The Grave of Truth by Evelyn Anthony

wasn’t there and he was thinking aloud. ‘Swine. She tried to get him off, but no—the Chief wouldn’t listen. Didn’t listen to her.…’
    â€˜Who tried to get him off?’ Max leaned close to him, he put a hand on his arm and gave it a little shake. ‘Who was it? Tell me.…’
    â€˜E.B.,’ Helm sniggered. ‘But the Chief wouldn’t listen.’
    E.B. The girl who had escaped with him from the Bunker had used those initials but they hadn’t registered. He’d forgotten them until he started reading the Allied reports and Trevor-Roper’s definitive account of the last days in Berlin. Eva Braun . Eva Braun had tried to save the man from execution. Adolf Hitler hadn’t yielded. He brought himself very near to Otto Helm.
    â€˜Who was he?’
    â€˜Eh? Who? I don’t know—I don’t remember things. Where’s Trudi—I want the bottle.’
    â€˜You can pee in a minute,’ Max Steiner said. ‘When you think back. The Bunker, the last day—who did E.B. try and save, Otto? Come on, you tell me and I’ll get Trudi for you.’
    The eyes were looking into his, and there was a clear intelligence in them. ‘Fegelein. He was trying to escape—betray us. I never told them about that. They put me away for all those years.… I never said anything about that.’
    â€˜No,’ Max said. He felt as if he’d been winded. Fegelein. Herman Fegelein. The man who had whispered to him to find Janus had been Eva Braun’s brother-in-law.
    He got up, and went to the door. ‘I’ll get Trudi for you,’ he said.
    He found her in the sitting room, watching television. She looked up and smiled. ‘You haven’t been long,’ she said. ‘Was Dad able to help?’
    â€˜No,’ Max shook his head. ‘I didn’t worry him too much. He’s pretty confused.’
    She stood up and there was something awkward about her. ‘He was in prison more than nineteen years,’ she said. ‘I was eight when he went inside. My mother kept things going till she died. I don’t know what he was supposed to have done, Herr Steiner, and I don’t care. He’s my father and I’m not ashamed of what he was. There are people around here who’d spit on us if they knew he’d been in the SS.’
    â€˜He wants the bottle,’ Max said.
    â€˜Oh, God,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ She hurried out. He looked round the pleasant little room. More potted plants, photographs of herself and her husband on a skiing holiday, outside the Mayor’s office after their wedding; modern furniture and bright colours. All his preconceived ideas about Otto Helm’s family were ludicrously wrong. The house didn’t belong to them; they were tenants, not owners, a young couple, not long married, looking after the wife’s invalid father. He remembered so vividly that it sickened him the last time he had seen Otto Helm, standing over the bound and bleeding victim in the Chancellory yard. He had been right not to mention that incident to his American interrogators. He might have been hanged instead of going to prison. To his daughter, and probably to her decent young husband too, he was a sick and helpless old man who had been punished for serving his country.
    There was nothing he could say to Trudi Mintzel that made any sense now. He let himself out of the flat and began to walk slowly down the road. He was booked on the ten-thirty flight to Hamburg the next day.
    Minna Walther had promised to meet him at the airport; it was understood that there would be an exchange of information. He went on walking; there was a tightness in his stomach that followed the nightmare, only he wasn’t dreaming now. He took a bus to the sector where his hotel was. A pretty girl sat next to him and smiled; the atmosphere was genial, different from his remembrance of the