Private Berlin (13 page)

FRIENDS, FELLOW BERLINERS, it’s only three in the afternoon, but I must admit that I’m already bone tired from the many long and difficult tasks I’ve
been forced to attend to already today. But I like to have things cleared away, cleaned up and polished like glass before
I move on to something new.

That’s the way of an invisible man.

Some old habits never die.

I look at my hands a moment and entertain the notion that I’ve never really seen myself, not without a mirror anyway; and
mirrors are part of life’s illusion, aren’t they?

I really don’t know what I look like at all, I decide, and I never will.

And if I don’t, who will?

Certainly not all those I’ve been forced to eliminate in the last two weeks. Not one of them recognized my new face.

But they knew my voice.

Before they died, when I was speaking to them, they looked at me like I was a scary puzzle with pieces missing.

I laugh, feeling buoyed as I smear instant tanning lotion on my face and hands, and then use colored contact lenses to turn
my eye color from brown to green. Then I glue on thick, dark eyebrows and a moustache and stuff rolls of cotton in my cheeks.

I pull on a blue workman’s coverall embroidered with the name of a local plumbing company. It’s amazing what you can find
in thrift stores if you really know what you’re looking for. I even found the matching cap there too.

When I’m finished and satisfied that no one from my current life would recognize me, I fill a toolbox with wrenches, screwdrivers,
and a mini blowtorch, making gentle clicking noises in my throat. It’s so important to have the right tools for the job, isn’t
it, my friends? Hmmm?

IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON by the time Mattie returned to Private Berlin, requisitioned a car, and drove the one hundred seventy kilometers south to
the city of Halle.

A gray, bleak city dominated by GDR-era architecture, Halle looked even more grim and somber in the mist that was swirling
in advance of another storm.

Mattie parked, wondering again if the body of the computer genius was indeed linked to the hacking at Private, Chris’s death,
and now the murder of Agnes Krüger in broad daylight. Was Hermann Krüger behind all of it? Could someone of his stature afford
to be so brazen and cold-blooded?

In an effort to answer those questions, Mattie went to city hall and inquired at the clerk’s office about Waisenhaus 44. The
tattooed emo girl who waited on her said she’d never heard of the orphanage, much less its records.

But a middle-aged woman working at a desk behind the emo girl told Mattie that Waisenhaus 44 was out on the road from Klepzig
to Reussen.

“It’s still there?” Mattie asked.

“Not for long,” she said. “Someone’s tearing it down next month and building a green lightbulb production facility.”

“Records?” Mattie asked.

“I think they were transferred to the Federal Archives after reunification.”

“No other place they could be?”

“Not that I know of.”

Mattie considered throwing in the towel. But then she decided to make the drive out to see the orphanage. She told herself
it might help her to understand whatever it was that Chris went through as a kid.

The thought of Chris as a boy made her think about Niklas. The two brought a lump to her throat, and tears to her eyes, and
it took every bit of her strength to stay on the wet highway leading east out of Halle.

The wind began to gust and the rain fell harder as Mattie drove north on the pot-holed secondary road from Klepzig to Reussen.
The road wound through farmland, by stands of hardwood trees partially stripped of leaves, and past giant white wind turbines,
their blades slicing the iron sky.

At last Mattie spotted the roofline of the orphanage through a tangle of brush and woods. It sat next to a field being tilled
by a farmer on a tractor.

Between two stout wooden posts, a new steel cable stretched across the orphanage’s overgrown driveway. There were notices
of condemnation in plastic sheeting stapled to both posts. A sign dangled from the cable: No Trespassing.

Mattie parked her car on the shoulder, pulled up the hood of her rain jacket, and got out. She trotted across the road, jumped
the cable, and moved down the driveway through sopping weeds and thorns that clawed at her slacks.

Vines strangled the off-kilter walls of Waisenhaus 44, a large three-story building with a sagging roof. The windows of the
old orphanage were gone, except for teeth-like shards that clung to the frames.

Mattie stepped up on the front porch, which sagged off the building. The orphanage’s front door lay broken on the floor in
the mouth of a long, gloomy central hallway.

Something in her stomach told Mattie not to enter and to leave the secrets of Waisenhaus 44 alone.

But then thunder cracked in the distance and the rain fell even harder.

Feeling keenly on edge, wondering if she was crazy, she stepped inside.

IN THE HALLWAY, Mattie stopped to get out her flashlight. She shined it around, finding a room to her right that held the last relics of an
office lying in leaves, fungus, and mold: a desk with two legs, a chair with the stuffing and rusted springs visible, and
an overturned file cabinet with no drawers.

This was where the headmaster or mistress must have done their business, Mattie thought. She walked on, moving about the orphanage’s
lower floor, which had been stripped of nearly everything.

She found the kitchen and the eating hall. They were stripped too.

As she climbed the stairs, she tried to imagine Chris in this horrid place, eight years old, motherless, fatherless. She thought
of Niklas having to be put in an orphanage and felt on the verge of weeping again.

On the second floor, Mattie discovered the ruins of old classrooms and became aware that something about the background din
of the rain falling and the tractor plowing had changed.

She ascended to the third floor and found dormitories set to either side of a long central corridor. The first was empty.
The one across the hall held rusted bunk-bed frames bolted to the wall.

Mattie walked over creaking floorboards to the second set of dorms. In the first one she inspected, the roof was caved in
on top of one of the steel bunk beds, the only one she’d seen that still had a mattress on it.

The mattress was black with filth and mold. There were puddles on it, and on the floor. For reasons she could not explain,
Mattie felt drawn into the dorm, toward that bunk bed mattress.

The floorboards felt soft and rotted underfoot. But she went anyway and stood in the rain teeming through the hole in the
roof, transfixed by the mattress and the splintered joists that stabbed it in several places.

Was this bed once Chris’s?

Mattie saw him lying on the bed as easily as another memory that came flooding in around her.

She and Chris were in bed at a ski condo they’d rented at Garmisch, a rare separation from Niklas.

Chris made her breakfast and brought it to her on a tray with a single rose, and a small box of chocolates wrapped in a bow.
He watched her eat, amused. And then he was interested to see her opening the chocolate box.

Inside was a ring, two emeralds surrounding an emerald-cut diamond.

Suddenly, there in the wreckage of the orphanage, loss flowed everywhere around Mattie, an invisible, terrible hydraulic pressure
built, making the room feel as menacing to her as the subbasement in the slaughterhouse.

Lightning flashed, almost blinding her.

Thunder cracked right overhead.

Mattie ducked, desperate now to leave this place, to get back to her car and go home to Niklas.

She ran from the room.

She raced to the staircase and then froze.

Standing in the shadows at the bottom of the staircase was a man in a long, black, hooded rain slicker.

His face was hidden beneath the hood.

He was aiming a double-barreled shotgun at her.

“WHO ARE YOU?” the man with the shotgun growled. “And what in God’s name are you doing in here?”

For an instant, Mattie couldn’t answer.

He adjusted his aim. “I asked you—”

She reached to her coat pocket.

“Easy,” the man said, still aiming the gun.

“I’m going for—my badge—and ID,” she stammered.

He picked his head up off the butt of the shotgun. “You police?”

“I work for Private, Private Berlin.” She showed him the badge.

He made a motion for her to come down the stairs toward him.

“The gun, sir?” she asked. “It’s making me nervous.”

At last he lowered the gun, and then pulled back the hood, revealing a rawboned man in his late thirties. He said, “I saw
the car after I quit plowing. You’re not supposed to be in here. They’re demolishing this place next month.”

“I’m sorry,” Mattie said, her wits returning. She started down the stairs toward him. “This was an orphanage. A…a close friend
of mine lived here.”

“Lot of people lived here. Can’t say many liked it, from what I’ve heard.”

She stuck out her hand. “Mattie Engel.”

“Darek Eberhardt,” he replied, not taking her hand. “You should leave, Frau Engel. This place is dangerous. Floorboards are
all rotted. You could go through anywhere. Break a leg. Or a neck.”

“My friend is…dead, murdered,” Mattie said. “He was more than my friend. He was my fiancé, and I’m just trying to understand
his childhood.”

Eberhardt studied her without emotion. “I’m sorry for your loss, but you won’t learn anything here. This place was abandoned
twenty years ago. Looters stripped most of it. Took the government forever, but they finally got the land sold to some green
energy company.”

“I heard that. Lightbulbs.”

Eberhardt turned without comment and started down the hall.

Mattie hurried after him, saying, “The records about Waisenhaus 44 that are in the Federal Archives, they’re…they’re incomplete.”

Eberhardt said nothing as he headed toward the front door.

Mattie called after him, “I was hoping I could find someone who knows about the orphanage, someone who might have known Chris.”

Eberhardt went out the front door. The rain had slowed. The thunder boomed and the lightning flashed to their east now.

“I’ve got to get back to my tilling,” Eberhardt said.

Mattie followed him, saying, “I’m sorry. I’d hoped…” She started to choke up. “It’s just so hard not understanding…why he
died, who he was, this place.”

She wiped at her tears with the sleeve of her rain jacket. Eberhardt had turned to face her, the shotgun held low at his side,
his face a mystery.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’ll be going. I’m sorry to have bothered you and taken you away from your work.”

Mattie pivoted and took several steps down the overgrown driveway toward the road.

“Hariat Ledwig,” the farmer said. “She lives in a nursing home in Halle.”

Mattie stopped and looked at him, puzzled. “Who is she?”

“My father’s second cousin. She ran this place for twenty-two years.”

THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, Mattie knocked and entered a room that reeked of old age, disease, and an antiseptic that smelled like citrus.

Hariat Ledwig sat upright in a chair by a hospital bed, connected by a tube to an oxygen tent. A little bird of a woman in
a nightgown, robe, and slippers, she was having a coughing fit. A blanket covered her legs. There were books stacked around
her. One lay open in her lap cradling a magnifying glass.

When the coughing subsided, Hariat Ledwig spit into a tissue and dropped it in a trashcan set among the books.

“What do you want?” the old woman croaked suspiciously.

Mattie identified herself, showed her the Private badge, and then said, “I met your second cousin’s son, Darek, out at the
old Waisenhaus 44 building. He suggested I come talk to you.”

Hariat Ledwig now turned highly guarded. “Who do you work for? The state?”

“No, I…”

The old woman picked up the magnifying glass and shook it at Mattie. “I was not a part of any forced adoptions. Never. Not
once. I can prove it.”

Mattie understood what she was talking about. During the communist reign in East Germany, children were sometimes taken from
parents thought disloyal. The children’s names were changed, and then they were given over to families deemed true to the
state.

“That’s not why I’m here, Frau Ledwig,” Mattie assured her. “And there is no client. I’m just trying to find out about a very
dear friend of mine who lived at Waisenhaus 44 in the seventies and eighties.”

Hariat Ledwig watched Mattie the way a cobra might a mongoose. “Your friend’s name?”

“Chris, uh, Christoph Schneider.”

The old woman blinked. Confusion and then pain rippled through her.

She started coughing again, hard and spastic convulsions, and she would not meet Mattie’s gaze.

When the fit eased, Mattie said, “Did you know Chris?”

Hariat Ledwig seemed in some kind of internal battle, but then she glanced sidelong at Mattie and said, “I had nothing to
do with whatever happened to that boy. Absolutely nothing.”

MATTIE FELT A pit opening in her stomach. She stared at the woman who’d run Waisenhaus 44 and said, “What
happened
to Chris?”

“I don’t know,” Hariat Ledwig whispered.

“You do.”

The old woman shifted painfully. “I
don’t
. Why are you here? Why now?”

“Because Chris was murdered last week.”

Hariat Ledwig’s eyes unscrewed a moment as if she’d fallen into some time warp. Then she said, wheezing, “I’d always hoped
he’d be safe and live a long life. I’d hoped they all would…I…I did nothing but try to help him as best I could, but it was
beyond me. I was a good person caught in an impossible situation!”

The old woman blubbered these last words: “I’m innocent.”

“Innocent of what?” Mattie demanded. “Was Chris abused in your orphanage?”

Hariat Ledwig forced herself to sit straighter. “Absolutely not. Whatever it was, it happened before he came, before they
all came to Waisenhaus 44.”

“All?”

The old woman hesitated, but then, between hacking fits, she described the snowy winter night of February 12, 1980.

A car and a police van came. A man got out of the rear of the car. He told Hariat Ledwig that he was with the state. Three
girls and three boys between the ages of six and nine had been found wandering the streets of East Berlin. Waisenhaus 44 was
the only orphanage around with vacancies.

The children appeared to be in shock when they arrived. They clung to each other obsessively. Most had violent nightmares,
and would wake up screaming for their mothers. Two of the girls were sisters and rarely let the other out of their sight.
They all feared men.

Over the course of years, Hariat Ledwig tried to coax out of them what had happened, but every time she did, they’d become
terrified and refuse. The only thing Chris ever said about it was that some things were best forgotten.

“So I did,” the old woman croaked. “From then on, I saw to their care as best I could. Made sure they were fed and clothed
and educated. Some of the six did better than others, Chris and Artur probably the best.

“And then they were teenagers, and word of the uprising in Berlin had reached even Waisenhaus 44. They all went up there one
night. They came back, but not for long. They were of age. They could do what they wanted. I lost track of them, though I
heard that Chris chose the army.”

Mattie nodded. “But other than that and the fact that Chris lived at the orphanage, there’s nothing about his childhood that’s
real. At least as far as documents go.”

Hariat Ledwig fought for breath. “Because of me. I did that.”

The old woman explained that after seeing the traumatized state the six children were in, and their pathological fear of being
asked to talk about it, she came to believe that someone had threatened them if they ever talked.

“I didn’t want whoever had tortured those children to be able to find them,” she said. “They came to me with no documents,
so I invented documents for them. Even when the children were able to tell me their parents’ names, I changed them, and made
the children memorize the new names I had written.”

“And you told no one?”

“It was a different time. As Chris said, one best forgotten.”

“What was Chris’s real name?”

“Rolf Christoph Wolfe.”

“And his mother and father?”

“I never knew. I guess I didn’t want to know.”

“Earlier today, a man posing as a professor stole six of the Waisenhaus 44 files from the Federal Archives. I believe Chris’s
file was among them.”

Hariat Ledwig blinked, and then she seemed to shrink right in front of Mattie. “How could that possibly…?” She choked hard
as if someone or something was strangling her. Then she said, coughing, “My God, they all came in on the same date. I sent
the Federal Archives the chronological copy of the files.”

The old woman broke down sobbing. “No, this is not right. I wanted them to be safe!”

Mattie went to her side, squatted down, and put her hand on the blanket, through which she could feel the woman’s legs. They
were like twigs. “Hariat, do you remember the names of the other five children?”

Hariat Ledwig’s crying slowed. “I knew what would happen when the wall fell. I knew there would be a witch hunt. I kept copies
of the files of every child who lived in my orphanage.”

Mattie’s heart skipped a beat. “Can I see them? Make copies?”

The old woman nodded. “They prove I was a decent person, not part of the sickness that seemed to afflict everyone around me
in those days.”