Garden of Beasts

by Jeffery Deaver

  Carrying the tray downstairs, he said good-bye to Gertrud then left. Hitler had insisted that guards be stationed outside his house, at least until the assassin was caught. Ernst had no objection to this but he now asked that they remain out of sight so as not to alarm his family. He also acquiesced to the Leader's demand that he not drive himself in his open Mercedes, as he preferred, but be driven in a closed auto by an armed SS bodyguard.

  They drove first to Columbia House, at Tempelhof. The driver climbed out and looked around to make sure the entry area was safe. He walked to the other two guards, stationed in front of the door, spoke with them and they looked around too, though Ernst couldn't imagine anyone being so foolish as to attempt an assassination in front of an SS detention center. After a moment they waved and Ernst climbed out of the car. He stepped through the front door and was led down the stairs, through several locked doors, and then into the cell area.

  Walking down the long hallway again, hot and dank, stinking of urine and shit. What a disgusting way to treat people, he thought. The British, American and French soldiers he'd captured during the War had been treated with respect. Ernst had saluted the officers, chatted with the enlisted men, made sure they were warm and dry and fed. He now felt a burst of contempt for the brown-uniformed jailer who accompanied him down the corridor, softly whistling the "Horst Wessel Song" and occasionally banging on bars with his truncheon, simply to frighten the prisoners.

  When they came to a cell three-quarters of the way down the corridor Ernst stopped, looked inside, his skin itching in the heat.

  The two Fischer brothers were drenched with sweat. They were frightened, of course-- everyone was frightened in this terrible place--but he saw something else in their eyes: youthful defiance.

  Ernst was disappointed. The look told him they were going to reject his offer: They'd chosen a spell in Oranienburg? He'd thought for certain that Kurt and Hans would agree to participate in the Waltham Study. They would have been perfect.

  "Good afternoon."

  The older one nodded. Ernst felt a strange chill. The boy resembled his own son. Why hadn't he noticed it before? Perhaps it was the self-confidence and the serenity that hadn't been there this morning. Perhaps it was just the lingering aftermath of the look in young Rudy's eyes earlier. In any case, the similarity unnerved him.

  "I need your answer now regarding your participation in our study."

  The brothers looked at each other. Kurt began to speak but it was the younger one who said, "We will do it."

  So, he'd been wrong. Ernst smiled and nodded, genuinely pleased.

  The older brother then added, "Provided you let us send a letter to England."

  "A letter?"

  "We wish to communicate with our parents."

  "That is not allowed, I'm afraid."

  "But you're a colonel, right? Aren't you someone who can decide what's allowed and what isn't?" Hans asked.

  Ernst cocked his head and examined the boy. But his attention returned to the older brother. The resemblance to Mark was indeed uncanny. He hesitated then said, "One letter. But you must send it in the next two days, while you're under my supervision. Your training sergeants won't permit it, not a letter to London. They are definitely not someone who can decide what's allowed and what isn't."

  Another glance passed between the boys. Kurt nodded. The colonel did too. And then he saluted them--just as he'd said good-bye to his son. Not with a fascist extended arm but in a traditional gesture, lifting his flat palm to his forehead, which the SA guard pretended not to notice.

  "Welcome to the new Germany," Ernst said in a voice that was close to a whisper and belied the crisp salute.

  They turned the corner and headed for Lutzow Plaza, putting as much distance between them and the boardinghouse as possible before they found a taxi, Paul looking back often to make sure they weren't being followed.

  "We aren't staying at the Metropol," he said, gazing up and down the street. "I'll find someplace safe. My friend Otto can do that. I'm sorry. But you'll have to just leave everything back there. You can't go back again."

  On the busy street corner they stopped. Absently his arm slipped around Kathe's waist as he looked into traffic. But he felt her stiffen. Then she pulled away.

  He glanced down at her, frowning.

  "I am going back, Paul." She spoke in a voice that was devoid of emotion.

  "Kathe, what's wrong?"

  "I was telling the truth to the Kripo inspector."

  "You..."

  "I was outside the door, looking in. You were the one who lied. You murdered that man in the room. There was no fight. He didn't have a gun. He was standing there helpless, and you hit him and killed him. It was horrible. I haven't seen anything so horrible since... since..."

  The fourth square from the grass...

  Paul was silent.

  An open truck drove past. A half dozen Stormtroopers were in the back. They shouted out something to a group of people on the street, laughing. Some of the pedestrians waved back. The truck disappeared fast around a corner.

  Paul led Kathe to a bench in a small park but she wouldn't sit. "No," she whispered. Arms folded across her chest, she stared at him coldly.

  "It's not as simple as you think," he whispered.

  "Simple?"

  "There's more to me, to why I'm here, yes. I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to be involved."

  Now, at last, raw anger exploded. "Oh, there's an excuse for lying! You didn't want to get me involved. You asked me to come to America, Paul. How much more involved could I be?"

  "I mean involved with my old life. This trip will be the end of that."

  "Old life? Are you a soldier?"

  "In a way." Then he hesitated. "No. That's not true. I was a criminal in America. I came here to stop them."

  "Them?"

  "Your enemies." He nodded at one of the hundreds of red-white-and-black flags that stirred nearby in the breeze. "I was supposed to kill someone in the government here to stop him from starting another war. But afterwards, that part of my life will be over with. I'd have a clean record. I'd--"

  "And when were you going to tell me this little secret of yours, Paul? When we got to London? To New York?"

  "Believe me. It's over with."

  "You used me."

  "I never--"

  "Last night--that wonderful night--you had me show you Wilhelm Street. You were using me as cover, weren't you? You wished to find a place where you could murder this man."

  He looked up at one of the stark, flapping banners and said nothing.

  "And what if in America I did something that angered you? Would you hit me? Would you kill me?"

  "Kathe! Of course not."

  "Ach, you say that. But you've lied before." Kathe pulled a handkerchief from her purse. The smell of lilac touched him momentarily and his heart cried, as if it were the smell of incense at a loved one's wake. She wiped her eyes and stuffed the cloth away. "Tell me one thing, Paul. How are you different from them? Tell me. How?... No, no, you are different. You're crueller. Do you know why?" Choking on tears. "You gave me hope and then you took it away. With them, with the beasts in the garden, there is never any hope. At least they're not deceitful like you. No, Paul. Fly back to your perfect country. I'll stay here. I'll stay until the knock on the door. And then I'll be gone. Like my Michael."

  "Kathe, I haven't been honest with you, no. But you have to leave with me.... Please."

  "Do you know what our philosopher Nietzsche wrote? He said, 'He who fights monsters must take care that he does not become a monster himself.' Oh, how true that is, Paul. How true."

  "Please, come with me." He took her by the shoulders, gripping her hard.

  But Kathe Richter was strong too. She pulled his hands off and stepped back. Her eyes fixed on his and she whispered ruthlessly, "I'd rather share my country with ten thousand killers than my bed with one. "

  And turning on her heels, she hesitated for a moment then
walked away quickly, drawing the glances of passersby, who wondered what might have caused such a fierce lovers' spat.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  "Willi, Willi, Willi...."

  Chief of Inspectors Friedrich Horcher drew the name out very slowly.

  Kohl had returned to the Alex and was nearly to his office when his boss caught up with him. "Yes, sir?"

  "I've been looking for you."

  "Yes? Have you?"

  "It's about that Gatow case. The shootings. You will recall?"

  How could he forget? Those pictures would be burned into his mind forever. The women... the children... But now he felt the chill of fear again. Had the case in fact been a test, as he'd worried earlier? Had Heydrich's boys waited to see if he'd drop the matter and now learned that he'd done worse: He'd secretly called the young gendarme at home about it?

  Horcher tugged at his blood-red armband. "I have good news for you. The case has been solved. Charlottenburg too, the Polish workers. They were both the work of the same killer."

  Kohl's initial relief that he was not going to be arrested turned quickly to bewilderment. "Who closed the case? Someone at Kripo?"

  "No, no, it was the head of the gendarmerie himself. Meyerhoff. Imagine."

  Ach... The matter was beginning to crystalize--to Willi Kohl's disgust. He wasn't the least surprised at the rest of the tale that his boss laid out. "The killer was a Czech Jew. Deranged. Much like Vlad the Impaler. Was he Czech? Maybe Romanian or Hungarian, I don't recall. Ha, history was always my poorest subject. In any case, the suspect was caught and confessed. He was handed over to the SS." Horcher laughed. "They took time out from their important, and mysterious, security alert to actually do some police work."

  "Was there one accomplice or more?" Kohl asked.

  "Accomplice? No, no, the Czech was alone."

  "Alone? But the gendarme in Gatow concluded there had to be at least two or three perpetrators, probably more. The pictures support that theory, and logic, as well, given the number of victims."

  "Ach, as we know, Willi, being trained policemen, the eye can be fooled. And a young gendarme in the suburbs? They are not used to crime scene investigation. Anyway, the Jew confessed. He acted alone. The case is solved. And the fellow is on his way to the camp."

  "I would like to interview him."

  A hesitation. Then, smiling still, Horcher adjusted his armband once again. "I'll see what I can do about that. Though it's likely that he might already be in Dachau."

  "Dachau? Why would they send him to Munich? Why not Oranienburg?"

  "Overcrowding perhaps. In any event, the case is done, so there's really no reason to talk to him."

  The man was, of course, dead by now.

  "Besides, you need all your time to concentrate on the Dresden Alley matter. How is that coming?"

  "We've had some breakthroughs," Kohl told his boss, trying to keep anger and frustration out of his voice. "A day or two and I think we'll have all our answers."

  "Excellent." Horcher frowned. "Even more hubbub over on Prince Albrecht Street than before. Did you hear? More alerts, more security measures. Even mobilizing among the SS. Still haven't heard what's going on. Have you caught a glimmer, by any chance?"

  "No, sir." Poor Horcher. Afraid everybody was better informed than he. "You'll have the report on the killing soon," Kohl told him.

  "Good. It is leaning toward that foreigner, isn't it? I believe you said it was."

  Kohl thought: No, you said it was. "The case is moving apace."

  "Excellent. My, look at us, Willi: Here we are working Sundays. Can you imagine it? Remember when we actually had Saturday afternoon and Sunday off?" The man wandered back up the quiet hallway.

  Kohl walked to the doorway of his office and saw the blank spaces where his notes and the photographs of the Gatow killings had rested. Horcher would have "filed them away"--meaning they'd had the same fate as the poor Czech Jew. Probably burned like the manifest of the Manhattan and floating over the city as particles of ash in the alkaline Berlin wind. He leaned wearily against the doorjamb, staring at the empty spaces on his desk, and he thought: This is the one thing about murder: It can never be undone. You return the stolen money, bruises heal, the burned-down house is rebuilt, you find the kidnap victim troubled but alive. But those children who had died, their parents, the Polish workers... their deaths were forever.

  And yet here was Willi Kohl being told that this was not so. That the laws of the universe were somehow different in this land: The deaths of the families and the workers had been erased. Because, if they had been real, then honest people would not rest until the loss had been understood and mourned and--Kohl's role--vindicated.

  The inspector hung his hat on the rack and sat heavily in his creaking chair. He looked over his incoming mail and telegrams. Nothing regarding Schumann. With his magnifying monocle, Kohl himself compared the fingerprints Janssen had taken of Taggert with the photos of those found on the cobblestones of Dresden Alley. They were the same. This relieved him somewhat; it meant that Taggert was indeed the murderer of Reginald Morgan, and the inspector had not let a killer go free.

  It was just as well that he could make the comparison himself. A message from the Identification Department told him that all the examiners and analysts had been ordered to drop any Kripo investigation and make themselves available to the Gestapo and SS in light of "a new development in the security alert."

  He walked to Janssen's desk and learned that the coroner's men still hadn't collected Taggert's body from the boardinghouse. Kohl shook his head and sighed. "We'll do what we can here. Have the ballistics technicians run tests on the Spanish pistol to make sure it is the murder weapon."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Oh, and, Janssen? If the firearms examiners too have been commandeered in the search for this Russian, then run the tests yourselves. You can do that, can you not?"

  "I can, sir, yes."

  After the young man had left, Kohl sat back and began to jot a list of questions about Morgan and the mysterious Taggert, which he would have translated and sent to the American authorities.

  A shadow appeared in the doorway. "Sir, a telegram," said the floor runner, a young man in a gray jacket. He offered the document to Kohl.

  "Yes, yes, thank you." Thinking it would be from the United States Lines about the manifest or Manny's Men's Wear, tersely explaining they could be of no help, he ripped the envelope open.

  But he was wrong. It was from the New York City Police Department. The language was English but he could understand the meaning well enough.

  TO DETECTIVE INSPECTOR W KOHL

  KRIMINALPOLIZEI ALEXANDERPLATZ BERLIN

  IN RESPONSE TO YOUR REQUEST OF EVEN DATE BE ADVISED

  THAT THE FILE ON P SCHUMANN HAS BEEN EXPUNGED AND OUR

  INVESTIGATION RE SAID INDIVIDUAL SUSPENDED INDEFINITELY

  STOP NO MORE INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE STOP

  REGARDS CAPT G O'MALLEY NYPD

  Kohl frowned. He found the department's English-German dictionary and learned that "expunged" meant "obliterated." He read the telegram several times more, feeling his skin grow hot with each reading.

  So the criminal police had been investigating Schumann. For what? And why had the file been destroyed and the investigation stopped?

  What were the implications of this? Well, the most immediate was that while the man might not have been guilty of killing Reginald Morgan, he was possibly in town for some criminal venture.

  And the other was that Kohl himself had let a potentially dangerous man loose in the city.

  He needed to find Schumann, or at least more information about him, and fast. Without waiting for Janssen to return, Willi Kohl collected his hat and walked along the dim hallway, then down the stairs. So distracted was he that he took the stairway to the forbidden ground floor. He pushed the door open anyway and was immediately confronted by an SS soldier. Amid the flapping of the DeHoMag card sorters, the man said, "Sir, this is a res
tricted--"

  "You will let me pass," Kohl growled with a fierceness that startled the young guard.

  Another guard, armed with an Erma machine gun, glanced their way.

  "I am leaving my building by the door at the end of that hallway. I don't have time to go the other way."

  The young SS man looked uneasily around him. No one else in the hallway said a word. Finally he nodded.

  Kohl stalked down the hall, ignoring the pain in his feet, and pushed outside into the brilliant, hot afternoon light. He oriented himself, lifted his foot to a bench and adjusted the lamb's wool to pad his right foot. Then the inspector started north in the direction of the Hotel Metropol.

  "Ach, Mr. John Dillinger!" Otto Webber frowned, gesturing him to a chair in a dark corner of the Aryan Cafe. He gripped Paul's arm hard and whispered, "I was worried about you. No word! Was my phone call to the stadium successful? I haven't heard anything on the radio. Not that our rodent Goebbels would go on state radio to spread the word of an assassination."

  Then the gang leader's smile faded. "What's the matter, my friend? Your face is not pleased."

  But before he could say anything the waitress Liesl noticed Paul and moved in fast. "Hello, my love," she said. Then pouted. "Shame on you. Last time you left without kissing me good-bye. What can I get you?"

  "A Pschorr."

  "Yes, yes, I'm pleased to. I've missed you."

  Ignored by the waitress, Webber said petulantly, "Excuse me, ach, excuse me. A lager for me."

  Liesl bent and kissed Paul's cheek. He smelled powerful perfume. It hung around him even after she left. He thought of lilac, thought of Kathe. He pushed the thoughts aside abruptly then explained what had happened at the stadium and afterward.

  "No! Our friend Morgan?" Webber was horrified.

  "A man pretending to be Morgan. The Kripo has my name and passport but they don't think I killed him. And they haven't connected me with Ernst and the stadium."

  Liesl brought them the beers. She squeezed Paul's shoulder as she stepped away and brushed against him flirtatiously, leaving another cloud of strong perfume around the table. Paul leaned away from it. She smiled lasciviously as she sashayed away.

  "She just can't figure out I'm not interested, can she?" he muttered, all the angrier because he couldn't get Kathe out of his mind.