Garden of Beasts

I just finished re-reading Jeffery Deaver’s novel, Garden of Beasts, set in 1936 Berlin, as the Germans are preparing to host the Olympic Games. Deaver tells a riveting story, featuring two very compelling characters.

One is Paul Schumann, the main character. Schumann is an American hit man (“button man”), who is arrested and given a chance at redemption. If he will go to Berlin and assassinate Reinhard Ernst, the man in charge of re-arming Germany, then his past will be forgiven. Schumann is a surprisingly moral hit man who adheres to a code; he kills only the guilty. He is good at his job and hard to catch; think Jason Bourne vs. the Nazis.

No less compelling is Willi Kohl, a quick-witted and humane German policeman charged with finding Schumann. (If Schumann is Bourne-like, then Kohl is a German version of Chief Inspective Foyle.) Kohl’s humanity is clearly on display as he and his young assistant, Konrad Janssen, are called upon to investigate a murder. Janssen makes the mistake of complaining about exerting so much “effort for a fat dead man.” This earns a reprimand from his boss. The victim was not just a “fat middle-aged man,” Kohl tells him, he was also “somebody’s son.” Kohl continues:

And perhaps he was somebody's brother. And maybe somebody’s husband or lover. And, if he was lucky, he was a father of sons and daughters. I would hope too that there are past lovers who think of him occasionally. And in his future other lovers might have awaited. And three or four more children he could have brought into the world. So, Janssen, when you look at the incident in this way we don’t have merely a curious mystery about a stocky dead man. We have a tragedy like a spiderweb reaching many different lives and many different places, extending for years and years. How sad that is … Do you see why our job is so important? (pp. 122-123, paperback version)

Kohl is not the only good German in the book. Another, heartsick at what the Nazis were doing to her country, mourns:

I don’t understand what has happened. We ware a people who love music and talk and who rejoice in sewing the perfect stitch in our men’s shirts and scrubbing our alley cobblestones clean and basking in the sun on the beach at Wannsee and buying our children clothing and sweets, we’re moved to tears by the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, by the words of Goethe and Schiller — yet we are possessed now. Why? (p. 291)

Garden of Beasts is both a gripping page-turner and a brooding meditation on the subject of good versus evil.