Garden of Beasts

the warehouse by the Spree had caused serious but not lethaldamage 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, Stollerand 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.
    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