The Seventh Secret (50 page)

She stood chilled, as realization of her own loss en-gulfed her. At once, she knew what must be done, should be done, and she remembered how it could be done.

Remembering, she straightened her shoulders, stood erect in the darkness.

Her husband had always insisted that he would not be trapped alive by his barbaric conquerors and paraded about as an exhibit. "
Tschapperl
. . . little thing," he had told her once, "if we're captured, we will be put in cages and hung up in the Moscow zoo." Indeed, through his foresight and cleverness, he had eluded his avengers. Afterward, in their hideout, reading of the Nuremberg trials, he had always deplored those weak-lings who had cooperated with the spectacle. Strangely, the one of the group that he had hated as a betrayer near the end had been the one he had come to admire, Hermann Göring. The fat man had shown bravery, and true loyalty, by escaping the noose and by having the courage to take his own life at Nuremberg.

Now Eva was applying her husband's belief to what would undoubtedly soon happen below.

In a day or two, the killers would go down there. They would clear out the lethal gas, and find dozens of pitiful corpses and remove them. Then they would have everything else as their trophies of the unending war. They would have her husband's precious remains rest-ing in the urn. They would have his mementos of a great life lived. They would have her long-kept journals, her secrets, and the truth that would lead them to Klara.

They would have their history to revise.

They would have their spectacle.

Now it came to her, the steps that her husband had taken to prevent such a demeaning occurrence.

Yes, in their last week in the old
Führerbunker
he had told her about the two secret levers. They were twin levers and each had heavy-duty wiring that led inside the hidden bunker. One lever could be activated from the lower level of the
Führerbunker
, the other from a spot in what had become the Café Wolf. Either one, activated, could release a detonation charge inside their underground home and blow it to bits.

But now, Eva realized, with all that gas filling their hidden bunker, an explosion and fire would be devastating beyond belief. The explosion would obliterate everything below.

Her husband's logic in laying out this destructive device had been simple. If the Russians came to the Führer bunker too soon, there would be time enough to destroy their underground haven so that the world would never know that he had intended to escape capture. With the escape bunker demolished, he and Eva could heroically take their own lives before falling into the grasp of the enemy. As to the twin back-up lever inside the Café
 
Wolf, it would serve a similar purpose if their escape succeeded. For if their hideout was ever discovered in the years after the escape, he could still have their haven obliterated, and themselves as well.

He would never allow a spectacle.

Nor would she, she told herself now. That was all that mattered. To obey his wishes.

The lever in the Café
 
Wolf was out of reach.

But the lever in the
Führerbunker,
far below, had never been discovered, she knew, so it could still be workable.

Her husband had shown it to her once near the very end of the war. He'd had an army electrician install it, and then had the electrician liquidated. Where had she seen this emergency lever forty years ago? She concentrated hard while reviving her memory of that day, those moments.

Yes, it had been down in the lower bunker, in Johannes Hentschel's cubbyhole, the engineer's room with its diesel motor that had provided them with air, water, electricity. When Hentschel had been asleep, her husband had taken her into the engineer's room, across the corridor from her bedroom.

"There are two important things for you to see, Effie," her husband had told her. "Here, above this counter, is the
Notbremse
—the emergency brake. If there is an assassination attempt on me, you pull this up. It -will black out this bunker and seal every door. But there is something even more important for you to know. Under the floor." He had tugged a concrete block out of the floor and pointed to a red switch. "That is the special lever that can activate a charge of cyclonite that will blow up and destroy our secret bunker, if ever it must be done. Remember, Effie, remember this." Then, petulantly, he had added, "I must always think of everything. "

Over the bridge of years, she remembered it exactly, as if she had just been shown it.

At once she sought and found the concrete stairs leading down to the lower Führer bunker. She did not really need the light. She could have managed the descent in the darkness or blindfolded, since she had made it so many times in those last weeks here, still so vivid in her memory.

As quickly as possible she picked her way down to the bottom. Flashlight in hand, she proceeded up the rotting and moist middle corridor, ignoring her suite, their suite, going straight ahead. Then she slowed, recalling once more the location of Hentschel's cubbyhole.

Her flashlight glared into the cramped small room, and she knew that this must be it. She went down on her knees, holding the flashlight in one hand, as her fingers clawed at the chipped and dirty concrete block. She broke one fingernail, then two, tugging at it, and at last the block gave and came upward.

She pointed her flashlight inside the hole, and there, dry, uncorroded, was the red switch, the special lever.

Without hesitation, she bent over, gripped the lever and yanked hard at it. It moved, and she pulled harder. There was a click, and she knew the system was alive and was now activated.

In two minutes it should take effect.

Holding her flashlight, she jumped to her feet, spun back into the corridor, and headed for the stairs. She went as fast as she could flight by flight up to the top.

She had just arrived inside the emergency exit when she heard the rumbling of the earth outside. She had stumbled to the exit opening when the explosion detonated the gas far below. The earth many meters before her and off toward the Wall and beyond it erupted as if a mammoth volcano had blown its top. A sheet of fire, a curtain of red, appearing a thousand feet high, reached for the sky. The roar of the explosion echoed and reechoed, a hundred times greater than the blast of the Russian artillery and Allied aerial bombardments she had listened to in the last weeks of the war.

In the Frontier Zone and in West Berlin far away there was a wild inferno.

The air before her was black with clouds of smoke and showers of dirt and debris, and she turned her head aside to protect her eyes.

For a long time she shielded her sight and waited. But her heart was beating joyously.

Don't worry, my darling, she told him, no spectacle, not now or ever.

Only when she heard the distant sirens did she venture into the open. The heaven was a fiery red blanket above. The debris and dust were gradually settling, and she discarded the flashlight and tried to see through the gray mass. Then she saw what she wanted to see and headed toward it.

When she neared the shattered section of the Berlin Wall, there was an opening in it wide enough to go through with a tank battalion.

Eva stood there triumphantly examining the breach.

Once more, she realized, she was the Merry Widow. All her friends and the remains of her beloved one wiped out and only rubble beneath in the endless rent in the earth. The Merry Widow, yes, widow, yes, but she knew that she was not alone.

She walked straight ahead, out of the East German Security Zone, toward the break in what had once been the fearsome Wall, and she walked into West Berlin.

The sirens were louder.

Eva Braun kept walking.

W
hen the door to the apartment on Knesebeckstrasse opened, Eva was relieved to see that it had been opened by Liesl from her wheelchair.

As Eva staggered inside, Liesl stared at her with bewilderment. "Eva," Liesl gasped, "what are you doing here at this hour? My God, look at you . . ."

Eva had forgotten how begrimed she was, and she ignored it now. Bending over Liesl, she whispered fiercely, "They found us out, they destroyed our place—."

"They—they—?"

"The foreigners who were searching for us."

"But how?"

"Never mind. Everyone else is lost. I managed to escape. Now we must all leave before they find us."

"Leave?"

"Not lose a minute. I have a taxi downstairs waiting. I had a few marks in my pocket. The taxi will take us to the Bahnhof. Can you make it to your feet?"

"With my cane, I'll be all right." Liesl hesitated. "Eva, are you sure?"

"They'll come for us, I'm certain. We must not be here."

"But Schmidt? Where is he?"

"He's dead. They went after him. Now it's us." Eva surveyed the living room. "Klara, where's Klara? And Franz, is he here?"

"He left for the school early. Klara is in the kitchen preparing breakfast for me." Liesl trembled. "Klara, what can we do with her?"

Without hesitation, Eva said, "She must come with us. Immediately."

"She'll refuse. She won't understand."

"She'll be made to understand. We'll tell her the truth."

"Eva, how can we?"

"We must. There's no choice. We must tell her and all of us must leave."

Liesl seemed to pull herself together. "All right. But—but it would be better if I am the one to tell her. Let me go into the kitchen. I can't imagine what the shock will do to her—"

"It must be done, Liesl."

"I was always afraid of this. But yes, it must be done."

Eva looked off toward the kitchen. "I can do it."

"Please let me, let me do it first," insisted Liesl, maneuvering her wheelchair around. "You go to my bedroom. Start packing for us."

"There will be no packing," said Eva. "Only a small bag for the money. You still have the money?"

"All of it, yes. In my bottom drawer with the passports."

"That's what we need. We can buy anything else when we get to where we're going. You're sure you can manage Klara?"

"I—I don't know."

Eva watched the old woman roll her wheelchair toward the kitchen. Then, purposefully, Eva left the living room and strode into the hall, past the Fiebigs' bedroom, into Liesl's bedroom.

Glancing at the bedside clock, she made for the closet. There she found a small overnight bag on the upper shelf, brought it down, tossed it on the unmade bed. She unlatched it, lifted the lid. With that done, she went to the dresser and drew out the bottom drawer. Beneath the sweaters were the boxes of currency. She began to transfer them to the bag. When the bag was filled, she closed and locked it.

Doing so, she heard a shrill cry, then a keening sound from a distant room, the kitchen.

Eva's eyes sought the clock. Only a few minutes had passed. As she took the bag off the bed she heard footsteps, and quickly wheeled to see a wild-eyed, distraught Klara in the doorway.

For a moment Eva felt compassion and pity. "Klara, I'm sorry, very sorry—"

Klara's voice was strained. "This is a joke, isn't it, a cruel and sick joke?"

"It's the truth, darling. . ." Eva started for her daughter, wanting to embrace her, but Klara backed away. "You're not my mother. You can't be. I don't believe it.

"I am your mother," Eva said steadily. "And he was your father."

"No, never! You're a crazy person! None of this is true!"

"It's true, Klara, darling. I am your mother, and he was your father."

"Never in a million years!" Klara screamed. "Not that monster—I"

Eva was across the room in an instant, hand up-raised. She slapped Klara hard. "Don't you dare!" she shouted. "I won't have you speak of him that way! Not now or ever!"

Klara burst into tears, convulsed, shoulders heaving.

There was no time to straighten out the child now, or to console her over the shock. There was only time for strength. He would have wanted it.

"Klara," she said firmly. "We must go now. We must not be found."