Jeffery Deaver - Garden Of Beasts

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?”

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.