Garden Of Beasts

EPILOGUE

A cold night in the Black Forest.

Two men trudged through the shallow snow. They were chilled certainly, but they were men who seemed to have a destination in mind and an important task to perform once they arrived.

Purpose, like desire, invariably numbs the body to discomfort.

As does the powerful Austrian liquor, obstler, which they’d been drinking liberally from a shared flask.

“How is your belly?” Paul Schumann asked his companion in German, noticing a particularly pronounced wince on the man’s mustachioed face.

The man gave a grunt. “It hurts, of course. It will always hurt, Mr. John Dillinger.”

After his return to Berlin, Paul had made a few subtle inquiries at the Aryan Café to learn where Otto Webber had lived; he’d wanted to do what he could to help any of the man’s “girls.” He’d gone to see one – Berthe – and learned to his shock and joy that Webber was still alive.

The bullet that had punctured the man’s gut in the warehouse by the Spree had caused serious but not lethal damage during its brief transit through his substantial flesh. He had floated halfway down the river in his Viking funeral boat before some fishermen pulled him out and decided he wasn’t as dead as he looked. They got him into a bed and stanched the bleeding. Soon he was in the care of an old gang-ring doctor, who, for a price, of course, stitched him up, no questions asked. The later infection was worse than the wound. (“Lugers,” Webber had griped. “They fire the filthiest of bullets. The toggle allows in germs.”) But Berthe made up for her inability to cook or keep house by being an infinitely dedicated nurse and she spent some months, with Paul’s help, getting the German gangster back to health.

Paul moved into another boardinghouse in a forgotten portion of the city, far from Magdeburger Alley and Alexander Plaza, and lay low for a time. He did some sparring in gyms, picked up some marks here and there in printing plants, and occasionally dated local women: mostly former Socis or artists or writers who’d gone to ground in places like Berlin North and November 1923 Square. During the first weeks of August he would go regularly to a post office or viewing hall to watch the Olympics live on the Telefunken or Fernseh television sets installed there for those who couldn’t get tickets to the Games. Playing the good National Socialist (with his bleached Aryan hair, no less), he would have forced himself to scowl each of the four times Jesse Owens won a gold medal, but it turned out that most of the Germans sitting around him enthusiastically cheered the Negro’s victories. The Germans won the most gold medals, which didn’t surprise anybody, but the U.S. won plenty and came in second. The only shadow over the event, Paul had been troubled to see, was that America’s Jewish runners, Stoller and Glickman, had indeed been pulled from the relay.

After the Games concluded and August moved toward September, Paul’s holiday came to an end. Determined to make up for his lapse in judgment at the Waltham Military College, he resumed his quest to kill Germany’s plenipotentiary for domestic stability.

But Webber’s weathervane system of civil servants reported some interesting information: Reinhard Ernst had disappeared. All they could learn was that his office at the Chancellory had been vacated. It seemed that he’d moved out of Berlin with his family and was spending a great deal of time on the road. He was given a new title (like ribbons and medals, Paul had learned, titles were tossed out by National Socialists like corn to chickens). Ernst was now the “state overleader for special industrial liaison.”

No other details about him could be learned. Did this mean that he’d been put out to pasture? Or were these merely security measures to protect the rearmament tzar?

Paul Schumann had no idea.

But one thing was clear. Germany’s military buildup was proceeding at a breakneck pace. That fall the new fighter plane, the Me 109, manned by German pilots, made its combat debut in Spain, helping Franco and his Nationalist troops. The plane was stunningly successful, decimating Republican positions. The German army was conscripting more and more young men, and navy yards were working at full capacity to produce warships and submarines.

By October even the out-of-the-way neighborhoods of Berlin were growing more and more dangerous, and as soon as Otto Webber was well enough to travel he and Paul took to the road.

“How far to Neustadt?” the American now asked.

“Not far. Ten kilometers or so.”

“Ten?” Paul grumbled. “God in heaven.”

In fact, though, he was glad that their next destination wasn’t nearby. Best to put some distance between them and St. Margen, their most recent stop, where Schupo officers were perhaps just now finding the body of a local National Socialist party boss. He’d been a brutal man who would order his thugs to round up and beat merchants then Aryanize their businesses. He had many enemies who wished to do him harm but the Kripo or Gestapo investigation would reveal that the circumstances of his death were hardly questionable; it was obvious that he had stopped his car by the roadside to relieve himself in the river and lost his footing on the icy shore. He’d fallen twenty feet and crushed his head on the rocks then drowned in the fast-flowing river. A half-empty bottle of schnapps was found beside him. A sorrowful accident. No need to look further.

Paul now considered their next destination. Neustadt, they had learned, would be the site of a speech by one of Hermann Göring’s front men, the headliner at a miniature Nuremberg rally that was currently under way. Paul had heard the man speak, inciting citizens to destroy the houses of Jews in the vicinity. He called himself “doctor” but he was nothing but a bigoted criminal, a petty man, a dangerous man – and one who would prove to be just as accident-prone as the party leader in St. Margen if Paul and Webber were successful.

Perhaps another fall. Or maybe he would knock an electric lamp into the bathtub with him. There was always the possibility too that, being as unbalanced as many National Socialist leaders seemed to be, the man might be inclined to shoot or hang himself in a fit of madness. After Neustadt they would hightail it to Munich, where, God bless him, Webber had yet another of his “girls,” with whom they could stay.

Headlights flared behind them and the two men took to the woods quickly and remained there until the truck passed. When the taillights vanished around a bend in the road the men continued on their way.

“Ach, Mr. John Dillinger, you know what this road was used for?”

“Tell me, Otto.”

“This was the center of the cuckoo clock trade. You have heard of them?”

“Sure. My grandmother had one. My grandfather kept taking the weights off the chains so it wouldn’t run. Hated that damn clock. Every hour, coo-koo, coo-koo… ”

“And this is the very road that the traders used, to carry them to market. There are not so many clock makers now but at one time you would see carts going up and down this highway at all hours of the night and day… Ach, and look there. You see that river? It feeds the Danube, and the rivers on the other side of the road feed the Rhine. This is the heart of my country. Isn’t it a beautiful place in the moonlight?”

Nearby an owl called, the wind sighed and the ice coating the tree branches tapped like peanut shells on a barroom floor.

The man is right, Paul thought; it is a beautiful place. And he felt within him a contentment as crisp as the day-old snow beneath his boots. The most improbable turn of events had made him a resident of this alien land, but he’d come to decide that it was far less alien to him than the country where his brother’s printing plant awaited, a world to which he knew he’d never return.

No, he’d left that life behind years ago, left behind any circumstance involving modest commerce, a neatly shingled house, a bright, loving wife, playful children. But this was perfectly fine with him. Paul Schumann wanted nothing more than what he had at this moment: to be walking under the coy eye of a half-moon, with a like-minded companion at his side, on a journey to fulfill the purpose God had given him – even if that role was the difficult and presumptuous task of correcting His mistakes.