Jeffery Deaver
Garden Of Beasts
Copyright © 2004 by Jeffery Deaver
To the memories of Hans and Sophie Scholl, brother and sister, executed in 1943 for anti-Nazi protests; journalist Carl von Ossietzky, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935 while imprisoned in Oranienburg camp; and Wilhelm Kruzfeld, a Berlin police officer who refused to let a mob destroy a synagogue during the Nazi-sponsored anti-Jewish riots known as the Night of Broken Glass… four people who looked at evil and said, “No.”
“[Berlin] was full of whispers. They told of illegal midnight arrests, of prisoners tortured in the S.A. barracks… They were drowned by the loud angry voices of the Government, contradicting through its thousand mouths.”
– Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories
I. THE BUTTON MAN
Chapter One
As soon as he stepped into the dim apartment he knew he was dead.
He wiped sweat off his palm, looking around the place, which was quiet as a morgue, except for the faint sounds of Hell’s Kitchen traffic late at night and the ripple of the greasy shade when the swiveling Monkey Ward fan turned its hot breath toward the window.
The whole scene was off.
Out of kilter…
Malone was supposed to be here, smoked on booze, sleeping off a binge. But he wasn’t. No bottles of corn anywhere, not even the smell of bourbon, the punk’s only drink. And it looked like he hadn’t been around for a while. The New York Sun on the table was two days old. It sat next to a cold ashtray and a glass with a blue halo of dried milk halfway up the side.