Read Online Hitler's Niece by Ron Hansen - Free Book Online Page B

guarantees them order than enjoy the freedom offered them by others.’”
    Angela frowned. “Are you saying this is occurring right now?”
    “Oh, so you’ve seen it in Austria as well?”
    “The Jews I know aren’t like that,” she said.
    “There are Jews and there are Jews,” he said. “I would only caution you to be suspicious.” Putzi found his fountain pen, tore out a page from his address book, and wrote on it The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . He handed it to Angela and watched with satisfaction as she dutifully put it in her purse. And then he saw Geli in the front seat, hiding a yawn. “All this grown-up talk,” he told her with a smile. “We do go on, don’t we?”
    “I wasn’t really listening,” she said. “I was just enjoying the ride. I haven’t been in a taxi before.”
    They were in front of the Sacher, and as Putzi Hanfstaengl got out his wallet, he grinned and said, “We’ll make this a night of firsts.”
    Coffee in the Sacher Café was a first for Angela, too. She found herself frightened by the high prices on the menu, the haughty ladies in furs, the Old World opulence of the furniture; and she was embarrassed by her faded dress with its cooking stains on the front, the shine on a green gabardine overcoat that she’d bought before the war, the hair that she’d been cutting with kitchen shears since the hard times after the armistice. She was forty, and just four years older than Putzi Hanfstaengl—whom she could not call by his nickname—and yet she felt dull and male in his company, without fascination or joy. She forgot the Jew-hating after a while and found herself liking this huge, generous, genial man; she even liked his ugliness—it gave a flavor of wry comedy to whatever he chanced to say. But he seemed to find it hard to unfasten himself from Geli’s admiration, and he seemed to be talking only to the girl when he said he was from an old family of art dealers and publishers on the Continent and in America, that he’d graduated from Harvard and had belonged to the Hasty Pudding Club, that he’d worked on Fifth Avenue in New York City for twelve years, then had returned to Germany to work on a doctorate in eighteenth-century history, that he was German on his father’s side and American on his mother’s, that his grandfather had been a Civil War general and a pallbearer at Abraham Lincoln’s funeral.
    Angela thought she ought to know that name; she glanced anxiously at Geli. Lincoln?
    Without shifting her fond gaze from Putzi, Geli said, “A president of the United States.”
    “I was just thinking that,” Angela said.
    But that was only the beginning of Angela’s being left out. Geli flirted with him outrageously, giggling at the faintest humor, finding reasons to touch his hands, flattering him with awe.
    “I first met your uncle at the Kindl Keller beer hall,” Putzi said. “While I had some misgivings about him and his program, I was utterly conquered by his oratory. And I recalled something that Teddy Roosevelt told me long ago when I visited him at his Sag-amore Hill estate. The former president told me it was wise in my business to buy only the finest art, but I ought to remember that in politics the choice is often the lesser of two evils. And so I became a member of the party.”
    “The lesser of two evils,” Angela said. “High praise.”
    But Hanfstaengl was too focused on Geli to hear her. Confessing that he and his wife, Helene, had taken Hitler on as their joint project, Putzi told how they’d spruced up her famous uncle, found him a tuxedo and a good tailor, taught him the graces of the dining table, and forbade him from adding four teaspoons of sugar to one of Prinz Metternich’s finest Gewürztraminer wines. “I haven’t yet got him to change that postage stamp of a mustache, though. He looks like a fourth-form schoolteacher or a bank clerk who lives with his mother.” Putzi told them he’d offered Hitler their parlor for his