The Seventh Secret (37 page)

Foster found the address and the house he sought in the middle of the block, and parked in front of it. It was, he could see, a small white stucco bungalow with a tile roof. It was enclosed by a weathered wooden fence, which protected the modest lawn and two pine trees overhanging the bungalow's porch. This was the residence of Leo Oberstadt, onetime Nazi slave laborer.

The dashboard clock of the Audi told Foster that he was ten minutes early for his appointment, and he sat back in the car to enjoy a pipeful of tobacco and to review the events of the morning.

He had been awakened this morning by the movement and softness of Emily's body against his. Feeling her lips on his cheek and then on his mouth, he had heard her whisper, "Rex, are you awake? I've missed you. I missed having you last night. It seems like a million years."

"It is a million years."

"I love you, Rex."

He had taken her in his arms, caressing her, smothering her with kisses, wanting to consume her. Gradually, her sighing had become a throaty moaning.

They had made love, tenderly, sweetly, slowly, until the fire caught them both and intensity grew, engulfing them, consuming them both.

It had been wonderful, like a long-desired homecoming, and he had known that it was a union he would cherish and remember forever.

When they had finished making love, he had not been surprised that his skin and hers were wet with the perspiration of pleasure. He had then led her from the bed into the bathroom. Turning on the shower, letting the water run warm, he had drawn her under the spray. They had studiously soaped each other's backs and when the froth of soap had been washed away by the water, they had stepped out onto the oval bathmat, and with care they had dried each other.

Leaving her to dress, Foster had gone into the bedroom to order from room service. Presently, they'd had breakfast together. Just as they finished, the phone had begun ringing. Emily had taken it, and the caller proved to be Andrew Oberstadt. Emily had reassured him that she had obtained permission for the nighttime excavation. Then, eyes on Foster, Emily had inquired once more about Oberstadt's father and his role as a foreman of slave laborers. After that had been confirmed, Emily had spoken of Rex's desire to meet with the elder Oberstadt. Fifteen minutes later, Andrew Oberstadt had called back, and Emily cheerfully announced to Foster, "You've got it, Rex, the appointment with Leo Oberstadt. Ten-thirty this morning."

Now the dashboard clock told Foster that it was ten-thirty and time to see Leo Oberstadt. Leaving the car, he unlatched the fence gate, went up the narrow walk to the door, and pressed the bell.

Seconds later a fat woman in a flowered caftan, with a kindly face, faint mustache, and two chins, filled the doorway. Foster identified himself and was immediately admitted.

He heard a querulous, raspy voice call out from an adjacent room, "Hilda, who is it?"

"Your American visitor, Herr Oberstadt," Hilda called back.

"Show him in, show him in!"

Hilda led Foster into an old-fashioned, musty living room. There were doilies everywhere and the television set was blaring. Not until he saw his host shake a cane, and order Hilda to shut off the television and to serve them each a cold beer, was Foster able to locate Leo Oberstadt. His host was propped up in the corner of a sofa, a metal walker beside him. Foster had been told to expect an invalid, and had imagined someone ravaged and withered. Actually, the elder Oberstadt was a large-framed man, probably once muscular, with immobile legs.

"You are the American architect Foster?" Leo Oberstadt's voice scratched out as if it were an accusation.

"I am, sir, and really pleased you could see me."

The elder Oberstadt tapped the other end of the sofa with his cane. "Sit down, young man, sit down." As Foster seated himself, his host went on. "You are a friend of the British lady my son works for?"

"I am."

"You know the foolishness she is engaged in? She wants to dig into the buried
Führerbunker
and find Adolf."

"Yes, I know, and it may not be foolishness, sir."

The old man took out a handkerchief, hawked into it, and ignored Foster's reply as he went on. "Last night my son brought me the original plan of the Führer-bunker. I studied the plan and gave him my advice." His sardonic eyes fixed on Foster. "You are acquainted with the ratpack's last bunker?"

"I think so."

"Of course. You are the American architect wasting your time doing a picture book about the Third Reich buildings and bunkers. All right, let's see what you know." He lifted a rolled-up diagram beside him, pulled off the rubber band, and displayed the plan of the
Führerbunker
for Foster. "Show me what you would do to get down to Hitler's suite without taking forever."

Foster bent over to examine the plan, although by now he felt that he knew it by heart. After a few moments, he spoke up. "First, let's remember this bunker was built of reinforced concrete. It had to be to protect its occupants from artillery shells and bombs. Therefore, no matter what the Soviets did—bulldozed it, maybe even blew up parts of it—I suspect the lower level of the bunker is still largely intact. With this in mind, I think the easiest and fastest way to get into it would be to start digging on the side where the one upper emergency exit existed. This should lead to four flights of concrete steps that go down to the central corridor. I'd guess those steps are still there. If they are, it might require no more than a few days of digging and shoring up to get below to Hitler's rooms.' He raised his head. "That's how I'd go about it, sir."

Leo Oberstadt's eyes held on Foster with a glint of approval. "You're a smart young fellow," he said. "Exactly what I advised my son last night, although he had the same idea. That's how he is going to go about the excavation. It should work, if anything will." He pulled back the
Führerbunker
plan and rolled it up. "All right, young man. Now we can talk. My son told me this morning you want to meet a former slave laborer."

"Yes, sir. I have a few questions I need answered."

"Maybe you've come to the right party," said Leo Oberstadt. "There are not many of us around. We're a small club. I am one of the few surviving veterans responsible for building most of Hitler's ratholes. You want to know how I became a slave laborer under the efficient Third Reich?"

In a relentless, rasping monotone, Leo Oberstadt recounted his story. Foster listened, fascinated at how Oberstadt's reliving of the past made it come alive in the present.

Leo Oberstadt's father had been part Jewish, part Lutheran, and his mother had been Jewish. He himself was in his twenties, a civil engineer and a partner in the family's modest construction business, when the Second World War broke out. Hitler's conquest of Europe was well underway when Leo's parents' religious origin was discovered. His mother, father, and he were arrested and thrown into a concentration camp. Within a month, his parents were sent off to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. "I never saw them again. I also was slated for extermination in Auschwitz, and had already been ordered into the death chamber, when a Nazi officer—an SS doctor—noticed my powerful shoulders, and chest, and biceps, and yanked me out of line. A directive had just come through from Albert Speer. Hitler wanted able-bodied young men from the KZ Häftlinge—Kon-zentrationslagers Häftlinge—concentration camp prisoners—Jews, Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, gypsies—to serve as slave laborers who could construct a series of underground bunkers throughout Germany."

Leo Oberstadt toiled as a slave laborer on two subterranean bunkers outside Berlin—backbreaking, sweaty, inhuman work with hundreds of other prisoners---when it was learned that he was actually a civil engineer with experience in his father's business. After that he was elevated to serving as a construction foreman, forced to take orders from Nazi guards and give orders to his fellow prisoners.

When their last job was almost complete, perhaps two months before the war ended, all of Leo's fellow slave laborers were led away to be liquidated. Leo alone, as their foreman, was allowed to stay alive the final two months to supervise the construction of rooms, offices, technical facilities in this last bunker. All the actual labor was done by young and fanatical members of the Hitler Youth. At no time before this construction began, or during his two-month imprisonment in the partially completed bunker, did Leo have the faintest notion as to where in Germany it was located. He had been brought to the job in the beginning blindfolded, and each night he was led away from the bunker site blindfolded until that last two months.

Then one morning he was blindfolded again and thrown into the back of an army truck by SS troopers. He could hear heavy cannonading all about him. He was being driven off somewhere, and he sensed he was to be executed, but his eyes were covered and his wrists were bound and he was helpless.

After a slow roundabout drive—a drive that took what he guessed to be at least twenty minutes—Leo heard one of the guards shout, "Get rid of him here! Let's beat it before we're ambushed!"

Roughly lifted to his feet, Leo felt himself being shoved and pushed, until he was heaved off the truck to the pavement below. As he landed in the street, momentarily stunned, his blindfold fell off. He could see the German truck starting to wheel away as three of the SS troopers in the rear aimed their rifles at him.

Frantically, Leo flung himself on his face, trying to avoid execution. But as the shots rang out, and he fell, one bullet caught him low in the back. He flattened out, was about to lose consciousness, when he saw before him a Soviet company of Red Army soldiers and three tanks break out of a onetime wooded area—now rubble-strewn, filled with stumps—and begin firing over him at the fleeing German truck. He thought that he heard the truck blow up, and then he sank into darkness.

"I woke up in a Russian field hospital," Leo Oberstadt recalled painfully. "Surgery saved me, although I lost most of the use of my left leg. Eventually, when my background became known, I was released. I revived my father's old construction company. I married. I had a son. I worked hard. My business prospered during the rebuilding of Berlin. About five years ago, I lost the use of my other leg and had to retire." He fell silent, and picked up the stein of beer that had been served. He drank, licked his lips, and said, "Now, Mr. Foster, what can I do for you?"

"I'll tell you exactly," said Foster. He spoke of his architectural book once more, and of the seven missing pieces, all underground headquarters bunkers inside West Germany. He told of the six he had found through Zeidler, each of their locations identified, and of the seventh bunker he had recovered from Spandau Prison. "I've located six bunkers. It's the seventh one, the only one Zeidler did for Hitler that bears no site identification, that I must know about. It is the largest of the bunkers, by far, and Zeidler thought that a laborer who worked on it might recognize it by its dimensions."

"Let me see," said the elder Oberstadt.

Foster tugged the folded plan of the seventh bunker from his jacket pocket, opened it, and handed it across the sofa to his host.

Leo Oberstadt sipped his beer and examined the plan. "You are right," he rasped, "a big one, a very big one. And—very familiar."

"You recognize it?" Foster asked eagerly.

The elder Oberstadt nodded.

"What we have here is the last bunker I worked on before they took me out to shoot me." He handed back the plan. "In fact, I'm certain this is the one."

"But where was it built?"

Leo Oberstadt looked at Foster with surprise. "Where was it built?" he repeated. "Why, I already told you. In Berlin, of course."

"How can you be sure? You were underground most of the time, and then you were blindfolded."

The old man shook his head slowly. "No, not all of the time, and not always blindfolded. I told you that they took me out of the bunker with my eyes covered to shoot me. They drove me what seemed to be twenty minutes away—it could have been only ten minutes away as the crow flies, but they had to go around the rubble—before they realized that they were about to be attacked by the Russians coming out of the devastated woods area. So they dumped me and tried to run and failed. "

Foster seized on the last. "The Russians coming out of the woods area? What woods?"

"Why out of the
Tiergarten
, of course. Today, it once again is one of the loveliest sites we have in Berlin. A short walk from what was then Hitler's Chancellery and the
Führerbunker
. Somewhere
near
there, I am sure, this seventh bunker was built."

I
t surprised Nicholas Kirvov that, although it was still morning, he was so weary. He sat lumpily at the metal outdoor terrace table of something called Delphi's
Taverna
, and nursed his cup of dark tea. He stared across the terrace into the thoroughfare named Kantstrasse, and thought what a high-flown name it was for a street that was so low-down and second-rate. From the Esso gasoline station at the corner to the sex shop without windows but with provocative posters mounted beside it there were only cheap, nondescript stores. He could not imagine what kind of art gallery would be located in this block, but his list promised him there was one, the Tisher Gallery, probably no more than another half block away, and he had vowed to overlook no art gallery in central Berlin.