Several boys were smothering tears. Another shell went off, bringing down rubble at the end of the street.
General Albers sidled up to Hitler and spoke in a sharp whisper. ‘We should get back to the bunker, Führer, as much for the sake of the boys as for ourselves. The chances of us all leaving here undamaged must be slim by now.’
Hitler nodded slowly and turned away. Albers and Goebbels fell in behind him. The guard led the way back across the Chancellery garden, the sodden earth sucking under their boots. At the top of the bunker steps Hitler stopped and looked back at the street. The SS officer was shepherding the boys back into the gutted office building. Hitler shook his head.
‘What a thing it would be,’ he said.
Albers and Goebbels looked at each other, mystified.
‘To be young again,’ Hitler said. ‘That young, with everything still to happen.’
Later, as General Albers sat in his quarters, recording the day’s events in his diary, he looked up at the agonized Christ on a large wood-and-ivory crucifix by his bed.
‘Not long now,’ he said quietly. ‘A week at most, with luck.’
The realism of the crucifix sometimes struck him as grotesque, but he kept it by him. It was the only memento of his wife, the one item to survive the inferno of their cottage after a British bomb reduced everything else, Greta included, to ash and vapour.
‘Perhaps, Lord,’ he said, ‘you will arrange it so I can surrender to someone with a sense of irony, and no great desire to punish.’
He looked at the diary again and thought for a moment before finishing the page. The small, special brotherhood is established, he wrote. If the meticulous plans of Secretary Bormann and Minister Goebbels unfold in the way they are intended, the remaining Jews in Germany will one day feel the Führer’s throttling grip from beyond the grave.
He put down the pen and rubbed his hands together. The room was cold and damp. He pushed back the chair, got down on his knees and peered under the bed. There was probably enough schnapps under there to ease the chill. He pulled out the bottle and held it up. Three good drinks, maybe four.
‘Enough for now.’
He stood up, took the tumbler from the night-stand and poured a measure. With the glass held out before him he felt an impulse to toast the future of the thirty bedraggled orphans. They had looked so downcast. Just pathetic, frightened, parentless children.
That was now. But years from now…
‘God,’ he groaned, ‘all the black tomorrows.’
He looked at his row of treasured books on the shelf above the bed; at the framed snapshot of himself and his brother as children; at the ivory face of Christ hanging there, twisted with pain and despair.
‘Why should I wish more calamity on the world?’
Outside in the passage there was the sound of shouting. The wise men in the map room were being outraged again, berating absent commanders for the failure of crazy stratagems to rescue the Nazi dream. Albers sighed and raised his glass to the crucifix.
‘Shalom,’ he whispered.
A policeman on New Bond Street pointed towards the corner of Clifford Street. ‘Along there,’ he told the attractive American woman, ‘and it’s the first turning on your right.’
She thanked him.
‘First visit?’ he said.
‘Oh no, not at all. I’ve been coming here since I was in college. But I still manage to lose myself in May fair.’
She thanked him again and moved on, turning along Clifford Street and into Cork Street. At the first gallery she stopped, caught by the sight of a solitary canvas on an easel in the middle of the window.
‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ a man said.
She nodded, coolly enough to stay aloof, not so much as to appear rude. She had reached a stage in her life where the ability to draw men’s attention, without trying, was no longer a particular pleasure.
‘Probably a fake, mind you,’ he grunted, moving off.
She could see it was no fake. It was an untitled George Stubbs, another of his horse paintings, this one a grey stallion hedged around with menacing shadows, rearing back from an unseen threat beyond the edge of the picture. The fear in the animal’s eyes was painfully authentic, a primal terror more vivid than a photograph could convey. She turned away and walked on, blinking against the cold wind, wondering how a person could live with such an unsettling picture.
Outside the Lancer Gallery she stopped and glanced at her watch. She had dawdled over lunch and hadn’t intended to get here so late. If she went in now, she would have to make it a swift visit. Too swift, probably, to enjoy it. If she waited until tomorrow she would have more time to browse. On the other hand, her London schedule was tight; a visit tomorrow could only be a maybe.
She stood facing the window, not sure what to do. As she raised her arm to look at her watch again, a man on the other side of the street drew a pistol from his pocket and fired a bullet into her spine. The impact threw her against the window. The second shot hit the back of her skull and came out through her forehead, smashing the plate glass.
Her body jerked and twisted, a grotesque puppet in a hail of falling glass. Abruptly she dropped to her knees. A single glass shard slid into her chin and pinned her to the edge of the window frame. She stopped twitching and became still.
The gunman made off along Cork Street into Burlington Gardens. He ran past witnesses too startled to do anything but stare at the glass and the blood and the blonde-headed corpse, spiked on the edge of the window.
The policeman who had given the woman directions appeared at the corner of the street. He stood for several seconds, staring like the others, taking in the scene, then he turned aside and muttered urgently to his radio.
The Arab came out of Sloane Street station with his eyes turned to the ground, walking purposefully, not quite hurrying. He stood in a knot of tourists by the crossing opposite the station entrance and waited for the green man.
‘Do you know the way to Oakley Gardens, at all?’ a small woman said. ‘I have this map but it’s very confusing.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He kept his face averted, as if he was watching for someone. ‘I’m a stranger here.’ He saw her push the map forward and stalled the next request. ‘I need glasses to read small print,’ he said. ‘I don’t have them with me. Sorry.’
He pulled up the collar of his windcheater, hiding half his face without obviously obscuring his identity. He breathed deeply, telling himself over and over to be calm and take care to make no eye contact. He forced his mind to stay on the primary need, which was to get to his rented room as fast as he could without arousing interest along the way.
The green man came on and he stepped into the road, moving fast but no faster than the others, his hands deep in his slit pockets. His right fingers were curled around his gun. The barrel was still warm.
Hurrying past W.H. Smith’s he could see the pedestrian light at Cheltenham Terrace was green, which meant it would be red before he got to the corner. He put on a spurt, just short of running, and cursed as the light changed. People bunched on the edge of the pavement. He eased in among them.
‘Bloody traffic,’ a man next to him said.
‘Right.’
‘It’s no pleasure walking any place these days.’
‘Yeah, right.’
The