Garden of Beasts

Roger Manvell, Gestapo; Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich; Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris; Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War; Adam LeBor and Roger Boyes, Seduced by Hitler; Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin; Richard Mandell, The Nazi Olympics; Susan D. Bachrach, The Nazi Olympics; Mark R. McGee, Berlin: A Visual and Historical Documentation from 1925 to the Present; Richard Overy, Historical Atlas of the Third Reich; Neal Ascherson, Berlin: A Century of Change; Rupert Butler, An Illustrated History of the Gestapo; Alan Bullock, Hitler; A Study in Tyranny; Pierre Aycoberry, The Social History of the Third Reich, 1833–1945; Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge.

SIMON & SCHUSTER PROUDLY PRESENTS
    THE TWELFTH CARD
    A Lincoln Rhyme Novel
    Jeffery Deaver
    Now available in hardcover from Simon & Schuster
    Turn the page for a preview of The Twelfth Card. . . .

I
    The Three-Fifths Man
    Tuesday, October 9

Chapter One
    His face wet with sweat and with tears, the man runs for freedom, he runs for his life.
    “There! There he goes!”
    The former slave does not know exactly where the voice comes from. Behind him? To the right or left? From atop one of the decrepit tenements lining the filthy cobblestoned streets here?
    Amid July air hot and thick as liquid paraffin, the lean man leaps over a pile of horse dung. The street sweepers don’t come here, to this part of the city. Charles Singleton pauses beside a pallet stacked high with barrels, trying to catch his breath.
    A crack of a pistol. The bullet goes wide. The sharp report of the gun takes him back instantly to the War: the impossible, mad hours as he stood his ground in his dusty blue uniform, steadying his heavy musket, facing men wearing dusty gray, aiming their own weapons his way.
    Running faster now. The men fire again. These bullets also miss.
    “Somebody stop him! Five dollars gold if you catch him.”
    But the few people out on the streets this early—mostly Irish rag pickers and laborers trooping to work with hods or picks on their shoulders—have no inclination to stop the Negro who has fierce eyes and large muscles and such frightening determination. As for the reward, the shouted offer came from a city constable, which means there’s no coin behind the promise.
    At the Twenty-third Street paintworks, Charles veers west. He slips on the slick cobblestones and falls hard. A mounted policeman rounds the corner and, raising his nightstick, bears down on the fallen man. And then—
    And? the girl thought.
    And?
    What happened to him?
    Sixteen-year-old Geneva Settle twisted the knob on the microfiche reader again but it would move no farther; she’d come to the last page on this carriage. She lifted out the metal rectangle containing the lead article in the July 23, 1868, edition of Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated. Riffling through the other frames in the dusty box, she’d worried that the remaining pages of that article were missing and she’d never find out what happened to her ancestor, Charles Singleton. She’d learned that historical archives regarding black history were often incomplete, if not forever misplaced.
    Where was the rest of the story?
    Ah . . . Finally she found it and mounted the carriage carefully into the battered gray reader, moving the knob impatiently to locate the continuation of the story of Charles’s flight.
    Geneva’s lush imagination—and years of immersingherself in books—had given her the wherewithal to embellish the bare-bones magazine account of the former slave’s pursuit through the hot, foul streets of nineteenth-century New York. She almost felt she was back then, rather than where she really was at the moment: 140 years later in the deserted fifth-floor library of the Museum of African-American Culture and History on Fifty-fifth Street in Midtown Manhattan.
    As she twisted the dial, the pages streamed past on the grainy screen. Geneva found the rest of the article, which was headlined:
    SHAME
    THE ACCOUNT OF A FREEDMAN’S CRIME
    CHARLES SINGLETON, A VETERAN OF THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES, BETRAYS THE CAUSE OF OUR PEOPLE IN A NOTORIOUS INCIDENT
    A picture accompanying the article showed twenty-eight-year-old Charles Singleton in his Civil War uniform. He was tall, his hands were large, and the tight fit of the uniform on his chest and arms suggested powerful muscles. Lips broad, cheekbones high, head round, skin quite dark.
    Staring at the unsmiling face