Jeffery Deaver - Garden Of Beasts

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.

While the story of Paul Schumann’s mission to Berlin is purely fiction – and the real-life individuals did not, of course, play the roles I gave them – the history, geography, technology and cultural and political institutions in the United States and Germany during the summer of 1936 are otherwise accurate. The Allies’ naivete about and ambivalence toward Hitler and the National Socialists were as I have described them. German rearmament occurred very much as I portrayed it, though it was not a single individual, like my fictional Reinhard Ernst, but a number of men who had the task of making the country ready for the war that Hitler had long envisioned. There was indeed a place known as “The Room” in Manhattan, and the Office of Naval Intelligence was the country’s CIA of its day.

Portions of Hitler’s Mein Kampf were the inspiration for the radio broadcasts throughout the story, and while there was no Waltham Study per se, such research was undertaken, although somewhat later than I have it in the book, by SS troops responsible for mass exterminations (known as Einstatzgruppen ), under the direction of Artur Nebe, who had at one time headed the Kripo. The Nazi government was using DeHoMag card-sorting machines for tracking its citizens in 1936, though they were not, to my knowledge, ever located at Kripo headquarters. The International Criminal Police Commission, which proved to be Willi Kohl’s salvation, did in fact meet in London in early 1937; the organization ultimately became Interpol. Sachsenhausen concentration camp officially replaced the old camp at Oranienburg in the late summer of 1936. For the next nine years more than 200,000 political and racial prisoners were held there; tens of thousands were executed or died from beatings, abuse, starvation and illness. The occupying Russians in turn used the facility as a prison to house some sixty thousand Nazis and other political prisoners, of whom an estimated twelve thousand died before the camp was closed in 1950.

As for Otto Webber’s favorite gin mill: The Aryan Café permanently closed its door shortly after the Olympic Games ended.

A brief note here regarding the fate of several characters appearing in the story: In the spring of 1945, as Germany lay in ruins, Hermann Göring came to the mistaken belief that Adolf Hitler was abdicating control of the country and asked to succeed him. To Göring’s shame and horror, Hitler was incensed and labeled him a backstabber, casting him out of the Nazi party and ordering his arrest. At the Nuremberg war crimes trial Göring was sentenced to die. He killed himself two hours before his scheduled execution in 1946.