muse and his inspiration. Without her he was incapable of going on. Let someone else lead the Nazi Party.

‘Alf’s like his mother. She always responded the same way to a setback. A lot of melodrama and then a total refusal to face the issue. That’s why we could never promote him in the army. Strasser’s staying with him night and day. He keeps making half-hearted attempts to kill himself. They’re out at Tegernsee now. Amann’s place. It’s remote. Nobody will bother them. Alf always goes there to restore himself.’

‘Did Geli live there, too?’ I asked.

Röhm said it wasn’t far from there. Obersalzberg. It probably wasn’t the best place to forget, but Hitler would not agree to go anywhere else and now he was refusing to leave his room. He would not get out of bed except to find Strasser and run endlessly over the events: what he could have done to stop it, what he should have done, how he loved her, how he would do anything for her, how it was all his fault and so on. Then Hitler would start weeping again, swallow some more pills and return to bed. He had pictures of her, notes she had written him. He stank. The Führer had not bathed since he heard the news. He had scarcely eaten and had taken a good many sleeping powders, but they had not worked. Strasser thought they had made him talk all the more volubly and exhausted him even further. He was thin and haggard. His hands shook. He could hardly keep himself from drooling. He wept constantly. He moved like an old man. He was like a drug addict deprived of his morphine. If Hindenburg saw him in that state it would confirm his every prejudice about this ‘seedy little Bohemian corporal’, as he always called Hitler.

‘It’s typical of the swine to falter at the last hurdle!’ Röhm was ferocious. ‘Him and his fucking guilt. He didn’t kill the bitch after all!’ This was a little insensitive. While I did not know Hitler, the man’s affection seemed to have been genuine enough. It was not in Röhm’s nature, unfortunately, to go over old ground.

‘What Göring told me,’ says Mrs Cornelius, who enjoyed a brief liaison with the Reichsmarschall a short while after his wife died, ‘was that Geli’s lover did it. The SS boy she was going to go to Vienna with. Zeiss? They were terrified of Hitler. When she told the boy Hitler wouldn’t let her go, he shot her in a lovers’ quarrel. Himmler had Zeiss shot later, but a lot of people still think it was Hitler himself.’

‘It was neither,’ I insist. ‘The killer was Röhm. He told me so.’

‘Well,’ she says, ‘there you go.’

She always says such things when she believes I am lying or exaggerating.

‘Study the facts,’ I say. ’It is all there. You only have to read between the lines - anyone can. The case is so obvious once you know.’

‘I don’t need to do any studying, Ivan,’ she says. ‘I got it from the horse’s mouth, didn’t I?’

‘Stupid horse. Big mouth.’ But Göring had his good points. I have no wish to confirm the stereotype.

‘Oh!’ She shakes with affectionate laughter. ’And you was so bloody clever yourself!’

‘I think you could at least acknowledge my experience,’ I say.

‘I believe what you boys got up to,’ she says. ‘It’s just what yer make of it, you know. I ‘ave to larf.’

‘What I did was not important? Strasser or Göring would have been the new Führer and everything would have gone along exactly the same?’

‘Well,’ she says, ‘there you go.’

But I know every detail. Every detail. If it had not been for me, the party would have self-destructed. The communists would have won. I made a sacrifice I will never admit to. Hitler’s guilt kept him in that condition, and his guilt had to be grounded.

In early October with only a few days left before the arranged meeting with Hindenburg, Strasser telephoned Röhm at the villa. Father Stempfle, who had been Geli’s confessor, was with him now, trying to convince him that Geli had always had suicidal tendencies while at the same time assuring Hitler his niece had deserved her full Catholic burial. This might be confusing the Chief all the more. Strasser said that both he and Stempfle had tried talking Hitler round, but he would begin to weep silently and refuse to respond. He was turning into a melancholy vegetable.

Röhm repeated what he had said before. They should try the known solution. It had always produced a catharsis in the past and clearly functioned as an act of absolution.

‘I told Strasser that it had to be one of us,’ said Röhm that night as we prepared for bed. ‘Someone who is already in on it. That’s Rudolf Hess, you, me, Gregor Strasser, little Bernhard Stempfle.’

‘To do what?’ I asked.

‘To do what you do best,’ he said. ‘I could make only one choice in the end. You. Will you do this for us, Mashi? For me? For Germany? Believe me, you’re the last damned card we can play.’ He explained what they wanted me to do.

‘That’s not a natural role for me,’ I said. ‘There would be difficulties, also, in the anatomical respects.’

Röhm explained how my costume would overcome those problems.

I was sure that it was possible for someone else to perform the ritual he described, however. While I understood the urgency of the situation, I simply did not have the heart for the role. Indeed, the thought terrified me. I could not play it with any kind of conviction. I did not tell them that the role was in some respects familiar from my Egyptian days when I had been a witness and a participant.

Pausing, with profound pain in his eyes, Röhm mentioned the file he had taken from Frau Oberhauser, the former Baroness von Ruckstühl. Clearly he had deliberated for a long time. He knew he was threatening something rare that we had built between us. ‘Then we would have to investigate these claims and discover how you, a suspected Jew, managed to inveigle your way into the holiest shrines of National Socialism.’

I grew a little sad at that moment and was deeply shocked. ‘A suspected what? My dear Ernst, whatever else you accuse me of, do not call me that. It is a disgusting slander. You yourself have said how you know for certain I am not a Jew.’

Röhm was silent. He turned away in shame.

I understood him well and was even sympathetic. The struggle he must be having with himself! His whole body was shaking. This was tearing him apart. For the love of his Fatherland and all he held dear, Stabschef Ernst Röhm was prepared to blackmail his ‘sweetest love’ and destroy almost everything honest and pure between us.

‘Only you could pull it off, Mashi. You have the skills, the physique, the actor’s gift . . .’

‘You want me to pose as some dirty little whore —’

‘A game, Mashi. Just a game. We’ve played it before.’

‘I have not played that role for you, Ernst. Never.’ My heart was sinking. I knew what this meant. Our idyll was drawing to a close. Yet still I resisted the inevitable. ‘Why not get some girl from the street? She needn’t know —’

‘We can’t risk it. Just as we can’t risk any more killing. Half the cops in Germany are waiting for a chance like this. That’s why you, at least, are guaranteed your life, Mashi.’ He turned, red-faced, with tears in his eyes. And then I realised the full horror of what had been contemplated.

‘You’ll lose nothing, Mashi. And the Fatherland will gain everything!’

I still wasn’t sure I could do what he wanted. ‘He would realise the deception, Ernst. You know he would.’

‘You haven’t seen the shape he’s in. Believe me, the pills have taken every ounce of judgement.’

‘Then how will this work?’

‘The way it has always worked. What do you think that little slut used to do for him? She kept him moving forward. I don’t know what you call it — but it got rid of any guilt he might be feeling about what he was doing.’

‘Guilt?’

‘There were things he promised his mother. Other loyalties. He had to give them up. He had to give a lot up, Mashi, to get where he is.’

I could not resist those pleading eyes. My friend was desperate. As a Christian I could only forgive him. I would have to help him. I, of all people, had come to understand how Christian duty must sometimes come before personal feelings. I bowed to his necessity, but an enormous sadness filled me. I knew a great love affair was finished. Love was what we both sacrificed.

That night Hess arrived from Munich driving the massive Mercedes received from an industrialist well-wisher. His old friend Father Stempfle was with him. Röhm had already suggested how I dress and had packed a bag for me. I was wrapped in one of his greatcoats. Perhaps instinctively recognising me from that encounter in the hotel, Stempfle looked at me with the same peculiar, gloating disgust he offered to most of the world. He moved so that he sat across from me with Röhm and began to eat a liver sausage, smacking his lips and glaring at me with happy sadism. The leather of the seat was cold. I felt utterly helpless.

Röhm had brought a case of chilled champagne and huge vacuum jug of coffee that he kept making me drink. He also had a sack of plums. He would check his watch and make me eat five every hour, while Father Stempfle coached me in a litany which added to the queasiness I soon felt from the fruit. The priest must have milked every single lurid detail from the girl and added experiences of his own. Of course, thanks to my sojourn in Arabia, none of this was unfamiliar to me, but I was aware how precision was important.

As we drove I wondered who else Stempfle had told about his discoveries. Hitler himself had recommended Stempfle as Geli’s confessor. As a good Catholic she needed someone to whom she could retail her sins, and Hitler needed a priest he could trust. Had Hitler deliberately set Stempfle up as Geli’s confessor to learn the last of his niece’s pathetic secrets? Was he aware of every infidelity or planned liaison? Whatever the motives, Stempfle had been her most explicit inquisitor and had heard every moment of her private life with Hitler. He had copies of the letters and drawings he had bought back on Hitler’s behalf. He showed me Geli in a variety of postures. They were familiar enough but not especially palatable.

‘Dirty little slut,’ said Röhm, glancing through the pictures. ‘You can tell she liked it.’

Mrs Cornelius has fallen asleep in the chair she allows no one else to use. Sometimes I think the thing is organic, a part of her. It sustains her like a life-support system. Every so often she returns to it and replenishes her energies. The very smell of that chair suggests some kind of amniotic concentrate. The noises she makes, deep within herself, resemble the distant yelps of feasting animals. With her head thrown back, her teeth out, her crimson mouth open and her blue mascaraed eyes closed, she seems in a kind of rapture. Her head, gloriously auraed in streaky reds and browns, resembles a primitive sculpture, some pagan Goddess of Death, some Rhiannon of the Portobello Market. To others she might seem ugly, but I see only nobility on that growling mask, the mark of wisdom, long experience and inexhaustible power.

We have both known the heights and the depths. We have ruled hearts and been ruled by them. We have known worldly prestige and fame. We have enjoyed the fruits of our successes and explored the byways of pleasure with tolerance and open minds. We have seen history made and realities changed. We have not lost sight of our dreams. We have seen them fade and sometimes we have had to put them aside. This century has not rewarded faith. We did what we had to do. We made our compromises and we survived.

‘He might want to lick your arse and nuzzle your cunt,’ said Father Stempfle, his lizard hands shaking as he guided me through the letters. ‘Here’s what you should do.’ He showed me the moulded rubber.

Hess was clearly glad to be driving. He had already been tortured by what he heard of the compromising letters and drawings and had refused to look at anything. Even Putzi Hanfstaengl had leafed through them, to his dismay. But all Hess had between himself and the chaotic infinite was his loyalty to his leader. He clung to that loyalty as others cling to a religion, in spite of all contradictions and rational evidence. His grip on sanity, on life of any kind, depended upon that loyalty. Hess was oddly disassociated from real life, as if he was watching a film which bore no relation to his ordinary existence. He studied the world with a kind of bemused, accepting smile. Nothing in the universe meant more to him than loyalty to Hitler. He appreciated the influence of men with firm ideas about what was valuable and what was not. It made him a worshipping parrot, a useful man, a typical Number Two. Hitler was fond of him and admired his faithfulness. ‘His very soul is brown,’ he would say.

We raced through dark little medieval villages and quaint hillside towns, past farms which had survived Germany’s troubles since the time of Charlemagne, past ancient pastures and rich orchards, all the wealth of old Bavaria. Röhm made me do something to Father Stempfle to make sure I knew exactly what they were talking about. Stempfle kept his eyes shut through the process and made noises through his teeth. Röhm, knowing how much the perverted divine hated it, grinned from start to finish. The relish he was taking in the old man’s dismay helped me get through the process, I will admit. I felt a kind of secondary pleasure in Röhm’s sadism. Nonetheless, I had to gag out of the window.

‘You’d better not do that later,’ said Röhm. He stroked my shoulders; he caressed my thighs. ‘You know I would never normally ask you for such a sacrifice.’

He looked at his watch. He made me drink some more champagne and eat five more plums. I protested. I did not have the stomach for it. Everything would be over soon, he said.

A huge silver moon hung in the black space between the mountain peaks. The car grumbled and whined up the steep roads. Birch and pine forests fell away below us. There were lights in distant valleys. Tall hills surrounded us. The air was richly scented by the trees and wild flowers. Röhm said this was his favourite time of the year up here. He became strangely melancholic. He knew that something was dying in both of us. The last of the summer wine, he said. He and Hitler had always planned to end their days here when their work was completed. He had a feeling something was stealing his future.

We passed through a dark village. A few more minutes and the car pulled up outside a small lodge decorated with fretwork in the typical local style. It stood on a hill in its own grounds among the trees.

‘The view is stunning at dawn,’ said Hess. ’We were happiest here, eh, Ernstie?’ He and his Führer had spent some of their best times here. Hitler had dictated Mein Kampf to his adoring secretary as his fame grew.

‘Carefree days,’ agreed the Stabschef and sighed.

Gregor Strasser was waiting for us at the top of a flight of wooden steps. He was unshaven and unslept. He looked at me and pursed his lips, as if he shared my own opinion of my inability to play the necessary part. My legs were weak. I could hardly walk. My stomach was churning. I wanted desperately to go to the toilet, but the special clothing I was wearing prevented that.

Strasser led us in. The place was unnaturally hot. It smelled of perfume, boiled sausage and other sourer scents I could not identify. Strasser apologised to Röhm and Hess for the state of the place. He had not thought it a good idea to get a woman in.

I sensed an odd silence about the room, as if we were attendant upon a recent death, a lying-in.

‘This is crazy,’ murmured Strasser. ‘It can’t work.’

‘Then come up with a better idea.’ Röhm, aggressive and impatient, was used to coming to decisions and then moving with them, like any soldier. ‘It’s worked before.’

‘But with a real girl. A particular girl.’

‘Believe me, Strasser,’ Röhm insisted. ‘It’s not a real girl he’s obsessed with. What have you told Alf about this?’

‘He doesn’t care. He’s spiralling down deeper every day. He’ll be completely catatonic at this rate. Like shell-shock. He and Hindenburg will make a perfect pair, each about as gaga as the other. The public will be spoiled for choice.’ Strasser spoke with a fierce edge to his voice, as if he himself were on the point of psychological collapse. ‘Meanwhile, the bastard’s draining the life and soul out of everyone.’

‘You didn’t tell him?’ Röhm indicated me.

‘I said there was someone coming to help him .. .’ Strasser looked me up and down once and turned away, nodding. ‘Well, I’ll admit the make-up’s convincing. Someone’s got a good memory.’

Röhm told me to put on the wig and the mask. He pulled the greatcoat off my shoulders. ‘A little masterpiece,’ he said.

Hess uttered a sudden burst of bovine amusement, as if the Minotaur had at last seen the funny side of things. I don’t believe he had any clear idea what was going on.

‘A dead ringer for our little canary,’ said Röhm.

Mrs Cornelius’s red lips curve in a smile of pure delight. She dreams of her happiest moments. Her great bosom lifts and falls; her hands are now as gnarled with arthritis as Röhm’s. They lie in her lap like the claws of a venerable bird of prey. We were never really predators, Mrs Cornelius and I. I am remembering my youth. I look down at my threadbare plaid shirt, my old cardigan, my grey flannel trousers, my dirty shoes. How is it that we so rarely see ourselves through our younger eyes? What would I have made of an old man like me? Would I have shown him respect, acknowledged his pride and his history? Or would I have mocked him as the young mock me now? They believe I am like them. That all I have to back my opinions is prejudice and ignorance. Yet I have stood shoulder to shoulder with great men in the face of unvanquishable evil - and have vanquished that evil. How many of these ‘bother boys’ can say the same?

I do not claim the experience left me unchanged.

Röhm went to get Father Stempfle out of the toilet. The priest had done all he could, he said. He was a hermit and needed privacy. He began to whine something about his fee. For a priest who had taken the vows of poverty and spent every waking hour talking of Jewish greed and rapacity, he had a very clear idea of his own financial worth. At the Bratwurstglockl they all said he was buying children from some slum dealer over in Cologne, but what he did with them, if anything, nobody really knew. Our normally tolerant, easygoing Stabschef had a genuine contempt for the man. Röhm said he’d had enough of Stempfle’s ‘finer feelings’. Stempfle’s future and everyone else’s depended upon kicking Hitler into some semblance of rational humanity for when they went to see the Reichspräsident on 10 October. It was up to party members to support any measure which would get the leader back at the helm. Anyone who didn’t use their fullest efforts was a traitor and would be treated like a traitor. He made a flicking motion with his thumb, as if to start a cigarette lighter. Stempfle had been at the Brown House often enough to know what that meant. Röhm told Stempfle to stop spluttering and run me through a couple of points again. The old lizard was shaking worse than I was by the time Strasser led us upstairs to the loft bedroom where Hitler slept.

He knocked on the door. A wet, enquiring noise came from the other side. Strasser seemed to think this was a good sign. ‘Ernst’s brought someone to see you, Alf.’

Strasser opened the door.

Röhm took me through. The place reeked of staleness and oriental perfumes. Joss sticks and scented candles were burning everywhere. In the far shadows was a small double bed with an old-fashioned canopy. Books and papers had been discarded one on top of the other. Ornaments and other objects lay in corners. Some of them were smashed, as if they had been flung against the wall.

‘Alf,’ says Röhm. ‘How’s tricks?’

‘Cup of tea, Ivan?’ Mrs Cornelius has woken up. She yawns and gusts. ‘Cor! Wot old age will do ter yer. Wot’s ther time? Me watch ‘as stopped.’

She rises from her chair to make the tea. I watch her moving like an old steamer, still graceful, still sturdy. She is well over seventy now.

I collect the dirty cups and follow her into the kitchen.

‘Look, Ivan.’

She is craning to peer through the basement window above the sink. At eye level it faces the tangle of weeds and overgrown shrubs she calls her garden. She strains until she can see the sky.

‘It’s brightenin’ up.’

Röhm went in first. He made a kind of crooning noise, as if to soothe a troubled dog. The sound was clearly familiar to the creature in the hidden depths of the bed. I heard a muffled response.

Röhm moved swiftly and lightly, like a soldier expertly making his way through no man’s land, until he was over there in the semi-darkness with his old friend, stroking his head, rocking it against his lap. The queer pathos of the scene aroused the most profound and unexpected feelings in me. I understood Röhm’s instinct to comfort and nurture the drooling, unlovely thing on the bed and was actually disgusted by my own tenderness.

The eyes turned towards me. I saw no change in them, no pain or warmth or desire which might inspire my feelings. Instead, something in the set of the head, the movement of the mouth, the turn of the wrist, a kind of mimicry of real emotions, were as successful at involving me as if they had been real. Instinctively, like a great screen actor, Hitler was able to arouse in me real concern and pity. I do not believe he was at all conscious of what he did. I think I understood him. It scarcely mattered to his artist’s soul if the feelings he inspired were inappropriate or even false. To inspire the feelings was sufficient. (An artist with the soul of a gangster, Major Nye thought.) Only incidentally did this bedridden creature exploit its own condition. Of course I had been completely unprepared for this. I felt faint in that airless room. I marshalled my emotions. I had relied on my panic and my terror getting me through the ordeal, but I could see how these unexpected responses might also help. In some amazement I found myself entering into the mood. Röhm looked up and nodded to me. Tentatively and a little unsteadily I moved slowly towards them.

‘Here she is, Alfy,’ whispered Röhm. ‘Here she is.’

Hitler’s pale, bloodshot eyes shifted from my mask to my legs to my panties, my crotch. His skin was a mottled silvery white illuminated with the deliquescence of a corpse. The familiar face, so stern and confident in his pictures, was puffed and lined with exhaustion. I noticed gelatinous moisture on his head and arms. The eyes remained a yearning vacuum, the eyes of an unfed incubus. I recoiled and then recovered. I made a sympathetic feminine sound. Once this was over, I reminded myself, I would be free. I was sick of fantasy. I would go to England, collect the money waiting for me, and resume my life.

Hitler spoke. His voice was a reedy vibrato, the voice of a sick child. ‘Wer ist es?’

‘Your friend,’ murmured Röhm. ’Deine Freundin.’

I held the dog whip like a sword as I drew a deep breath of the hellish atmosphere.

‘Dein Engel.’

I composed a smile.

‘Your angel.’