Garden of Beasts

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 notebookand 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