Blood Relative (22 page)

I grinned. ‘You seem to have all the facts at your fingertips!’

‘Well, facts are my business. Also, I never had a proper education, so now I always want to learn more and more. I love information – like your brother, the journalist, maybe. Was he the same?’

‘Yeah, I’m just discovering the lengths he would go to to get to the bottom of a story. Maybe that’s what killed him …’

‘Hmm …’ murmured Haller as he switched lanes, deftly slipping from one line of traffic to another.

‘What is it?’

‘I think you should learn from his mistakes.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, you are like your brother in this way, you are always chasing after a story that is in your head. First you try to find this other person who might have killed your brother, a person that no one believes in but you. Then you decide, no, I accept it was my wife who did this, but she must have a reason. Then you decide what that reason is: her father was in the Stasi and he did terrible things to her, so you try to prove that. But because you start with this story, like a theory you want to prove, you look at the world through a pair of blinkers. You see a man on the train – he must be Stasi also. Another man catches your eye at the Adlon …
ach so
, more Stasi, sent by your wife’s father, surveilling you. However, what is the first thing that we discover for sure? That your Mariana lived in an orphanage. There was no father in her life. So now, what do we do with your theory?’

‘I see what you mean.’

‘My advice is, don’t think about stories, or theories. Concentrate on facts. OK, so now we are getting close.’

We had driven south through the city. By a mixture of dead reckoning and surreptitious glances at Haller’s satnav I reckoned we were back within a couple of kilometres of his office. The area was dotted with low-rise housing blocks, strung out through the kind of open space that looks far better on planner’s sketches than it ever does in reality. The blocks that faced onto the main roads had shops, bars and cafes on their ground floors. The buildings were interspersed by fields given over to allotments, stripped bare of their plants by the winter, and building sites guarded by chain-link fencing. At one vacant, apparently neglected lot a large poster mounted on a billboard showed a model of the development that might one day be standing there. A florid, prosperous-looking man in late middle age was standing behind the model, looking down on it approvingly. At the bottom of the poster was a company name: Tretow Immobilien GmbH.

The voice from the satnav said, ‘
Sie haben Ihr Ziel erreicht
.’

We’d arrived. Haller brought the car to a halt and looked at the sign.

‘Thanks a lot, guys,’ he muttered. ‘I guess they don’t need orphanages any more.’

I got out and looked through the fence at the expanse of frosty, barren ground where Mariana had spent her childhood. After the speed with which we’d got to Heike Schmidt and found the name of the orphanage, I’d been lulled into assuming that we’d turn up, find a gloomy, doom-ridden old building and somehow all the questions about Mariana’s past would magically be answered. But all we had now was an emptiness, an absence. It was almost as though the old forces that had once ruled here were covering their tracks, removing the evidence of what they had done. I remembered seeing news reports, soon after the Wall came down, about how Stasi officers had desperately shredded all the documents that could reveal the full extent of their crimes. The orphanage, it seemed, had been shredded as well.

‘Cheer up,’ said Haller. ‘Investigations are not supposed to be easy. Otherwise anyone could do them. However, we can still find out what happened here. All we need are witnesses. Come.’

He drove a little further down the road until we came to a line of shops. There he made his way from one store to another, talking to any customers or staff who looked old enough to have remembered the orphanage. Finally, he struck lucky. We’d gone into a butcher’s, past a placard on the pavement that consisted of a cheery pig holding a blackboard on which were written the bargains of the day. Inside, a small elderly woman was inspecting the sausages arrayed in a chiller cabinet with sharp, magpie eyes. ‘Ha!’ she snorted, after Haller had enquired about the orphanage and its inhabitants. ‘You want Old Fredi. He was the ABV round here.’

‘So where will I find this Fredi?’

‘Is it past midday?’

Haller consulted his watch. ‘Yes, just.’

‘Then he will be at the
Kneipe
with all his cronies, like he always is, getting drunk and talking about the good old days.’

‘How will I recognize him?’

‘Just ask the barman. He will show you. Everyone knows Old Fredi. They may not like him. But they know him …’

Haller thanked the old woman. As we left the store I asked, ‘What’s an ABV?’

‘
Abschnittsbevollmächtigter
,’ Haller replied, laughing at the look of bafflement that crossed my face at the tongue-twisting word. ‘It means, literally, someone who has power of attorney over a district. In practice, that ABV was a man officially appointed by the state to observe the people in an area and report antisocial behaviour.’

‘Like an official snoop?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But I thought the Stasi had hundreds of thousands of people snooping for them unofficially.’

‘Yes, they did. But for the Stasi, there was never too much information.’

‘OK … and a
Kneipe
?’

‘It’s the Berlin term for a bar …’ Haller nodded his head at the door into which he was heading. ‘Like this one.’

35

The French modernist architect Le Corbusier described a house as a machine for living. Well, this
Kneipe
was a machine for drinking. It had almost no decoration, no homely touches, no attempt whatever to create a welcoming, comfortable atmosphere. It was simply a space with a bar down one side of the room covered in fake wood laminate and provided with a series of pumps for draught beer. A couple of high round tables stood in the middle of the room, ringed by wooden stools. Lower, rectangular tables were placed round the remaining walls. The barman gestured at one of the tables, where three men were sitting. ‘Over there. The one in the brown sweater.’

I had expected a decrepit old geezer. In fact, Old Fredi turned out to be a tough, gnarled, shaven-headed man, who exuded an air of resentful tension like emotional BO.

Haller pulled up a chair, sat down at the table and motioned to me to do the same. Then he put a 100-euro note on the table, slid it towards Old Fredi and said, ‘Can I buy you fellows another drink?’

Fredi looked at him with glowering suspicion: ‘Who’s buying?’

‘Does it matter?’ Haller asked. ‘I’m not a cop, this is nothing official, I was just told you could help me with a business enquiry.’

‘Who’s the boyfriend?’

‘A business associate.’

I said nothing. From the moment we had stepped into the bar every word had been spoken in German. It was taking my full concentration just to follow what Haller was saying and make sense of the Berliners’ strong accents.

Fredi reached out and slid the note towards himself before shoving it in a trouser pocket. ‘Three more litres of beer, and six double schnapps,’ he said. ‘And some pretzels.’

‘And potato chips,’ said one of the other men at the table.

I saw Haller glance in my direction. ‘I’ll get it,’ I said.

‘Beer for me too,’ Haller said.

I got the round in while Haller began making desultory conversation with Fredi and his drinking pals. It took a few seconds to distribute all the glasses and snacks. Fredi took a good long drink from his beer stein and wiped the foam off his lips. Then he picked up his first glass of schnapps and downed it in one.

When the empty glass had been slammed back down on the table Haller spoke: ‘Tell me about the orphanage.’

‘What orphanage?’ Fredi replied, smirking as though he’d just said something spectacularly clever.

‘The one round the corner,’ said Haller.

‘Oh, that orphanage. It was a building, filled with children … who didn’t have their mummies and daddies, boo-hoo!’

Fredi basked in the supportive laughter of his pals, drank some more, then looked up at Haller and asked, ‘What else do you want to know?’

‘I want to know what happened there that was so bad a woman would not want to talk about it more than twenty years later.’

The men stopped laughing. Fredi narrowed his eyes and said, ‘No, you do not want to know.’

Haller looked right back at him. ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ He placed two more notes on the table. I tried to banish the thought that they’d soon be appearing on my bill.

Again Fredi pocketed the money. He seemed to need Dutch courage pretty badly because he ignored the beer and sank his second schnapps. When he looked around at the other men, as if seeking their advice or encouragement, their eyes were blank, giving nothing whatever away. Whatever Fredi was going to say, they didn’t want to be part of it.

Finally he muttered to himself, ‘I must be mad,’ then said, ‘There was a man at the orphanage, a caretaker. There were rumours that he was hurting the children … hurting them very badly, if you know what I mean.’

Haller had jotted a couple of notes on a small pad. ‘Did you pass these rumours on to the authorities?’

‘You mean, did I report them to the Stasi … like I was supposed to?’ There was a bitterness in Fredi’s voice, a simmering self-hatred. ‘Yes, of course I did. That was my job. But I only did it once. Then it was made very clear to me that they were not interested in hearing anything about the orphanage. They were very specific. They wanted to know about everything that happened in the rest of my area. But at the orphanage … nothing!’

Haller looked up from his pad: ‘So what was the name of this caretaker?’

‘I’ve forgotten.’

Haller reached for his wallet again: ‘Maybe I can help you recover your memory.’

Fredi shook his head. ‘No, it would make no difference. I do not want to remember. That would not be a good idea. In fact, it would be a seriously bad one. Understand?’

‘So this man is still around?’

A shrug: ‘Possibly.’

‘Where?’ Haller asked.

Fredi laughed derisively and waved an arm in the air as if tracing it across the sky. ‘Here, right here. He watches over us all … like God!’

His pals snickered and shot nervous looks at one another. I wasn’t really concentrating on them, I was trying to make the connection and then it came and without thinking at all I blurted out, ‘Of course! The name at the orphanage … Tretow! Tretow Immobilien!’

Haller gazed up at the ceiling, shaking his head at my stupidity and his for allowing me to come with him. A look of genuine fear crossed Fredi’s face and he snapped at me, ‘Shut up! Are you trying to get us all killed? Get out of here. Now. Both of you! I’m not saying another thing.’

Haller got up, grabbing my arm and almost dragging me out of the bar and onto the street.

‘That!’ he almost shouted when we were standing on the pavement. ‘That, right there, is the reason I didn’t want you coming with me. Shit! Serves me right for letting an amateur come along on a job …’

He stalked off down the street then stopped, pulled himself together, took a deep breath and turned back to me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, meaning it. ‘I didn’t mean to screw it up like that.’

‘It’s OK … We weren’t going to get much more anyway. However, next time you have a bright idea, just wait till we are in the car.’

‘So now what? Do we track down this Tretow?’

‘And say what? We don’t know what he did, or when. We have no evidence …’

‘Well we have to do something. Mariana was in that orphanage. He was obviously harming the kids there … and for some reason the Stasi were turning a blind eye to it. He could be the key to everything.’

‘Exactly. Which is why we have to get our facts straight before we approach him. We will only have one chance. We must not waste it.’

An uneasy silence fell between us as the door of the
Kneipe
swung open and one of Old Fredi’s drinking pals, the one who’d asked for potato chips, came outside. He looked at us, then concentrated on the tricky task of pulling a packet of cigarettes from an inside pocket, extracting one and lighting up, his shoulders hunched against the wind. He dragged the first long breath deep into his lungs and then walked over in our direction.

‘You still want to know about the orphanage?’ he asked.

‘Maybe,’ Haller replied.

‘I can help you. But I need some of that money you were handing out to that tight-fisted bastard Fredi, because he won’t be sharing any of his. And this one …’ he jerked his chin at me, ‘better keep his mouth shut this time.’

Haller peeled off another hundred and handed it over. ‘So …?’

‘There’s a woman round here, Magda Färber. She worked at the orphanage, looking after the children. She’ll know what went on there.’

‘And are you going to help me find her?’

‘Another hundred …’

‘Fifty. I can find her myself. You can save me some time, but that’s all.’

‘She works at the school now, part-time, serving lunch to the kids. She’ll be out in an hour or so, once they’ve cleaned up.’

‘How will I recognize her?’

The man gave a hacking laugh. ‘Magda? Can’t miss her. Look for the orange hair. Same colour as an orangutan … and about as filthy too.’

Haller handed over a fifty. ‘Then she’s perfect for an ape like you.’

36

‘She does not resemble an orang-utan to me,’ said Haller, and I agreed. The Magda Färber who came walking out of the kitchen entrance of the Grundschule Rudower might have given her hair a startling, vivid ginger dye job, but the rest of her was hardly ape-like. She was small, trim and made up like a glamour girl, albeit one from the mid-1980s. Her stonewashed jeans weren’t exactly Paris fashions, her short, quilted ski-jacket was a cheap, garish pink, and her face had been given a battering by time and poverty. But compared to the soaks on Old Fredi’s table she was a vision of beauty.