you are wrong, my friend. Such a man can be swayed by the truth when it threatens everything he has worked for.’
‘So we are trying to protect Herr Hitler, then?’
‘We are protecting no one,’ the Chief Inspector said, ‘except Bavaria herself.’
‘Did you give him the letter?’ the girl asks.
He feels a tension in his shoulders that he hasn’t felt in forty years. The memory of that conversation terrifies him, although he was not afraid at the time.
In those days, he had known Hitler as a common, brutish politician: a small, loud Austrian who had managed to convince thugs and a few people in power to follow him.
Fritz had no idea what Hitler would become, what he was transforming into, even as the case unfolded. If he had known then what he learned later, he would not have pursued the case at all, despite the pressures put on him.
He would have politely declined, and faced the consequences.
‘What?’ Fritz asks the girl.
‘The Chief Inspector. Did you give him the letter?’ She is caught in the story now. She has stopped writing as he speaks, her notebook upside down and forgotten on the ground. She looks at her recorder only when it clicks and stops. He is relieved about that. He has chosen the right person after all.
Fritz holds up one finger, then pushes himself out of the chair.He no longer cares if she sees the ripped back, the mottled brown stuffing, the ruined spring. She is seeing inside his life now. He can hide nothing from her if she is to understand.
As he walks into the bedroom, he hears a faint click. She has finally remembered to pause her recorder. He smiles.
The bedroom is dark. He still makes his bed military fashion, the corners precise, the blanket smooth and untouched. The room shows an obsessive neatness not reflected in the front room. His clothes hang in his closet, shirts arranged by sleeve length, suitcoats by age. The colours are all the same: blacks and whites. Only his First World War uniform tucked in the very back adds colour to the wardrobe. His police uniform and his undercover clothes are in the footlocker behind the shoes. He avoids it and instead pulls out a box of mildewing cardboard. He has not opened it in years, and he resists the urge to sit on his haunches and look through the memories.
Instead, he reaches inside and removes a cigar box sealed with brittle, yellow tape. He tucks the box under his arm and returns to the living room.
She is picking the edges off a pastry, avoiding the frosting and eating only the cake. She is studying her hands, but he caught the nervous glance she shot at the bedroom just before he came back. He returns to his chair, sets the box on his lap and slits the tape with his thumbnail. The lid flops open, flimsy with age. A pile of letters, still in their envelopes, line one side. He reaches to the bottom of the pile, to the only letter not in an envelope. The paper is still crinkled. The ink has faded, but Gürtner’s signature is clear. He puts the box on the floor and hands the letter to her.
‘My God.’ Her hands shake as she takes the letter from him. ‘My God.’
She stares at it for a moment, rereading it, realising (probably) that he can quote it from memory. This has been only a story to her until this moment. Now, though, she knows. She knows he tells her the truth. He can see it in her eyes, in her shaking hands. She looks at him over the paper’s edge.
‘May I take this with me?’ she asks.
‘No,’ he says, unwilling, even forty years later to part with evidence. ‘But you may photograph it here.’
She nods and, after a moment, hands the paper back to him. He folds it carefully and returns it to the bottom of the cigar box. She scribbles in her notebook, then adds a series of exclamation points. It irritates him that she writes her notes in English. If she wrote in German, he could read it upside down.
‘Is there more in the box?’ she asks.
He resists the urge to pick it up and clutch it to his
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