Garden of Beasts (12 page)

“Johann,” Willi Kohl asked the waiter, “what exactly was this man with the brown hat wearing?”

“A light gray suit, a white shirt and a green tie, which I found rather garish.”

“And he was large?”

“Very large, sir. But not fat. He was a bodybuilder perhaps.”

“Any other characteristics?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“Was he foreign?”

“I don’t know. But he spoke German flawlessly. Perhaps a faint accent.”

“His hair color?”

“I couldn’t say. Darker rather than lighter.”

“Age?”

“Not young, not old.”

Kohl sighed. “And you said ‘companions’?”

“Yes, sir. He arrived first. Then he was joined by another man. Considerably smaller. Wearing a black or dark gray suit. I don’t recall his tie. And then yet another, a man in brown overalls, in his thirties. A worker, it seemed. He joined them later.”

“Did the big man have a leather suitcase or satchel?”

“Yes. It was brown.”

“His companions spoke German too?”

“Yes.”

“Did you overhear their conversation?”

“No, Inspector.”

“And the man’s face? The man in the hat?” Janssen asked.

A hesitation. “I didn’t see the face. Or his companions’.”

“You waited on them but you did not see their faces?” Kohl asked.

“I didn’t pay any attention. It’s dark in here, as you can see. And in this business… so many people. You look but you rarely see, if you understand.”

That was true, Kohl supposed. But he also knew that since Hitler had come to power three years ago, blindness had become the national malady. People either denounced fellow citizens for “crimes” they hadn’t witnessed, or else were unable to recall the details of offenses they actually had seen. Knowing too much might mean a trip to the Alex—the Kripo headquarters—or the Gestapo’s on Prince Albrecht Street to examine endless pictures of known felons. No one would willingly go to either of those places; today’s witness could be tomorrow’s detainee.

The waiter’s eyes swept the floor, troubled. Sweat broke out on his forehead. Kohl pitied him. “Perhaps in lieu of a description of his face, you could give us some other observations and we could dispense with a visit to police headquarters. If you happen to think of something helpful.”

The man looked up, relieved.

“I’ll try to assist you,” the inspector said. “Let’s start with some specifics. What did he eat and drink?”

“Ah, that’s something. He at first ordered a wheat beer. He must not have ever drunk it before. He only sipped it and pushed it aside. But he drank all of the Pschorr ale that his companion ordered for him.”

“Good.” Kohl never knew at first what these details about a suspect might ultimately reveal. Perhaps the man’s state or country of origin, perhaps something more specific. But it was worth noting, which Willi Kohl now did in his well-thumbed notebook, after a lick of the pencil tip. “And his food?”

“Our sausage and cabbage plate. With much bread and margarine. They had the same. The big man ate everything. He seemed ravenous. His companion ate half.”

“And the third man?”

“Coffee only.”

“How did the big man—as we’ll call him—how did he hold his fork?”

“His fork?”

“After he cut a piece of sausage, did he change his fork from one hand to another and then eat the bite? Or did he lift the food to his mouth without changing hands?”

“I… I don’t know, sir. I would think possibly he
did
change hands. I say that because it seemed he was always placing his fork down to drink the beer.”

“Good, Johann.”

“I am happy to aid my Leader in any way I can.”

“Yes, yes,” Kohl said wearily.

Switching forks. Common in other countries, less so in Germany, like whistling for taxis. So the accent may have indeed been foreign.

“Did he smoke?”

“I believe so, sir.”

“Pipe, cigar, cigarette?”

“Cigarette, I believe. But I—”

“Didn’t see the brand of the manufacturer.”

“No, sir. I didn’t.”

Kohl walked across the room and examined the suspect’s table and the chairs around it. Nothing helpful. He frowned to see that the ashtray contained ash but no cigarette stubs.

More evidence of their man’s cleverness?

Kohl then crouched and struck a match over the floor beneath the table.

“Ah, yes, look, Janssen! Some flakes of the same brown leather we found earlier. Indeed it is our man. And there are marks in the dust here that suggest he set a satchel down.”

“I wonder what it contains,” Janssen said.

“That does not interest us,” Kohl said, scooping up these flakes and depositing them in an envelope. “Not at this point. The importance is the bag itself, the connection it establishes between this man and Dresden Alley.”

Kohl thanked the waiter and, with a longing glance at a plate of wiener schnitzel, he walked outside, Janssen behind him.

“Let’s inquire around the neighborhood to see if anyone saw our gentlemen. You take the far side of the street, Janssen. I’ll take the flower vendors.” Kohl laughed grimly. Berlin flower sellers were notoriously rude.

Janssen removed his handkerchief and wiped his brow. He seemed to give a faint sigh.

“Are you tired, Janssen?”

“No, sir. Not at all.” The young man hesitated then added, “It’s just that it seems our work sometimes is hopeless. All this effort for a fat dead man.”

Kohl dug his yellow pipe out of his pocket, frowning to see that he’d put his pistol into the same pocket and had nicked the bowl. He filled it with tobacco. He said, “Yes, Janssen, you’re right. The victim
was
a fat middle-aged man. But we’re clever detectives, aren’t we? We know something else about him, as well.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“That he was somebody’s son.”

“Well… of course he was.”

“And perhaps he was somebody’s brother. And maybe somebody’s husband or lover. And, if he was lucky, he was a father of sons and daughters. I would hope too that there are past lovers who think of him occasionally. And in his future other lovers might have awaited. And three or four more children he could have brought into the world.” He rasped a match on the side of the box and got a smolder going in the meerschaum. “So, Janssen, when you look at the incident in this way we don’t have merely a curious mystery about a stocky dead man. We have a tragedy like a spiderweb reaching many different lives and many different places, extending for years and years. How sad that is…. Do you see why our job is so important?”

“Yes, sir.”

And Kohl believed that the young man did indeed understand.

“Janssen, you must get a hat. But for now, I’ve changed my mind. You take the shady side of the street. It will mean, of course, that
you
must interview the flower vendors. They’ll treat you to some words you won’t hear outside of a Stormtrooper barracks but at least you won’t return to your wife tonight with skin the shade of fresh beetroot.”

Chapter Eight

Walking toward the busy square to find a taxi, Paul glanced behind him from time to time. Smoking his Chesterfield, looking at the sights, stores, passersby, once again searching for anything out of kilter.

He slipped into a public rest room, which was immaculate, and stepped into a stall. He stubbed out his cigarette and dropped it, along with the cigarette butts and wad of pulp that had held the address of Käthe Richter’s boardinghouse, into the toilet. Then he tore the pictures of Ernst up into dozens of tiny pieces and flushed everything away.

Outside on the street again, he put aside the difficult images of Max’s sad and unnecessary death and concentrated on the job ahead of him. It had been years since he’d killed anyone with a rifle. He was a good shot with a long weapon. People call guns “equalizers.” But that’s not completely true. A pistol weighs perhaps three pounds, a rifle twelve or more. To hold a weapon absolutely still requires strength, and Paul’s solid arms had helped make him the best shot in his squadron.

Yet now, as he’d explained to Morgan, when he had to touch off someone, he preferred to do it with a pistol.

And he always came in close, close as breath.

He never said a word to his victim, never confronted him, never even let him know what was about to happen. He would appear, as silently as a big man could, behind the victim, if possible, and fire the shot into his head, killing him instantly. He would never think of behaving like the sadistic Bugsy Siegel or the recently departed Dutch Schultz; they’d slowly beat people to death, torment them, taunt them. What Paul did as a button man had nothing to do with anger or pleasure or the gritty satisfaction of revenge; it was simply about committing an evil act to eliminate a greater evil.

And Paul Schumann insisted on paying the price for this hypocrisy. He suffered from the proximity of killing. The deaths sickened him, sent him into a tunnel of sorrow and guilt. Every time he killed, another part of him died too. Once, drunk in a shabby West Side Irish bar, he concluded that he was the opposite of Christ; he died so that others might die too. He wished he’d been too smoked on hooch to remember that thought. But it’d stuck with him.

Still, he supposed Morgan was right about using the rifle. His buddy Damon Runyon had once said that a man could be a winner only if he was willing to step over the edge. Paul sure did that often enough, but he also knew when to stop walking. He’d never been suicidal. On a number of occasions he’d postponed the touch-off when he sensed the odds were bad. Maybe six to five against was acceptable. But worse than that? He didn’t—

A loud crash startled him. Something flew through a bookstore window onto the sidewalk a few yards away. A bookcase. Some books followed. He glanced inside the shop and saw a middle-aged man holding his bloody face. He appeared to have been struck on the cheek. A woman, crying, gripped his arm. They were both terrified. Four large men in light brown uniforms stood around them. Paul supposed they were Stormtroopers, Brownshirts. One of them was holding a book and shouting at the man. “You are not allowed to sell this shit! They’re illegal. They’re a ticket to Oranienburg.”

“It’s Thomas Mann,” the man protested. “It means nothing against the Leader or our Party. I—”

The Brownshirt slapped the bookseller in his face with the open book. He spoke in a mocking voice. “It’s…” Another furious slap. “Thomas…” Another, and the spine of the book broke. “Mann….”

The bullying angered Paul but it wasn’t his problem. He could hardly afford to draw attention to himself here. He started on. But suddenly one of the Brownshirts grabbed the woman by the arm and pushed her out the door. She fell hard into Paul and dropped to the sidewalk. She was so terrified she didn’t even seem to notice him. Blood ran from her knees and palms where the window glass had cut her skin.

The apparent leader of the Stormtroopers dragged the man outside. “Destroy the place,” he called to his friends, who began to push over the counters and shelves, rip the pictures from the walls, slam the sturdy chairs onto the floor, trying to break them. The leader glanced at Paul then delivered a powerful blow to the midsection of the bookseller, who gave a grunt, rolled over on his stomach and vomited. The Brownshirt stepped toward the woman. He grabbed her by the hair and was about to strike her in the face when Paul, out of instinct, grabbed his arm.

The man spun around, spittle flying from his mouth, set in a large, square face. He stared into Paul’s blue eyes. “Who are you? Do you know who I am? Hugo Felstedt of the Berlin Castle Stormtrooper Brigade. Alexander! Stefan!”

Paul eased the woman aside. She bent and helped up the other bookseller, who was wiping his mouth, tears falling from the pain, the humiliation.

Two Stormtroopers emerged from the store. “Who is this?” one asked.

“Your card! Now!” Felstedt cried.

Although he’d boxed all his life, Paul avoided street brawls. His father used to sternly lecture the boy that he should never compete in any event where no one oversaw the rules. He was forbidden to fight in school yards and alleyways. “You listening to me, son?” Paul had dutifully replied, “Sure, Pa, you bet.” But sometimes there was nothing to do but meet Jake McGuire or Little Bill Carter and take and give some knuckle. He wasn’t sure what made those times different. But somehow you knew without a doubt that you couldn’t walk away.

And sometimes—maybe a lot of times—you
could,
but you just plain didn’t want to.

He sized up the man; he was like the kid lieutenant, Vincent Manielli, Paul decided. Young and muscled, but mostly talk. The American eased his weight to his toes, balanced himself and struck Felstedt’s midsection with a nearly invisible straight right.

The man’s jaw dropped and he backed up, struggling for breath, tapping his chest as if searching for his heart.

“You swine,” one of the others cried in a high voice, shocked, reaching for his pistol. Paul danced forward, grabbed the man’s right hand, pulled it from the holster cover, and popped a left hook into his face. In boxing there is no pain worse than a solid blow to the nose and, as the cartilage snapped and the blood flowed onto his camel-brown uniform, the man gave a keening howl and staggered back against the wall, tears pouring from his eyes.

Hugo Felstedt had by now dropped to his knees and was no longer interested in his heart; he was gripping his belly as
he
retched pathetically.

The third trooper went for his gun.

Paul stepped forward fast, fists closed. “Don’t,” he warned calmly. The Brownshirt suddenly bolted up the street, crying, “I’ll get some help…. I’ll get some help….”

The fourth Stormtrooper stepped outside. Paul moved toward him and he cried, “Please, don’t hurt me!”

Eyes fixed on the Brownshirt, Paul knelt, opened the satchel and began rummaging through the papers inside to find the pistol.

His eyes dipped for a moment and the Stormtrooper bent suddenly, grabbed some shards of window glass and flung them toward Paul. He ducked but the man launched himself into the American and caught him on the cheek with his brass-knuckled fist. It was a glancing blow but Paul was stunned and fell backward over his briefcase into a small weedy garden next to the store. The Brownshirt leapt after him. They grappled. The man was not particularly strong nor was he a trained fighter but, still, it took Paul a moment to struggle to his feet. Angry that he’d been caught off guard, he grabbed the man’s wrist, twisted sharply and heard a snap.

“Oh,” the man whispered. He sagged to the ground and passed out.

Felstedt was rolling into a sitting position, wiping vomit from his face.

Paul pulled the man’s pistol from his belt and flung it onto the roof of a low building nearby. He turned to the bookseller and the woman. “Leave now. Go.”

Speechless, they stared at him.

“Now!” he muttered sharply.

A whistle sounded up the street. Some shouts.

Paul said, “Run!”

The bookseller wiped his mouth again and glanced at the remains of their shop one last time. The woman put her arm around his shoulders and they hurried away.

Looking in the opposite direction down Rosenthaler Street, Paul noted a half dozen Brownshirts running in his direction.

“You Jew swine,” the man with the broken nose muttered. “Oh, you’re done for now.”

Paul grabbed the satchel, scooped the scattered contents back inside and began running toward a nearby alley. A glance behind. The clutch of large men was in pursuit. Where the hell had they all come from? Breaking from the alley, he found himself on a street of residential buildings, pushcarts, decrepit restaurants and tawdry shops. He paused, looking around the crowded street.

He stepped past a vendor selling secondhand clothing and, when the man was looking away, slipped a dark green jacket off a rack of men’s garments. He rolled it up and started into another alley to put it on. But he heard shouts from nearby. “There! Is that him?… You! Stop!”

To his left he saw three more Stormtroopers pointing his way. Word had spread of the incident. He hurried into the alley, longer and darker than the first. More shouts behind him. Then a gunshot. He heard a sharp snap as the bullet hit brick near his head. He glanced back. Another three or four uniformed men had joined his pursuers.

There are far too many people in this country who will chase you simply because you are running….

Paul spit hard against the wall and struggled to suck air into his lungs. A moment later he burst out of the alley into another street, more crowded than the first. He inhaled deeply and lost himself in the crowds of Saturday shoppers. Looking up and down the avenue, he saw three or four alleys branching off.

Which one?

Shouts behind him as the Stormtroopers poured into the street. No time to wait. He picked the nearest alleyway.

Wrong choice. The only exits from it were five or six doors. They were all locked.

He started to run back out of the cul-de-sac but stopped. There were now a dozen Brownshirts prowling through the crowds, moving steadily toward this alley. Most of them held pistols. Boys accompanied them, dressed like the flag-lowering youngsters he’d met yesterday at the Olympic Village.

Steadying his breathing, he pressed flat against the brick.

A swell mess this is, he thought angrily.

He stuffed his hat, tie and suit jacket into the satchel, then pulled on the green jacket.

Paul set the bag at his feet and took out the pistol. He checked to make certain the gun was loaded and a round chambered. Bracing his arm against the wall, he rested the weapon on his forearm and leaned out slowly, aiming at the man who was in the lead—Felstedt.

It would be difficult for them to figure out where the shot had come from and Paul hoped they’d scatter for cover, giving him the chance to lam through the rows of nearby pushcarts. Risky… but they’d be at this alley in a few minutes; what other choices did he have?

Closer, closer…

Touching the ice…

Pressure slowly increasing on the trigger as he aimed at the center of the man’s chest, the sights floating on the spot where the diagonal leather strap from belt to shoulder covered his heart.

“No,” the voice whispered urgently in his ear.

Paul spun around, leveling the pistol at the man who’d come up silently behind him. He was in his forties, dressed in a well-worn suit. His thick hair was swept back with oil and he had a bushy mustache. He was some inches shorter than Paul, his belly protruding over his belt. In his hands was a large cardboard carton.

“You may point that elsewhere,” he said calmly, nodding down at the pistol.

The American didn’t move the gun. “Who are you?”

“Perhaps we may converse later. We have more urgent matters now.” He stepped past Paul and looked around the corner. “A dozen of them. You must have done something quite irksome.”

“I beat up three of them.”

The German lifted a surprised eyebrow. “Ach, well, I assure you, sir, if you kill one or two, there will be hundreds more here within minutes. They’ll hunt you down and they may kill a dozen innocent people in the process. I can help you escape.”

Paul hesitated.

“If you don’t do as I say they
will
kill you. Murder and marching are the only things they do well.”

“Put the box down.” The man did and Paul lifted his jacket, looked at the waistband then gestured for him to turn in a circle.

“I have no gun.”

The same gesture, impatient.

The German turned. Paul patted his pockets and ankles. He was unarmed.

The man said, “I was watching you. You removed your jacket and hat— that’s good. And you stood out like a virgin on Nollendorf Plaza in that gauche tie. But it is likely you’ll be searched. You must discard the clothes.” A nod toward the satchel.

Running footsteps sounded nearby. Paul stepped back, considering the words. The advice made sense. He dug the items out of the satchel and stepped to a trash bin.

“No,” the man said. “Not there. If you wish to dispose of something in Berlin don’t throw it into food bins because people foraging for scraps will find it. And don’t throw it into the waste containers or the Gestapo or the V-men or A-men from the SD will find it; they regularly go through garbage. The only safe place is the sewer. No one goes through the sewers. Not yet, in any case.”

Paul glanced down at a nearby grating and reluctantly shoved in the items.

His luck-of-the-Irish tie…

“Now I’ll add something to your role as an escaper-from-dung-shirts.” He reached into his jacket pocket and extracted several hats. He selected a light-colored canvas crush hat. He unfurled and handed it to Paul then replaced the others. “Put it on.” The American did so. “Now, the pistol too. You must get rid of it. I know you are hesitant, but in truth it will do you little good. No gun carries enough bullets to stop all the Stormtroopers in the city, let alone a puny Luger.”

Yes or no?

Instinct again told him the man was right. He crouched down and tossed the gun down the grating as well. He heard a splash far below street level.