Templar's Quest

56

Oberkampf Neighbourhood, Paris

1942 hours

Stepping out of the bathroom, Dolf Reinhardt glanced at his watch.

Scheisse! He was scheduled to go back on duty in forty-five minutes. Striding over to the wardrobe, he pulled a freshly laundered shirt off the hanger.

A few minutes later, dressed in his chauffeur’s uniform, Dolf grabbed the black cap and jammed it on his head. He despised the ridiculous hat, but Herr Doktor Uhlemann insisted that he wear it.

Ready to leave, he quickly strode down the dingy hallway to the second bedroom.

‘Hello, Mutter.’ He wrinkled his nose at the faint scent of dried urine and sour perspiration.

The grey-haired woman who sat at the window didn’t acknowledge the greeting. She never did. Diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, his mother had withdrawn into a non-verbal state. Day in, day out, she sat beside the window staring at the Paris rooftops, a blank, slack-jawed expression on her face. Dolf didn’t have the money to put her in a nursing facility and the one time he’d hired a health-care worker, he’d come home and found the aide yelling at his mother. He nearly killed the bitch on the spot.

While he loved his mother with all his heart, a part of him deeply resented that she’d become such a burden. The daily monotony of cleaning her foul bed pans and soiled bed sheets was grinding him down. Of late, he kept wishing that she’d hurry up and die. If she could carry on a minimal conversation, the situation would be easier to withstand. But living with a silent, frail ghost was becoming unbearable. A strange type of hell in which they shared the same space and yet she was unaware of his existence.

In a hurry, he stepped over to the dresser and retrieved a green plastic prescription bottle from the top drawer.

‘Time for your medicine,’ he told his mother, gently inserting a capsule between her lips. Grabbing the water glass from the nearby table, he finagled the straw into her mouth. ‘Take a sip, Mother.’

Never taking her gaze from the window, his mother sucked a bit of water through the straw. Dolf returned the glass to the table then pried open his mother’s mouth to make certain that she’d swallowed the sleeping pill. He next checked the restraints on her wrists. To keep her from wandering off, he was forced to strap her into the chair whenever he left the flat.

Bending down, he kissed his mother on the cheek, making a mental note to give her a sponge bath in the morning. ‘I’ll be back later this evening.’

It was the same one-sided conversation that they had each and every night.

As he turned to leave, Dolf glanced at the framed picture hanging on the wall next to his mother’s chair. The faded photograph, published in a 1943 edition of the Völkische Beobachter newspaper, was of a six-year-old girl with long blonde braids attired in a traditional dirndl dress. Arms extended, she offered the Führer a slice of freshly baked black bread on an ornately carved wooden platter. Taken during Walpurgisnacht, the pagan spring festival when bonfires burned bright to lure witches from their covens, the photograph had captured the hearts and souls of the German people. Enthralled by the sight of their Führer with such a lovely child, households across the Reich framed the photograph and hung it alongside their cherished family portraits.

An overnight celebrity, his mother, Hedwig Krueger, became known to an entire generation as ‘the Führer’s Little Handmaid’.

Before she lapsed into a demented state of mind, his mother often spoke of that long ago May day, fondly recalling how the Führer, his piercing eyes as blue as the lake waters at Königsee, pinched her cheek and squeezed her shoulder, thanking her profusely for the slice of schwarzbrot.

Dolf stared at the photograph for a few more seconds before turning to leave.

When he was a young boy and his mother would tuck him in at night, she used to always tell him that good things come to those who wait.

At thirty-seven years of age, Dolf Reinhardt was tired of waiting.