Five Past Midnight (15 page)

The SS guard studied Kahr's face, comparing it with the photograph on the pass. Sergeant Kahr's mouth was crooked, lower on one side, giving him a carping look, even though he seldom carped. His eyes were dark and faded, with only a suggestion of life left in them.

The two guards were all polish and creases, brittle in their importance, guarding this hole in the ground. Every day this same guard glared at the ID photograph and then Kahr with renewed suspicion, and each time the guard handed back the pass slowly, as if he might change his mind at any moment. Finally the guard nodded, a grudging, almost imperceptible movement. When the other guard opened the heavy steel door, Sergeant Kahr entered the blockhouse. The door clanked shut behind him with the deep finality of the last sound on earth.

Kahr descended the stairs to one landing, then another, circling counterclockwise. The fetid smell reached for him, dank and sour. The bunker was surrounded by groundwater, and with every heavy rain the sewers backed up, filling the toilets with waste that would spill out into the halls. Added to the sewage smell were the odors of coal-tar disinfectant and damp wool uniforms. Kahr was sure these foul aromas chased away the good air, depriving his brain of oxygen, and so every shift he became dumber and dumber.

Then he heard the whine, his whine. Sergeant Kahr may have been the only person assigned to the bunker whom the ventilator system's incessant drone did not bother. Most compared the sound to a dentist's drill. Constant, always on, reaching every room in the bunker, inescapable. But Sergeant Kahr was one of the bunker's ventilation technicians. His duty was to maintain the equipment that sucked in new air and blew out old air. He took pride in his task and appreciated the whine because it constantly reminded bunker denizens of his importance. Kahr might be the lowest-ranking person in the entire complex, but the whine was suffered by everyone irrespective of rank, which gave him some satisfaction.

At the bottom of the stairs was a foyer, lit so brightly by overhead bulbs that Kahr had to squint up into the faces of the two SS guards posted there. Schutzstaffel guards were all tall. One examined his pass, then checked the duty roster on his clipboard, marking off Kahr's name. The other guard searched Kahr, running his hands up the sergeant's uniform to his armpits, then along his lower back, then down and up his trousers, rudely probing his crotch. This guard carried a Schmeisser submachine gun across his stomach on a sling.

The guard captain worked at a small desk to one side of the door. He glanced up at Kahr, but quickly returned to his rosters and bulletins. Four telephones and several loose-leaf binders covered his desk. The guard captain wore a livid purple burn scar on his right cheek and right side of his neck.

"All right, Sergeant," the guard with the clipboard said. "You can go in."

"Bleib
übrig,"
Kahr said pointedly. Survive. Lately, Berliners had been using the phrase instead of "good-bye." Kahr knew it irritated the SS guards, who viewed the new saying as defeatist. So he said it again.

"Bleib
übrig."

"I'll survive, old man." The clipboard guard laughed meanly. "From the looks of you, you may not."

Kahr could only nod agreement. The war had beaten up Ulrich Kahr, had ravaged his face and his body, and he knew it. Perhaps he shouldn't feel sorry for himself. He hadn't seen frontline duty, after all, not in this war, anyway because he was fifty-five years old, born the same year as the Führer. But the war had etched deep lines into Kahr's face, running from his nose to the corners of his mouth, fanning out from his eyes in expanding webs. The skin below his eyes was a ghastly mottled green, looking as if it had been bruised. He walked now in a stoop like an old man. And he was hesitant, the boldness gone from him. Everything, from climbing a flight of stairs to rising from a chair to spreading ersatz butter on black bread, seemed an insurmountable physical challenge. Last week the Führer's physician, Dr. Morrel, a kindly man, had offered to examine Kahr. The sergeant had politely said no. Kahr's decline was not due to a physical ailment but to news from the fronts, and in the last half year he had taken Germany's sufferings upon his shoulders.

Kahr had been a widower for fifteen years, and had raised his sons on his own. Last summer his oldest boy, Eswald, a Wehrmacht infantryman, had been killed by the American naval bombardment on the Normandy coast. Then just this past Christmas, Kahr had learned his second son, Theodor, an armored scout-car driver, had been killed during the Ardennes campaign when his vehicle rolled over a mine.

Now all that was left of Ulrich Kahr's family was his youngest son, Max, who was on the eastern front. Every time Kahr saw the regimental chaplain, Kahr held his breath, hoping the chaplain wasn't bringing bad news, as he had already done twice. Kahr took little solace in knowing he was not alone in having lost two sons. German families had been gutted by this war, their boys torn from them. A pall of grief lay over the land.

And there was no one to turn to. Every man in his regiment had lost someone. To talk of one's own loss was to rekindle someone else's heartache. So he suffered alone and in silence. Ulrich Kahr knew he could never again be whole, but he had one tender hope. The chance he might see his son Max again, home and alive, was a fragile prospect, too perilous to nudge by dwelling on it, but it was all that was left for Kahr.

He stepped into a long central corridor used as a lounge. A Persian carpet brought from the Chancellery covered some of the floor, its edges folded under to fit the space. The furniture was an odd mix: a utilitarian bench resembling a pew, three ribbonback Louis Quinze chairs, several camp stools, and a long oak table against a wall under two enormous Schinkel landscapes. Dome lights cast the concrete walls in pale yellow.

Ventilation grates were along the walls near the ceiling at three-meter intervals. Emergency telephones were mounted on each of the hallway's walls. The first door to his right was to a cloakroom.

Just then General Keitel emerged from the second door, from the conference room. In those two paces into the hall Keitel transformed his face. In the conference room he had been a worried supplicant, earnest but unassuming, offering nothing to offend. But as he stepped into the hall, Keitel's chin firmed, his head lifted haughtily, and his gaze became imperious. Even his dueling scar remolded itself, from an insignificant welt to a magnificent testament to Prussian honor. He must have been meeting with the Führer, the only person on earth who could drain the Wehrmacht chief of staff s face of its arrogance.

Then Kahr heard the golden voice, the remarkable tones that had once lifted Germany. "And, Keitel, you tell him it must be done. He must wheel around. There can be no other course of action."

The general half-turned, and answered, "Of course, my Führer."

Kahr gave the conference room the swiftest of glances. The leader was bent over a map table. He was wearing the pearl-gray tunic with the olive shirt and black trousers that he always wore in the bunker. On his left breast were his golden Party badge and the Iron Cross won in the Great War. Then General Jodl stepped around the table, and Sergeant Kahr's view of the leader was blocked, and Kahr knew it best to quickly move on anyway.

He walked straight ahead. Lockers were to one side, where Foreign Minister Ribbentrop was conferring with an SS general Kahr did not recognize, Ribbentrop fidgeted with a tunic pocket that contained a package of cigarettes, and he politely herded the general toward the door, apparently anxious to get outside for a cigarette. Smoking was forbidden in the bunker. Even matches were prohibited, some said for security purposes but most believed their banning was an extension of the Führer's loathing of cigarette smoke. Huddling at the rear of the corridor were the Luftwaffe's Chief of Staff General Koller, Major General Walter Buhle, and Hitler's adjutant, General Burgdorf. Aides to these officers— young men, eager and efficient, fairly panting—lined the wall opposite the lockers, waiting. The corridor was crowded.

Kahr glanced at his watch, wondering if he had time to visit the galley, which was through the door at the far end of the hall, then up the stairs to a second group of rooms, which included the servants' rooms, the communal mess, the pantry and galley. One of the cooks was sweet on Kahr, and would slip him pastry or a plate of veal. She liked to pretend the extra rations were her surreptitious gift to Sergeant Kahr, and she would make a production of looking over her shoulders to insure no one was looking as she passed the food to him, but in truth no one be- lowground cared that Kahr often carried extra food from the kitchen to his post in the ventilation room. The SS guard at the door to the stairway would glance at the food and say nothing. Kahr's wristwatch indicated he had better forgo visiting the cook this day.

The sergeant had noticed a stratification in the bunker's society. Those who spent most of their time belowground—the Führer's cooks and secretaries and waiter, his personal aide and bodyguard SS-Colonel Günsche, his valet Heinz Linge, Martin Bormann, the blond woman with the chirpy Bavarian accent Kahr had heard called Eva, the SS guards at the bunker's entrances, and a few others, including Kahr and the other technicians who ran the ventilation system and generators and telephone banks—were treated as family by the Führer. He listened to their problems and gave them advice, sometimes scolding, often encouraging. When one of his secretaries, Trudi Reymann, weepingly reported that her fiance hadjilted her, Hitler sat beside her for half an hour, patting her hand and cooing softly. When his waiter, Walter Gademann, broke his wrist in a fall, Hitler stood by the operating table in the bunker's surgery, chatting to Gademann to distract him from the pain as Dr. Morrel set the bone and applied a cast. And a month ago Kahr had been promoted from staff sergeant to master sergeant, and was astonished to find the Führer's signature, rather than the signature of Kahr's captain, on the order of promotion.

The second level of bunker society were those who visited the complex often, both the military men whose duty brought them underground and the sycophants who had somehow gained both the Führer's favor and valid passes. The former included Keitel and Jodl, Generals Krebs and Guderian, Admiral Doenitz, and Ministers Goebbels and Speer. The latter included General Hermann Fegelein, the SS liaison who was married to Eva Braun's sister, and who did little more than gossip with anyone he could slow long enough to catch an ear. These visitors were not considered family by the Führer, and were handled with less patience and less solicitude.

Battlefield commanders — Manteuffel and Busse and many others — arrived at irregular intervals, mud on their boots, uniforms often torn, faces haggard, anxious to report and get away from this place Often as not, they would be summarily promoted or transferred or dismissed, and they rarely knew their fate when they arrived In their demeanor and haste, these generals brought shocking reality into the bunker, where eight-foot-thick concrete walls muffled both bombs and unpleasant reality. The contempt felt for those safely ensconced below- ground was visible on every battlefield commander's face, and those in Führerbunker society were just as relieved to see them go as the commanders were to go. These front-liners were certainly not members of the underground family.

This bunker had been built just the year before, but had not been completed. Construction was halted after the place had been made habitable but before it had been made comfortable. No one knew why construction had stopped, at least no one Sergeant Kahr had spoken with. He skirted the crowd, passing the first door on his left, which was to the telephone switchboard and guards' room. Here the overhead lights were for some reason orange, giving everyone's face a malarial hue. In other rooms the light was white, almost incandescent, a light that flattened perspective and revealed blue veins beneath skin. Older rooms were dusty with new concrete, while newer rooms were damp, the concrete not fully set Some walls seeped water and were discolored by mold. A few walls were carefully painted to match furniture, but others had been left as unpainted concrete. Some rooms were as warm and humid as a hothouse, others were dry and cool. Everywhere was the soprano hum of the ventilator fans, and in some rooms this sound was supplemented by the gurgle of the toilet plumbing or the rumble of the sump pumps or the clang of exterior doors. Each underground room had its own combination of scents and colors and sounds, and there seemed to be no reason to any of it. And Ulrich Kahr liked none of it, except the ventilator's hum.

The sergeant thought of the Führerbunker as a concrete submarine, the walls always pressing in on him. As the end of each shift neared, the place became more and more oppressive, and Kahr always emerged from the bunker gasping, eternally grateful for the sky, whether it was clouds or sun or firestorm smoke or the darkness of night. He dreaded those days that called him to sleep at his post, on a Pullman cot in his generator-ventilator room.

He rang the buzzer of the second door on the left with that day's signal; two rings, then one, then one more. The door was a solid steel plate with a dead bolt that could be opened only from the inside. Because of the room's critical equipment, the door was kept locked at all times. A Wehrmacht sergeant pulled open the door, and Kahr entered his domain, a cubicle filled with machinery. At the far end were two diesel generators, quiet for the moment because electricity had been patched through to the bunker. Many times a day the bunker would plunge into the absolute darkness of a coal shaft. The beating heart of the Reich would be utterly still until Ulrich Kahr came to its rescue. Helped by a flashlight, Kahr would pull the cord on a gasoline starter motor, then engage the diesel generators, and within a few moments the bunker would again have light and ventilation. The generators each produced sixty kilowatts, and supplied emergency electricity for the lights, heating system, water pump, and switchboard.

The ventilator whine was loudest in this room. Kahr asked the Wehrmacht sergeant who had admitted him, and who was now standing in front of the control panel making the final entries of his shift into the log, "Anything new?"