Garden of Beasts

odds I’ll survive long enough to use my get-out-of-jail card?”
    “Reasonable,” the commander said. “Not great but reasonable.”
    Paul was a friend of the sports journalist and writer Damon Runyon. They’d drink together some in the dives near Broadway, go to fights and ball games. A couple of years ago Runyon had invited Paul to a party after the New York opening of his movie Little Miss Marker, which Paul thought was a pretty good flick. At the party afterward, where he got a kick out of meeting Shirley Temple, he’d asked Runyon to autograph a book. The writer had inscribed it, To my pal, Paul—Remember, all of life is six to five against.
    Avery said, “How ’bout we just say your chances’re a lot better than if you go to Sing Sing.”
    After a moment Paul asked, “Why me? You’ve got dozens of button men in New York’d be willing to do it for that kind of scratch.”
    “Ah, but you’re different, Paul. You’re not a two-bit punk. You’re good. Hoover and Dewey say you’ve killed seventeen men.”
    Paul scoffed. “Bum wire, I keep saying.”
    In fact, the number was thirteen.
    “What we’ve heard about you is that you check everything two, three times before the job. You make sure your guns’re in perfect shape, you read up about your victims, you look over their places ahead of time, you find their schedule and you make sure they stick to it, you know when they’ll be alone, when they make phone calls, where they eat.”
    The Senator added, “And you’re smart. Like I was saying. We need smart for this.”
    “Smart?”
    Manielli said, “We been to your place, Paul. You got books. Damn, you got a lot of books. You’re even in the Book of the Month Club.”
    “They’re not smart books. Not all of ’em.”
    “But they are books,” Avery pointed out. “And I’m betting a lot of people in your business don’t read much.”
    “Or can’t read,” Manielli said and laughed at his own joke.
    Paul looked over at the man in the wrinkled white suit. “Who’re you?”
    “You don’t need to worry—” Gordon began.
    “I’m asking him.”
    “Listen,” the Senator grumbled, “we’re calling the shots, my friend.”
    But the fat man waved his hand and then replied to Paul, “You know the comics? Little Orphan Annie, the girl without the pupils in her eyes?”
    “Yeah, sure.”
    “Well, think of me as Daddy Warbucks.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    But he just laughed and turned to the Senator. “Keep pitching your case. I like him.”
    The rail-thin politician said to Paul, “Most important, you don’t kill anybody innocent.”
    Gordon added, “Jimmy Coughlin told us you said one time that you only kill other killers. What’d you say? That you only ‘correct God’s mistakes’? That’s what we need.”
    “God’s mistakes,” the Senator repeated, smiling in lip but not in spirit.
    “Well, who is it?”
    Gordon looked at the Senator, who deflected the question. “You have relatives in Germany still?”
    “Nobody close. My family came over here a long time ago.”
    The Senator asked, “What do you know about the Nazis?”
    “Adolf Hitler’s running the country. Sounds like nobody’s really crazy about it. There was this big rally against him at Madison Square Garden in March, two, three years ago. Traffic was a swell mess, I’ll tell you. I missed the first three rounds of a fight up in the Bronx. Got under my skin. . . . That’s about it.”
    “Did you know, Paul,” the Senator said slowly, “that Hitler’s planning another war?”
    That brought him up short.
    “Our sources’ve been giving us information from Germany since Hitler came to power in thirty-three. Last year, our man in Berlin got his hands on a draft of this letter. It was written by one of their senior men, General Beck.”
    The commander handed him a typed sheet. It was in German. Paul read it. The author of the letter called for a slow but steady rearmament of the German armed forces to protect and expand what Paul translated as “living area.” The nation had to be ready for war in a few years.
    Frowning, he put the sheet down. “And they’re going ahead with this?”
    “Last year,” Gordon said, “Hitler started a draft and since then he’s building up the troops to even higher levels than that letter recommends. Then four months ago German troops took over the Rhineland—the demilitarized zone bordering France.”
    “I read about that.”
    “They’re building