Garden of Beasts (34 page)

No response.

He tried the door. It was not locked. He slipped inside and noted a suitcase resting open on the bed, clothes and books around it. This reassured him; it meant Schumann hadn’t returned yet. Where was she, though? Perhaps she wanted to collect money she was owed or, more likely, borrow what she could from friends and family. Emigrating from Germany through proper channels meant leaving with nothing more than clothes and pocket money; thinking she’d be leaving illegally with Schumann, she’d get as much cash as she could. The radio was on, the lights. She’d be back soon.

Taggert noticed next to the door a rack containing keys for all the rooms. He found the set to Schumann’s and stepped into the corridor again. He walked quietly up the hall. In a swift motion he unlocked the door, pushed inside and lifted his pistol.

The living room was empty. He locked the door then stepped silently into the bedroom. Schumann was not here, though his suitcase was. Taggert stood in the middle of the room, debating. Schumann was sentimental perhaps in his concern for the woman but he was a thorough professional. Before he entered he would look through the windows in the front and back to see if anybody was here.

Taggert decided to lie in wait. He settled on the only realistic option: the closet. He’d leave the door open an inch or two so he could hear Schumann enter. When the button man was in the midst of packing his bag, Taggert would slip out of the closet and kill him. If he was lucky Käthe Richter would be with him and he could murder her as well. If not, he’d wait in her room. She might arrive first, of course, in which case he could kill her then or wait until Schumann returned. He’d have to consider which was best. He’d then scour the rooms to make certain that there was no trace of Schumann’s real identity and call the SS and Gestapo to let them know that the Russian had been stopped.

Taggert stepped inside the large closet, swung the door nearly shut and undid his top several shirt buttons to alleviate the terrible heat. He breathed deeply, sucking air into his aching lungs. Sweat dotted his forehead and prickled the skin in the pits of his arms. But that mattered not one iota. Robert Taggert was wholly sustained, no,
intoxicated,
by an element far better than damp oxygen: the euphoria of power. The boy from low, gray Hartford, the boy beaten simply because he was a sharper thinker but a slower runner than the others in his low, gray neighborhood had just met Adolf Hitler himself, the most savvy politician on the face of the earth. He had seen the man’s searing blue eyes regard him with admiration and respect, a respect that would soon be echoed in America when he returned home and reported about the success of his mission.

Ambassador to England, to Spain. Yes, even here eventually, the country he loved. He could go anywhere he wished.

Wiping his face again, he wondered how long he would have to wait for Schumann to return.

The answer to that question came just a moment later. Taggert heard the front door of the boardinghouse open and heavy footsteps in the hall. They continued past this room. There was a knocking.

“Käthe?” came the distant voice.

It was Paul Schumann speaking.

Would he go inside her apartment to wait?

No… The footsteps returned in this direction.

Taggert heard the jangle of the key, the squeak of old hinges and then a click as the door closed. Paul Schumann had walked into the room where he would die.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Heart pounding like any hunter close to his prey, Robert Taggert listened carefully.

“Käthe?” Schumann’s voice called.

Morgan heard the creak of boards, the sound of water running in the sink. The gulp of a man drinking thirstily.

Taggert lifted his pistol. It would be better to shoot him in the chest, front on, as if he’d been attacking. The SS would want him alive, of course, to interrogate him and wouldn’t be happy if Taggert shot the man in the back. Still, he could take no chances. Schumann was too large and too dangerous to confront face-to-face. He’d tell Himmler that he’d had no choice; the assassin had tried to escape or grab a knife. Taggert had been forced to shoot him.

He heard the man walk to the bedroom. And a moment later, the sounds of rummaging through drawers as he filled his suitcase.

Now, he thought.

Taggert pushed one of the two closet doors open further. This gave him a view of the bedroom. He raised the pistol.

But Schumann wasn’t visible. Taggert could see only the suitcase on the bed. And scattered around it were some books, and other objects. Then he frowned, looking at a pair of shoes sitting in the bedroom doorway. They hadn’t been there before.

Oh, no…

Taggert realized that Schumann had walked to the bedroom but had then slipped off his shoes and eased back into the living room in stocking feet. He’d been pitching books through the doorway onto the bed to make Taggert think he was still there! That meant—

The huge fist crashed through the closet door as if it were spun sugar. The knuckles struck Taggert in the neck and jaw and he saw searing red in his vision as he staggered into the living room. He dropped the pistol and grabbed his throat, pressing the agonized flesh.

Schumann gripped Taggert by the lapels and flung him across the room. He crashed into a table and fell to the floor, where he lay crumpled like the German bisque doll that had landed beside him, unbroken, staring at the ceiling with her eerie, violet eyes.

“You’re a ringer, right? You’re not Reggie Morgan.”

Paul didn’t bother to explain that he’d done what every smart button man has to do—memorize the appearance of a room when he left it and then match that memory with what the place looks like when he returned. He’d seen the closet door, which he’d left closed, was open a few inches. Knowing that Taggert would have to track him down and kill him, he knew that’s where the man was hiding.

“I—”

“Who?” Paul growled.

When the man said nothing, Paul took him by the collar with one hand and, with the other, emptied his jacket pocket: a wallet, a number of American passports, a U.S. diplomatic identity card in the name of Robert Taggert and the Stormtrooper card he’d flashed at Paul in the alley when they’d met.

“Don’t move,” Paul muttered, then examined the find. The wallet was Reginald Morgan’s; it contained an ID card, some business cards with his name and an address on Bremer Street in Berlin and one in Washington, D.C. There were several photographs too—all depicting the man who’d been killed in Dresden Alley. One photo had been taken at a social function. He stood between an elderly man and woman, his arms around them both, all smiling at the Kodak.

One of the passports, well used and filled with entry and exit stamps, was in Morgan’s name. It too contained a picture of the man from the alley.

Another passport—the one he’d showed Paul yesterday—also contained the name Reginald Morgan but the picture was of the man in front of him. Now, he held it under a lamp and examined the document closely. It seemed phony. A second passport, which seemed genuine, contained dozens of stamps and visas and was in the name of Robert Taggert, like the diplomatic ID card. The two remaining passports, a U.S. one in the name of Robert Gardner and a German one in the name of Artur Schmidt, had pictures of the man here.

So this guy on the floor in front of him had killed his contact in Berlin and taken over his identity, Paul understood.

“Okay, what’s the game?”

“Just settle down, buddy. Don’t do anything stupid.” The man had dropped the stiff Reggie Morgan persona. The one who emerged was slick, like one of Lucky Luciano’s sharkskin-suited Manhattan underbosses.

Paul held up the passport he thought was genuine. “This’s you. Taggert, right?”

The man pressed his jaw and neck where Paul had hit him and rubbed the reddened area. “You got me, Paulio.”

“How’d it work?” He frowned. “You intercepted the pass codes about the tram, right? That’s why Morgan did a double-take in the alley. He thought
I
was the rat because I flubbed the phrase about the tram, same as I thought about him. Then you swapped documents when you were searching the body.” Paul read the Stormtrooper card. “‘Veterans’ Relief.’ Crap,” he snapped, furious he hadn’t looked at it more closely when Taggert had first flashed it at him. “Who the hell are you, mister?”

“A businessman. I just do odd jobs for people.”

“And you got picked because you looked a little like the real Reggie Morgan?”

This offended him. “I got picked because I’m good.”

“What about Max?”

“He was legit. Morgan paid him a hundred marks to get him the wire on Ernst. Then I paid him
two
hundred to pretend I was Morgan.”

Paul nodded. “That’s why the sap was so nervous. It wasn’t the SS he was afraid of; it was me.”

But the history of the deception seemed to bore Taggert. He continued impatiently. “We’ve got some horse trading to do, my friend. Now—”

“What was the point of this?”

“Paulio, we don’t exactly have time for chats, don’t you think? Half the Gestapo’s looking for you.”

“No, Taggert. If I’m understanding this right, thanks to you, they’re looking for some Russian. They don’t even know what I look like. And you wouldn’t lead ’em back here—at least not until after you’d killed me. So we’ve got all the time in the world. Now, spill.”

“This is about bigger things than you and me, buddy.” Taggert moved his jaw in a slow circle. “You fucking loosened my teeth.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s not—”

Paul stepped closer, closing his hand into a fist.

“Okay, okay, calm down, big guy. You want to know the truth? Here’s the lowdown: There’re a lot of people back home that don’t want to get into another fight over here.”

“That’s what I’m
doing,
for God’s sake. Stopping the rearmament.”

“Actually, we don’t give a fig about Hun rearmament. What we care about is keeping Hitler happy. Get it? Show him the U.S. is on his side.”

Paul finally understood. “So I was the Easter lamb. You set me up as a Russian killer, and then you rat me out—so it looks to Hitler like the U.S. is his good pal, is that it?”

Taggert nodded. “Pretty much on the money, Paulio.”

“Are you goddamn blind?” Paul said. “Don’t you see what he’s doing here? How can anybody be on their side?”

“Christ, Schumann, what’s the hitch? Maybe Hitler takes over part of Poland, Austria, the Sudetenland.” He laughed. “Hell, he can even have France. No skin off our nose.”

“He’s murdering people. Doesn’t anybody see that?”

“Just a few Jews—”

“
What?
Are you hearing what you’re saying?”

Taggert held up his hands. “Look, I don’t mean it like that. Things here are only temporary. The Nazis’re like kids with a new toy: their country. They’ll get tired of this Aryan crap before the year is out. Hitler’s all talk. He’ll calm down and realize eventually that he
needs
Jews.”

“No,” Paul said emphatically. “You’re wrong there. Hitler’s nuts. He’s Bugsy Siegel times a thousand.”

“Well, okay, Paulio, it’s not for you or me to decide stuff like that. Let’s concede you caught us. We tried to pull a fast one and, good for you, you tumbled to it. But you need me, buddy-boy. You’re not getting out of this country without my help. So here’s what we’re going to do: Let’s you and me find some Russian-looking sap, kill him and call the Gestapo. Nobody’s seen you. I’ll even let you play the hero. You can meet Hitler and Göring. Get a goddamn medal. You and the broad can go back home. And I’ll sweeten the pot: I’ll throw some business to your friend Webber. Black market dollars. He’d love it. How’s that sound? I can make it happen. And everybody wins. Or… you can die here.”

Paul asked, “I’ve got one question. Was it Bull Gordon? Was he behind it?”

“Him? Naw. He wasn’t part of it. It was… other interests.”

“What the hell does that mean, ‘interests’? I want an answer.”

“Sorry, Paulio. I didn’t get to where I am now by having a loose tongue. Nature of the business, you know.”

“You’re as bad as the Nazis.”

“Yeah?” Taggert muttered. “And who’re you to talk, button man?” He stood up, dusting his jacket off. “So whatta you say? Let’s find ourselves some Slav hobo, cut his throat and give the Huns their Bolshevik. Let’s do it.”

Everybody wins….

Without shifting his weight, without narrowing his eyes, without giving any hint of what he was about to do, Paul drove his fist directly into the man’s chest. Taggert’s eyes snapped wide as his breath stopped. He never even glanced toward Paul’s left fist as it shot forward and crushed his throat. By the time Taggert dropped to the floor, his extremities were shivering in death throes and a rattle echoed from his wide-open mouth. Whether it was a ruptured heart or a broken neck that killed him, he was dead within thirty seconds.

Paul stared down at the body for a long moment, hands shaking—not from the powerful blows but from the fury within him at the betrayal. And at the man’s words.

He can even have France… Just a few Jews…

Paul hurried into the bedroom, stripped off the sweat clothes he’d stolen at the stadium, sponged off with water from the basin in the bedroom and dressed. He heard a knocking on the door. Ah, Käthe had returned. He realized suddenly that Taggert’s body still lay visible in the living room. He hurried out to move the corpse into the bedroom.

Just as he was bending down to drag it into the closet, though, the front door to the apartment opened. Paul looked up. It hadn’t been Käthe knocking. He found himself staring at two men. One was round, mustachioed, wearing a wrinkled cream-colored suit with a waistcoat. A Panama hat was in his hand. A slim, younger man in a dark suit stood beside him, gripping a black automatic pistol.

No! It was the very same cops who’d been dogging him since yesterday. He sighed and slowly stood.

“Ach, at last, is Mr. Paul Schumann,” said the older man in heavily accented English, blinking in surprise. “I am Detective-inspector Kohl. You are under arrest, sir, for the murder of Reginald Morgan in Dresden Alley yesterday.” He glanced down at Taggert’s body and added, “And now, it seems, for the murder of someone else as well.”