little box, and when her finger hit his name, it jumped. There was Arthur Prell, Hitler’s own bodyguard, woven into modern Berlin by the good offices of the telephone book. In 2005, his name stood in blameless black letters. Beside it, an equally modest number stood, only five digits. She dialed. The phone rang. It rang until the possibility of an answering machine was eliminated.
A faraway voice sounded—the cottony, warbling voice Margaret remembered, the voice of a very old man.
“Hallo?” said the distant voice.
“Yes, hello.” Margaret invented herself on the spot. “I’m Margarethe Taub, journalist.”
“Yeah?” the voice said, sounding childish and confused.
“Yes. I write for—Smithsonian magazine,” Margaret said, haltingly. She wondered if the publication still existed. “I’d like to know if you’d be willing to give an interview.”
“Give a what?”
“Give an interview.”
“Why?”
“My understanding is that you were one of Adolf Hitler’s bodyguards,” Margaret said.
“Oh, yes. That’s true. So you want an interview. They all come to me for that. Well, I don’t have much time. But I can fit you in I guess, I can probably fit you in.” He sounded resigned and proud. His words, even more than when she had heard him at the bunker, were soggy and mucous-filled.
“Would you like to meet at the bunker?” Margaret asked.
“What?”
“Whether you’d like to meet at the bunker,” Margaret said loudly into the receiver. “I’ve seen you there before.”
“No.” He paused, and seemed to swallow thickly. He badly needed to clear his throat. “No, no. My knees, you see.” Margaret didn’t tell him that she had seen him there, hopping about on spry feet.
“Where would you like to meet for the interview, Herr Prell?”
“Well, I guess we can meet here at my place.”
And they set up a time to meet at his house, in Rudow.
Margaret went home triumphant. She discovered, online, that Prell was selling a CD: Songs from the Berghof, to raise money for his cause—the support of old SS officers who were “denied a pension” by the German government.
She reread several detailed accounts of Hitler’s last days in the bunker.
Later, she went to an electronics store down on the Kurfürstendamm and bought a cheap microcassette recorder.
After that, still feeling incomplete, she went to a brilliantly lit department store and walked around the candy department. She should bring Prell some small token, she thought. She decided on chocolates, but couldn’t decide what size box. There were small ones, and then there were large ones that cost a pretty penny. She spent a long time making up her mind. She chose a small one in the end. Waiting in line at the cash register, however, she looked at it and thought it appeared trifling, insulting even. She darted back to the glass wall and got an impressive tin of individually wrapped truffles.
The day of the interview arrived. Margaret spent a long time deciding what to wear. The skirt she eventually chose was short, but at the same time, very becoming.
A long and oppressive subway ride followed. Prell lived all the way at the far eastern end of the U7 line.
In Rudow, Margaret hauled her racing bike off the train. She peddled through the settlement of little homes, the gabled houses, the towering pine trees. The streets were named for flowers. She turned in at Eucalyptus, found the house number on the gate, and there it was, Prell’s little house. It had plastic white lace curtains, the wont of the elderly East, and a low wall around a little garden, with a gate that opened and closed on a remotely controlled lock. Margaret pressed the buzzer.
All was quiet.
She pressed again.
A door on the side of the house sprang open, and Prell appeared. He took the stairs sideways, apparently with a bad knee after all, but still he lunged toward her quickly, on spry, stilt legs, and opened the gate. They shook hands. Margaret blushed. She followed him inside. He took her coat.
She looked about the living room—artificial flowers in abundance, the smell of gumdrops and potpourri, paintings of spring bouquets and clowns dotting the walls in sloughs of stale color.
At the table, Margaret fumbled to get out her tape recorder. Prell’s eyes gleamed hungrily at the sight of it.
She took a deep breath. She asked a question, and they began.
It should have been interesting, the things he said. But the old man began to drone. He recited empty things, things that sounded as though they were memorized from books—freezer-burned, senseless chatter, and, most troubling of all, his answers did not correspond to