Hitler's Niece by Ron Hansen

out what he was plotting, and he made so much sense to me that within a few days I joined the party. Others here are doing the same.”
    When they got to cell 7, the guard unlocked the door, hollered “Heil Hitler!” and kissed Angela’s and Geli’s hands in good-bye, just as it was Hitler’s habit to do.
    They heard Hitler talking when they walked inside, but he was behind a closed door. Angela was surprised to find that the cell was like a white-walled gentleman’s club and filled with so much food it looked like a fancy delicatessen. Well-wishers from all over Germany had mailed Hitler fruit baskets, homemade strudel and tortes and cakes, Rhein and Mosel wines, Westphalian hams, brown rings of sausage and salami, Andechs and Franziskaner beer. Angela lifted off her veiled hat as she went to a four-paned window of old glass and iron bars and saw a fine but wrinkled view of frosted trees along the Lech River and a garden on the first floor. An old Remington typewriter was on a walnut secretary against one wall, and a ream of white bond paper was beside it, patiently waiting for words; the four chairs were made of cane and rattan, and a bookcase held works by Bismarck, Nietzsche, Ranke, Treitschke, and Marx. A crown formed with sprigs of green laurel leaves was tacked onto one wall, and on the floor was an old front page of the London Times , obliterated with Hitler’s offended comments and juvenile caricatures of Jewish faces. One of the Landsberg prisoners knew English, Angela saw, for he’d translated into German a journalist’s opinion that “the Hitler trial has proved that a plot against the Constitution of the Reich is not considered a serious crime in Bavaria”—about which the prisoner offered a fairly obvious and vulgar joke on the constitution of the queen. With time on their hands , Angela thought, men turn into boys . She heard her daughter say, “What a lot of loot!” and she turned.
    Geli, too, was now hatless. She’d tucked a pink sugarcane in her cheek as she held a mandolin she’d found and strummed a chord with a plectrum. “We have been far too law-abiding, Mother.”
    “Are you thinking we ought to trade places?”
    “Aren’t you?”
    Angela said, “We’d be in a tailor shop here. We’d be doing dishes. Adolf has always had a way of getting extra consideration.”
    A tall, fierce, officious man in loden-green hiking clothes looked out from the room where Hitler was talking. “You are the Raubals?”
    “Yes.”
    Angela briefly saw Adolf holding forth before the man softly shut the door behind him. He held out his hand to her. “Herr Rudolf Hess,” he said. “His personal secretary.” He shook her hand hard once while formally bowing. And then he did the same to Geli.
    They felt like Prussian officers just in from the front. They both gave their first names.
    “The leader is conferring with Count Rudinski,” Hess said, as if they’d surely know the name. “Won’t you please sit?”
    They did, as did he, effeminately crossing his legs at his thighs but holding himself firmly upright with an air of stiff-backed confidence, his square-jawed head tilted high. His hairline was receding, but his black hair flowed back from his forehead in waves that women got by marcelling theirs with hot irons. Angela had never seen eyebrows that were so much like heavy objects, that so darkly shaded his deep eyesockets that his irises were as obscured as brown pebbles dropped in snow. His mouth was a wide, thin line and tightly shut in order to hide the buckteeth and overbite that stole from him the look of high intellect he wanted. Ill at ease with their silence, he offered, “Would you like some food?”
    “Shall we hire a truck?” Angela asked.
    Geli giggled behind her hand.
    Hess faintly smiled, as though he’d missed the humor, and then he lifted and seemed to weigh a Thüringer cervelat in his hand. “We get these gifts, and I know we aren’t finished. The party is forbidden in