“Now, what would your mother say?”

“Hey.”

“Easy,” she said, then nodded toward Jake. “Besides, he gets mean.”

The GI glanced at Jake, then winked at her. “Maybe next time then, babe. Thanks for the picture.”

“There’s one for the books,” she said to Jake as the GIs moved away. “I never thought I’d get picked up in Hitler’s office.”

Jake looked at her, surprised. He had never thought of her being picked up at all. Now he saw that, scrubbed of combat dirt and bluff, she was attractive. “Babe,” he said, amused.

“Where’s the bunker?” ‹›“There, I guess.” He pointed through the window to the back courtyard, where a group of Russian soldiers stood guard. A small concrete blockhouse, a scarred, empty patch of ground. The two GIs were being turned away but offered cigarettes around until the guards stepped aside to let them take a picture. Jake thought of Egypt, the valley of bunkers where the pharaohs had gone to ground, in love with death. But even they hadn’t taken their city with them.

“They say he married her at the end,” Liz said.

While the Russians ran wild overhead, the very last hour.

“Let’s hope it meant something to her.”

“It always does,” she said lightly, then glanced at him. “I’ll come back. I can see you’re not in the mood.”

Everybody wants to see the bunker, Ron had said. The last act, right down to the ghoulish wedding and finally, too late, the one shot. Now a story for the magazines. Did Eva have flowers? A champagne toast, before they put the dog down and Magda murdered her children.

“It’s not a shrine,” Jake said, still looking out the window. “They should bulldoze it over.”

“After I get my picture,” Liz said.

They moved back into the gloom of the long gallery. There were the broken-up chairs again, stuffing bursting out of the bayonet slashes. Why had the Russians left it like this? Some kind of barbarous lesson? But who was here to learn it? GIs were taking pictures by the fallen chandeliers, oblivious tourists. Near the wall was a heap of medals, thrown out of drawers. Iron Crosses. When Jake bent over to pick one up, a souvenir for Ron, he felt like a gravedigger scavenging through remains.