Garden of Beasts

out of kilter.
    He slipped into a public rest room, which was immaculate, and stepped into a stall. He stubbed out his cigarette and dropped it, along with the cigarette butts and wad of pulp that had held the address of Käthe Richter’s boardinghouse, into the toilet. Then he tore the pictures of Ernst up into dozens of tiny pieces and flushed everything away.
    Outside on the street again, he put aside the difficult images of Max’s sad and unnecessary death and concentrated on the job ahead of him. It had been years since he’d killed anyone with a rifle. He was a good shot with a long weapon. People call guns “equalizers.” But that’s not completely true. A pistol weighs perhaps three pounds, a rifle twelve or more. To hold a weapon absolutely still requires strength, and Paul’s solid arms had helped make him the best shot in his squadron.
    Yet now, as he’d explained to Morgan, when he had to touch off someone, he preferred to do it with a pistol.
    And he always came in close, close as breath.
    He never said a word to his victim, never confronted him, never even let him know what was about to happen.He would appear, as silently as a big man could, behind the victim, if possible, and fire the shot into his head, killing him instantly. He would never think of behaving like the sadistic Bugsy Siegel or the recently departed Dutch Schultz; they’d slowly beat people to death, torment them, taunt them. What Paul did as a button man had nothing to do with anger or pleasure or the gritty satisfaction of revenge; it was simply about committing an evil act to eliminate a greater evil.
    And Paul Schumann insisted on paying the price for this hypocrisy. He suffered from the proximity of killing. The deaths sickened him, sent him into a tunnel of sorrow and guilt. Every time he killed, another part of him died too. Once, drunk in a shabby West Side Irish bar, he concluded that he was the opposite of Christ; he died so that others might die too. He wished he’d been too smoked on hooch to remember that thought. But it’d stuck with him.
    Still, he supposed Morgan was right about using the rifle. His buddy Damon Runyon had once said that a man could be a winner only if he was willing to step over the edge. Paul sure did that often enough, but he also knew when to stop walking. He’d never been suicidal. On a number of occasions he’d postponed the touch-off when he sensed the odds were bad. Maybe six to five against was acceptable. But worse than that? He didn’t—
    A loud crash startled him. Something flew through a bookstore window onto the sidewalk a few yards away. A bookcase. Some books followed. He glanced inside the shop and saw a middle-aged man holding his bloody face. He appeared to have been struck on the cheek. A woman, crying, gripped his arm. They were both terrified. Four large men in light brown uniforms stood around them. Paul supposed they were Stormtroopers, Brownshirts.One of them was holding a book and shouting at the man. “You are not allowed to sell this shit! They’re illegal. They’re a ticket to Oranienburg.”
    “It’s Thomas Mann,” the man protested. “It means nothing against the Leader or our Party. I—”
    The Brownshirt slapped the bookseller in his face with the open book. He spoke in a mocking voice. “It’s . . .” Another furious slap. “Thomas . . .” Another, and the spine of the book broke. “Mann. . . .”
    The bullying angered Paul but it wasn’t his problem. He could hardly afford to draw attention to himself here. He started on. But suddenly one of the Brownshirts grabbed the woman by the arm and pushed her out the door. She fell hard into Paul and dropped to the sidewalk. She was so terrified she didn’t even seem to notice him. Blood ran from her knees and palms where the window glass had cut her skin.
    The apparent leader of the Stormtroopers dragged the man outside. “Destroy the place,” he called to his friends, who began to push over the counters and shelves, rip the pictures from the walls, slam the sturdy chairs onto the floor, trying to break them. The leader glanced at Paul then delivered a powerful blow to the midsection of the bookseller, who gave a grunt, rolled over on his stomach and vomited. The Brownshirt stepped toward the woman. He grabbed her by the hair and was about to strike her in the face when Paul, out of instinct, grabbed his arm.
    The man spun around, spittle flying from his mouth, set in a large, square