Garden of Beasts

statistic that he, as a diligent police officer, knew well: The most popular form of transportation in Berlin was the bicycle, hundreds ofwhich clogged the streets here, hiding their suspects’ escape as effectively as a cloud of dense smoke.
    •   •   •
    They’d ditched the bikes and were walking down a busy street a half mile from November 1923 Square.
    Paul and Morgan looked for another café or tap room with a phone.
    “How did you know they were in the Edelweiss Café?” Morgan asked, breathing hard from the fast cycling.
    “The car, the one parked on the curb.”
    “The black one?”
    “Right. I didn’t think anything of it at first. But something clicked in my mind. I remembered a couple of years ago, when I was on my way to a job. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one going to visit Bo Gillette. Some cops from Brooklyn got there first. But they were lazy and parked outside, halfway up over the curb, figuring it was an unmarked car, so who’d notice? Well, Bo noticed. He shows up, understands they’re looking for him and vanishes. It took me a month to find him again. In the back of my mind I was thinking, police car. So when the younger guy stepped outside I realized right away it was the same man I’d seen on the patio of the Summer Garden.”
    “They’ve tracked us from Dresden Alley to the Summer Garden to here. . . . How on earth?”
    Paul thought back. He hadn’t told Käthe Richter he was coming here and he’d checked a dozen times to make sure nobody had been following him from the boardinghouse to the cab stand. He’d told nobody at the Olympics. The pawnbroker might have betrayed them here, but he wouldn’t have known about the Summer Garden. No, these two industrious cops had trailed them on their own.
    “Taxis,” Paul finally said.
    “What?”
    “That’s the only link. To the Summer Garden and here. From now on, if we can’t shank it, we have the driver drop us two, three blocks from where we’re going.”
    They continued away from November 1923 Square. Some blocks farther on they found a beer hall with a public phone. Morgan went inside to make the call to his contact while Paul ordered ales and, edgy and vigilant, kept watch outside. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see the two cops hurrying up the street, still on their trail.
    Who the hell were they?
    When Morgan returned to the table he was troubled. “We have a problem.” He took a sip of the beer and wiped his mustache. He leaned forward. “They’re not releasing any information. Word came from Himmler or Heydrich—my man’s not sure who—but no information about public appearances of Party or government officials is to be released until further notice. No press conferences. Nothing. The announcement went out just a few hours ago.”
    Paul drank down half the beer. “What do we do? Do you know anything about Ernst’s schedule?”
    “I don’t even know where he lives, except somewhere in Charlottenburg. We could stake him out at the Chancellory maybe, follow him. But that’ll be very hard. If you’re within five hundred feet of a senior party official you can be expected to be stopped for your papers and detained if they don’t like what they see.”
    Paul reflected for a moment. He said, “I have a thought. I might be able to get some information.”
    “About what?”
    “Ernst,” Paul said.
    “You?” Morgan asked, surprised.
    “But I’ll need a couple of hundred marks.”
    “I have that, yes.” He counted out bills and slipped them to Paul.
    “And your man in the information ministry? Do you think he could find out about people who aren’t officials?”
    Morgan shrugged. “I can’t say for certain. But I can tell you one thing without doubt—that if the National Socialists have any skill at all, it is gathering information on their citizens.”
    •   •   •
    Janssen and Kohl left the courtyard building.
    Mrs. Haeger could offer no descriptions of the suspects, though, ironically, this was due to literal, not political, blindness. Cataracts in her eyes had allowed the busybody to observe the men hiding, then and making off with the bicycles but rendered her unable to give any more details.
    Discouraged, they returned to November 1923 Square and resumed their search, making their way up and down the street, talking to shop vendors and waiters, flashing the etching of the victim and inquiring about their suspect.
    They had no success—until they came to a