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“Oh, splendid, then I’ll just take this to him and tell him that I found it in your hotel room.” Bauer rolled up the sketch and shook it. “Bye, Bernie.”

“No—wait.” Stempfle stepped in front of him. “What do you want? Why are you here?”

“I want the truth. Right now, or I take this to Hitler.” Stempfle might have been scum, but he wasn’t especially good at hiding his guilt.

“There was no blackmail, was there, Father? You stole them from his flat on Prinzregentenplatz. You pocketed the money.” Bauer could see the man crumbling. He pressed on. “I’m going to give you one chance to extricate yourself from this situation, Father. One chance and only one. If you lie to me, I put this sketch into Hitler’s hand personally. So what do you say?”

Stempfle dropped, defeated, onto the bed, and buried his face in his hands.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” said Bauer. “Where are the other four drawings?”

“He wanted to keep them, he said.”

“None of them are signed?” Bauer gritted his teeth in frustration. True, the girl’s face did very much resemble Geli. But without the familiar attribution of A. Hitler, this drawing proved little.

“He signed the others,” said Stempfle. “The other four.”

Bauer sighed. That helped, to be sure. But he needed something more. He needed to push harder.

“He would just claim his name was forged on these sketches. Which means you’re no help to me, Father. And you know what that means. So I would suggest you improve your memory quickly.”

Stempfle went quiet. He closed his eyes and raised his face to the ceiling, his feet drumming nervously on the floor. Finally, he released a sigh and turned to Bauer.

“To forge a name on a drawing might be simple,” he said. “But not an entire letter.”

34

“HE WROTE A LETTER?” Thomas Bauer asked. “To Geli?”

Bernhard Stempfle nodded. “It was on his private stationery, too. He wrote it in 1929. He never sent it to her. And for some reason I will never understand, he left it lying around his flat. The landlady’s son found it. He demanded money for its return.”

“And you know this because… ?”

“Because the blackmailer contacted me,” said Stempfle. “He knew I was close to the Führer. I’m the one who paid to get the letter back.”

Bauer nodded. “That’s what gave you the idea to pull this scam with the pornographic sketches. Because you’d been the bag man before. This time, you were both blackmailer and bag man. Clever, Father.”

Stempfle didn’t answer, but Bauer was clearly right.

“So tell me about this letter,” said Bauer.

“The letter was… quite graphic.” Stempfle shook his head. “As intimate as you could possibly imagine. Lurid details.”

“Give me an idea of how intimate, how lurid.”

Stempfle smirked. “Are you familiar with the term undinism, Bauer?”

“No,” he answered. “But I’m going to guess it has something to do with getting aroused when someone takes a piss on you.”

Stempfle drew back, startled and impressed. “You do have good sources.”

“Okay, so here’s my next question,” said Bauer. “Where is this letter? Don’t tell me it was destroyed.”

“No, but it might as well have been, for your purposes.”

“Why is that?”

“Because it’s locked in a safe inside the Führer’s office at Nazi headquarters.”