Garden of Beasts

by Jeffery Deaver

  Paul listened for a moment longer but the repetitious rambling bored him. He tuned out the meaningless sound and looked at the sun-baked landscape, the houses, the inns, as the pretty suburbs west of the city gave way to more sparse areas. The driver turned off the Hamburg highway and pulled up in front of the Olympic Village's main entrance. Paul paid the man, who thanked him by lifting an eyebrow but said nothing, remaining fixed on the words streaming from the radio. He considered asking the driver to wait but decided it would be wiser to find someone else to take him back to town.

  The village was hot in the afternoon sun. The wind smelled salty, like ocean air, but it was dry as alum and carried a fine grit. Paul displayed his pass and continued down the perfectly laid sidewalk, past rows of narrow trees perfectly spaced, rising straight from round disks of mulch in the perfect, green grass. The German flag snapped smartly in the hot wind: red and white and black.

  Ach, surely you know...

  At the American dorms he bypassed the reception area, with its German soldier, and slipped into his room through the back door. He changed his outfit, burying the green jacket in a basket full of dirty laundry, there being no sewers handy, and putting on cream-colored flannels, a tennis shirt and a light cable-knit sweater. He brushed his hair differently--to the side. The makeup had worn off but there was nothing he could do about that now. As he stepped out the door with his suitcase and satchel a voice called, "Hey, Paul."

  He glanced up to see Jesse Owens, dressed in gymnasium clothes, returning to the dorm. Owens asked, "What're you doing?"

  "Heading into town. Get some work done."

  "Naw, Paul. We were hoping you'd stay around. You missed an all-right ceremony last night. You've gotta see the food they got here. It's swell."

  "I know it's grand, but I gotta skip. I'm doing some interviews in town."

  Owens stepped closer then nodded at the cut and bruise on Paul's face. Then the runner's sharp eyes dropped down to the man's knuckles, which were raw and red from the fight.

  "Hope the rest of your interviews go better than the one this morning. Dangerous to be a sportswriter in Berlin, looks like."

  "I took a spill. Nothing serious."

  "Not for you maybe," Owens said, amused. "But what about the fellow you landed on?"

  Paul couldn't help but smile. The runner was just a kid. But there was something worldly about him. Maybe growing up a Negro in the South and Midwest made you mature faster. Same with putting yourself through school on the heels of the Depression.

  Like stumbling into his own line of work had changed Paul. Changed him real fast.

  "What exactly are you doin' here, Paul?" the runner whispered.

  "Just my job," he answered slowly. "Just doing my job. Say, what's the wire on Stoller and Glickman? Hope they haven't been sidelined."

  "Nope, they're still scheduled," Owens said, frowning, "but the rumors aren't sounding good."

  "Good luck to them. And to you too, Jesse. Bring home some gold."

  "We'll do our best. See you later?"

  "Maybe."

  Paul shook his hand and walked off toward the entrance to the village, where a line of taxis waited.

  "Hey, Paul."

  He turned to see the fastest man in the world saluting him, a grin on his face.

  The poll of the vendors and bench-sitters along Rosenthaler Street had been futile (though Janssen confirmed that he'd learned some new curses when a flower seller found out he was troubling her only to ask questions, not to buy anything). There had been a shooting not far away, Kohl had learned, but that was an SS matter--perhaps about their jealously guarded "minor security matter"--and none of the elite guard would deign to speak to the Kripo about it.

  Upon their return to headquarters, however, they found that a miracle had occurred. The photographs of the victim and of the fingerprints from Dresden Alley were on Willi Kohl's desk.

  "Look at this, Janssen," Kohl said, gesturing at the glossy pictures, neatly assembled in a file.

  He sat down at his battered desk in his office in the Alex, the Kripo's massive, ancient building, nicknamed for the bustling square and surrounding neighborhood where it was located: Alexander Plaza. All the state buildings were being renovated except theirs, it seemed. The criminal police were housed in the same grimy building they'd been in for years. Kohl did not mind this, however, since it was some distance from Wilhelm Street, which at least gave some practical autonomy to the police, even if none now existed administratively.

  Kohl was also fortunate to have an office of his own, a room that measured four meters by six and contained a desk, a table and three chairs. On the oak plain of the desk were a thousand pieces of paper, an ashtray, a pipe rack and a dozen framed photographs of his wife, children and parents.

  He rocked forward in his creaking wooden chair and looked over the crime scene photographs and the ones of the fingerprints. "You're talented, Janssen. These are quite good."

  "Thank you, sir." The young man was looking down at them, nodding.

  Kohl regarded him closely. The inspector himself had taken a traditional route up through the police ranks. The son of a Prussian farmer, young Willi had become fascinated with both Berlin and police work from the story-books he'd read growing up. At eighteen he'd come to the city and gotten a job as a uniformed Schupo officer, went through the basic training at the famed Berlin Police Institute and worked his way up to corporal and sergeant, receiving a college degree along the way. Then, with a wife and two children, he'd gone on to the institute's Officers School and joined Kripo, rising over the years from detective-inspector assistant to senior detective-inspector.

  His young protege, on the other hand, had gone a different route, one that was far more common nowadays. Janssen had graduated from a good university several years ago, passed the qualifying exam in jurisprudence, then, after attending the police institute, he was accepted at this young age as a detective-inspector candidate, apprenticed to Kohl.

  It was often hard to draw the inspector candidate out; Janssen was reserved. He was married to a solid, dark-haired woman who was now pregnant with their second child. The only time Janssen grew animated was when he talked about his family or about his passion for bicycling and hiking. Until all police were put on overtime because of the approaching Olympics, detectives worked only half days on Wednesday and Janssen would often change into his hiking shorts in a Kripo lavatory at noon and go off on a wander with his brother or his wife.

  But whatever made him tick, the man was smart and ambitious and Kohl was very fortunate to have him. Over the past several years the Kripo had been hemorrhaging talented officers to the Gestapo, where the pay and opportunities were far better. When Hitler came to power the number of Kripo detectives around the country was twelve thousand. Now, it was down to eight thousand. And of those, many were former Gestapo investigators sent to the Kripo in exchange for the young officers who'd transferred out; in truth, they were largely drunks and incompetents.

  The telephone buzzed and he picked it up. "This is Kohl."

  "Inspector, it is Schreiber, the clerk you spoke to today. Hail Hitler."

  "Yes, yes, hail." On the way back to the Alex from the Summer Garden, Kohl and Janssen had stopped at the haberdashery department at Tietz, the massive department store that dominated the north side of Alexander Plaza, near Kripo headquarters. Kohl had shown the clerk the picture of Goring's hat and asked what kind it was. The man didn't know but would look into the matter.

  "Any luck?" Kohl asked him.

  "Ach, yes, yes, I have found the answer. It's a Stetson. Made in the United States. As you know, Minister Goring shows the finest taste."

  Kohl made no comment on that. "Are they common here?"

  "No, sir. Quite rare. Expensive, as you can imagine."

  "Where could I buy one in Berlin?"

  "In truth, sir, I don't know. The minister, I'm told, special-orders them from London."

  Kohl thanked him, hung up and told Janssen
what he'd learned.

  "So perhaps he's an American," Janssen said. "But perhaps not. Since Goring wears the same hat."

  "A small piece of the puzzle, Janssen. But you will find that many small pieces often give a clearer picture of a crime than a single large piece." He took the brown evidence envelopes from his pocket and selected the one containing the bullet.

  The Kripo had its own forensics laboratory, dating back to when the Prussian police force had been the nation's preeminent law enforcer (if not the world's; in the Weimar days, the Kripo closed 97 percent of the murder cases in Berlin). But the lab too had been raided by the Gestapo both for equipment and personnel, and the technical workers at headquarters were harried and far less competent than they had once been. Willi Kohl, therefore, had taken it upon himself to become an expert in certain areas of criminal science. Despite the absence of his personal interest in firearms, Kohl had made quite a study of ballistics, modeling his approach on the best firearms laboratory in the world--the one at J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C.

  He shook the bullet out onto a clean piece of paper.

  Placing the monocle in his eye he found a pair of tweezers and examined the slug carefully. "Your eyes are better," he said. "You look."

  The inspector candidate carefully took the bullet and the monocle while Kohl pulled a binder from his shelf. It contained photographs and sketches of many types of bullets. The binder was large, several hundred pages, but the inspector had organized it by caliber and by number of grooves and lands--the stripes pressed into a lead slug by the rifling in the barrel--and whether they twisted to the left or the right. Only five minutes later Janssen found a match.

  "Ach, this is good news," Kohl said.

  "How so?"

  "It is an unusual weapon our killer used. Look. It's a nine-millimeter Largo round. Most likely from the Spanish Star Modelo A. Good for us, it is rare. And as you pointed out, it is either a new weapon or one that has been fired little. Let us hope the former. Janssen, you have a way with words: Please send a telegram to all police precincts in the area. Have them query gun shops and see if any have sold a new or little-used Star Modelo A in the past several months, or ammunition for such a gun. No, make that the past year. I want names and addresses of all purchasers."

  "Yes, sir."

  The young inspector candidate took down the information and started for the Teletype room.

  "Wait, add as a postscript to your message a description of our suspect. And that he is armed." The inspector gathered up the clearest photographs of the suspect's fingerprints and the inked card of the victim's. Sighing, he said, "And now I must try to be diplomatic. Ach, how I hate doing that."

  Chapter Ten

  "I am sorry, Inspector Kohl, the department is engaged."

  "Entirely?"

  "Yes, sir," said the prim bald man in a tight suit, buttoned high on his chest. "Several hours ago we were ordered to stop all other investigations and compile a list of everyone in the files with a Russian background or pronounced appearance."

  They were in the ante-office of the Kripo's large identification division, where fingerprint analysis and anthropometry were performed.

  " Everyone in Berlin?"

  "Yes. There is some alert going on."

  Ah, the security matter again, the one that Krauss had deemed too insignificant to mention to the Kripo.

  "They're using fingerprint examiners to check personal files? And our fingerprint examiners, no less?"

  "Drop everything," the buttoned-up little man replied. "Those were my orders. From Sipo headquarters."

  Himmler again, Kohl thought. "Please, Gerhard, these are vital." He showed him the fingerprint card and the photos.

  "They are good pictures." Gerhard examined them. "Very clear."

  "Put three or four examiners on it, please. That's all I'm asking."

  A pinched-face laugh crossed the administrator's face. "I cannot, Inspector. Three? Impossible."

  Kohl felt the frustration. A student of foreign criminal science, he looked with envy at America and England, where forensic identification was now done almost exclusively by fingerprint analysis. Here, yes, fingerprints were used for identification but, unlike in the United States, the Germans had no uniform system of analyzing prints; each area of the country was different. A policeman in Westphalia might analyze a print in one way; a Berlin Kripo officer would analyze it differently. By posting the samples back and forth it was possible to achieve an identification but the process could take weeks. Kohl had long advocated standardizing fingerprint analysis throughout the country but had met with considerable resistance and lethargy. He'd also urged his supervisor to buy some American wire-photo machines, remarkable devices that could transmit clear facsimile photographs and pictures, such as of fingerprints, over telephone lines in minutes. They were, however, quite expensive and his boss had turned down the request without even taking the matter up with the police president.

  More troubling to Kohl, though, was that once the National Socialists came to power fingerprints took on less importance than the antiquated system of Bertillon anthropometry, in which measurements of the body, face and head were used to identify criminals. Kohl, like most modern detectives, rejected Bertillon analysis as unwieldy; yes, each person's body structure was largely different from another's, but dozens of precise measurements were needed to categorize someone. And, unlike fingerprints, criminals rarely left sufficient bodily impressions at the scene to link any individual to the site of the crime through Bertillon data.

  But the National Socialists' interest in anthropometry went beyond merely identifying someone; it was the key to what they termed the "science" of criminobiology: categorizing people as criminal irrespective of their behavior, solely on their physical characteristics. Hundreds of Gestapo and SS labored full-time to correlate size of nose and shade of skin, for instance, to proclivity to commit a crime. Himmler's goal was not to bring criminals to justice but to eliminate crime before it occurred.

  To Kohl this was as frightening as it was foolish.

  Looking out over the huge room of long tables, filled with men and women hunched over documents, Kohl now decided that the diplomacy he'd summoned up on the way here would have no effect. A different tactic was required: deceit. "Very well. Tell me a date you can begin your analysis. I must tell Krauss something. He's been nagging me for hours."

  A pause. "Our Pietr Krauss?"

  "The Gestapo's Krauss, yes. I'll tell him... what shall I tell him, Gerhard? It will take you a week, ten days?"

  "The Gestapo is involved?"

  "Krauss and I investigated the crime scene together." At least this much was true. More or less.

  "Perhaps this incident relates to the security situation," the man said, uneasy now.

  "I'm sure it does," Kohl said. "Perhaps those very prints are from the Russian in question."

  The man said nothing but looked over the pictures. He was so slim; why did he wear such a tight suit?

  "I will submit the prints to an examiner. I will call you with any results."

  "Whatever you can do will be appreciated," Kohl said, thinking: Ach, one examiner? Most likely useless, unless he happened to find a lucky match.

  Kohl thanked the technician and walked back up the stairs to his floor. He entered the office of his superior, Friedrich Horcher, who was chief of inspectors for Berlin-Potsdam.

  The lean, gray-haired man, with a throwback of a waxed mustache, had been a good investigator in his early days and had weathered the seas of recent German politics well. Horcher had been ambivalent about the Party; he'd been a secret member in the terrible days of the Inflation, then he quit because of Hitler's extreme views. Only recently had he joined again, reluctantly perhaps, drawn along inexorably by the course the nation was taking. Or perhaps he was a true convert. Kohl had no idea which was the case.

  "How is this case coming, Willi? The Dresden Alley case?"

  "Slowly,
sir." He added grimly, "Resources are occupied, it seems. Our resources."

  "Yes, something is going on. An alert of some sort."

  "Indeed."

  "Have you heard anything about it, I wonder?" Horcher asked.

  "No, nothing."

  "But still we are under such pressure. They think the world is watching and one dead man near the Tiergarten might ruin the image of our city forever." At Horcher's level, irony was a dangerous luxury and Kohl could detect none in the man's voice. "Any suspects?"

  "Some aspects of his appearance, some small clues. That's all."

  Horcher straightened the papers on his desk. "It would be helpful if the perpetrator was--"

  "--a foreigner?" Kohl supplied.

  "Exactly."

  "We shall see.... I would like to do one thing, sir. The victim is as yet unidentified. This is a handicap. I would like to run a picture in The People's Observer and the Journal and see if anyone recognizes him."

  Horcher laughed. "A picture of a dead body in the paper?"

  "Without knowing the victim we are largely disadvantaged in the investigation."

  "I will send the matter to the propaganda office and see what Minister Goebbels has to say. It would have to be cleared with him."

  "Thank you, sir." Kohl turned to leave. Then he paused. "One other matter, Chief of Inspectors. I am still waiting for that report from Gatow. It's been a week. I was wondering if you perhaps had received it."

  "What was in Gatow? Oh, that shooting?"

  "Two," Kohl corrected. "Two shootings."

  In the first, two families, picnicking by the Havel River, southwest of Berlin, had been shot to death: seven individuals, including three children. The next day there'd been a second slaughter: eight laborers, living in caravans between Gatow and Charlottenburg, the exclusive suburb west of Berlin.

  The police commandant in Gatow had never handled such a case and had one of his gendarmes call the Kripo for help. Raul, an eager young officer, had spoken to Kohl, and had sent photos of the crime scene to the Alex. Willi Kohl, hardened to homicide investigations, had nonetheless been shocked at the sight of the mothers and children gunned down. The Kripo had jurisdiction over all nonpolitical crimes anywhere in Germany, and Kohl wished to make the murders a priority.