Prisoner of Night and Fog by Anne Blankman Page B

had Kurt and his companion meant? Reinhard was an SA street tough, the sort that Uncle Dolf depended on to provide protection during speeches and muscle during fights. Hardly the type to get asked to do anything important for the Party.
    And insulting her father . . . She had reached the third floor. The corridor was deserted, so she closed her eyes and counted—another of Uncle Dolf’s old calming tricks. They hadn’t known Papa. They could be forgiven for their ugly comments. Steadier, she continued along the corridor.
    She rapped on Herr Hanfstaengl’s door. A brusque “Come in!” summoned her into the tiny office.
    Hanfstaengl was hanging up a telephone receiver, his massive frame contorted to fit behind the small desk. He looked like an adult forced to use child-sized furniture. Impatience jutted out his jaw in the expression she recognized after seeing it so many times over the years. “You’re a clever girl, Gretchen, and I shan’t waste your time.” He started to pace. “I have nothing for you to do. There’s no end of work in this confounded office, but Herr Hitler won’t let me get anything accomplished!”
    He aimed a swift kick at the wastebasket. Unsure whether to laugh or back away, Gretchen decided the wisest thing to do was nothing.
    “He sticks me in this small office on the third floor so foreign correspondents must wander about this whole place, searching for me and stumbling across God-knows-what information we’re trying to suppress in the meantime.” Hanfstaengl threw up his ham-sized hands. “It’s all I can do to convince him to be interviewed for a foreign paper, and most of the time he doesn’t show up for the reporter, and I have to search the whole city until I find him looking at used cars or holding court at Café Heck.
    “Don’t look so alarmed, child,” he continued, curling into his desk chair. “Sit down, and we shall find something you can do.”
    “If this is an inconvenience, Herr Hanfstaengl, I can find a position elsewhere.”
    “Of course it’s an inconvenience, and no, you certainly can’t find a job elsewhere. Why, I can’t get a full-time position in my own family’s art reproduction business; that’s the sort of desperate straits Germany is in. We all must go begging these days.” He smiled, although there was anger in it. “How’s your mother?” he asked so abruptly it took her a second to answer.
    “She’s well, Herr Hanfstaengl. She thanks you very much for the job.”
    “Liesel’s a fine woman. I must tell my wife to call on her soon. They got on famously in the old days.”
    The old days  . . . Those three words were enough to pull up the past before Gretchen. Once again she was a little girl, sitting on the parlor floor of their shabby apartment in the Schwabing district while her mother and Hanfstaengl’s elegant American wife sipped tea and chatted about poetry and art, and Reinhard played toy soldiers with the Hanfstaengls’ toddler, Egon. Snow swirled past the window, and somewhere, out in the white-blanketed city, her father and Herr Hanfstaengl sat in a beer hall, stamping their feet to keep warm and cheering as Uncle Dolf took the podium.
    A lump lodged in her throat. “It all seems so long ago.”
    “Yes.” He spoke softly, and she guessed he was remembering his little daughter Hertha, dead two years now. She thought of her father’s grave, the tiny stone square that said so little: KLAUS MÜLLER 17 SEPTEMBER 1892—9 NOVEMBER 1923. It said nothing about the fact that he had been a husband, a father, a gifted shoemaker, a soldier.
    “Herr Hanfstaengl,” she said, “what do you know about my father’s death? I mean,” she added when his eyebrows drew down in surprise, “I know he was a hero, but no one has ever told me very much about what happened. And now that I’m older, I’d like to know.”
    “It isn’t a pleasant story,” he warned. Concern lined his long face. “And I don’t know all the