Garden of Beasts (22 page)

“There’s money involved?”

Morgan said, “That’s why we’re calling. He wants a lot. Immediately.”

“What’s a lot?”

“A thousand. Your currency.”

A pause. “That could be a problem.”

“We don’t have any choice,” Paul said. “You’ve got to make it work.”

“We could bring you back from your trip early.”

“No, you don’t want to do that,” Paul said emphatically.

The sound from the radio could have been a wave of static or could have been Bull Gordon’s sigh.

“Sit tight. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

“So what would we get for my money?”

“I don’t know the details,” Bull Gordon said to Cyrus Adam Clayborn, who was in New York on the other end of the phone. “They couldn’t go into it. Worried about eavesdropping, you know. But apparently the Nazis have cut off access to information Schumann needs to find Ernst. That’s my take.”

Clayborn grunted.

Gordon found himself surprisingly at ease, considering that the man he was speaking to was the fourth-or fifth-richest human being in the country. (He had ranked number two but the stock market crash had pulled him down a couple of notches.) They were very different men but they shared two vital characteristics: they had military in their blood and they were both patriots. That made up for a lot of distance in income and station.

“A thousand? Cash?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I like that Schumann. That was pretty sharp, his reelection comment. FDR’s scared as a rabbit.” Clayborn chuckled. “Thought the Senator was going to crap right there.”

“Looked like it.”

“Okay. I’ll arrange the funds.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Clayborn preempted Gordon’s next question. “’Course, it’s late Saturday in Hun-ville. And he needs the money now, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Hold on.”

Three long minutes later the magnate came back on the line.

“Have ’em go to the clerk at the usual pickup spot in Berlin. Morgan’ll know it. The Maritime Bank of the Americas. Number eighty-eight Udder den Linden Street, or however the hell you say it. I can never get it right.”

“
Unter den Linden.
It means ‘Under the Linden Trees.’”

“Fine, fine. The guard’ll have the package.”

“Thanks, sir.”

“Bull?”

“Yes, sir?”

“We don’t have enough heroes in this country. I want that boy to come home in one piece. Considering our resources…” Men like Clayborn would never say, “my money.” The businessman continued. “Considering our resources, what can we do to improve the odds?”

Gordon considered the question. Only one thing came to mind.

“Pray,” he said and pressed down the cradle on the phone then paused for a moment and lifted it once more.

Chapter Seventeen

Inspector Willi Kohl sat at his desk in the gloomy Alex, attempting to understand the inexplicable, a game played nowhere more often than in the halls of police departments everywhere.

He had always been a curious man by nature, intrigued, say, by how the blend of simple charcoal, sulfur and nitrate produced gunpowder, how undersea boats worked, why birds clustered together on particular parts of telegraph lines, what occurred within human hearts to whip otherwise rational citizens into a frenzy when some weasely National Socialist spoke at a rally.

His mind was presently preoccupied with the question of what sort of man could take another’s life? And why?

And, of course, “Who?” as he now whispered aloud, thinking of the drawing done by the street artist at November 1923 Square. Janssen was now having it too printed up downstairs, as they’d done with the photo of the victim. It wasn’t a bad sketch by any means, Kohl reflected. There were some erasures from the false starts and corrections but the face was distinctive: a handsome square jaw, thick neck, hair a bit wavy, a scar on the chin and a sticking plaster on his cheek.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

Willi Kohl knew the facts: the man’s size and age and hair color and probable nationality, even his likely city of residence. But he’d learned in his years as an investigator that to find certain criminals, you needed far more than details like this. To truly understand them, something more was required, intuitive insights. This was one of Kohl’s greatest talents. His mind made connections and leaps that occasionally startled even himself. But now, none of these was forthcoming. Something about this case was out of balance.

He sat back in his chair, examining his notes as he sucked on his hot pipe (one advantage of being with the ostracized Kripo was that Hitler’s disdain for smoking did not reach here, to these unhallowed halls). He shot smoke toward the ceiling and sighed.

The results from his earlier requests had not been forthcoming. The laboratory technician had not been able to find any fingerprints on the Olympic guidebook that they’d found at the scene of the brawl with the Stormtroopers, and the FPE (yes, Kohl noted angrily, still only one examiner) hadn’t found matches for the prints from Dresden Alley. And still nothing from the coroner. How the hell long does it take to cut a man open, to analyze his blood?

Of the dozens of missing persons reports that had flooded into the Kripo today, none matched the description of the man who was certainly a son and maybe a father, maybe a husband, maybe a lover….

Some telegrams had arrived from precincts around Berlin, reporting the names of those who’d bought Spanish Star Modelo A pistols or Largo ammunition in the past year. But the list was woefully incomplete and Kohl was discouraged to learn that he’d been wrong; the murder weapon was not as rare as he’d thought. Perhaps because of the close connection between Germany and Franco’s Nationalist forces in Spain, many of these powerful and efficient guns had been sold here. The list as of the moment totaled fifty-six people in Berlin and environs, and a number of gun shops remained to be polled. Officers had also reported that some shops kept no records or were closed for the weekend.

Besides, if the man had come to town only yesterday, as it now seemed, he most likely hadn’t bought the gun himself. (Though the list might yet prove valuable: The killer could have stolen the gun, taken it from the victim himself or gotten it from a comrade who had been in Berlin for some time.)

Understanding the inexplicable…

Still hoping for the passenger manifest for the
Manhattan,
Kohl had sent telegrams to port officials in Hamburg and to the United States Lines, the owner and operator of the vessel, requesting a copy of the document. But Kohl wasn’t optimistic; he wasn’t even sure if the port master
had
a copy. As for the ship line itself, they would have to locate the document, create a copy and then post or Teletype it to Kripo headquarters; that could take days. In any event, there’d so far been no response to these requests.

He had even sent a telegram to Manny’s Men’s Wear in New York, asking about recent purchasers of Stetson Mity-Lites. This plea too was presently unanswered.

He glanced impatiently at the brass clock on his desk. It was getting late and he was starving. Kohl wished either for a break in the case or to return home for dinner with his family.

Konrad Janssen stepped into his doorway. “I have them, sir.”

He held up a printed sheet of the street artist’s rendering, fragrant with the scent of ink.

“Good… Now, sadly, Janssen, you have one more task tonight.”

“Yes, sir, whatever I can do.”

One further quality of serious Janssen was that he had no aversion to working hard.

“You will take the DKW and return to the Olympic Village. Show the artist’s picture to everyone you can find, American or otherwise, and see if anybody recognizes him. Leave some copies along with our telephone number. If you have no luck there, take some copies to the Lützow Plaza precinct. If they happen to find the suspect tell them to detain him as a witness only and to call me at once. Even at home.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you, Janssen…. Wait, this is your first murder investigation, is it not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ah, you never forget the first one. You’re doing well.”

“I appreciate that, sir.”

Kohl gave him the keys to the DKW. “A delicate hand on the choke. She likes air as much as petrol. Perhaps more.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll be at home. Telephone me with any developments.”

After the young man had gone Kohl unlaced and removed his shoes. He opened his desk drawer, extracted a box of lamb’s wool and wound several pieces around his toes to cushion the sensitive areas. He placed a few strategic wads in his shoes themselves and, wincing, slipped his feet back inside.

He glanced past the picture of the suspect to the grim photographs of the murders in Gatow and Charlottenburg. He’d heard nothing more about the report from the crime scene or interviews of any witnesses. He supposed that his fiction about the Kosi conspiracy he’d pitched to Chief of Inspectors Horcher had had no effect.

Gazing at the pictures: a dead boy, a woman trying to grasp the leg of a man lying just out of reach, a worker clutching his worn shovel… Heartbreaking. He stared for some moments. He knew it was dangerous to pursue the case. Certainly dangerous for his career, if not his life. And yet he had no choice.

Why? he wondered. Why this compulsion he invariably felt to close a murder case?

Willi Kohl supposed it was that, ironically, in death he found his sanity. Or, more accurately, in the process of bringing to justice those who caused death. This was his purpose on earth, he felt, and to ignore any killing—of a fat man in an alley or a family of Jews—was to ignore his nature and was therefore a sin.

The inspector now put the photographs away. Taking his hat, he stepped into the hallway of the old building and proceeded down the length of Prussian tile and stone and wood worn down over the years but nonetheless spotlessly clean and polished to a shine. He walked through shafts of low, rosy sun, which was the main source of illumination at headquarters this time of year; the grande dame of Berlin had become a spendthrift under the National Socialists (“Guns before butter,” Göring proclaimed over and over and over), and the building’s engineers did all they could to conserve resources.

Since he’d given his car to Janssen and would have to take a tram home, Kohl continued down two flights to a back door of headquarters, a shortcut to the stop.

At the bottom of the stairs signs pointed the way to the Kripo’s holding cells, to the left, and to the old-case archives straight ahead. It was in this latter direction that he headed, recalling spending time there in his days as a detective-inspector assistant, reading the files not only to learn what he could from the great Prussian detectives of the past but simply because he enjoyed seeing the history of Berlin as told through its law enforcers.

His daughter’s fiancé, Heinrich, was a civil servant but his passion was police work. Kohl decided he would bring the young man here sometime and they could browse through the files together. The inspector might even show him some of the cases Kohl himself had worked on years ago.

But, as he pushed through the doorway, he stopped fast; the archives were gone. Kohl was startled to find himself in a brilliantly lit corridor in which stood six armed men. They were not, however, in the green uniforms of the Schupo; they wore SS black. Almost as one, they turned toward him.

“Good evening, sir,” one said, the closest to him. A lean man with an astonishingly long face. He eyed Kohl carefully. “You are… ?”

“Detective Inspector Kohl. And who are you?”

“If you’re looking for the archives they are now on the second floor.”

“No. I’m simply using the rear exit door.” Kohl started forward. The SS trooper took a subtle step toward him. “I’m sorry to report that it is no longer in use.”

“I didn’t hear about that.”

“No? Well, it has been the case for the past several days. You will have to go back upstairs.”

Kohl heard a curious sound. What was it? A mechanical
clap, clap…

A burst of sunlight filled the hallway as two SS men opened the far door and wheeled in dollies holding cartons. They turned into one of the rooms at the end of the corridor.

He said to the guard, “That door is the one I’m speaking of. It appears to be in use.”

“Not in
general
use.”

The sounds…

Clap, clap, clap
and, beneath it, the rumbling of a motor or engine…

He glanced to his right, through a partially open doorway, where he glimpsed several large mechanical devices. A woman in a white coat was feeding stacks of paper into one of them. This must be part of the Kripo’s printing department. But then he observed that, no, they weren’t sheets of paper but cards with holes punched in them and they were being sorted by the device.

Ah, Kohl understood. An old mystery had been answered. Some time ago he’d heard that the government was leasing large calculating and sorting machines, called DeHoMags, after the firm that made them, the German subsidiary of the American company International Business Machines. These devices used punched cards to analyze and cross-reference information. Kohl had been delighted when he’d learned of the leases. The machines could be invaluable in criminal investigations; they might narrow down fingerprint categories or ballistics information a hundred times faster than a technician could by hand. They could also cross-reference modus operandi to link criminal and crime and could keep track of parolees or recidivist offenders.

The inspector’s enthusiasm soon soured, though, when he learned that the devices were not available for use by the Kripo. He’d wondered who’d gotten them and where they were. But now, to his shock, it seemed that at least two or three were less than a hundred meters from his office and guarded by the SS.

What was their purpose?

He asked the guard.

“I couldn’t tell you, sir,” the man replied in a brittle voice. “I have not been informed.”

From inside the room the woman in white looked out. Her hands paused and she spoke to someone. Kohl couldn’t hear what was said, nor see the person she was speaking to. The door slowly swung shut as if by magic.

The guard with the vertical face stepped past Kohl and opened the door that led back up the stairs. “Again, Inspector, as I said, there is no exit here. You will find another door up one flight and—”

“I’m familiar with the building,” Kohl said testily and returned to the stairs.

“I brought you something,” he said.

Standing in Paul’s living room in the Magdeburger Alley boardinghouse, Käthe Richter took the small package with a curious look: cautious awe, as if it had been years since anyone had given her a present. She rubbed her thumbs on the brown paper covering what Otto Webber had located for him.

“Oh.” She uttered a faint exhalation as she looked at the leather-bound book on whose jacket was stamped
Collected Poems of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

“My friend said it’s not illegal but it’s not legal either. That means it will soon be illegal.”

“Limbo,” she said, nodding. “It was the same with American jazz here for a time, which is now forbidden.” Continuing to smile, Käthe turned the volume over and over in her hands.

He said, “I didn’t know his names run in my family.”

She glanced up with a quizzical look on her face.

“My grandfather was Wolfgang. My father was Johann.”

Käthe smiled at the coincidence and flipped through the book.

“I was wondering,” he said. “If you’re not busy, perhaps some dinner.”

Her face went still. “As I told you, I am able to serve only breakfast, not—”

He laughed. “No, no. I want to take you out to dinner. Perhaps see some sights in Berlin.”

“You want to…”

“I would like to take you out.”

“I… No, no, I couldn’t.”

“Oh, you have a friend, a husband….” He’d glanced at her hand and seen no rings but he wasn’t sure how one declared commitment in Germany. “Please, ask him to come too.”

Käthe was at a loss for words. Finally she said, “No, no, there is no one. But—”

Paul said firmly, “No ‘but’s. I’m not in Berlin for very long. I could use somebody to show me around town.” He gave her a smile. In English: “I’ll tell you, miss, I ain’t taking no for an answer.”

“I don’t understand ‘ain’t,’” she said. “But I have not been to a restaurant for a long time. Perhaps such an evening could be enjoyable.”

Paul frowned. “You’ve got the English wrong.”

“Oh, what should it be?” she asked.

“The proper word is ‘
will
’ be enjoyable, not ‘could.’”

She gave a faint laugh and agreed to meet him in a half hour. She returned to her room, while Paul showered and changed.

Thirty minutes later, a knock on the door. When he opened it he blinked. She was an entirely different person.