The Man Who Wasn't There

The Russians had stopped shelling long enough to reload, and in the quiet the fans went on pulling Berlin down the shaft and into his study as cordite, brick dust and somebody frying horse. The smoke stood at his desk like a tenant measuring for curtains.

Under the Chancellery garden, under a lid of concrete thicker than a man is tall, the diesel generator stuttered. Thrum-thrum-skip. Thrum-thrum-skip. The lamp pulsed with it. In the flicker hung a map of Berlin with a blue arrow for Steiner's attack, which had stayed on the paper, and a blue arrow for Wenck, who was coming. Two glasses stood on the desk. Eva's held Rémy Martin Louis XIII, because she had insisted on the best, and her lipstick was on the rim. His held tepid water.

Eva had gone first. She had been Frau Hitler for a day and a half. She had insisted on the lipstick too. Victory Red, she called it, and she laughed, and the laugh broke in the middle. Then she drank half her cognac at his desk, went next door to lie down, and bit her ampule. Linge, the valet, covered her with a flag that would be on fire before the afternoon was out. Bitter almond still came through the open door with her Chanel No. 5. Professor Haase had explained the smell to him. Cyanide gives off bitter almond, and only some people are born able to catch it, while everybody else gets the perfume and nothing more. He was one of the lucky ones. He could tell she was dead from his chair, and he stayed in it.

The Führer sat alone. His left hand shook against the oak. It had shaken since Stalingrad, and for the newsreels he kept it behind his back with the right hand around the wrist. Morell had flown out a week earlier with his needles and his Vitamultin and left the hand to itself. His face was the color of old tallow.

Beside the water glass lay the Walther PPK with a round chambered. Next to the pistol was a glass ampule of prussic acid. The ampules had come through Himmler's people. Himmler had turned out to be talking to the Swedes, so the day before, the Führer had one tried on his own shepherd Blondi. Tornow, the dog sergeant, held her jaws apart. Professor Haase crushed the glass between her back teeth. When it was done the Führer came in to look at her. He kept both hands behind his back, and he was out of the room again before Tornow let go of her.

The door stayed shut. The antechamber kept its voices. Across the desk, the empty chair had a man in it with his legs crossed.

Now the room smelled of a freshly struck match, and nobody in it had struck one.

The suit was charcoal and cut as close as a boy's confirmation suit. Each time the lamp dimmed, the cloth stayed lit a moment longer than the room. The Führer looked at the man's face and found he was looking at the lamp. He tried again and got the map, then the door handle.

The man turned his wrist over and read a watch. "Punctual, Herr Hitler."

The voice came out of the chair and out of the ventilation grille at once.

The Führer's hand jumped toward the Walther. "Günsche—"

"Günsche is outside that door and he is staying outside it. He has had his orders since 15:21. Ten minutes, nobody comes through. He believes you gave them. Goebbels believes Günsche made them up." A lit cigarette was between the man's fingers. Its smoke leaned left, into the push of the ventilation. "We need the room for what comes next."

"Who are you?"

"A collector."

Overhead a shell came down in the garden. The bunker shuddered, and dust sifted out of the ceiling through the lamplight. The cognac in Eva's glass shivered from the middle out to the rim. Then it ran back in to the middle and was level again while the walls were still shaking.

The man took a glass marble out of his pocket and set it on the desk. Silvered like a mirror, it stayed where he put it. Down the corridor the generator went on skipping. The lamp burned steady anyway. On the oak the Führer's left hand lay still.

The marble held a studio in Vienna. He stood in it at an easel, silver-haired, and thinned ochre for the wash on a church steeple. The acceptance letter from the Academy of Fine Arts hung framed on the wall. A woman called from the next room while children argued about supper. He died at eighty-seven. The obituary ran four lines.

The man gave the marble a quarter turn. Now it held a hospital tent at Wervik in October 1918 and a row of men with mustard gas in their lungs. A corporal lay under a wool blanket with his eyes bandaged. They carried him out before morning.

"So. Dead in that chair in six minutes, the way the history books need you?" The man tapped the marble with a fingernail. It rang like a glass under a wet finger, and the lamp went blue and then the yellow-green of an old bruise. "Or alive?"

"The bunker is surrounded."

"The bunker can stay surrounded." Ash dropped from the cigarette and went up. It was gone before it reached the ceiling. "There are other versions. In some of them you walk out. In every one of those you are somebody else."

The man pushed the marble across the oak. "Touch it."

The Führer's hand crossed the desk. When one finger touched the glass, cracks ran out from it across the walls and the ceiling, tik-tik-tik-tik, and the room fell apart into panes. Every pane held a different room. The Walther going off. A submarine hull groaning under the weight of the sea. A hospital corridor where nurses spoke Portuguese to a dying old man who answered them in German. He pulled the trigger and he left the trigger alone. He got out and he stayed.

He snatched his hand back. The room came together. Eva's cognac was level in its glass.

The man read his watch again. Its steel case had an eight-sided bezel and a 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, with a name nobody will bother to remember." He stood. "If you say no, you do what you came down here to do."

In the antechamber, on the far side of the door, Goebbels was asking somebody what time it was.

"Why?"

"Because I want to see what happens." For the length of that sentence the man had a face. It was the plain face of a clerk in a ticket window. Then the Führer was looking at the door handle again.

He looked at the Walther. At the ampule. At the print of Victory Red on Eva's glass.

"Yes."

The man held his hand out across the desk. The Führer stood and took it.

The uniform left him a thread at a time. The Iron Cross First Class, pinned on him near Soissons in August 1918 on the word of a Jewish lieutenant named Gutmann, lifted off his chest and hung in the air. The gold Party badge followed it, then the wound badge, then the buttons, and each one took with it a year, a signature, an order screamed down a telephone. Thread and metal went back down to the chair he had just left and knitted there into a tunic with a man inside it. The man in the tunic had his forelock and his shaking left hand. The left hand was reaching for the pistol.

What stood holding the stranger's hand was pale and soft and had brown hair.

He tried to say his name. His mouth made the shapes. No sound came. The name had stayed in the chair.

In the bunker, at 15:30, Adolf Hitler put the muzzle of a Walther PPK to his right temple and pulled the trigger.

Somewhere between that room and a railway platform, what was left over became Edmund Pölzl. Born 1920, Linz. Parents deceased. Occupation, translator. History, none.

Paris, 12 May 1946

Pak-pak-pak. Boys were throwing firecrackers under the glass roof of the Gare de l'Est. The Republic had moved the anniversary of the surrender to the next day off. Flags hung from the girders. Along the platform children with sticks for rifles were fighting the Liberation over again, and one boy stopped to sight down his stick at a man with a cardboard suitcase.

Edmund Pölzl stood on that platform with a cardboard suitcase in his left hand and a stranger's grip still warm in his right. A year had gone by without him. The ticket in his pocket said he had come in on the train from Strasbourg. His papers were crisp and the ink on them was fresh. The photograph showed a man of twenty-six with brown hair and the kind of face witnesses get wrong. Edmund had been his brother, who died of measles at five. Pölzl was what his mother signed before she married. The clerk who typed the papers had left the dots off the o.

He took a room in the 18th, on the sixth floor. At the third landing his left leg folded under him. The papers said twenty-six. The legs were fifty-seven. One of them had stopped a shell splinter at the Somme. He climbed the rest with both hands on the iron rail, which was slick from a hundred other palms.

The room was as wide as the bed was long. One roof beam crossed the ceiling, and under it stood a table, a chair, a hotplate and a sink with a drip in it. He set the suitcase down and sat on the mattress. The springs shrieked.

That night he dreamed a crowd. Faces turned up to him by the thousand with their mouths open. He stood over them on a stone rostrum while his hands chopped the air and the words came out of him in a roar. He woke in the dark with his throat raw. He had been shouting in German, in Paris, a year after the war. A fist hit the wall beside his head.

"Ta gueule, sale Boche!"

He lay still. In the corner the sink kept on. Tap. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap. From that night he went to bed with a handkerchief knotted between his teeth.

He found work in a bureau near the Opéra, where German technical manuals went into French for the Air Ministry. The French had come with the papers, whole. It fit him like another man's shoes. The German he read a page ahead of his hands. He ate lunch alone at his desk, bread and an apple, because the canteen served sausage and beef stewed brown.

One afternoon in June he was working through the maintenance schedule for the Junkers Jumo 004, the jet engine that the designers at Sud-Ouest meant to hang on a French airplane. The manual gave the engine twenty-five hours of running between overhauls. He was still reading the German when his pencil put a 10 in the margin of his typescript.

At the next desk sat a young Alsatian named Frey, who had been drafted out of Colmar at nineteen and had spent the rest of the war in a Luftwaffe ground crew. Frey leaned over. "Problem?"

Edmund looked at the 10.

"You have a head for German numbers, Pölzl." Frey put a finger on the margin. "Twenty-five is the book. Ten is what we got out of them at Lechfeld. Where does a translator from Linz pick that up?"

"I read it somewhere."

He rubbed out the 10 and went on typing. His fingers left sweat on the keys.

Frey looked at him a while, then went back to his own page. The next morning a supervisor Edmund had never met pulled a chair up to his desk. Until lunch the man ran a finger under every line of the translations and the German beside them. He found nothing wrong. The German had been understood and the French was sound.