Jeffery Deaver - Garden Of Beasts

“Well, you can overdo anything,” he pointed out. “I enjoy sports.”

“Yes, you seem athletic. Do you body-build?”

“Some. Mostly I box.”

“Box? You mean the sort where you hit other people?”

He laughed. “That’s the only kind of boxing there is.”

“Barbaric.”

“It can be – if you let your guard down.”

“You joke,” she said. “But how can you encourage people to strike each other?”

“I couldn’t really tell you. But I like it. It’s fun.”

“Fun,” she scoffed.

“Yeah, fun,” he said, growing angry too. “Life’s hard. Sometimes you need to hold on to something fun, when the rest of the world is turning to shit around you… Why don’t you go to a boxing match sometime? Go see Max Schmeling. Drink some beer, yell till you’re hoarse. You might enjoy it.”

“Kakfif,” she said bluntly.

“What?”

“Kakfif,” Käthe repeated. “It’s a shortening for ‘Completely out of the question.’”

“Suit yourself.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I’m a pacifist, as I was telling you today. All my friends in Berlin are pacifists. We don’t combine the idea of fun with hurting people.”

“I don’t walk around like a Stormtrooper and beat up the innocent. The guys I spar with? They want to do it.”

“You encourage causing pain.”

“No, I discourage people from hitting me. That’s what sparring is.”

“Like children,” she muttered. “You’re like children.”

“You don’t understand.”

“And why do you say that? Because I’m a woman?” she snapped.

“Maybe. Yeah, maybe that’s it.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“I’m not talking about intelligence. I only mean that women aren’t inclined to fight.”

“We aren’t inclined to be the aggressor. We will fight to protect our homes.”

“Sometimes the wolf isn’t in your home. Don’t you go out and kill him first?”

“No.”

“You ignore him and hope he goes away?”

“Yes. Exactly. And you teach him he doesn’t need to be destructive.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Paul said. “You can’t talk a wolf into being a sheep.”

“But I think you can if you wish to,” she said. “And if you work hard at it. Too many men don’t want that, however. They want to fight. They want to destroy because it gives them pleasure.” Dense silence between them for a long moment. Then, her voice softening, she said, “Ach, Paul, please forgive me. Here you are, being my companion, doing the town with me. Which I haven’t done for so many months. And I repay you by being like a shrew. Are American women shrews like me?”

“Some are, some aren’t. Not that you are one.”

“I’m a difficult person to be with. You have to understand, Paul – many women in Berlin are this way. We have to be. After the War there were no men left in the country. We had to become men and be as hard as they. I apologize.”

“Don’t. I enjoy arguing. It’s just another way of sparring.”

“Ach, sparring! And me a pacifist!” She gave a girlish laugh.

“What would your friends say?”

“What indeed?” she said and took his arm as they crossed the street.

Even though he was a “lukewarm” – politically neutral, not a member of the Party – Willi Kohl enjoyed certain privileges reserved for devout National Socialists.

One of these was that when a senior Kripo official had moved to Munich, Kohl had been offered the chance to take his large four-bedroom apartment in a pristine, linden-lined cul-de-sac off Berliner Street near Charlottenburg. Berlin had had a serious housing shortage since the War and most Kripo inspectors, even many at his level, were relegated to boxy, nondescript folk-apartments, thrown together in boxy, nondescript neighborhoods.

Kohl wasn’t quite sure why he’d been so rewarded. Most likely because he was always ready to help fellow officers analyze crime scene information, make deductions from the evidence or interview a witness or suspect. Kohl knew that the most invaluable man in any job is the one who can make his colleagues – and superiors especially – appear invaluable as well.

These rooms were his sanctuary. They were as private as his workplace was public and were populated by those closest to his heart: his wife and children and, on occasion (sleeping always in the parlor, of course), Charlotte’s fiancé, Heinrich.

The apartment was on the second floor and as he walked, wincing, up the stairs, he could make out the smells of onions and meat. Heidi kept to no schedule in preparing her food. Some of Kohl’s colleagues would solemnly declare Saturdays, Mondays and Wednesdays, for instance, to be State Loyalty Meat-free Days. The Kohl household, at least seven strong, went without meat often, owing to scarcity as well as cost, but Heidi refused to be bound by a ritual. This Saturday night they might have aubergine with bacon in cream sauce or kidney pudding or sauerbraten or even an Italian-style dish of pasta with tomatoes. Always a sweet, of course. Willi Kohl liked his linzertorte and strudel.

Wheezing from the walk up the stairs, he opened the door just as eleven-year-old Hanna raced to him. Every inch the little blonde Nordic maid, despite her parents’ brown hair, she wrapped her arms around the large man. “Papa! Can I carry your pipe for you?”

He fished out the meerschaum for her. She carried it to the rack in the den where dozens of others sat.

“I’m home,” he called.

Heidi stepped into the doorway and kissed her husband on both cheeks. A few years younger than he, she’d become round over the course of their marriage, developing a smooth extra chin and huge bosom, adding pounds with each child. But this was as it should be; Kohl felt you should grow both in soul and in girth with your partner. Five children had earned her a certificate from the Party. (Women with more offspring had higher accolades; producing nine children won you a gold star. Indeed, a couple with fewer than four offspring were not allowed to call themselves a “family.”) But Heidi had angrily stuffed the parchment into the bottom of her bureau. She had children because she enjoyed them, enjoyed everything about them – giving them life, raising them, directing their course – not because the Little Man wished to swell the population of his Third Empire.

His wife vanished then returned a moment later, bearing a snifter of schnapps. She let him have only one glass of the potent drink before dinner. He grumbled about the rationing occasionally but he secretly welcomed it. He knew far too many policemen who didn’t stop with the second glass. Or second bottle.

He said hello to Hilde, his seventeen-year-old, lost as always in a book. She rose and hugged him and then returned to the divan. The willowy girl was the family scholar. But she’d been having a difficult time lately. Goebbels himself said that a woman’s sole purpose was to be beautiful and populate the Third Empire. The universities were largely closed to girls now, and those admitted were limited to two courses of study: domestic science (which earned what was contemptuously called the “pudding degree”) or education. Hilde, however, wished to study mathematics and science and ultimately become a university professor. But she would be allowed to teach only lower grades. Kohl believed both of his older daughters were equally smart but learning came more easily to Hilde than to vivacious and athletic Charlotte, four years older. He was often amazed at how he and Heidi had produced such similar and yet vastly different human beings.

The inspector walked out onto his small balcony, where he would sometimes sit and smoke his pipe late at night. It faced west and now he gazed at the fierce red-and-orange clouds, lit by the vanished sun. He took a small sip of the harsh schnapps. The second was kinder and he sat down comfortably in his chair, trying hard not to think about fat, dead men, about the tragic deaths in Gatow and Charlottenburg, about Pietr – forgive me, Peter – Krauss, about the mysterious churning of the DeHoMags in the basement of the Kripo. Trying not to think about their clever Manny’s New York suspect.