Flight

The man climbed up the airtight ramp, carrying nothing but a small leather briefcase. He was pleased to see that the voluptuous stewardess awaiting him on top was blonde with pale blue eyes, a proper Aryan woman.

“Good evening, sir, and welcome aboard!” She greeted him with a perfunctory smile as he handed her the ticket.

“Evening,” he replied in perfect English. He hated the language, but spoke it like a native.

A frown wrinkled her face as her gaze fell upon his ticket, and terror seized the man’s heart. Had he been discovered by the MI5? Or betrayed by his own men?

The man scanned his surroundings for any sign of danger. However, the stewardess's frown soon melted into a warm smile.

“You have a pleasant surprise coming your way, sir,” she winked conspiratorially at him.

A grip around a man's heart tightened at those words.

“Enjoy your flight!” she said, returning his ticket.

“Thank you!”

The man moved past her into the plane's body. With a curt apology, he rushed past a group of passengers who were putting their luggage into the overhead rack, found his seat, and slid onto it. It was an aisle seat next to the emergency exit with extra legroom, a fact which pleased most passengers.

However, the man felt anything but pleased. He firmly squeezed his briefcase against his chest with his shaking fingers and tried to deepen his breath, a technique for subduing the panic attacks doctor Morell had taught him.

The stewardess's words kept replaying in his mind.

You have a pleasant surprise coming your way, sir.

A pleasant surprise.

Pleasant.

Pleasant.

But surely, he would have been arrested if Churchill had discovered him. MI5 wouldn't play silly games with him had they known he was here. But what could the verdammt surprise be then?

That's when he first spotted the emergency exit and the extra space it provided for his feet. Aware that his laughter was famous worldwide and could be his death if practiced in public, he stifled his giggles and placed the briefcase under his seat, finally relaxing.

What a pleasant surprise it is to have more wiggle room for my feet. A pleasant surprise indeed.

The man stretched his legs in front of him, adjusted the cushion behind his head, and fell into a slumber. He hadn't slept for more than 24 hours, and the weariness was getting to him. And his last sleep had been terrible as well, interrupted by the detonations all around the bunker. It had been at 3 a.m. when he’d finally decided the day had come at last.

He sneaked out of the bedroom, careful not to wake Eva or the dogs, and went into his office, snapping at the guard not to let anyone disturb him. Everything was waiting for him there, as arranged with doctor Morell: a razor blade, a wig, blue contact lenses, and a blonde mustache and beard. Shaving his well-groomed mustache felt like a crime to him, for it was a staple of his identity, making him recognizable to billions.

Yet, that was exactly why it had to be done.

When he finished with his camouflage, he gazed at his reflection in the wardrobe mirror. He was amused to see that he now looked like a true Aryan, a race he had fooled hundreds of millions into believing was superior, at the same time accepting an inferior-race man as their leader. Good doctor Morell really had a sense of humor.

“Oh, I will really miss the old fart,” he thought as he put on the Soviet uniform. When he finally topped his bald head with a red-star hat, he opened a heavy metal door rumoured to open into a safe with the Nazi gold, but which in fact led to an underground evacuation corridor. “And the dogs, I'll definitely miss the dogs,” he sighed wistfully before slamming the door behind him.

The man turned on the flashlight and set off down the dark, dirty corridor. This had so far been the best morning he’d had in weeks, maybe even months. He had been confined in this musty bunker for so long — forced to attend endless pointless meetings with his generals — that his muscles atrophied, and his legs savored the brisk walk for a change. Besides, the detonations overhead were like music to his ears; the Russians bombarding the Germans on order to capture him, and the Germans bombarding the Russians to protect him, both of them wasting their lives as he slid underneath their feet. The prospect of it made him giddy.

This soft music slowly faded away as he left the outskirts of Berlin behind. The corridor ended with the metal rack of a modern electrically-powered elevator. As the man stepped out of the fake well in an abandoned village 13 miles south of Berlin, the sun had already risen, and it took his eyes a few moments to adjust to the light before they spotted what they were searching for. The woodland camo GAZ-67 had been so thoroughly covered with brush that it was invisible to anyone who didn't know exactly where to look.

The man removed the branches from the hood, jumped into the Jeep, and let out a roar of jubilation as the engine came to life. He really enjoyed driving, but in the last six years had had barely a chance to sit behind the wheel, with his personal assistant driver always doing it for him.

“Sweitz, here I come!” he exclaimed jovially, savoring the grind of the wheels against the gravel road.

And indeed, no later than noon had he illegally crossed the Swiss border. The SS Intel, which informed him that both the Americans and the Soviets were so focused on Berlin that they left the unprotected corridor to the south, had been correct, and the man hadn't heard a single gunshot as he traversed Saxony and Bavaria unimpeded.

As soon as the Swiss Autobahn came into sight, he parked the Jeep in the tall grass on an abandoned Alpine passageway, and replaced his Soviet uniform with a baseball cap, sunglasses, a leather jacket, jeans, and sneakers, passing as an American tourist as he hitchhiked a ride to Bern airport, a role he would play all the way to America, the land of his dreams—

The man was jerked from his slumber by loud applause reverberating through the plane. The dusk was already settling over Heathrow, and he needed to slide the sunglasses down his nose to see what was going on in the dimly lit aisle.

When he finally spotted the cause of the commotion, a darkness far deeper than the tint of his sunglasses fell over his eyes, sending his head spinning. The applause had its roots in a slender woman standing at the top of the aisle. Her shoulder-length blonde hair curled softly at the ends, resting on the shoulders of her puffy fur coat. She was so short that the tail of her coat slid across the carpet as she walked down the aisle, modestly waving away the applause with her hand, her crimson lips stretched into a smile.

Marlene Dietrich stopped right in front of the man and looked him in the eyes. “Entschuldigen Sie, bitte,” she said, pointing at the window seat next to him.

“Ja, ja, natürlich, Frau Dietrich,” the man stammered, forgetting in his astonishment that the American tourist John Greenwood, whose passport he carried, didn't speak German. He drew his outstretched legs back, and Marlene elegantly slid into the seat next to him.

“Ein Amerikaner?” she asked him, shaking off her coat. Underneath, she wore a crimson evening dress with a deep cleavage and a completely naked back.

“Nein—- ja, ja, Frau,” the man replied stupidly. He gave himself a little shake, lifted his gaze from her bosom to her face, and added inconsequently, more to himself than to her, “I speak a tiny bit of German.”

“You should have painted your eyebrows,” she said in English without preamble.

“I’m sorry?” The man’s heart leapt into his throat.

“The brows give you away.”

The man gripped his suitcase to stop his hands from shaking. He couldn’t muster a single word. Was this Churchill's game? To send his favorite star in the world to torment him before the arrest?

Marlene rolled her eyes. “You should have dyed them in a lighter shade. Like me, see?” She pointed at her forehead, where her heavily plucked eyebrows were replaced by pencil-drawn lines.

When he still didn’t offer any reply, she frowned, a shadow of doubt crossing her beautiful face. “Your beard is naturally black, isn't it?”

“Oh, yes, it is,” he finally managed.

Marlene’s lips curled into a warm smile, and she patted him on the shoulder. “But don't worry, most women wouldn't notice it. Blonde suits you well, by the way.”

“Thanks.”

At that moment, the buxom stewardess, who was counting the passengers, gave the man a sly wink when she noticed he was in conversation with the actress.

The man was sure that Marlene had said something.

“Sorry?”

“I asked if you were married,” she said with a giggle. His complete enchantment by her presence greatly amused her.

“Oh. No, I haven’t met her yet,” he said with a wan smile, finally composing himself enough to construct a sentence.

“Never too late for it. But you might consider dying those eyebrows then.”

“Oh, I surely will, Frau Dietrich.”

She squinted at him thoughtfully in silence. “Do I know you from somewhere? Your face seems so familiar, but I can't put my finger on it—”

“Dear passengers,” the stewardess announced over the loud PA system, drowning Marlene’s words. “Welcome aboard the flight Nr. 1765, London-New York. If you could please spare me a moment of your attention, I would gladly show you how to buckle—-”

With an apologetic smile, the man pointed vaguely at the speaker to indicate he can't hear her anymore, then leaned back in his seat. He covered his face with his cap, lest she continue studying his features in his sleep, which could have the most catastrophic consequences.

Meeting the actress of his dreams, which could ironically prove to be his demise, temporarily resolved the battle between his tiredness and excitement in favor of the latter, and he couldn't fall asleep. His mind kept racing, trying to think of a plausible story for her familiarity with his features, interrupted by the totally unhelpful visions of the two of them making out in the seat, and then moving on to have sex in the airplane toilet, unable to restrain their long-repressed desires for each other until the landing. He would tell her who he really was, and she would be disgusted at first. His imagination couldn't reach a point where her disgust ever faded away — her immigration to America, renunciation of German citizenship, and a huge public campaign against him were insurmountable obstacles to that — but it managed to use that contempt as a fuel for her desire, making her even hornier in his mind's eye.

The man felt an erection stirring in his American pants and crossed his legs to hide it. Feigning a shuffle in his seat, he gently leaned toward her until his shoulder lightly rested against hers, counting on her decency not to interrupt his sleep.

She didn't.

Feigning sleep, the man eventually fell asleep. In his dream, he was trudging through the concrete maze of the Vorbunker, a rifle in his hand. The overhead detonations shook the walls, and dust from the ceiling fell onto his Soviet uniform. He found the remains of the doors leading into the lower platform were blown open, with scraps of metal hanging from its rusty hinges.

He carefully descended the gloomy staircase into the Führerbunker. The crude electrical lamps flickered overhead, casting a cold white light onto the spectacle around. The floor was littered with rubble, torn maps of fake battlefronts fallen from the walls, cyanide pills, and corpses.

The bodies were unscathed, all lying with their faces upward, and he recognized every single one of them; Dr. Morell on a stretcher in the infirmary; Joseph and Marie in their bedroom, surrounded by their six children, as though they were all asleep.

He stepped over the corpses of two huge German Shepherds and entered the office labeled ‘Führer’. His eyes fell on a slender figure stretched on the couch, her lips pressed against her fresh wedding ring, her blue eyes averted toward the low ceiling they could no longer see.

“Where is he?” The bald commander cried from the backroom, upending the furniture as though the man he looked for could be hiding in a closet.

A young soldier approached him reluctantly. “General,” he said. “We found a passage behind a fake safe.”

“Show me,” the general went into the neighboring chamber out of the man’s sight, and a loud cry of anger echoed across the bunker.

The man woke with a start. His heart was racing wildly in his chest, and it took him a while to remember where he was. He blinked away the images of Eva’s body swimming before his eyes to realize he was lying over both seats, his head resting against the window pane.

Marlene was gone.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” came a voice over the PA, “We sincerely hope you enjoyed your flight. We will soon be landing in New York. It is 1:00 a.m., 2nd of May, according to local time. But before we start the landing maneuver, I would like to introduce you to a special guest accompanying us on this flight, who will treat us all with a song to celebrate this glorious day when our Soviet Allies have at last ended the war in our enemy’s capital. Dear passengers, the one and only Marlene Dietrich!”

There was a slight pause for the microphone handover, and then Marlene's beautiful alto reverberated through the plane.

Vor der Kaserne, vor dem großen Tor

Stand eine Laterne und steht sie noch davor

So woll'n wir uns da wiedersehen

Bei der Laterne woll'n wir stehn

Wie einst Lili Marleen

Wie einst Lili Marleen

As he enjoyed her beautiful voice, the man wondered whether he should ask for her autograph when she returned to her seat. He knew this was his only chance of ever acquiring it. Yet, the only piece of paper he possessed was his fake passport, and he didn’t want to wave it in front of her like a toreador to a bull. The fate had served him surprisingly well the last couple of days, and that was no point in teasing it.

And yet, it was Marlene Dietrich—

He scrambled through his pocket for a pen.