Free The Wolf's Hour by Robert McCammon Page A

many of the circles had been crossed out with angry lines. More maps lay on the office’s large desk, along with piles of papers that needed signatures. A small metal box had been opened, and in it were carefully organized vials of watercolors and horsehair brushes of various sizes. The man behind the desk had pulled his stiff-backed chair to an easel in the corner of the windowless room, and on that easel was a painting in progress: a watercolor of a white farmhouse and behind it the purple rise of jagged mountain peaks. On the floor around the artist’s feet were other paintings of houses and the countryside, all of them put aside before they were finished.
    “Here. Right here. Do you see it?” The artist wore glasses, and he tapped his paintbrush against a smeared shadow at the farmhouse’s edge.
    “I see… a shadow,” Martin answered.
    “In the shadow. Right there!” He tapped it again, harder. “Look close!” He picked up the painting, getting water-colors on his fingers, and thrust it in Martin’s face.
    Martin swallowed thickly. He saw a shadow, and only that. This seemed to be important, and should be handled carefully. “Yes,” he answered. “I think… I do see it.”
    “Ah!” the other man said, smiling. “Ah! So there it is!” He spoke German with a heavy-some might think clumsy-Austrian accent. “The wolf, right there in the shadow!” He pointed the brush’s wooden end at a dark scrawl that Martin couldn’t make heads or tails of. “The wolf on the prowl. And look here!” He picked up another painting, badly done, of a winding mountain stream. “See it? Behind that rock?”
    “Yes, mein Führer,” Martin Bormann said, staring at a rock and a misshapen line or two.
    “And here, in this one!” Hitler offered a third painting, of a field of white edelweiss. He pointed his crimson-smeared finger at two dark dots amid the sunny flowers. “The eyes of the wolf! You see, he’s creeping closer! You know what that means, don’t you?”
    Martin hesitated, then slowly shook his head.
    “The wolf is my lucky symbol!” Hitler said, with a hint of agitation. “Everyone knows that! And here’s the wolf, appearing in my paintings with a will of its own! Do you need a clearer portent than that?”
    Here we go, Hitler’s secretary thought. Now we descend into the maelstrom of signs and symbols.
    “I’m the wolf, don’t you understand?” Hitler took off his glasses, which few but the inner circle ever saw him wearing, snapped them shut, and slid them into their leather case. “This is a portent of the future. My future.” His intense blue eyes blinked. “The future of the Reich, I should say of course. This only tells me again what I already know to be true.”
    Martin waited without speaking, staring at the farmhouse picture with its unintelligible scribble in the shadows.
    “We’re going to smash the Slavs and drive them back into their rat holes,” Hitler went on. “Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk… names on a map.” He grasped a map, leaving red fingerprints on it, and pushed it disdainfully off the desk. “Frederick the Great never considered defeat. Never considered it! He had loyal generals, yes. He had a staff who obeyed orders. Never in my life have I seen such willful disobedience! If they want to hurt me, why don’t they just put a gun to my head?”
    Martin said nothing. Hitler’s cheeks were growing red and his eyes looked yellow and moist, a bad sign. “I said we need larger tanks,” the Führer continued, “and you know what I heard in return? Larger tanks use more fuel. That’s their excuse. They think of every possible way to hobble me. Larger tanks use more fuel. Well, what is the whole of Russia but a vast pit of petroleum? And my officers tumble back from the Slavs in terror and refuse to fight for the lifeblood of Germany! How can we hope to hold the Slavs back without fuel? Not to speak of the air raids destroying the ball-bearing plants! You know