Jeffery Deaver: Garden Of Beasts

The lieutenant said, “We’ll have a plane and a crew waiting in Holland. There’s an old aerodrome outside of Berlin. After you’ve finished we’ll fly you out from there.”

“Fly me out?” Paul asked, intrigued. Flying fascinated him. When he was nine he broke his arm – the first of more times than he wanted to count – when he built a glider and launched himself off the roof of his father’s printing plant, crash-landing on the filthy cobblestones two stories below.

“That’s right, Paul,” Gordon said.

Avery offered, “You like airplanes, don’t you? You’ve got all those airplane magazines in your apartment. Books too. And pictures of planes. Some models too. You make those yourself?”

Paul felt embarrassed. It made him angry that they’d found his toys.

“You a pilot?” the Senator asked.

“Never even been in a plane before.” Then he shook his head. “I don’t know.” This whole thing was absolutely nuts. Silence filled the room.

It was broken by the man in the wrinkled white suit. “I was a colonel in the War too. Just like Reinhard Ernst. And I was at Argonne Woods. Just like you. ”

Paul nodded.

“You know the total?”

“Of what?”

“How many we lost?”

Paul remembered a sea of bodies, American, French and German. The wounded were in some ways more horrible. They cried and wailed and moaned and called for their mothers and fathers and you never forgot that sound. Ever.

The older man said in a reverent voice, “The AEF lost more than twenty-five thousand. Almost a hundred wounded. Half the boys under my command died. In a month we advanced seven miles against the enemy. Every day of my life I’ve thought about those numbers. Half my soldiers, seven miles. And Meuse-Argonne was our most spectacular victory in the War… I do not want that to happen again.”

Paul regarded him. “Who are you?” he asked again.

The Senator stirred and began to speak but the other man replied, “I’m Cyrus Clayborn.”

Yeah, that was it. Brother… The old guy was the head of Continental Telephone and Telegraph – a real honest-to-God millionaire, even now, in the shadow of the Depression.

The man continued. “Daddy Warbucks, like I was saying. I’m the banker. For, let’s say, projects like this it’s usually better for the money not to come out of public troughs. I’m too old to fight for my country. But I do what I can. That satisfy your itch, boy?”

“Yeah, it does.”

“Good.” Clayborn looked him over. “Well, I’ve got one more thing to say. The money they mentioned before? The amount?”

Paul nodded.

“Double it.”

Paul felt his skin crackle. Ten thousand dollars? He couldn’t imagine it.

Gordon’s head slowly turned toward the Senator. This, Paul understood, wasn’t part of the script.

“Would you give me cash? Not a check.”

For some reason the Senator and Clayborn laughed hard at this. “What-ever you want, sure,” the industrialist said.

The Senator pulled a phone closer to him and tapped the hand piece. “So, what’s it going to be, son? We get on the horn to Dewey, or not?”

The rasp of a match broke the silence as Gordon lit a cigarette. “Think about it, Paul. We’re giving you the chance to erase the past. Start all over again. What kind of button man gets that kind of deal?”

Finally, the man could do what he’d come here for.

It was six in the morning and the ship in whose pungent third-class corridor he now stood, the S.S. Manhattan, was nosing toward Hamburg harbor, ten days after leaving New York.

The vessel was, literally, the flagship of the United States Lines – the first in the company’s fleet constructed exclusively for passengers. It was huge – over two football fields in length – but this voyage had been especially crowded. Typical transatlantic crossings found the ship carrying six hundred or so passengers and a crew of five hundred. On this trip, though, nearly four hundred Olympic athletes, managers and coaches and another 850 passengers, mostly family, friends, the press and members of the AOC, filled the three classes of accommodations.

The number of passengers and the unusual requirements of the athletes and reporters on board the Manhattan had made life hectic for the diligent, polite crew, but particularly so for this round, bald man, whose name was Albert Heinsler. Certainly his job as a porter meant long and strenuous hours. But the most arduous aspect of his day was due to his true role on board the ship, one that not a single soul here knew anything about. Heinsler called himself an A-man, which is how the Nazi intelligence service referred to their trusted operatives in Germany – their Agenten.

In fact, this reclusive thirty-four-year-old bachelor was merely a member of the German-American Bund, a group of ragtag, pro-Hitler Americans loosely allied with the Christian Front in their stand against Jews, Communists and Negroes. Heinsler didn’t hate America but he could never forget the terrible days as a teenager when his family had been driven to poverty during the War because of anti-German prejudice; he himself had been relentlessly taunted – “Heinie, Heinie, Heinie the Hun” – and beaten up countless times in school yards and alleys.

No, he didn’t hate his country. But he loved Nazi Germany with all his heart and was enraptured with the messiah Adolf Hitler. He’d make any sacrifice for the man – prison or even death if necessary.

Heinsler had hardly believed his good fortune when the commanding Stormtrooper at the New Jersey headquarters of the bund had noted the loyal comrade’s past employment as a bookkeeper on board some passenger liners and had arranged to get him a job on the Manhattan. The brown-uniformed commandant had met him on the boardwalk at Atlantic City and explained that while the Nazis were magnanimously welcoming people from around the world they were worried about security breaches that the influx of athletes and visitors might allow. Heinsler’s duty was to be the Nazis’ clandestine representative on this ship. He wouldn’t be doing his past job, though – keeping ledgers. It was important that he be free to roam the ship without suspicion; he’d be a porter.

Why, this was the thrill of his life! He immediately quit his job working in the back room of a certified public accountant on lower Broadway. He spent the next few days, until the ship sailed, being his typically obsessed self, preparing for his mission as he worked through the night to study diagrams of the ship, practice his role as a porter, brush up on his German and learn a variation of Morse code, called continental code, which was used when telegraphing messages to and within Europe.

Once the ship left port he kept to himself, observed and listened and was the perfect A-man. But when the Manhattan was at sea, he’d been unable to communicate with Germany; the signal of his portable wireless was too weak. The ship itself had a powerful radiogram system, of course, as well as short-and long-wave wireless, but he could hardly transmit his message those ways; a crew radio operator would be involved, and it was vital that nobody heard or saw what he had to say.

Heinsler now glanced out the porthole at the gray strip of Germany. Yes, he believed he was close enough to shore to transmit. He stepped into his minuscule cabin and retrieved the Allocchio Bacchini wireless-telegraph set from under his cot. Then he started toward the stairs that would take him to the highest deck, where he hoped the puny signal would make it to shore.