Hitler's Niece by Ron Hansen

her naked torso was a gigantic sleek black python whose fierce head hung over her shoulder to nestle just above her round left breast. She seemed to be taking dull pleasure in its weight. The title was Sensuality . Geli was mystified. Why was this erotic? What did her uncle see that she didn’t? She heard Hitler telling Ingrid about the hikes and picnics the National Socialist German Workers Party organized for the young, for whom life, he knew, was now so boring, but Geli could not shift her gaze from the vexing picture, though it was making her feel a little ill. And then Hitler called, “Er, Fräulein Raubal? Will you tie my tie?”
    She closed the book. “You can’t?”
    “I have trouble with it.”
    She felt his chagrin as if it were catching. “I think I would have had to grow up with a father to know how.”
    “I can do it,” Ingrid hurriedly said, and Geli watched closely as her uncle hesitantly offered his throat to her and oddly held his breath as she tied a four-in-hand, flushing with panic when she got one part wrong, and falling back with relief when she finished.
    Sheepishly eyeing his niece, he put on a blue serge suit coat, a calf-length black cashmere overcoat, and a black slouch hat that could have had a former life in the Old West.
    Geli told him, “You look like a desperado, Herr Hitler.”
    Without humor he thanked her for reminding him, and got a handgun from underneath his pillow and slipped it into his overcoat pocket. “I have to worry about assassination all the time,” he told them.
    Halfway up Thierschstrasse was the finance office of the Eher Publishing House, and the official party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer). Walking there , Hitler took joy in telling the girls how he took over the weekly with an interest-free loan from Herr Ernst Hanfstaengl of six hundred American dollars, a fortune in Germany then, but shrewdly paid off the loan a few months later with fantastically inflated deutsche marks, “so I got offices, furnishings, Linotype, paper, and two American rotary presses for the price of a peppermint stick.”
    “But I thought Putzi was a friend of yours,” Geli said.
    Hitler’s face was full of childish wonderment over what the objection could possibly be; then he informed his niece that Herr Hanfstaengl was also a good Nazi. “Willingly, with no regret, a good Nazi gives all he has to his leader.”
    And then he held open the front door to the finance office, and followed the girls inside. Geli saw Max Amann hastily put out his cigarette, get up from his cluttered desk, and proudly offer a straight-armed version of the Italian Fascist salute as soon as he saw her uncle stroll in. Hitler’s former sergeant major in the List Regiment, and a graduate of a business college, Amann was a short, gruff, and often irritable man in his thirties with crew-cut hair, a brown inch of mustache that frankly imitated his leader’s—who’d soon order it shaved off—and a face that seemed as hard and cruel as cinderblock. But he softened with adoration whenever Hitler was near. Quickly ignoring the girls, the grinning business manager held out forms and letters for Hitler’s signature and tried to illustrate with a wide green ledger some financial problem that the unofficial publisher ought to be aware of. But Hitler wouldn’t even sit, for a film of dust was on his favorite chair. Everywhere files and papers were heaped and scattered around Amann. An hourglass spider hurried across his hand-cranked adding machine. Everything he touched seemed to have turned into an ashtray.
    Hitler sighed as he signed his name twenty times with a Mont Blanc pen, then curtly told Amann that the office stank of tobacco and escorted the girls outside. “Well, that’s done,” he said, as if he’d finished a hard day.
    Geli told her uncle that she felt sorry for Amann, that he looked like a hound in a kennel visited only at mealtime.
    Hitler laughed. “I’ll have to tell