Garden of Beasts (11 page)

Touching the ice…

“No,” Paul said in a whisper. “Tell me everything.”

They drove down Rosenthaler Street, as quickly as the tiny engine could carry them, toward the Summer Garden restaurant.

Konrad Janssen asked his boss, “Sir, a question?”

“Yes?”

“Inspector Krauss was hoping to find that a foreigner was the killer and we have evidence that the suspect is one. Why didn’t you tell him that?”

“Evidence that
suggests
that he
might be
one. And not very strongly. Merely that he might have had an accent and that he whistled for a taxi.”

“Yes, sir. But shouldn’t we have mentioned it? We could use the Gestapo’s resources.”

Heavyset Kohl was breathing hard and sweating furiously in the heat. He liked the summer because the family could enjoy the Tiergarten and Luna Park or drive to Wannsee or the Havel River for picnics. But for climate he was an autumn person at heart. He wiped his forehead and replied, “No, Janssen, we should
not
have mentioned it nor should we have sought the Gestapo’s help. And this is why: First, since the consolidation last month, the Gestapo and SS are doing whatever they can to strip the Kripo of its independence. We must retain as much as we can and that means we need to do our job alone. And second, and much, much more important: The Gestapo’s ‘resources’ are often simply arresting anyone who seems in the least guilty—of anything. And sometimes arresting those who are clearly innocent but whose arrests might be
convenient.
”

Kripo headquarters contained six hundred holding cells, whose purpose had once been like those in police stations everywhere: to detain criminal arrestees until they were released or tried. Presently these cells—filled to overflowing—held those accused of vague political crimes and were over-seen by Stormtroopers, brutal young men in brown uniforms and white armbands. The cells were merely temporary stops on the way to a concentration camp or Gestapo headquarters on Prince Albrecht Street. Sometimes to the cemetery.

Kohl continued. “No, Janssen, we’re craftsmen practicing the refined art of police work, not Saxon farmers armed with sickles to mow down dozens of citizens in the pursuit of a single guilty man.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Never forget that.” He shook his head. “Ach, how much harder it is to do our job in this moral quicksand around us.” As he pulled the car to the curb he glanced at his assistant. “Janssen, you could have me arrested, you know, and sent to Oranienburg for a year for saying what I just did.”

“I wouldn’t say anything, sir.”

Kohl killed the ignition. They climbed out, then trotted quickly up the broad sidewalk toward the Summer Garden. As they got closer Willi Kohl detected the scent of well-marinated sauerbraten, for which this place was known. His stomach growled.

Janssen was carrying a copy of the National Socialist newspaper,
The People’s Observer,
which featured Göring prominently on the front page, wearing a jaunty hat of a cut that wasn’t common in Berlin. Thinking of these particular accessories, Kohl glanced at his assistant; the inspector candidate’s fair face was growing red from the July sun. Did today’s young people not realize that hats had been created for a purpose?

As they approached the restaurant Kohl motioned Janssen to slow. They paused beside a lamppost and studied the Summer Garden. There were not many diners remaining at this hour. Two SS officers were paying and leaving, which was just as well, since, for the reasons he’d just explained to Janssen, he preferred to say nothing about the case. The only men remaining were a middle-aged fellow in lederhosen and a pensioner.

Kohl noted the thick curtains, protecting them from surveillance from inside. He nodded to Janssen and they stepped onto the deck, the inspector asking each diner if he’d seen a large man in a brown hat enter the restaurant.

The pensioner nodded. “A big man? Indeed, Detective. I didn’t look clearly but I believe he walked inside about twenty minutes ago.”

“He’s still there?”

“He hasn’t come out, not that I saw.”

Janssen stiffened like a beagle on a scent. “Sir, shall we call the Orpo?”

These were the uniformed Order Police, housed in barracks, ready, as the name suggested, to keep order by use of rifles, machine pistols and truncheons. But Kohl thought again of the mayhem that could erupt if they were summoned, especially against an armed suspect in a restaurant filled with patrons. “No, I think we won’t, Janssen. We’ll be more subtle. You go around the back of the restaurant and wait at the door. If anyone comes out, whether in a hat or not, detain him. Remember—our suspect is armed. Now move surreptitiously.”

“Yes, sir.”

The young man stopped at the alley and, with an extremely unsurreptitious wave, turned the corner and vanished.

Kohl casually started forward and paused, as if perusing the posted menu. Then he moved closer, feeling uneasiness, feeling too the weight of his revolver in his pocket. Until the National Socialists came to power few Kripo detectives carried weapons. But several years ago, when then Interior Minister Göring had expanded the many police forces in the country, he’d ordered every policeman to carry a weapon and, to the shock of Kohl and his colleagues in the Kripo, to use them liberally. He’d actually issued an edict saying that a policeman would be reprimanded for failing to shoot a suspect, but not for shooting someone who turned out to be innocent.

Willi Kohl hadn’t fired a weapon since 1918.

Yet, picturing the shattered skull of the victim in Dresden Alley, he now was pleased that he had the gun with him. Kohl adjusted his jacket, made sure he could grab the gun quickly if he needed to and took a deep breath. He pushed through the doorway.

And froze like a statue, panicked. The interior of the Summer Garden was quite dark and his eyes were used to the brilliant sunlight outside; he was momentarily blinded. Foolish, he thought angrily to himself. He should have considered this. Here he stood with “Kripo” written all over him, a clear target for an armed suspect.

He stepped further inside and closed the door behind him. In his cottony vision, people moved throughout the restaurant. Some men, he believed, were standing. Someone was moving toward him.

Kohl stepped back, alarmed. His hand went toward the pocket containing his revolver.

“Sir, a table? Sit where you like.”

He squinted and slowly his vision began returning.

“Sir?” the waiter repeated.

“No,” he said. “I’m looking for someone.”

Finally the inspector was able to see normally again.

The restaurant contained only a dozen patrons. None was a large man with a brown hat and light suit. He started into the kitchen.

“Sir, you can’t—”

Kohl displayed his identification card to the waiter.

“Yes, sir,” the man said timidly.

Kohl walked through the stupefyingly hot kitchen and to the back door. He opened it. “Janssen?”

“No one came through the door, sir.”

The inspector candidate joined his boss and they returned to the dining room.

Kohl motioned the waiter over to them.

“Sir, what is your name?”

“Johann.”

“Well, Johann, have you seen a man in here, within the past twenty minutes, wearing a hat like this?” Kohl nodded at Janssen, who displayed the picture of Göring.

“Why, yes, I have. He and his companions just left moments ago. It seemed rather suspicious. They left by the side door.”

He pointed to the empty table. Kohl sighed with disgust. It was one of the two tables next to the windows. Yes, the curtain was thick but he noted a tiny gap at the side; their suspect had undoubtedly seen them canvassing the patrons on the patio.

“Come, Janssen!” Kohl and the inspector candidate rushed out the side door and through an anemic garden typical of the tens of thousands throughout the city; Berliners loved growing flowers and plants but land was at such a premium that they were forced to use any scraps of dirt they could find for their gardens. There was only one route out of the patch; it led to Rosenthaler Street. They trotted to it and looked up and down the congested street. No sign of their suspect.

Kohl was furious. Had he not been distracted by Krauss they would likely have had more of a chance to intercept the large man in the hat. But mostly he was angry with himself for his carelessness on the patio a moment earlier.

“In our haste,” he muttered to Janssen, “we’ve burnt the crust, but perhaps we can salvage some of the remaining loaf.” He turned and stalked back toward the front door of the Summer Garden.

Paul, Morgan and the skinny, nervous man known as Max stood fifty feet up Rosenthaler Street in a small cluster of linden trees.

They were watching the man in the white suit and his younger associate in the garden, beside the restaurant, looking up and down the street, then they returned to the front door.

“They couldn’t be after us,” Morgan said. “Impossible.”

“They were looking for
someone,
” Paul said. “They came out the side door a minute after we did. That’s not a coincidence.”

In a shaky voice, Max asked, “You think they were Gestapo? Or Kripo?”

“What’s Kripo?” Paul asked.

“Criminal police. Plainclothes detectives.”

“They were
some
sort of police,” Paul announced. There was no doubt. He’d suspected it from the moment he’d seen the two men approach the Summer Garden. He’d taken the window table specifically to keep an eye on the street and, sure enough, he’d noticed the men—a heavyset one in a Panama hat and a slimmer, younger one in a green suit—asking diners on the patio questions. Then the younger one had stepped away—probably to cover the back door—and the white-suited cop had walked to the posted menu, examining it for far longer than one normally would.

Paul had stood suddenly, tossed down money—paper bills only, on which fingerprints would be nearly impossible to find—and snapped, “Leave now.” With Morgan and a panicked Max behind him, he’d pushed through the side door and waited at the front of a small garden until the cop had gone inside the restaurant, then walked fast down Rosenthaler Street.

“Police,” Max now muttered, sounding near tears. “No… no…”

Too many people to chase you here… and too many people to follow you, too many people to rat on you.

I’d do anything for him and the Party….

Paul looked again down the street, back toward the Summer Garden. No one was in pursuit. Still, he felt an electric current of urgency to learn information of Ernst’s whereabouts from Max and get on with the touch-off. He turned, saying, “I need to know…” His voice faded.

Max was gone.

“Where is he?”

Morgan too turned. “Goddamn,” he muttered in English.

“Did he betray us?”

“I can’t believe that he would—it would mean his arrest too. But…” Morgan’s voice faded as he looked past Paul. “No!”

Spinning around, Paul saw Max about two blocks away. He was among several people stopped by two men in black uniforms, whom he apparently hadn’t seen. “An SS security stop.”

Max looked around nervously, waiting his turn to be questioned by the SS troopers. He wiped his face, looking guilty as a teenager.

Paul whispered, “There’s nothing for him to worry about. His papers are fine. He gave us Ernst’s photos. As long as he doesn’t panic he’ll be all right.”

Calm down, Paul told the man silently. Don’t look around….

Then Max smiled and stepped closer to the SS.

“He’s going to be fine,” Morgan said.

No, he’s not, Paul thought. He’s going to shank it.

And just at that moment the man turned and fled.

The SS troops pushed aside a couple they’d been speaking with and began running after him. “Stop, you will stop!”

“No!” Morgan whispered. “Why did he do that? Why?”

Because he was scared witless, Paul thought.

Max was slimmer than the SS guards, who were in bulky uniforms, and was beginning to pull away from them.

Maybe he can make it. Maybe—

A shot echoed and Max tumbled to the concrete, blood blossoming on his back. Paul looked behind him. A third SS officer across the street had drawn his pistol and fired. Max started to crawl toward the curb when the first two guards caught up to him, gasping for breath. One drew his pistol, fired a shot into the poor man’s head and leaned against a lamppost to catch his breath.

“Let’s go,” Paul whispered. “Now!”

They turned back onto Rosenthaler Street and walked north, along with the other pedestrians moving steadily away from the site of the shooting.

“God in heaven,” Morgan muttered. “I’ve spent a month cultivating him and holding his hand while he got details on Ernst. Now what do we do?”

“Whatever we decide, it’s got to be fast; somebody might make the connection between him”—a glance back at the body in the street—“and Ernst.”

Morgan sighed and thought for a moment. “I don’t know anyone else close to Ernst…. But I do have a man in the information ministry.”

“You have somebody inside
there?
”

“The National Socialists are paranoid but they have one flaw that offsets that: their ego. They have so many agents in place that it never occurs to them that somebody might infiltrate
them.
He’s just a clerk but he may be able to find out something.”

They paused on a busy corner. Paul said, “I’m going to get my things at the Olympic Village and move to the boardinghouse.”

“The pawnshop where we’re getting the rifle is near Oranienburger Station. I’ll meet you in November 1923 Square, under the big statue of Hitler. Say, four-thirty. Do you have a map?”

“I’ll find it.”

The men shook hands and, with a glance back at the crowd standing around the body of the unfortunate man, they started their separate ways as another siren filled the streets of a city that was clean and orderly and filled with polite, smiling people—and that had been the site of two killings in as many hours.

No, Paul reflected, the unfortunate Max hadn’t betrayed him. But he realized that there was another implication that was far more troubling: These two cops or Gestapo agents had tracked Morgan or Paul or both of them from Dresden Alley to the Summer Garden on their own and come within minutes of capturing them. This was police work far better than any he’d seen in New York. Who the hell are they? he wondered.