Jeffery Deaver

June 30, 2004

Question: Jeff, this is your first historical novel. What triggered the idea to place a story in 1936 Berlin?
Jeffery Deaver: The inspiration for the book was September 11th. I wanted to write a book with a different villain—basically, pure evil, institutionalized evil, rather than your typical hit man or serial killer. But since I don’t find fundamentalist terrorism particularly compelling for a thriller, I searched for some large-scale evil that would give me the chance to write about something a bit different and yet keep a certain familiarity about the book. The Nazis came to mind immediately. I liked the Olympics as an image because of the stark irony: There was Hitler putting on a show for world harmony while at the same time preparing for war and murdering thousands of opponents in the early concentration camps.

Question: I imagine that writing this book took an amazing amount of research because you touch on so many historical facts. Where did you begin?
Jeff: Yes, indeed. Usually it takes me one year to research and write a book. Garden of Beasts took me two, and the extra year was devoted almost entirely to research. I read perhaps ten thousand pages of material from books, the Internet, declassified government documents, correspondence, maps. Even though we know how certain aspects of the story played out (World War II did occur, for instance), I was careful not to read anything past the fall of 1936, since I didn’t want to have my characters anticipate what might happen.

Question: The story is based in history yet it is a very suspenseful thriller. How did you balance the facts with your fiction?
Jeff:  My number one responsibility is to give my readers a sweaty-palm thriller, not a history book. I tried very hard to incorporate only those facts into the book that would move the story along. For instance, there are very accurate scenes involving Hitler, Goering and Goebbels (their dialog is modeled after actual transcripts of theirs), but those scenes aren’t gratuitous. They introduce a subplot that pays off at the end of the book in a big way.

Question: Can you describe the main characters: Paul Schumann, Willi Kohl, and Reinhard Ernst?
Jeff:  Paul is a hit man for the New York mob (he works for Luciano and other assorted mobsters). But he’s a hit man with a conscience. He’s like a soldier (he was a decorated infantryman in WWI); he only kills other killers. Willi Kohl is a senior investigator in the Kripo, the Berlin criminal police. He’s smart, hardworking, loves his family (and his bratwurst and desserts!), and dislikes the Nazis, but is forced to work among them. He is the most efficient and relentless of all the foxes on the trail of Paul Schumann. Reinhard Ernst—Hitler’s rearmament tzar—is the most complex character in the book. He is a former WWI hero and has a deep love of the German people and nation. He sees Hitler as a temporary evil and thinks he can work toward a better country after he’s removed; still, he must do his duty, which means making the country ready for war.

Question: Do you have a favorite character in this book?
Jeff: My favorite is probably Otto Webber. He’s a small-time crime boss and operator in Berlin. He’s funny, lives life to the fullest and forms an improbable friendship with Paul.

Question: Do you plan on writing any other historical novels?
Jeff: I may. But it would have to be a story that would let me tell my typical novel—many twists and turns, surprise endings, and a very short time frame, one or two days (which probably eliminates the Hundred-Years War!).

Question: You have mentioned that there is a connection in Garden of Beasts to the Lincoln Rhyme series. Do you want to share anything more about this?
Jeff:  The reference is in the last half of the book.

The Button Man
Monday, 13 July, 1936

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.

He clicked the light on.

Well, there was a side door, like he’d noted yesterday from the hallway, looking over the place. But it was nailed shut. And the window that let onto the fire escape? Brother, sealed nice and tight with chicken wire he hadn’t been able to see from the alley. The other window was open but was also forty feet above cobblestones.

No way out . . .

And where was Malone? Paul Schumann wondered.

Malone was on the lam, Malone was drinking beer in Jersey, Malone was a statue on a concrete base underneath a Red Hook pier.

Didn’t matter.

Whatever’d happened to the booze hound, Paul realized, the punk had been nothing more than bait, and the wire that he’d be here tonight was pure bunk.

In the hallway outside, a scuffle of feet. A clink of metal.

Out of kilter . . .

Paul set his pistol on the room’s one table, took out his handkerchief and mopped his face. The searing air from the deadly Midwest heat wave had made its way to New York. But a man can’t walk around without a jacket when he’s carrying a 1911 Colt .45 in his back waistband and so Paul was condemned to wear a suit. It was his single-button, single-breasted gray linen. The white-cotton, collar-attached shirt was drenched.

Another shuffle from outside in the hallway, where they’d be getting ready for him. A whisper, another clink.

Paul thought about looking out the window but was afraid he’d get shot in the face. He wanted an open casket at his wake and he didn’t know any morticians good enough to fix bullet or bird shot damage.

Who was gunning for him? he wondered.

It wasn’t Luciano, of course, the man who’d hired him to touch off Malone. It wasn’t Meyer Lansky either. They were dangerous, yeah, but not snakes. Paul’d always done top-notch work for them, never leaving a bit of evidence that could link them to the touch-off. Besides, if either of them wanted Paul gone, they wouldn’t need to set him up with a bum job. He’d simply be gone.

So who’d snagged him? If it was O’Banion or Rothstein from Williamsburg or Valenti from Bay Ridge, well, he’d be dead in a few minutes.

If it was dapper Tom Dewey, the death would take a bit longer—whatever time was involved to convict him and get him into the electric chair up in Sing-Sing.

More voices in the hall. More clicks, metal seating against metal.

But looking at it one way, he reflected wryly, everything was silk so far; he was still alive.

And thirsty as hell.

He walked to the Kelvinator and opened it. Three bottles of milk—two of them curdled—and a box of Kraft cheese and one of Sunsweet tenderized peaches. Several Royal Crown colas. He found an opener and removed the cap from a bottle of the soft drink.

From somewhere he heard a radio. It was playing “Stormy Weather.”

Sitting down at the table again, he noticed himself in the dusty mirror on the wall above a chipped enamel washbasin. His pale blue eyes weren’t as alarmed as they ought to be, he supposed. His face was, though, weary. He was a large man—over six feet and weighing more than two hundred pounds. His hair was from his mother’s side, reddish brown; his fair complexion from his father’s German ancestors. The skin was a bit marred—not from pox but from knuckles in his younger days and EverLast gloves more recently. Concrete and canvas too.

Sipping the soda pop. Spicier than Coca-Cola. He liked it.

Paul considered his situation. If it was O’Banion or Rothstein or Valenti, well, none of them gave a good goddamn about Malone, a crazy riveter from the shipyards turned punk mobster, who’d killed a beat cop’s wife and done so in a pretty unpleasant way. He’d threatened more of the same to any law that gave him trouble.

Every boss in the area, from the Bronx to Jersey, was shocked at what he’d done. So even if one of them wanted to touch off Paul, why not wait until after he’d knocked off Malone?

Which meant it was probably Dewey.

The idea of being stuck in the caboose till he was executed depressed him. Yet, truth be told, in his heart Paul wasn’t too torn up about getting nabbed. Like when he was a kid and would jump impulsively into fights against two or three kids bigger than he was, sooner or later he’d eventually pick the wrong guys and end up with a broken bone. He’d known the same thing about his recent career: that ultimately a Dewey or an O’Banion would bring him down.

Thinking of one of his father’s favorite expressions: “On the best day, on the worst day, the sun finally sets.” The round man would snap his colorful suspenders and add, “Cheer up, P.S. Tomorrow’s a whole new horse race.”

He jumped when the phone rang.

Paul looked at the black Bakelite for a long moment. On the seventh ring, or the eighth, he answered. “Yeah?”

“Paul,” a crisp, young voice said. No neighborhood slur.

“You know who it is.”

“I’m up the hall in another apartment. There’re six of us here. Another half dozen on the street.”

Twelve? Paul felt an odd calm. Nothing he could do about twelve. They’d get him one way or the other. He sipped more of the Royal Crown. He was so damn thirsty. The fan wasn’t doing anything but moving the heat from one side of the room to the other. He asked, “You working for the boys from Brooklyn or the West Side? Just curious.”

“Listen to me, Paul. Here’s what you’re going to do. You only have two guns on you, right? The Colt. And that little twenty-two. The others are back in your apartment?”

Paul laughed. “That’s right.”

“You’re going to unload them and lock the slide of the Colt open. Then walk to the window that’s not sealed and pitch them out. Then you’re going to take your jacket off, drop it on the floor, open the door and stand in the middle of the room with your hands up in the air. Stretch ’em way up high.”

“You’ll shoot me,” he said.

“You’re living on borrowed time anyway, Paul. But if you do what I say you might stay alive a little longer.”

The caller hung up.

He dropped the hand piece into the cradle. He sat motionless for a moment, recalling a very pleasant night a few weeks ago. Marion and he had gone to Coney Island for miniature golf and hot dogs and beer, to beat the heat. Laughing, she’d dragged him to a fortuneteller at the amusement park. The fake gypsy had read his cards and told him a lot of things. The woman had missed this particular event, though, which you’d think should’ve showed up somewhere in the reading if she was worth her salt.

Marion. . . . He’d never told her what he did for a living. Only that he owned a gym and he did business occasionally with some guys who had questionable pasts. But he’d never told her more. He realized suddenly that he’d been looking forward to some kind of future with her. She was a dime-a-dance girl at a club on the West Side, studying fashion design during the day. She’d be working now; she usually went till 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. How would she find out what happened to him?

If it was Dewey he’d probably be able to call her.

If it was the boys from Williamsburg, no call. Nothing.

The phone began ringing again.

Paul ignored it. He slipped the clip from his big  gun and unchambered the round that was in the receiver, then he emptied the cartridges out of the revolver. He walked to the window and tossed the pistols out one at a time. He didn’t hear them land.

Finishing the soda pop, he took his jacket off, dropped it on the floor. He started for the door but paused. He went back to the Kelvinator and drank down another Royal Crown. Then he wiped his face again, opened the front door, stepped back and lifted his arms.

The phone stopped ringing.

# # #

 

“Deaver fans expect the unexpected from this prodigiously talented thriller writer, and the creator of the Lincoln Rhyme series and other memorable yarns (The Blue Nowhere, etc.) doesn’t disappoint with his 19th novel, this time offering a deliciously twisty tale set in Nazi Berlin. Deaver weaves three manhunts — Paul after his target, Kohl after Paul, and the Nazi hierarchy after Paul — with a deft hand, bringing to frightening life the Berlin of 1936, a city on the brink of madness. Top Nazis, including Hitler, Himmler and Goring, make colorful cameos, but it’s the smart, shaded-gray characterizations of the principals that anchor the exciting plot. An affecting love affair goes in surprising directions, as do the main plot lines, which move outside Berlin as heroes become villains and vice versa. This is prime Deaver, which means prime entertainment.”
— Publishers Weekly starred review

“World War I veteran Paul Schumann is a hit man with a conscience—he kills only bad guys. But then he is arrested, and the Office of Naval Intelligence makes him an offer: go to jail or go to Germany disguised as an Olympic athlete and kill a ranking Nazi. If he succeeds, he will be both forgiven and rich; if he fails, he’ll be dead. Taking a break from his successful Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs thrillers, Deaver plays out an intriguing plot against the ominous backdrop of Hitler’s growing power. Incredibly, there are still many Germans in 1936 who don’t feel that Hitler is either serious or will last very long. Denial runs strong, but even stronger is the blanket of evil that is snuffing out dissent and freedom. Following Schumann through a multitude of twists, turns, and betrayals is exciting and helps illuminate the early days of the Third Reich. Highly recommended.”
— Library Journal

“Although not known for historical fiction, Deaver takes the new genre in stride, subtly and plausibly working real people into the tale while delivering his signature sense of story, depth of characterization, and sharply rendered dialogue. Readers looking for the author’s usual startling plot twists will not be disappointed, either. Deaver’s audience will be pleased with this one, but it will be an equally big hit with fans of such Nazi-era thrillers as Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy or Robert Harris’ Fatherland.”
— Booklist

“Deaver’s novel, equal parts noir thriller and historical extrapolation, is a page-turner that offers a twisting visceral experience of the tension in Berlin during that fateful summer.”
— Amazon.com Editorial Review

Narrated by Dennis Boutsikaris. Listen to an excerpt.

His face wet with sweat and with tears, the man runs for freedom, he runs for his life.

“There! There he goes!”

The former slave does not know exactly where the voice comes from. Behind him? To the right or left? From atop one of the decrepit tenements lining the filthy cobblestoned streets here?

Amid July air hot and thick as liquid paraffin, the lean man leaps over a pile of horse dung. The street sweepers don’t come here, to this part of the city.  Charles Singleton pauses beside a pallet stacked high with barrels, trying to catch his breath.

A crack of a pistol. The bullet goes wide. The sharp report of the gun takes him back instantly to the War: the impossible, mad hours as he stood his ground in his dusty blue uniform, steadying his heavy musket, facing men wearing dusty gray, aiming their own weapons his way.

Running faster now. The men fire again. These bullets also miss.

“Somebody stop him! Five dollars’ gold if you catch him.”

But the few people out on the streets this early—mostly Irish rag pickers and laborers trooping to work with hods or picks on their shoulders—have no inclination to stop the Negro who has fierce eyes and large muscles and such frightening determination. As for the reward, the shouted offer came from a city constable, which means there’s no coin behind the promise.

At the Twenty-third Street paintworks, Charles veers west. He slips on the slick cobblestones and falls hard.  A mounted policeman rounds the corner and, raising his nightstick, bears down on the fallen man. And then—

And? the girl thought.

And?

What happened to him?

Sixteen-year-old Geneva Settle twisted the knob on the microfiche reader again but it would move no farther; she’d come to the last page on this carriage. She lifted out the metal rectangle containing the lead article in the July 23, 1868, edition of Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated. Riffling through the other frames in the dusty box, she’d worried that the remaining pages of that article were missing and she’d never find out what happened to her ancestor, Charles Singleton. She’d learned that historical archives regarding black history were often incomplete, if not forever misplaced.

Where was the rest of the story?

Ah . . . Finally she found it and mounted the carriage carefully into the battered gray reader, moving the knob impatiently to locate the continuation of the story of Charles’s flight.

Geneva’s lush imagination—and years of immersing herself in books—had given her the wherewithal to embellish the bare-bones magazine account of the former slave’s pursuit through the hot, foul streets of nineteenth-century New York. She almost felt she was back then, rather than where she really was at the moment: 140 years later in the deserted fifth-floor library of the Museum of African-American Culture and History on Fifty-fifth Street in Midtown Manhattan.

As she twisted the dial, the pages streamed past on the grainy screen. Geneva found the rest of the article, which was headlined:

SHAME
————–
THE ACCOUNT OF A FREEDMAN’S CRIME
————-
CHARLES SINGLETON, A VETERAN
OF THE WAR
BETWEEN THE STATES,
BETRAYS THE CAUSE OF OUR PEOPLE
IN A NOTORIOUS INCIDENT

A picture accompanying the article showed twenty-eight-year-old Charles Singleton in his Civil War uniform. He was tall, his hands were large and the tight fit of the uniform on his chest and arms suggested powerful muscles. Lips broad, cheekbones high, head round, skin quite dark.

Staring at the unsmiling face, the calm, piercing eyes, the girl believed there was a resemblance between them—she had the head and face of her ancestor, the roundness of his features, the rich shade of his skin.  Not a bit of the Singleton physique, though. Geneva Settle was skinny as a grade-school boy, as the Delano Project girls loved to point out.

She began to read once more, but a noise intruded.

A click in the room. A door latch? Then she heard several footsteps. They paused. Another step. Finally silence. She glanced behind her, saw nobody.

She felt a chill, but told herself not to be freaked. It was just bad memories that put her on edge: the Delano girls whaling on her in the school yard behind Langston Hughes High, and that time Tonya Brown and her crew from the St. Nicholas Houses dragged her into an alley then pounded her so bad that she lost a back tooth that still hadn’t been replaced. Boys groped, boys dissed, boys put you down. But it was the girls who made you bleed.

Get her down, cut her, cut the bitch . . .

More footsteps. Another pause.

Silence.

The nature of this place didn’t help. Dim, musty, quiet. And there was no one else here, not at 8:15 on a Tuesday morning. The museum wasn’t open yet—tourists were still asleep or having their breakfasts—but the library opened at 8:00. Geneva had been waiting here when they unlocked the doors, she’d been so eager to read the article. She now sat in a cubicle at the end of a large exhibit hall, where faceless mannequins wore nineteenth-century costumes and the walls were filled with paintings of men in bizarre hats, women in bonnets and horses with wack, skinny legs.

Another footstep. Then another pause.

Should she leave? Go hang with Dr. Barry, the librarian, until this creepy dude left?

And then the other visitor laughed.

Not a weird laugh, a fun laugh.

And he said, “Okay. I’ll call you later.”

A snap of a cell phone folding up. That’s why he’d been pausing, just listening to the person on the other end of the line.

Told you not to worry, girl. People aren’t dangerous when they laugh. They aren’t dangerous when they say friendly things on cell phones. He’d been walking slowly because that’s what people do when they’re talking—even though what kind of rude claimer’d make a phone call in a library? Geneva turned back to the microfiche screen, wondering; You get away, Charles? Man, I hope so.

Yet he regained his footing and, rather than own up to his mischief, as a courageous man would do, continued his cowardly flight.

So much for objective reporting, she thought angrily.

For a time he evaded his pursuers. But escape was merely temporary. A Negro tradesman on a porch saw the freedman and implored him to stop, in the name of justice, asserting that he had heard of Mr. Singleton’s crime and recriminating him for bringing dishonor upon all colored people throughout the nation. The citizen, one Walker Loakes, thereupon flung a brick at  Mr. Singleton with the intent of knocking him down. However,

Charles dodges the heavy stone and turns to the man, shouting, “I am  innocent. I did not do what the police say!”

Geneva’s imagination had taken over and, inspired by the text, was writing the story once again.

But Loakes ignores the freedman’s protests and runs into the street, calling to the police that the fugitive is headed for the docks.

His heart torn, his thoughts clinging to the image of Violet and their son, Joshua, the former slave continues his desperate run for freedom.

Sprinting, sprinting . . .

Behind him comes the gallop of the mounted police.  Ahead of him, other horsemen appear, led by a helmeted police officer, brandishing a pistol.  “Halt, halt where you are, Charles Singleton! I’m Detective Captain William Simms. I’ve been searching for you for two days.”

The freedman does as ordered. His broad shoulders slump, strong arms at his side, chest heaving as he sucks in the humid, rancid air beside the Hudson River.
Nearby is the Tow Boat office,  and up and down the river he sees the spindles of the sailing ship masts, hundreds of them, taunting him with their promise of freedom.  He leans, gasping, against the large Swiftsure Express Company sign.  Charles stares at the approaching officer as the clop, clop, clop of his horse’s hooves resonate loudly on the cobblestones.

“Charles Singleton, you are under arrest for burglary. You will surrender to us or we will subdue you. Either way you will end up in shackles. Pick the first and you will suffer no pain. Pick the second, you will end up bloody. The choice is yours.”

“I have been accused of a crime I did not commit!”

“I repeat: Surrender or die. Those are your only choices.”

“No, sir, I have one other,” Charles shouts. He resumes his flight—toward the dock.

“Stop or we will shoot!” Detective Simms calls.

But the freedman bounds over the railing of the pier like a horse taking a picket in a charge. He seems to hang in the air for a moment then cartwheels thirty feet into the murky waters of the Hudson River, muttering some words, perhaps a plea to Jesus, perhaps a declaration of love for his wife and child, though whatever they might be none of his pursuers can hear.

# # #

Fifty feet from Geneva Settle forty-one-year-old Thompson Boyd moved closer to the girl.

He pulled the stocking cap over his face, adjusted the eye holes and opened the cylinder of his pistol to make sure it wasn’t jammed. He’d checked it earlier but, in this job, you could never be too certain. He put the gun into his pocket and pulled the billy club out of a slit cut into his dark raincoat.

He was in the stacks of books in the costume exhibit hall, which separated him from the microfiche reader tables. His latex-gloved fingers pressed his eyes, which had been stinging particularly sharply this morning. He blinked away a few tears from the pain.

He looked around again, making sure the room was in fact deserted.

No guards were here, none downstairs either. No security cameras or sign-in sheets. All good. But there were some logistical problems. The big room was deathly quiet, and Thompson couldn’t hide his approach to the girl.  She’d know someone was in the room with her and might become edgy and alert.

So after he’d stepped inside this wing of the library and locked the door behind him, he’d laughed, a chuckle.  Thompson Boyd had stopped laughing years ago. But he was also a craftsman who understood the power of humor—and how to use it to your advantage in this line of work. A laugh—coupled with a farewell pleasantry and a closing cell phone—would put her at ease, he reckoned.

This ploy seemed to work. He looked quickly around the long row of shelves and saw the girl, staring at the microfiche screen. Her hands, at her side, seemed to clench and unclench nervously at what she was reading.

He started forward.

Then stopped. The girl was pushing away from the table. He heard her chair slide on the linoleum. She was walking somewhere. Leaving? No. He heard the sound of the drinking fountain and her gulping some water. Then he heard her pulling books off the shelf and stacking them up on the microfiche table. Another pause and she returned to the stacks once again, gathering more books. The thud as she set them down.  Finally he heard the screech of her chair as she sat once more. Then silence.

Thompson looked again. She was back in her chair, reading one of the dozen books piled in front of her.

With the bag containing the condoms, razor knife and duct tape in his left hand, the club in his right, he started toward her again.

Coming up behind her now, twenty feet, fifteen, holding his breath.

Ten feet. Even if she bolted now, he could lunge forward and get her—break a knee or stun her with a blow to the head.

Eight feet, five . . .

He paused and silently set the rape pack on a shelf. He took the club in both hands. He stepped closer, lifting the varnished oak rod.

Still absorbed in the words, she read intently, oblivious to the fact that her attacker was an arm’s length behind her.  Thompson swung the club downward with all his strength toward the back of the girl’s skull.

Crack. . . .

A painful vibration stung his hands as the baton struck her head with a hollow snap.

But something was wrong. The sound, the feel were off.  What was going on? Thompson Boyd leapt back as the body fell to the floor.

And tumbled into pieces.

The torso of the mannequin fell one way. The head another. Thompson stared for a moment.  He glanced to his side and saw a ball gown draped over the bottom half of the same mannequin—part of a display on women’s clothing in Reconstruction America.

No . . . .

Somehow, she’d tipped to the fact that he was here and was a threat. She’d then collected some books from the shelves as an excuse for standing up and taking apart a mannequin. She’d dressed the upper part of it in her own sweatshirt and stocking cap then propped it on the chair.

But where was she?

The slap of racing feet answered the question. Thompson Boyd heard her sprinting for the fire door. The man slipped the billy club into his coat, pulled out his gun, and started after her.

“Lincoln Rhyme, Deaver’s popular paraplegic detective, returns in a robust thriller that demonstrates Deaver’s unflagging ability to entertain. …this is one of the more lively thrillers of the year and will be a significant bestseller.”
— Publishers Weekly

“A new Lincoln Rhyme novel is cause for excitement among fans of twisty-turny thrillers. This time out, Rhyme, the quadriplegic forensic investigator, is trying to find out why a man was stalking a high-school student. Turns out it might have something to do with the death of one of the student’s ancestors nearly 140 years ago. Deaver, who must have been born with a special plot-twist gene, somehow manages, in every book, to pull two or three big surprises out of his hat. He also has a knack for drawing us immediately into the story. For some readers, it’s his detailed description of investigative techniques; for others, it’s Rhyme himself, the crusty, bad-tempered (but secretly lovable) detective who, with the help of his protege (and lover), the beautiful Amelia Sachs, solves crimes that most other investigators couldn’t begin to crack. The Rhyme novels are among the cleverest of contemporary detective fiction.”
—Booklist