Free The Hour of the Cat by Peter Quinn Page A

disdain. A palpable awe of the new Germany and its leader. If there were any wish to challenge him, the French and British were doing a skillful job of disguising it.
    â€œSooner or later,” Oster said, “either we Germans will have the courage to turn wishes into facts or be damned by our own cowardice.”
    The nursemaids doubled back and came past the portico. The day before, during the morning ride in the Tiergarten, General Heydrich stopped his horse. Canaris stopped, too, thinking perhaps Heydrich wished to dismount and give the horses a rest. Instead, Heydrich leaned out of his saddle and said in a quiet, solemn voice, “Wilhelm, there are rumors that, if true, could implicate certain members of the officer corps in treasonous conversations. We must work together to search out and destroy such a conspiracy, if it exists. We will show no mercy to such scum, even though they wear a German uniform.” He patted Canaris’s shoulder. “We, the loyal servants of the Reich!”
    Oster lingered with another cigarette beneath the portico. Alone, Canaris mounted the stairs to his office. At the second landing, he caught a glimpse through the two-storied Palladian window of the nursemaids as they crossed the street. If surveillance had been ordered, it would probably be less clumsy and obvious. Or perhaps not. As fast as the Abwehr has grown, Himmler’s SS empire had grown far faster. At last count, Pieckenbrock’s Section I of Military Intelligence estimated that Reichsführer-SS Himmler and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS Security Service, or SD, employed 40,000 Gestapo men, 60,000 agents and 100,000 official informers. Along with the main concentration camps at Dachau, Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, Buchenwald, Flossenburg and Ravensbrück, they had camps under construction at Mauthausen, in newly annexed Austria.
    The night he and Erika watched the newsreel of the Führer’s entry into Vienna, they dined in a restaurant right off Potsdamer Platz. Berlin wallowed in its new prosperity. Construction scaffolds were everywhere, new automobiles, crowded stores, high-toned cafés. The restaurant was filled with handsome young officers in uniform, women in well-cut clothes, plump businessmen with UFA starlets on their arms.
    There seemed no hint of the other Berlin, the underworld of wiretaps, informers, arrests, interrogations, and internment on suspicion of disloyalty. The masses of obedient and loyal citizens had nothing to fear. But along with the carrot of Germany’s renewed strength and power was the insinuation of the stick, a self-correcting mechanism for the few who might prove too overt in their dissent, an underlying dread threaded into the neon and newly poured concrete and traffic-choked streets, medieval torture chambers housed next to movie theaters, the soundtracks loud enough to obliterate any noise that might miraculously escape the impervious prison walls.
    At first Canaris had been incredulous at the reports that Colonel Piekenbrock sent him on the self-contained network of concentration camps the SS had set up. The Stormtroopers’ assault on Reds, socialists, and radicals, the first violent outburst after the National Socialists had taken power, had been transmogrified into a permanent terror. The reports of floggings, beatings, clubbings, prisoners drowned in latrines, whipped with barbed wire, strung up on racks, their genitals crushed, seemed a preposterous rehash of the prurient novels on the Inquisitions, with their cheap, lurid paper covers, that salesmen and students bought for a few pfennigs at railway news-stands. But the consistency of the reports gradually erased any doubts about their authenticity. Theodor Eicke, once an inmate of a psychiatric clinic in which he’d been consigned to a straightjacket, was now in charge of more than 10,000 well-trained and armed SS Death’s Heads Units responsible for policing the camps. In