Jeffery Deaver - Garden Of Beasts

“Good, Johann.”

“I am happy to aid my Leader in any way I can.”

“Yes, yes,” Kohl said wearily.

Switching forks. Common in other countries, less so in Germany, like whistling for taxis. So the accent may have indeed been foreign.

“Did he smoke?”

“I believe so, sir.”

“Pipe, cigar, cigarette?”

“Cigarette, I believe. But I-”

“Didn’t see the brand of the manufacturer.”

“No, sir. I didn’t.”

Kohl walked across the room and examined the suspect’s table and the chairs around it. Nothing helpful. He frowned to see that the ashtray contained ash but no cigarette stubs.

More evidence of their man’s cleverness?

Kohl then crouched and struck a match over the floor beneath the table.

“Ah, yes, look, Janssen! Some flakes of the same brown leather we found earlier. Indeed it is our man. And there are marks in the dust here that suggest he set a satchel down.”

“I wonder what it contains,” Janssen said.

“That does not interest us,” Kohl said, scooping up these flakes and depositing them in an envelope. “Not at this point. The importance is the bag itself, the connection it establishes between this man and Dresden Alley.”

Kohl thanked the waiter and, with a longing glance at a plate of wiener schnitzel, he walked outside, Janssen behind him.

“Let’s inquire around the neighborhood to see if anyone saw our gentlemen. You take the far side of the street, Janssen. I’ll take the flower vendors.” Kohl laughed grimly. Berlin flower sellers were notoriously rude.

Janssen removed his handkerchief and wiped his brow. He seemed to give a faint sigh.

“Are you tired, Janssen?”

“No, sir. Not at all.” The young man hesitated then added, “It’s just that it seems our work sometimes is hopeless. All this effort for a fat dead man.”

Kohl dug his yellow pipe out of his pocket, frowning to see that he’d put his pistol into the same pocket and had nicked the bowl. He filled it with tobacco. He said, “Yes, Janssen, you’re right. The victim was a fat middle-aged man. But we’re clever detectives, aren’t we? We know something else about him, as well.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“That he was somebody’s son.”

“Well… of course he was.”

“And perhaps he was somebody’s brother. And maybe somebody’s husband or lover. And, if he was lucky, he was a father of sons and daughters. I would hope too that there are past lovers who think of him occasionally. And in his future other lovers might have awaited. And three or four more children he could have brought into the world.” He rasped a match on the side of the box and got a smolder going in the meerschaum. “So, Janssen, when you look at the incident in this way we don’t have merely a curious mystery about a stocky dead man. We have a tragedy like a spiderweb reaching many different lives and many different places, extending for years and years. How sad that is… Do you see why our job is so important?”

“Yes, sir.”

And Kohl believed that the young man did indeed understand.

“Janssen, you must get a hat. But for now, I’ve changed my mind. You take the shady side of the street. It will mean, of course, that you must interview the flower vendors. They’ll treat you to some words you won’t hear outside of a Stormtrooper barracks but at least you won’t return to your wife tonight with skin the shade of fresh beetroot.”

Walking toward the busy square to find a taxi, Paul glanced behind him from time to time. Smoking his Chesterfield, looking at the sights, stores, passersby, once again searching for anything out of kilter.

He slipped into a public rest room, which was immaculate, and stepped into a stall. He stubbed out his cigarette and dropped it, along with the cigarette butts and wad of pulp that had held the address of Käthe Richter’s boardinghouse, into the toilet. Then he tore the pictures of Ernst up into dozens of tiny pieces and flushed everything away.

Outside on the street again, he put aside the difficult images of Max’s sad and unnecessary death and concentrated on the job ahead of him. It had been years since he’d killed anyone with a rifle. He was a good shot with a long weapon. People call guns “equalizers.” But that’s not completely true. A pistol weighs perhaps three pounds, a rifle twelve or more. To hold a weapon absolutely still requires strength, and Paul’s solid arms had helped make him the best shot in his squadron.

Yet now, as he’d explained to Morgan, when he had to touch off someone, he preferred to do it with a pistol.

And he always came in close, close as breath.

He never said a word to his victim, never confronted him, never even let him know what was about to happen. He would appear, as silently as a big man could, behind the victim, if possible, and fire the shot into his head, killing him instantly. He would never think of behaving like the sadistic Bugsy Siegel or the recently departed Dutch Schultz; they’d slowly beat people to death, torment them, taunt them. What Paul did as a button man had nothing to do with anger or pleasure or the gritty satisfaction of revenge; it was simply about committing an evil act to eliminate a greater evil.

And Paul Schumann insisted on paying the price for this hypocrisy. He suffered from the proximity of killing. The deaths sickened him, sent him into a tunnel of sorrow and guilt. Every time he killed, another part of him died too. Once, drunk in a shabby West Side Irish bar, he concluded that he was the opposite of Christ; he died so that others might die too. He wished he’d been too smoked on hooch to remember that thought. But it’d stuck with him.

Still, he supposed Morgan was right about using the rifle. His buddy Damon Runyon had once said that a man could be a winner only if he was willing to step over the edge. Paul sure did that often enough, but he also knew when to stop walking. He’d never been suicidal. On a number of occasions he’d postponed the touch-off when he sensed the odds were bad. Maybe six to five against was acceptable. But worse than that? He didn’t -

A loud crash startled him. Something flew through a bookstore window onto the sidewalk a few yards away. A bookcase. Some books followed. He glanced inside the shop and saw a middle-aged man holding his bloody face. He appeared to have been struck on the cheek. A woman, crying, gripped his arm. They were both terrified. Four large men in light brown uniforms stood around them. Paul supposed they were Stormtroopers, Brownshirts. One of them was holding a book and shouting at the man. “You are not allowed to sell this shit! They’re illegal. They’re a ticket to Oranienburg.”

“It’s Thomas Mann,” the man protested. “It means nothing against the Leader or our Party. I-”

The Brownshirt slapped the bookseller in his face with the open book. He spoke in a mocking voice. “It’s…” Another furious slap. “Thomas…” Another, and the spine of the book broke. “Mann…”

The bullying angered Paul but it wasn’t his problem. He could hardly afford to draw attention to himself here. He started on. But suddenly one of the Brownshirts grabbed the woman by the arm and pushed her out the door. She fell hard into Paul and dropped to the sidewalk. She was so terrified she didn’t even seem to notice him. Blood ran from her knees and palms where the window glass had cut her skin.

The apparent leader of the Stormtroopers dragged the man outside. “Destroy the place,” he called to his friends, who began to push over the counters and shelves, rip the pictures from the walls, slam the sturdy chairs onto the floor, trying to break them. The leader glanced at Paul then delivered a powerful blow to the midsection of the bookseller, who gave a grunt, rolled over on his stomach and vomited. The Brownshirt stepped toward the woman. He grabbed her by the hair and was about to strike her in the face when Paul, out of instinct, grabbed his arm.