Garden of Beasts

him. A sorrowful accident. No need to look further.
    Paul now considered their next destination. Neustadt, they had learned, would be the site of a speech by one of Hermann Göring’s front men, the headliner at a miniature Nuremberg rally that was currently under way. Paul had heard the man speak, inciting citizens to destroy the houses of Jews in the vicinity. He called himself “doctor” but he was nothing but a bigoted criminal, a petty man, a dangerous man—and one who would prove to be just as accident-prone as the party leader in St. Margen if Paul and Webber were successful.
    Perhaps another fall. Or maybe he would knock an electric lamp into the bathtub with him. There was always the possibility too that, being as unbalanced as many National Socialist leaders seemed to be, the man might be inclined to shoot or hang himself in a fit of madness. AfterNeustadt they would hightail it to Munich, where, God bless him, Webber had yet another of his “girls,” with whom they could stay.
    Headlights flared behind them and the two men took to the woods quickly and remained there until the truck passed. When the taillights vanished around a bend in the road the men continued on their way.
    “Ach, Mr. John Dillinger, you know what this road was used for?”
    “Tell me, Otto.”
    “This was the center of the cuckoo clock trade. You have heard of them?”
    “Sure. My grandmother had one. My grandfather kept taking the weights off the chains so it wouldn’t run. Hated that damn clock. Every hour, coo-koo, coo-koo . . . ”
    “And this is the very road that the traders used, to carry them to market. There are not so many clock makers now but at one time you would see carts going up and down this highway at all hours of the night and day. . . . Ach, and look there. You see that river? It feeds the Danube, and the rivers on the other side of the road feed the Rhine. This is the heart of my country. Isn’t it a beautiful place in the moonlight?”
    Nearby an owl called, the wind sighed and the ice coating the tree branches tapped like peanut shells on a barroom floor.
    The man is right, Paul thought; it is a beautiful place. And he felt within him a contentment as crisp as the day-old snow beneath his boots. The most improbable turn of events had made him a resident of this alien land, but he’d come to decide that it was far less alien to him than the country where his brother’s printing plant awaited, a world to which he knew he’d never return.
    No, he’d left that life behind years ago, left behind any circumstance involving modest commerce, a neatly shingled house, a bright, loving wife, playful children. But this was perfectly fine with him. Paul Schumann wanted nothing more than what he had at this moment: to be walking under the coy eye of a half-moon, with a like-minded companion at his side, on a journey to fulfill the purpose God had given him—even if that role was the difficult and presumptuous task of correcting His mistakes.

A UTHOR’S N OTE
    While the story of Paul Schumann’s mission to Berlin is purely fiction—and the real-life individuals did not, of course, play the roles I gave them—the history, geography, technology and cultural and political institutions in the United States and Germany during the summer of 1936 are otherwise accurate. The Allies’ naivete about and ambivalence toward Hitler and the National Socialists were as I have described them. German rearmament occurred very much as I portrayed it, though it was not a single individual, like my fictional Reinhard Ernst, but a number of men who had the task of making the country ready for the war that Hitler had long envisioned. There was indeed a place known as “The Room” in Manhattan, and the Office of Naval Intelligence was the country’s CIA of its day.
    Portions of Hitler’s Mein Kampf were the inspiration for the radio broadcasts throughout the story, and while there was no Waltham Study per se, such research was undertaken, although somewhat later than I have it in the book, by SS troops responsible for mass exterminations (known as Einstatzgruppen ), under the direction of Artur Nebe, who had at one time headed the Kripo. The Nazi government was using DeHoMag card-sorting machines for tracking its citizens in 1936, though they were not, to my knowledge, ever located at Kripo headquarters. The International Criminal Police Commission, which proved to be Willi Kohl’s salvation, did in fact meet in