Garden of Beasts: A Novel of Berlin 1936 Read online

  A moment later yet another man entered, about the same age as the Senator, wearing a white linen suit that was savagely wrinkled. The body it encased was large and soft. He carried a walking stick. He glanced once at Paul then, without a word to anyone, he retreated to the corner. He too looked familiar but Paul couldn’t place him.

  “Now,” Gordon continued. “Here’s the situation, Paul. We know you’ve worked for Luciano, we know you’ve worked for Lansky, a couple of the others. And we know what you do for them.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “You’re a button man, Paul,” Manielli said brightly, as if he’d been looking forward to saying it.

  Gordon said, “Last March Jimmy Coughlin saw you . . .” He frowned. “What do you people say? You don’t say ‘kill.’”

  Paul, thinking: Some of us people say “chill off.” Paul himself used “touch off.” It was the phrase that Sergeant Alvin York used to describe killing enemy soldiers during the War. It made Paul feel less like a punk to use the term that a war hero did. But, of course, Paul Schumann didn’t share any of this at the moment.

  Gordon continued. “Jimmy saw you kill Arch Dimici on March thirteenth in a warehouse on the Hudson.”

  Paul had staked out the place for four hours before Dimici showed up. He’d been positive the man was alone. Jimmy must’ve been sleeping one off behind some crates when Paul arrived.

  “Now, from what they tell me, Jimmy isn’t the most reliable witness. But we’ve got some hard evidence. A few revenue boys picked him up for selling hooch and he made a deal to rat on you. Seems he’d picked up a shell casing at the scene and was keeping it for insurance. No prints’re on it—you’re too smart for that. But Hoover’s people ran a test on your Colt. The scratches from the extractor’re the same.”

  Hoover? The FBI was involved? And they’d already tested the gun. He’d pitched it out of Malone’s window less than an hour ago.

  Paul rocked his upper and lower teeth against each other. He was furious with himself. He’d searched for a half hour to find that damn casing at the Dimici job and had finally concluded it’d fallen through the cracks in the floor into the Hudson.

  “So we made inquiries and heard you were being paid five hundred dollars to . . .” Gordon hesitated.

  Touch off.

  “. . . eliminate Malone tonight.”

  “Like hell I was,” Paul said, laughing. “You got yourself some bum wire. I just went to visit him. Where is he, by the way?”

  Gordon paused. “Mr. Malone will no longer be a threat to the constabulary or the citizens of New York City.”

  “Sounds like somebody owes you five C-notes.”

  Bull Gordon didn’t laugh. “You’re in Dutch, Paul, and you can’t beat the rap. So here’s what we’re offering. Like they say in those used-Studebaker ads: this’s a one-time-only offer. Take it or leave it. We don’t negotiate.”

  The Senator finally spoke. “Tom Dewey wants you as bad as he wants the rest of the scum on his list.”

  The special prosecutor was on a divine mission to clean up organized crime in New York. Crime boss Lucky Luciano, the Italian Five Families in the city and the Jewish syndicate of Meyer Lansky were his main targets. Dewey was dogged and smart and he was winning conviction after conviction.

  “But he’s agreed to give us first dibs on you.”

  “Forget it. I’m not a stool pigeon.”

  Gordon said, “We’re not asking you to be one. That’s not what this is about.”

  “Then what do you want me to do?”

  A pause for a moment. The Senator nodded toward Gordon, who said, “You’re a button man, Paul. What do you think? We want you to kill somebody.”

  Chapter Two

  He held Gordon’s eyes for a moment then he looked at the pictures of the ships on the wall. The Room . . . It had a military feel to it. Like an officers’ club. Paul had liked his time in the army. He’d felt at home there, had friends, had a purpose. That was a good time for him, a simple time—before he came back home and life got complicated. When life gets complicated, bad things can happen.

  “You’re being square with me?”

  “Oh, you bet.”

  With Manielli squinting out a warning to move slowly, Paul reached into his pocket and took out a pack of Chesterfields. He lit one. “Go on.”

  Gordon said, “You’ve got that gym over on Ninth Avenue. Not much of a place, is it?” He asked this of Avery.

  “You been there?” Paul asked.

  Avery said, “Not so swank.”

  Manielli laughed. “Real dive, I’d say.”

  The commander continued, “But you used to be a printer before you got into this line of work. You liked the printing business, Paul?”

  Cautiously Paul said, “Yeah.”

  “Were you good at it?”

  “Yeah, I was good. What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?”

  “How’d you like to make your whole past go away. Start over. Be a printer again. We can fix it so nobody can prosecute you for anything you’ve done in the past.”

  “And,” the Senator added, “we’ll cough up some bucks too. Five thousand. You can get a new life.”

  Five thousand? Paul blinked. It took most joes two years to earn that kind of money. He asked, “How can you clean up my record?”

  The Senator laughed. “You know that new game, Monopoly? You ever play it?”

  “My nephews have it. I never played.”

  The Senator continued. “Sometimes when you roll the dice you end up in prison. But there’s this card that says ‘Get Out of Jail Free.’ Well, we’ll give you one for real. That’s all you need to know.”

  “You want me to kill somebody? That’s queer. Dewey’d never agree to it.”

  The Senator said, “The special prosecutor hasn’t been informed about why we want you.”

  After a pause he asked, “Who? Siegel?” Of all the current mobsters Bugsy Siegel was the most dangerous. Psychotic, really. Paul had seen the bloody results of the man’s brutality. His tantrums were legendary.

  “Now, Paul,” Gordon said, disdain on his face, “it’d be illegal for you to kill a U.S. citizen. We’d never ask you to do anything like that.”

  “Then I don’t get the angle.”

  The Senator said, “This is more like a wartime situation. You were a soldier. . . .” A glance at Avery, who recited, “First Infantry Division, First American Army, AEF. St. Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne. You did some serious fighting. Got yourself some medals for marksmanship in the field. Did some hand-to-hand too, right?”

  Paul shrugged. The fat man in the wrinkled white suit sat silently in his corner, hands clasped on the gold handle of his walking stick. Paul held his eye for a minute. Then turned back to the commander. “What’re the odds I’ll survive long enough to use my get-out-of-jail card?”

  “Reasonable,” the commander said. “Not great but reasonable.”

  Paul was a friend of the sports journalist and writer Damon Runyon. They’d drink together some in the dives near Broadway, go to fights and ball games. A couple of years ago Runyon had invited Paul to a party after the New York opening of his movie Little Miss Marker, which Paul thought was a pretty good flick. At the party afterward, where he got a kick out of meeting Shirley Temple, he’d asked Runyon to autograph a book. The writer had inscribed it, To my pal, Paul—Remember, all of life is six to five against.

  Avery said, “How ’bout we just say your chances’re a lot better than if you go to Sing Sing.”

  After a moment Paul asked, “Why me? You’ve got dozens of button men in New York’d be willing to do it for that kind of scratch.”

  “Ah, but you’re different, Paul. You’re not a two-bit punk. You’re good. Hoover and Dewey say you’ve killed seventeen men.”

  Paul scoffed. “Bum wire, I keep saying.”

  In fact, the number was thirteen.

  “What we’ve heard about you is that you check everything two, three t
imes before the job. You make sure your guns’re in perfect shape, you read up about your victims, you look over their places ahead of time, you find their schedule and you make sure they stick to it, you know when they’ll be alone, when they make phone calls, where they eat.”

  The Senator added, “And you’re smart. Like I was saying. We need smart for this.”

  “Smart?”

  Manielli said, “We been to your place, Paul. You got books. Damn, you got a lot of books. You’re even in the Book of the Month Club.”

  “They’re not smart books. Not all of ’em.”

  “But they are books,” Avery pointed out. “And I’m betting a lot of people in your business don’t read much.”

  “Or can’t read,” Manielli said and laughed at his own joke.

  Paul looked over at the man in the wrinkled white suit. “Who’re you?”

  “You don’t need to worry—” Gordon began.

  “I’m asking him.”

  “Listen,” the Senator grumbled, “we’re calling the shots, my friend.”

  But the fat man waved his hand and then replied to Paul, “You know the comics? Little Orphan Annie, the girl without the pupils in her eyes?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Well, think of me as Daddy Warbucks.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  But he just laughed and turned to the Senator. “Keep pitching your case. I like him.”

  The rail-thin politician said to Paul, “Most important, you don’t kill anybody innocent.”

  Gordon added, “Jimmy Coughlin told us you said one time that you only kill other killers. What’d you say? That you only ‘correct God’s mistakes’? That’s what we need.”

  “God’s mistakes,” the Senator repeated, smiling in lip but not in spirit.

  “Well, who is it?”

  Gordon looked at the Senator, who deflected the question. “You have relatives in Germany still?”

  “Nobody close. My family came over here a long time ago.”

  The Senator asked, “What do you know about the Nazis?”

  “Adolf Hitler’s running the country. Sounds like nobody’s really crazy about it. There was this big rally against him at Madison Square Garden in March, two, three years ago. Traffic was a swell mess, I’ll tell you. I missed the first three rounds of a fight up in the Bronx. Got under my skin. . . . That’s about it.”

  “Did you know, Paul,” the Senator said slowly, “that Hitler’s planning another war?”

  That brought him up short.

  “Our sources’ve been giving us information from Germany since Hitler came to power in thirty-three. Last year, our man in Berlin got his hands on a draft of this letter. It was written by one of their senior men, General Beck.”

  The commander handed him a typed sheet. It was in German. Paul read it. The author of the letter called for a slow but steady rearmament of the German armed forces to protect and expand what Paul translated as “living area.” The nation had to be ready for war in a few years.

  Frowning, he put the sheet down. “And they’re going ahead with this?”

  “Last year,” Gordon said, “Hitler started a draft and since then he’s building up the troops to even higher levels than that letter recommends. Then four months ago German troops took over the Rhineland—the demilitarized zone bordering France.”

  “I read about that.”

  “They’re building submarines at Helgoland and’re taking back control of the Wilhelm Canal to move warships from the North Sea to the Baltic. The man running the finances over there has a new title. He’s head of the ‘war economy.’ And Spain, their civil war? Hitler’s sending troops and equipment supposedly to help Franco. Actually he’s using the war to train his soldiers.”

  “You want me . . . you want a button man to kill Hitler?”

  “Lord, no,” the Senator said. “Hitler’s just a crank. Funny in the head. He wants the country to rearm but he doesn’t have a clue how to do it.”

  “And this man you’re talking about does?”

  “Oh, you bet he does,” the Senator offered. “His name’s Reinhard Ernst. He was a colonel during the War but he’s civilian now. Title’s a mouthful: plenipotentiary for domestic stability. But that’s hooey. He’s the brains behind rearmament. He’s got his finger in everything: financing with Schacht, army with Blomberg, navy with Raeder, air force with Göring, munitions with Krupp.”

  “What about the treaty? Versailles? They can’t have an army, I thought.”

  “Not a big one. Same with the navy . . . and no air force at all,” the Senator said. “But our man tells us that soldiers and sailors’re popping up all over Germany like wine at Cana’s wedding.”

  “So can’t the Allies just stop them? I mean, we won the War.”

  “Nobody in Europe’s doing a thing. The French could’ve stopped Hitler cold last March, at the Rhineland. But they didn’t. The Brits? All they did was scold a dog that’d pissed on the carpet.”

  After a moment Paul asked, “And what’ve we done to stop them?”

  Gordon’s subtle glance was one of deference. The Senator shrugged. “In America all we want is peace. The isolationists’re running the show. They don’t want to be involved in European politics. Men want jobs, and mothers don’t want to lose their sons in Flanders Fields again.”

  “And the president wants to get elected again this November,” Paul said, feeling FDR’s eyes peering down on him from above the ornate mantelpiece.

  Awkward silence for a moment. Gordon laughed. The Senator did not.

  Paul stubbed out his cigarette. “Okay. Sure. It’s making sense now. If I get caught there’s nothing to lead them back to you. Or to him.” A nod toward Roosevelt’s picture. “Hell, I’m just a crazy civilian, not a soldier like these kids here.” A glance at the two junior officers. Avery smiled; Manielli did too but his was a very different smile.

  The Senator said, “That’s right, Paul. That’s exactly right.”

  “And I speak German.”

  “We heard you’re fluent.”

  Paul’s grandfather was proud of his country of ancestry, as was Paul’s father, who insisted the children study German and speak their native language in the house. He recalled absurd moments when his mother would shout in Gaelic and his father in German when they fought. Paul had also worked in his grandfather’s plant, setting type and proofreading German-language printing jobs during the summers when he was in high school.

  “How would it work? I’m not saying yes. I’m just curious. How would it work?”

  “There’s a ship taking the Olympic team, families and press over to Germany. It leaves day after tomorrow. You’d be on it.”

  “The Olympic team?”

  “We’ve decided it’s the best way. There’ll be thousands of foreigners in town. Berlin’ll be packed. Their army and police’ll have their hands full.”

  Avery said, “You won’t have anything to do with the Olympics officially—the games don’t start till August first. The Olympic Committee only knows you’re a writer.”

  “A sports journalist,” Gordon added. “That’s your cover. But basically you just play dumb and make yourself invisible. Go to the Olympic Village with everybody else and spend a day or two there then slip into the city. A hotel’s no good; the Nazis monitor all the guests and record passports. Our man’s getting a room in a private boardinghouse for you.”

  Like any craftsman, certain questions about the job slipped into his mind. “Would I use my name?”

  “Yes, you’ll be yourself. But we’ll also get you an escape passport—with your picture but a different name. Issued by some other country.”

  The Senator said, “You look Russian. You’re big and solid.” He nodded. “Sure, you’ll be the ‘man from Russia.’”

  “I don’t speak Russian.”

  “Nobody there does either. Besides, you’ll probably never need the passport. It’s just to get you out of the country in an emergency.”

>   “And,” Paul added quickly, “to make sure nobody traces me to you if I don’t make it out, right?”

  The Senator’s hesitation, followed by a glance at Gordon, said he was on the money.

  Paul continued. “Who’m I supposed to be working for? All the papers’ll have stringers there. They’d know I wasn’t a reporter.”

  “We thought of that. You’ll be writing freelance stories and trying to sell ’em to some of the sports rags when you get back.”

  Paul asked, “Who’s your man over there?”

  Gordon said, “No names just now.”

  “I don’t need a name. Do you trust him? And why?”

  The Senator said, “He’s been living there for a couple of years and getting us quality information. He served under me in the War. I know him personally.”

  “What’s his cover there?”

  “Businessman, facilitator, that sort of thing. Works for himself.”

  Gordon continued. “He’ll get you a weapon and whatever you need to know about your target.”

  “I don’t have a real passport. In my name, I mean.”

  “We know, Paul. We’ll get you one.”

  “Can I have my guns back?”

  “No,” Gordon said and that was the end of the matter. “So that’s our general plan, my friend. And, I should tell you, if you’re thinking of hopping a freight and laying low in some Hooverville out west? . . .”

  Paul sure as hell had been. But he frowned and shook his head.

  “Well, these fine young men’ll be sticking to you like limpets until the ship docks in Hamburg. And if you should get the same hankering to slip out of Berlin, our contact’s going to be keeping an eye on you. If you disappear, he calls us and we call the Nazis to tell them an escaped American killer’s at large in Berlin. And we’ll give them your name and picture.” Gordon held his eye. “If you think we were good at tracking you down, Paul, you ain’t seen nothing like the Nazis. And from what we hear they don’t bother with trials and writs of execution. Now, we clear on that?”

  “As a bell.”

  “Good.” The commander glanced at Avery. “Now, tell him what happens after he finishes the job.”