Garden of Beasts (19 page)

“Whatever business he’s up to, it’s in places like this that he’ll find support and comrades. Stand back somewhat, Janssen. It is always easier to spot a person on the
lookout
for a suspect, such as us, than to spot that suspect himself.”

The young man moved into the shadows of a fishmonger’s store, whose stinking bins were mostly empty. Gamy eels, carp and sickly canal trout were all he had for sale. The officers studied the streets for a few moments, looking for their quarry.

“Now let us think, Janssen. He got out of the taxi with his suitcase—and the incriminating satchel—at Lützow Plaza. He did not have the car drive him directly here from the Olympics possibly because he dropped his bags off where he is now staying and came here for some other purpose. Why? To meet someone? To deliver something, perhaps the satchel? Or to collect something or someone? He has been to the Olympic Village, Dresden Alley, the Summer Garden, Rosenthaler Street, Lützow Plaza and now here? What ties these settings together? I wonder.”

“Shall we survey all the stores and shops?”

“I think we must. But I will tell you, Janssen, the food-deprivation concern is now serious. I am actually feeling light-headed. We will first query the cafés and, at the same time, get some sustenance for ourselves.”

Inside his shoes Kohl’s toes flexed against the pain. The lamb’s wool had migrated and his feet were stinging once again. He nodded to the closest restaurant, the one he’d parked in front of, the Edelweiss Café, and they stepped inside.

It was a dingy place. Kohl noted the averted eyes that typically greeted the appearance of an official. When they were through looking over the patrons on the off-chance that their Manny’s New York suspect might be here, Kohl displayed his ID to a waiter, who snapped instantly to attention. “Hail Hitler. How may I assist?”

In this smoky dive, Kohl doubted anyone had even heard of the position of maître d’, so he asked for the manager.

“Mr. Grolle, yes, sir. I will get him at once. Please, sit at this table, sirs. And if you wish some coffee and something to eat, please let me know.”

“I will have a coffee and apple strudel. Perhaps a double-size piece. And my colleague?” He lifted an eyebrow at Janssen.

“Just a Coca-Cola.”

“Whipped cream with the strudel?” the manager asked.

“But of course,” Willi Kohl said in a surprised voice, as if it were a sacrilege to serve it without.

As they were walking back from the gun dealer toward the Edelweiss Café, where Morgan would call his contact at the information ministry, Paul asked, “What will he get us? About Ernst’s whereabouts?”

“He told me that Goebbels insists on knowing where all the senior officials will be appearing in public. He then decides if it is important to have a filming crew or a photographer present to record the event.” He gave a sour laugh. “You go to see, say,
Mutiny on the Bounty,
and you don’t even get a Mickey Mouse cartoon until twenty minutes of tedious reels of Hitler coddling babies and Göring parading in his ridiculous uniforms before a thousand Labor Service workers.”

“And Ernst will be on that list?”

“That’s what I’m hoping. I hear the colonel doesn’t have much patience for propaganda, and he detests Goebbels as much as Göring, but he has learned to play the game. One does not succeed in the government in this day and age without playing the game.”

As they approached the Edelweiss Café, Paul noticed a cheap black car sitting on the curb beside the statue of Hitler, in front of the restaurant. Detroit still seemed to have one up on the German auto industry. While he’d seen some beautiful Mercedes and BMW models, most of the cars in Berlin were like this one, boxy and battered. When he returned to the United States, and had the ten G’s, he’d get the car of his dreams, a shiny black Lincoln. Marion would look swell in a car like that.

Paul was suddenly very thirsty. He decided he’d get a table while Morgan made his call. The café seemed to specialize in pastry and coffee but on a hot day like this, those had no appeal to him. Nope, he decided; he’d continue his education in the fine art of German beer making.

Chapter Fourteen

Sitting at a rickety table at the Eidelweiss Café, Willi Kohl finished his strudel and coffee. Much better, he thought. His hands had actually been shaking from the hunger. It wasn’t healthy to go without food for so long.

Neither the manager nor anyone else had seen a man fitting the suspect’s description. But Kohl hoped someone in this unfortunate area had seen the victim from the Dresden Alley shooting. “Janssen, do you have the pictures of our poor, dead man?”

“In the DKW, sir.”

“Well, fetch them.”

“Yes, sir.”

The young man finished his Coca-Cola and walked to the car.

Kohl followed him out the door, absently tapping the pistol in his pocket. He wiped his brow and looked up the street to his right toward the sound of yet another siren. He heard the DKW door slam and he turned back, glancing toward Janssen. As he did, the inspector noticed a fast movement just beyond his assistant, to Kohl’s left.

It appeared that a man in a dark suit, carrying a fiberboard musical instrument case or suitcase, had turned and stepped quickly into the courtyard of a large, decrepit apartment building next door to the Edelweiss Café. There was something unnatural about the abruptness with which the man had veered off the sidewalk. It struck him as somewhat odd as well that a man in a suit would be going into such a shabby place.

“Janssen,” Kohl called, “did you see that?”

“What?”

“That man going into the courtyard?”

The young officer shrugged. “Not clearly. I just saw some men on the sidewalk. Out of the corner of my eye.”

“Men?”

“Two, I believe.”

Kohl’s instincts took over. “We must look into this!”

The apartment building was attached to the structure on the right and, looking down the alley, the inspector could see that there were no side doors. “There’ll be a service entrance in the back, like at the Summer Garden. Cover it again. I’ll go through the front. Assume that both men are armed and desperate. Keep your pistol in your hand. Now run! You can beat them if you hurry.”

The inspector candidate sprinted down the alley. Kohl too armed himself. He slowly approached the courtyard.

Trapped.

Just like at Malone’s apartment.

Paul and Reggie Morgan stood, panting from the brief sprint, in a gloomy courtyard, filled with trash and a dozen browning juniper bushes. Two teenage boys in dusty clothes tossed rocks at pigeons.

“Not the same police?” gasped Morgan. “From the Summer Garden? Impossible.”

“The same.” Paul wasn’t sure they’d been spotted, but the younger officer, in the green suit, had glanced their way just as Paul had pulled Morgan into the courtyard. They had to assume they’d been seen.

“How did they find us?”

Paul ignored the question, looking around him. He ran to the wooden entrance door in the center of the U of the building; it was closed and locked. The first-floor windows were eight feet off the ground, a tough climb. Most were closed but Paul saw one was open and the apartment it let onto appeared deserted.

Morgan noticed Paul’s glance and said, “We could hide there, yes. Pull the blinds. But how do we climb up?”

“Please,” Paul called to one of the boys who’d been pitching rocks, “do you live here?”

“No, sir, we just come to play.”

“Do you want to earn a whole mark?”

“Greet God, sir,” one said. His eyes went wide and he trotted over to the men. “Yes, we do.”

“Good. But you must act quickly.”

Willi Kohl paused outside the courtyard entrance.

He waited a moment until he was sure Janssen would be in position in the back and then turned the corner. No sign of the suspect from Dresden Alley or the man with the suitcase. Only some teenage boys standing around a pile of wooden milk crates across the courtyard. They glanced up uneasily at the officers and began to walk out of the courtyard.

“You, boys!” Kohl called.

They stopped, looked at each other uneasily. “Yes?”

“Did you just see two men?”

Another uncomfortable shared glance. “No.”

“Come here.”

There was a brief pause. Then simultaneously they began sprinting, vanishing from the courtyard, raising puffs of dust beneath their feet. Kohl didn’t even try to pursue them. Gripping his pistol, he looked around the courtyard. All of the apartments on the ground floor had curtained windows or anemic plants resting on the sills, suggesting they were occupied. One, though, was curtainless and dark.

Kohl approached it slowly and noticed that on the dusty ground below the window were indentations—from the milk cartons, he understood. The suspect and his companion had paid the boys to carry the crates to the window then replace them
after
the men had climbed into the apartment.

The inspector, gripping his pistol tightly, pressed the button for the building’s janitor.

A moment later a harried man arrived. The wiry, gray janitor opened the door and glanced with a nervous blink at the pistol in Kohl’s hand.

Kohl stepped inside, looking past the man into the dark corridor. There was motion at the far end of the hall. Kohl prayed that Janssen would remain vigilant. The inspector had at least been tested on the battlefield. He’d been shot at and had, he believed, shot one or two enemy soldiers. But Janssen? Though he was a talented marksman, the boy had fired only at paper targets. How would he do if the matter came to a gun-fight?

He whispered to the janitor, “The apartment on this floor, two to the right.” He pointed. “It is unoccupied?”

“Yes, sir.”

Kohl stepped back so he could keep an eye on the courtyard in case the suspects tried to leap out the window and run. He told the janitor, “There’s another officer at your back entrance. Go fetch him at once.”

“Yes, sir.”

But just as he was leaving, a stocky old woman in a purple dress and blue head scarf waddled toward them. “Mr. Greitel, Mr. Greitel! Quickly, you must call the police!”

Kohl turned to her.

The janitor said, “The police are here, Mrs. Haeger.”

“Ach, how can that be?” She blinked.

The inspector asked her, “What do you require the police for?”

“Theft!”

Instinct told Kohl that this had something to do with the pursuit. “Tell me, ma’am. Quickly now.”

“My apartment is in the front of the building. And from my window I noted two men hiding behind the stack of milk crates, which I must point out you have been promising for weeks you will cart away, Mr. Greitel.”

“Please continue. This matter could be most urgent.”

“These two were skulking. It was obvious. Then, just a moment ago, I saw them stand and take two bicycles from the rack next to the front entrance. I don’t know about one of the bicycles but the other was clearly Miss Bauer’s, and she has had no male companion for two years, so I know she would not have been lending him the bicycle.”

“No!” Kohl muttered and hurried outside. Now he realized that the suspect had paid the boys simply to drop a couple of the crates beneath the window to leave the marks in the dust but then to return them to the pile, behind which the men had hidden. The boys then were probably told to act furtive or uneasy, making Kohl think this was how the suspects had gotten into the building.

He burst from the courtyard and looked up and down the street, seeing living proof of a statistic that he, as a diligent police officer, knew well: The most popular form of transportation in Berlin was the bicycle, hundreds of which clogged the streets here, hiding their suspects’ escape as effectively as a cloud of dense smoke.

They’d ditched the bikes and were walking down a busy street a half mile from November 1923 Square.

Paul and Morgan looked for another café or tap room with a phone.

“How did you know they were in the Edelweiss Café?” Morgan asked, breathing hard from the fast cycling.

“The car, the one parked on the curb.”

“The black one?”

“Right. I didn’t think anything of it at first. But something clicked in my mind. I remembered a couple of years ago, when I was on my way to a job. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one going to visit Bo Gillette. Some cops from Brooklyn got there first. But they were lazy and parked outside, halfway up over the curb, figuring it was an unmarked car, so who’d notice? Well, Bo noticed. He shows up, understands they’re looking for him and vanishes. It took me a month to find him again. In the back of my mind I was thinking, police car. So when the younger guy stepped outside I realized right away it was the same man I’d seen on the patio of the Summer Garden.”

“They’ve tracked us from Dresden Alley to the Summer Garden to here…. How on earth?”

Paul thought back. He hadn’t told Käthe Richter he was coming here and he’d checked a dozen times to make sure nobody had been following him from the boardinghouse to the cab stand. He’d told nobody at the Olympics. The pawnbroker might have betrayed them here, but he wouldn’t have known about the Summer Garden. No, these two industrious cops had trailed them on their own.

“Taxis,” Paul finally said.

“What?”

“That’s the only link. To the Summer Garden and here. From now on, if we can’t shank it, we have the driver drop us two, three blocks from where we’re going.”

They continued away from November 1923 Square. Some blocks farther on they found a beer hall with a public phone. Morgan went inside to make the call to his contact while Paul ordered ales and, edgy and vigilant, kept watch outside. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see the two cops hurrying up the street, still on their trail.

Who the hell
were
they?

When Morgan returned to the table he was troubled. “We have a problem.” He took a sip of the beer and wiped his mustache. He leaned forward. “They’re not releasing any information. Word came from Himmler or Heydrich—my man’s not sure who—but no information about public appearances of Party or government officials is to be released until further notice. No press conferences. Nothing. The announcement went out just a few hours ago.”

Paul drank down half the beer. “What do we do? Do you know
anything
about Ernst’s schedule?”

“I don’t even know where he lives, except somewhere in Charlottenburg. We could stake him out at the Chancellory maybe, follow him. But that’ll be very hard. If you’re within five hundred feet of a senior party official you can be expected to be stopped for your papers and detained if they don’t like what they see.”

Paul reflected for a moment. He said, “I have a thought. I might be able to get some information.”

“About what?”

“Ernst,” Paul said.

“You?” Morgan asked, surprised.

“But I’ll need a couple of hundred marks.”

“I have that, yes.” He counted out bills and slipped them to Paul.

“And your man in the information ministry? Do you think he could find out about people who
aren’t
officials?”

Morgan shrugged. “I can’t say for certain. But I can tell you one thing without doubt—that if the National Socialists have any skill at all, it is gathering information on their citizens.”

Janssen and Kohl left the courtyard building.

Mrs. Haeger could offer no descriptions of the suspects, though, ironically, this was due to literal, not political, blindness. Cataracts in her eyes had allowed the busybody to observe the men hiding, then and making off with the bicycles but rendered her unable to give any more details.

Discouraged, they returned to November 1923 Square and resumed their search, making their way up and down the street, talking to shop vendors and waiters, flashing the etching of the victim and inquiring about their suspect.

They had no success—until they came to a bakery across from the park, hidden in the shadow of Hitler’s statue. A round man in a dusty white apron admitted to Kohl that he’d seen a taxi pull up across the street an hour or so ago. A taxi here was an unusual occurrence, he said, since residents could not afford them and there was no earthly reason for anyone from outside the neighborhood to come here, at least not in a cab.

The man had noticed a big man with slicked-down hair climb out, look around and then walk to the statue. He’d sat down on a bench for a short time then left.

“He was wearing what?”

“Some light clothing. I didn’t see very clearly.”

“Any other features you noticed?”

“No, sir. I had a customer.”

“Did he have a suitcase or satchel with him?”

“I don’t believe so, sir.”

So, Kohl reflected, his assumption was correct: most likely he was staying somewhere near Lützow Plaza and had come here on an errand of some sort.

“Which way did he go?”

“I didn’t see, sir. Sorry.”

Blindness, of course. But at least this was a confirmation that their suspect had indeed arrived here recently.

Just then a black Mercedes turned the corner and braked to a stop.

“Ach,” Kohl muttered, watching Peter Krauss get out of the vehicle and look around. He knew how the man had tracked him down. Regulations required that he inform the department’s desk officers every time he left the Alex during duty hours and where he would be. He’d debated about not sharing this information today. But ignoring rules was hard for Willi Kohl and before he left he’d jotted down,
November 1923 Square,
and the time he expected to return.

Krauss nodded a greeting. “Just making the rounds, Willi. Wondering how the case is coming.”

“Which case?” Kohl asked, solely to be petulant.

“The body in Dresden Alley, of course.”

“Ach, it seems our department resources are diminished.” He added in a wry tone, “For some unknown reason. But we think the suspect might have come here earlier.”

“I told you I would check with my contacts. I’m pleased to report that my informant has it on good information that the killer is indeed a foreigner.”

Kohl took out his pad and pencil. “And what is the suspect’s name?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“What is his nationality?”

“He wasn’t able to say.”

“Well, who is this informant?” Kohl asked, exasperated.