Garden of Beasts

several years ago, passed the qualifying exam in jurisprudence, then, after attending the police institute, he was accepted at this young age as a detective-inspector candidate, apprenticed to Kohl.
    It was often hard to draw the inspector candidate out; Janssen was reserved. He was married to a solid, dark-haired woman who was now pregnant with their second child. The only time Janssen grew animated was when he talked about his family or about his passion for bicycling and hiking. Until all police were put on overtime because of the approaching Olympics, detectives worked only half days on Wednesday and Janssen would often change intohis hiking shorts in a Kripo lavatory at noon and go off on a wander with his brother or his wife.
    But whatever made him tick, the man was smart and ambitious and Kohl was very fortunate to have him. Over the past several years the Kripo had been hemorrhaging talented officers to the Gestapo, where the pay and opportunities were far better. When Hitler came to power the number of Kripo detectives around the country was twelve thousand. Now, it was down to eight thousand. And of those, many were former Gestapo investigators sent to the Kripo in exchange for the young officers who’d transferred out; in truth, they were largely drunks and incompetents.
    The telephone buzzed and he picked it up. “This is Kohl.”
    “Inspector, it is Schreiber, the clerk you spoke to today. Hail Hitler.”
    “Yes, yes, hail.” On the way back to the Alex from the Summer Garden, Kohl and Janssen had stopped at the haberdashery department at Tietz, the massive department store that dominated the north side of Alexander Plaza, near Kripo headquarters. Kohl had shown the clerk the picture of Göring’s hat and asked what kind it was. The man didn’t know but would look into the matter.
    “Any luck?” Kohl asked him.
    “Ach, yes, yes, I have found the answer. It’s a Stetson. Made in the United States. As you know, Minister Göring shows the finest taste.”
    Kohl made no comment on that. “Are they common here?”
    “No, sir. Quite rare. Expensive, as you can imagine.”
    “Where could I buy one in Berlin?”
    “In truth, sir, I don’t know. The minister, I’m told, special-orders them from London.”
    Kohl thanked him, hung up and told Janssen what he’d learned.
    “So perhaps he’s an American,” Janssen said. “But perhaps not. Since Göring wears the same hat.”
    “A small piece of the puzzle, Janssen. But you will find that many small pieces often give a clearer picture of a crime than a single large piece.” He took the brown evidence envelopes from his pocket and selected the one containing the bullet.
    The Kripo had its own forensics laboratory, dating back to when the Prussian police force had been the nation’s preeminent law enforcer (if not the world’s; in the Weimar days, the Kripo closed 97 percent of the murder cases in Berlin). But the lab too had been raided by the Gestapo both for equipment and personnel, and the technical workers at headquarters were harried and far less competent than they had once been. Willi Kohl, therefore, had taken it upon himself to become an expert in certain areas of criminal science. Despite the absence of his personal interest in firearms, Kohl had made quite a study of ballistics, modeling his approach on the best firearms laboratory in the world—the one at J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C.
    He shook the bullet out onto a clean piece of paper.
    Placing the monocle in his eye he found a pair of tweezers and examined the slug carefully. “Your eyes are better,” he said. “You look.”
    The inspector candidate carefully took the bullet and the monocle while Kohl pulled a binder from his shelf. It contained photographs and sketches of many types of bullets. The binder was large, several hundred pages, but the inspector had organized it by caliber and by number of grooves and lands—the stripes pressed into a lead slug bythe rifling in the barrel—and whether they twisted to the left or the right. Only five minutes later Janssen found a match.
    “Ach, this is good news,” Kohl said.
    “How so?”
    “It is an unusual weapon our killer used. Look. It’s a nine-millimeter Largo round. Most likely from the Spanish Star Modelo A. Good for us, it is rare. And as you pointed out, it is either a new weapon or one that has been fired little. Let us hope the former. Janssen, you have a way with