The Seventh Secret by Irving Wallace

star in Hollywood after the trouble was over. That had been long ago. No matter. Now, at seventy-three, -she decided, she still cut an imposing figure. She had bent very little to the passage of time, was still of erect bearing and trim, her hair dyed brown now, her face crisscrossed with tiny- wrinkles now, but not too badly for an older woman. Her mind and memory were as sharp as ever. Only her walk had given in to the years. It had become slower, more tentative, her breath shorter.
    So now the routine.
    Evelyn Hoffmann moved away from the Café window and went to the narrow shop next door bearing a sign over the entrance that read KONDITOREI. She waited her turn, and then had a box filled with fresh Nusskuchen and had it wrapped with a ribbon to resemble a gift.
    Leaving the shop, she walked slowly across the street, purse in one hand and the box of cakes in the other, to Askanischer Platz, halting briefly on Schöneberger Strasse to buy today's copy of the Berliner Morgenpost . Seeing that it was sold out, she settled for the tabloid BZ—the Berliner Zeitung —which she rarely read, and took her place in the bus shelter to await the approaching number 29 bus that would bring her to the Ku'damm in twenty minutes.
    On the bus, she began scanning her BZ. The lead photograph and story reported that the American cowboy president had dispatched more nuclear missiles to West Germany, their warheads to be aimed at the Soviet Union. This satisfied her, since she hated the Russians even more than the Americans. As the bus rumbled along, Evelyn absently leafed through her paper. A lesser headline caught her attention, and she noted that the first paragraph beneath it was datelined London:
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A British publishing house, Ryan and Maxwell, Ltd., announced yesterday that it was going ahead with plans to bring out the long-discussed biography of Adolf Hitler, Herr Hitler , authored by Sir Harrison Ashcroft and his daughter Emily Ashcroft, of Oxford. There had been some question about the future of the unfinished book when Dr. Ashcroft, pursuing his research on Hitler's final days in Berlin, met an untimely death in an auto accident. However, yesterday the British publishing house announced that Emily Ashcroft had agreed to complete alone the biography that she and her father had been preparing for five years.
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    Involuntarily frowning, Evelyn read on, lost patience with the rest of the news, and folded the tabloid, stuffing it into her purse.
    On the bustling Ku'damm, she dismounted from the bus and slowly traversed the few blocks on Knesebeckstrasse that brought her to the six-story apartment building where her closest relatives lived. On the third floor, in a large modern apartment, dwelt Evelyn's beloved Klara Fiebig, who worked part-time as an artist for advertising firms, and her husband, Franz Fiebig, a somewhat acidic but clever schoolteacher who taught modern history at the Schliesion Oberschule in the Charlottenburg district. Klara's mother, Liesl, invalided and often in a wheelchair, lived with the Fiebigs. Liesl had been Evelyn Hoffmann's maid in better days—the first of two maids with the same name—younger than Evelyn by three years and a distant cousin. Liesl had bought the expensive apartment for her daughter and son-in-law in return for their care.
    Evelyn was usually cheerful, looking forward to her weekly visit and tea and gossip with the family—a remote family, to be sure, but the only family that she had left—but somehow the ride on the bus this morning had changed and dampened her mood, and upon arrival at the apartment she was lost in thought and somber.
    Inside the apartment parlor there was an inexplicable atmosphere of joy. Franz was away teaching his classes at this hour, but attractive Klara, hugging Aunt Evelyn, and Liesi in the wheelchair, were both beaming with some secret wonderful news.
    "Tell her, tell your Aunt Evelyn," Liesl croaked from the wheelchair.
    Klara held