Garden Of Beasts

Chapter Twenty

He had been in his office at the Alex for an hour, since 5 A. M., painstakingly writing out the English-language telegram that he had composed in his mind as he lay sleepless in bed beside peaceful Heidi, fragrant with the powder she dusted on before retiring.

Willi Kohl now looked over his handiwork:

I AM BEING SENIOR DETECTIVE INSPECTOR WILLI

KOHL OF THE KRIMINALPOLIZEI (CRIMINAL POLICE) IN

BERLIN STOP WE SEEK INFORMATION REGARD AMERI

CAN POSSIBLY FROM NEW YORK PRESENTLY IN BERLIN

PAUL SCHUMANN IN CONNECTION OF HOMICIDE STOP

ARRIVED WITH AMERICAN OLYMPIC TEAM STOP PLEASE

TO REMIT ME INFORMATION ABOUT THIS MAN AT KRIM

INALPOLIZEI HEADQUARTERS ALEXANDERPLATZ

BERLIN TO DIRECTION OF INSPECTOR WILLI KOHL

STOP MOST URGENT STOP THANKING YOU REGARDS

He’d struggled hard with the wording. The department had translators but none worked on Sunday and he wanted to send the telegram immediately. It would be earlier in America; he wasn’t sure about the time zones and he guessed the hour to be about midnight overseas but he hoped that the law enforcers there would keep the same long shifts as police in most countries.

Kohl read the telegram once again and decided that, though flawed, it was good enough. On a separate sheet of paper he wrote instructions to send it to the International Olympic Committee, the New York City Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He walked down to the telegraph office. He was disappointed to find that no one was as yet on duty. Angrily, he returned to his desk.

After a few hours’ sleep, Janssen was presently en route back to the Olympic Village to see if he could pick up any more leads there. What else could Kohl himself do? Nothing occurred to him, except hounding the medical examiner for the autopsy and FPE for the fingerprint analysis. But they, of course, were not in their offices yet either and might not come in at all on Sunday.

He felt the frustration acutely.

His eyes dropped down to the hard-worked-on telegram.

“Ach, this is absurd.” He would wait no longer. How difficult could it be to man a Teletype machine? Kohl rose and hurried back to the department, figuring he would do the best he could to transmit the telegram to the United States himself. And if, because of his clumsy fingers, it ended up being sent by mistake to a hundred different places in America, well, so much the better.

She had returned to her own room not long before, around 6 A.M., and was now back in his, wearing a dark blue housedress, pins holding her hair flat to her head, a little blush on her cheeks. Paul stood in the doorway, wiping the remnants of the shaving froth from his face. He put the cover on his safety razor and dropped it into his stained canvas bag.

Käthe had brought coffee and toast, along with some pale margarine, cheese, dried sausage and soupy marmalade. She walked through the low, dusty light streaming into the front window of his living room and set the tray on the table near the kitchen.

“There,” she announced, nodding at the tray. “No need for you to come to the breakfast room.” She looked at him once quickly. Then away. “I have chores.”

“So, you still game?” he asked in English.

“What is ‘game’?”

He kissed her. “It means what I asked you last night. Are you still willing to come with me?”

She ordered the china on the tray, which had seemed to him already perfectly ordered. “I’m game. Are you?”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t have let you change your mind. It would be Kakfif. Out of the question.”

She laughed. Then a frown. “One thing I wish to say.”

“Yeah?”

“I give opinions quite often.” She looked down. “And quite strongly. Michael called me a cyclone. I want to say, regarding the subject of sports: I could learn to like them too.”

Paul shook his head. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“No?”

“Then I’ll feel I had to like poetry.”

She pressed her head to his chest. He believed she was smiling.

“You will like America,” he said. “But if you don’t, when all this blows over you can come back. You aren’t necessarily leaving the country forever.”

“Ah, my wise writer-man. You think this will – the expression? – will blow over?”

“Yes, I do. I think they won’t be in power much longer.” He looked at the clock. The time was nearly seven-thirty. “Now I have to meet my associate.”

“On Sunday morning? Ach, I finally understand your secret.”

He looked at her with a cautious smile.

“You’re writing about priests who play sports!” She laughed. “That’s your big story!” Then her smile faded. “And why must you leave so quickly if you are writing about sports or the cubic meters of concrete used for the stadium?”

“I don’t have to leave quickly. I have some important meetings back in the United States.” Paul drank his coffee quickly and ate one piece of toast and sausage. “You finish what’s left. I’m not hungry now.”

“Well, hurry back to me. I will pack. But only one bag, I think. If I take too many, perhaps a ghost will try to hide in one.” A laugh. “Ach, I am sounding like someone out of a story by our macabre friend E.T.A. Hoffmann.”

He kissed her and left the boardinghouse, stepped out into the morning, already hot, already painting a damp coat on the skin. With a glance up and down the empty street, he made his way north, over the canal, and into the Tiergarten, the Garden of Beasts.

Paul found Reggie Morgan sitting on a bench in front of the very pond where Käthe Richter’s lover had been beaten to death three years ago.

Even at this early hour, dozens of people were here. A number of walkers and bicyclists. Morgan’s jacket was off and his shirt sleeves partly rolled up.

Paul sat down beside him. Morgan flicked an envelope inside his jacket pocket. “Got the greenbacks okay,” he whispered in English.

They reverted to German. “They cashed a check on Saturday night?” Paul asked, laughing. “I’m living in a whole new world.”

“You think Webber will show up?” Morgan asked skeptically.

“Oh, yes. If there’s money involved he’ll be here. But I’m not sure how helpful he’ll be. I looked over Wilhelm Street last night. There are dozens of guards, hundreds maybe. It’d be far too risky to do the job there. We’ll have to see what Otto says. Maybe he’s found another location.”

They sat in silence for a moment.

Paul watched him look around the park. Morgan seemed wistful. He said, “I will miss this country very much.” For a moment the man’s face lost its keenness and the dark eyes were sad. “There are good people here. I find them kinder than the Parisians, more open than the Londoners. And they spend far more time enjoying life than New Yorkers. If we had time I’d take you to the Lustgarten and Luna Park. And I love to walk here, in the Tiergarten. I enjoy watching birds.” The thin man seemed embarrassed at this. “A foolish diversion.”

Paul laughed to himself, thinking of the model airplanes sitting on his bookshelf in Brooklyn. Foolishness is in the eye of the beholder.

“So you’ll leave?” Paul asked.

“I can’t stay. I’ve been here far too long. Every day there’s another chance of a mistake, some carelessness that will tip them off to me. And after what we’re about to do they’ll look very closely at every foreigner who’s had business here recently. But after life returns to normal and the National Socialists are gone I can return.”

“What will you do when you come back?”

Morgan brightened. “I would like to be a diplomat. That’s why I am in this business. After what I saw in the trenches…” He nodded at a bullet scar on his arm. “After that, I decided I was going to do whatever I could to stop war. The diplomatic corps made sense. I wrote the Senator about it. He suggested Berlin. A country in flux, he called it. So here I am. I hope to be a liaison officer in a few years. Then ambassador or a consul. Like our Ambassador Dodd here. He’s a genius, a true statesman. I won’t be posted here, of course, not at first. Too important a country. I could start out in Holland. Or maybe Spain, well, after their civil war is over, of course. If there’s any Spain left. Franco’s as bad as Hitler. It’ll be brutal. But, yes, I would like to come back here when sanity returns.”

A moment later Paul spotted Otto Webber coming down the path, walking slowly, a bit unsteadily and squinting against the powerful sunlight.

“There he is now.”

“Him? He looks like a Bürgermeister. And one who spent the evening in his cups. We’re relying on him? ”

Webber approached the bench and sat down, breathing hard. “Hot, hot day. I didn’t know it could be this hot in the morning. I’m rarely up at this hour. But neither are the dung-shirts so we can meet without much concern. You are Mr. John Dillinger’s associate?”

“Dillinger?” Morgan asked.

“I am Otto Webber.” He shook Morgan’s hand vigorously. “You are?”

“I’ll keep my name to myself if you don’t mind.”

“Ach, me, yes, that’s fine.” Webber examined Morgan closely. “Say, I have some nice trousers, several pair. I can sell them to you cheap. Yes, yes, very cheap. The best quality. From England. I can have one of my girls alter them to fit you perfectly. Ingrid is available. And very talented. Quite pretty too. A real pearl.”

Morgan glanced down at his gray flannel slacks. “No. I don’t need any clothes.”

“Champagne? Stockings?”

“Otto,” Paul said. “I think the only transaction we’re interested in involves what we were talking about yesterday.”

“Ach, yes, Mr. John Dillinger. Except I have some news you may not like. All of my contacts report that a veil of silence has descended on Wilhelm Street. Something has made them cautious. Security has become higher than ever. And all this in the last day. There is no information anyone has about this person you were mentioning.”

Paul’s face twisted in disappointment.

Morgan muttered, “I spent half of last night coming up with the money.”

“Good,” Webber said brightly. “Dollars, correct?”

“My friend,” the slim American added caustically, “you don’t get paid if we don’t get results.”

“But the situation is not hopeless. I can still be of some assistance.”

“Go on,” Morgan said impatiently. He looked down again at his slacks, brushing at a smudge.

The German continued. “I can’t tell you where the chicken is but what would you say if I can get you into the henhouse and you could find out for yourself?”

“The-”

He lowered his voice. “I can get you into the Chancellory. Ernst is the envy of all the ministers. Everyone tries to snuggle close to the Little Man and get offices in the building but the best that most of them can do is to find space nearby. That Ernst abides there is a source of anguish to many.”

Paul scoffed. “I looked it over last night. There’re guards everywhere. You couldn’t get me in there.”

“Ah, but I am of a different opinion, my friend.”

“How the hell can you do it?” Paul had lapsed into English. He repeated the question in German.

“We have the Little Man to thank. He is obsessed with architecture. He has been renovating the Chancellory since he came to power. Laborers are there seven days a week. I will provide a workman’s outfit, a forged identification card and the two passes that will get you into the building. One of my contacts is doing the plastering there and he has access to all the documentation.”

Morgan considered this and nodded, now less cynical about the idea.

“My friend tells me that Hitler wishes rugs in all the offices on the important floors. That will include Ernst’s. The carpet suppliers are measuring the offices. Some have been measured, some have not. We will hope Ernst’s has not. In the event it has been, you can make some excuse about having to measure again. The pass I will give you is from a company that is known for, among other things, its fine carpeting. I will also provide a meter stick and a notebook.”

“How do you know you can trust this man?” Paul asked.

“Because he’s been using cheap plaster and pocketing the difference between its cost and what the state is paying him. That’s a death offense when you’re building Hitler’s seat of power. So I have some leverage with him; he wouldn’t lie to me. Besides, he thinks only that we’re running some scam to undercut the price of carpets. Of course, I did promise him a bit of egg.”

“Egg?” Morgan asked.

It was for Paul to interpret. “Money.”

Whose bread I eat is whose song I sing…

“Take it out of the thousand dollars.”

“I wish to point out that I don’t have the thousand dollars.”

Morgan shook his head, reached into his pocket and counted out a hundred.

“That’s fine. See, I’m not greedy.”

Morgan rolled his eyes at Paul. “Not greedy? Why, he’s like Göring.”

“Ach, I take that as a compliment, sir. Our air minister is a very resourceful businessman.” Webber turned to Paul. “Now, there will be some officials in the building, even on Sunday. But my man tells me they will be senior people and will be mostly in the Leader’s portion of the building, to the left, which you will not be allowed near. To the right are the lower-level-officials’ offices – that’s where Ernst’s is. They, and their secretaries and aides, will most likely not be there. You should have some time to browse through his office and, with luck, find his calendar or a memo or notation about his appointments in the next few days.”

“This is not bad,” Morgan said.

Webber said, “It will take me an hour or so to put everything in place. I will pick up the coveralls and your papers and a truck. I’ll meet you by that statue there, the woman with the large bosom, at ten A. M. And I’ll bring some pants for you, ” he added to Morgan. “Twenty marks. Such a good price.” He smiled then said to Paul, “Your friend here eyes me with a very particular look, Mr. John Dillinger. I don’t believe he trusts me.”

Reggie Morgan shrugged. “I will tell you, Otto Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Webber.” A glance at Paul. “My colleague here told you about the precautions we’ve taken to make certain you don’t betray us. No, my friend, trust is not the issue. I’m looking at you this way because I wish to know what the hell you think is wrong with these trousers of mine?”

He saw Mark’s face in the young boy’s before him.

This was to be expected, of course, seeing the father in the son. But it was still unsettling.

“Come here, Rudy,” Reinhard Ernst said to his grandson.

“Yes, Opa.”

The hour was early on Sunday and the housekeeper was removing breakfast dishes from the table, on which sunlight fell as yellow as pollen. Gertrud was in the kitchen, examining a plucked goose, which would be dinner later that day. Their daughter-in-law was at church, lighting candles to the memory of Mark Albrecht Ernst, the very same young man the colonel saw now echoed in his grandson.

He tied the laces of Rudy’s shoes. He glanced once more at the boy’s face and saw Mark again, though noted a different look on his face this time: curious, discerning.

It was uncanny really.

Oh, how he missed his son…

It was eighteen months since Mark had said good-bye to his parents, wife and Rudy, all of them standing behind the rail at Lehrter Station. Ernst had given the twenty-seven-year-old officer a salute – a real salute, not the fascist one – as his son had boarded the train to Hamburg to take command of his ship.

The young officer was fully aware of the dangers of the ramshackle vessel yet he’d wholly embraced them.

Because that is what soldiers and sailors do.

Ernst thought about Mark daily. But never before had the spirit of his son come so close to him as now, seeing these familiar expressions in his own grandson’s face, so direct, so confident, so curious. Were they evidence that the boy had his father’s nature? Rudy would be subject to the draft in a decade. Where would Germany be then? At war? Peace? Back in possession of the lands stolen away by the Treaty of Versailles? Would Hitler be gone, an engine so powerful that it quickly seizes and burns? Or would the Leader still be in command, burnishing his vision of the new Germany? Ernst’s heart told him he should be vitally concerned about these questions. Yet he knew he couldn’t worry about them. All he could focus on was his duty.

One had to do one’s duty.

Even if that meant commanding an old training ship not meant to carry powder and shells, whose jerry-rigged magazine was too close to the galley or engine room or a sparking wire (no one would ever know), the consequences being that one moment the ship was practicing war maneuvers in the cold Baltic and the next she was a cloud of acrid smoke over the water, her shattered hull dropping through the blackness of water to the sea floor.

Duty…

Even if that meant spending half one’s days battling in the trenches of Wilhelm Street, all the way to the Leader, if necessary, to do what was best for Germany.

Ernst gave a final tug on Rudy’s shoelace to make sure it wouldn’t come undone and trip the boy. Then he stood and looked down at this tiny version of his son. Acting on impulse, very unusual for Ernst, he asked, “Rudy, I have to see someone this morning. But later, would you like to come with me to the Olympic stadium? Would you like that?”

“Oh, yes, Opa.” The boy’s face blossomed into a huge smile. “I could run around the tracks.”

“You run quickly.”

“Gunni at my child-school and I ran a race from the oak tree to the porch and he’s two years older than I but I won.”

“Good, good. Then you will enjoy the afternoon. You’ll come with me and you can run on the same track that our Olympians will race on. Then when we see the Games next week you can tell everyone that you ran on the same track. Won’t that be fun?”

“Oh, yes, Opa.”

“I have to go now. But I’ll return at noontime and pick you up.”

“I’ll practice running.”

“Yes, you do that.”

Ernst walked to his den, collected several files on the Waltham Study, then found his wife in the pantry. He told her that he would pick up Rudy later that day. And for now? Yes, yes, it was Sunday morning but still he had to attend to some important matters. And, no, they couldn’t wait.

Whatever else they said about him, Hermann Göring was tireless.

Today, for instance, he’d arrived at his desk in the air ministry at 8 A.M. A Sunday, no less. And he’d had a stop to make on the way.

Sweating furiously, he had marched into the Chancellory a half hour before that, making his way to Hitler’s office. It was possible that Wolf was awake – still awake, that is. An insomniac, the man often stayed up past dawn. But, no, the Leader was in bed. The guard reported that he’d retired about five, with instructions not to be disturbed.

Göring had thought for a moment then jotted a note and left it with the guard.

My Leader,

I have learned of a matter of concern at the highest level. Betrayal might be involved. Significant future plans are at stake. I will relate this information in person as soon as it suits.

Göring

Good choice of words. “Betrayal” was always a trigger. The Jews, the Communists, the Social Democrats, the Republicans – the backstabbers, in short – had sold out the country to the Allies at the end of the War and still threatened to play Pilate to Hitler’s Jesus.

Oh, Wolf got hot when he heard that word.

“Future plans” was good, as well. Anything that threatened setbacks to Hitler’s vision of the Third Empire would get the man’s immediate attention.

Though the Chancellory was merely around the corner, it had been unpleasant to make the trip, a large man on a hot morning. But Göring’d had no choice. He couldn’t telephone or send a runner; Reinhard Ernst wasn’t a competent enough intriguer to have his own intelligence network to spy on colleagues but any number of others would be delighted to steal Göring’s revelation about Ludwig Keitel’s Jewish background and hand it to the Leader as if it were their own discovery. Goebbels, for instance, Göring’s chief rival for Wolf’s attention, would do so in a heartbeat.

Now, close to 9 A.M., the minister was turning his attention to a discouragingly large file about Aryanizing a large chemical company in the west and folding it into the Hermann Göring Works. His phone buzzed.

From the anteroom his aide answered. “Minister Göring’s office.”

The minister leaned forward and looked out. He could see the man standing to attention as he spoke. The aide hung up and walked to the doorway. “The Leader will see you in a half hour, sir.”

Göring nodded and walked to the table across his office. He sat and served himself food from the heaped-high tray. The aide poured coffee. The air minister flipped through the financial information on the chemical company but he had trouble concentrating; the image that kept emerging from the charts of numbers was of Reinhard Ernst being led from the Chancellory by two Gestapo officers, a look of bewilderment and defeat on the colonel’s otherwise irritatingly placid face.

A frivolous fantasy, to be sure, but it provided some pleasant diversion while he scarfed down a huge plate of sausage and eggs.

Chapter Twenty-One

In a spacious but dusty and unkempt Krausen Street apartment, which had been in existence from the days of Bismarck and Wilhelm, a half kilometer southeast of the government buildings, two young men sat at an ornate dining room table. For hours they’d been engaged in a debate. The discussion had been lengthy and fervent because the subject was nothing less than their survival.

As with so many matters nowadays the ultimate question they’d been wrestling with was that of trust.

Would the man deliver them to salvation, or would they be betrayed and pay for that gullibility with their lives?

Tink, tink, tink…

Kurt Fischer, the older of the two blond-haired brothers, said, “Stop making that noise.”

Hans had been tapping the knife on the plate that had held an apple core and some rinds from cheese, the remnants of their pathetic breakfast. He continued the tink for a moment more and then set the utensil down.

Five years separated the brothers but there were other gulfs far wider between them.

Hans said, “He could denounce us for money. He could denounce us because he’s drunk on National Socialism. He could denounce us because it’s Sunday and he simply takes a fancy to denounce someone.”

This was certainly true.

“And, as I keep saying, what’s the hurry? Why today? I would like to see Ilsa again. You remember her, don’t you? Oh, she is as beautiful as Marlene Dietrich.”

“You are making a joke, aren’t you?” Kurt replied, exasperated. “We’re concerned for our lives and you’re pining away for a big-titted girl you’ve known for less than a month.”

“We can leave tomorrow. Or why not after the Olympics? People will leave the Games early, toss away their day tickets. We can get in for the afternoon events.”

This was the crux of the matter, most likely: the Olympics. For a handsome youth like Hans, there would be many Ilsas in his life; she was not particularly pretty or bright (though she did seem particularly loose by National Socialist standards). But what troubled Hans the most about their escape from Germany was missing the Games.

Kurt sighed in frustration. His brother was nineteen, an age at which many men held responsible positions in the army or a trade. But his brother had always been impulsive and a dreamer, and a bit lazy, as well.

What to do? Kurt thought, taking up the debate with himself. He chewed on a piece of dry bread. They’d had no butter for a week. In fact, they had little of any food left. But Kurt hated to go outside. Ironically, he felt more vulnerable there – when in fact it was probably far more dangerous to be in the apartment, which was undoubtedly watched from time to time by the Gestapo or the SD.

Reflecting again: It all came down to trust. Should they or should they not?

“What was that?” Hans asked, lifting an eyebrow.

Kurt shook his head. He hadn’t realized he’d spoken out loud. The question had been addressed to the only two people in the world who would have answered honestly and with sound judgment. Their parents. But Albrecht and Lotte Fischer were not present. Social Democrats, pacifists, the couple had attended a worldwide peace conference in London two months ago. But just before they returned, they’d learned from a friend that their names were on a Gestapo list. The secret police were planning to arrest them at Tempelhof when they arrived. Albrecht made two attempts to slip into the country and get his sons out, once through France and once through the Czech Sudetenland. He was refused entry both times, nearly arrested the second.

Ensconced in London, taken in by like-minded professors and working part-time as translators and teachers, the distraught parents had managed to get several messages to the boys, urging them to leave. But their passports had been lifted and their identity cards stamped. Not only were they the children of pacifists and ardent Socis, but the Gestapo had files on the boys themselves, it seemed. They held their parents’ political beliefs, and the police had noted their attendance at the forbidden swing and jazz clubs, where American Negro music was played and girls smoked and the punch was spiked with Russian vodka. They had friends who were activists.

Hardly subversive. But it was merely a matter of time until they were arrested. Or they starved. Kurt had been dismissed from his job. Hans had completed his mandatory six-month Labor Service stint and was back home now. He’d been drummed out of university – the Gestapo had seen to that, as well – and, like his brother, he too was unemployed. Their future might very well see them becoming beggars on Alexander Plaza or Oranienburger Square.

And so the question of trust had arisen. Albrecht Fischer managed to contact a former colleague, Gerhard Unger, from the University of Berlin. A pacifist and Soci himself, Unger had quit his job teaching not long after the National Socialists had come to power and returned to his family confectionary company. He often traveled over borders and, being firmly anti-Hitler, was more than happy to help smuggle the boys out of Germany in one of his company’s trucks. Every Sunday morning Unger made a run to Holland to deliver his candy and pick up ingredients. It was felt that with all the visitors coming into the country for the Olympics the border guards would be preoccupied and pay no attention to a commercial truck leaving the country on a regular run.

But could they trust him with their lives?

There was no apparent reason not to. Unger and Albrecht had been friends. They were like-minded. He hated the National Socialists.

Yet nowadays there were so many excuses for betrayal.

He could denounce us because it’s Sunday…

And there was another reason behind Kurt Fischer’s hesitation to leave. The young man was a pacifist and Social Democrat mostly because of his parents and his friends; he’d never been very active politically. Life to him had been hiking and girls and traveling and skiing. But now that the National Socialists were in power, he was surprised to find within him a strong desire to fight them, to enlighten people about their intolerance and evil. Perhaps, he debated, he should stay and work to bring them down.

But they were so powerful, so insidious. And so deadly.

Kurt looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It had run down. He and Hans were always forgetting to wind it. This had been their father’s job and the image of the still timepiece made Kurt’s heart ache. He pulled his pocket watch out and checked the time. “We have to go now or call him and tell him we’re not doing it.”

Tink, tink, tink… The knife resumed its cymbal tapping on the plate.

Then long silence.

“I say we stay,” Hans said. But he looked at his brother expectantly; there’d always been rivalry between the two, yet the younger would abide by any decision the older made.

But will I decide correctly?

Survival…

Kurt Fischer finally said, “We’re going. Get your pack.”

Tink, tink…

Kurt shouldered his knapsack and glared defiantly at his brother. But Hans’s mood changed like spring weather. He suddenly laughed and gestured at their clothing. They were dressed in shorts, short-sleeved shirts and hiking boots. “Look at us: Paint us brown and we’d be Hitler Youth!”

Kurt couldn’t help but smile. “Let’s go, comrade,” he said sarcastically, the term the same one used by Stormtroopers and Youth to refer to their fellows.

Refusing a last look around the apartment, for fear he’d start to cry, Kurt Fischer opened the door and they stepped into the corridor.

Across the hallway was stocky, apple-cheeked Mrs. Lutz, a War widow, scrubbing her doormat. The woman usually kept to herself but would sometimes stop by certain residents’ apartments – only those who met her strict standards of neighborliness, whatever those might be – to deliver her miraculous foodstuffs. She considered the Fischers her friends and over the years had left presents of lung pudding, prune dumplings, head cheese, pickled cucumbers, garlic sausage and noodles with tripe. Just seeing her now, Kurt began to salivate.

“Ach, the Fischer brothers!”

“Good morning, Mrs. Lutz. You’re hard at work early.”

“It will be hot again, I’ve heard. Ach, for some rain.”

“Oh, we don’t want anything to interfere with the Olympics,” Hans said with a hint of irony. “We’re so looking forward to seeing them.”

She laughed. “Silly people running and jumping in their undergarments! Who needs them when my poor plants are dying of thirst? Look at my John-go-to-bed-at-noons outside the door. And the begonias! Now, tell me, where are your parents? Still on that trip of theirs?”

“In London, yes.” Their parents’ political difficulties were not common knowledge and the brothers were naturally reluctant to mention them to anyone.

“It’s been several months. They better get home soon or they won’t recognize you. Where are you off to now?”

“Hiking. In the Grünewald.”

“Oh, it’s lovely there. And much cooler than in the city.” She returned to her diligent scrubbing.

As they walked down the stairs Kurt glanced at his brother and noticed that Hans had quickly grown sullen again.

“What’s the matter?”

“You seem to think this city is the devil’s playground. But it’s not. There are millions of people like her.” He nodded back up the stairs. “Good people, kind people. And we’re leaving all of them behind. And to go to what? A place where we know no one, where we can hardly speak the language, where we have no jobs, a place we were at war with only twenty years ago? How well do you think we’ll be received?”

Kurt had no rebuttal for this. His brother was one hundred percent correct. And there were probably a dozen more arguments to be made against their leaving.

Outside, they looked up and down the hot street. None of the few people out at this hour paid any attention to them. “Let’s go,” Kurt said and strode down the sidewalk, reflecting that, in a way, he’d been honest with Mrs. Lutz. They were going on a wander – only not to any rustic hostel in the fragrant woods west of Berlin but toward an uncertain new life in a wholly alien land.

He jumped when his phone buzzed.

Hoping it was the medical examiner on the Dresden Alley case, he grabbed the receiver. “Kohl here.”

“Come see me, Willi.”

Click.

A moment later, his heart beating solidly, he was walking up the hall to Friedrich Horcher’s office.

What now? The chief of inspectors was at headquarters on a Sunday morning? Had Peter Krauss learned that Kohl had made up the story about Reinhard Heydrich and Göttburg (the man came from Halle) to save the witness, the baker Rosenbaum? Had someone overheard him make an improvident comment to Janssen? Had word come down from on high that the inspector inquiring about dead Jews in Gatow was to be reprimanded?

Kohl stepped into Horcher’s office. “Sir?”

“Come in, Willi.” He rose and closed the door, gestured Kohl to sit.

The inspector did so. He held the man’s eye, as he’d told his sons to do whenever they looked at another human being with whom difficulty might arise.

There was silence as Horcher resumed his seat and rocked back and forth in the sumptuous leather chair, playing absently with the brilliant red armband on his left biceps. He was one of the few senior Kripo officials who actually wore one in the Alex.

“The Dresden Alley case… keeping you busy, is it?”

“An interesting one, this.”

“I miss the days of investigating, Willi.”

“Yes, sir.”

Horcher meticulously ordered papers on his desk. “You will go to the Games?”

“I got my tickets a year ago.”

“Did you? Your children are looking forward to it?”

“Indeed. My wife too.”

“Ach, good, good.” Horcher had not heard a single word of Kohl’s. More silence for a moment. He stroked his waxed mustache, as he was accustomed to do when not playing with his crimson armband. Then: “Some-times, Willi, it’s necessary to do difficult things. Especially in our line of work, don’t you think?” Horcher avoided his eyes when he said this. Through his concern, Kohl thought: This is why the man will not advance very far in the Party; he’s actually troubled to deliver bad news.

“Yes, sir.”

“People within our esteemed organization have been aware of you for some time.”

Like Janssen, Horcher was incapable of being sardonic. “Esteemed” would be meant sincerely, though which organization he might be referring to was a mystery, given the incomprehensible hierarchy of the police. To his shock he learned the answer to this question when Horcher continued. “The SD has quite some file on you, wholly independent of the Gestapo’s.”

This chilled Kohl to his core. Everyone in government could count on a Gestapo file. It would be insulting not to have one. But the SD, the elite intelligence service for the SS? And its leader was none other than Reinhard Heydrich himself. So the story he’d spun to Krauss about Heydrich’s hometown had returned. And all to save a Jew baker he didn’t even know.

Breathing hard, palms staining his trousers with sweat, Willi Kohl numbly nodded, as the end of his career – and perhaps his life – began to unfold before him.

“Apparently there have been discussions about you at high levels.”

“Yes, sir.” He hoped his voice didn’t quaver. He locked his eyes onto Horcher’s, which tore themselves away after an electric few seconds and examined a Bakelite bust of Hitler on a table near the door.

“There is a matter that has come up. And unfortunately I can do nothing about it.”

Of course there would be no help from Friedrich Horcher, who was not only merely Kripo, the lowest rung of the Sipo, but was a coward as well.

“Yes, sir, what might this matter be?”

“It is desired… it actually is ordered that you represent us at the ICPC in London this February.”

Kohl nodded slowly, waiting for more. But, no, this seemed to be the entire volley of bad news.

The International Criminal Police Commission, founded in Vienna in the twenties, was a cooperative network of police forces throughout the world. They shared information about crime, criminals and law enforcement techniques via publications, telegram and radio. Germany was a member and Kohl had been delighted to learn that, though America was not, representatives from the FBI would be attending the conference, with an eye toward joining.

Horcher scanned his desktop, upon whose surface Hitler, Göring and Himmler also gazed down from their wooden frames on the wall.

Kohl took several breaths to steady himself. He said, “It would be an honor.”

“Honor?” Horcher scowled. Leaning forward, he said softly, “Generous of you.”

Kohl understood his superior’s scorn. Attendance at the conference would be a waste of time. Because the hue and cry of National Socialism was a self-reliant Germany, an alliance of international law enforcement organizations sharing information was the last thing Hitler wanted. There was a reason that “Gestapo” was an acronym for “ secret state police.”

Kohl was being sent as a figurehead, merely to keep up appearances. No one higher would dare go – for a National Socialist official to leave the country for two weeks meant he might not find his job awaiting him when he returned. But Kohl, since he was merely a worker bee, with no intent to rise in the Party ranks, could disappear for a fortnight and return with no loss – aside, of course, from the little matter that a dozen cases would be delayed, and rapists and killers might go free.

Which was not their concern, of course.

Horcher was relieved at the detective’s reaction. He asked with animation, “When was your last holiday, Willi?”

“Heidi and I go to Wannsee and the Black Forest frequently.”

“I mean abroad.”

“Ah, well… some years now. France. And one trip to Brighton in England.”

“You should take your wife with you to London.”

The suggestion alone was enough to expiate Horcher’s guilt; after a judicious moment he said to Kohl, “I’m told the ferry and train fares are quite reasonable at that time of year.” Another pause. “Though we will, of course, provide for your travel and accommodations.”

“Most generous.”

“Again, I’m sorry you must bear this cross, Willi. But you’ll eat and drink well. British beer is much better than what one hears. And you can see the Tower of London!”

“Yes, I would enjoy that.”

“What a treat, the Tower of London,” the chief of inspectors repeated enthusiastically. “Well, good day to you, Willi.”

“Good day, sir.”

Through the halls, eerie and gloomy, despite shafts of bright sunlight falling on the oak and marble, Kohl returned to his office, calming slowly from the scare.

He sat heavily in his chair and glanced at the box of evidence and his notes regarding the Dresden Alley incident.

Then his eyes slid to a folder sitting next to it. He lifted the telephone receiver and placed a call to the operator in Gatow and asked to be connected to a private residence.

“Yes?” a young man’s voice answered cautiously, unaccustomed perhaps to calls on Sunday morning.

“This is Gendarme Raul?” Kohl asked.

A pause. “Yes.”

“I am Inspector Willi Kohl.”

“Ah, yes, Inspector. Hail Hitler. You are telephoning me at home. On a Sunday.”

Kohl chuckled. “Indeed I am. Forgive the interruption. I’m calling regarding the crime scene report from the shootings in Gatow and the other, the Polish workers.”

“Forgive me, sir. I am inexperienced. The report, I’m sure, was shoddy compared to what you are used to. Certainly nothing of the quality you yourself could produce. I did the best I could.”

“You mean the report is completed?”

Another hesitation, longer than the first. “Yes, sir. And it was submitted to Gendarmerie Commander Meyerhoff.”

“I see. When was that?”

“Wednesday last, I believe. Yes. That is correct.”

“Has he reviewed it?”

“I noticed a copy on his desk Friday evening, sir. I had also asked that one be sent to you. I’m surprised you haven’t received it yet.”

“Well, I will follow this matter up with your superior… Tell me, Raul. Were you satisfied with your handling of the crime scene?”

“I believe I did a thorough job, sir.”

“Did you reach any conclusions?” Kohl asked.

“I…”

“Speculation is perfectly acceptable at this stage of an investigation.”

The young man said, “Robbery did not seem to be the motive?”

“You are asking me?”

“No, sir. I’m stating my conclusion. Well, speculation.”

“Good. Their belongings were on them?”

“Their money was missing. But jewelry and other effects were not taken. Some of them appeared quite valuable. Though…”

“Go on.”

“The items were on the victims when they were brought into our morgue. I’m sorry to say the effects have since disappeared.”

“That does not interest, or surprise, me. Did you find any suggestion that they had enemies? Any of them?”

“No, sir, at least not regarding the families in Gatow. Quiet, hardworking, apparently decent folk. Jews, yes, but they did not practice their religion. They were, of course, not involved in the Party but they were not dissidents. As for the Polish workers, they had come here from Warsaw only three days before their deaths to plant trees for the Olympics. They were not Communists or agitators that anyone knew.”

“Any other thoughts?”

“There were at least two or three killers involved. I noted the footprints, as you instructed me. Both incidents, the same.”

“The type of weapon used?”

“No idea, sir. The casings for the shells were gone when I arrived.”

“Gone?” An epidemic of conscientious murderers, it seemed. “Well, the lead slugs may tell us. Did you recover any in good shape?”

“I searched the ground carefully. But I couldn’t find any.”

“The coroner must have recovered some.”

“I asked him, sir, and he said none were found.”

“None?”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“My irritation is not directed at you, Gendarme Raul. You are a credit to your profession. And forgive me for disturbing you at home. You have children? I think I hear an infant in the background. Did I awaken him?”

“Her, sir. But when she is old enough I will tell her of the honor of being awakened from her dreams by such a famed investigator as yourself.”

“Good day.”

“Hail Hitler.”

Kohl dropped the phone in the cradle. He was confused. The facts in the murders suggested an SS, Gestapo or Stormtrooper killing. But had that been the case, Kohl and the gendarme would have been ordered at once to stop the investigation – the way Kripo detectives had been told instantly to cease looking into a recent black-market food case when the investigation found leads to Admiral Raeder of the navy and Walter von Brauchitsch, a senior army officer.

They weren’t being prevented from pursuing the case but they were encountering foot-dragging. What to make of the ambiguity?

It was almost as if the killings, whatever the motive, had been dangled before Kohl as a test of his loyalty. Had Commander Meyerhoff called the Kripo at the behest of the SD to see if the inspector would refuse to handle cases involving Jew and Pole killings? Could this be the case?

But, no, no, that was too paranoid. He was thinking of this only because he’d learned of the SD file on him.

Kohl could come up with no answers to these questions and so he rose and wandered through the silent halls once more to the Teletype room to learn if another miracle had occurred and his counterparts in America had seen fit to respond to his urgent inquiries.

The battered van, hot as an oven inside, pulled up on Wilhelm Square and parked in an alley.

“How do I address people?” Paul asked.

“‘Sir,’” Webber said. “Always ‘sir.’”

“There won’t be any women?”

“Ach, good question, Mr. John Dillinger. Yes, there may be a few. But they will not be in official positions, of course. They’ll be your peers. Secretaries, cleaners, file clerks, typists. They will be single – no married women may work – so you will say ‘Miss.’ And you may flirt a little if you like. That would be appropriate from a workman but they will also understand if you ignore them, wishing only to get your job done as efficiently as possible and get back home to your Sunday meal.”

“Do I knock on doors or just enter?”

“Always knock,” Morgan offered. Webber nodded.

“And I say ‘Hail Hitler’?”

Webber scoffed. “As often as you like. One has never gone to prison for saying that.”

“And that salute you do. The arm in the air?”

“Not necessary,” Morgan said. “Not from a workman.” He reminded, “And remember your G ’s. Soften them. Speak as a Berliner. Lull suspicions before they arise.”

In the back of the sweltering van Paul stripped off his clothes and pulled on the coveralls Webber had provided. “Good fit,” the German said. “I can sell them to you if you wish to keep them.”

“Otto,” Paul said, sighing. He examined the battered identity card, which contained a picture of a man resembling himself. “Who’s this?”

“There is a warehouse, not much used, where the Weimar stored files of soldiers who fought in the War. There are millions of them, of course. I use them from time to time for forging passes and other documents. I locate a picture that resembles the person buying the documents. The photographs are older and worn but so are our identity cards because we must keep them with us at all times.” He looked at the picture then up at Paul. “This is a man who was killed at Argonne-Meuse. His file notes that he won several medals before he died. They were considering an Iron Cross. You look good for a dead man.”

Webber then handed him the two work permits that would allow him access to the Chancellory. Paul had left his own passport and the fake Rus sian one at the boardinghouse, had bought a pack of German cigarettes and carried the cheap, unmarked matches from the Aryan Café; Webber had assured him he’d be searched carefully at the front of the building. “Here.” Webber handed him a notebook and pencil and a battered meter stick. He also gave him a short steel rule, which he could use as a jimmy on the lock in Ernst’s office door if need be.

Paul looked these items over. He asked Webber, “They’re really going to fall for this?”

“Ach, Mr. John Dillinger, if you want certainty, aren’t you in the wrong line of work?” He took out one of his cabbage cigars.

“You’re not going to smoke that here?” Morgan asked.

“Where would you have me smoke it? On the door stoop of the Leader’s abode, striking the match on an SS guard’s ass?” He lit the stogie, nodded at Paul. “We will be waiting here for you.”

Hermann Göring strode through the Chancellory building as if he owned it.

Which, he believed, he one day would.

The minister loved Adolf Hitler the way Peter loved Christ.

But Jesus eventually got nailed to a T of wood and Peter took over the operation.

That is what would happen in Germany, Göring knew. Hitler was an unearthly creation, unique in the history of the world. Mesmerizing, brilliant beyond words. And because of that he would not survive to see old age. The world cannot accept visionaries and messiahs. Wolf would be dead within five years and Göring would weep and beat his breast, pierced by pitched, genuine sorrow. He would officiate during the lengthy mourning. And then he would lead the country to its position as the greatest nation in the world. Hitler said that this would be a thousand-year empire. But Hermann Göring would steer his regime on the course to forever.

But, for now, smaller goals: tactical measures to make certain that it was he who stepped into the role of Leader.

After he’d finished his eggs and sausage, the minister had changed clothes again (he normally went through four or five outfits a day). He was now in a flamboyant green military uniform, encrusted with braids, ribbons and decorations, some earned, many bought. He had dressed for the part because he felt like he was on a mission. And his goal? To tack Reinhard Ernst’s head to the wall (Göring was, after all, hunting master of the empire).

The file exposing Keitel’s Jewish heritage tucked under his arm like a riding crop, he strode down the dim corridors. Turning a corner, he winced in pain from his wound – the bullet he’d taken in the groin during the November ’23 Beer Hall Putsch. He’d swallowed his pills only an hour before – he was never without them – but already the numbness was wearing off. Ach, the pharmacist must have gotten the strength wrong. He would berate the man about this later. He nodded to the SS guards and stepped into the Leader’s outer office, smiling to the secretary.

“He asked that you go in at once, Mr. Minister.”

Göring strode across the carpet and then entered the Leader’s office. Hitler was leaning against the edge of his desk, as he often did. Wolf was never comfortable sitting still. He would pace, he would perch, he’d rock back and forth, gazing out windows. He now sipped his chocolate, set the cup and saucer on the desktop, and nodded gravely to someone sitting in a high-backed armchair. Then he looked up. “Ah, Mr. Air Minister, come in, come in.”

Hitler held up the note Göring had penned earlier. “I must hear more about this. It’s interesting that you mention a conspiracy… Our comrade here, it seems, has brought similar news of such a matter too.”

Halfway through the large office, Göring blinked and stopped abruptly, seeing the other visitor to the Leader’s office rise from the armchair. It was Reinhard Ernst. He nodded and offered a smile. “Good morning, Mr. Minister.”

Göring ignored him and asked Hitler, “A conspiracy?”

“Indeed,” Hitler said. “We have been discussing the colonel’s project, the Waltham Study. It seems some enemies have falsified information about his associate, Doctor-professor Ludwig Keitel. Can you imagine? They’ve gone so far as to suggest that the professor has Jewish blood in him. Please, sit, Hermann, and tell me about this conspiracy you’ve uncovered.”

Reinhard Ernst believed that for as long as he lived he would never forget the look on Hermann Göring’s puffy face at that moment.

In the ruddy, grinning moon of flesh, the eyes registered utter shock. A bully cut down.

Ernst took no particular pleasure in the coup, however, because once the shock bled out, the visage turned to one of pure hatred.

The Leader didn’t seem to notice the silent exchange between the men. He tapped several documents on the desk. “I asked Colonel Ernst for information about his study on our military he is currently conducting, which he will deliver tomorrow…” A sharp look at Ernst, who nodded and assured him, “Indeed, my Leader.”

“And in preparing it he learned that someone has altered records of the relatives of Doctor-professor Keitel and others working with the government. Men at Krupp, Farben, Siemens.”

“And,” Ernst muttered, “I was shocked to find that the matter goes beyond that. They have even altered records of the relatives and ancestors of many prominent officials in the Party itself. Planting information in and around Hamburg, mostly. I saw fit to destroy much of what I came across.” Ernst looked Göring up and down. “Some lies referred to people quite high up. Suggestions of liaisons with Jewish tinkers, bastard children and the like.”

Göring frowned. “Terrible.” His teeth were close together – furious not only at the defeat but at Ernst’s hint that Jewish ancestry might have figured in the air minister’s past, as well. “Who would do such a thing?” He began fidgeting with the folder he held.

“Who?” Hitler muttered. “Communists, Jews, Social Democrats. I myself have been troubled lately by the Catholics. We must never forget they oppose us. It’s easy to be lulled, considering our common hatred for the Jews. But who knows? We have many enemies.”

“Indeed we do.” Göring again cast a look at Ernst, who asked if he could pour the minister some coffee or chocolate.

“No, thank you, Reinhard,” was the chilly reply.

As a soldier Ernst had learned early that of all the weapons in the arsenal of the military the single most effective was accurate intelligence. He insisted on knowing exactly what his enemy was up to. He’d made a mistake in thinking that the phone kiosk some blocks away from the Chancellory was not monitored by Göring’s spies. Through that carelessness, the air minister had learned the name of the coauthor of the Waltham Study. But fortunately Ernst – while appearing to be naive in the art of intrigue – nonetheless had good people placed where they were quite useful. The man who regularly provided information to Ernst about goings-on at the air ministry had last night reported, just after he’d cleaned up a broken spaghetti plate and fetched the minister a clean shirt, that Göring had unearthed information about Keitel’s grandmother.

Disgusted to have to be playing such a game, yet aware of the deadly risk the situation posed, Ernst had immediately gone to see Keitel. The doctor-professor had supposed that the woman’s Jewish connection was true but he’d had nothing to do with that side of the family for years. Ernst and Keitel had themselves spent hours last night creating forgeries of documents suggesting that businessmen and government officials who were pure-blooded Aryan had Jewish roots.

The only difficult part of Ernst’s strategy was to make certain that he got to Hitler before Göring did. But one of the techniques of warfare that Ernst was committed to in strategic military planning was what he called the “lightning strike.” By this he meant moving so quickly that your enemy had no time to prepare a defense, even if he was more powerful than you. The colonel blustered his way into the Leader’s office early this morning and laid out his conspiracy, proffering the forgeries.

“We will get to the bottom of it,” Hitler now said and stepped away from the desk to pour himself more hot cocoa and take several zwiebacks from a plate. “Now, Hermann, what about your note? What have you uncovered?”

With a smiling nod toward Ernst, the huge man refused to acknowledge defeat. Instead he shook his head, with a massive frown, and said, “I’ve heard of unrest at Oranienburg. Particular disrespect for the guards there. I’m worried about the possibility of rebellions. I would recommend reprisals. Harsh reprisals.”

This was absurd. Being extensively rebuilt with slave labor and renamed Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp was perfectly secure; there was no chance for rebellion whatsoever. The prisoners were like penned, declawed animals. Göring’s comments were told for one purpose only: out of vindictiveness, to lay a series of deaths of innocent people at Ernst’s feet.

As Hitler considered this, Ernst said casually, “I know little about the camp, my Leader, and the air minister has a good point. We must make absolutely certain there is no dissent.”

“But… I sense some hesitation, Colonel,” Hitler said.

Ernst shrugged. “Only that I wonder if such reprisals would be better inflicted after the Olympics. The camp is not far from the Olympic Village, after all. Particularly with the foreign reporters in town, it could be quite awkward if stories leaked out. I would think it best to keep the camp as secret as possible until later.”

This idea didn’t please Hitler, Ernst could see at once. But before Göring could protest, the Leader said, “I agree it’s probably best. We’ll deal with the matter in a month or two.”

When he and Göring would have forgotten about the matter, Ernst hoped.

“Now, Hermann, the colonel has more good news. The British have completely accepted our warship and undersea boat quotas under last year’s treaty. Reinhard’s plan has worked.”

“How fortunate,” Göring muttered.

“Air Minister, is that file for my attention?” The Leader’s eyes, which missed little, glanced at the documents under the man’s arm.

“No, sir. It’s nothing.”

The Leader poured himself yet more chocolate and walked to the scale model of the Olympic stadium. “Come, gentlemen, and look at the new additions. They’re quite nice, don’t you think? Elegant, I would say. I love the modern styling. Mussolini thinks he invented it. But he is a thief, of course, as we all know.”

“Indeed, my Leader,” Göring said.

Ernst too murmured his approval. Hitler’s dancing eyes reminded him of Rudy’s when the boy had shown his Opa an elaborate sand castle he’d built at the beach last year.

“I’m told the heat might be breaking today. Let us hope that will be the case, for our picture-taking session. Colonel, you will wear your uniform?”

“I think not, my Leader. I am, after all, merely a civil servant now. I wouldn’t want to appear ostentatious in the company of my distinguished colleagues.” Ernst kept his eyes on the mock-up of the stadium and, with some effort, avoided a glance at Göring’s elaborate uniform.

The office of the plenipotentiary for domestic stability – the sign painted in stark Gothic German characters – was on the third floor of the Chancellory. The renovations on this level seemed largely completed, though the smell of paint and plaster and varnish was heavy in the air.

Paul had entered the building without difficulty, though he’d been carefully searched by two black-uniformed guards armed with bayonet-mounted rifles. Webber’s paperwork passed muster, though he was stopped and searched again on the third floor.

He waited until a patrol had walked down the hallway and knocked respectfully on the rippled-glass window in the door to Ernst’s office.

No answer.

He tried the knob and found it unlocked. He walked through the dark anteroom and toward the door that led to Ernst’s private office. He stopped suddenly, alarmed that the man might be here, since the light under the door was so bright. But he knocked again and heard nothing. He opened the door and found that the brilliance was sunlight; the office faced east and the morning light streamed viciously into the room. Debating about the door, he decided to leave it open; closing it was probably against regulations and would be suspicious, if guards made rounds.

His first impression was how cluttered the office was: papers, booklets, account sheets, bound reports, maps, letters. They covered Ernst’s desk and a large table in the corner. Many books sat on the shelves, most dealing with military history, apparently arranged chronologically, starting with Caesar’s Gallic Wars. After what Käthe had told him about German censorship, he was surprised to find books by and about Americans and Englishmen: Pershing, Teddy Roosevelt, Lord Cornwallis, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Lord Nelson.

There was a fireplace, empty this morning, of course, and scrubbed clean. On the black-and-white marble mantel were plaques of war decorations, a bayonet, battle flags, pictures of a younger, uniformed Ernst with a stout man sporting a fierce mustache and wearing a spiked helmet.

Paul opened his notebook, in which he’d sketched a dozen room plans, then paced off the perimeter of the office, drew it and added dimensions. He didn’t bother with the measuring stick; he needed credibility, not accuracy. Walking to the desk, Paul looked over it. He saw several framed pictures. These showed the colonel with his family. Others were of a handsome brunette woman, probably his wife, and a threesome: a young man in uniform with, apparently, his own young wife and infant. Then there were two of the same young woman and the child, taken several years apart and more recently.

Paul looked away from the pictures and quickly read over dozens of papers on the desk. He was about to reach for one of the piles of documents and dig through it, but he paused, aware of a sound – or perhaps an absence of sound. Just a softening of the loose noises floating about him. Instantly Paul dropped to his knees and set the measuring stick on the floor, then began walking it from one side of the room to the other. He looked up as a man slowly entered, glancing at him with curiosity.

The photographs on the mantel and the ones that Morgan’s contact, Max, had shown him had been several years old but there was no doubt that the man standing in front of him was Reinhard Ernst.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Hail Hitler,” Paul said. “Forgive me if I am disturbing you, sir.”

“Hail,” the man replied lethargically. “You are?”

“I am Fleischman. I am measuring for carpets.”

“Ah, carpets.”

Another figure glanced into the room, a large, black-uniformed guard. He asked to see Paul’s papers, read them carefully and then returned to the ante-office, pulling up a chair just outside the door.

Ernst asked Paul, “And how big a room do I have here?”

“Eight by nine and a half meters.” Paul’s heart was pounding; he’d nearly said “yards.”

“I would have thought it bigger.”

“Oh, it is bigger, sir. I was referring to the size of the rug. Generally with fine floors like this our customers want a border of wood visible.”

Ernst glanced at the floor as if he’d never seen the oak. He took his jacket off and hung it on a suit form beside his desk. He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and rubbed them. Then he sat forward, pulled on some wire-rimmed glasses and read some documents.

“You are working on Sunday, sir?” Paul asked.

“As you,” Ernst replied with a laugh, not looking up.

“The Leader is eager to finish the renovations to the building.”

“Yes, that is certainly true.”

As he bent to measure a small alcove Paul glanced sideways at Ernst, noting the scarred hand, the creases around the mouth, the red eyes, the demeanor of someone with a thousand thoughts percolating in his mind, someone carrying a thousand burdens.

A faint squeal as Ernst swiveled in his chair to face the window, removing his glasses. He seemed to soak up the glare and heat of the sun hungrily, with pleasure, but with a hint of regret, as well, as if he were a man of the outdoors not happy that his duty kept him desk-bound.

“How long have you done this work, Fleischman?” he asked without turning.

Paul stood, clutching the notebook at his side. “All my life, sir. Since the War.”

Ernst continued to bask in the sun, leaning back slightly, eyes closed. Paul walked quietly to the mantel. The bayonet was a long one. It was dark and had not been sharpened recently but it was still quite capable of death.

“And you enjoy it?” Ernst asked.

“It suits me.”

He could snatch the grisly weapon up and step to Ernst’s back in one second, kill him quickly. He’d killed with a blade before. Using a knife is not like fencing in a Douglas Fairbanks movie. The blade is merely a deadly extension of the fist. A good boxer is a good knife man.

Touching the ice…

But what about the guard outside the door? That man would have to die too. Yet Paul never killed his touch-off’s bodyguards, never even put himself in a situation where he might have to. He might kill Ernst with the blade, then knock the guard out. But with all the other soldiers around, somebody might hear the ruckus and they’d arrest him. Besides, his orders were to make sure the death was public.

“It suits you,” Ernst repeated. “A simple life, with no conflicts and no difficult choices.”

The phone buzzed. Ernst lifted it. “Yes?… Yes, Ludwig, the meeting went to our advantage… Yes, yes… Now, have you found some volunteers? Ach, good… But perhaps another two or three… Yes, I’ll meet you there. Good afternoon.”

Hanging up the phone, Ernst glanced at Paul then toward the mantel. “Some of my mementos. I’ve known soldiers all my life, and we all seem to be pack rats of memorabilia like this. I have many more items at home. Isn’t it odd how we keep souvenirs of such horrendous events? It sometimes seems mad to me.” He looked at the clock on his desk. “Are you finished, Fleischman?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“I have some work to do now in private.”

“Thank you for allowing the intrusion, sir. Hail Hitler.”

“Fleischman?”

Paul turned at the doorway.

“You are a lucky man to have your duty coincide with your circumstance and your nature. How rare that is.”

“I suppose it is, sir. Good day to you.”

“Yes, hail.”

Outside, into the hallway.

With Ernst’s face and his voice burned into Paul’s mind, he walked down the stairs, eyes forward, moving slowly, passing invisibly among the men here, in black or gray uniforms or suits or the coveralls of laborers. And everywhere the stern, two-dimensional eyes staring down at him from the paintings on the walls: the trinity whose names were etched into brass plates, A. Hitler, H. Göring and P. J. Goebbels.

On the ground floor he turned toward the glaring front doorway that opened onto Wilhelm Street, footsteps echoing loudly. Webber had provided used boots, a good addition to the costume, except that a hobnail had worn through the leather and tapped loudly with every step, no matter how Paul twisted his foot.

He was fifty feet from the doorway, which was an explosion of sunlight surrounded by a halo.

Forty feet.

Tap, tap, tap.

Twenty feet.

He could see outside now, cars streaming past on the street.

Tenfeet…

Tap… tap…

“You! You will stop.”

Paul froze. He turned to see a middle-aged man in a gray uniform striding quickly to him.

“You came down those stairs. Where were you?”

“I was only-”

“Let me see your documents.”

“I was measuring for carpets, sir,” Paul said, digging Webber’s papers out of his pocket.

The SS man looked them over quickly, compared the photo and read the work order. He took the meter stick from Paul’s hand, as if it were a weapon.

He returned the work order then looked up. “Where is your special permit?”

“Special permit? I wasn’t told I needed one.”

“For access upstairs, you must have one.”

“My superior never told me.”

“That’s not our concern. Everyone with access to floors above the ground needs a special permit. Your party membership card?”

“I… I don’t have it with me.”

“You are not a member of the Party?”

“Of course, sir. I am a loyal National Socialist, believe me.”

“You’re not a loyal National Socialist if you don’t carry your card.” The officer searched him, flipped through the notebook, glanced at the sketches of the rooms and the dimensions. He was shaking his head.

Paul said, “I am to return later in the week, sir. I can bring you a special permit and Party card then.” He added, “And at that time I can measure your office as well.”

“My office is on the ground floor, in the back – the area not scheduled for renovation,” the SS officer said sourly.

“All the more reason to have a fine Persian carpet. Of which we happen to have several more than have been allotted. And nothing to do but let them rot in a warehouse.”

The man considered this. Then he glanced at his wristwatch. “I don’t have time to pursue this matter. I am Security Underleader Schechter. You will find my office down the stairs and to the right. The name is on the door. On with you now. But when you come back, have the special permit or it will be Prince Albrecht Street for you.”

As the three men sped away from Wilhelm Square, a siren sounded nearby. Paul and Reggie Morgan looked uneasily out the windows of the van, which stank of burned cabbage and sweat.

Webber laughed. “It’s an ambulance. Relax.” A moment later the medical vehicle turned the corner. “I know the sounds of all the official vehicles. It’s helpful knowledge in Berlin nowadays.”

After a few moments Paul said quietly, “I met him.”

“Met whom?” Morgan asked.

“Ernst.”

Morgan’s eyes widened. “He was there?”

“He came into the office just after I got there.”

“Ach, what do we do?” Webber said. “We can’t get back inside the Chancellory. How will we find out where he’ll be?”

“Oh, I found that out,” Paul said.

“You did?” Morgan asked.

“I had time to look over his desk before he arrived. He’ll be at the stadium today.”

“Which stadium?” Morgan asked. “There are dozens in the city.”

“The Olympic stadium. I saw a memorandum. Hitler’s having photographs of senior Party officials taken there this afternoon.” He glanced at a nearby clock tower. “But we have only a few hours to get me into place. I think we’ll need your help once again, Otto.”

“Ach, I can get you anywhere you wish, Mr. John Dillinger. I work the miracles… and you pay for them. That is why we are such good partners, of course. And speaking of which, my American cash, if you please.” And he let the transmission of the van scream in second gear as he held out his right hand, palm up, until Morgan dropped the envelope into it.

After a moment Paul was aware that Morgan had been looking him over. The man asked, “What was Ernst like? Did he seem like the most dangerous man in Europe?”

“He was polite, he was preoccupied, he was weary. And sad.”

“Sad?” Webber asked.

Paul nodded, recalling the man’s fast yet burdened eyes, the eyes of someone waiting for arduous trials to be over with.

The sun finally sets…

Morgan glanced at the shops and buildings and flags on the wide avenue of Under the Lindens. He asked, “Is that a problem?”

“Problem?”

“Will meeting him make you hesitate to… to do what you’ve come here for? Will it make a difference?”

Paul Schumann wished to God that he could say it would. That seeing someone up close, that talking to him, would melt the ice, would make him hesitate to take that man’s life. But he answered truthfully. “No. It will make no difference.”

They sweated from the heat, and Kurt Fischer, at least, sweated from fear.

The brothers were now two blocks from the square where they would meet Unger, the man who was to spirit them away from this foundering country and reunite them with their parents.

The man they were trusting with their lives.

Hans stooped down, picked up a stone and skipped it across the waters of the Landwehr Canal.

“Don’t!” Kurt whispered harshly. “Don’t draw attention to us.”

“You should relax, brother. Skipping stones doesn’t draw attention. Everybody does it. God, it’s hot. Can we stop for a ginger beer?”

“Ach, you think we are on holiday, don’t you?” Kurt glanced around. There were not many people out. The hour was early, the heat already fierce.

“See anyone following us?” his brother asked with some irony.

“Do you want to stay in Berlin? All things considered?”

“All I know is that if we give up our house, we’ll never see it again.”

“If we don’t give it up, we’ll never see Mother and Father again. Probably we’ll never see anyone again.”

Hans scowled and picked up another stone. He got three skips this time. “Look! Did you see that?”

“Hurry up.”

They turned into a market street, where vendors’ booths were being set up. There were a number of trucks parked on the streets and sidewalks. The vehicles were filled with turnips, beets, apples, potatoes, canal trout, carp, cod oil. None of the most-in-demand items, of course, like meat, olive oil, butter and sugar. Even so, people were already queuing up to find the best – or rather the least unappetizing – purchases.

“Look, there he is,” Kurt said, crossing the street and making for an old truck parked off the side of the square. A man with curly brown hair leaned against it, smoking as he looked through a newspaper. He glanced up, saw the boys and nodded subtly. He tossed the paper inside the cab of the truck.

It all comes down to trust…

And sometimes you’re not disappointed. Kurt had had doubts that he would even show up.

“Mr. Unger!” Kurt said as they joined him. They shook hands warmly. “This is my brother, Hans.”

“Ach, he looks just like his father.”

“You sell chocolates?” the boy asked, looking at the truck.

“I manufacture and sell candy. I was a professor but that is not a lucrative job any longer. Learning is sporadic but eating sweets is a constant, not to mention politically safe. We can talk later. Now we should get out of Berlin. You can ride in the cab with me until we get near the border. Then you will climb into a space in the back. I use ice to keep the chocolate from melting on days like this, and you will lie under boards covered with ice. Don’t worry, you won’t freeze to death. I’ve cut holes in the side of the truck to let in some warm air. We’ll cross the border, as I do every week. I know the guards. I give them chocolate. They never search me.”

Unger walked to the back of the truck and closed the gate.

Hans climbed into the cab, picked up the newspaper and started reading. Kurt turned, wiped his brow and looked out one last time over the city in which he’d spent his entire life. In the heat and the haze, it seemed Italian, reminding him of a trip he’d taken to Bologna with his parents when his father was lecturing for a fortnight at the old university there.

The young man was turning back to climb into the truck next to his brother when there was a collective gasp from the crowd.

Kurt froze, eyes wide.

Three black cars skidded to a stop around Unger’s truck. Six men jumped out, in black SS uniforms.

No!

“Hans, run!” Kurt shouted.

But two of the SS troops raced to the passenger side of the vehicle. They ripped the door open and dragged his younger brother onto the street. He fought back until one struck him in the gut with a truncheon. Hans yelped and stopped struggling, rolling on the ground, clutching his belly. The soldiers pulled him to his feet. “No, no, no!” Unger cried. Both he and Kurt were shoved against the side of the truck.

“Papers! Empty your pockets.”

The three captives did as they were told.

“The Fischers,” said the SS commander, looking over their identity cards and nodding in recognition.

Tears running down his cheeks, Unger said to Kurt, “I didn’t betray you. I swear I didn’t!”

“No, he didn’t,” said the SS officer, who unholstered his Luger, worked the toggle to cock it and shot the man in the head. Unger dropped to the pavement. Kurt gasped in horror. “ She did,” the SS man added, nodding toward a large, middle-aged woman leaning out of the SS car’s window.

Her voice, filled with fury, raged at the boys: “Betrayers! Swine!”

It was Mrs. Lutz, the war widow who lived on their floor in the apartment building, the woman who had just wished them a good day!

Shocked, staring at Unger’s limp body, from which blood flowed copiously, Kurt heard her breathless scream, “You ungrateful pigs. I’ve been watching you, I know what you’ve done, I know who’s been to your apartment. I write down what I’ve seen. You’ve betrayed our Leader!”

The SS commander grimaced with irritation at the woman. He nodded toward a younger officer and he pushed her back into the car.

“You have been on our list, both of you, for some time.”

“We’ve done nothing!” Staring at Unger’s blood, unable to look away from the growing crimson pool, Kurt whispered, “Nothing. I swear. We were just trying to be with our parents.”

“Illegally escaping the country, pacifism, anti-Party activities… all capital offenses.” He pulled Hans closer, aimed the pistol at his head. The boy whimpered. “Please, no. Please!…”

Kurt stepped forward fast. A guard slugged him in the belly and he doubled over. He saw the commander touch the gun to the back of his brother’s head.

“No!”

The commander squinted and leaned back to avoid the spray of blood and flesh.

“Please, sir!”

But then another officer whispered, “We have those orders, sir. During the Olympics, restraint.” He nodded toward the market, where a crowd had gathered, watching. “Foreigners might be present, perhaps reporters.”

Hesitating for a long moment, the commander muttered impatiently, “All right. Take them to Columbia House.”

Although it was being phased out in favor of the more ruthlessly efficient, and less visible, Oranienburg camp, Columbia House was still the most notorious jail in Berlin.

The man nodded at Unger’s corpse. “And dump that somewhere. Find out if he’s married and if so send his wife his bloody shirt.”

“Yes, my leader. With what message?”

“The shirt will be the message.” The commander put his gun away and strode back to his car. He glanced briefly at the Fischer brothers but his eyes didn’t really see them; it was as if they were already dead.

“Where are you, Paul Schumann?”

Like his question yesterday to the then anonymous suspect – Who are you? – Willi Kohl posed this query aloud and in frustration, with no immediate hope of an answer. The inspector had thought that knowing the man’s name would speed the resolution of the case. But this was not so.

Kohl had received no reply to his telegrams to the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the International Olympic Committee. He’d gotten a brief response from the New York City Police Department but it said only that they would look into the matter when “practicable.”

This was not a word that Kohl was familiar with but when he looked it up in the department’s English-German dictionary an angry scowl filled his face. Over the past year he’d sensed a reluctance by American law enforcers to cooperate with the Kripo. Some of this was due to anti-National Socialist sentiment in the United States. Some too, he believed, might have roots in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping; Bruno Hauptmann had escaped from police custody in Germany and fled to America, where he’d murdered the child.

Kohl had sent a second, brief telegram in his halting English, thanking the NYPD and reminding them of the urgency of the matter. He’d alerted the border guards to detain Schumann if he tried to leave but word would get only to the major crossings.

Nor had Janssen’s second trip to the Olympic Village proved fruitful. Paul Schumann had not been officially connected to the American team. He had come to Berlin as a writer with no known affiliation. He’d left the Olympic Village the day before and no one had seen him since, nor did anyone know where he might have gone. Schumann’s name wasn’t on the list of those who had bought Largo ammunition or Modelo A’s recently but this was no surprise since he’d only arrived with the team on Friday

Rocking back in his chair, looking through the box of evidence, reading his penciled notes… Kohl looked up to see that Janssen had paused in the doorway, chatting with several other young plainclothed assistant inspectors and inspector candidates.

Kohl frowned at the noisy coffee klatch.

The younger officers paid their respects.

“Hail Hitler.”

“Hail, Inspector Kohl.”

“Yes, yes.”

“We are on our way to the lecture. Are you coming?”

“No,” Kohl muttered. “I’m working.” Since the Party’s ascension in ‘33, one-hour talks on National Socialism were held weekly in the main assembly hall of the Alex. Attendance by all Kripo officers was mandatory. Lukewarm Willi Kohl rarely went. The last one he’d attended was two years ago and had been entitled “Hitler, Pan-Germanism and the Roots of Fundamental Social Change.” He’d fallen asleep.

“SD Leader Heydrich himself may show up.”

“We’re not sure,” another added enthusiastically. “But he might. Can you imagine? We could shake his hand!”

“As I said, I’m working.” Kohl looked past their youthful, enthusiastic faces. “What do you have, Janssen?”

“Good day, Inspector,” one young officer said exuberantly. They went off, loudly, down the hall.

Kohl fixed his frown on Janssen, who winced. “Sorry, sir. They attach themselves to me because I’m attached to…”

“Me?”

“Well, yes, sir.”

Kohl nodded in the direction they’d gone. “They’re members?”

“Of the Party? Several are, yes.”

Before Hitler came to power it was illegal for a police officer to be a member of any political party. Kohl said, “Don’t be tempted to join, Janssen. You think it will help your career but it won’t. It will only get you stuck further in the spiderweb.”

“Moral quicksand,” Janssen quoted back his boss.

“Indeed.”

“Anyway, how could I possibly join?” he asked gravely then offered one of his rare smiles. “Working with you leaves me no time for the rallies.”

Kohl smiled back then asked, “Now what do you have?”

“The postmortem from Dresden Alley.”

“It’s about time.” Twenty-four hours to perform an autopsy. Inexcusable.

The inspector candidate handed his boss the thin folder, which contained only two pages.

“What’s this? Did the coroner do the autopsy in his sleep?”

“I-”

“Never mind,” Kohl muttered and read through the document. It first stated the obvious, of course, as autopsies always did, in the dense language of physiology and morphology: that the cause of death was severe trauma to the brain due to the passage of a bullet. No sexual diseases, a bit of gout, a bit of arthritis, no war wounds. He and Kohl had in common bunions, and the calluses on the victim’s feet suggested that he was indeed an ardent walker.

Janssen looked over Kohl’s shoulder. “Look, sir, he had a broken finger that set badly.”

“That does not interest us, Janssen. It’s the little finger, which is prone to breaking under many circumstances, as opposed to an injury that is unique and might help us understand the man better. A recent break might be helpful – we could call upon physicians in northwest Berlin for leads to patients – but this fracture is old.” He turned back to the report.

The alcohol in his blood suggested that he’d had some liquor not long before he’d died. The stomach contents revealed chicken, garlic, herbs, onion, carrots, potatoes, a reddish-colored sauce of some sort and coffee, all digested to the point that suggested the meal had been enjoyed about a half hour before death.

“Ah,” Kohl brightened, jotting all these facts down in pencil in his battered little notebook.

“What, sir?”

“Here is something that does interest us, Janssen. While we can’t be positive, it appears that the victim ate a very sublime dish for his last meal. It is probably coq au vin, a French delicacy that marries chicken with the unlikely partner of red wine. Usually a Burgundy such as Chambertin. We don’t see it here often, Janssen. You know why? Because we Germans make pissbad red wines, and the Austrians, who make brilliant reds, don’t send us very much. Oh, yes, this is good.” He thought for a moment then rose and walked to a map of Berlin on his wall. He found a pushpin and stuck it into Dresden Alley. “He died here at noon and he had lunch at a restaurant about thirty minutes before that. You recall he was a good walker, Janssen: his leg muscles, which put mine to shame, and the calluses on his feet. So, while he might have taken a taxi or tram to his fatal encounter, we will assume that he walked. Allowing him a few minutes after the meal for a cigarette… you recall his yellow-stained fingertips?”

“Not exactly, sir.”

“Be more observant, then. Allowing him time for a cigarette and to pay the check and savor his coffee, we will assume that he walked on his sturdy legs for twenty minutes before he came to Dresden Alley. How far could a brisk walker go in that time?”

“I would guess a kilometer and a half.”

Kohl frowned. “I too would guess that.” He examined the legend of the Berlin map and drew a circle around the site of the killing.

Janssen shook his head. “Look at that. It’s huge. We need to take the photograph of the victim to every restaurant in that circle?”

“No, only to those serving coq au vin, and of those only the ones that do so at lunchtime on Saturday. A fast look at the hours of service and the menu in front will tell us if we need to inquire further. But it will still be a huge task and one that must be undertaken immediately.”

The young officer stared at the map. “Is it up to you and me, sir? Can we visit all of them ourselves? How can we?” He shook his head, discouraged.

“Of course we can’t.”

“Then?”

Willi Kohl sat back, his eyes floating around the room. They settled momentarily on his desktop. Then he said, “You wait here for any telegrams or other messages about the case, Janssen.” Kohl took his Panama hat from the rack in the corner of his office. “And me, I have a thought.”

“Where will you be, sir?”

“On the trail of a French chicken.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

The anxious atmosphere that hung about the three men in the boardinghouse was like cold smoke.

Paul Schumann knew the sensation well – from those moments as he waited to step into the boxing ring, trying to remember everything he knew about his opponent, picturing the guy’s defenses, planning when best to dance under them, when to rise onto his toes and deliver a roundhouse or jab, figuring out how to exploit his weaknesses – and how best to compensate for your own.

He knew it from other times too: as a button man planning his touch-offs. Looking at maps drawn in his own careful handwriting, double-checking the Colt and his backup pistol, looking over the notes he’d assembled of his victim’s schedules, preferences, dislikes, routines, acquaintances.

This was the Before.

The hard, hard Before. The stillness preceding the kill. The moment when he chewed the facts amid a feeling of impatience and edginess. Fear too, of course. You never got away from that. The good button men didn’t, in any case.

And always the growing numbness, the crystalizing of his heart.

He was starting to touch the ice.

In the dim room, windows closed, shades down – phone unplugged, of course – Paul and Morgan looked over a map and two dozen publicity photos of the Olympic stadium, which Webber had dug up, along with a pair of sharply creased gray flannel trousers for Morgan (which the American had examined skeptically at first but then decided to keep).

Morgan tapped one of the photos. “Where do you-?”

“Please, one moment,” Webber interrupted. He rose and walked across the room, whistling. He was in a jovial mood, now that he had a thousand dollars in his pocket and wouldn’t have to worry about lard and yellow dye for a while.

Morgan and Paul exchanged frowns. The German dropped to his knees and began pulling records out from the cabinet beneath a battered gramo-phone. He grimaced. “Ach, no John Philip Sousa. I look all the time but they are hard to find.” He glanced up at Morgan. “Say, Mr. John Dillinger here tells me that Sousa is American. But I think he is joking. Please, the bandleader is English, is he not?”

“No, he’s American,” the slim man said.

“I have heard otherwise.”

Morgan lifted an eyebrow. “Perhaps you’re right. Maybe a wager would be in order. A hundred marks?”

Webber considered then said, “I will look into the matter further.”

“We don’t really have time for music,” Morgan added, watching Webber examining the stack of disks.

Paul said, “But I think we have time to cover up the sounds of our conversation?”

“Exactly,” Webber said. “And we shall use…” He examined a label. “A collection of our stolid German hunting songs.” He turned on the device and set the needle in the groove of the disk. A rousing, scratchy tune filled the room. “This is ‘The Deer-stalker.’” A laugh. “Appropriate, considering our mission.”

The mobsters Luciano and Lansky did exactly the same in America – usually playing the radio, to cover up conversation in the event Dewey’s or Hoover’s boys had a mike in the room where they were meeting.

“Now, you were saying?”

Morgan asked, “Where is the photography session?”

“Ernst’s memorandum says the pressroom.”

“That’s here,” Webber said.

Paul examined the drawing carefully and wasn’t pleased. The stadium was huge and the press box must have been two hundred feet long. It was located near the top of the building’s south side. He could take up position in the stands on the north side but that meant a very long shot across the entire width of the facility.

“Too far. A little breeze, the distortion of the window… No. I couldn’t guarantee a fatal shot. And I might hit someone else.”

“So?” Webber asked lethargically. “Maybe you could shoot Hitler. Or Göring… why, he’s as big a target as a dirigible. A blind man could hit him.” He looked over the map again. “You could get Ernst when he got out of the car. What do you think of that, Mr. Morgan?” The fact that Webber had gotten Paul into and out of the Chancellory safely had given the gang leader sufficient credibility to be trusted with Morgan’s name.

“But we don’t know exactly when and where he’ll be arriving,” Morgan pointed out. There were a dozen walks and passages he could take. “They might not use the main entrance. We couldn’t anticipate that and you should be in hiding before he gets there. The entire National Socialist pantheon will be assembled; security is going to be massive.”

Paul continued to peruse the map. Morgan was right. And he noticed from the map that there was an underground driveway that seemed to circle the entire stadium, probably for the leaders to use for protected entrances and exits. Ernst might never be outside at all.

They stared silently for a time. An idea occurred to Paul and, touching the photos, he explained it: The back walkways of the stadium were open. Leaving the pressroom, one would walk either east or west along this corridor then down several flights of stairs to the ground level, where there was a parking area, a wide drive and sidewalks that led to the railway station. About a hundred feet from the stadium, overlooking the parking lot and drive, was a cluster of small buildings, labeled on the map Storage Facilities.

“If Ernst came out onto that walkway and down the stairs I could shoot from that shed. The one there.”

“You could make the shot?”

Paul nodded. “Yes, easily.”

“But, as we were saying, we don’t know that Ernst will arrive or leave that way.”

“Maybe we can force him outside. Flush him out like a bird.”

“And how?” Morgan asked.

Paul said, “We ask him.”

“Ask him?” Morgan frowned.

“We get a message to him in the pressroom that he’s urgently needed. There’s someone who needs to see him in private about something important. He walks out the corridor onto the porch, into my sights.”

Webber lit one of his cabbage cigars. “But would any message be so urgent that he’d interrupt a meeting with the Leader, Göring and Goebbels?”

“From what I’ve learned about him he’s obsessed with his job. We tell him that there’s a problem having to do with the army or navy. I know that’ll get his attention. What about this Krupp, the armorer that Max told us about. Could a message from Krupp be urgent?”

Morgan nodded. “Krupp. Yes, I’d think so. But how do we get the message to Ernst while he’s in the photography session?”

“Ach, easy,” Webber said. “I’ll telephone him.”

“How?”

The man drew on his ersatz cigar. “I will find out the number of one of the telephones in the pressroom and place a call. I will do this myself. I will ask for Ernst and tell him that there is a driver downstairs with a message. Only for him to see. From Gustav Krupp von Bohlen himself. I will call from a post office so when the Gestapo dials seven afterward to find the source of the call, there’ll be no lead to me.”

“How can you get the number?” Morgan asked.

“Contacts.”

Paul asked cynically, “Do you really have to bribe someone to find the number, Otto? I would suspect that half the sports journalists in Berlin have them.”

“Ach,” Webber said, smiling in delight. He tried English. “You are hitting the head on the nail.” Back to his native tongue: “Of course that’s true. But the most important aspect of any venture is knowing which individual to approach and what his price is.”

“All right,” Morgan said, exasperated. “How much? And remember, we are not a bottomless well.”

“Another two hundred. Marks will be fine. And for that I will add, for no extra charge, a way to get into and out of the stadium, Mr. John Dillinger. A full SS uniform. You can sling your rifle over your shoulder and walk straight into the stadium like Himmler himself and no one will stop you. Practice your ‘Hail’s and your Hitler salute, flapping your limp arm in the air like our goat-peeing Leader.”

Morgan frowned. “But if they catch him masquerading as a soldier they’ll shoot him for a spy.”

Paul glanced at Webber and they both broke into laughter. It was the gang leader who said, “Please, Mr. Morgan. Our friend is about to kill the national military tzar. If he is caught he could be dressed like George Washington and whistling ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ and they would still shoot him quite dead, do you not think?”

“I was only considering ways to make it less obvious,” Morgan grumbled.

“No, it’s a good plan, Reggie,” Paul said. “After the shot they’ll get all the officials back to Berlin as fast as possible. I’ll ride with the guards protecting them. Once we’re in town, I’ll get lost in the crowd.” Afterward he’d slip into the embassy building near the Brandenburg Gate and radio Andrew Avery and Vince Manielli in Amsterdam, who’d send the plane out to the aerodrome for him.

As their eyes returned to the maps of the stadium Paul decided it was time. He said, “I want to tell you. There’s someone coming with me.”

Morgan glanced at Webber, who laughed. “Ach, what are you thinking? That I could possibly live anywhere but this Prussian Garden of Eden? No, no, I will leave Germany only for heaven.”

Paul said, “A woman.”

Morgan’s mouth tightened. “The one here.” Nodding toward the hallway of the boardinghouse.

“That’s right. Käthe.” Paul added, “You looked into her. You know she’s legitimate.”

“What have you told her?” asked the troubled American.

“The Gestapo has her passport and it’s only a matter of time until they arrest her.”

“It’s a matter of time until they arrest a lot of people here. What have you told her, Paul?” Morgan repeated.

“Just our cover story about sportswriting. That’s all.”

“But-”

“She’s coming with me,” he said.

“I should call Washington, or the Senator.”

“Call who you like. She’s coming.”

Morgan looked at Webber.

“Ach, I have been married three times, possibly four,” the German said. “And I now have a… complicated arrangement. Expect no advice from me on matters of the heart.”

Morgan shook his head. “Jesus, we’re running an airways service.”

Paul fixed his fellow American with a gaze. “One other thing: At the stadium I’ll only have the Russian passport for ID. If I don’t make it she’ll never hear what happened. Will you tell her something – about me having to leave? I don’t want her thinking that I ditched her. And do what you can to get her out.”

“Of course.”

“Ach, you’ll make it, Mr. John Dillinger. You’re the American cowboy with big balls, right?” Webber wiped his sweating forehead. He rose and found three glasses in the cupboard. From a flask he poured some clear liquid into them and passed them around. “Austrian obstler. You have heard of it? It is the best of all liquors, good for the blood and good for the soul. Now, drink up, gentlemen, then let us go out and change the fate of my poor nation.”

“I will need as many of them as you can find,” Willi Kohl said.

The man nodded cautiously. “It isn’t really a question of finding them. They are always quite findable. It’s a question of how out-of-the-ordinary this matter is. There is really no precedent for it.”

“It is out of the ordinary,” Kohl agreed. “That much is true. But Police Chief Himmler has branded this an unusual case and an important one. Other officers are occupied throughout the city with equally pressing matters and he left it to me to be resourceful. So I have come to you.”

“Himmler?” asked Johann Muntz. The middle-aged man stood in the doorway of a small house on Grün Street in Charlottenburg. Shaved and trimmed and wearing a suit, he looked as if he’d just returned from church this Sunday morning, a risky outing, to be sure, if you wished to retain your job as headmaster of one of the best schools in Berlin.

“Well, as you know, they’re autonomous. Completely self-governed. I cannot dictate anything to them. They might say no. And there is nothing I can do about that.”

“Ah, Dr. Muntz, I’m just asking for an opportunity to appeal to them in hopes they will volunteer to help the cause of justice.”

“But today is Sunday. How can I contact them?”

“I suspect you need only call the leader at home and he will arrange for their assembly.”

“Very well. I will do it, Inspector.”

Three-quarters of an hour later, Willi Kohl found himself in Muntz’s backyard, looking over the faces of nearly two dozen boys, many of whom were dressed in brown shirts, shorts and white socks, black ties dangling from a braided leather clasp at the throat. The youngsters were, for the most part, members of the Hindenburg School’s Hitler Youth brigade. As the school’s headmaster had just reminded Kohl, the organization was completely independent of any adult supervision. The members selected their own leaders and it was they who determined the activities of their group, whether that was hiking, football or denouncing backstabbers.

“Hail Hitler,” Kohl said and was greeted with a number of outstretched right hands and a surprisingly loud echo of the salutation. “I am Senior Detective-inspector Kohl, with the Kripo.”

Some of the faces broke into looks of admiration. And some of the youthful faces remained as emotionless as the face of the fat dead man in Dresden Alley.

“I need your assistance in the furtherance of National Socialism. A matter of the highest priority.” He looked at a young blond boy, who had been introduced to him as Helmut Gruber, who, Kohl recalled, was the leader of the Hindenburg brigade. He was smaller than most of the others but he had an adult confidence about him. A steely look filled his eyes as he gazed back at a man thirty years older than he. “Sir, we will do whatever is necessary to help our Leader and our country.”

“Good, Helmut. Now listen, everyone. You may think this is an odd request. I have here two bundles of documents. One is a map of an area near the Tiergarten. The other is a picture of a man we are trying to identify. Written on the bottom of the man’s picture is the name of a particular dish one would order at a restaurant. It’s called coq au vin. A French term. You don’t need to know how it’s pronounced. All you need to do is go to every restaurant in the circled area on the map and see if the establishment was open yesterday and if that dish is on the luncheon menu. If it is you will ask if the manager of the restaurant knows the person in this picture or remembers him dining there recently. If so, contact me at Kripo headquarters at once. Will you do this?”

“Yes, Inspector Kohl, we will,” Squad Leader Gruber announced, not bothering to poll his troops.

“Good. The Leader will be proud of you. I will now distribute these sheets.” He paused and caught the eye of one particular student in the back, one of the few not dressed in a uniform. “One other matter. It is necessary that you all be discreet regarding something.”

“Discreet?” the boy asked, frowning.

“Yes. It means you must refrain from mentioning a fact I am about to share with you. I have come to you for this assistance because of my son Günter, in the back there.” Several dozen eyes swiveled toward the boy, whom Kohl had called at home not long before and instructed to come to his headmaster’s house. Günter blushed fiercely and looked down. His father continued. “I suspect you do not know that my son will in the future be assisting me in important matters of state security. This, by the way, is why I cannot let him join your fine organization; I prefer that he remain behind the scenes, as it were. In this way he will be able to continue to help me work for the glory of the fatherland. Please keep this fact among yourselves. You will do that?”

Helmut’s eyes grew still as he glanced back at Günter, thinking perhaps of recent Aryan and Jew games that possibly should not have been played. “Of course, Mr. Inspector Kohl,” he said.

Kohl looked at his son’s face and its repressed smile of joy and then said, “Now line up in a single queue and I will distribute the papers. My son and Squad Leader Gruber will decide how you divide the labor.”

“Yes, sir. Hail Hitler.”

“Hail Hitler.” Kohl forced himself to offer a firm, outstretched-arm salute. He gave the handouts to the two boys. He added, “Oh, and gentlemen?”

“Yes, sir?” Helmut responded, standing to attention.

“Mind the traffic. Look carefully when crossing streets.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

He knocked on the door and she let him into her room.

Käthe seemed embarrassed by her living space in the boardinghouse. Bare walls, no plants, rickety furniture; she or the landlord had moved all the better items into the rooms to be let. Nor did anything here seem personal. Maybe she’d been pawning off her possessions. Sunlight hit the faded carpet but it was a small, solitary trapezoid and pale; the light was reflected from a window across the alley.

Then she gave a girlish laugh and flung her arms around him. She kissed him hard. “You smell of something different. I like it.” She sniffed his face.

“Shaving soap?”

“Perhaps that’s it, yes.”

He’d used some he’d found in the lavatory, a German brand, rather than his Burma Shave, because he was afraid a guard at the stadium might smell the unfamiliar scent of the American soap and grow suspicious.

“It’s nice.”

He noticed a single suitcase on the bed. The Goethe book was on the bare table, a cup of weak coffee next to it. There were white lumps floating on the surface and he asked her if there was such a thing as Hitler milk from Hitler cows.

She laughed and said that the National Socialists had plenty of asses among them, but to her knowledge they’d created no ersatz cows. “Even real milk curdles when it’s old.”

Then he said, “We’re leaving tonight.”

She nodded, frowning. “Tonight? When you say ‘immediately,’ you mean it.”

“I will meet you here at five.”

“Where are you going now?” Käthe asked him.

“Just doing one final interview.”

“Well, good luck, Paul. I will look forward to reading your article, even if it is about, oh, perhaps the black market, and not sports.” She gave him a knowing look. Käthe was a clever woman, of course; she suspected he had business here other than writing stories – probably, like half the town, putting together some semi-legal ventures. Which made him think she’d already accepted a darker side to him – and that she wouldn’t be very upset if he eventually told her the truth about what he was doing here. After all, his enemy was her enemy.

He kissed her once more, tasting her, smelling lilac, feeling the pressure of her skin against him. But he found that, unlike last night, he wasn’t the least stirred. This didn’t trouble him, though; it was the way things had to be. The ice had taken him completely.

“How could she have betrayed us?”

Kurt Fischer answered his brother’s question with a despairing shake of his head.

He too was heartsick at the thought of what their neighbor had done. Why, Mrs. Lutz! To whom they took a loaf of their mother’s warm stollen, lopsided and overfilled with candied fruit, every Christmas Eve, whom their parents had comforted as she cried on the anniversary of Germany’s surrender – that date a surrogate for the day her husband was killed during the War, since no one knew exactly when he died.

“How could she do it?” Hans whispered again.

But Kurt Fischer was unable to explain.

If she had denounced them because they had been planning to post dissident billboards or to attack some Hitler Youth, he might have understood. But all they wanted to do was leave a country whose leader had said, “Pacifism is the enemy of National Socialism.” Like so many others, he supposed, Mrs. Lutz had become intoxicated by Hitler.

The prison cell at Columbia House was about three by three meters, made of rough-hewn stone, windowless, with metal bars for a door, opening onto the corridor. Water dripped and the young men heard the scuttle of rats nearby. There was a single bare, glaring bulb overhead in the cell, yet none in the corridor so they could see few details of the dark forms that occasionally passed. Sometimes the guards were alone, other times they escorted prisoners, who were barefoot and made no sound except their occasional gasps or pleas or sobs. Sometimes the silence of their fear was more chilling than the noises they uttered.

The heat was unbearable; it made their skin itch. Kurt couldn’t understand why – they were underground and it should have been cool here. Then he noticed a pipe in the corner. Hot air streamed out fiercely. The jailors were pumping it in from a furnace to make sure the prisoners didn’t get even a small respite from their discomfort.

“We shouldn’t’ve left,” Hans muttered. “I told you.”

“Yes, we should have stayed in our apartment – that would have saved us.” He was speaking with sharp irony. “Until when? Next week? Tomorrow? Don’t you understand she’s been watching us? She’s seen the parties, she heard what we’ve said.”

“How long will we be here?”

And how does one answer that question? Kurt thought; they were in a place where every moment was forever. He sat on the floor – there was nowhere else to perch – as he stared absently into the dark, empty cell across the corridor from theirs.

A door opened and boots sounded on the concrete.

Kurt began counting the steps – one, two, three…

At twenty-eight the guard would be even with their cell. Counting footsteps was something he’d already learned about being a prisoner; captives are desperate for any information, for any certainty.

Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two…

The brothers regarded each other. Hans balled up his fists. “They’ll hurt. They’ll taste blood,” he muttered.

“No,” Kurt said. “Don’t do anything foolish.”

Twenty-five, twenty-six…

The steps slowed.

Blinking against the glare from the light overhead, Kurt saw two large men in brown uniforms appear. They looked at the brothers.

Then turned away.

One of them opened the cell opposite and harshly called, “Grossman, you will come out.”

The darkness in the cell moved. Kurt was startled to realize that he’d been staring at another human being. The man staggered to his feet and stepped forward, using the bars as support. He was filthy. If he’d gone inside clean-shaven, the stubble on his face told Kurt that he had been in the cell for at least a week.

The prisoner blinked, looked around him at the two large men, then at Kurt across the hallway.

One of the guards glanced at a piece of paper, “Ali Grossman, you have been sentenced to five years in Oranienburg camp for crimes against the State. Step outside.”

“But I-”

“Remain quiet. You are to be prepared for the trip to the camp.”

“They deloused me already. What do you mean?”

“I said quiet!”

One guard whispered something to the other, who replied, “Didn’t you bring yours?”

“No.”

“Well, here, use mine.”

He handed some light-colored leather gloves to the other guard, who pulled them on. With the grunt of a tennis player delivering a powerful serve, the guard swung his fist directly into the thin man’s belly. Grossman cried out and began to retch.

The guard’s knuckles silently struck the man’s chin.

“No, no, no.”

More blows, finding their targets on his groin, his face, his abdomen. Blood flowed from his nose and mouth, tears from his eyes. Choking, gasping. “Please, sir!”

In horror, the brothers watched as the human being was turned into a broken doll. The guard who’d been doing the hitting looked at his comrade and said, “I’m sorry about the gloves. My wife will clean and mend these.”

“If it’s convenient.”

They picked the man up and dragged him up the hall. The door echoed loudly.

Kurt and Hans stared at the empty cell. Kurt was speechless. He believed he’d never been so frightened in his life. Hans finally asked, “He probably did something quite terrible, don’t you think? To be treated like that.”

“A saboteur, I’d guess,” Kurt said in a shaky voice.

“I heard there was a fire in a government building. The transportation ministry. Did you hear that? I’ll bet he was behind it.”

“Yes. A fire. He was surely the arsonist.”

They sat paralyzed with terror, as the blistering stream of air from the pipe behind them continued to heat the tiny cell.

It was no more than a minute later that they heard the door open and slam closed again. They glanced at each other.

The footsteps began, echoing as leather met concrete…six, seven, eight…

“I will kill the one who was on the right,” Hans whispered. “The bigger. I can do it. We can get the keys and-”

Kurt leaned close, shocking the boy by gripping his face in both of his hands. “No!” he whispered so fiercely that his brother gasped. “You will do nothing. You will not fight them, you will not speak back. You will do exactly what they say and if they hit you, you will take the pain silently.” All his earlier thoughts of fighting the National Socialists, of trying to make some difference, had vanished.

“But-”

Kurt’s powerful fingers pulled Hans close. “You will do as I say!”…thirteen, fourteen…

The footsteps were like a hammer on the Olympic bell, each one sending a jolt of fear vibrating within Kurt Fischer’s soul.

…seventeen, eighteen…

At twenty-six they would slow.

At twenty-eight they would stop.

And the blood would begin to flow.

“You’re hurting me!” But even Hans’s strong muscles couldn’t shake off his brother’s grip.

“If they knock out your teeth you will say nothing. If they break your fingers you can cry and wail and scream. But you will say nothing to them. We are going to survive this. Do you understand me? To survive we cannot fight back.”

Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four…

A shadow fell on the floor in front of the bars.

“Understand?”

“Yes,” Hans whispered.

Kurt put his arm around his brother’s shoulder and they faced the door.

The men stopped at the cell.

But they weren’t the guards. One was a lean gray-haired man in a suit. The other was heavier, balding, wearing a brown tweed jacket and a waistcoat. They looked the brothers over.

“You are the Fischers?” the gray-haired man asked.

Hans looked at Kurt, who nodded.

He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and read. “Kurt.” He looked up. “You would be Kurt. And you, Hans.”

“Yes.”

What was this?

The man looked up the hallway. “Open the cell.”

More footsteps. The guard appeared, glanced in and unlocked the door. He stepped back, his hand on the truncheon that hung from his belt.

The two men stepped inside.

The gray-haired man said, “I am Colonel Reinhard Ernst.”

The name was familiar to Kurt. He occupied some role in Hitler’s government, though he wasn’t sure what exactly. The second man was introduced as Doctor-professor Keitel, from some military college outside of Berlin.

The colonel asked, “Your arrest document says ‘crimes against the State.’ But they all do. What exactly were your crimes?”

Kurt explained about their parents and about trying to leave the country illegally.

Ernst cocked his head and regarded the boys closely. “Pacifism,” he muttered and turned to Keitel, who asked, “You’ve committed anti-Party activities?”

“No, sir.”

“You are Edelweiss Pirates?”

These were informal anti-National Socialist clubs of young people, some said gangs, rising up in reaction to the mindless regimentation of the Hitler Youth. They’d meet clandestinely for discussions about politics and art – and to sample some of the pleasures of life that the Party, publicly at least, condemned: drinking, smoking and unmarried sex. The brothers knew some young people who were members but they themselves were not. Kurt told the men this.

“The offense may seem minor, but” – Ernst displayed a piece of paper – “you have been sentenced to three years at Oranienburg camp.”

Hans gasped. Kurt felt stunned, thinking of the terrible beating they’d just seen, poor Mr. Grossman pounded into submission. Kurt knew too that people sometimes went to Oranienburg or Dachau to serve a short sentence but were never seen again. He sputtered, “There was no trial! We were arrested an hour ago! And today is Sunday. How can we have been sentenced?”

The colonel shrugged. “As you can see, there was a trial.” Ernst handed him the document, which contained dozens of prisoners’ names, Kurt’s and Hans’s among them. Next to each was the length of sentence. The heading on the document said simply “The People’s Court.” This was the infamous tribunal that consisted of two real judges and five men from the Party, the SS or the Gestapo. There was no appeal from its judgment.

He stared at it, numb.

The professor spoke. “You are in general good health, both of you?”

The brothers glanced at each other and nodded.

“Jewish to any degree?”

“No.”

“And you have done Labor Service?”

Kurt said, “My brother has. I was too old.”

“As to the matter at hand,” Professor Keitel said, “we are here to offer you a choice.” He seemed impatient.

“Choice?”

Ernst’s voice lowered and he continued. “It is the thinking of some people in our government that particular individuals should not participate in our military. Perhaps they are of a certain race or nationality, perhaps they are intellectuals, perhaps they tend to question decisions of our government. I, however, believe that a nation is only as great as its army, and that for an army to be great it must be representative of all its citizens. Professor Keitel and I are doing a study that we think will support some shifts in how the government views the German armed forces.” He glanced back into the hall and said to the SA guard, “You can leave us.”

“But, sir-”

“You can leave us,” Ernst repeated in a calm voice and yet it seemed to Kurt as strong as Krupp steel.

The man glanced again at Kurt and Hans and then receded down the hall.

Ernst continued. “And this study may very well ultimately determine how the government values its citizens in general. We have been looking for men in your circumstances to help us.”

The professor said, “We need healthy young men who would otherwise be excluded from military service for political or other reasons.”

“And what would we do?”

Ernst gave a brief laugh. “Why, you’d become soldiers, of course. You would serve in the German army, navy or air force for one year, regular duty.”

He glanced at the professor, who continued. “Your service will be as any other soldier’s. The only difference is that we will monitor your performance. Your commanding officers will keep notes on your record. The information will be compiled and we will analyze it.”

Ernst said, “If you serve the year, your criminal record will be erased.” A nod at the court’s sentencing list. “You will be free to emigrate if you wish. But the currency regulations will remain in place. You can only take a limited number of marks and you will not be allowed back into the country.”

Kurt was thinking about something he’d heard a moment ago. Perhaps they are of a certain race or nationality… Did Ernst foresee that Jews or other non-Aryans would someday be in the German army?

And, if so, what did that mean for the country in general? What changes did these men have in mind?

“You are pacifists,” Ernst said. “Our other volunteers who’ve agreed to help us have had less of a difficult choice than you. Can a pacifist morally join a military organization? That’s a hard decision to make. But we would like you to participate. You are Nordic in appearance, are in excellent health and have the bearing of soldiers. With people like you involved, I believe certain elements in the government would be more inclined to accept our theories.”

“Regarding these beliefs of yours,” Keitel added, “I will say this: Being a professor at a war college and a military historian, I find them naive. But we will take your sentiments into account, and your duties in the service would be commensurate with your views. We would hardly make a flier out of a man terrified of heights or put a claustrophobic in an undersea boat. There are many jobs in the military that a pacifist could hold. Medical service comes to mind.”

Ernst said, “And, as I said, after some time you may find that your feelings about peace and war become more realistic. There is no better crucible for becoming a man than the army, I feel.”

Impossible, Kurt thought. He said nothing.

“But if your beliefs dictate that you cannot serve,” Ernst said, “you have another option.” A gesture toward the sentencing document.

Kurt glanced at his brother. “May we discuss this between ourselves?”

Ernst said, “Certainly. But you only have a few hours. There is a group being inducted late this afternoon, with basic training to start tomorrow.” He looked at his watch. “I have a meeting now. I’ll be back here by two or three to learn your decision.”

Kurt handed the sentencing document to Ernst.

But the colonel shook his head. “Keep that. It might help you make up your mind.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Twenty minutes from downtown Berlin, just past Charlottenburg, the white van turned north at Adolf Hitler Plaza, Reggie Morgan behind the wheel. He and Paul Schumann, beside him, gazed at the stadium to the left. Two massive rectangular columns stood at the front, the five Olympic rings floating between them.

As they turned left onto Olympic Street, Paul again noted the massive size of the complex. According to the directional signs, in addition to the stadium itself were a swimming facility, a hockey rink, a theater, a sports field and many outbuildings and parking areas. The stadium was white, toweringly high and long; it didn’t remind Paul of a building as much as an impregnable battleship.

The grounds were crowded: mostly workmen and provisioners but also many gray-and black-uniformed soldiers and guards, security for the National Socialist leaders attending the photography session. If Bull Gordon and the Senator wanted Ernst to die in public, then this was the place for it.

It appeared that one could drive right up to the front plaza of the stadium. But for an SS lieutenant (the commission was courtesy of Otto Webber, no extra cost) to climb out of a private van would be suspicious, of course. So they decided to skirt the stadium. Morgan would drop Paul off in some trees near a parking lot, which he would “patrol,” examining trucks and workmen as he slowly made his way to the shed overlooking the press office on the south side of the stadium.

The van now pulled off the road onto a grassy patch and rocked to a stop, invisible from the stadium. Paul climbed out and assembled the Mauser. He took the telescopic sight off the rifle – it was not the sort of accessory a guard would have – and slipped it into his pocket. He slung the gun over his shoulder and put his black helmet on his head.

“How do I look?” Paul asked.

“Authentic enough to scare me. Good luck to you.”

I’ll need it, Paul thought grimly, peering through the trees at the scores of workmen on the grounds, ready and able to point out an intruder, and at the hundreds of guards who’d be happy to gun him down.

Six to five against…

Brother. He glanced at Morgan and felt an impulse to lift his hand in an American salute, one veteran to another, but of course Paul Schumann was fully aware of his role. “Hail.” And lifted his arm. Morgan repressed a smile and reciprocated.

As Paul turned to leave, Morgan said softly, “Oh, wait, Paul. When I spoke to Bull Gordon and the Senator this morning, they wished you luck. And the commander said to tell you you can print his daughter’s wedding invitations as your first job. You know what he means?”

Paul gave a nod and, gripping the sling of the Mauser, started toward the stadium. He stepped through the line of trees and into a huge parking lot, which must have had room for twenty thousand cars. He strode with authority and determination, glancing sharply toward the vehicles parked here, every inch the diligent guard.

Ten minutes later Paul had made his way through the lot and was at the soaring entrance to the stadium. There were soldiers on duty here, carefully checking papers and searching anyone who wanted to enter, but on the surrounding grounds, Paul was merely another soldier and no one paid him any attention. With an occasional “Hail Hitler” and nods, he skirted the building, heading toward the shed. He passed a huge iron bell, on the side of which was an inscription: “I Summon the Youth of the World.”

As he approached the shed he noticed that it had no windows. There was no back door; the escape after the shooting would be difficult. He’d have to exit by the front, in full view of the entire stadium. But he suspected the acoustics would make it very difficult to tell where the shot had come from. And there were many sounds of construction – pile drivers, saws, riveting machines and the like – to obscure the report of the rifle. Paul would walk slowly from the shed after firing, pause and look around, even call for help if he could do so without raising suspicion.

The time was one-thirty. Otto Webber, who was in the Potsdam Plaza post office, would place his call around two-fifteen. Plenty of time.

He strolled on slowly, examining the grounds, looking in parked vehicles.

“Hail Hitler,” he said to some laborers, who were stripped to the waist and painting a fence. “It is a hot day for work like that.”

“Ach, it’s nothing,” one replied. “And if it were, so what? We work for the good of the fatherland.”

Paul said, “The Leader is proud of you.” And continued on to his hunting blind.

He glanced at the shed curiously as if wondering if it posed any security threat. Pulling on the black leather gloves that were part of the uniform, he opened the door and stepped inside. The place was filled with cardboard cartons tied with twine. Paul recognized the smell immediately from his days as a printer: the bitter scent of paper, the sweet scent of ink. The shed was being used to store programs or souvenir booklets of the Games. He arranged some cartons to make a shooting position in the front of the shed. He then laid his open jacket to the right of where he’d be lying, to catch the ejected shells when he worked the bolt of the gun. These details – retrieving the casings and minding fingerprints – probably didn’t matter. He had no record here and would be out of the country by nightfall. But nonetheless he went to the trouble simply because this was his craft.

You make sure nothing is out of kilter.

You check your p ’s and q ’s.

Standing well inside the small building, he scanned the stadium with the rifle’s telescopic sight. He noted the open corridor behind the pressroom, which Ernst would take to reach the stairway and walk down to meet the messenger or driver that Webber would tell him about. He’d have a perfect shot as soon as the colonel stepped out of the doorway. There were large windows too, which he might shoot through if the man paused in front of one.

The time was one-fifty.

Paul sat back, legs crossed, and cradled the rifle in his lap. Sweat was dripping down his forehead in tickling rivulets. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt then began to mount the telescopic sight onto the rifle.

“What do you think, Rudy?”

But Reinhard Ernst did not expect his grandson to answer. The boy wasstaring with smiling awe over the expanse of the Olympic stadium. They were in the long press facility on the south side of the building, above the Leader’s reviewing stand. Ernst held him up so that he could look through the window. Rudy was virtually dancing with excitement.

“Ah, who is this?” a voice asked.

Ernst turned to see Adolf Hitler and two of his SS guards enter the room.

“My Leader.”

Hitler walked forward and smiled at the boy.

Ernst said, “This is Rudy, my son’s boy.”

A faint look of sympathy on the Leader’s face told Ernst that he was thinking of Mark’s death in the war maneuvers accident. Ernst was momentarily surprised that the man remembered but realized that he should not have been; Hitler’s mind was as expansive as the Olympic field, frighteningly quick, and it retained everything he wished to retain.

“Say hello to our Leader, Rudy. Salute as I taught you.”

The boy gave a smart National Socialist salute and Hitler laughed in delight and tousled Rudy’s hair. The Leader stepped closer to the window and pointed out some of the features of the stadium, talking in an enthusiastic voice. Hitler asked the boy about his studies and what subjects he liked, which sports he enjoyed.

More voices in the hallway. The two rivals Goebbels and Göring arrived together. What a drive that must have been, thought Ernst, smiling to himself.

After his defeat at the Chancellory that morning Göring remained desultory. Ernst could see it clearly, despite the smile. What a difference between the two most powerful men in Germany… Hitler’s tantrums, admittedly extreme, were rarely about personal matters; if his favorite chocolate was not available or he knocked his shin on a table he would shrug the matter off without anger. And as to reversals on issues of state, yes, he had a temper that could terrify his closest of friends, but once the problem was solved he was on to other matters. Göring, on the other hand, was like a greedy child. Anything that went against his wishes would infuriate him and fester until he found suitable revenge.

Hitler was explaining to the boy what sporting events would be played in which areas of the stadium. Ernst was amused to see that beneath his broad smile Göring was growing all the more angry that the Leader was paying such attention to his rival’s grandson.

Over the next ten minutes other officials began arriving: Von Blomberg, the state defense minister, and Hjalmar Schacht, head of the state bank, with whom Ernst had developed a complicated system of financing rearmament projects using untraceable funds known as “Mefo bills.” Schacht’s middle name was Horace Greeley, after the American, and Ernst would joke with the brilliant economist about having cowboy roots. Here too were Himmler, block-faced Rudolf Hess and serpent-eyed Reinhard Heydrich, who greeted Ernst in a distracted way, which was how he greeted everyone.

The photographer meticulously set up his Leica and other equipment so that he could get both the subject in the foreground and the stadium in the back, yet the lights would not flare in the windows. Ernst had developed an interest in photography. He himself owned several Leicas and he’d planned to buy Rudy a Kodak, which was imported from America and easier to use than the German precision cameras. The colonel had recorded some of the trips he and his family had taken. Paris and Budapest in particular had been well documented, as had a hiking sojourn in the Black Forest and a boat trip down the Danube.

“Good, good,” the photographer now called. “We can begin.”

Hitler first insisted on taking a picture with Rudy and lifted the boy onto his knee, laughing and chatting with him like a good uncle. After this the planned pictures began.

Though he was pleased that Rudy was enjoying himself, Ernst was growing impatient. He found publicity absurd. Moreover, it was a bad tactical error – as was the whole idea of holding the Olympics in Germany, for that matter. There were far too many aspects of the rearmament that should have been kept secret. How could a foreign visitor not see that this was a military nation and becoming more so every day?

The flashes went off, as the celebrities of the Third Empire looked cheerful or thoughtful or ominous for the lens. When Ernst was not being photographed he talked with Rudy or stood by himself and, in his mind, composed his letter to the Leader about the Waltham Study, considering what to say and what not to.

Sometimes you couldn’t share all…

An SS guard appeared in the doorway. He spotted Ernst and called, “Mr. Minister.”

A number of heads turned.

“Mr. Minister Ernst.”

The colonel was as amused as Göring was irritated; Ernst was not officially a minister of state.

“Yes?”

“Sir, there is a phone call for you from the secretary of Gustav Krupp von Bohlen. There is a matter he needs to inform you of immediately. Something most important. Regarding your latest meeting.”

What had they discussed then that was so urgent? Armor for the warships had been one topic. It hadn’t seemed so critical. But now that England had accepted the new German shipbuilding figures, perhaps Krupp would have a problem meeting the production quotas. But then he reflected that, no, the baron had not been informed of the victory regarding the treaty. Krupp was as brilliant a capitalist as he was a technician. But he was also a coward, who’d shunned the Party until Hitler came to power then had become a rabid convert. Ernst suspected the crisis was minor at worst. But Krupp and his son were so important to the rearmament plans that they could not be ignored.

“You may take the call on one of those phones there. I will have it put through.”

“Excuse me for one moment, my Leader.”

Hitler nodded and returned to discussing the angle of the camera with the photographer.

A moment later one of the many phones against the wall buzzed. A glowing light indicated which it was and Ernst picked it up.

“Yes? This is Colonel Ernst.”

“Colonel. I am Stroud, an aide to Baron von Bohlen. I apologize for the disturbance. He’s sent some documents for you to examine. A driver has them at the stadium where you are now.”

“What are these about?”

A pause. “I was instructed by the baron not to mention the subject over this telephone.”

“Yes, yes, fine. Where is the driver?”

“In the driveway on the south side of the stadium. He will meet you there. It’s better to be discreet. Alone, I am saying, sir. Those are my instructions.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Hail Hitler.”

“Hail.”

Ernst hung the phone in the cradle. Göring had been watching him like an obese falcon. “A problem, Minister?”

The colonel decided both to ignore the feigned sympathy and the irony in the title. Rather than lie, he admitted, “Some problem that Krupp’s having. He’s sent me a message about it.”

As a maker primarily of armor, artillery and munitions, Krupp dealt more with Ernst and the naval and army commanders than with Göring, whose province was the air.

“Ach.” The huge man turned back to the mirror the photographer had provided. He began moving a finger around his face, smoothing his makeup.

Ernst started for the door.

“Opa, may I come with you?”

“Of course, Rudy. This way.”

The boy scurried after his grandfather and they stepped into the interior corridor that connected all the pressrooms. Ernst put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. He oriented himself and noticed a doorway that would lead to one of the south stairways. They started toward it. He’d downplayed the concern at first but in fact he was growing troubled. Krupp steel was recognized as the best in the world; the spire of New York City’s magnificent Chrysler building was made of his company’s famed Enduro KA-2. But this meant too that foreign military planners were looking very carefully at Krupp’s products and output. He wondered if the British or French had learned how much of his steel was going not to rails or washing machines or automobiles but to armor.

Grandfather and grandson made their way through a crowd of workers and foremen energetically finishing the construction here on the press-booth floor, cutting doors to size, mounting hardware, sanding and painting walls. As they dodged around a carpentry station, Ernst glanced down at the arm of his suit and grimaced.

“What’s wrong, Opa?” Rudy shouted over the scream of a saw.

“Oh, look at this. Look at what I’ve gotten on me.” There was a sprinkling of plaster on it.

He brushed the dust away as best he could but some remained. He wondered if he should wet his fingers to clean it. But this might cause the plaster to set permanently in the cloth. Gertrud would not be pleased if that happened. He’d leave it for now. He put his hand on the door handle to step onto the outer walkway that led to the stairs.

“Colonel!” a voice called in his ear.

Ernst turned.

The SS guard had run up behind him. He shouted over the whine of the saw, “Sir, the Leader’s dogs are here. He wonders if your grandson would like to pose with them.”

“Dogs?” Rudy asked excitedly.

Hitler liked German shepherds and had several of them. They were genial animals, house pets.

“Would you like that?” Ernst asked.

“Oh, yes, please, Opa.”

“Don’t play roughly with them.”

“No, I won’t.”

Ernst escorted the boy back down the hall and watched him run to the dogs, which were sniffing around the room, exploring. Hitler laughed, seeing the youngster hug the larger one and kiss him on top of the head. The animal licked Rudy with his huge tongue. With some difficulty, Göring bent down and petted the animals too, a childlike smile on his round face. Though he was heartless in many ways, the minister loved animals devoutly.

The colonel then returned to the corridor and walked toward the outer door once again. He blew again at the plaster dust on his sleeve then paused in front of one of the large, south-facing windows and looked outside. The sun fell on him fiercely. He’d left his hat back in the press booth. Should he get it?

No, he thought. It would -

His breath was knocked from his lungs as he felt a jarring blow to his body and found himself tumbling to the drop cloth covering the marble, gasping in agony… confused, frightened… But the one thought most prominent in his mind as he struck the floor was: Now I’ll get paint on my suit too! What will Gertrud say about this?

Chapter Twenty-Six

The Munich House was a small restaurant ten blocks northwest of the Tier-garten and five from Dresden Alley.

Willi Kohl had eaten here several times and recalled enjoying the Hungarian goulash, to which they added caraway seeds and raisins, of all things. He’d drunk a wonderful red Austrian Blaufrankisch wine with the meal.

He and Janssen parked the DKW in front of the place and Kohl tossed the Kripo card onto the dashboard to fend off eager Schupos armed with their traffic offense booklets.

Tapping spent tobacco from his meerschaum pipe, Kohl hurried toward the restaurant, Konrad Janssen close behind. Inside, the decor was Bavarian: brown wood and yellowing stucco plaster, with borders of wooden gardenias everywhere, clumsily carved and painted. The room was aromatic of sour spices and grilled meat. Kohl was instantly hungry; he had eaten only one breakfast that morning and it had consisted of nothing more than pastry and coffee. The smoke was dense, for the lunch hour was nearly over and people had exchanged empty plates for coffee and cigarettes.

Kohl saw his son Günter standing with the young Hitler Youth leader, Helmut Gruber, and two other teenagers, dressed in the group’s uniform. The Youth had kept their army officer-style hats on, even though they were inside, either out of disrespect or ignorance.

“I received your message, boys.”

Extending his arm in a salute, the Hitler Youth leader said, “Detective-inspector Kohl, Hail Hitler. We have identified the man you are seeking.” He held up the picture of the body found in Dresden Alley.

“Have you now?”

“Yes, sir.”

Kohl glanced at Günter and saw contradictory feelings in his son’s face. He was proud to have elevated his status with the Youth but wasn’t happy that Helmut had preempted the restaurant search. The inspector wondered if this incident would be a double benefit – the identification of the body for him and a lesson about the realities of life among the National Socialists for his son.

The maître d’ or owner, a stocky, balding man in a dusty black suit and shabby gold-striped waistcoat, saluted Kohl. When he spoke he was clearly uneasy. Hitler Youth were among the most energetic of denouncers. “Inspector, your son and his friends here were inquiring about this individual.”

“Yes, yes. And you, sir, are…?”

“Gerhard Klemp. I am the manager and have been for sixteen years.”

“Did this man eat lunch here yesterday?”

“Please, yes, he did. And almost three days a week. He first came in several months ago. He said he liked it because we prepare more than just German food.”

Kohl wanted the boys to know as little about the murder as possible so he said to his son and the Hitler Youths, “Ah, thank you, son. Thank you, Helmut.” He nodded to the others. “We will take over from here. You’re a credit to your nation.”

“I would do anything for our Leader, Detective-inspector,” Helmut said in a tone fitting to his declaration. “Good day, sir.” Again he lifted his arm. Kohl watched his son’s arm extend similarly and, in response, the inspector himself gave a sharp National Socialist salute. “Hail.” Kohl ignored Janssen’s faint look of amusement at his gesture.

The youngsters left, chattering and laughing; they seemed normal for a change, boyish and happy, free from their usual visage – mindless automatons out of Fritz Lang’s science fiction film Metropolis. He caught his son’s eye and the boy smiled and waved as the cluster disappeared out the door. Kohl prayed his decision on his son’s behalf was not a mistake; Günter could so easily be seduced by the group.

He turned back to Klemp and tapped the picture. “What time did he lunch here yesterday?”

“He came in early, about eleven, just as we were opening. He left thirty, forty minutes later.”

Kohl could see that Klemp was troubled by the death but reluctant to express sympathy in case the man turned out to be an enemy of the state. He was also very curious but, as with most citizens these days, was afraid to ask questions about the investigation or to volunteer anything more than he was asked. At least he didn’t suffer from blindness.

“Was he alone?”

“Yes.”

Janssen asked, “But did you happen to observe him outside to see if he arrived with anyone or perhaps met someone when he left?” He nodded toward the restaurant’s large, uncurtained windows.

“I didn’t see anyone, no.”

“Were there persons he dined with regularly?”

“No. He was usually by himself.”

“And which way did he go after he finished eating yesterday?” Kohl asked, jotting it all down in his notebook after touching the pencil tip to his tongue.

“I believe to the south. That would be the left.”

The direction of Dresden Alley.

“What do you know about him?” Kohl asked.

“Ach, a few things. For one, I have his address, if that helps.”

“Indeed it does,” said Kohl excitedly.

“After he began coming here regularly I suggested he open an account with us.” He turned to a file box containing neatly penned cards and wrote down an address on a slip of paper. Janssen looked at it. “Two blocks from here, sir.”

“Do you know anything else about him?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. He was secretive. We spoke rarely. It wasn’t the language. No, it was his preoccupation. He was usually reading the newspaper or a book or business documents and didn’t wish to converse.”

“What do you mean by ‘it wasn’t the language’?”

“Oh, he was an American.”

Kohl lifted an eyebrow at Janssen. “He was?”

“Yes, sir,” the man replied, glancing once more at the picture of the dead man.

“And his name?”

“Mr. Reginald Morgan, sir.”

“And you are who?”

Robert Taggert held up a cautionary finger in response to Reinhard Ernst’s question, then looked carefully out the window Ernst had been standing at when Taggert had tackled the colonel a moment before to get him out of the line of sight of the shed, where Paul Schumann was waiting.

Taggert caught a glimpse of the black doorway in the shed and could vaguely make out the muzzle of the Mauser easing back and forth.

“No one go outside!” Taggert called to the workers. “Keep away from the windows and the doors!” He turned back to Ernst, who sat on a box containing cans of paint. Several of the laborers had helped him up from the floor and stood nearby.

Taggert had been late arriving at the stadium. Driving the white van, he’d had to circle far to the north and west to make certain Schumann didn’t see him. After flashing his identity cards to the guards, he had run up the stairs to the press floor to find Ernst pausing in front of the window. The construction noise was loud and the colonel hadn’t heard his shout over the screams of the power saws. So the American had sprinted down the hall past a dozen or so astonished workers and knocked Ernst away from the window.

The colonel was cradling his head, which had struck the tarpaulin-covered floor. There was no blood on his scalp, and he didn’t seem badly hurt, though Taggert’s tackle had stunned him and knocked the wind from his lungs.

Responding to Ernst’s question, Taggert said, “I’m with the American diplomatic staff in Washington, D.C.” He proffered his papers: a government identification card and an authentic American passport issued in his real name, not the forgery in the name of Reginald Morgan – the Office of Naval Intelligence agent he’d shot to death in front of Paul Schumann in Dresden Alley yesterday and had been impersonating ever since.

Taggert said, “I’ve come here to warn you about a plot against your life. An assassin is outside now.”

“But Krupp… Is Baron von Bohlen involved?”

“Krupp?” Taggert feigned surprise and listened as Ernst explained about the phone call.

“No, that must have been one of the conspirators, who called to lure you out.” He gestured out the door. “The killer is in one of the supply sheds south of the stadium. We’ve heard he’s a Russian but dressed in an SS uniform.”

“A Russian? Yes, yes, there was a security alert about such a man.”

In fact, there would have been no danger had Ernst stayed at the window or stepped out onto the porch. The rifle that Schumann now held was the same one he’d tested at November 1923 Square yesterday but last night Taggert had plugged the barrel of the gun with lead so that if Schumann had fired, the bullet never would have left the muzzle. Yet had that happened, the American gangster would have known he’d been set up and might have escaped, even if he’d been injured by the exploding rifle.

“Our Leader could be in danger!”

“No,” Taggert said. “It’s only you he’s after.”

“Me?…” Then Ernst’s head swiveled. “My grandson!” He rose abruptly. “My grandson is here. He could be at risk too.”

“We have to tell everyone to stay away from the windows,” Taggert said, “and to evacuate the area.” The two men hurried down the hallway. “Is Hitler in the pressroom?” Taggert asked.

“He was a few minutes ago.”

Oh, this was far better than Taggert could have hoped for. When Schumann had reported, back in the boardinghouse, that Hitler and the other leaders would be assembled here, he’d been ecstatic, though he’d obscured this reaction, of course. He now said, “I need to tell him what we’ve learned. We have to act fast before the assassin escapes.”

They walked into the pressroom. The American blinked, stunned to find himself among the most powerful men in Germany, their heads turning to look at him in curiosity. The only ones in the room who ignored Taggert were two cheerful German shepherd dogs and a cute little boy of about six or seven.

Adolf Hitler noticed Ernst, still holding the back of his head, the paint and plaster on his suit. Alarmed, he asked, “Reinhard, you are hurt?”

“Opa!” The boy ran forward.

Ernst first put his arms around the child and ushered him quickly to the center of the room away from the doors and windows. “It’s all right, Rudy. I just took a spill… Everyone, keep back from the windows!” He gestured to an SS guard. “Take my grandson into the hallway. Stay with him.”

“Yes, sir.” The man did as ordered.

“What’s happened?” Hitler called.

Ernst replied, “This man is an American diplomat. He tells me there’s a Russian out there with a rifle. In one of the supply sheds south of the stadium.”

Himmler nodded to a guard. “Get some men in here now! And assemble a detachment downstairs.”

“Yes, my Police Chief.”

Ernst explained about Taggert, and the German leader approached the American, who was nearly breathless with excitement to be in Hitler’s presence. The man was short, about the same height as Taggert, but broader of body and with thicker features. A stern frown filled his wan face and he examined the American’s papers carefully. The eyes of the dictator of Germany were surrounded by drooping lids above and bags below but they themselves were every bit the pale but piercing blue that he’d heard of. This man could mesmerize anyone, Taggert thought, feeling this force himself.

“Please, my Leader, may I see?” Himmler asked. Hitler handed him the documents. The man looked them over and asked, “You speak German?”

“Yes, I do.”

“With all respect, sir, are you armed?”

“I am,” Taggert said.

“With the Leader and the others here, I will take possession of your weapon until we learn what this matter is about.”

“Of course.” Taggert lifted his jacket and allowed one of the SS men to take the pistol from him. He’d expected this. Himmler was, after all, head of the SS, whose primary purpose was guarding Hitler and the government leaders.

Himmler told another SS trooper to take a look at the sheds and see if he could observe the purported assassin. “Hurry.”

“Yes, my Police Chief.”

As he left the pressroom, a dozen armed SS guards filed into the room and spread out, protecting the assembly. Taggert turned to Hitler and nodded respectfully. “State Chancellor-President, several days ago we learned of a potential plot by the Russians.”

Nodding, Himmler said, “The intelligence we received Friday from Hamburg – about the Russian doing some ‘damage.’”

Hitler waved him silent and nodded for Taggert to continue.

“We thought nothing particular of this information. We hear it all the time from the damn Russians. But then we learned some specifics a few hours ago: that his target was Colonel Ernst and that he might be here at the stadium this afternoon. I assumed he was examining the stadium with an eye toward shooting the colonel during the Games themselves. I came here to see for myself and noticed a man slip into a shed south of the stadium. And then I learned to my shock that the colonel and the rest of you were here.”

“How did he get on the grounds?” Hitler raged.

“An SS uniform and false identity papers, we believe,” Taggert explained.

“I was about to step outside,” Ernst said. “This man saved my life.”

“What about Krupp? The phone call?” Göring asked.

“Krupp has nothing to do with this, I’m sure,” Taggert said. “The call was undoubtedly from a confederate to lure the colonel outside.”

Himmler nodded to Heydrich, who strode to the phone, dialed a number and spoke for several moments. He looked up. “No, it was not Krupp who called. Unless he now makes his calls from the Potsdam Plaza post office.”

Hitler muttered ominously to Himmler, “Why did we not know about this?”

Taggert knew that conspiracy paranoia danced constantly in Hitler’s head. He came to Himmler’s defense, saying, “They were very clever, the Russians. We only learned about it from our sources in Moscow, by happenstance… But, please, sir, we must move quickly. If he realizes we’re onto him he’ll escape and try again.”

“Why Ernst?” Göring asked.

Meaning, Taggert supposed, why not me?

Taggert directed his response to Hitler, “State Leader, we understand that Colonel Ernst is involved in rearmament. We are not troubled with that – in America we consider Germany our greatest European ally and we want you to be militarily strong.”

“Your countrymen feel this way?” Hitler asked. It was well known in diplomatic circles that he was very troubled by the anti-Nazi sentiment in America.

Now able to discard the placid demeanor of Reggie Morgan, Taggert spoke with an edge to his voice. “You don’t always get the full story. Jews talk loudly – in your country and in mine – and the leftist element are forever whining, the press, the Communists, the Socialists. But they’re a small fraction of the population. No, our government and the majority of Americans are firmly committed to being your ally and seeing you get out from under the yoke of the Versailles. It’s the Russians who are concerned about your rearming. However, please, sir, we have only minutes. The assassin.”

The SS guard returned just then. “It’s as he said, sir. There are some sheds beside the parking plaza. The door to one is open and, yes, there’s a rifle barrel protruding, scanning for a target at the stadium here.”

Several of the men in the room gasped and muttered indignation. Joseph Goebbels picked at his ear nervously. Göring had unholstered his Luger and was waving it around comically like a child with a wooden pistol.

Hitler’s voice shook and his hands quivered in rage. “Communist Jew animals! They come to my country and do this to me! Backstabbers… And with our Olympics about to start! They…” He was unable to continue his diatribe, he was so furious.

To Himmler, Taggert said, “I speak Russian. Surround the shed and let me try to convince him to surrender. I’m sure the Gestapo or the SS can persuade him to tell us who and where the other conspirators are.”

Himmler nodded then turned to Hitler. “My Leader, it is important that you and the others leave at once. By the underground route. Perhaps there is only the one assassin but perhaps too there are others that this American doesn’t know about.”

Like everyone who’d read the intelligence reports on Himmler, Taggert considered the former fertilizer salesman half insane and an incurable sycophant. But the American’s role here was clear and he said submissively, “Police Chief Himmler is correct. I’m not sure how complete our information is. Go to safety. I will help your troops capture the man.”

Ernst shook Taggert’s hand. “My thanks to you.”

Taggert nodded. He watched Ernst collect his grandson from the corridor and then join the others, who took an internal stairway down to the underground driveway, surrounded by a squad of guards.

Only when Hitler and the others were gone did Himmler return Taggert’s pistol. The police chief then called to the SS officer who had arranged the detachment downstairs, “Where are your men?”

The guard explained that two dozen were deployed to the east, out of view of the shed.

Himmler said, “SD Leader Heydrich and I will remain here and call a general alert for the area. Bring us that Russian.”

“Hail Hitler.” The guard turned on his heels and hurried down the staircase, Taggert behind him. They jogged to the east side of the stadium, joined the troops there and, in a wide arc to the south, approached the shed.

The men ran quickly, surrounded by the emotionless SS troops, amid the sound of gun bolts and toggles, snapping bullets into place. But despite the apparent tension and drama, Robert Taggert was at ease for the first time in days. Like the man he’d killed in Dresden Alley – Reggie Morgan – Taggert was one of those people who exist in the shadows of government and diplomacy and business, doing the bidding for their principals in ways sometimes legal and often not. One of the few truthful things he’d told Schumann was his passion for a diplomatic posting either in Germany or elsewhere (Spain would indeed be nice). But such plums were not easy to come by and had to be earned, often in mad and risky situations. Such as the plan involving the poor sap Paul Schumann.

His instructions from the United States had been simple: Reggie Morgan would have to be sacrificed. Taggert would kill him and take over his identity. He would help Paul Schumann plan Reinhard Ernst’s death and then, at the last moment, Taggert would dramatically “rescue” the German colonel, proof of how firmly the U.S. supported the National Socialists. Word of the rescue and Taggert’s comments about that support would trickle up to Hitler. But as it turned out, the results were far, far better: Taggert had actually performed his routine for Hitler and Göring themselves.

What happened to Schumann was irrelevant, whether he died now, which would be cleaner and more convenient, or was caught and tortured. In the latter case, Schumann would eventually talk… and tell an unlikely tale of being hired by the American Office of Naval Intelligence to kill Ernst, which the Germans would instantly dismiss since it was Taggert and the Americans who turned him in. And if he turned out to be a German-American gangster and not a Russian? Ah, well, he must’ve been recruited by the Russians.

A simple plan.

But there had been setbacks from the beginning. He’d planned to kill Morgan several days ago and impersonate him at the first meeting with Schumann yesterday. But Morgan had been a very cautious man and talented at leading a covert life. Taggert had had no chance to murder him before Dresden Alley. And how tense that had been…

Reggie Morgan had had only the old pass phrase – not the lines about the tram to Alexanderplatz – so when he’d met Schumann in the alley, they’d each believed the other was an enemy. Taggert had managed to kill Morgan just in time and convince Schumann that he was in fact the American agent – thanks to the right pass phrase, the forged passport, and the accurate description of the Senator. Taggert had also made sure he was the first to go through the dead man’s pockets. He’d pretended to find proof that Morgan was a Stormtrooper, though the document he’d showed Schumann was, in fact, simply a card attesting that the bearer had donated a sum to a War veterans’ relief fund. Half the people in Berlin had such cards since the Brownshirts were very adept at soliciting “contributions.”

Schumann himself had also proved to be a source of concern. Oh, the man was smart, far smarter than the thug whom Taggert had expected. He had a suspicious nature and didn’t tip off what he was really thinking. Taggert had had to watch what he said and did, constantly remind himself to be Reginald Morgan, the dogged, nondescript civil servant. When Schumann, for instance, had insisted they check Morgan’s body for tattoos, Taggert was horrified. The most likely tattoo they’d find would have said “U.S. Navy.” Or maybe the name of the ship he’d served on in the War. But fate had smiled; the man had never been under the needle.

Now, Taggert and the black-uniformed troops arrived at the shed. He could just see the barrel of the Mauser protruding, as Paul Schumann searched for his target. The men deployed quietly, the senior SS officer directing his soldiers with hand signals. Taggert was as impressed as ever with the brilliance of German tactical skills.

Closer now, closer.

Schumann was preoccupied, continuing to scan the balcony behind the press box. He would be wondering what had happened. Why the delay in getting Ernst outside? Had the phone call from Webber gone through properly?

As the SS men circled the shed, cutting off any chance of Schumann’s escape, Taggert reminded himself that after he was finished here, he would have to return to Berlin and find Otto Webber and kill him. Käthe Richter too.

When the young soldiers were in position around the shed, Taggert whispered, “I will go speak to him in Russian and get him to surrender.” The SS commander nodded. The American took his pistol from his pocket. He was in no danger, of course, because of the Mauser’s plugged barrel. Still, he moved slowly, pretending to be cautious and uneasy.

“Keep back,” he whispered. “I’ll go in first.”

The SS nodded, eyebrows raised, impressed at the American’s courage.

Taggert lifted his pistol and stepped toward the doorway. The rifle muzzle still eased back and forth. Schumann’s frustration at not finding a target was palpable.

In a swift motion, Taggert flung one of the doors open and lifted his pistol, applying pressure on the trigger.

He stepped inside.

Robert Taggert gasped. A chill ran through him.

The Mauser continued its scan of the stadium, moving back and forth slowly. The deadly rifle, though, was gripped not by a would-be assassin’s hands but by lengths of twine torn from packing cartons and tethered to a roof beam.

Paul Schumann was gone.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Running.

Not his favorite form of exercise by any means, though Paul often ran laps or jogged in place, to get the legs in shape and to work the tobacco and beer and corn whisky out of his system. And now he was running like Jesse Owens.

Running for his life.

Unlike poor Max, gunned down in the street as he sprinted away from the SS guards, Paul attracted little notice; he was wearing gymnasium clothes and shoes he’d stolen from the locker room of the Olympic stadium’s swimming complex and he looked like any one of the thousands of athletes in and around Charlottenburg, in training for the Games. He was about three miles east of the stadium now, heading back to Berlin, pumping hard, putting distance between himself and the betrayal, which he had yet to figure out.

He was surprised that Reggie Morgan – if it was Morgan – had made a careless mistake after going to such elaborate efforts to set him up. There were certainly button men who didn’t look over their tools every time they were going on a job. But that was nuts. When you were up against ruthless men, always armed, you made sure that your own weapons were in perfect shape, that nothing was out of kilter.

In the baking-hot shed Paul had mounted the telescopic sight and made sure the calibrations were set to the same numbers as at the pawnshop shooting range. Then, as a final check he’d slipped the bolt out of the Mauser and sighted up the bore. It was blocked. He thought at first this was some dirt or creosote from the fiberboard carrying case. But Paul had found a length of wire and dug inside. He looked closely at what he scraped off. Somebody had poured molten lead down the muzzle. If he’d fired, the barrel might have exploded or the bolt shot backward through Paul’s cheek.

The gun had been in Morgan’s possession overnight and was the same weapon; Paul had noted a unique configuration in the grain when he was sighting it in yesterday. So Morgan, or whoever he might be, had clearly sabotaged the gun.

Moving fast, he’d ripped twine from the cartons in the shed and hung the rifle from the ceiling to make it appear he was still there then slipped outside, joining a group of other troopers walking north. He’d split off from them at the swimming complex, found a change of clothing and shoes, thrown away the SS uniform and torn up and flushed the Russian passport down a toilet.

Now, a half hour from the stadium, running, running…

Sweating fiercely through the thick cloth, Paul turned off the highway and trotted into a small village center. He found a fountain made from an old horse trough and bent to the spigot, drinking a quart of the hot, rusty water. Then he bathed his face.

How far from the city was he? Probably four miles or so, he guessed. He saw two officers in green uniforms and tall green-and-black hats stopping a large man, demanding his papers.

He turned casually away from them and walked down side streets, deciding it was too risky to continue into Berlin on foot. He noticed a parking lot – rows of cars around a train station. Paul found an open-air DKW and, making sure he was out of sight, used a rock and a broken branch to knock the key lock into the dashboard. He fished underneath for the wires. Using his teeth, he cut through the cloth insulation and twined the copper strands together. He pushed the starter button. The engine ground for a moment but didn’t catch. Grimacing, he realized he’d forgotten to set the choke. He adjusted it to rich and tried again. The engine fired to life and sputtered and he adjusted the knob until it was running smoothly. It took a moment to figure out the gears but soon he was easing east through the narrow streets of the town, wondering who’d sold him out.

And why? Had it been money? Politics? Some other reason?

But at the moment he could find no hint of the answers to those questions. Escaping occupied all his thoughts.

He shoved the accelerator to the floor and turned onto a broad, immaculate highway, passing a sign that assured him that the city center of Berlin was six kilometers away.

Modest quarters, off Bremer Street in the northwest portion of town. Typical of many dwellings in this neighborhood, Reginald Morgan’s was in a gloomy stone four-flat that dated from the Second Empire, though this particular structure summoned up no Prussian glory whatsoever.

Willi Kohl and his inspector candidate climbed from the DKW. They heard more sirens and glanced up to see a truck of SS troops speeding along the roads – yet another installment of the secret security alert, even more extensive than earlier, it seemed, with random roadblocks now being set up throughout the city. Kohl and Janssen themselves were stopped. The SS guard glanced with disdain at the Kripo ID and waved them through. He didn’t respond to the inspector’s query about what was happening and merely snapped, “Move along.”

Kohl now rang the bell beside the thick front door. The inspector tapped his foot with impatience as they waited. Two lengthy rings later a stocky landlady in a dark dress and apron opened the door, eyes wide at the sight of two stern men in suits.

“Hail Hitler. I’m sorry, sirs, that I didn’t get here sooner but my legs aren’t-”

“Inspector Kohl, with the Kripo.” He showed his identity card so the woman would relax somewhat; at least they were not Gestapo.

“Do you know this man?” Janssen displayed the photo taken in Dresden Alley.

“Ach, that’s Mr. Morgan, who lives here! He doesn’t look… Is he dead?”

“Yes, he is.”

“God in heav-” The politically questionable phrase died in her mouth.

“We’d like to see his rooms.”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Follow me.” They walked into a courtyard so overwhelmingly bleak, Kohl thought, that it would sadden even Mozart’s irrepressible Papageno. The woman rocked back and forth as she walked. She said breathlessly, “I always thought him a little strange, to tell the truth, sirs.” This was served up with careful glances at Kohl, to make it clear that she was no confederate of Morgan’s, in case he’d been killed by the National Socialists themselves, and yet that his behavior wasn’t so suspicious that she should have denounced him herself.

“We haven’t seen him for a whole day. He went out just before lunch yesterday and he never returned.”

They went through another locked door at the end of the courtyard and up two flights of stairs, which reeked of onion and pickle.

“How long had he lived here?” Kohl asked.

“Three months. He paid for six in advance. And tipped me…” Her voice faded. “But not much.”

“The rooms were furnished?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any visitors you recall?”

“None that I knew of. None that I let into the building.”

“Show her the drawing, Janssen.”

He displayed the picture of Paul Schumann. “Have you seen this man?”

“No, sir. Is he dead too?” She added abruptly, “I mean, sir, no, I’ve never seen him.”

Kohl looked into her eyes. They were evasive, but with fear, not deception, and he believed her. Under questioning, she told him that Morgan was a businessman, he took no phone calls here and picked up his mail at the post office. She didn’t know if he had an office elsewhere. He never said anything specific about his job.

“Leave us now.”

“Hail Hitler,” she replied and scurried off like a mouse.

Kohl looked around the room. “So you see how I made an incorrect deduction, Janssen?”

“How is that, sir?”

“I assumed Mr. Morgan was German because he wore clothes made of Hitler cloth. But not all foreigners are wealthy enough to live on Under the Lindens and to buy top-of-the-line at KaDeWe, though that is our impression.”

Janssen thought for a moment. “That’s true, sir. But there could be another reason he wore ersatz clothes.”

“That he wished to masquerade as a German?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, Janssen. Though perhaps he wanted not so much to masquerade as one of us but more to not draw attention to himself. But either makes him suspicious. Now let’s see if we can make our mystery less mysterious. Start with the closets.”

The inspector candidate opened a door and began his examination of the contents.

Kohl himself chose the less demanding search and eased into a creaking chair to look through the documents on Morgan’s desk. The American had been, it seemed, a middleman of sorts, providing services for a number of U.S. companies in Germany. For a commission he would match an American buyer with a German seller and vice versa. When American businessmen came to town Morgan would be hired to entertain them and arrange meetings with German representatives from Borsig, Bata Shoes, Siemens, I.G. Farben, Opel, dozens of others.

There were several pictures of Morgan and documents confirming his identity. But it was curious, Kohl thought, that there were no truly personal effects. No family photographs, no mementos.

…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…

Kohl considered the implications of this absence of personal information. Did it mean he was a loner? Or was there another reason for keeping his personal life secret?

Janssen dug through the closet. “And is there anything in particular I ought to be looking for, sir?”

Embezzled money, a married mistress’s handkerchief, a letter of extortion, a note from a pregnant teenager… any of the indicia of motive that might explain why poor Mr. Morgan had died brutally on the immaculate cobblestones of Dresden Alley.

“Look for anything that enlightens us, in any way, regarding the case. I can describe it no better than that. It is the hardest part of being a detective. Use your instinct, use your imagination.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kohl continued his own examination of the desk.

A moment later Janssen called, “Look at this, sir. Mr. Morgan has some pictures of naked women. They were in a box here.”

“Are they commercially made? Or did he take them himself?”

“No, they are postcards, sir. He bought them somewhere.”

“Yes, yes, then they do not interest us, Janssen. You must discern between the times that a man’s vices are relevant and when they are not. And, I promise you, voluptuous postcards are not presently important. Please, continue your search.”

Some men grow calm in direct proportion to their desperation. Such men are rare, and they are particularly dangerous, because, while their ruthlessness is not diminished, they are never careless.

Robert Taggert was one such man. He was livid that some goddamn button man from Brooklyn had out-thought him, had jeopardized his future, but he was not going to let emotion cloud his judgment.

He knew how Schumann had figured things out. There was a piece of wire on the floor of the shed and bits of lead next to it. Of course, he’d checked the bore of the gun and found it plugged. Taggert thought angrily, Why the hell didn’t I empty the powder out of his shells and recrimp the bullets back into the brass casing? There’d have been no danger to Ernst that way and Schumann never would have figured out the betrayal until it was too late and the SS troops were around the shed.

But, he reflected, the matter wasn’t hopeless.

After a second brief meeting in the Olympic pressroom with Himmler and Heydrich, during which he told them he knew little more of the plot than what he’d already explained, he left the stadium, telling the Germans that he would contact Washington at once and see if they had more details. Taggert left them both, muttering about Jewish and Russian conspiracies. He was surprised he’d been allowed out of the stadium without being detained – his arrest would not have been logical but was certainly a risk in a country top-heavy with suspicion and paranoia.

Taggert now considered his quarry. Paul Schumann was not stupid, of course. He’d been set up to be a Russian and he’d know that was whom the Germans would be looking for. He’d have ditched his fake identity by now and be an American again. But Taggert preferred not to tell the Germans that; it would be better to produce the dead “Russian,” along with his confederates, a gang-ring criminal and a woman dissident – Käthe Richter undoubtedly had some Kosi-sympathizing friends, adding to the credibility of the Russian assassin scenario.

Desperate, yes.

But, as he steered the white van south over the Stormtrooper-brown canal then east, he remained calm as stone. He parked on a busy street and climbed out. There was no doubt that Schumann would return to the boardinghouse for Käthe Richter. He’d adamantly insisted on taking the woman with him back to America. Which meant that, even now, he wasn’t going to leave her behind. Taggert also knew that he’d come in person, not call her; Schumann knew the dangers of tapped phones in Germany.

Continuing quickly through the streets, feeling the comforting bump of the pistol against his hip, he turned the corner and proceeded into Magdeburger Alley. He paused and examined the short street carefully. It seemed deserted, dusty in the afternoon heat. He casually walked past Käthe Richter’s boardinghouse and then, sensing no threat, returned quickly and descended to the basement entrance. He shouldered open the door then slipped into the dank cellar.

Taggert climbed the wooden stairs, keeping to the sides of the steps to minimize the creaks. He came to the top, eased the doorway open and, pulling the pistol from his pocket, stepped out into the ground-floor hallway. Empty. No sounds, no movement other than the frantic buzzing of a huge fly trapped between two panes of glass.

He walked the length of the corridor, listening at each door, hearing nothing. Finally he returned to the door on which hung a crudely painted sign that read, Landlady.

He knocked. “Miss Richter?” He wondered what she looked like. It had been the real Reginald Morgan who’d arranged for these rooms for Schumann, and apparently they’d never met; she and Morgan had spoken on the phone and exchanged a letter of agreement and cash through the pneumatic delivery system that crisscrossed Berlin.

Another rap on the door. “I’ve come about a room. The front door was open.”

No response.

He tried the door. It was not locked. He slipped inside and noted a suitcase resting open on the bed, clothes and books around it. This reassured him; it meant Schumann hadn’t returned yet. Where was she, though? Perhaps she wanted to collect money she was owed or, more likely, borrow what she could from friends and family. Emigrating from Germany through proper channels meant leaving with nothing more than clothes and pocket money; thinking she’d be leaving illegally with Schumann, she’d get as much cash as she could. The radio was on, the lights. She’d be back soon.

Taggert noticed next to the door a rack containing keys for all the rooms. He found the set to Schumann’s and stepped into the corridor again. He walked quietly up the hall. In a swift motion he unlocked the door, pushed inside and lifted his pistol.

The living room was empty. He locked the door then stepped silently into the bedroom. Schumann was not here, though his suitcase was. Taggert stood in the middle of the room, debating. Schumann was sentimental perhaps in his concern for the woman but he was a thorough professional. Before he entered he would look through the windows in the front and back to see if anybody was here.

Taggert decided to lie in wait. He settled on the only realistic option: the closet. He’d leave the door open an inch or two so he could hear Schumann enter. When the button man was in the midst of packing his bag, Taggert would slip out of the closet and kill him. If he was lucky Käthe Richter would be with him and he could murder her as well. If not, he’d wait in her room. She might arrive first, of course, in which case he could kill her then or wait until Schumann returned. He’d have to consider which was best. He’d then scour the rooms to make certain that there was no trace of Schumann’s real identity and call the SS and Gestapo to let them know that the Russian had been stopped.

Taggert stepped inside the large closet, swung the door nearly shut and undid his top several shirt buttons to alleviate the terrible heat. He breathed deeply, sucking air into his aching lungs. Sweat dotted his forehead and prickled the skin in the pits of his arms. But that mattered not one iota. Robert Taggert was wholly sustained, no, intoxicated, by an element far better than damp oxygen: the euphoria of power. The boy from low, gray Hartford, the boy beaten simply because he was a sharper thinker but a slower runner than the others in his low, gray neighborhood had just met Adolf Hitler himself, the most savvy politician on the face of the earth. He had seen the man’s searing blue eyes regard him with admiration and respect, a respect that would soon be echoed in America when he returned home and reported about the success of his mission.

Ambassador to England, to Spain. Yes, even here eventually, the country he loved. He could go anywhere he wished.

Wiping his face again, he wondered how long he would have to wait for Schumann to return.

The answer to that question came just a moment later. Taggert heard the front door of the boardinghouse open and heavy footsteps in the hall. They continued past this room. There was a knocking.

“Käthe?” came the distant voice.

It was Paul Schumann speaking.

Would he go inside her apartment to wait?

No… The footsteps returned in this direction.

Taggert heard the jangle of the key, the squeak of old hinges and then a click as the door closed. Paul Schumann had walked into the room where he would die.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Heart pounding like any hunter close to his prey, Robert Taggert listened carefully.

“Käthe?” Schumann’s voice called.

Morgan heard the creak of boards, the sound of water running in the sink. The gulp of a man drinking thirstily.

Taggert lifted his pistol. It would be better to shoot him in the chest, front on, as if he’d been attacking. The SS would want him alive, of course, to interrogate him and wouldn’t be happy if Taggert shot the man in the back. Still, he could take no chances. Schumann was too large and too dangerous to confront face-to-face. He’d tell Himmler that he’d had no choice; the assassin had tried to escape or grab a knife. Taggert had been forced to shoot him.

He heard the man walk to the bedroom. And a moment later, the sounds of rummaging through drawers as he filled his suitcase.

Now, he thought.

Taggert pushed one of the two closet doors open further. This gave him a view of the bedroom. He raised the pistol.

But Schumann wasn’t visible. Taggert could see only the suitcase on the bed. And scattered around it were some books, and other objects. Then he frowned, looking at a pair of shoes sitting in the bedroom doorway. They hadn’t been there before.

Oh, no…

Taggert realized that Schumann had walked to the bedroom but had then slipped off his shoes and eased back into the living room in stocking feet. He’d been pitching books through the doorway onto the bed to make Taggert think he was still there! That meant -

The huge fist crashed through the closet door as if it were spun sugar. The knuckles struck Taggert in the neck and jaw and he saw searing red in his vision as he staggered into the living room. He dropped the pistol and grabbed his throat, pressing the agonized flesh.

Schumann gripped Taggert by the lapels and flung him across the room. He crashed into a table and fell to the floor, where he lay crumpled like the German bisque doll that had landed beside him, unbroken, staring at the ceiling with her eerie, violet eyes.

“You’re a ringer, right? You’re not Reggie Morgan.”

Paul didn’t bother to explain that he’d done what every smart button man has to do – memorize the appearance of a room when he left it and then match that memory with what the place looks like when he returned. He’d seen the closet door, which he’d left closed, was open a few inches. Knowing that Taggert would have to track him down and kill him, he knew that’s where the man was hiding.

“I-”

“Who?” Paul growled.

When the man said nothing, Paul took him by the collar with one hand and, with the other, emptied his jacket pocket: a wallet, a number of American passports, a U.S. diplomatic identity card in the name of Robert Taggert and the Stormtrooper card he’d flashed at Paul in the alley when they’d met.

“Don’t move,” Paul muttered, then examined the find. The wallet was Reginald Morgan’s; it contained an ID card, some business cards with his name and an address on Bremer Street in Berlin and one in Washington, D.C. There were several photographs too – all depicting the man who’d been killed in Dresden Alley. One photo had been taken at a social function. He stood between an elderly man and woman, his arms around them both, all smiling at the Kodak.

One of the passports, well used and filled with entry and exit stamps, was in Morgan’s name. It too contained a picture of the man from the alley.

Another passport – the one he’d showed Paul yesterday – also contained the name Reginald Morgan but the picture was of the man in front of him. Now, he held it under a lamp and examined the document closely. It seemed phony. A second passport, which seemed genuine, contained dozens of stamps and visas and was in the name of Robert Taggert, like the diplomatic ID card. The two remaining passports, a U.S. one in the name of Robert Gardner and a German one in the name of Artur Schmidt, had pictures of the man here.

So this guy on the floor in front of him had killed his contact in Berlin and taken over his identity, Paul understood.

“Okay, what’s the game?”

“Just settle down, buddy. Don’t do anything stupid.” The man had dropped the stiff Reggie Morgan persona. The one who emerged was slick, like one of Lucky Luciano’s sharkskin-suited Manhattan underbosses.

Paul held up the passport he thought was genuine. “This’s you. Taggert, right?”

The man pressed his jaw and neck where Paul had hit him and rubbed the reddened area. “You got me, Paulio.”

“How’d it work?” He frowned. “You intercepted the pass codes about the tram, right? That’s why Morgan did a double-take in the alley. He thought I was the rat because I flubbed the phrase about the tram, same as I thought about him. Then you swapped documents when you were searching the body.” Paul read the Stormtrooper card. “‘Veterans’ Relief.’ Crap,” he snapped, furious he hadn’t looked at it more closely when Taggert had first flashed it at him. “Who the hell are you, mister?”

“A businessman. I just do odd jobs for people.”

“And you got picked because you looked a little like the real Reggie Morgan?”

This offended him. “I got picked because I’m good.”

“What about Max?”

“He was legit. Morgan paid him a hundred marks to get him the wire on Ernst. Then I paid him two hundred to pretend I was Morgan.”

Paul nodded. “That’s why the sap was so nervous. It wasn’t the SS he was afraid of; it was me.”

But the history of the deception seemed to bore Taggert. He continued impatiently. “We’ve got some horse trading to do, my friend. Now-”

“What was the point of this?”

“Paulio, we don’t exactly have time for chats, don’t you think? Half the Gestapo’s looking for you.”

“No, Taggert. If I’m understanding this right, thanks to you, they’re looking for some Russian. They don’t even know what I look like. And you wouldn’t lead ’em back here – at least not until after you’d killed me. So we’ve got all the time in the world. Now, spill.”

“This is about bigger things than you and me, buddy.” Taggert moved his jaw in a slow circle. “You fucking loosened my teeth.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s not-”

Paul stepped closer, closing his hand into a fist.

“Okay, okay, calm down, big guy. You want to know the truth? Here’s the lowdown: There’re a lot of people back home that don’t want to get into another fight over here.”

“That’s what I’m doing, for God’s sake. Stopping the rearmament.”

“Actually, we don’t give a fig about Hun rearmament. What we care about is keeping Hitler happy. Get it? Show him the U.S. is on his side.”

Paul finally understood. “So I was the Easter lamb. You set me up as a Russian killer, and then you rat me out – so it looks to Hitler like the U.S. is his good pal, is that it?”

Taggert nodded. “Pretty much on the money, Paulio.”

“Are you goddamn blind?” Paul said. “Don’t you see what he’s doing here? How can anybody be on their side?”

“Christ, Schumann, what’s the hitch? Maybe Hitler takes over part of Poland, Austria, the Sudetenland.” He laughed. “Hell, he can even have France. No skin off our nose.”

“He’s murdering people. Doesn’t anybody see that?”

“Just a few Jews-”

“ What? Are you hearing what you’re saying?”

Taggert held up his hands. “Look, I don’t mean it like that. Things here are only temporary. The Nazis’re like kids with a new toy: their country. They’ll get tired of this Aryan crap before the year is out. Hitler’s all talk. He’ll calm down and realize eventually that he needs Jews.”

“No,” Paul said emphatically. “You’re wrong there. Hitler’s nuts. He’s Bugsy Siegel times a thousand.”

“Well, okay, Paulio, it’s not for you or me to decide stuff like that. Let’s concede you caught us. We tried to pull a fast one and, good for you, you tumbled to it. But you need me, buddy-boy. You’re not getting out of this country without my help. So here’s what we’re going to do: Let’s you and me find some Russian-looking sap, kill him and call the Gestapo. Nobody’s seen you. I’ll even let you play the hero. You can meet Hitler and Göring. Get a goddamn medal. You and the broad can go back home. And I’ll sweeten the pot: I’ll throw some business to your friend Webber. Black market dollars. He’d love it. How’s that sound? I can make it happen. And everybody wins. Or… you can die here.”

Paul asked, “I’ve got one question. Was it Bull Gordon? Was he behind it?”

“Him? Naw. He wasn’t part of it. It was… other interests.”

“What the hell does that mean, ‘interests’? I want an answer.”

“Sorry, Paulio. I didn’t get to where I am now by having a loose tongue. Nature of the business, you know.”

“You’re as bad as the Nazis.”

“Yeah?” Taggert muttered. “And who’re you to talk, button man?” He stood up, dusting his jacket off. “So whatta you say? Let’s find ourselves some Slav hobo, cut his throat and give the Huns their Bolshevik. Let’s do it.”

Everybody wins…

Without shifting his weight, without narrowing his eyes, without giving any hint of what he was about to do, Paul drove his fist directly into the man’s chest. Taggert’s eyes snapped wide as his breath stopped. He never even glanced toward Paul’s left fist as it shot forward and crushed his throat. By the time Taggert dropped to the floor, his extremities were shivering in death throes and a rattle echoed from his wide-open mouth. Whether it was a ruptured heart or a broken neck that killed him, he was dead within thirty seconds.

Paul stared down at the body for a long moment, hands shaking – not from the powerful blows but from the fury within him at the betrayal. And at the man’s words.

He can even have France… Just a few Jews…

Paul hurried into the bedroom, stripped off the sweat clothes he’d stolen at the stadium, sponged off with water from the basin in the bedroom and dressed. He heard a knocking on the door. Ah, Käthe had returned. He realized suddenly that Taggert’s body still lay visible in the living room. He hurried out to move the corpse into the bedroom.

Just as he was bending down to drag it into the closet, though, the front door to the apartment opened. Paul looked up. It hadn’t been Käthe knocking. He found himself staring at two men. One was round, mustachioed, wearing a wrinkled cream-colored suit with a waistcoat. A Panama hat was in his hand. A slim, younger man in a dark suit stood beside him, gripping a black automatic pistol.

No! It was the very same cops who’d been dogging him since yesterday. He sighed and slowly stood.

“Ach, at last, is Mr. Paul Schumann,” said the older man in heavily accented English, blinking in surprise. “I am Detective-inspector Kohl. You are under arrest, sir, for the murder of Reginald Morgan in Dresden Alley yesterday.” He glanced down at Taggert’s body and added, “And now, it seems, for the murder of someone else as well.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Keep your hands still. Yes, yes, please, Mr. Schumann. Keep them raised.”

The American was quite large, Kohl observed. Easily four inches taller than the inspector himself and broad. The street artist’s rendering had been accurate but the man’s face was marred with more scars than in the sketch, and the eyes… well, they were a soft blue, cautious yet serene.

“Janssen, see if that man is indeed dead,” Kohl said, returning to German. He covered Schumann with his own pistol.

The young detective leaned down and examined the figure, though there was little doubt in Kohl’s mind he was looking at a corpse.

The young officer nodded and stood up.

Willi Kohl was as shocked as he was pleased to find Schumann here. He’d never expected this. Just twenty minutes before, in Reginald Morgan’s room on Bremer Street, the inspector had found a letter of confirmation taking rooms in this boardinghouse on behalf of Paul Schumann. But Kohl was sure that after he’d killed Morgan, Schumann would have been smarter than to remain in the residence his victim had arranged for him. He and Janssen had sped here in hopes of finding some witnesses or evidence that might lead to Schumann, but hardly the American himself.

“So, are you one of those Gestapo police?” Schumann asked in German. Indeed, as the witnesses had reported, he had just a trace of accent. The G was that of a born Berliner.

“No, we are with the Criminal Police.” He displayed his identification card. “Janssen, search him.”

The young officer expertly patted every place that a pocket – obvious or secret – might be. The inspector candidate discovered his U.S. passport, money, comb, matches and a pack of cigarettes.

Janssen handed everything over to Kohl, who told his assistant to handcuff Schumann. He then flipped open the passport and examined it carefully. It appeared authentic. Paul John Schumann.

“I didn’t kill Reggie Morgan. He did.” A nod toward the body. “His name is Taggert. Robert Taggert. He tried to kill me too. That’s why we were fighting.”

Kohl wasn’t sure that “fighting” was the right word to describe a confrontation between this tall American, with red calloused knuckles and huge arms, and the victim, who had the physique of Joseph Goebbels.

“Fight?”

“He pulled a gun on me.” Schumann nodded toward a pistol lying on the floor. “I had to defend myself.”

“Our Spanish Star Modelo A, sir,” Janssen said excitedly. “The murder weapon!”

The same type of gun as the murder weapon, Kohl thought. A bullet comparison would tell if it was the same gun or not. But he would not correct a colleague, even a junior one, in front of a suspect. Janssen draped a handkerchief around the weapon, picked it up and noted the serial number.

Kohl licked his pencil, jotted the number into his notebook and asked Janssen for the list of people who had bought such guns, supplied by police precincts around town. The young man produced it from his briefcase. “Now get the fingerprint kit from the car and print the gun and our friends here. Both the live one and the dead one.”

“Yes, sir.” He stepped outside.

The inspector flipped through the names on the list, seeing no Schumann.

“Try Taggert,” the American said, “or one of those names.” He nodded toward a stack of passports sitting on the table. “He had those on him.”

“Please, you may sit.” The inspector helped the cuffed Schumann onto the couch. He’d never had a suspect assist him in an investigation before but Kohl picked up the stack of passports that Schumann suggested might be revealing.

And indeed they were. One passport was Reginald Morgan’s, the man killed in Dresden Alley. It was clearly authentic. The others contained pictures of the man lying at their feet but were issued in different names. One could not be a criminal investigator in National Socialist Germany these days without being familiar with forged documents. Of the others, only the passport in the name of Robert Taggert seemed genuine to Kohl and was the only one filled with apparently legitimate stamps and visas. He compared all the names with those on the list of gun purchasers. He stopped at one entry.

Janssen appeared in the doorway with the fingerprint kit and the Leica. Kohl held up the list. “It seems the deceased did buy the Modelo A last month, Janssen. Under the name of Artur Schmidt.”

Which still didn’t preclude Schumann from being Morgan’s killer; Taggert might simply have given or sold him the gun. “Proceed with the fingerprinting,” Kohl instructed. The young officer opened the briefcase and began his task.

“I didn’t kill Reggie Morgan, I’m telling you. He did.”

“Please, say nothing now, Mr. Schumann.”

Reginald Morgan’s wallet was also here. Kohl looked through it. He paused and looked at the picture of the man at a social event, standing with two older people.

We know something else about him… that he was somebody’s son… And perhaps he was somebody’s brother. And maybe somebody’s husband or lover…

The inspector candidate proceeded to dust powder on the gun and then took Taggert’s prints. The young man said to Schumann, “Sir, if you could sit forward please.” Kohl approved of his protégé’s polite tone.

Schumann cooperated and the young man printed him then wiped the ink off his fingers with the astringent cleaner that was included in the kit. Janssen placed the gun and the two printed cards on a table for his boss’s inspection. “Sir?”

Kohl pulled out his monocle. He examined the weapon and the men’s prints closely. He was no expert but his opinion was that the only prints on the pistol were Taggert’s.

Janssen’s eyes narrowed and he nodded to the floor.

Kohl followed the glance. A battered leather bag there. Ah, the telltale satchel! Kohl walked over and opened the clasp. He leafed through the contents – deciphering the English as best he could. There were many notes about Berlin, sports, the Olympics, a press pass in the name of Paul Schumann, dozens of innocuous clippings from American newspapers.

So, the inspector thought, he’s been lying. The bag placed him at the murder scene.

But as Kohl examined it carefully he noted that, while it was old, yes, the leather was supple, not flaking.

Then he glanced at the body in front of them. Kohl set the case down and crouched over the dead man’s shoes. They were brown, worn, and shedding bits of leather. The color and shine were just like the ones they’d found on the cobblestones of Dresden Alley and on the floor of the Summer Garden restaurant. Schumann’s shoes were not shedding such flakes. The inspector’s face twisted in irritation at himself. Another erroneous assumption. Schumann had been telling the truth. Perhaps.

“Search him now, Janssen,” Kohl said, rising. A nod toward the body.

The inspector candidate dropped to his knees and began examining the corpse carefully.

Kohl lifted an eyebrow at Janssen, who continued the search. He found money, a penknife, a packet of cigarettes. A pocket watch on a heavy gold chain. Then the young man frowned. “Look, sir.” He handed the inspector some silk clothing labels, undoubtedly cut from the garments Reginald Morgan had worn in Dresden Alley. They bore the names of German clothing manufacturers or stores.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” Schumann said.

“Yes, yes, you may talk in a minute. Janssen, contact headquarters. Have someone there get in touch with the American embassy. Ask about this Robert Taggert. Tell them he’s in possession of a diplomatic identity card. Say nothing about his death at this time.”

“Yes, sir.” Janssen located the phone, which Kohl noted was disconnected from the wall, a common sight nowadays. The Olympic flag on the building, unaccompanied by the National Socialist banner, told him the place was owned or managed by a Jew or someone else in disfavor; the phones might be tapped. “Call from the wireless in the DKW, Janssen.”

The inspector candidate nodded and left the room again.

“Now, sir, you may enlighten me. And please spare me no details.”

Schumann said in German, “I came over here with the Olympic team. I’m a sportswriter. A freelance journalist. Do you-?”

“Yes, yes, I am familiar with the term.”

“I was supposed to meet Reggie Morgan and he’d introduce me to some people for the stories. I wanted what we call ‘color.’ Information about the livelier parts of the city, gamblers, hustlers, boxing clubs.”

“And this Reggie Morgan did what? As a profession, I mean.”

“He was just an American businessman I’d heard about. He’d lived here for a few years and knew the place pretty well.”

Kohl pointed out, “You came over with the Olympic team and yet theyseemed unwilling to tell me anything about you. That’s curious, don’t you think?”

Schumann laughed bitterly. “You live in this country and you ask me why anyone would be reluctant to answer a policeman’s questions?”

It is a matter of state security…

Willi Kohl allowed no expression to cross his face but he was momentarily embarrassed at the truth of this comment. He regarded Schumann closely. The American appeared at ease. Kohl could detect no signs of fabrication, which was one of the inspector’s particular talents.

“Continue.”

“I was to meet with Morgan yesterday.”

“That would have been when? And where?”

“Around noon. Outside a beer hall on Spener Street.”

Right next to Dresden Alley, Kohl reflected. And around the time of the shooting. Surely, if he had something to hide, he would not place himself near the scene of the killing. Or would he? The National Socialist criminals were by and large stupid and obvious. Kohl sensed he was in the presence of a very smart man, though whether he was a criminal or not, the inspector could not tell. “But, as you contend, the real Reginald Morgan did not show up. It was this Taggert.”

“That’s right. Though I didn’t know it at the time. He claimed he was Morgan.”

“And what happened at this meeting?”

“It was very brief. He was agitated. He pulled me into this alley, said something had come up and I was supposed to meet him later. At a restaurant-”

“The name?”

“The Summer Garden.”

“Where the wheat beer was not to your liking.”

Schumann blinked, then replied, “Is it to anyone’s liking?”

Kohl refrained from smiling. “And you met Taggert again, as planned, at the Summer Garden?”

“That’s right. A friend of his joined us there. I don’t recall his name.”

Ah, the laborer.

“He whispered something to Taggert, who looked worried and said we ought to beat it.” A frown at the literal German translation of what would be an English idiom. “I mean, leave quickly. This friend thought there were some Gestapo or something around, and Taggert agreed. We slipped out the side door. I should’ve guessed then that something wasn’t right. But it was kind of an adventure, you know. That’s just what I was looking for, for my stories.”

“Local color,” Kohl said slowly, reflecting that it is so much easier to make a big lie believable when the liar feeds you small truths. “And did you meet this Taggert at any other times?” A nod toward the body. “Other than today, of course?” Kohl wondered if the man would admit going to November 1923 Square.

“Yes,” Schumann said. “Some square later that day. A bad neighborhood. Near Oranienburger Station. By a big statue of Hitler. We were going to meet some other contact. But that guy never showed up.”

“And you ‘beat it’ from there as well.”

“That’s right. Taggert got spooked again. It was clear something was off. That’s when I decided I better cut things off with the guy.”

“What happened,” Kohl asked quickly, “to your Stetson hat?”

A concerned look. “Well, I’ll be honest, Detective Kohl. I was walking down the street and saw some young…” A hesitation as he sought a word. “Beasts… toughs?”

“Yes, yes, thugs.”

“In brown uniforms.”

“Stormtroopers.”

“Thugs,” Schumann said with some disgust. “They were beating up a bookseller and his wife. I thought these men were going to kill them. I stopped them. The next thing I knew there were a dozen of them after me. I threw some clothes away, down the sewer, so they wouldn’t recognize me.”

This is a wiry man, Kohl thought. And clever.

“Are you going to arrest me for beating up some of your Nazi thugs?”

“That doesn’t interest me, Mr. Schumann. But what does very much interest me is the purpose of this whole masquerade orchestrated by Mr. Taggert.”

“He was trying to fix some of the Olympic events.”

“Fix?”

The American thought for a moment. “To have a player lose intentionally. That’s what he’d been doing here over the past several months, putting together gambling pools in Berlin. Taggert’s colleagues were going to place bets against some of the American favorites. I have a press pass and can get close to the athletes. I was supposed to bribe them to lose on purpose. That’s why he was so nervous for the past couple days, I guess. He owed some of your gang rings, he called them, a lot of money.”

“Morgan was killed because this Taggert wished to impersonate him?”

“That’s right.”

“Quite an elaborate plot,” Kohl observed.

“Quite a lot of money was involved. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Another glance at the limp body on the floor. “I noted that you said you decided to end your relationship with Mr. Taggert as of yesterday. And yet here he is. How did this tragic ‘fight,’ as you call it, transpire?”

“He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was desperate for the money – he’d borrowed a lot to place the bets. He came here today to threaten me. He said they were going to make it look like I killed Morgan.”

“To extort you into helping them.”

“That’s right. But I said I didn’t care. I was going to turn him in anyway. He pulled that gun on me. We struggled and he fell. It seems he broke his neck.”

Kohl’s mind instinctively applied the information Schumann had provided against the facts and the inspector’s awareness of human nature. Some details fit; some were jarring. Willi Kohl always reminded himself to keep an open mind at crime scenes, refrain from reaching conclusions too quickly. Now, this process happened automatically; his thoughts were deadlocked. It was as if a punch card had jammed in one of the DeHoMag sorting machines.

“You fought to save yourself and he died in a fall.”

A woman’s voice said, “Yes, that is exactly what happened.”

Kohl turned to the figure in the doorway. She was about forty, slim and attractive, though her face was tired, troubled.

“Please, your name?”

“Käthe Richter.” She automatically handed her card to him. “I manage this building in the owner’s absence.”

Her papers confirmed her identity and he returned the ID. “And you were a witness to this event?”

“I was here. In the hallway. I heard some disturbance from inside and opened the door partway. I saw the whole thing.”

“And yet you were gone when we arrived.”

“I was afraid. I saw your car pull up. I didn’t want to get involved.”

So she was on a Gestapo or SD list. “And yet here you are.”

“I debated for some moments. I took the chance that there are still some policemen in this city who are interested in the truth.” She said this defiantly.

Janssen stepped inside. He eyed the woman but Kohl said nothing about her. “Yes?” the inspector asked.

“Sir, the American embassy said they have no knowledge of a Robert Taggert.”

Kohl nodded as he continued to ponder the information. He stepped closer to Taggert’s body and said, “Quite a fortuitous fall. Fortuitous from your perspective, of course. And you, Miss Richter, I’ll ask you again – you saw the struggle firsthand? You must be honest with me.”

“Yes, yes. That man had a gun. He was going to kill Mr. Schumann.”

“Do you know the victim?”

“No, I don’t. I’ve never seen him.”

Kohl glanced again at the body then tucked his thumb into his vest watch pocket. “It’s a curious business, being a detective, Mr. Schumann. We try to read the clues and follow where they lead. And in this case the clues put me on your trail – indeed they led me here, directly to you – and now it seems those very same clues suggest that it was actually this other man I have been seeking all along.”

“Life’s funny sometimes.”

The phrase made no sense in German. Kohl assumed it was a translation of an American idiom but he deduced the meaning.

Which he certainly could not dispute.

He took his pipe from his pocket and, without lighting it, slipped it into his mouth and chewed on the stem for a moment. “Well, Mr. Schumann, I have decided not to detain you, not at this moment. I will let you leave, though I will retain your passport while I look into these matters in more depth. Do not leave Berlin. As you have probably seen, our various authorities are quite adept at locating people in our country. Now, I’m afraid, you will have to quit the boardinghouse. It’s a crime scene. Do you have another place to stay where I can contact you?”

Schumann thought for a moment. “I’ll get a room at the Hotel Metropol.”

Kohl wrote this down in his notebook and pocketed the man’s passport. “Very well, sir. Now, is there anything else you wish to tell me?”

“Not a thing, Inspector. I’ll cooperate however I can.”

“You may leave now. Take only your necessities. Uncuff him, Janssen.”

The inspector candidate did so. Schumann walked to his suitcase. As Kohl watched carefully, he packed a shaving kit with a razor, shaving soap, toothbrush and dental cream. The inspector handed him back his cigarettes, matches, money and comb.

Schumann glanced at the woman. “Can you walk me to the tram stop?”

“Yes, of course.”

Kohl asked, “Miss Richter, you live here in the building?”

“The back apartment on this floor, yes.”

“Very well. I’ll be in touch with you, as well.”

Together, they walked out the door.

After they had gone Janssen frowned and said, “Sir, how can you let him go? Did you believe his story?”

“Some of it. Enough to allow me to release him temporarily.” Kohl explained to the inspector candidate his concerns: He believed that the killing here had been in self-defense. And it did indeed appear that Taggert was the killer of Reginald Morgan. But there remained unanswered questions. If they had been in any other country, Kohl would have detained Schumann until he verified everything. But he knew that if he now ordered the man held while he investigated further, the Gestapo would peremptorily declare the American to be the guilty “foreigner” Himmler wanted and he’d be in Moabit Prison or Oranienburg camp by nightfall.

“Not only would a man die for a crime he probably did not commit but the case will be declared closed and we’ll never find the complete truth – which is, of course, the whole point of our job.”

“But shouldn’t I at least follow him?”

Kohl sighed. “Janssen, how many criminals have we ever apprehended by following them? What do they say in the American crime shockers? ‘Shadowing’?”

“Well, none, I would guess, but-”

“So we will leave that to fictional detectives. We know where we can find him.”

“But the Metropol is a huge hotel with many exits. He could escape from us easily there.”

“That does not interest us, Janssen. We’ll continue to look into Mr. Schumann’s role in this drama shortly. Our priority now, though, is to examine the room here carefully… Ach, congratulations, Inspector Candidate.”

“Why is that, sir?”

“You have solved the Dresden Alley murder.” He nodded toward the body. “And, what’s more, the perpetrator is dead; we need not be inconvenienced by a trial.”

Chapter Thirty

Accompanied by an SS bodyguard, Colonel Reinhard Ernst had taken Rudy back home to Charlottenburg. He was grateful for the boy’s young age; the child hadn’t completely understood the peril at the stadium. The grim faces of the men, the urgency in the pressroom and the fast drive away from the complex had been troubling to him, but he could not fathom the significance of the events. All he knew was that his Opa had fallen and hurt himself slightly, even though his grandfather had made light of the “adventure,” as he called it.

The highlights of the afternoon for the boy, in fact, had not been the magnificent stadium, nor meeting some of the most powerful men in the world, nor the alarm over the assassin. It had been the dogs; Rudy now wanted one himself, preferably two. He talked endlessly about the animals.

“Construction everywhere,” Ernst muttered to Gertrud. “I’ve ruined my suit.”

True, she wasn’t pleased but she was more troubled that he’d taken a fall. She examined his head closely. “You have a bump. You must be more careful, Reinie. I’ll bring you ice for it.”

He hated to be less than honest with her. But he simply would not tell her that he’d been the target of an assassin. If she’d learned that, she would implore him to stay home, no, insist. And he would have to refuse, as he rarely did with his wife. Hitler may have buried himself beneath corpses during the November ’23 rebellion to remain out of harm’s way, but Ernst would never avoid an enemy when his duty required otherwise.

Under different circumstances, yes, he might have remained home for a day or two until the assassin was found, which surely he would be, now that the great mechanism of the Gestapo, SD and SS was in motion. But Ernst had a vital matter to attend to today: conducting the tests at the college with Doctor-professor Keitel and preparing the memo about the Waltham Study for the Leader.

He now asked to have the housekeeper bring him some coffee, bread and sausage in the den.

“But Reinie,” Gertrud said, exasperated, “it’s Sunday. The goose…”

Afternoon meals on the day of rest were a long tradition in the Ernst household, not to be broken if at all possible.

“I’m sorry, my dear. I have no choice. Next week I will spend the entire weekend with you and the family.”

He walked into the den and sat at his desk, then began jotting notes.

Ten minutes later Gertrud herself appeared, carrying a large tray.

“I won’t have you eating a coarse meal,” she said, lifting the cloth off the tray.

He smiled and looked over the huge plate of roast goose with orange marmalade, cabbage, boiled potatoes and green beans with cardamon. He rose and kissed her on the cheek. She left him and, as he ate, without much appetite, he began to peck out a draft of the memo on his typewriter.

HIGHEST CONFIDENTIALITY

Adolf Hitler,

Leader, State Chancellor and President of the German

Nation and Commander of the Armed Forces

Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg,

State Minister of Defense

My Leader and my Minister:

You have asked for details of the Waltham Study being conducted by myself and Doctor-Professor Ludwig Keitel of Waltham Military College. I am pleased to describe the nature of the study and the results so far.

This study arises out of my instructions from you to make ready the German armed forces and to help them achieve most expeditiously the goals of our great nation, as you have set forth.

He paused and organized his thoughts. What to share and what not to share?

A half hour later he finished the page-and-a-half document, made a few penciled corrections. This draft would do for now. He would have Keitel read the document as well and make corrections, then Ernst would retype the final version tonight and personally deliver it to the Leader tomorrow. He wrote a note to Keitel asking for his comments and clipped it to the draft.

Carrying the tray downstairs, he said good-bye to Gertrud then left. Hitler had insisted that guards be stationed outside his house, at least until the assassin was caught. Ernst had no objection to this but he now asked that they remain out of sight so as not to alarm his family. He also acquiesced to the Leader’s demand that he not drive himself in his open Mercedes, as he preferred, but be driven in a closed auto by an armed SS bodyguard.

They drove first to Columbia House, at Tempelhof. The driver climbed out and looked around to make sure the entry area was safe. He walked to the other two guards, stationed in front of the door, spoke with them and they looked around too, though Ernst couldn’t imagine anyone being so foolish as to attempt an assassination in front of an SS detention center. After a moment they waved and Ernst climbed out of the car. He stepped through the front door and was led down the stairs, through several locked doors, and then into the cell area.

Walking down the long hallway again, hot and dank, stinking of urine and shit. What a disgusting way to treat people, he thought. The British, American and French soldiers he’d captured during the War had been treated with respect. Ernst had saluted the officers, chatted with the enlisted men, made sure they were warm and dry and fed. He now felt a burst of contempt for the brown-uniformed jailer who accompanied him down the corridor, softly whistling the “Horst Wessel Song” and occasionally banging on bars with his truncheon, simply to frighten the prisoners.

When they came to a cell three-quarters of the way down the corridor Ernst stopped, looked inside, his skin itching in the heat.

The two Fischer brothers were drenched with sweat. They were frightened, of course – everyone was frightened in this terrible place – but he saw something else in their eyes: youthful defiance.

Ernst was disappointed. The look told him they were going to reject his offer: They’d chosen a spell in Oranienburg? He’d thought for certain that Kurt and Hans would agree to participate in the Waltham Study. They would have been perfect.

“Good afternoon.”

The older one nodded. Ernst felt a strange chill. The boy resembled his own son. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? Perhaps it was the self-confidence and the serenity that hadn’t been there this morning. Perhaps it was just the lingering aftermath of the look in young Rudy’s eyes earlier. In any case, the similarity unnerved him.

“I need your answer now regarding your participation in our study.”

The brothers looked at each other. Kurt began to speak but it was the younger one who said, “We will do it.”

So, he’d been wrong. Ernst smiled and nodded, genuinely pleased.

The older brother then added, “Provided you let us send a letter to England.”

“A letter?”

“We wish to communicate with our parents.”

“That is not allowed, I’m afraid.”

“But you’re a colonel, right? Aren’t you someone who can decide what’s allowed and what isn’t?” Hans asked.

Ernst cocked his head and examined the boy. But his attention returned to the older brother. The resemblance to Mark was indeed uncanny. He hesitated then said, “One letter. But you must send it in the next two days, while you’re under my supervision. Your training sergeants won’t permit it, not a letter to London. They are definitely not someone who can decide what’s allowed and what isn’t.”

Another glance passed between the boys. Kurt nodded. The colonel did too. And then he saluted them – just as he’d said good-bye to his son. Not with a fascist extended arm but in a traditional gesture, lifting his flat palm to his forehead, which the SA guard pretended not to notice.

“Welcome to the new Germany,” Ernst said in a voice that was close to a whisper and belied the crisp salute.

They turned the corner and headed for Lützow Plaza, putting as much distance between them and the boardinghouse as possible before they found a taxi, Paul looking back often to make sure they weren’t being followed.

“We aren’t staying at the Metropol,” he said, gazing up and down the street. “I’ll find someplace safe. My friend Otto can do that. I’m sorry. But you’ll have to just leave everything back there. You can’t go back again.”

On the busy street corner they stopped. Absently his arm slipped around Käthe’s waist as he looked into traffic. But he felt her stiffen. Then she pulled away.

He glanced down at her, frowning.

“I am going back, Paul.” She spoke in a voice that was devoid of emotion.

“Käthe, what’s wrong?”

“I was telling the truth to the Kripo inspector.”

“You…”

“I was outside the door, looking in. You were the one who lied. You murdered that man in the room. There was no fight. He didn’t have a gun. He was standing there helpless, and you hit him and killed him. It was horrible. I haven’t seen anything so horrible since… since…”

The fourth square from the grass…

Paul was silent.

An open truck drove past. A half dozen Stormtroopers were in the back. They shouted out something to a group of people on the street, laughing. Some of the pedestrians waved back. The truck disappeared fast around a corner.

Paul led Käthe to a bench in a small park but she wouldn’t sit. “No,” she whispered. Arms folded across her chest, she stared at him coldly.

“It’s not as simple as you think,” he whispered.

“Simple?”

“There’s more to me, to why I’m here, yes. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to be involved.”

Now, at last, raw anger exploded. “Oh, there’s an excuse for lying! You didn’t want to get me involved. You asked me to come to America, Paul. How much more involved could I be?”

“I mean involved with my old life. This trip will be the end of that.”

“Old life? Are you a soldier?”

“In a way.” Then he hesitated. “No. That’s not true. I was a criminal in America. I came here to stop them.”

“Them?”

“Your enemies.” He nodded at one of the hundreds of red-white-and-black flags that stirred nearby in the breeze. “I was supposed to kill someone in the government here to stop him from starting another war. But afterwards, that part of my life will be over with. I’d have a clean record. I’d-”

“And when were you going to tell me this little secret of yours, Paul? When we got to London? To New York?”

“Believe me. It’s over with.”

“You used me.”

“I never-”

“Last night – that wonderful night – you had me show you Wilhelm Street. You were using me as cover, weren’t you? You wished to find a place where you could murder this man.”

He looked up at one of the stark, flapping banners and said nothing.

“And what if in America I did something that angered you? Would you hit me? Would you kill me?”

“Käthe! Of course not.”

“Ach, you say that. But you’ve lied before.” Käthe pulled a handkerchief from her purse. The smell of lilac touched him momentarily and his heart cried, as if it were the smell of incense at a loved one’s wake. She wiped her eyes and stuffed the cloth away. “Tell me one thing, Paul. How are you different from them? Tell me. How?… No, no, you are different. You’re crueller. Do you know why?” Choking on tears. “You gave me hope and then you took it away. With them, with the beasts in the garden, there is never any hope. At least they’re not deceitful like you. No, Paul. Fly back to your perfect country. I’ll stay here. I’ll stay until the knock on the door. And then I’ll be gone. Like my Michael.”

“Käthe, I haven’t been honest with you, no. But you have to leave with me… Please.”

“Do you know what our philosopher Nietzsche wrote? He said, ‘He who fights monsters must take care that he does not become a monster himself.’ Oh, how true that is, Paul. How true.”

“Please, come with me.” He took her by the shoulders, gripping her hard.

But Käthe Richter was strong too. She pulled his hands off and stepped back. Her eyes fixed on his and she whispered ruthlessly, “I’d rather share my country with ten thousand killers than my bed with one. ”

And turning on her heels, she hesitated for a moment then walked away quickly, drawing the glances of passersby, who wondered what might have caused such a fierce lovers’ spat.

Chapter Thirty-One

“Willi, Willi, Willi…”

Chief of Inspectors Friedrich Horcher drew the name out very slowly.

Kohl had returned to the Alex and was nearly to his office when his boss caught up with him. “Yes, sir?”

“I’ve been looking for you.”

“Yes? Have you?”

“It’s about that Gatow case. The shootings. You will recall?”

How could he forget? Those pictures would be burned into his mind forever. The women… the children… But now he felt the chill of fear again. Had the case in fact been a test, as he’d worried earlier? Had Heydrich’s boys waited to see if he’d drop the matter and now learned that he’d done worse: He’d secretly called the young gendarme at home about it?

Horcher tugged at his blood-red armband. “I have good news for you. The case has been solved. Charlottenburg too, the Polish workers. They were both the work of the same killer.”

Kohl’s initial relief that he was not going to be arrested turned quickly to bewilderment. “Who closed the case? Someone at Kripo?”

“No, no, it was the head of the gendarmerie himself. Meyerhoff. Imagine.”

Ach… The matter was beginning to crystalize – to Willi Kohl’s disgust. He wasn’t the least surprised at the rest of the tale that his boss laid out. “The killer was a Czech Jew. Deranged. Much like Vlad the Impaler. Was he Czech? Maybe Romanian or Hungarian, I don’t recall. Ha, history was always my poorest subject. In any case, the suspect was caught and confessed. He was handed over to the SS.” Horcher laughed. “They took time out from their important, and mysterious, security alert to actually do some police work.”

“Was there one accomplice or more?” Kohl asked.

“Accomplice? No, no, the Czech was alone.”

“Alone? But the gendarme in Gatow concluded there had to be at least two or three perpetrators, probably more. The pictures support that theory, and logic, as well, given the number of victims.”

“Ach, as we know, Willi, being trained policemen, the eye can be fooled. And a young gendarme in the suburbs? They are not used to crime scene investigation. Anyway, the Jew confessed. He acted alone. The case is solved. And the fellow is on his way to the camp.”

“I would like to interview him.”

A hesitation. Then, smiling still, Horcher adjusted his armband once again. “I’ll see what I can do about that. Though it’s likely that he might already be in Dachau.”

“Dachau? Why would they send him to Munich? Why not Oranienburg?”

“Overcrowding perhaps. In any event, the case is done, so there’s really no reason to talk to him.”

The man was, of course, dead by now.

“Besides, you need all your time to concentrate on the Dresden Alley matter. How is that coming?”

“We’ve had some breakthroughs,” Kohl told his boss, trying to keep anger and frustration out of his voice. “A day or two and I think we’ll have all our answers.”

“Excellent.” Horcher frowned. “Even more hubbub over on Prince Albrecht Street than before. Did you hear? More alerts, more security measures. Even mobilizing among the SS. Still haven’t heard what’s going on. Have you caught a glimmer, by any chance?”

“No, sir.” Poor Horcher. Afraid everybody was better informed than he. “You’ll have the report on the killing soon,” Kohl told him.

“Good. It is leaning toward that foreigner, isn’t it? I believe you said it was.”

Kohl thought: No, you said it was. “The case is moving apace.”

“Excellent. My, look at us, Willi: Here we are working Sundays. Can you imagine it? Remember when we actually had Saturday afternoon and Sunday off?” The man wandered back up the quiet hallway.

Kohl walked to the doorway of his office and saw the blank spaces where his notes and the photographs of the Gatow killings had rested. Horcher would have “filed them away” – meaning they’d had the same fate as the poor Czech Jew. Probably burned like the manifest of the Manhattan and floating over the city as particles of ash in the alkaline Berlin wind. He leaned wearily against the doorjamb, staring at the empty spaces on his desk, and he thought: This is the one thing about murder: It can never be undone. You return the stolen money, bruises heal, the burned-down house is rebuilt, you find the kidnap victim troubled but alive. But those children who had died, their parents, the Polish workers… their deaths were forever.

And yet here was Willi Kohl being told that this was not so. That the laws of the universe were somehow different in this land: The deaths of the families and the workers had been erased. Because, if they had been real, then honest people would not rest until the loss had been understood and mourned and – Kohl’s role – vindicated.

The inspector hung his hat on the rack and sat heavily in his creaking chair. He looked over his incoming mail and telegrams. Nothing regarding Schumann. With his magnifying monocle, Kohl himself compared the fingerprints Janssen had taken of Taggert with the photos of those found on the cobblestones of Dresden Alley. They were the same. This relieved him somewhat; it meant that Taggert was indeed the murderer of Reginald Morgan, and the inspector had not let a killer go free.

It was just as well that he could make the comparison himself. A message from the Identification Department told him that all the examiners and analysts had been ordered to drop any Kripo investigation and make themselves available to the Gestapo and SS in light of “a new development in the security alert.”

He walked to Janssen’s desk and learned that the coroner’s men still hadn’t collected Taggert’s body from the boardinghouse. Kohl shook his head and sighed. “We’ll do what we can here. Have the ballistics technicians run tests on the Spanish pistol to make sure it is the murder weapon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, and, Janssen? If the firearms examiners too have been commandeered in the search for this Russian, then run the tests yourselves. You can do that, can you not?”

“I can, sir, yes.”

After the young man had left, Kohl sat back and began to jot a list of questions about Morgan and the mysterious Taggert, which he would have translated and sent to the American authorities.

A shadow appeared in the doorway. “Sir, a telegram,” said the floor runner, a young man in a gray jacket. He offered the document to Kohl.

“Yes, yes, thank you.” Thinking it would be from the United States Lines about the manifest or Manny’s Men’s Wear, tersely explaining they could be of no help, he ripped the envelope open.

But he was wrong. It was from the New York City Police Department. The language was English but he could understand the meaning well enough.

TO DETECTIVE INSPECTOR W KOHL

KRIMINALPOLIZEI ALEXANDERPLATZ BERLIN

IN RESPONSE TO YOUR REQUEST OF EVEN DATE BE ADVISED

THAT THE FILE ON P SCHUMANN HAS BEEN EXPUNGED AND OUR

INVESTIGATION RE SAID INDIVIDUAL SUSPENDED INDEFINITELY

STOP NO MORE INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE STOP

REGARDS CAPT G O’MALLEY NYPD

Kohl frowned. He found the department’s English-German dictionary and learned that “expunged” meant “obliterated.” He read the telegram several times more, feeling his skin grow hot with each reading.

So the criminal police had been investigating Schumann. For what? And why had the file been destroyed and the investigation stopped?

What were the implications of this? Well, the most immediate was that while the man might not have been guilty of killing Reginald Morgan, he was possibly in town for some criminal venture.

And the other was that Kohl himself had let a potentially dangerous man loose in the city.

He needed to find Schumann, or at least more information about him, and fast. Without waiting for Janssen to return, Willi Kohl collected his hat and walked along the dim hallway, then down the stairs. So distracted was he that he took the stairway to the forbidden ground floor. He pushed the door open anyway and was immediately confronted by an SS soldier. Amid the flapping of the DeHoMag card sorters, the man said, “Sir, this is a restricted-”

“You will let me pass,” Kohl growled with a fierceness that startled the young guard.

Another guard, armed with an Erma machine gun, glanced their way.

“I am leaving my building by the door at the end of that hallway. I don’t have time to go the other way.”

The young SS man looked uneasily around him. No one else in the hallway said a word. Finally he nodded.

Kohl stalked down the hall, ignoring the pain in his feet, and pushed outside into the brilliant, hot afternoon light. He oriented himself, lifted his foot to a bench and adjusted the lamb’s wool to pad his right foot. Then the inspector started north in the direction of the Hotel Metropol.

“Ach, Mr. John Dillinger!” Otto Webber frowned, gesturing him to a chair in a dark corner of the Aryan Café. He gripped Paul’s arm hard and whispered, “I was worried about you. No word! Was my phone call to the stadium successful? I haven’t heard anything on the radio. Not that our rodent Goebbels would go on state radio to spread the word of an assassination.”

Then the gang leader’s smile faded. “What’s the matter, my friend? Your face is not pleased.”

But before he could say anything the waitress Liesl noticed Paul and moved in fast. “Hello, my love,” she said. Then pouted. “Shame on you. Last time you left without kissing me good-bye. What can I get you?”

“A Pschorr.”

“Yes, yes, I’m pleased to. I’ve missed you.”

Ignored by the waitress, Webber said petulantly, “Excuse me, ach, excuse me. A lager for me.”

Liesl bent and kissed Paul’s cheek. He smelled powerful perfume. It hung around him even after she left. He thought of lilac, thought of Käthe. He pushed the thoughts aside abruptly then explained what had happened at the stadium and afterward.

“No! Our friend Morgan?” Webber was horrified.

“A man pretending to be Morgan. The Kripo has my name and passport but they don’t think I killed him. And they haven’t connected me with Ernst and the stadium.”

Liesl brought them the beers. She squeezed Paul’s shoulder as she stepped away and brushed against him flirtatiously, leaving another cloud of strong perfume around the table. Paul leaned away from it. She smiled lasciviously as she sashayed away.

“She just can’t figure out I’m not interested, can she?” he muttered, all the angrier because he couldn’t get Käthe out of his mind.

“Who?” Webber asked, drinking several large gulps.

“Her. Liesl.” He nodded.

Webber frowned. “No, no, no, Mr. John Dillinger. Not her. Him. ”

“What?”

Webber frowned. “You thought Liesl is a woman?”

Paul blinked. “She’s a…”

“But of course.” He drank more beer, wiped his mustache with the back of his hand. “I thought you knew. It’s obvious.”

“Jesus Lord.” Paul rubbed his cheek hard where he’d been kissed. He glanced back. “Obvious to you maybe.”

“For a man with your profession, you’re a babe in the woods.”

“I said I liked women, when you asked me about the rooms here.”

“Ach, the show in here is women. But half the waitresses are men. Don’t blame me if both sexes find you attractive. Besides, it’s your fault – you tipped her like a prince from Addis Ababa.”

Paul lit a cigarette to cover the scent of the perfume, which he now found revolting.

“So, Mr. John Dillinger, I see there are problems for you. Are the people behind this betrayal the ones who were to get you out of Berlin?”

“I don’t know yet.” He glanced around the nearly empty club but still leaned forward to whisper, “I need your help again, Otto.”

“Ach, here I am, always ready to assist. Me, the saver-from-dung-shirts, the butter-maker, the champagne-dealer, the Krupp-impersonator.”

“But I have no money left.”

Webber gave a sneer. “Money… it’s the root of all evil, after all. What do you need, my friend?”

“A car. Another uniform. And another gun. A rifle.”

Webber was quiet. “Your hunt continues.”

“That’s right.”

“Ach, what I could’ve done with a dozen men like you in my gang ring… But Ernst’s security will be higher than ever. He may leave town for a while.”

“True. But perhaps not immediately. When I was in his office I saw that he had two appointments today. The first was at the stadium. The other is at a place called Waltham College. Where is that?”

“Waltham?” Webber asked. “It’s-”

“Hello, darling, do you wish another beer? Or maybe you wish me? ”

Paul jumped as hot breath blew against his ear and arms snaked around him. Liesl had come up from behind.

“The first time,” the waitress whispered, “will be free. Perhaps even the second time.”

“Stop it,” he barked. The waitress’s face went cold.

Now knowing the truth about him, Paul could see that while the creature’s face was pretty it had clearly masculine angles.

“You needn’t be rude, my darling.”

“I’m sorry,” Paul said, leaning away. “I’m not interested in men.”

Liesl said coolly, “I’m not a man.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, then, you shouldn’t have flirted,” Liesl snapped. “You owe me four marks for the beers. No, five. I added wrong.”

Paul paid and the waitress turned away coldly, muttering and noisily cleaning adjacent tables.

“My girls,” Webber said dismissively, “they get the same way sometimes. It can be such a bother.”

They resumed their conversation and Paul repeated, “Waltham College? What do you know about it?”

“A military school not far from here. It’s on the way to Oranienburg, by the way – the home of our beautiful concentration camp. Why don’t you just knock on the door while you’re there and give yourself up. Save the SS the trouble of tracking you down.”

“A car and a uniform,” Paul repeated. “I want to be an official but not a soldier. That’s what we did at the stadium and they might be anticipating it. Maybe-”

“Ach, I know! You can be an RAD leader.”

“A what?”

“National Labor Service. A Soldier of the Spade. Every young man in the country must do a stint as a laborer, probably thought up by Ernst himself as another clever way to train soldiers. They carry their shovels like guns and practice marching as much as digging. You’re too old to be in the service but you could be an officer. They have trucks to shuttle workers to job sites and parade grounds and they’re common in the countryside. No one would notice you. I know where to find you one, a nice truck. And a uniform. They’re a tasteful blue-gray. Just the color for you.”

Paul whispered, “And the rifle?”

“That will be harder. But I have some thoughts.” He finished his beer. “When do you wish to do this?”

“I should be at Waltham College by five-thirty. No later.”

Webber nodded. “Then we must move quickly to turn you into a National Socialist official.” He laughed. “Though you need no training. God knows the real ones have none.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

He heard only static at first. Then the scratchy sounds coalesced into: “Gordon?”

“We don’t use names,” the commander reminded, pressing the Bakelite phone to his ear furiously so that he could hear the words from Berlin more clearly. It was Paul Schumann, calling via radio patched through London. The time was just before 10 A.M. on Sunday morning but Gordon was at his desk at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C., where he’d been all night, anxiously waiting to hear whether the man had succeeded in killing Ernst. “Are you all right? What’s going on? We’ve been checking all the press, monitoring the radio broadcasts and nothing’s-”

“Be quiet,” Schumann snapped. “I don’t have time for ‘friends in the north’ and ‘friends in the south.’ Just listen.”

Gordon sat forward in his chair. “Go ahead.”

“Morgan’s dead.”

“Oh, no.” Gordon closed his eyes momentarily, feeling the loss. He hadn’t known the man personally but his information had always been solid, and any man who risks his life for his country was okay in Gordon’s book.

Then Schumann delivered a bombshell. “He was murdered by somebody named Robert Taggert, an American. You know him?”

“What? An American?”

“Do you know him?”

“No, never heard of him.”

“He tried to kill me too. Before I could do what you sent me for. The guy you’ve been talking to for the past couple of days was Taggert, not Morgan.”

“What was that name again?”

Schumann spelled it and told Gordon that he might have some connection with the U.S. diplomatic service but he wasn’t sure. The commander wrote the name on a slip of paper and shouted, “Yeoman Willets!”

The woman appeared in the doorway a moment later. Gordon jammed the note into her palm. “Get me everything you can find about this guy,” he said. She vanished instantly. Then into the phone: “Are you all right?”

“Were you part of it?” Despite the bad connection Gordon could feel the man’s anger.

“What?”

“It was all a setup. From the beginning. Were you part of it?”

Gordon felt the swampy July morning air of Washington, D.C., float in and out of the open window. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

After a pause Schumann told the whole story – about the murder of Morgan, Taggert’s masquerading as him and the betrayal of Schumann to the Nazis.

Gordon was genuinely shocked. “My God, no. I swear. I’d never do that to one of my men. And I consider you one of them. I honestly do.”

Another pause. “Taggert said you weren’t involved. But I wanted to hear it from you.”

“I swear…”

“Well, you’ve got a traitor somewhere on your end, Commander. You need to find out who.”

Gordon sat back, shattered at this news. He stared, numb, at the wall in front of him, on which were a number of citations, his Yale diploma and two pictures: President Roosevelt and Theodorus B.M. Mason, the solid-jawed naval lieutenant who’d been the first head of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

A traitor…

“What does this Taggert say?”

“All he said was that it was ‘interests.’ Nothing more specific. They wanted to keep the boss here happy. The overall boss, I mean.”

“Can you talk to him again, find out more?”

A hesitation. “No.”

Gordon understood the implication; Taggert was dead.

Schumann continued. “I got the pass phrases about the tram when I was on the ship. Taggert got the same phrases we did but Morgan didn’t know them. How could that happen?”

“I sent the code to my men on the ship. It also went separately to where you are now. Morgan was supposed to pick it up there.”

“So Taggert got the right message and had a different one sent to Morgan. That German-American Bund spy on board didn’t transmit anything. It wasn’t him. So who could’ve done that? Who knew the right phrase?”

Two names came immediately to Gordon’s mind. A soldier before everything else, Gordon knew that a military commander had to consider all possibilities. But young Andrew Avery was like a son to him. He knew Vincent Manielli less well yet he’d seen nothing in the young officer’s record that would make him doubt his loyalty.

As if he were a mind reader, Schumann asked, “How long have you worked with those two boys of yours?”

“It would be next to impossible.”

“‘Impossible’ has a whole goddamn different meaning lately. Who the hell else knew about the code? Daddy Warbucks?”

Gordon considered. But the moneybags, Cyrus Clayborn, only knew in general what they had planned. “He didn’t even know there was a pass code.”

“Then who came up with the phrase?”

“We did, together, the Senator and me.”

More static. Schumann said nothing.

But Gordon added, “No, it can’t be him.”

“Was he with you when you sent the codes?”

“No. He was in Washington.”

Gordon was thinking: The moment he hung up with me, the Senator could have sent a message to Taggert in Berlin with the right code and arranged for the wrong one to go to Morgan. “Impossible.”

“I keep hearing that word, Gordon. That doesn’t cut it with me.”

“Look, this whole thing was the Senator’s idea in the first place. He had some talks with people in the administration and he came to me.”

“All that means is he’s been planning to set me up from the beginning.” Schumann added ominously, “Along with those same ‘people.’”

Facts cascaded through Gordon’s mind. Could this be? Where could the betrayal lead?

Finally Schumann said, “Listen, you handle that situation the way you want. Are you still going to get me that plane?”

“Yes, sir. You have my absolute word on that. I’ll contact my men in Amsterdam myself. We’ll have it there in about three and a half hours.”

“No, I’ll need it later than that. About ten tonight.”

“We can’t land in the dark. The strip we’re using’s abandoned. It doesn’t have lights. But there should be enough daylight left to set down around eight-thirty. How’s that?”

“No. Then make it dawn tomorrow.”

“Why?”

There was a pause. “I’m going to get him this time.”

“Going to…?”

“Do what I came here for,” Schumann growled.

“No, no… You can’t. It’s too dangerous now. Come on home. Get that job you were talking about. You earned it. You-”

“Commander… you listening?”

“Go on.”

“See, I’m here and you’re there, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me, so all of this jawing now’s just a waste of time. Make sure that plane’s at the field at dawn tomorrow.”

Yeoman Ruth Willets appeared in the doorway. “Hold on,” Gordon said into the phone.

“Nothing on Taggert yet, sir. Records’ll call as soon as they find something.”

“Where’s the Senator?”

“In New York.”

“Get me on any plane you can going up there now. Army, private. Whatever it takes.”

“Yessir.”

Gordon turned back to the phone. “Paul, we’ll get you your lift out of there. But please listen to reason. Everything’s changed now – you have any idea what the risks are?”

The noise on the line rose and swallowed most of Schumann’s words but it seemed to Bull Gordon that he heard what might’ve been laughter and then the button man’s voice again. Part of the phrase was something like “six to five against.”

Then he was listening to a silence that was far louder than the static had ever been.

In a warehouse in eastern Berlin (which Otto Webber called “his” despite the fact they had to break a window to get inside) they found racks of National Labor Service uniforms. Webber pulled a fancy one off a hanger. “Ach, yes, as I said, the blue-gray becomes you.”

Maybe it did, but the color was also conspicuous, especially since his shooting blind at Waltham College would be an open field or forest, as Webber had described the landscape there. The uniform was also close-fitting, bulky and hot. It would get him close to the school but he took another set of more practical clothing as well, dungarees, a dark shirt and a pair of boots, to wear for the touch-off itself.

One of Webber’s business associates had access to a motor pool of government trucks and, with the assurance that Webber would return the vehicle within one day (and not try to sell it back to the government when he did so), the key was handed over, in exchange for some Cuban cigars that had been made in Romania.

Now they needed only the rifle.

Paul had considered the pawnbroker near November 1923 Square, the one who’d supplied the Mauser. But he couldn’t be sure whether the man had been part of Taggert’s deceit or, even if not, whether the Kripo or Gestapo had traced the gun back to the shop and arrested him.

But Webber told him there were often rifles stored in a small warehouse on the Spree River, where he sometimes made deliveries of military supplies.

They drove north and, just after crossing the river at Wullenweber Street, turned west and headed through an area of low manufacturing and commercial buildings. Webber tapped Paul’s arm and he pointed to a dark building to their left.

“That’s it, my friend.”

The place appeared deserted, which they’d expected, today being Sunday. (“Even godless dung-shirts insist on a day of rest,” Webber explained.) But unfortunately the warehouse was set back behind a tall barbed-wire fence and had a spacious, now empty parking area in the front, which made it very visible from the well-traveled street.

“How do we-?”

“Relax, Mr. John Dillinger,” Webber said. “I know what I’m doing. There’s a waterside entrance for boats and barges. It’s impossible to see from the street and you can’t tell it’s a National Socialist warehouse from that side – no eagles or hooked crosses on the dock – so no one will think twice about our visit.”

They parked a half block past the warehouse and Webber led him through an alley, south, toward the water. The men stepped out onto a stone wall above the brown river, where the air was pungent with the scent of rotten fish. They walked down old stairs, carved into stone, and onto a concrete wharf. Several rowboats were tied up and Webber climbed into one. Paul joined him.

They cast off and in a few minutes had rowed their way to a similar dock beneath the back of the military warehouse.

Webber tied the boat up and climbed carefully onto the stone, slick with bird droppings. Paul followed. Looking around, he could see boats on the river, mostly pleasure craft, but Webber was right; no one was paying them any attention. They climbed a few steps to the back door and Paul took a fast look through the window. No lights were on inside and only dim sunlight filtered through several opaque skylights, but the large room appeared deserted. Webber extracted a key ring from his pocket and tried several skeleton keys until he found one that worked. Paul heard a soft click. Webber glanced at him and nodded. Paul pushed the door open.

They walked into the hot, musty room, filled with the eye-burning fumes of creosote. Paul looked around and noticed hundreds of crates. Against the wall were racks of rifles. The army or SS was using this place as an assembly station – taking the guns from the crates, ripping off the oil-paper wrapping and cleaning off the creosote, which had been smeared on to prevent rusting. They were Mausers, similar to the one that Taggert had arranged for him, though with longer barrels, which was good. This meant they were more accurate and, at Waltham, he might be quite far from Ernst. No telescopic sights. But Paul Schumann hadn’t had one on his Springfield at St. Mihiel and Argonne Woods and his marksmanship there had been deadly accurate.

He walked to the rack, picked up one, looked it over and tried the bolt. It worked smoothly, giving the satisfying click of finely machined metal. He aimed and dry-fired it a few times, getting a feel for the trigger. They located crates labeled 7.92 mm , the caliber of ammunition for the Mauser. Inside were gray cardboard boxes, printed with swastikas and eagles. He opened one, took out five bullets, loaded the gun then chambered and ejected a round to make absolutely certain the bullets were right.

“Good, let’s get out of here,” he said, putting two boxes of the shells into his pocket. “Can we-”

His words were interrupted as the front door opened, casting a beam of fierce sunlight on them. They turned, squinting. Before Paul could lift the rifle, the young man in the doorway, wearing a black SS uniform, was pointing a pistol toward them. “You! Put that down at once. Hands up!”

Paul crouched, set the Mauser on the floor and slowly rose.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Otto Webber said gruffly, “What are you doing? We are from the Krupp Munitions Works. We were sent to make certain that the correct ammunition-”

“Quiet.”

The young guard looked around nervously to see if anyone else was here.

“There was a problem with a delivery. We got a call from-”

“It’s Sunday. Why are you working on Sunday?”

Webber laughed. “My young friend, when we deliver the wrong shipment to the SS, we will correct our error no matter what the day or the hour. My supervisor-”

“Quiet!” The young soldier spotted a telephone on a dusty workstation and moved toward it, keeping the pistol pointed toward them. When he was nearly to the table Webber lowered his hands and started walking in his direction.

“Ach, this is absurd.” He was exasperated. “I have identification.”

“You will stop right there!” He thrust the gun forward.

“I will show you the paperwork from my supervisor.” Webber kept walking.

The SS guard pulled the trigger. A short metallic bang shook the walls.

Unsure if Webber was hit or not, Paul scooped the Mauser up from the floor and rolled behind a high stack of rifle crates, chambering a round.

The young trooper lunged for the phone and pulled the receiver off the cradle, then ducked back. “Please, listen,” he cried into the handset. Paul rose fast. He had no view of the soldier but he fired a bullet into the phone unit, which exploded into a dozen Bakelite shards. The trooper cried out.

Paul slipped back behind cover. But not before he caught a glimpse of Otto Webber lying on the floor, writhing slowly as he gripped his belly, which was stained with blood.

No…

“You Jew!” the young trooper raged. “You will throw down your gun at once. There will soon be a hundred men here.”

Paul made his way to the front of the building, where he could cover both the front and back doors. He glanced quickly out the window and saw a lone motorcycle parked in front. He knew the young man was merely making a routine check of the warehouse and there would be no others coming. But someone might have heard the shot. And the SS man could simply stay where he was, keeping Paul pinned down, until his superior realized he hadn’t reported back and sent more troops to the warehouse.

He looked out from his end of the stack of crates. He had no idea where the soldier was. He -

Another gunshot echoed. Glass splintered the front window, nowhere near Paul.

The SS guard had fired through the glass to draw attention; he’d shot directly into the street, not caring if he hit anyone.

“You Jew pig!” the man raged. “Stand up and raise your hands or you’ll die screaming in Columbia House!” The voice came from a different place this time, closer to the front of the warehouse. He’d crawled forward to put more crates between himself and his enemy.

Another shot through the window. Outside a car horn blared.

Paul moved into the next row, swinging the gun before him, finger on the trigger. The Mauser was ungainly – good for distance, bad for this. He looked fast. The aisle was empty. He jumped as another shot shattered a window. Someone must have heard by now. Or seen a bullet strike a wall or house across the street. Maybe a car or passerby had been hit.

He started for the next aisle. Fast, swinging the gun before him.

A glimpse of the man’s black uniform, disappearing. The SS man had heard Paul, or anticipated him, and slipped behind another stack of crates.

Paul decided he couldn’t wait any longer. He’d have to stop the guard. There was nothing to do but charge over the center row of crates, just like he’d gone over the top of the trenches in an assault during the War, and hope he could get off a fatal shot before the man sprayed bullets at him from the semiautomatic pistol.

Okay, Paul said to himself. He took a deep breath.

Another…

Go!

He leapt to his feet and climbed onto the crate in front of him, lifting the gun. His foot just touched the second crate when he heard a sound behind him and to his right. The soldier had flanked him! But as he turned, the grimy windows shook again from a gunshot. Paul froze.

The SS soldier stepped directly in front of him, twenty feet away. Paul frantically raised the Mauser but just before he fired, the soldier coughed. Blood sprayed from his mouth, and the Luger dropped to the floor. He shook his head. He fell heavily and lay still, blood turning his uniform ruddy.

To his right, Paul could see Otto Webber on the floor. He clutched his bloody gut with one hand. In his other was a Mauser. He’d managed to crawl to a rack of guns, load one and fire. The rifle slid to the floor.

“Are you crazy?” Paul whispered angrily. “Why did you go toward him like that? Didn’t you think he’d shoot?”

“No,” the white-faced, sweating man said, laughing. “I didn’t think he’d do that.” The man sighed in pain. “Go see if anybody has responded to his subtle call for help.”

Paul ran to the front and noted the area was still deserted. Across the street was a tall, windowless building, a factory or warehouse, closed today. It was likely that the bullets had struck the wall unnoticed.

“It’s clear,” he said, returning to Webber, who had sat up and was looking down at the mass of blood on his belly. “Ach.”

“We have to find a doctor.” Paul slung the rifle over his shoulder. He helped Webber to his feet and they made their way out the back doorway and into the boat. Pale and sweating, the German lay back with his head against the bow as Paul rowed frantically to the dock near the truck.

“Where can I take you? For a doctor?”

“Doctor?” Webber laughed. “It’s too late for that, Mr. John Dillinger. Leave me. Go on. I can tell. It’s too late.”

“No, I’m taking you for help,” Paul repeated firmly. “Tell me where to find somebody who won’t go running to the SS or Gestapo.” He pulled the boat to the dock, tied it up and climbed out. He set the Mauser in a patch of grass nearby and turned back to help Webber out of the boat.

“No!” Paul whispered.

Webber had untied the rope and with his remaining strength pushed off from the dock. The dinghy was now ten feet away, drifting into the current.

“Otto! No!”

“As I say, too late,” Webber called, gasping. Then he gave a sour laugh. “Look at me, a Viking’s funeral! Ach, when you return home play some John Philip Sousa and think of me… Though I still say he’s English. You Americans take credit for far too much. Now, go on, Mr. John Dillinger. Do what you have come here for.”

The last glimpse Paul Schumann had of his friend were the man’s eyes closing as he slumped to the bottom of the boat, which gathered speed, drawn into the murky water of the Spree.

A dozen of them, all young men, who had chosen life and freedom over honor. Was it cowardice or intelligence that had motivated them to do this?

Kurt Fischer wondered if he was the only one among them plagued by this question.

They were being driven through the countryside northwest of Berlin in the same sort of bus that used to take them on outings as young students. The round driver piloted his vehicle smoothly over the winding road and tried, unsuccessfully, to get them to sing hunting and hiking songs.

Kurt sat next to his brother, as they shared stories with the others. Little by little he learned something about them. Mostly Aryan, all from middle-class families, all with degrees, attending universities or planning to do so after their Labor Service. Half were, like Kurt and Hans, marginally anti-Party for political and intellectual reasons: Socialists, pacifists, protestors. The other half were “swing kids,” richer, rebellious too but not as political; their main complaint with the National Socialists was cultural: the censoring of movies, dance and music.

There were no Jews, Slavs or Roma gypsies among this crowd, of course. Nor any Kosis, either. Despite Colonel Ernst’s enlightenment, Kurt knew that it would be many years before such ethnic and political groups would find a home in the military or German officialdom. Kurt’s personal belief was that it would never happen as long as the triumvirate of Hitler, Göring and Goebbels was in power.

So here they were, he was thinking, these young men, brought together by the predicament of having to choose between a concentration camp and possible death or an organization they found morally wrong.

Am I a coward, Kurt wondered again, choosing as I did? He remembered Goebbels’s call for the nationwide boycott of Jewish stores in April of ’33. The National Socialists thought it would receive an overwhelming show of support. In fact, the event went badly for the Party, with many Germans – his parents among them – openly defying the boycott. Thousands, in fact, sought out stores they hadn’t previously been to, just to show support for their Jewish fellow citizens.

That was courage. Did he not have this bravery within him?

“Kurt?”

He looked up. His brother had been speaking to him. “You’re not listening.”

“What did you say?”

“When will we eat supper? I’m hungry.”

“I don’t have any clue. How would I know?”

“Is army food any good? I heard you eat well. I suppose it depends, though. If you’re in the field, it’ll be different than at a base. I wonder what it’s like.”

“What, the food?”

“No. Being in the trenches. Being-”

“We won’t be in the trenches. There won’t be another war. And if there is, you heard Colonel Ernst, we won’t have to fight. We’ll be given different duties.”

His brother didn’t look convinced. And more troubling, he didn’t look that upset that he might be seeing combat. Why, he even seemed intrigued by the thought. This was a very new, and disturbing, side to his brother.

I wonder what it’s like…

Conversation in the bus continued – about sports, about the scenery, about the Olympics, about American movies. And girls, of course.

Finally they arrived, turning off the highway and easing down a long maple-lined drive that led to the campus of Waltham Military College.

What their pacifist parents would think to see them in such a place!

The bus squealed to a halt in front of one of the school’s red-brick buildings. Kurt was struck by the incongruity: an institution devoted to the philosophy and practice of warfare, yet set in an idyllic vale with a rich carpet of grass, fluttering ivy crawling up the ancient buildings, forests and hills behind, which formed a gentle frame for the scene.

The boys gathered their rucksacks and climbed off the bus. A young soldier not much older than they identified himself as their recruitment officer and shook their hands, welcoming them. He explained that Doctor-professor Keitel would be with them shortly. He held up a football that he and another soldier had been kicking around and he tapped it toward Hans, who expertly sent it on its way to another of the recruits.

And, as always happens when young men and a ball end up together on a grassy field, it was only a matter of minutes before two teams had formed and a game begun.

Chapter Thirty-Four

At 5:30 P.M. the Labor Service truck eased over a smooth, immaculate highway that wove through tall stands of pine and hemlock. The air was flecked with motes of dust, and lazy insects died on the flat windshield.

Paul Schumann struggled to think only of Reinhard Ernst, of his target. Groping for the ice.

Don’t think about Otto Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Webber.

This was, however, impossible. Paul was consumed with memories of the man he’d known only a day. Presently he was thinking that Otto would have fit in perfectly on the West Side of New York. Drinking with Runyon and Jacobs and the boxing crew. Maybe he’d even enjoy sparring a little. But what Webber really would have loved were the opportunities in America: the freedom to run countless scams and grifts.

Someday I may boast to you of my better cons…

But then his thoughts faded as he turned around a slow curve and diverted down a side road. A kilometer along the highway he saw a carefully painted sign, Waltham Military College. Three or four young men in hiking outfits lounged on the grass, surrounded by packs, baskets and the remnants of their Sunday afternoon dinner. A sign beside them pointed down the wide drive to the main hall. A second road led to the stadium and gymnasium and Academic Buildings 1 through 4. Farther along was the driveway to Buildings 5 through 8. It was in Building 5 that Ernst would have his meeting in a half hour, Paul had read on his schedule. He continued past the turnoff, though, drove another hundred yards along the road and pulled onto a deserted unpaved byway, overgrown with grass. He nosed the truck into the woods so that it couldn’t be seen from the main road.

A deep breath. Paul rubbed his eyes and wiped the sweat from his face.

Would Ernst actually show up? he wondered. Or would he be like Dutch Schultz that time in Jersey City, when the mobster had skipped out on a meeting where he’d instinctively – some said psychically – known he was going to be ambushed?

But what else could Paul do? He had to believe the colonel would go ahead with the meeting. And his assessment was that the man would in fact show up here. Everything he’d learned about him suggested someone who didn’t shirk his obligations. The American climbed out of the truck. He stripped off the bulky blue-gray uniform and hat, folded them neatly and rested them on the front seat, beneath which he’d also hidden another suit, in case he needed to change identity yet again to escape. Paul dressed quickly in the working clothes he’d stolen from the warehouse. Then, collecting the rifle and the ammunition, he plunged into the thickest part of the woods, moving as silently as he could.

He slowly made his way through the quiet, fragrant forest, cautious at first, expecting more guards or troops, especially after the attempt that afternoon on Ernst’s life, but he was surprised to find none at all. As he moved closer to the buildings, easing through brush and trees, he saw some people and vehicles near the front of one of the structures, which a sign reported was No. 5, the one he sought. Parked up the drive about one hundred feet from it was a black Mercedes sedan. A man wearing an SS uniform stood beside the car, looking around vigilantly, a machine gun over his shoulder. Was this Ernst’s car? He couldn’t see through the glare of the windows.

Paul also noted a small panel van and a bus, near which a dozen young men in civilian clothing and a soldier in a gray uniform were playing soccer. A second soldier leaned against the bus, watching the game and cheering the teams on.

Why would someone as senior as Ernst meet with this small group of students? Maybe they were a handpicked group of future officers; the boys looked like model National Socialists – fair, blond and in very good shape. Whoever they were, Paul assumed that Ernst would meet with them in the classroom, which would require him to walk the fifty feet or so from the Mercedes to Building 5. Paul would have plenty of time to touch him off. From where he now crouched, though, he had no good shooting angle. The trees and brush waved in the hot wind and not only impaired the sight of his prey but could deflect the bullet.

The door to the Mercedes opened and a balding man in a brown jacket climbed out. Paul looked past him into the backseat. Yes! Ernst was inside. Then the door slammed and he lost sight of the colonel, who remained in the car. The man in brown carried a large folder to a second car, an Opel, near Paul, where the wooded hill bottomed out. He set the folder in the backseat and returned to the far side of the field.

Paul’s attention was drawn to the Opel; it was unoccupied. The car would give him a good shooting position, provide some cover from the soldiers and offer Paul a head start back into the woods to the truck for his escape afterward.

Yes, he decided, the car would be his hunting blind. Cradling the Mauser in the crook of his arm, Paul moved slowly forward, hearing the soft buzz of insects, the snap and crunch of the dusty July vegetation beneath his body and the shouts and laughter of young men enjoying their soccer game.

The faithful set of Auto Union wheels clattered along the highway at a paltry sixty kilometers per hour, rattling madly despite the mirror-smooth surface of the road. A backfire erupted and the engine gulped for air. Willi Kohl adjusted the choke and stomped on the accelerator once again. The car shuddered but finally picked up a bit of speed.

After he’d left Kripo headquarters through the forbidden back door – defiantly and, yes, foolishly – the inspector had walked toward the Hotel Metropol. As he’d approached he gradually became aware of music; the notes penned by Mozart so many years ago were dancing from the strings of a chamber quartet in the magnificent lobby.

He’d looked through the windows at the glittering chandeliers, the murals of scenes from Wagner’s Ring, the waiters in perfect black trousers and perfect white jackets balancing silver trays on their palms. And he’d continued past the hotel, not even pausing. The inspector had known all along, of course, that Paul Schumann was lying about coming here. His investigation had revealed that the American was a man who was comfortable not with champagne and limousines and Mozart, but with Pschorr ale and sausages. He was a man with worn shoes and a love of boxing rings. A man with some connection with the fringe neighborhood around November 1923 Square. If a man had no hesitation to take on four Stormtroopers with his fists, he would not be checking into an effete place like the Metropol, nor could he afford it either.

Yet this place had been the first location Schumann had thought of inresponse to Kohl’s question about his new address – which suggested that the American might have seen it recently. And since Miss Richter’s boardinghouse was far across town, it was logical that he had seen the hotel on his way to Berlin North, the tough neighborhood that began just a block past the hotel. This was an area that was akin to Paul Schumann’s temperament and tastes.

It was a large district; under most circumstances a half dozen investigators would be needed to canvass the locals and gather information on a suspect. But some evidence Kohl had found might, he believed, help him narrow his search considerably: At the boardinghouse he’d discovered in Schumann’s pockets a limp box of cheap matches, tucked into the packet of German cigarettes. Kohl was familiar with these. He often found them in the possession of other suspects, who’d picked them up in establishments in bad areas of the city, like Berlin North.

Perhaps the American had no connection here, but it was a good place to start his search. Armed with Paul Schumann’s passport, Kohl had made the rounds in the southern end of the neighborhood, noting first what kind of matches they gave away and, if they were the same, then showing the American’s picture to waiters and bartenders.

“No, Inspector… I am so sorry. Greet God, Inspector… I have seen no one like that. Hail Hitler. I’ll keep on the lookout for him… Hail Hitler hail Hitler hail Hitler…”

He tried a restaurant on Dragoner Street. Nothing. Then walked a few doors farther on, to a club on the same street. He’d flashed his ID card to the man at the entrance and walked into the bar. Yes, the matches were the same as Schumann had had. He’d walked through the various rooms, flashing the American’s passport, asking if anyone had seen him. The civilians in the audience were typically blind, and the SS typically uncooperative. (One barked, “You’re blocking my view, Kripo. Move your ass!”)

But then he’d shown the picture to a waitress. Her eyes had flashed in anger.

“You know him?” Kohl had asked.

“Ach, do I know him? Yes, yes.”

“You are?”

“Liesl. He claimed his name was Hermann but I see that was a lie.” She nodded at the passport. “I’m not surprised. He was here not an hour ago. With his toad of a companion, Otto Webber.”

“Who is this Webber?”

“A toad, as I say.”

“What were they doing here?”

“What else? Drinking, talking. Ach, and flirting… A man flirts with a girl and then rejects her coldly… How cruel that is.” Liesl’s Adam’s apple had quivered and Kohl deduced the whole sad story. “Will you arrest him?”

“Please, what do you know about him? Where he is staying, what his business is?”

Liesl had not known much. But one bit of information was golden. Schumann and Webber apparently planned to meet with someone later that afternoon. And a clandestine gathering it was to be, the spurned waitress had offered darkly. “A toad’s business. At someplace called Waltham College.”

Kohl had hurried from the Aryan Café, collected the DKW and sped to Waltham. He now saw the military college in front of him and eased the car gently onto the gravel shoulder near two low brick columns topped with statues of imperial eagles. Several students lounging on the grass beside backpacks and a picnic basket glanced at the dusty, black car.

Kohl gestured the students over to the car and the blond young men, sensing authority, trotted quickly forward.

“Hail Hitler.”

“Hail,” Kohl replied. “School is still in session? In the summer?”

“There are courses being taught, sir. Today, though, we have no classes, so we’ve been hiking.”

Like his own sons, these students were caught in the great fever of Third Empire education, only more so, of course, since the whole point of this college was to produce soldiers.

What brilliant criminals the Leader and his crowd are. They kidnap the nation by seizing our children…

He opened Schumann’s passport and displayed the picture. “Have you seen this man?”

“No, Inspector,” one said and glanced at his friends, who shook their heads no.

“How long have you been here?”

“Perhaps an hour.”

“Has anyone arrived in that time?”

“Yes, sir. Not long ago, a school bus arrived and with it an Opel and a Mercedes. A black one. Five-liter. New.”

“No, it was the seven-point-seven,” a friend corrected.

“You’re blind! It was much smaller.”

A third said, “And that Labor Service truck. Only it didn’t drive in here.”

“No, it went past and then turned off the road.” The boy pointed. “Near the entrance of some other academic buildings.”

“Labor Service?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was the truck full of workers?”

“We couldn’t see in the back.”

“Did you get a look at the driver?”

“No, sir.”

“Nor I.”

Labor Service… Kohl pondered this. RAD workers were used primarily for farming and public works. It would be very unusual for them to be assigned to a college, especially on Sunday. “Has the Service been doing some work here?”

The boy shrugged. “I don’t believe so, sir.”

“I’ve heard of nothing either, sir.”

“Don’t say anything of my questions,” Kohl said. “To anyone.”

“A matter of Party security?” one boy asked with an intrigued smile.

Kohl touched his finger to his lips.

And left them gossiping excitedly about what the mysterious policeman might mean.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Closing in on the gray Opel.

Crawling, pause.

Then crawling again. Just like at St. Mihiel and the dense, ancient forests of Argonne.

Paul Schumann smelled hot grass and the old manure used to fertilize the field. Smelled the oil and creosote of the weapon. Smelled his own sweat.

Another few feet. Then pause.

He had to move slowly; he was very exposed here. Anyone on the field around Building 5 might have glanced his way and noticed the grass swaying unnaturally or caught the glint of low light reflecting off the rifle barrel.

Pause.

He looked over the field again. The man in brown was taking a stack of documents from the panel truck. The glare on the windows continued to obscure any view of Ernst in the Mercedes. The SS guard continued his vigil of the area.

Looking back toward the classroom building, Paul watched the balding man call the young men together. They reluctantly ended the soccer game and walked into the classroom.

With their attention focused away from him, Paul continued more quickly now to the Opel, opened the back door and climbed into the baking vehicle, feeling his skin prickle from the heat. Looking out through the back left window, he noted that this was the perfect vantage point to shoot from. He had an excellent view of the area around Ernst’s car – a clear killing field of forty to fifty feet to bring the man down. And it would take the bodyguard and soldiers some time to figure out where the shot had come from.

Paul Schumann was touching the ice firmly. He clicked the Mauser’s safety catch off and squinted toward Ernst’s car.

“Greetings, future soldiers. Welcome to Waltham Military College.”

Kurt Fischer and the others replied to Doctor-professor Keitel with various greetings. Most said, “Hail Hitler.”

It was interesting that Keitel himself did not use that salutation, Kurt noted.

The recruitment soldier who’d been playing football with them stood beside the doctor-professor, in the front of the classroom, holding a stack of large envelopes. The man winked at Kurt, who’d just missed blocking a goal the soldier had scored.

The volunteers sat at oak desks. On the walls around them were maps and flags that Kurt didn’t recognize. His brother was looking around too and he leaned over and whispered, “Battle flags of Second Empire armies.”

Kurt shushed him, frowning in irritation, both at the interruption and because his younger brother knew something he did not. And how, he now wondered, troubled, did his brother, the son of pacifists, even know what a battle flag was?

The dowdy professor continued. “I’m going to tell you what is planned for the next few days. You will listen carefully.”

“Yes, sir” and its variations filled the room.

“First, you will fill out a personal information form and application for induction into the armed forces. Then you will answer a questionnaire about your personality and your aptitudes. The answers will be compiled and analyzed and will help us determine your talents and mental preferences for certain duties. Some of you, for instance, will be better suited for combat, some for radio work, some for office detail. So it is vital that you answer honestly.”

Kurt glanced toward his brother, who did not, however, acknowledge him. Their agreement had been that they would answer any such questions in a way as to be guaranteed of being assigned office tasks or even manual labor – anything to keep from having to kill another human being. But Kurt was troubled that Hans might be thinking differently now. Was he being seduced by the idea of becoming a combat soldier?

“After you are through with the forms, Colonel Ernst will address you. Then you will be shown to your dormitory and be given supper. Tomorrow you will begin your training and spend the next month marching and improving your physical condition before your classroom instruction begins.”

Keitel nodded at the soldier, who began passing out the packets. The recruitment officer paused at Kurt’s desk. They agreed to try for another game before supper, if the light held. The soldier then followed Keitel outside to get pencils for the inductees.

As he absently smoothed his hand over his documents, Kurt found himself oddly content, despite the harrowing circumstances of this hard, hard day. Yes, certainly some of this was gratitude – to Colonel Ernst and Doctor-professor Keitel – for providing this miraculous salvation. But more than that he was beginning to feel that he’d been given the chance to do something important after all, an act that transcended his own plight. Had Kurt gone to Oranienburg his imprisonment or death would have been courageous perhaps, but meaningless. Now, though, he decided that the incongruous act of volunteering for the army might prove to be exactly the gesture of defiance he’d been searching for, a small but concrete way of helping save his country from the brown plague.

With a smile toward his brother, Kurt ran his hand over the test envelope, realizing that for the first time in months his heart was truly content.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Willi Kohl parked the DKW not far from the Labor Service truck, which was about fifty meters off the road, parked in such a way that the driver clearly intended that the vehicle not be seen.

As he walked quietly to the truck, his Panama hat low to keep the glaring sun out of his eyes, he removed his pistol and listened for footsteps, voices. But he heard nothing out of the ordinary: only birds, crickets, cicadas. He approached the truck slowly. He looked into the back and found the burlap bags, shovels and hoes he’d expected – the “weapons” of the Labor Service. But in the cab he located some items that interested him considerably more. On the seat was an RAD officer’s uniform – carefully folded as if it would be used again soon and the wearer was concerned that wrinkles might make him appear suspicious. More important, though, was what he found wrapped in paper beneath the seat: a blue double-breasted suit and a white shirt, both in large sizes. The shirt was an Arrow, made in the United States. And the suit? Kohl felt his heart thud as he looked at the label inside the jacket. Manny’s Men’s Wear, New York City.

Paul Schumann’s favorite store.

Kohl replaced the clothes and looked around for any sign of the American, the toad Webber or anyone else.

No one.

The footsteps in the dust outside the door of the truck suggested that Schumann had gone into the woods toward the campus. An old service drive, leading in that direction, was overgrown with grass but more or less smooth. But it was also exposed; the hedgerows and brush on either side would be a perfect place for Schumann to lie in wait. The only other route was through the hilly woods, strewn with rocks and branches. Ach… His poor feet cried out at the very sight of it. But he had no choice. Willi Kohl started forward through the painful obstacle course.

Please, Paul Schumann prayed. Please, step out of the car, Colonel Ernst, and into clear view. In a country that has outlawed God, where there were fewer prayers to hear, perhaps He’d grant this one.

But apparently this was not the moment for divine help. Ernst remained inside the Mercedes. Glare from the windshield and windows kept Paul from seeing exactly where he was in the backseat. If he fired through the glass and missed he’d never have another chance.

He scanned the field again, reflecting: No breeze. Good light – from the side, not in his eyes – illuminating the killing field. A perfect opportunity to shoot.

Paul wiped the sweat off his forehead and sat back in frustration. He felt something pressing uncomfortably into his thigh and he glanced down. It was the folder of papers that the balding man had placed in the car ten minutes before. He pushed it to the floor but, as he did, he glanced at the document on top. He lifted it and, alternating between glancing at Ernst’s Mercedes and the letter, he read:

Ludwig:

You will find annexed hereto my draft letter to the Leader about our study. Note that I’ve included a reference to the testing being done today at Waltham. We can add the results tonight.

At this early stage of the study I believe it is best that we refer to those killed by our Subject soldiers as state criminals. Therefore you will see in the letter that the two Jewish families we killed at Gatow will be described as Jew subversives, the Polish laborers killed at Charlottenburg as foreign infiltrators, the Roma as sexual deviants, and the young Aryans at Waltham today will be political dissidents. At a later point we can, I feel, be more forthright about the innocence of those exterminated by our Subjects but at the moment I do not believe the climate is right for this.

Nor do I refer to the questionnaires you administer to the soldiers as “psychological testing.” This too, I feel, would be unfavorably received.

Please review this and contact me about alterations. I intend to submit the letter as requested, on Monday, 27 July.

– Reinhard

Paul frowned. What was this all about? He flipped to the next sheet and continued reading.

HIGHEST CONFIENTIALITY

Adolf Hitler,

Leader, State Chancellor and President of the German

Nation and Commander of the Armed Forces

Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg,

State Minister of Defense

My Leader and my Minister:

You have asked for details of the Waltham Study being conducted by myself and Doctor-Professor Ludwig Keitel of Waltham Military College. I am pleased to describe the nature of the study and the results so far.

This study arises out of my instructions from you to make ready the German armed forces and to help them achieve most expeditiously the goals of our great nation, as you have set forth.

In my years of commanding our courageous troops during the War, I learned much about men’s behavior during combat. While any good soldier will follow orders, it became clear to me that men respond in different ways to the matter of killing, and this difference, I believe, is based on their nature.

In brief, our study involves asking questions of soldiers before and after they execute condemned enemies of the state and then analyzing their responses. These executions involve a number of different situations: various methods of execution, categories of prisoners, relationship of the soldier to the prisoners, the family background and personal history of the soldier, etc. The examples to date are as follows:

On 18 July of this year, in the town of Gatow, a soldier (Subject A) questioned at length two groups convicted of Jewish subversive activities. He was then ordered to carry out the execution order by automatic weapon fire.

On 19 July, a soldier in Charlottenburg (Subject B) similarly executed a number of Polish infiltrators. Although Subject B was the proximate cause of their deaths, he had had no communication with them prior to their extermination, unlike the Gatow executions.

On 21 July a soldier (Subject C) executed a group of Roma Gypsies engaged in sexually deviant behavior in a special facility we have had constructed at Waltham College. Carbon monoxide gas from vehicle exhaust was the means of death. Like Subject B, this soldier never conversed with the victims, but, unlike him, he did not witness their actual deaths.

Paul Schumann gasped in shock. He looked again at the first letter. Why, these people killed were innocent, by Ernst’s own admission. Jewish families, Polish workers… He read the passages again to make sure he’d seen correctly. He thought he must have mistranslated the words. But, no, there wasn’t any doubt. He looked across the dusty field at the black Mercedes, which still sheltered Ernst. He glanced down at the letter to Hitler and continued.

On 26 July a soldier (Subject D) executed a dozen political dissidents at the Waltham facility. The variation in this case was that these particular convicts were of Aryan extraction, and Subject D spent an hour or more conversing and playing sports with them immediately before he executed them, getting to know some of them by name. He was further instructed to observe them die.

Oh, Christ… that’s here, today!

Paul leaned forward, squinting over the field. The gray-uniformed German soldier who’d been playing soccer with the boys gave a stiff-arm salute to the balding man in brown then he hooked a thick hose from the tailpipe of the bus into a fixture on the outside wall of the classroom.

We are presently compiling the responses provided by all of these Subject soldiers. Several dozen other executions are planned, each one a variation intended to provide us with as much helpful data as possible. The results of the first four tests are attached hereto.

Please be assured we reject out of hand the tainted Jew-thinking of traitors like Dr. Freud but feel that solid National Socialist philosophy and science will allow us to match the personality types of soldiers with the means of death, the nature of the victims and the relationship between them to more efficiently achieve the goals you have set forth for our great nation.

We will be submitting the complete report to you within two months.

With all humble respect,

Col. Reinhard Ernst,

Plenipotentiary

for Domestic Stability

Paul looked up, across the field, to see the soldier glance into the classroom at the young men, close the door, then walk calmly to the bus and turn on the engine.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

When the door to the classroom closed, the students looked around them. It was Kurt Fischer who got out of his seat and walked to the window. He rapped on it.

“You’ve forgotten the pencils,” he called.

“There are some in the back,” someone called.

Kurt found three stubby pencils sitting on a chalkboard ledge. “But not enough for us all.”

“How can we take a test without pencils?”

“Open a window!” somebody called. “My God, it’s hot in here.”

A tall blond boy, jailed because he’d written a poem ridiculing the Hitler Youth, walked to the windows. He struggled to undo the latch.

Kurt returned to his seat and tore open his envelope. He pulled out the sheets of paper to see what sort of personal information they wanted and if there would be any questions about their parents’ pacifism. But he laughed in surprise.

“Look at this,” he said. “The printing didn’t come out on mine.”

“No, mine too.”

“It’s all of them! They’re blank!”

“This is absurd.”

The blond boy at the window called, “They don’t open.” He looked around the stifling room at the others. “None of them. The windows. They don’t open.”

“I can do it,” said a huge young man. But the locks defeated him too. “They’re sealed shut. Why would that be?…” Then he squinted at the window. “It’s not normal glass, either. It’s thick.”

It was then that Kurt smelled the sweet, strong aroma of petrol exhaust flooding into the room from a vent above the door.

“What’s that? Something’s wrong!”

“They’re killing us!” a boy shrieked. “Look outside!”

“A hose. Look!”

“Break out. Break the glass!”

The large boy who’d tried to open the windows looked around. “A chair, table, anything!”

But the tables and benches were bolted to the floor. And although the room had seemed to be a regular classroom, there were no pointers, no globes, not even ink bottles in the wells they might try to shatter the glass with. Several students tried to shoulder down the door but it was thick oak and barred from the outside. The faint blue cloud of exhaust smoke streamed steadily into the room.

Kurt and two other boys tried to kick the windows out. But the glass was indeed thick – far too strong to break without heavy tools. There was a second door but that too was securely closed and locked.

“Stuff something in the vents.”

Two boys stripped off their shirts and Kurt and another student boosted them up. But their murderers, Keitel and Ernst, had anticipated everything. The vents were thick screening, a half meter by a meter in size. There was no way to block the smooth surface.

The boys began to choke. Everyone scrabbled away from the vent, into the corners of the room, some crying, some praying.

Kurt Fischer looked outside. The “recruitment” officer, who’d scored a goal against him just minutes earlier, stood with his arms crossed, gazing at them calmly, the same way someone might watch bears frolic in their pen at the Zoological Garden on Budapest Street.

Paul Schumann saw before him the black Mercedes, still protecting his prey.

He saw the SS guard looking around vigilantly.

He saw the balding man walk up to the soldier who’d fitted the hose to the classroom building, speaking to him, then jotting on a sheet of paper.

He saw an empty field where a dozen young men had just played a soccer game in their last minutes on earth.

And above all of these discrete images he saw what linked them: the appalling specter of indifferent evil. Reinhard Ernst was not simply Hitler’s architect of war, he was a murderer of the innocent. And his motive: the handy collection of information.

The whole goddamn world here was out of kilter.

Paul swung the Mauser to the right, toward the bald man and the soldier. The second gray-uniformed trooper leaned against the van, smoking a cigarette. The two soldiers were some distance apart but Paul could probably touch them both off. The balding man – maybe the professor mentioned in the letter to Hitler – was probably not armed and would most likely flee at the first shot. Paul could then sprint to the classroom, open the door and give covering fire so the boys could get away to safety.

Ernst and his guard would escape or hunker down behind the car until help arrived. But how could Paul let these young men die?

The sights of the Mauser centered on the soldier’s chest. Paul began applying pressure to the trigger.

Then he sighed angrily and swung the muzzle of the rifle back to the Mercedes.

No, he had come here for one purpose. To kill Reinhard Ernst. The young people in the classroom were not his concern. They’d have to be sacrificed. Once he shot Ernst the other soldiers would take cover and return fire, forcing Paul to escape back into the woods, while the boys suffocated.

Trying not to imagine the horror in the room, what those young men would be going through, Paul Schumann touched the ice once more. He steadied his breathing.

And, just at that moment, his prayer was finally answered. The back door to Ernst’s car opened.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

I used to swim for hours at a time, and hike for days, Willi Kohl thought angrily, as he leaned against a tree and caught his breath. It was unjust to be given both a hearty appetite and a flair for a sedentary job.

Ach, and there was the matter of his age too, of course.

Not to mention the feet.

Prussian police training was the best in the world but tracking a suspect through the woods like Göring on a bear hunt had not been part of the curriculum. Kohl could find no signs of Paul Schumann’s route, nor anyone else’s. His own progress had been slow. He would pause from time to time as he approached a particularly dense thicket and make sure no one was sighting at him with a weapon. Then he’d resume his cautious pursuit.

Finally, through the brush ahead of him, he noticed a mowed field around a classroom building. Parked nearby were a black Mercedes, a bus and a van. An Opel too, on the opposite side of the field. Several men stood about, two soldiers among them, with an SS trooper beside the Mercedes.

Was this some sort of furtive black market business deal Schumann was involved in with this Webber? If so, where were they?

Questions, nothing but questions.

Then Kohl noted something unusual. He eased closer, pushing aside brush. He squinted the sweat from his eyes and looked carefully. A hose ran from the tailpipe of the bus into the school. Why would that be? Perhaps they were killing vermin.

Then he soon forgot this curious detail. His attention turned to the Mercedes, whose back door was open. A man was climbing out. Kohl realized with a shock that it was a government minister: Reinhard Ernst, the man in charge of what was dubbed “domestic stability,” though everyone knew that he was the military genius behind rearming the country.

What was he doing here? Could it -

“Oh, no,” Willi Kohl whispered aloud. “Good God…”

He suddenly understood exactly what the security alerts were all about, what the relationship between Morgan and Taggert and Schumann were, and what the American’s mission in this country was.

Gripping his pistol, the inspector began jogging through the woods toward the clearing, cursing the Gestapo and the SS and Peter Krauss for not telling him what they knew. Cursing too the twenty years and twenty-five kilos that life had added to his body since he’d become a policeman. As for his feet, so urgent was his desire to prevent Ernst’s death that he forgot about the pain completely.

All lies!

Everything they’d said was a lie. To get us to come willingly to their death chamber! Kurt had taken what he thought was the cowardly choice, agreeing to join the service, and he was now about to die for that decision – while if he and Hans had gone to the concentration camp they might very well have survived.

Listless and dizzy, Kurt Fischer sat in the corner of Academic Building 5, beside his brother. No less frightened than anyone else, no less desperate, he was not, however, trying to rip the iron desks from the floor or batter the door with his shoulder like the others. He knew Ernst and Keitel had thought this out ahead of time and had constructed an impregnable, airtight building to be their coffin. The National Socialists were as efficient as they were demonic.

Rather, he was wielding a different tool. With the stub of pencil from the back of the room, he was jotting unsteady words onto a page of blank paper ripped from the back of a book. Ironically, considering that it was pacifism that had brought them to this terrible place, the volume’s title was Cavalry Tactics During the War Between France and Prussia, 1870-1871.

Whimpers of fear, shouts of anger around him, sobs.

Kurt hardly heard them. “Don’t be afraid,” he told his brother.

“No,” the terrified younger man said, his voice cracking. “I’m not.”

Rather than the letter of reassurance that he’d planned on writing to their parents that night, which Ernst had promised they could send, he now wrote a very different note.

Albrecht and Lotte Fischer

Prince George Street, No. 14

Swiss Cottage,

London, England

If by some miracle this reaches you, please know that you are in our thoughts now, at these last minutes of our lives. The circumstances of our deaths are as pointless as those of the ten thousand who have died before us here. We pray that you continue your work, with us in your thoughts, so that perhaps this madness can end. Tell everyone who will listen that the evil here is worse than the worst they can imagine and it will not end until somebody has the courage to stop it.

Know that we love you.

– Your sons

Around him the screams abated as the young men dropped to their knees or bellies and began kissing the scuffed oak floor and baseboards to suck whatever air they might from beneath the floors. Some simply prayed peacefully.

Kurt Fischer looked over his writing once more. He actually gave a soft laugh. For he’d realized suddenly that this was the essential purpose he’d been hoping for: delivering the message to his parents and ultimately, he prayed, the world. This is how he would fight the Party. His weapon was his death.

And, now at the end, he felt a curious optimism that this note would be found and delivered and perhaps, through his parents or others, it would be the final root that cracked the wall of the jail imprisoning his country.

The pencil fell from his hand.

Using his last morsels of thought and strength, Kurt folded the paper and put it into his wallet, which had the most chance of being removed from his body by a local mortician or doctor, who, God willing, might find the words he’d written and have the courage to send them on.

Then he took his brother’s hand and closed his eyes.

Still, Paul Schumann had no target.

Reinhard Ernst was pacing erratically beside the Mercedes as he spoke into the microphone attached by a wire to the dashboard in the front seat. The man’s tall bodyguard also blocked Paul’s view.

He kept the gun steady, finger on the trigger, waiting for the man to stop.

Touching the ice…

Controlling his breathing, ignoring the flies buzzing into his face, ignoring the heat. Silently screaming to Reinhard Ernst: Stop moving, for Christ’s sake! Let me do this thing and get away, back to my country, back to my printing plant, my brother… the family that I’ve had, the family that I may yet have.

An image of Käthe Richter came quickly into his head and he saw her eyes, felt her tears, heard the echo of her voice.

I’d rather share my country with ten thousand killers than my bed with one…

His finger caressed the trigger of the Mauser, and her face and words vanished in a spray of ice.

And just at that moment Ernst stopped pacing, clipped the microphone back onto the dashboard of the Mercedes and stepped away from the car. He stood with arms folded, chatting amiably to his bodyguard, who nodded slowly, as they gazed at the classroom.

Paul rested the sights on the colonel’s chest.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Approaching the clearing, Willi Kohl heard a loud gunshot.

It echoed off the buildings and the landscape and was swallowed in the tall grass and juniper around him. The inspector ducked instinctively. He saw, across the clearing, the tall form of Reinhard Ernst drop to the ground beside the Mercedes.

No… The man is dead! It’s my fault! Through my oversight, my stupidity, a man has been killed, a man vital to the fatherland.

The minister’s SS bodyguard, crouching, looked for the assailant.

What have I done? the inspector thought.

But then another shot rang out.

Easing to the protective trunk of a thick oak at the edge of the clearing, Kohl saw one of the regular army soldiers slump to the ground. Kohl looked just beyond him and saw another soldier lying on the grass, blood on his chest. Nearby a balding man in a brown jacket scrabbled to safety under the bus.

The inspector then looked back to the Mercedes. What was this? He’d been wrong. The minister was unhurt! Ernst had dived to the ground for cover when he’d heard the first shot but was now rising cautiously, a pistol in his hand. His guard had unslung a machine pistol and he too was looking for a target.

Schumann hadn’t killed Ernst.

Then a third shot rang through the clearing. It hit Ernst’s Mercedes, shattering a window. A fourth, too, hitting the car’s tire and inner tube. Then Kohl saw motion on the grassy field. It was Schumann, yes! He was running from the Opel toward the school, firing occasionally toward the Mercedes with a long rifle, forcing Ernst and his guard to remain low. He reached the front door of the classroom as Ernst’s SS man rose and fired several times. The bus, however, protected the American from the shots.

But he was not protected from Willi Kohl.

The inspector wiped his hand on his slacks and aimed his revolver at Schumann. It was a long-range shot but not impossible and at least he could pin the man down until other troops arrived.

But just as Kohl began to squeeze the trigger, Schumann ripped the front door of the building open. He stepped inside and emerged a moment later, dragging out a young man. Several others followed, staggering, holding their chests, coughing, some vomiting. Another one, then three more.

God in Heaven! Kohl was stunned. It was they who’d been gassed, not rats or mice.

Schumann motioned the men toward the woods and, before Kohl could recover from the shock of what he’d seen and aim once more, the American was firing toward the Mercedes again, giving the young men cover with the rifle as they made for the safety of the dense forest.

The Mauser kicked hard against his shoulder as Paul fired again. He aimed low, hoping to hit Ernst’s or his guard’s legs. But their car was in a shallow gully and he couldn’t find a target beneath it. He glanced inside the classroom quickly; the last of the young men were leaving. They staggered out and ran for the woods.

“Run!” Paul cried. “Run!”

He fired twice more to keep Ernst and the guard down.

Flinging sweat from his forehead with his fingers, Paul tried to get closer to the Mercedes but both Ernst and his guard were armed and good shots, and the SS man had a submachine gun. They fired repeatedly and Paul could make no headway toward them. As Paul worked the bolt to chamber a round, the guard peppered the bus and the ground nearby. Ernst leapt into the front seat of the Mercedes and grabbed the microphone then took cover again on the far side of the car.

How long would it be until help arrived? Paul had driven through Waltham only two miles up the road; he was sure the good-sized town would be home to a garrison of police. And the school itself might have its own security force.

If he wanted to survive he’d have to flee now.

He fired twice more, using up the last of the Mauser ammunition. He tossed the rifle to the ground then bent down and pulled a pistol from the belt of one of the dead soldiers. It was a Luger, like Reginald Morgan’s. He worked the toggle to put a bullet in the chamber.

He looked down and saw, crouching, halfway under the bus, the balding mustachioed man who’d led the students into the building.

“What’s your name?” Paul asked in German.

“Please, sir.” His voice shook. “Do not-”

“Your name? ”

“Doctor-professor Keitel, sir.” The man was crying. “Please…”

Paul recalled that this was the name on the letter about the Waltham Study. He lifted the pistol and shot him once in the center of the forehead.

Then he took a final look toward Ernst’s car and could see no target. Paul ran across the field, firing several shots into the Mercedes to keep Ernst and the guard down, and soon he plunged into the woods as bullets from the SS man’s weapon chopped through the lush green foliage around him, none even close to its mark.

Chapter Forty

Willi Kohl had turned away from the clearing and now, drenched in sweat and sick from the heat and exertion, was heading back in the direction of the Labor Service truck, Schumann’s means of escape, he assumed. He would flatten the tires to prevent him from leaving.

A hundred meters, two hundred, gasping, wondering: Who were the young people? Were they criminals? Were they innocent?

He paused to try to catch his breath. If he didn’t, he was sure Schumann would easily hear the wheezing rasp as he approached.

He scanned the forest. He saw nothing.

Where was the truck? He was disoriented. This direction? No, it was the other way.

But perhaps Schumann wasn’t making for the truck. Maybe he did have another way out. The man was brilliant, after all. He might have hidden -

Without a sound, without any warning, a piece of hot metal touched the back of his head.

No! His first thought was: Heidi, my love… how will you manage alone with the children in this mad world of ours? Oh, no, no!

“Don’t move.” In barely accented German.

“I won’t… Is you, Schumann?” he asked in English.

“Give me the pistol.”

Kohl let the weapon go. Schumann took it from him.

A huge hand gripped his shoulder and turned the inspector around.

What eyes, Kohl thought, chilled. He reverted to his native language. “You are going to kill me, yes?”

Schumann said nothing but patted the inspector’s pockets for other weapons. He stood back and then examined the field and forest around them. Apparently satisfied that they were alone, the American reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew several pieces of paper, damp with sweat. He handed them to Kohl, who asked, “What is this?”

“Read it,” Schumann said.

Kohl said, “Please, my spectacles.” Glancing down at his breast pocket.

Schumann lifted the glasses out. He handed them to the inspector.

Placing them on his nose, he unfolded and read the documents quickly, shocked by the words. He looked up, speechless, staring into Schumann’s blue eyes. He looked down and read the top page again.

Ludwig:

You will find annexed hereto my draft letter to the Leader about our study. Note that I’ve included a reference to the testing being done today at Waltham. We can add the results tonight.

At this early stage of the study I believe it is best that we refer to those killed by our Subject soldiers as state criminals. Therefore you will see in the letter that the two Jewish families we killed at Gatow will be described as Jew subversives, the Polish laborers killed at Charlottenburg as foreign infiltrators, the Roma as sexual deviants, and the young Aryans at Waltham today will be political dissidents…

Oh, our dear God in Heaven, he thought. The Gatow case, the Charlottenburg case! Another too: Gypsies murdered. And those young men today! With more planned… They were killed simply as fodder for this barbarous study, one sanctioned at the highest levels of government.

“I…”

Schumann took the sheets back. “On your knees. Close your eyes.”

Kohl looked once more at the American. Ach, yes, these are the eyes of a killer, he realized. How had he missed the look earlier at the boardinghouse? Perhaps because there are so many killers among us now that we have grown immune. Willi Kohl had acted humanely, letting Schumann go while he continued to investigate, rather than send the man to sure death in an SS or Gestapo cell. He’d saved the life of a wolf that had now turned on him. Oh, he could tell Schumann that he knew nothing about this horror. Yet why should the man believe him? Besides, Kohl thought with shame, despite his ignorance about this particular monstrosity, the inspector was undeniably linked to the people who had perpetrated it.

“Now!” Schumann whispered fiercely.

Kohl knelt in the leaves, thinking of his wife. Recalling that when they were young, first married, they would picnic in the Grünewald Forest. Ah, the size of the basket she packed, the salt of the meat, the resinous aroma of the wine, the sour pickles. The feel of her hand in his.

The inspector closed his eyes and said a prayer, thinking that at least the National Socialists hadn’t found a way to make your spiritual communications a crime. He was soon lost in a fervent narrative, which God had to share with Heidi and their children.

And then he realized that some moments had passed.

Eyes still closed, he listened carefully. He heard only the wind through the trees, the buzzing of insects, an airplane’s tenor motor high above him.

Another endless minute or two. Finally he opened his eyes. He debated. Then Willi Kohl slowly looked behind him, expecting to hear the crack of a pistol shot at any moment.

No sign of Schumann. The large man had slipped silently from the clearing. Not far away he heard an internal combustion engine start. Then the mesh of gears.

He rose and, as fast as his solid frame and difficult feet could manage, trotted toward the sound. He came to the grass service road and followed it toward the highway. There was no sign of the Labor Service truck. Kohl veered in the direction of his DKW. But he stopped quickly. The hood was up and wires dangled. Schumann had disabled it. He turned and hurried back down the road toward the academic building.

He arrived at the same time that two SS staff cars skidded to a stop nearby. Uniformed troops leapt out and immediately surrounded the Mercedes in which Ernst sat. They drew their pistols and gazed out into the woods, looking for threats.

Kohl hurried across the clearing toward them. The SS officers frowned at Kohl’s approach and turned their weapons on him.

“I’m Kripo!” he called breathlessly and waved his identification card.

The SS commander gestured him over. “Hail Hitler.”

“Hail,” Kohl gasped.

“A Kripo inspector from Berlin? What are you doing here? You heard the wireless report of the assault on Colonel Ernst?”

“No, I followed the suspect here, Captain. I didn’t know his designs on the colonel, though. I wanted him in connection with a different matter.”

“The colonel and his guard didn’t get a look at the assailant,” the SS man said to the inspector. “Do you know what he looks like?”

Kohl hesitated.

A single word burned into the inspector’s mind. It seated itself like a lamprey and would not leave.

That word was duty.

Finally Kohl said, “Yes, yes, I do know, sir.”

The SS commander said, “Good. I’ve ordered roadblocks throughout the area. I’ll send them his description. He’s Russian, is he not? That’s what we heard.”

“No, he’s American,” Kohl said. “And I can do better than merely describe him. I know what vehicle he’s driving and I have his photograph.”

“You have?” the commander asked, frowning. “How?”

“He surrendered this to me earlier today.” Willi Kohl knew he had no choice. Still his heart cried in agony as he dug into his pocket and handed the passport to the commander.

Chapter Forty-One

I’m a fool, thought Paul Schumann.

He was in despair and there was no bottom to it.

Piloting the Labor Service truck west along rough back roads that led to Berlin, looking in the mirror for signs that he was being followed.

A fool…

Ernst had been in my sights! I could have killed him! And yet…

Yet those others, the young men, would have died horrible deaths in that goddamn classroom. He’d told himself to forget them. To touch the ice. To do what he’d come to this troubled country for.

But he hadn’t been able to.

Paul now slammed his palm against the steering wheel, shaking with anger. Now, how many others would die because of his decision? Every time he read that the National Socialists had expanded their army, that they had developed new weapons, that their soldiers had engaged in training exercises, that more people had disappeared from their homes, that they had died bloody on the fourth square of concrete from the grass in the Garden of Beasts, he would feel responsible.

And killing the monstrous Keitel didn’t take the horror out of his choice. Reinhard Ernst, a far worse man than anyone had ever imagined, was still alive.

He felt tears fill his eyes. Fool…

Bull Gordon had picked him because he was so goddamn good. Oh, sure, he touched the ice. But a better man, a stronger man would not simply have gripped the cold; he would have taken it into his soul and made the correct decision, whatever the cost to those young men. His face burning with shame, Paul Schumann drove on, heading back toward Berlin, where he would hide out until the rescue plane arrived in the morning.

Then he rounded a bend and braked hard. An army truck blocked the way. Standing beside it were six SS troopers, two with machine guns. Paul hadn’t thought they would set up roadblocks this quickly or on small roads like this. He took both the pistols – his and the inspector’s – and put them nearby on the seat.

Paul gave a limp salute. “Hail Hitler.”

“Hail Hitler, Officer,” was the crisp reply from the SS commander, though he glanced with a hint of derision at the Labor Service uniform, which Paul had put back on.

“Please, what is the problem?” Paul asked.

The commander approached the truck. “We are looking for someone in connection with an incident at Waltham Military College.”

“Is that why I’ve seen all the official cars on the road?” Paul asked, heart slamming in his chest.

The SS officer grunted, then he studied Paul’s face. He was about to ask a question when a motorcycle pulled up and the driver killed the engine, leapt off and hurried to the commander. “Sir,” he said, “a Kripo detective has learned the assassin’s identity. Here’s his description.”

Paul’s hand slowly curled around the Luger. He could kill these two. But there were still the others nearby.

Handing a sheet of paper to the commander, the motorcyclist continued. “He’s an American. But he speaks German fluently.”

The commander consulted the note. He glanced at Paul then back down at the paper. He announced, “The suspect is about five feet six inches high and quite thin. Black hair and a mustache. According to his passport, his name is Robert E. Gardner.”

Paul stared at the commander, nodding, silent. Gardner? he wondered.

“Ach,” the SS officer asked, “why are you looking at me? Have you seen such a man or not?”

“No, sir. I’m sorry. I haven’t.”

Gardner?… Who was he?… Wait, yes, Paul remembered: It was the name on one of Robert Taggert’s fake passports.

Kohl had given that documentation to the SS, not Paul’s own.

The commander looked down at the sheet of paper again. “The detective reported that the man was driving a green Audi sedan. Have you seen this vehicle in the area?”

“No, sir.”

In the mirror Paul noticed two of the other officers looking in the back of the truck. They called, “Everything’s fine here.”

The commander continued. “If you see him or the Audi, you will contact the authorities immediately.” He shouted to the driver of the truck barricading the road. “Let him pass.”

“Hail Hitler,” Paul said with an enthusiasm he believed he hadn’t heard anyone else use since he’d arrived in Germany.

“Yes, yes, hail Hitler. Now move along!”

An SS staff Mercedes skidded to a stop outside Building 5 of Waltham Military College, where Willi Kohl was watching dozens of troops prowl through the forest in search of the young men who’d escaped from the classroom.

The door of the car opened and no less than Heinrich Himmler himself climbed out, wiped his schoolteacher glasses with a handkerchief and strode up to the SS commander, Kohl and Reinhard Ernst, who was out of the car now and surrounded by a dozen guards.

Kohl raised his arm and Himmler responded with a brief salute and then studied the man closely with his tight eyes. “You are Kripo?”

“Yes, Police Chief Himmler. Detective-inspector Kohl.”

“Ah, yes. So you are Willi Herman Kohl.”

The detective was taken aback that the overlord of German police would know his name. He recalled his SD file and felt all the more uneasy at the recognition. The mousy man turned away and asked Ernst, “You are unharmed?”

“Yes. But he killed several officers and my colleague, Doctor-professor Keitel.”

“Where is the assassin?”

The SS commander said sourly, “He escaped.”

“And who is he?”

“Inspector Kohl has learned his identity.” With a temerity that Ernst’s rank allowed – but Kohl would not dare use – the colonel said abruptly, “Look at the passport picture, Heinrich. He was the same man who was at the Olympic stadium. He was standing one meter from the Leader, from all the ministers. He was that close to us all.”

“Gardner?” Himmler asked uneasily, gazing at the booklet the SS com mandant held up. “He was using a fake name at the stadium. Or this one is fake.” The small man looked up and frowned. “But why did he save your life at the stadium?”

“Obviously he didn’t save my life,” Ernst snapped. “I wasn’t in danger then. He must have rigged the gun in the shed himself to make it appear that he was our ally. To get under our defenses, of course. Who knows whom else he was going to target after he’d killed me. Perhaps the Leader himself.

“The report you told us about said that he was Russian,” he added sharply. “But this is an American passport.”

Himmler fell silent for a moment, eyes sweeping the dry leaves at their feet. “The Americans would have no incentive to harm you, of course. I would guess that the Russians hired him.” He looked at Kohl. “How do you happen to know of this assassin?”

“Purely a coincidence, State Police Chief. I followed him as a suspect in another case. Only after I arrived here to conduct surveillance did I realize that Colonel Ernst was present at the college and that the suspect had designs to kill him.”

“But surely you knew of the earlier attempt on Colonel Ernst’s life?” Himmler asked quickly.

“The incident that the colonel was just referring to, at the Olympic stadium? No, sir. I was not apprised of that.”

“You weren’t?”

“No, sir. Kripo was not informed. And I just met with Chief of Inspectors Horcher no more than two hours ago. He knew nothing of it either.” Kohl shook his head. “I wish we had been informed, sir. I could have coordinated my case with the SS and Gestapo so that this incident might not have happened and those soldiers not died.”

“You’re saying that you did not know that our security forces were looking for a possible infiltrator as of yesterday?” Himmler asked with the leaden delivery of a bad cabaret actor.

“That’s correct, my Police Chief.” Kohl looked into the man’s tiny eyes, framed by round black-rimmed glasses, and knew that it had been Himmler himself who’d given the order to keep the Kripo in the dark about the security alert. He was, after all, the Third Empire’s Michelangelo in the art of hoarding credit, plundering glory and deflecting blame, better even than Göring. Kohl wondered if he himself was somehow at risk here. A potentially disastrous security breach had occurred; would it benefit Himmler to sacrifice someone for the oversight? Kohl’s stock seemed high, but sometimes a scapegoat was necessary, especially when your intrigue has nearly gotten Hitler’s rearmament expert killed. Kohl made a quick decision and added, “And curiously I heard nothing from our Gestapo liaison officer either. We just met yesterday afternoon. I wish he’d mentioned the specific details of the security matter.”

“And who is your Gestapo liaison?”

“That would be Peter Krauss, sir.”

“Ah.” The state chief of police nodded, filing the information away, and lost interest in Willi Kohl.

“There were some political prisoners here too,” Reinhard Ernst said evasively. “A dozen or so young men. They have escaped into the woods. I’ve sent troops to find them.” His eyes strayed again to the deadly classroom. Kohl too looked at the building, which seemed so benign, a modest facility of higher learning, dating from Second Empire Prussia, and yet which he now understood represented the purest of evils. He noticed that Ernst had had the soldiers remove the hose from the exhaust and drive the bus away. The clipboard and some documents that had been scattered on the ground, probably part of the abhorrent Waltham Study, were likewise gone.

Kohl said to Himmler, “With your permission, sir, I would like to prepare a report as soon as possible and assist in finding the killer.”

“Yes, do so immediately, Inspector.”

“Hail.”

“Hail,” Himmler said.

Kohl turned and started toward some SS troopers beside a van to arrange for a ride back to Berlin. As he walked painfully toward them, he decided that he could finesse the incident in such a way as to reduce the risk to himself. True, the picture in the passport matched the face of a man killed in a boardinghouse in southwest Berlin before the attempt on Ernst’s life. But only Janssen, Paul Schumann and Käthe Richter knew that. The latter two would not be volunteering any information to the Gestapo and, as for the inspector candidate, Kohl would dispatch Janssen to Potsdam immediately for several days on one of the homicides that awaited their attention there and take control of all the files on Taggert and the Dresden Alley murder. Tonight Kohl would produce the body of the assassin, who died while trying to escape. The coroner would not, of course, have performed the autopsy yet – if the corpse had even been picked up – and Kohl could make sure, through favors or bribery, that the time of death would be noted as occurring after the assassination attempt here at the school.

He doubted there would be any further inquiry; the whole matter was now a dangerous embarrassment – to Himmler for being slack in state security and to Ernst because of the incendiary Waltham Study. He could -

“Oh, Kohl, Inspector Kohl?” Heinrich Himmler called.

He turned. “Yes, sir?”

“How soon will your protégé be ready, do you think?”

The inspector thought for a moment and could make no sense of this. “Ah, yes, Police Chief Himmler. My protégé?”

“Konrad Janssen. How soon will he be transferring to the Gestapo?”

What did he mean? Kohl’s mind was blank for a moment.

Himmler continued. “Why, you knew that we accepted him into the Gestapo before his graduation from the police college, didn’t you? But we wanted him to apprentice to one of the best investigators in the Alex before he began working on Prince Albrecht Street.”

Kohl felt the blow in his chest, hearing this news. But he recovered quickly. “Forgive me, State Police Chief,” the inspector said, shaking his head and smiling. “Of course I was aware. The incident here has wholly occupied my mind… Regarding Janssen, he’ll be ready soon. He’s proving extremely talented.”

“We’ve had our eye on him for some time, Heydrich and I both. You can be proud of that boy. He’s going to the top quickly, I have a feeling. Hail Hitler.”

“Hail Hitler.”

Devastated, Kohl walked away. Janssen? He’d planned all along to work for the secret political police? The inspector’s hands trembled with pain at this betrayal. So, the boy had lied about everything – his desire to be a criminal detective, about joining the Party (to rise through the Gestapo and the Sipo he would have to be a member). And, with a chill running through him, he thought of the many indiscretions he’d shared with the inspector candidate.

Janssen, you could have me arrested, you know, and sent to Oranienburg for a year for saying what I just did…

Still, he reflected, the inspector candidate needed Kohl to get ahead and could not afford to denounce him. Perhaps the danger was not as great as it could have been.

Kohl looked up from the ground at the coterie of SS troops standing around the van. One of them, a huge man in a black helmet, asked, “Yes? Can we help you?”

He explained about his DKW.

“The killer disabled it? Why did he bother? He could have outrun you on foot!” The soldiers laughed. “Yes, yes, we’ll give you a ride, Inspector. We’ll leave in a few minutes.”

Kohl nodded and, still numb with shock from learning about Janssen, climbed into the van and sat by himself. He stared into the orange disk of the sun, slipping behind a hillside bristling with the silhouettes of flowers and grass. He slouched, head against the back of the seat. The SS troops got into the vehicle and they started off, out of the college, heading southeast, back to Berlin.

The soldiers talked about the attempted assassination and the Olympic Games and plans for a big National Socialist rally outside of Spandau this coming weekend.

It was at this moment that the inspector came to a decision. His choice seemed absurdly impulsive, as fast as the sudden vanishing of the sun below the horizon, brilliant color in the sky one moment then nothing but a blue-gray dimness an instant later. But perhaps, he reflected, his was no conscious choice at all but was inevitable and had been determined long, long before, by immutable laws, in the same way that day had to become dusk.

Willi Kohl and his family would leave Germany.

Konrad Janssen’s betrayal and the Waltham Study – both stark emblems of what the government was and where it was going – were reason enough. Yet what truly decided the matter was the American, Paul Schumann.

Standing with the SS officers outside Building 5, aware that he had both Schumann’s real passport and Taggert’s fake ones in his pocket, Kohl had agonized over doing his duty. And in the end he had done so. But the sorrow was that his obligation had dictated he act against his country.

As for how he would leave, he knew that too. He would remain ignorant of Janssen’s choice (but would, of course, cease his improvident asides to the young man), he would mouth whatever lines Chief of Inspectors Horcher wished him to, he would stay well clear of the basement of Kripo headquarters with its busy DeHoMag card-sorting machines, he would handle murders like the one in Gatow exactly the way they wished him to – which was, of course, to handle them not at all. He would be the model National Socialist policeman.

And then in February he would take his entire family with him to the International Criminal Police Commission conference in London. And from there they would sail for New York, to which two cousins had emigrated some years ago and had made lives for themselves.

Being a senior official traveling on Kripo business he could easily arrange for exit documents and permission to take a good amount of money out of the country. There would be some tricky maneuvering, of course, in making the arrangements, but who in Germany nowadays did not have some skill at intrigue?

Heidi would welcome the change, of course, finding a haven for her children. Günter would be saved from his Nazi Youth classmates. Hilde could attend school once again and perhaps become the professor she wished to be.

His older daughter had a complication, of course: her fiancé, Heinrich Sachs. But Kohl decided he would convince the man to come with them. Sachs was vehemently anti-National Socialist, had no close relatives and was so completely in love with Charlotte that he would follow her anywhere. The young Sachs was a talented civil servant, spoke English well and, despite some bouts of arthritis, he was a tireless worker; Kohl suspected that he would have a far easier time finding a job in America than would Kohl himself.

As for the inspector – starting over in middle age! What an overwhelming challenge! He thought ironically of the Leader’s nonsensical opus, My Struggle. Well, what a struggle he himself would have – a tired man with a family, beginning again at an age when he should be delegating cases to young inspectors and taking half-days off to escort his children to the wave-making pool at Luna Park. Yet, it was not the thought of the effort and uncertainty awaiting him that made him choke quietly and that drew tears from his eyes, which he averted from the young SS troopers.

No, the tears were for what he was now looking at as they swept around a turn en route to Berlin: the plains of Prussia. And, though they were dusty and wan on this dry summer evening, they still exuded a grandeur and palpable significance, for they were the plains of his Germany, a great nation at heart, whose truths and ideals had somehow tragically been stolen by thieves.

Kohl reached into his pocket and pulled out his meerschaum pipe. He filled the bowl then searched his jacket but could find no match. He heard a rasp as the SS trooper sitting next to him struck one and held it out for him. “Thank you,” Kohl said and sucked on the stem to ignite the tobacco. He sat back, filling the air around him with the scent of pungent cherries, and stared out the front windshield as the lights of Berlin came into view.

Chapter Forty-Two

The car wove like a dancer along the road to his home in Charlottenburg. Reinhard Ernst sat in the back, bracing himself against the turns, his head resting on the luxurious leather. He had a new driver and guard; Claus, the SS lieutenant with him at Waltham College, had been injured by glass flying from a window of the Mercedes and had been taken to a surgeon. Another SS car, filled with black-helmeted guards, was behind them.

He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Ach, Keitel dead, along with the soldier taking part in the study. “Subject D” was how Ernst thought of him; he’d never even known the man’s name… What a disaster this day had been.

Yet the one thing that stood out most prominently in Ernst’s thoughts was the choice that the killer had made outside Building 5. If he’d wanted to kill me, the colonel reflected, which was clearly his mission, he could have, easily. Yet he had decided not to; he’d rescued the young men instead. Reflecting on this act, the horror of what Ernst had been doing became clear. Yes, he realized, the Waltham Study was abominable. He had looked those young men in the face and told them: Serve in the army for a year and your sins will be absolved – all the while knowing that this was a lie; he’d spun the fiction solely to keep the victims relaxed and unsuspecting, so that the soldier could get to know them before he killed them.

Yes, he’d lied to the Fischer brothers, just as he’d lied to the Polish workers when he’d said they would receive double pay to transplant some trees near Charlottenburg for the Olympics. And he’d lied to the Jewish families in Gatow, telling them to assemble by the riverside, because there were some renegade Stormtroopers nearby and Ernst and his men would protect them.

Ernst didn’t dislike Jews. He’d fought beside some in the War and found them as smart and courageous as everyone else. Indeed, based on the Jews he’d known then and since, he couldn’t find any difference between them and Aryans. As for Poles, well, his reading of history told him they too were not so very different from their Prussian neighbors and indeed had a nobility that few National Socialists possessed.

Repugnant, what he was doing with the study. Horrifying. He felt a twist of razor-sharp shame within him, like the searing pain in his arm when the hot shrapnel had ripped into his shoulder in the War.

The road now straightened and they approached the neighborhood where he lived. Ernst leaned forward and gave the driver directions to his home.

Abominable, yes…

And yet… as he looked around him at the familiar buildings and cafés and parks of this portion of Charlottenburg, the horror began to dull, just as happened on the battlefield after the last Mauser or Enfield was fired, the cannon salvos ceased, the cries of the wounded abated. He recalled tonight watching the “recruitment officer,” Subject D, who had willingly, cavalierly, hooked up the deadly hose to the school, even though he’d been playing soccer with the victims shortly before. Another soldier might have balked altogether. Had he not died, his answers to the doctor-professor’s questionnaire would have been extremely helpful in establishing the criteria they would use to match soldiers and duties.

The weakness he’d felt a moment ago, the contrition prompted by the assassin’s choice to forsake his own duty, vanished suddenly. He was once again convinced he was doing the right thing. Let Hitler have his fling with madness. Some innocents would die, yes, until the storm blew over, but eventually the Leader would be gone, while the army Ernst was creating would outlast him and be the backbone of a new German glory – and ultimately a new European peace.

Sacrifices had to be made.

Tomorrow Ernst would begin searching for another psychologist or doctor-professor who might help him continue the work. And this time he would find one who was more attuned to the spirit of National Socialism than Keitel – and one without Jewish grandparents, for God’s sake. Ernst must be more clever. This was a time in history when one had to be clever.

The car pulled up in front of his house. Ernst thanked the driver and stepped out. The SS troops in the car behind his leapt out as well and joined the others already guarding his residence. The commander told him that the men would remain until the assassin was caught or it could be verified that he’d been killed or fled the country. Ernst politely thanked him as well and walked inside. He greeted Gertrud with a kiss. She glanced at the grass and mud stains on his pants.

“Ach, you are hopeless, Reinie!”

Without explaining, he smiled wanly. She returned to the kitchen, where she was cooking something fragrant with vinegar and garlic. Ernst climbed the stairs to wash and change his clothes. He saw his grandson in his room, drawing on a tablet of paper.

“Opa!” the boy cried and ran to him.

“Hello, Mark. Are we going to work on our boat tonight?”

He didn’t respond and Ernst realized the little boy was frowning.

“What is the matter?”

“Opa, you called me Mark. That was Papa’s name.”

Had he? “I’m sorry, Rudy. I was not thinking clearly. I’m very tired today. I believe I need a nap.”

“Yes, I take naps too,” the boy said eagerly, happy to please his grandfather with his knowledge. “In the afternoon sometimes I get tired. Mutti gives me hot milk, cocoa sometimes, and then I have a nap.”

“Exactly. That’s how your foolish grandfather feels. It’s been a long day and he needs a nap. Now you get the wood and knives ready. After supper we will work on our boat.”

“Yes, Opa, I’ll do it now.”

Close to 3 P.M. Bull Gordon walked up the steps to The Room in Manhattan. The city was busy and vibrant in other neighborhoods, even on Sunday, but here the cross street was still.

The blinds were closed and the town house appeared deserted but as Gordon, wearing civvies today, approached, the front door opened before he even took the key from his pocket. “Afternoon, sir,” the uniformed naval officer said in a soft voice.

Gordon nodded.

“The Senator’s in the parlor, sir.”

“Alone?”

“That’s right.”

Gordon walked inside, hung his topcoat on a rack in the hallway. He felt the weapon in his pocket. He wouldn’t need it, probably, but he was glad it was there. He drew a deep breath and walked into the small room.

The Senator was sitting in an armchair beside a Tiffany floor lamp. He was listening to the Philco radio. When he saw Gordon he shut it off and asked, “Tiring flight?”

“They’re always tiring. Seems that way.”

Gordon walked to the bar and poured himself a scotch. Maybe not a good idea, what with the gun. But to hell with it. He added another finger to the glass. He offered a querying glance to the Senator.

“Sure. Only double that.” He nodded at Gordon’s glass.

The commander poured smoky liquid into another glass and handed it to the older man. He sat down heavily. His head still throbbed from the flight in the R2D-1, the naval version of the DC-2. It was just as fast but lacked the comfortable wicker chairs and soundproofing of the Douglas Commercial line.

The Senator was wearing a suit, waistcoat and stiff-collared shirt with a silk tie. Gordon wondered if it had been what he’d worn to church that morning. He’d once told the commander that whatever a politician personally believed, even if he was an atheist, he had to go to church. Image. It counts.

The Senator said gruffly, “So. You may as well tell me what you know. Get it over with.”

The commander took a deep sip of whisky and did just what the old man asked.

Berlin sat under a veil of night.

The city was a huge expanse, flat except for the few cloud-catchers of the skyline and the Tempelhof airport beacon to the south. This view vanished as the driver piloted his vehicle over the crest of the hill and plunged into the ordered northwestern neighborhoods of the city, among cars apparently returning from their weekends at nearby Prussian lakes and mountains.

All of which made driving particularly difficult. And Paul Schumann wanted to make certain he was not stopped by the traffic police. No identification, a stolen truck… No, it was vital to be inconspicuous.

He turned down a street that led to a bridge across the Spree and worked his way south. Finally he found what he sought, an open lot in which dozens of delivery vehicles and vans were parked. He’d noticed this as he’d walked from Lützow Plaza to Käthe Richter’s boardinghouse along the canal when he’d first arrived in the city.

Could that only have been yesterday?

He thought again about her. And about Otto Webber too.

As hard as it was to picture them, though, those images were better than dwelling on his pitiful decision at Waltham.

On the best day, on the worst day, the sun finally sets…

But it would be a long, long time before the sun set on his failure today. Maybe it never would.

He parked between two large vans, killed the engine. He sat back, wondering if it was crazy to return here. But he concluded that it was probably a wise move. He wouldn’t have to stay long. Smooth-faced Avery and bucking-for-a-fight Manielli would make sure the pilot took off promptly for the rendezvous at the aerodrome. Besides, he sensed instinctively he was safer here than anywhere outside the city. Beasts as arrogant as the National Socialists would never suspect that their prey was hiding squarely in the middle of their garden.

The door opened and the orderly let another man into The Room, where Bull Gordon and the Senator sat.

In his trademark white suit, looking every inch a plantation owner from a hundred years ago, Cyrus Clayborn walked inside and nodded to the two men with a casual smile on his ruddy face. Then he squinted and nodded once more. He glanced at the liquor cabinet but didn’t make a move toward it; he was an abstainer, Bull Gordon knew.

“They have any coffee here?” Clayborn asked.

“No.”

“Ah.” Clayborn set his walking stick against the wall near the door and said, “You only ask me here when you need money, and I suspect you’re not after alms today.” He sat heavily. “It’s the other thing, huh?”

“It’s the other thing,” Gordon echoed. “Where’s your man?”

“My bodyguard?” Clayborn cocked his head.

“Right.”

“Outside in the car.”

Relieved that he wouldn’t need his pistol after all – Clayborn’s minder was notoriously dangerous – Gordon called one of the three navy men in an office near the front door and told him to make sure the fellow stayed inside the limo, not to let him into the town house. “Use any force you need to.”

“Yes, sir. With pleasure, sir.”

Gordon hung up and saw the financier chuckling. “Don’t tell me you were thinkin’ it’d come to six-guns, Commander.” When the officer said nothing Clayborn asked, “So. How’d you tip to it?”

“Fellow named Albert Heinsler,” Gordon replied.

“Who?”

“You oughta know,” grumbled the Senator. “He was on the Manhattan because of you.”

Gordon continued. “The Nazis’re smart, sure, but we thought – why would they have a spy on the ship? That seemed bum to me. We knew Heinsler was with the Jersey division of the German-American Bund, so we had Hoover put some pressure on them.”

“Doesn’t that faggot have anything better to do with his time?” Clayborn grumbled.

“We found out you’re a big contributor to the bund.”

“Man’s gotta put his money to work somehow,” he said glibly, making Gordon detest him all the more. The magnate nodded. “Heinsler was his name, huh? Never knew it. He was just on board to keep an eye on Schumann and get a message to Berlin about a Russian being in town. Needed to keep the Huns on alert. Make our little play more credible, you know. All part of the act.”

“How did you know Taggert?”

“Served with me in the War. Promised him some diplomatic postings if he helped me out here.”

The Senator shook his head. “We couldn’t figure out how you got the pass codes.” He laughed and nodded toward Gordon. “At first the commander here thought I was the one sold Schumann out. That’s okay, though. Didn’t ruffle my feathers. But then Bull remembered your companies – you control every telephone and telegraph line on the East Coast. You had somebody listen in when I called the commander and we decided on the codes.”

“That’s baloney. I-”

Gordon said, “One of my men checked your company’s files, Cyrus. You had transcripts of the conversations between the Senator and me. You found out everything.”

Clayborn shrugged, more amused than troubled. Which really rubbed Gordon the wrong way. The commander snapped, “We’ve got it all, Clay-born.” He explained how the original idea to kill Reinhard Ernst had come from the magnate, who suggested it to the Senator. Patriotic duty, he’d said. He’d help fund the assassination. Hell, he’d fund the whole thing. The Senator had gone to certain people high in the administration and they’d approved the operation on the sly. But Clayborn had secretly called Robert Taggert and ordered him to kill Morgan, meet Schumann and help him plot to kill Ernst, then save the German colonel at the last minute. When Gordon had gone to him to ask for the extra thousand bucks, Clayborn had kept up the pretense that it was Morgan, not Taggert, whom Gordon was talking to.

“Why’s it so important to you to keep Hitler happy?” Gordon asked.

Clayborn scoffed. “You’re a fool if you’re ignoring the Jew threat. They’re plotting all over the world. Not to mention the Communists. And, for God’s sake, the coloreds? We can’t let our guard down for a minute.”

Disgusted, Gordon snapped, “So that’s what this’s all about? Jews and Negroes?”

Before the old man could answer, though, the Senator said, “Oh, I’ll betcha there’s something else, Bull… Money, right, Cyrus?”

“Bingo!” the white-haired man whispered. “The Germans owe us billions – all the loans we floated to keep them going over the past fifteen years. We have to keep Hitler and Schacht and the rest of the money boys over there happy so our notes keep getting paid.”

“They’re rearming to start another war,” Gordon growled.

Clayborn said matter-of-factly, “All the better to be on their side then, don’t you think? Bigger market for our arms.” He pointed a finger at the Senator. “Provided you fools in Congress get rid of the Neutrality Act…” Then he frowned. “So what do the Huns think about the Ernst situation?”

“Oh, well, it’s a goddamn mess,” the Senator raged. “Taggert tells them about an assassination but the killer escapes and tries again. Then Taggert disappears. Publicly they’re talking about the Russians hiring an American assassin. But in private they’re wondering if we weren’t behind the whole thing.”

Clayborn grimaced in disgust. “And Taggert?” Then he nodded. “Dead. Sure. And Schumann did it. Well, that’s the way it goes… So, gentlemen, I suppose this is the end of our fine working relationship.”

“Reggie Morgan’s dead because of you… You’re guilty of some pretty bad crimes here, Cyrus.”

The man brushed a white eyebrow. “How ’bout you funding this little outing with private money? Oh, that’d make a nice topic for a congressional hearing, don’tcha think? We have ourselves a standoff here, looks like. So I’m thinking it’s best we both go our separate ways and keep mum. Good night now. Oh, and keep buying stock in my company if you civil servants can afford any. It’s only going to go up.” Clayborn stood slowly. He picked up his cane and headed for the door.

Gordon decided that, whatever the consequences, whatever happened to his own career, he’d make sure Clayborn get didn’t away with this, not after the man had murdered Reginald Morgan and nearly killed Schumann. But larger justice would have to wait. There was only one matter that needed attention at the moment. “I want Schumann’s money,” the commander said.

“What money?”

“The ten thousand you promised him.”

“Oh. He didn’t produce. The Huns suspect us and my man’s dead. Schumann’s outa luck. No dough.”

“You’re not going to chisel him.”

“Sorry,” the businessman said, not looking the least contrite.

“Well, in that case, Cyrus,” the Senator called, “good luck.”

“We’ll keep our fingers crossed for you,” Gordon added.

The businessman stopped, looked back.

“I’m just thinking what might happen if Schumann finds out you not only tried to kill him but you stiffed him too.”

“Knowing his line of work and all,” Gordon chimed in again.

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“He’ll be back here in a week, ten days.”

The industrialist sighed. “All right, all right.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a booklet of bank drafts. He tore one out and started to write.

Gordon shook his head. “Nope. You’re going to go dig up some good, old-fashioned scratch right now. Now. Not next week.”

“Sunday night? Ten thousand?”

“Now,” the Senator echoed. “If Paul Schumann wants greenbacks, greenbacks’re what we’re going to give him.”

Chapter Forty-Three

They were sick of waiting.

During their weekend in Amsterdam, Lieutenants Andrew Avery and Vincent Manielli had seen tulips in every color imaginable and looked at plenty of fine paintings and flirted with page-boyed blondes who had round, rosy faces (Manielli, at least; Avery being contentedly married). They’d enjoyed the company of a dashing Royal Air Force flier named Len Aarons, who was in the country on his own intrigues (about which he was as evasive as the Americans). They’d drunk quarts of Amstel beer and cloying Genever gin.

But life on a foreign army base wears thin fast. And, in truth, they were also tired of hanging from tenterhooks, worrying about Paul Schumann.

Now, though, the waiting was over. At 10 A. M. Monday morning the twin-engine plane, streamlined as a gull, flared for a moment and then touched down on the grass field at Machteldt Aerodrome outside of Amsterdam. It settled onto its tail wheel and slowed, then taxied toward the hangar, weaving in a zigzag since the pilot couldn’t see over the raised nose when the plane was on the ground.

Avery waved as the sleek, silver plane eased toward them.

“I think I’ll go a few rounds with him,” Manielli shouted over the sound of the engines and prop wash.

“Who?” Avery asked.

“Schumann. Do some sparring. I watched him; he’s not as good as he thinks he is.”

The lieutenant looked his colleague over and laughed.

“What?”

“He’d eat you like a box of Cracker Jack and spit out the prize.”

“I’m younger, I’m faster.”

“You’re stupider.”

The plane eased up to a parking strip and the pilot cut the engines. The props coughed to a stop and the ground crew ran out to chock the wheels under the big Pratt & Whitneys.

The lieutenants walked up to the door. They’d tried to think of something to get Schumann, a present, but couldn’t figure out what. Manielli had said, “We’ll tell him we gave him his first airplane ride. That’ll be his present.”

But Avery had said, “No. You can’t tell somebody that something you’ve already done for them is a present.”

Manielli figured the lieutenant would know this; married men knew all about the protocols of giving presents. So they bought him a carton of Packs o’ Pleasure – Chesterfields – which had taken them some effort, and expense, to find in Holland. Manielli now held it under his arm.

One of the ground crew walked to the door of the plane and pulled it down. It became stairs. The lieutenants stepped forward, grinning, but stopped fast as a man in his early twenties, wearing filthy clothing, stepped into the doorway, hunched over because of the low clearance.

He blinked, held his hand up to shelter his eyes from the sun, then climbed down the stairs. “Guten Morgen… Bitte, Ich bin Georg Mattenberg.” He threw his arms around Avery and hugged him heartily. Then he walked past him, rubbing his eyes as if he’d just awakened.

“Who the hell’s he?” Manielli whispered.

Avery shrugged and then stared at the door as other men emerged. There were five altogether. All in their twenties or late teens, in good shape, but exhausted and bleary-eyed, unshaven, their clothes tattered and stained with sweat.

“It’s the wrong plane,” Manielli whispered. “Jesus, where-”

“It’s the right plane,” his fellow officer said but he was no less confused.

“Lieutenant Avery?” an accented voice called from the doorway. A man a few years older than the others climbed out. Another, younger, joined him.

“That’s me. Who are you?”

“I speak English better as the others. I will answer. I am Kurt Fischer and this is my brother, Hans.” He laughed at the lieutenants’ expression and said, “You are not expecting us, yes, yes. But Paul Schumann saved us.”

He told a story about how Schumann had rescued a dozen young men from being gassed to death by the Nazis. The American had managed to round up some of them as they fled into a forest and offered them the chance to escape from the country. Some wanted to stay and take their chances but seven had agreed to leave, including the Fischer brothers. Schumann had loaded them into the back of a Labor Service truck, where they’d grabbed shovels and burlap bags and masqueraded as workers. He’d driven them through a roadblock to safety in Berlin, where they hid out for the night.

“At dawn he droved us out to a old aerodrome outside of the city, where we got on this airplane. And here we are.”

Avery was about to pepper the man with more questions, but at that moment a woman appeared in the doorway of the airplane. She was around forty, quite thin, as tired as the others. Her brown eyes quickly snapped up everything around her. She climbed down the stairs. In one hand was a small suitcase, in the other a book whose cover had been torn off.

“Ma’am,” Avery said, casting another perplexed gaze at his colleague.

“You are Lieutenant Avery? Or perhaps you are Lieutenant Manielli.” Her English was perfect, with only a slight accent.

“I… well, yes, I’m Avery.”

The woman said, “My name is Käthe Richter. This is for you.”

She handed him a letter. He opened it and nudged Manielli. They both read:

Gordon, Avery and Manelli (or however the hell you spell it):

Get these people into England or America or wherever they want to go. Find homes for them, get them set up. I don’t care how you do it but make sure it happens.

And if you’re thinking about sending them back to Germany, just remember that Damon Runyon or one of my buddies at the Sun or the Post would be pretty interested in what you sent me to Berlin for. Now that’d be one hell of a news story. Esp. in an election year.

It’s been swell, boys,

Paul

P.S.: There’s a Negro living in the back room of my gym, Sorry Williams. Have the place signed over to him, however that works. And give him some dough too. Be generous.

“There is this as well,” she said and gave Avery several tattered pages typed in German. “It’s about something called the Waltham Study. Paul said the commander should see it.”

Avery took the document and put it in his pocket. “I’ll make sure he gets it.”

Manielli walked to the airplane. Avery joined him and they looked into the empty cabin. “He didn’t trust us. He thought we were going to hand him over to Dewey after all and had the pilot land somewhere else before they got here.”

“France, you think?” Manielli suggested. “Maybe he got to know it during the War… No, I know. I’ll bet it was Switzerland.”

Stung that Schumann had thought they’d renege on their deal, Avery called toward the cockpit, “Hey, where did you drop him off?”

“What?”

“Where did you land? To drop Schumann off?”

The pilot frowned as he glanced at the copilot. Then he looked back at Avery. His voice echoed through the tinny fuselage: “You mean he didn’t tell you?”