Garden of Beasts (44 page)

“Oh, well, it’s a goddamn mess,” the Senator raged. “Taggert tells them about an assassination but the killer escapes and tries again. Then Taggert disappears. Publicly they’re talking about the Russians hiring an American assassin. But in private they’re wondering if we weren’t behind the whole thing.”

Clayborn grimaced in disgust. “And Taggert?” Then he nodded. “Dead. Sure. And Schumann did it. Well, that’s the way it goes…. So, gentlemen, I suppose this is the end of our fine working relationship.”

“Reggie Morgan’s dead because of you…. You’re guilty of some pretty bad crimes here, Cyrus.”

The man brushed a white eyebrow. “How ’bout you funding this little outing with private money? Oh, that’d make a nice topic for a congressional hearing, don’tcha think? We have ourselves a standoff here, looks like. So I’m thinking it’s best we
both
go our separate ways and keep mum. Good night now. Oh, and keep buying stock in my company if you civil servants can afford any. It’s only going to go up.” Clayborn stood slowly. He picked up his cane and headed for the door.

Gordon decided that, whatever the consequences, whatever happened to his own career, he’d make sure Clayborn get didn’t away with this, not after the man had murdered Reginald Morgan and nearly killed Schumann. But larger justice would have to wait. There was only one matter that needed attention at the moment. “I want Schumann’s money,” the commander said.

“What money?”

“The ten thousand you promised him.”

“Oh. He didn’t produce. The Huns suspect us and my man’s dead. Schumann’s outa luck. No dough.”

“You’re not going to chisel him.”

“Sorry,” the businessman said, not looking the least contrite.

“Well, in that case, Cyrus,” the Senator called, “good luck.”

“We’ll keep our fingers crossed for you,” Gordon added.

The businessman stopped, looked back.

“I’m just thinking what might happen if Schumann finds out you not only tried to kill him but you stiffed him too.”

“Knowing his line of work and all,” Gordon chimed in again.

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“He’ll be back here in a week, ten days.”

The industrialist sighed. “All right, all right.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a booklet of bank drafts. He tore one out and started to write.

Gordon shook his head. “Nope. You’re going to go dig up some good, old-fashioned scratch right now. Now. Not next week.”

“Sunday night? Ten thousand?”

“Now,” the Senator echoed. “If Paul Schumann wants greenbacks, greenbacks’re what we’re going to give him.”

Chapter Forty-Three

They were sick of waiting.

During their weekend in Amsterdam, Lieutenants Andrew Avery and Vincent Manielli had seen tulips in every color imaginable and looked at plenty of fine paintings and flirted with page-boyed blondes who had round, rosy faces (Manielli, at least; Avery being contentedly married). They’d enjoyed the company of a dashing Royal Air Force flier named Len Aarons, who was in the country on his own intrigues (about which he was as evasive as the Americans). They’d drunk quarts of Amstel beer and cloying Genever gin.

But life on a foreign army base wears thin fast. And, in truth, they were also tired of hanging from tenterhooks, worrying about Paul Schumann.

Now, though, the waiting was over. At 10
A
.
M
. Monday morning the twin-engine plane, streamlined as a gull, flared for a moment and then touched down on the grass field at Machteldt Aerodrome outside of Amsterdam. It settled onto its tail wheel and slowed, then taxied toward the hangar, weaving in a zigzag since the pilot couldn’t see over the raised nose when the plane was on the ground.

Avery waved as the sleek, silver plane eased toward them.

“I think I’ll go a few rounds with him,” Manielli shouted over the sound of the engines and prop wash.

“Who?” Avery asked.

“Schumann. Do some sparring. I watched him; he’s not as good as he thinks he is.”

The lieutenant looked his colleague over and laughed.

“What?”

“He’d eat you like a box of Cracker Jack and spit out the prize.”

“I’m younger, I’m faster.”

“You’re stupider.”

The plane eased up to a parking strip and the pilot cut the engines. The props coughed to a stop and the ground crew ran out to chock the wheels under the big Pratt & Whitneys.

The lieutenants walked up to the door. They’d tried to think of something to get Schumann, a present, but couldn’t figure out what. Manielli had said, “We’ll tell him we gave him his first airplane ride. That’ll be his present.”

But Avery had said, “No. You can’t tell somebody that something you’ve already done for them is a present.”

Manielli figured the lieutenant would know this; married men knew all about the protocols of giving presents. So they bought him a carton of Packs o’ Pleasure—Chesterfields—which had taken them some effort, and expense, to find in Holland. Manielli now held it under his arm.

One of the ground crew walked to the door of the plane and pulled it down. It became stairs. The lieutenants stepped forward, grinning, but stopped fast as a man in his early twenties, wearing filthy clothing, stepped into the doorway, hunched over because of the low clearance.

He blinked, held his hand up to shelter his eyes from the sun, then climbed down the stairs.
“Guten Morgen…. Bitte, Ich bin Georg Mattenberg.”
He threw his arms around Avery and hugged him heartily. Then he walked past him, rubbing his eyes as if he’d just awakened.

“Who the hell’s he?” Manielli whispered.

Avery shrugged and then stared at the door as other men emerged. There were five altogether. All in their twenties or late teens, in good shape, but exhausted and bleary-eyed, unshaven, their clothes tattered and stained with sweat.

“It’s the wrong plane,” Manielli whispered. “Jesus, where—”

“It’s the right plane,” his fellow officer said but he was no less confused.

“Lieutenant Avery?” an accented voice called from the doorway. A man a few years older than the others climbed out. Another, younger, joined him.

“That’s me. Who are you?”

“I speak English better as the others. I will answer. I am Kurt Fischer and this is my brother, Hans.” He laughed at the lieutenants’ expression and said, “You are not expecting us, yes, yes. But Paul Schumann saved us.”

He told a story about how Schumann had rescued a dozen young men from being gassed to death by the Nazis. The American had managed to round up some of them as they fled into a forest and offered them the chance to escape from the country. Some wanted to stay and take their chances but seven had agreed to leave, including the Fischer brothers. Schumann had loaded them into the back of a Labor Service truck, where they’d grabbed shovels and burlap bags and masqueraded as workers. He’d driven them through a roadblock to safety in Berlin, where they hid out for the night.

“At dawn he droved us out to a old aerodrome outside of the city, where we got on this airplane. And here we are.”

Avery was about to pepper the man with more questions, but at that moment a woman appeared in the doorway of the airplane. She was around forty, quite thin, as tired as the others. Her brown eyes quickly snapped up everything around her. She climbed down the stairs. In one hand was a small suitcase, in the other a book whose cover had been torn off.

“Ma’am,” Avery said, casting another perplexed gaze at his colleague.

“You are Lieutenant Avery? Or perhaps you are Lieutenant Manielli.” Her English was perfect, with only a slight accent.

“I… well, yes, I’m Avery.”

The woman said, “My name is Käthe Richter. This is for you.”

She handed him a letter. He opened it and nudged Manielli. They both read:

Gordon, Avery and Manelli (or however the hell you spell it):

Get these people into England or America or wherever they want to go. Find homes for them, get them set up. I don’t care how you do it but make sure it happens.

And if you’re thinking about sending them back to Germany, just remember that Damon Runyon or one of my buddies at the Sun or the Post would be pretty interested in what you sent me to Berlin for. Now that’d be one hell of a news story. Esp. in an election year.

It’s been swell, boys,

Paul

P.S.: There’s a Negro living in the back room of my gym, Sorry Williams. Have the place signed over to him, however that works. And give him some dough too. Be generous.

“There is this as well,” she said and gave Avery several tattered pages typed in German. “It’s about something called the Waltham Study. Paul said the commander should see it.”

Avery took the document and put it in his pocket. “I’ll make sure he gets it.”

Manielli walked to the airplane. Avery joined him and they looked into the empty cabin. “He didn’t trust us. He thought we were going to hand him over to Dewey after all and had the pilot land somewhere else before they got here.”

“France, you think?” Manielli suggested. “Maybe he got to know it during the War…. No, I know. I’ll bet it was Switzerland.”

Stung that Schumann had thought they’d renege on their deal, Avery called toward the cockpit, “Hey, where did you drop him off?”

“What?”

“Where did you land? To drop Schumann off?”

The pilot frowned as he glanced at the copilot. Then he looked back at Avery. His voice echoed through the tinny fuselage: “You mean he didn’t tell you?”

E
PILOGUE

S
ATURDAY, 21
N
OVEMBER, 1936

A cold night in the Black Forest.

Two men trudged through the shallow snow. They were chilled certainly, but they were men who seemed to have a destination in mind and an important task to perform once they arrived.

Purpose, like desire, invariably numbs the body to discomfort.

As does the powerful Austrian liquor, obstler, which they’d been drinking liberally from a shared flask.

“How is your belly?” Paul Schumann asked his companion in German, noticing a particularly pronounced wince on the man’s mustachioed face.

The man gave a grunt. “It hurts, of course. It will
always
hurt, Mr. John Dillinger.”

After his return to Berlin, Paul had made a few subtle inquiries at the Aryan Café to learn where Otto Webber had lived; he’d wanted to do what he could to help any of the man’s “girls.” He’d gone to see one—Berthe—and learned to his shock and joy that Webber was still alive.

The bullet that had punctured the man’s gut in the warehouse by the Spree had caused serious but not lethal damage during its brief transit through his substantial flesh. He had floated halfway down the river in his Viking funeral boat before some fishermen pulled him out and decided he wasn’t as dead as he looked. They got him into a bed and stanched the bleeding. Soon he was in the care of an old gang-ring doctor, who, for a price, of course, stitched him up, no questions asked. The later infection was worse than the wound. (“Lugers,” Webber had griped. “They fire the filthiest of bullets. The toggle allows in germs.”) But Berthe made up for her inability to cook or keep house by being an infinitely dedicated nurse and she spent some months, with Paul’s help, getting the German gangster back to health.

Paul moved into another boardinghouse in a forgotten portion of the city, far from Magdeburger Alley and Alexander Plaza, and lay low for a time. He did some sparring in gyms, picked up some marks here and there in printing plants, and occasionally dated local women: mostly former Socis or artists or writers who’d gone to ground in places like Berlin North and November 1923 Square. During the first weeks of August he would go regularly to a post office or viewing hall to watch the Olympics live on the Telefunken or Fernseh television sets installed there for those who couldn’t get tickets to the Games. Playing the good National Socialist (with his bleached Aryan hair, no less), he would have forced himself to scowl each of the four times Jesse Owens won a gold medal, but it turned out that most of the Germans sitting around him enthusiastically cheered the Negro’s victories. The Germans won the most gold medals, which didn’t surprise anybody, but the U.S. won plenty and came in second. The only shadow over the event, Paul had been troubled to see, was that America’s Jewish runners, Stoller and Glickman, had indeed been pulled from the relay.

After the Games concluded and August moved toward September, Paul’s holiday came to an end. Determined to make up for his lapse in judgment at the Waltham Military College, he resumed his quest to kill Germany’s plenipotentiary for domestic stability.

But Webber’s weathervane system of civil servants reported some interesting information: Reinhard Ernst had disappeared. All they could learn was that his office at the Chancellory had been vacated. It seemed that he’d moved out of Berlin with his family and was spending a great deal of time on the road. He was given a new title (like ribbons and medals, Paul had learned, titles were tossed out by National Socialists like corn to chickens). Ernst was now the “state overleader for special industrial liaison.”

No other details about him could be learned. Did this mean that he’d been put out to pasture? Or were these merely security measures to protect the rearmament tzar?

Paul Schumann had no idea.

But one thing was clear. Germany’s military buildup was proceeding at a breakneck pace. That fall the new fighter plane, the Me 109, manned by German pilots, made its combat debut in Spain, helping Franco and his Nationalist troops. The plane was stunningly successful, decimating Republican positions. The German army was conscripting more and more young men, and navy yards were working at full capacity to produce warships and submarines.

By October even the out-of-the-way neighborhoods of Berlin were growing more and more dangerous, and as soon as Otto Webber was well enough to travel he and Paul took to the road.

“How far to Neustadt?” the American now asked.

“Not far. Ten kilometers or so.”

“Ten?” Paul grumbled. “God in heaven.”

In fact, though, he was glad that their next destination wasn’t nearby. Best to put some distance between them and St. Margen, their most recent stop, where Schupo officers were perhaps just now finding the body of a local National Socialist party boss. He’d been a brutal man who would order his thugs to round up and beat merchants then Aryanize their businesses. He had many enemies who wished to do him harm but the Kripo or Gestapo investigation would reveal that the circumstances of his death were hardly questionable; it was obvious that he had stopped his car by the roadside to relieve himself in the river and lost his footing on the icy shore. He’d fallen twenty feet and crushed his head on the rocks then drowned in the fast-flowing river. A half-empty bottle of schnapps was found beside him. A sorrowful accident. No need to look further.

Paul now considered their next destination. Neustadt, they had learned, would be the site of a speech by one of Hermann Göring’s front men, the headliner at a miniature Nuremberg rally that was currently under way. Paul had heard the man speak, inciting citizens to destroy the houses of Jews in the vicinity. He called himself “doctor” but he was nothing but a bigoted criminal, a petty man, a dangerous man—and one who would prove to be just as accident-prone as the party leader in St. Margen if Paul and Webber were successful.

Perhaps another fall. Or maybe he would knock an electric lamp into the bathtub with him. There was always the possibility too that, being as unbalanced as many National Socialist leaders seemed to be, the man might be inclined to shoot or hang himself in a fit of madness. After Neustadt they would hightail it to Munich, where, God bless him, Webber had yet another of his “girls,” with whom they could stay.

Headlights flared behind them and the two men took to the woods quickly and remained there until the truck passed. When the taillights vanished around a bend in the road the men continued on their way.

“Ach, Mr. John Dillinger, you know what this road was used for?”

“Tell me, Otto.”

“This was the center of the cuckoo clock trade. You have heard of them?”

“Sure. My grandmother had one. My grandfather kept taking the weights off the chains so it wouldn’t run. Hated that damn clock. Every hour,
coo-koo, coo-koo…
”

“And this is the very road that the traders used, to carry them to market. There are not so many clock makers now but at one time you would see carts going up and down this highway at all hours of the night and day…. Ach, and look there. You see that river? It feeds the Danube, and the rivers on the other side of the road feed the Rhine. This is the heart of my country. Isn’t it a beautiful place in the moonlight?”

Nearby an owl called, the wind sighed and the ice coating the tree branches tapped like peanut shells on a barroom floor.

The man is right, Paul thought; it
is
a beautiful place. And he felt within him a contentment as crisp as the day-old snow beneath his boots. The most improbable turn of events had made him a resident of this alien land, but he’d come to decide that it was far less alien to him than the country where his brother’s printing plant awaited, a world to which he knew he’d never return.

No, he’d left that life behind years ago, left behind
any
circumstance involving modest commerce, a neatly shingled house, a bright, loving wife, playful children. But this was perfectly fine with him. Paul Schumann wanted nothing more than what he had at this moment: to be walking under the coy eye of a half-moon, with a like-minded companion at his side, on a journey to fulfill the purpose God had given him—even if that role was the difficult and presumptuous task of correcting His mistakes.