Garden of Beasts by Jeffery Deaver Read Free Book Online Page A

Colonel Reinhard Ernst, a man whose ultimate importance, to Paul Schumann, had little to do with his potential threat to peace in Europe and to so many innocent lives but could be found in the fact that he was the last person that the button man would ever kill.

    Several hours after the Manhattan docked and the athletes and their entourage had disembarked, a young crewman from the ship exited German passport control and began wandering through the streets of Hamburg.
    He wouldn’t have much time ashore—being so junior, he had a leave of only six hours—but he’d spent all his life on American soil and was bound and determined to enjoy his first visit to a foreign country.
    The scrubbed, rosy-cheeked assistant kitchen mate supposed there were probably some swell museums in town. Maybe some all-right churches too. He had his Kodak with him and was planning to ask locals to take some snapshots of him in front of them for his ma and pa. ( “Bitte, das Foto?” he’d been rehearsing.) Not to mention beer halls and taverns… and who knew what else he might find for diversion in an exotic port city?
    But before he could sample some local culture he had an errand to complete. He’d been concerned that this chore would eat into his precious time ashore but as it turned out he was wrong. Only a few minutes after leaving the customs hall, he found exactly what he was looking for.
    The mate walked up to a middle-aged man in a green uniform and a black-and-green hat. He tried out his German. “Bitte…”
    “Ja, mein Herr?”
    Squinting, the mate blundered on, “Bitte, du bist ein Polizist, uhm, or a Soldat? ”
    The officer smiled and said in English, “Yes, yes, I am a policeman. And I was a soldier. What can I help you for?”
    Nodding down the street, the kitchen mate said, “I found this on the ground.” He handed the man a white envelope. “Isn’t that the word for ‘important’?” He pointed to the letters on the front: Bedeutend. “I wanted to make sure it got turned in.”
    Staring at the front of the envelope, the policeman didn’t respond for a moment. Then he said, “Yes, yes. ‘Important.’” The other words written on the front were Für Obersturmführer-SS, Hamburg. The mate had no idea what this meant but it seemed to trouble the policeman.
    “Where was this falling?” the policeman asked.
    “It was on the sidewalk there.”
    “Good. You are thanked.” The officer continued to look at the sealed envelope. He turned it over in his hand. “You were seeing perhaps who dropped it?”
    “Nope. Just saw it there and thought I’d be a Good Samaritan.”
    “Ach, yes, Samaritan.”
    “Well, I better scram,” the American said. “So long.”
    “Danke,” the policeman said absently.
    As he headed back toward one of the more intriguing tourist sites he’d passed, the young man was wondering what exactly the envelope contained. And why the man he’d met on the Manhattan, the porter Al Heinsler, had asked him last night to deliver it to a local policeman or soldier after the ship docked. The fellow was a little nuts, everybody agreed, the way everything in his cabin was perfectly ordered and clean, nothing out of line, his clothes pressed all the time. The way he kept to himself, the way he got all wet-eyed talking about Germany.
    “Sure, what is it?” the mate had asked.
    “There was a passenger on board who seemed a little fishy. I’m letting the Germans know about him. I’m going to try to send a wireless message but sometimes they don’t go through. I want to make sure the authorities get it.”
    “Who’s the passenger? Oh, hold up, I know—that fat guy in the checkered suit, the one who passed out drunk at the captain’s table.”
    “No, it was somebody else.”
    “Why not go to the sergeant-at-arms on board?”
    “It’s a German matter.”
    “Oh. And you can’t deliver it?”
    Heinsler had folded his pudgy hands together in a creepy way and shook his head. “I don’t know