Garden of Beasts

face.”
    “Age?”
    The man shook his head. “All I know is that he was a big man and was wearing a light suit. . . . I can’t say the color, I’m afraid. Oh, and on his head was a hat like Air Minister Göring wears.”
    “What kind is that?” Kohl asked.
    “With a narrow brim. Brown.”
    “Ah, something helpful.” Kohl looked the janitor up and down. “Very well, you may go now.”
    “Hail Hitler,” the man said with pathetic enthusiasm and offered a powerful salute, perhaps in compensation for the fact he needed to use his left arm for the gesture.
    The inspector offered a distracted “Hail” and returned to the body. They quickly collected their equipment. “Let’s hurry. To the Summer Garden.”
    They started back to the car. Willi Kohl winced, glancing down at his feet. Even wearing overpriced leather shoes stuffed with the softest of lamb’s wool did little to help his distraught toes and arches. Cobblestones were particularly brutal.
    He was suddenly aware of Janssen, at his side, slowing. “Gestapo,” the young man whispered.
    Dismayed, Kohl looked up and saw Peter Krauss, in a shabby brown suit and matching felt trilby hat, approach. Two of his assistants, younger men, about Janssen’s age, held back.
    Oh, not now! The suspect might be at the restaurant this very moment, not suspecting that he’d been detected.
    Krauss walked toward the two Kripo inspectors leisurely. Propaganda Minister Goebbels was always sending out Party photographers to stage pictures of model Aryans and their families to use in his publications. Peter Krauss could easily have been a subject for a hundred such pictures: He was a tall, slim, blond man. A former colleague of Kohl’s, Krauss had been invited to join the Gestapo because of his experience in the old Department 1A of the Kripo, which investigated political crimes. Just after the National Socialists came to power the department was spun off and became the Gestapo. Krauss was like many Prussian Germans: Nordic with some Slav blood in his veins but office gossip had it that he’d been invited to leave the Kripo for the job on Prince Albrecht Street only after changing his first name from Pietr, which sniffed of the Slavic.
    Kohl had heard Krauss was a methodical investigator though they had never worked together; Kohl had always refused to handle political crimes, and now the Kripo was forbidden to.
    Krauss said, “Willi, good afternoon.”
    “Hail. What brings you here, Peter?”
    Janssen nodded and the Gestapo investigator did the same. He said to Kohl, “I received a phone call from our boss.”
    Did he mean Heinrich Himmler himself? Kohl wondered. It was possible. One month ago, the SS leader had consolidated every police force in Germany under his own control and had created the Sipo, the plainclothed division, which included the Gestapo, the Kripo, and the notorious SD, which was the SS’s intelligence division. Himmler had just been named state chief of police, a rather modest description, Kohl had thought at the timeof the announcement, for the most powerful law enforcer on earth.
    Krauss continued. “He’s been instructed by the Leader to keep our city blemish-free during the Olympics. We’re to look into all serious crimes near the stadium, Olympic Village and city center and make sure the perpetrators are swiftly caught. And here, a murder within shouting distance of the Tiergarten.” Krauss clicked his tongue in dismay.
    Kohl glanced obviously at his watch, desperate to get to the Summer Garden. “I’m afraid I have to leave, Peter.”
    Examining the body closely, crouching down, the Gestapo man said, “Unfortunately with all the foreign reporters in town . . . So difficult to control them, to monitor them.”
    “Yes, yes, but—”
    “We need to make sure this is solved before they learn of the death.” Krauss rose and walked in a slow circle around the dead man. “Who is he, do we know?”
    “Not yet. His ID is missing. Tell me, Peter, this wouldn’t have anything to do with an SS or SA matter, would it?”
    “Not that I know of,” Krauss replied, frowning. “Why?”
    “On the way here, Janssen and I noticed many more patrols. Random stops to check papers. Yet we’ve heard no word about an operation.”
    “Ach, that’s nothing,” the Gestapo inspector said, waving his hand dismissively. “A minor security matter. Nothing the Kripo need worry about.”
    Kohl looked again at his pocket watch. “Well, I