Garden of Beasts

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