Garden of Beasts (37 page)

Chapter Thirty-One

“Willi, Willi, Willi….”

Chief of Inspectors Friedrich Horcher drew the name out very slowly.

Kohl had returned to the Alex and was nearly to his office when his boss caught up with him. “Yes, sir?”

“I’ve been looking for you.”

“Yes? Have you?”

“It’s about that Gatow case. The shootings. You will recall?”

How could he forget? Those pictures would be burned into his mind forever. The women… the children… But now he felt the chill of fear again. Had the case in fact been a test, as he’d worried earlier? Had Heydrich’s boys waited to see if he’d drop the matter and now learned that he’d done worse: He’d secretly called the young gendarme at home about it?

Horcher tugged at his blood-red armband. “I have good news for you. The case has been solved. Charlottenburg too, the Polish workers. They were both the work of the same killer.”

Kohl’s initial relief that he was not going to be arrested turned quickly to bewilderment. “Who closed the case? Someone at Kripo?”

“No, no, it was the head of the gendarmerie himself. Meyerhoff. Imagine.”

Ach… The matter was beginning to crystalize—to Willi Kohl’s disgust. He wasn’t the least surprised at the rest of the tale that his boss laid out. “The killer was a Czech Jew. Deranged. Much like Vlad the Impaler. Was
he
Czech? Maybe Romanian or Hungarian, I don’t recall. Ha, history was always my poorest subject. In any case, the suspect was caught and confessed. He was handed over to the SS.” Horcher laughed. “They took time out from their
important,
and mysterious, security alert to actually do some police work.”

“Was there one accomplice or more?” Kohl asked.

“Accomplice? No, no, the Czech was alone.”

“Alone? But the gendarme in Gatow concluded there had to be at least two or three perpetrators, probably more. The pictures support that theory, and logic, as well, given the number of victims.”

“Ach, as we know, Willi, being trained policemen, the eye can be fooled. And a young gendarme in the suburbs? They are not used to crime scene investigation. Anyway, the Jew confessed. He acted alone. The case is solved. And the fellow is on his way to the camp.”

“I would like to interview him.”

A hesitation. Then, smiling still, Horcher adjusted his armband once again. “I’ll see what I can do about that. Though it’s likely that he might already be in Dachau.”

“Dachau? Why would they send him to Munich? Why not Oranienburg?”

“Overcrowding perhaps. In any event, the case is done, so there’s really no reason to talk to him.”

The man was, of course, dead by now.

“Besides, you need all your time to concentrate on the Dresden Alley matter. How is that coming?”

“We’ve had some breakthroughs,” Kohl told his boss, trying to keep anger and frustration out of his voice. “A day or two and I think we’ll have all our answers.”

“Excellent.” Horcher frowned. “Even more hubbub over on Prince Albrecht Street than before. Did you hear? More alerts, more security measures. Even mobilizing among the SS. Still haven’t heard what’s going on. Have
you
caught a glimmer, by any chance?”

“No, sir.” Poor Horcher. Afraid everybody was better informed than he. “You’ll have the report on the killing soon,” Kohl told him.

“Good. It
is
leaning toward that foreigner, isn’t it? I believe you said it was.”

Kohl thought: No,
you
said it was. “The case is moving apace.”

“Excellent. My, look at us, Willi: Here we are working Sundays. Can you imagine it? Remember when we actually had Saturday afternoon
and
Sunday off?” The man wandered back up the quiet hallway.

Kohl walked to the doorway of his office and saw the blank spaces where his notes and the photographs of the Gatow killings had rested. Horcher would have “filed them away”—meaning they’d had the same fate as the poor Czech Jew. Probably burned like the manifest of the
Manhattan
and floating over the city as particles of ash in the alkaline Berlin wind. He leaned wearily against the doorjamb, staring at the empty spaces on his desk, and he thought: This is the one thing about murder: It can never be undone. You return the stolen money, bruises heal, the burned-down house is rebuilt, you find the kidnap victim troubled but alive. But those children who had died, their parents, the Polish workers… their deaths were forever.

And yet here was Willi Kohl being told that this was not so. That the laws of the universe were somehow different in this land: The deaths of the families and the workers had been erased. Because, if they had been real, then honest people would not rest until the loss had been understood and mourned and—Kohl’s role—vindicated.

The inspector hung his hat on the rack and sat heavily in his creaking chair. He looked over his incoming mail and telegrams. Nothing regarding Schumann. With his magnifying monocle, Kohl himself compared the fingerprints Janssen had taken of Taggert with the photos of those found on the cobblestones of Dresden Alley. They were the same. This relieved him somewhat; it meant that Taggert was indeed the murderer of Reginald Morgan, and the inspector had not let a killer go free.

It was just as well that he could make the comparison himself. A message from the Identification Department told him that all the examiners and analysts had been ordered to drop any Kripo investigation and make themselves available to the Gestapo and SS in light of “a new development in the security alert.”

He walked to Janssen’s desk and learned that the coroner’s men still hadn’t collected Taggert’s body from the boardinghouse. Kohl shook his head and sighed. “We’ll do what we can here. Have the ballistics technicians run tests on the Spanish pistol to make sure it
is
the murder weapon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, and, Janssen? If the firearms examiners too have been commandeered in the search for this Russian, then run the tests yourselves. You can do that, can you not?”

“I can, sir, yes.”

After the young man had left, Kohl sat back and began to jot a list of questions about Morgan and the mysterious Taggert, which he would have translated and sent to the American authorities.

A shadow appeared in the doorway. “Sir, a telegram,” said the floor runner, a young man in a gray jacket. He offered the document to Kohl.

“Yes, yes, thank you.” Thinking it would be from the United States Lines about the manifest or Manny’s Men’s Wear, tersely explaining they could be of no help, he ripped the envelope open.

But he was wrong. It was from the New York City Police Department. The language was English but he could understand the meaning well enough.

TO DETECTIVE INSPECTOR W KOHL

KRIMINALPOLIZEI ALEXANDERPLATZ BERLIN

IN RESPONSE TO YOUR REQUEST OF EVEN DATE BE ADVISED

THAT THE FILE ON P SCHUMANN HAS BEEN EXPUNGED AND OUR

INVESTIGATION RE SAID INDIVIDUAL SUSPENDED INDEFINITELY

STOP NO MORE INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE STOP

REGARDS CAPT G O’MALLEY NYPD

Kohl frowned. He found the department’s English-German dictionary and learned that “expunged” meant “obliterated.” He read the telegram several times more, feeling his skin grow hot with each reading.

So the criminal police
had
been investigating Schumann. For what? And why had the file been destroyed and the investigation stopped?

What were the implications of this? Well, the most immediate was that while the man might not have been guilty of killing Reginald Morgan, he was possibly in town for some criminal venture.

And the other was that Kohl himself had let a potentially dangerous man loose in the city.

He needed to find Schumann, or at least more information about him, and fast. Without waiting for Janssen to return, Willi Kohl collected his hat and walked along the dim hallway, then down the stairs. So distracted was he that he took the stairway to the forbidden ground floor. He pushed the door open anyway and was immediately confronted by an SS soldier. Amid the flapping of the DeHoMag card sorters, the man said, “Sir, this is a restricted—”

“You will let me pass,” Kohl growled with a fierceness that startled the young guard.

Another guard, armed with an Erma machine gun, glanced their way.

“I am leaving my building by the door at the end of that hallway. I don’t have time to go the other way.”

The young SS man looked uneasily around him. No one else in the hallway said a word. Finally he nodded.

Kohl stalked down the hall, ignoring the pain in his feet, and pushed outside into the brilliant, hot afternoon light. He oriented himself, lifted his foot to a bench and adjusted the lamb’s wool to pad his right foot. Then the inspector started north in the direction of the Hotel Metropol.

“Ach, Mr. John Dillinger!” Otto Webber frowned, gesturing him to a chair in a dark corner of the Aryan Café. He gripped Paul’s arm hard and whispered, “I was worried about you. No word! Was my phone call to the stadium successful? I haven’t heard anything on the radio. Not that our rodent Goebbels would go on state radio to spread the word of an assassination.”

Then the gang leader’s smile faded. “What’s the matter, my friend? Your face is not pleased.”

But before he could say anything the waitress Liesl noticed Paul and moved in fast. “Hello, my love,” she said. Then pouted. “Shame on you. Last time you left without kissing me good-bye. What can I get you?”

“A Pschorr.”

“Yes, yes, I’m pleased to. I’ve missed you.”

Ignored by the waitress, Webber said petulantly, “Excuse me, ach, excuse me. A lager for me.”

Liesl bent and kissed Paul’s cheek. He smelled powerful perfume. It hung around him even after she left. He thought of lilac, thought of Käthe. He pushed the thoughts aside abruptly then explained what had happened at the stadium and afterward.

“No! Our friend Morgan?” Webber was horrified.

“A man
pretending
to be Morgan. The Kripo has my name and passport but they don’t think I killed him. And they haven’t connected me with Ernst and the stadium.”

Liesl brought them the beers. She squeezed Paul’s shoulder as she stepped away and brushed against him flirtatiously, leaving another cloud of strong perfume around the table. Paul leaned away from it. She smiled lasciviously as she sashayed away.

“She just can’t figure out I’m not interested, can she?” he muttered, all the angrier because he couldn’t get Käthe out of his mind.

“Who?” Webber asked, drinking several large gulps.

“Her. Liesl.” He nodded.

Webber frowned. “No, no, no, Mr. John Dillinger. Not her.
Him.
”

“What?”

Webber frowned. “You thought Liesl is a woman?”

Paul blinked. “She’s a…”

“But of course.” He drank more beer, wiped his mustache with the back of his hand. “I thought you knew. It’s obvious.”

“Jesus Lord.” Paul rubbed his cheek hard where he’d been kissed. He glanced back. “Obvious to you maybe.”

“For a man with your profession, you’re a babe in the woods.”

“I said I liked women, when you asked me about the rooms here.”

“Ach, the
show
in here is women. But half the waitresses are men. Don’t blame me if both sexes find you attractive. Besides, it’s your fault—you tipped her like a prince from Addis Ababa.”

Paul lit a cigarette to cover the scent of the perfume, which he now found revolting.

“So, Mr. John Dillinger, I see there are problems for you. Are the people behind this betrayal the ones who were to get you out of Berlin?”

“I don’t know yet.” He glanced around the nearly empty club but still leaned forward to whisper, “I need your help again, Otto.”

“Ach, here I am, always ready to assist. Me, the saver-from-dung-shirts, the butter-maker, the champagne-dealer, the Krupp-impersonator.”

“But I have no money left.”

Webber gave a sneer. “Money… it’s the root of all evil, after all. What do you need, my friend?”

“A car. Another uniform. And another gun. A rifle.”

Webber was quiet. “Your hunt continues.”

“That’s right.”

“Ach, what I could’ve done with a dozen men like you in my gang ring…. But Ernst’s security will be higher than ever. He may leave town for a while.”

“True. But perhaps not immediately. When I was in his office I saw that he had
two
appointments today. The first was at the stadium. The other is at a place called Waltham College. Where is that?”

“Waltham?” Webber asked. “It’s—”

“Hello, darling, do you wish another beer? Or maybe you wish
me?
”

Paul jumped as hot breath blew against his ear and arms snaked around him. Liesl had come up from behind.

“The first time,” the waitress whispered, “will be free. Perhaps even the second time.”

“Stop it,” he barked. The waitress’s face went cold.

Now knowing the truth about him, Paul could see that while the creature’s face was pretty it had clearly masculine angles.

“You needn’t be rude, my darling.”

“I’m sorry,” Paul said, leaning away. “I’m not interested in men.”

Liesl said coolly, “I’m not a man.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, then, you shouldn’t have flirted,” Liesl snapped. “You owe me four marks for the beers. No, five. I added wrong.”

Paul paid and the waitress turned away coldly, muttering and noisily cleaning adjacent tables.

“My girls,” Webber said dismissively, “they get the same way sometimes. It can be such a bother.”

They resumed their conversation and Paul repeated, “Waltham College? What do you know about it?”

“A military school not far from here. It’s on the way to Oranienburg, by the way—the home of our beautiful concentration camp. Why don’t you just knock on the door while you’re there and give yourself up. Save the SS the trouble of tracking you down.”