The Man Who Wasn't There

The bombs stopped seventeen minutes ago. Three streets east, Russians sang "Katyusha," and their cigarette smoke crept through the ventilation shafts and pooled in the corridors like a tenant already measuring for curtains.

Forty feet down, the diesel generator stuttered. Thrum-thrum-skip. Thrum-thrum-skip. Lights pulsed with it. In the flicker: maps pinned to concrete walls, borders erased three days prior, arrows charting the movements of divisions already dissolved. Two glasses on the desk, untouched. Cognac for Eva, Rémy Martin Louis XIII, because she'd insisted on the best. Tepid water for him.

Eva took her capsule twenty-three minutes ago. Bitter almond still clung to the air, braided with her Chanel No. 5. She'd insisted on lipstick. Victory Red, she called it, then laughed in a way that cracked at the edges. Her body lay in the next room under a flag that would burn by morning.

The Führer sat alone. His left hand tremored against the oak, the shaking that took root at Stalingrad and worsened with every retreat, every injection of Morell's Vitamultin. Pervitin still burning through his blood, pupils blown in a face the color of old tallow. The Walther P38 lay on the desk beside the water glass. One round chambered. Seven in the magazine, patient as understudies. Beside it, a glass ampule of prussic acid. He'd tested the poison on Blondi first, held his German Shepherd's jaw open and crushed the capsule between her teeth, watched her seize for ninety seconds before the stillness. His hands shook through the whole thing.

He sat alone. And then he did not.

A man occupied the chair across from him who had not occupied it seven seconds before. No door opened. No footsteps approached. One frame of reality held an empty chair; the next held a man in it, legs crossed.

The suit belonged to no year on record. Charcoal gray, except in certain light it shifted to the color of television static. The fabric caught light at wrong angles and held it a half-second too long, the way a still pond holds a stone's ripple after the stone sinks. His face refused observation. The eye traveled to it and slid off, landing on the concrete wall, the lamp, the damp stain in the corner.

"Punctual, Herr Hitler."

The voice arrived from the walls, from the ceiling, from the space behind the eardrums.

The Führer's hand twitched toward the Walther. "Security—"

"Dismissed at 15:21. Günsche believes you gave the order. Goebbels believes Günsche did." A cigarette appeared between the man's fingers, already lit. Its smoke drifted against the ventilation current, curling left when the air pushed right. "We need privacy for what comes next."

"Who are you?"

"A collector."

Above them, a shell struck. The bunker shuddered. Dust sifted from the ceiling and drifted through the lamplight. The cognac in Eva's glass rippled in concentric rings. Once. Twice. Three times. The ripples reversed, flowing inward, the liquid settling before the shaking stopped.

The man produced a sphere the size of a child's marble, mirror-polished, and set it on the desk. It did not roll. A hum rose from it, below the threshold of hearing. The Führer's tremoring hand went still.

In its surface, reflections. In one, he stood before an easel in a Vienna studio, hair silver, thinning ochre for a church steeple's wash. The Academy of Fine Arts acceptance letter hung framed on the wall behind him. A woman called from the next room. Children's voices beneath hers, arguing about supper. He died at eighty-seven. The obituary ran four lines.

In another, a field hospital near Ypres, October 1918. Mustard gas filled his lungs and stayed. A corporal's body under a wool blanket, one among eleven in the tent, four of whom would join him before dawn.

"To die here in six minutes, which is what the history books require?" The man tapped the sphere with one finger. It rang, and the sound carried color: blue, then silver, then the mottled yellow-green of a five-day bruise. "Or to live?"

"The bunker is surrounded."

"I'm not talking about the bunker." Ash fell from the man's cigarette and traveled upward, dissolving before it reached the ceiling. "Other versions exist. Ones where you walk out. Where you become someone else entirely."

The man pushed the sphere across the oak toward him. "Touch it."

The Führer's hand crossed the desk. Skin met glass.

Crack.

Every surface fractured into planes reflecting different scenes: the Walther firing, a submarine's hull groaning under pressure, a hospital corridor where nurses spoke Portuguese to a dying man who answered in German. He saw himself pulling the trigger and not pulling it, escaping and not escaping.

He yanked his hand back. The room reassembled. Eva's cognac sat motionless.

The man checked a watch on his left wrist. Steel case, octagonal bezel, the dial grooved in horizontal lines. "You have four minutes. If you say yes, Adolf Hitler dies at 15:30. Documented. A different man walks out, someone with no name worth remembering." He stood. "If you say no, you do what you came down here to do."

Russian voices through the door, close enough to make out individual words.

"Why?"

"Because I want to see what happens." For one moment, his face resolved into features: a man's face, unremarkable, forgettable. Then it slid away like a name on the tip of the tongue.

The Führer looked at the Walther. At the cyanide. At Eva's lipstick on the cognac glass, the print of Victory Red on crystal.

"Yes."

The man's hand extended across the desk. The Führer took it.

His uniform dissolved thread by thread, each strand carrying weight as it went. The Iron Cross First Class, earned at the Somme, fell away and became iron, then atoms, then gone. Every medal, every insignia, every button took a year with it, a signature, an order screamed into a telephone receiver. What remained ran pale and soft.

He tried to speak his name. His mouth shaped the syllables. No sound came.

In the bunker, at 15:30, Adolf Hitler pressed the barrel of a Walther P38 against his right temple and pulled the trigger.

In the space between, a man who had been Adolf Hitler became Ernst Bauer, born 1920, Linz, parents deceased, occupation translator, history none.