Garden of Beasts

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