Garden of Beasts

Hitler.”
    Devastated, Kohl walked away. Janssen? He’d planned all along to work for the secret political police? The inspector’s hands trembled with pain at this betrayal. So, the boy had lied about everything—his desire to be acriminal detective, about joining the Party (to rise through the Gestapo and the Sipo he would have to be a member). And, with a chill running through him, he thought of the many indiscretions he’d shared with the inspector candidate.
    Janssen, you could have me arrested, you know, and sent to Oranienburg for a year for saying what I just did. . . . 
    Still, he reflected, the inspector candidate needed Kohl to get ahead and could not afford to denounce him. Perhaps the danger was not as great as it could have been.
    Kohl looked up from the ground at the coterie of SS troops standing around the van. One of them, a huge man in a black helmet, asked, “Yes? Can we help you?”
    He explained about his DKW.
    “The killer disabled it? Why did he bother? He could have outrun you on foot!” The soldiers laughed. “Yes, yes, we’ll give you a ride, Inspector. We’ll leave in a few minutes.”
    Kohl nodded and, still numb with shock from learning about Janssen, climbed into the van and sat by himself. He stared into the orange disk of the sun, slipping behind a hillside bristling with the silhouettes of flowers and grass. He slouched, head against the back of the seat. The SS troops got into the vehicle and they started off, out of the college, heading southeast, back to Berlin.
    The soldiers talked about the attempted assassination and the Olympic Games and plans for a big National Socialist rally outside of Spandau this coming weekend.
    It was at this moment that the inspector came to a decision. His choice seemed absurdly impulsive, as fast as the sudden vanishing of the sun below the horizon, brilliant color in the sky one moment then nothing but a blue-gray dimness an instant later. But perhaps, he reflected, his wasno conscious choice at all but was inevitable and had been determined long, long before, by immutable laws, in the same way that day had to become dusk.
    Willi Kohl and his family would leave Germany.
    Konrad Janssen’s betrayal and the Waltham Study—both stark emblems of what the government was and where it was going—were reason enough. Yet what truly decided the matter was the American, Paul Schumann.
    Standing with the SS officers outside Building 5, aware that he had both Schumann’s real passport and Taggert’s fake ones in his pocket, Kohl had agonized over doing his duty. And in the end he had done so. But the sorrow was that his obligation had dictated he act against his country.
    As for how he would leave, he knew that too. He would remain ignorant of Janssen’s choice (but would, of course, cease his improvident asides to the young man), he would mouth whatever lines Chief of Inspectors Horcher wished him to, he would stay well clear of the basement of Kripo headquarters with its busy DeHoMag card-sorting machines, he would handle murders like the one in Gatow exactly the way they wished him to—which was, of course, to handle them not at all. He would be the model National Socialist policeman.
    And then in February he would take his entire family with him to the International Criminal Police Commission conference in London. And from there they would sail for New York, to which two cousins had emigrated some years ago and had made lives for themselves.
    Being a senior official traveling on Kripo business he could easily arrange for exit documents and permission to take a good amount of money out of the country. There would be some tricky maneuvering, of course, in makingthe arrangements, but who in Germany nowadays did not have some skill at intrigue?
    Heidi would welcome the change, of course, finding a haven for her children. Günter would be saved from his Nazi Youth classmates. Hilde could attend school once again and perhaps become the professor she wished to be.
    His older daughter had a complication, of course: her fiancé, Heinrich Sachs. But Kohl decided he would convince the man to come with them. Sachs was vehemently anti–National Socialist, had no close relatives and was so completely in love with Charlotte that he would follow her anywhere. The young Sachs was a talented civil servant, spoke English well and, despite some bouts of arthritis, he was a tireless worker; Kohl suspected that he would have a far easier time finding a job