Garden of Beasts

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 notso. 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 mysteriousTaggert, 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