Garden of Beasts

that moment, his prayer was finally answered. The back door to Ernst’s car opened.

Chapter Thirty-Eight
    I used to swim for hours at a time, and hike for days, Willi Kohl thought angrily, as he leaned against a tree and caught his breath. It was unjust to be given both a hearty appetite and a flair for a sedentary job.
    Ach, and there was the matter of his age too, of course.
    Not to mention the feet.
    Prussian police training was the best in the world but tracking a suspect through the woods like Göring on a bear hunt had not been part of the curriculum. Kohl could find no signs of Paul Schumann’s route, nor anyone else’s. His own progress had been slow. He would pause from time to time as he approached a particularly dense thicket and make sure no one was sighting at him with a weapon. Then he’d resume his cautious pursuit.
    Finally, through the brush ahead of him, he noticed a mowed field around a classroom building. Parked nearby were a black Mercedes, a bus and a van. An Opel too, on the opposite side of the field. Several men stood about, two soldiers among them, with an SS trooper beside the Mercedes.
    Was this some sort of furtive black market business deal Schumann was involved in with this Webber? If so, where were they?
    Questions, nothing but questions.
    Then Kohl noted something unusual. He eased closer,pushing aside brush. He squinted the sweat from his eyes and looked carefully. A hose ran from the tailpipe of the bus into the school. Why would that be? Perhaps they were killing vermin.
    Then he soon forgot this curious detail. His attention turned to the Mercedes, whose back door was open. A man was climbing out. Kohl realized with a shock that it was a government minister: Reinhard Ernst, the man in charge of what was dubbed “domestic stability,” though everyone knew that he was the military genius behind rearming the country.
    What was he doing here? Could it—
    “Oh, no,” Willi Kohl whispered aloud. “Good God . . .”
    He suddenly understood exactly what the security alerts were all about, what the relationship between Morgan and Taggert and Schumann were, and what the American’s mission in this country was.
    Gripping his pistol, the inspector began jogging through the woods toward the clearing, cursing the Gestapo and the SS and Peter Krauss for not telling him what they knew. Cursing too the twenty years and twenty-five kilos that life had added to his body since he’d become a policeman. As for his feet, so urgent was his desire to prevent Ernst’s death that he forgot about the pain completely.
    •   •   •
    All lies!
    Everything they’d said was a lie. To get us to come willingly to their death chamber! Kurt had taken what he thought was the cowardly choice, agreeing to join the service, and he was now about to die for that decision—while if he and Hans had gone to the concentration camp they might very well have survived.
    Listless and dizzy, Kurt Fischer sat in the corner of Academic Building 5, beside his brother. No less frightened than anyone else, no less desperate, he was not, however, trying to rip the iron desks from the floor or batter the door with his shoulder like the others. He knew Ernst and Keitel had thought this out ahead of time and had constructed an impregnable, airtight building to be their coffin. The National Socialists were as efficient as they were demonic.
    Rather, he was wielding a different tool. With the stub of pencil from the back of the room, he was jotting unsteady words onto a page of blank paper ripped from the back of a book. Ironically, considering that it was pacifism that had brought them to this terrible place, the volume’s title was Cavalry Tactics During the War Between France and Prussia, 1870–1871.
    Whimpers of fear, shouts of anger around him, sobs.
    Kurt hardly heard them. “Don’t be afraid,” he told his brother.
    “No,” the terrified younger man said, his voice cracking. “I’m not.”
    Rather than the letter of reassurance that he’d planned on writing to their parents that night, which Ernst had promised they could send, he now wrote a very different note.
    Albrecht and Lotte Fischer
    Prince George Street, No. 14
    Swiss Cottage,
    London, England
    If by some miracle this reaches you, please know that you are in our thoughts now, at these last minutesof our lives. The circumstances of our deaths are as pointless as those of the ten thousand who have died before us here. We pray that you