Private Berlin (14 page)

“FIND THESE PEOPLE, Gabriel,” Mattie said, slapping down six blue files on the hippie scientist’s workbench at Private Berlin. “They’re the key.”

“Wait a second,” Katharina complained. “I’ve got first dibs on him.”

Dr. Gabriel was hunched over a computer, removing its hard drive.

“Kat—” Mattie insisted.

Her friend cut her off. “That computer belongs to Ernst Neumann, dead computer genius, doctoral student at Berlin Tech, and,
according to his roommate, a freelance hacker who’d come into a lot of cash recently.”

“Really?” Mattie said, impressed. “I’ll do my own research then.”

Gabriel did not look up, just gestured with his screwdriver toward an iMac. “Use that machine.”

Mattie started toward the machine with Katharina in tow. “What’s in those files?” she asked.

“Fiction,” Mattie said, sitting down in front of the computer.

The door to Gabriel’s lab opened and Jack Morgan entered with Daniel Brecht. They were on their way out to catch Cassiano’s
game at the stadium, but they wanted to bring everyone up to speed on Pavel, his background in the KGB, and his disappearance
last evening, sometime after he’d vacated the room he’d shared with Perfecta.

“And I spoke with some old friends in Vegas,” Morgan said. “There was heavier than normal betting on the games where Cassiano
played poorly. And get this: in every case, Hertha went into the games as five to three favorites.”

“I’m not following,” Katharina said.

“The odds were such that few flags would be raised on someone betting on Cassiano’s opponents,” Morgan said.

“Pavel?” Mattie asked.

“That’s where my money is,” Dietrich said. “Here’s a picture of him.”

Mattie studied the photograph of the nightclub owner, but she could not tell if it was the man she’d seen at the Federal Archives
that morning.

Then she told them all what she’d discovered in Halle.

When she finished, Gabriel abandoned the hard drive of the computer genius, went to Mattie, and pushed her out of her chair,
flipping open the first file. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“Gabriel!” Katharina protested.

“The computer will take me hours,” he said. “This, minutes.”

The first file belonged to Ilse Frei, who had been one of the younger of the six children who’d arrived at Waisenhaus 44 on
February 12, 1980.

Morgan and Brecht left for the game just before Gabriel found an Ilse Frei, correct age, living near Frankfurt.

“She’s a paralegal and lives in the suburb of Bad Homburg,” the old hippie said, now giving his computer a command to cross-reference
her name against the various law-enforcement databases to which Private had access.

He immediately got a hit and looked pained.

“What is it?” Mattie asked, coming around the back of his chair.

“Ilse Frei was reported missing fifteen days ago.”

MY FRIENDS, FELLOW Berliners, twenty years ago it would have taken me weeks to track down the address of Greta Amsel. I know this because nearly
two decades ago, shortly after recuperating from my surgeries, I decided to find and kill the bitch that bore me.

It took me a solid month of painstaking document research to locate my dear sweet mother and end her life. But that is a story
for another time.

It had taken me all of an hour on Google to pin down the fact that Greta Amsel was a nurse who lived alone in a small apartment
building in the outskirts of West Berlin not far from Falkensee.

At the moment, I’m sitting in my blue workman’s van diagonally across the street from the apartment building, reviewing the
actions I took after finding her. I’d had the good sense to call her phone number once I’d arrived. The voice on the machine
was a stranger’s. Funny, I never would have recognized it.

I called the apartment manager next, a man named Gustav Banter, and posed as an electrical supply salesman from Mannheim who
wanted to drop by later, around five thirty. Impossible, Banter told me. His shift ended at four thirty.

How sad, I said, and settled in to wait for Greta.

Again, I did not recognize her voice on her answering machine, but I know her the moment she rides by me on her bicycle at
a quarter to five. She’s still got the naturally blond hair, the high cheekbones, and that lost look about her.

Greta Amsel locks her bike in a rack in front of the apartment building. I wait until she’s been inside ten minutes before
taking the tool bag from the floor and setting it on the passenger seat beside me.

I wait until a man carrying a book bag comes down the street and heads for the front door of Greta’s building. As he puts
his key into the lock, I’m angling in behind him.

In a heavy Slavic accent, I say, “Do you knows where I finds Herr Banter? The superintendent?”

The young man turns to look at me. “Banter? He’s long gone by now.”

I shake my head angrily. “I get call to come fix toilet leak on third floor.” I pat my pockets. “I got number and name here
somewhere, but I supposed to meet Banter.”

The young man shrugs. “Banter’s a worthless piece of shit. It’s just like him not to hang around when someone’s toilet’s leaking.
I’m in two twelve. It’s not above me, is it? My ceiling could be falling in.”

“No,” I say. “Three forty-seven, or something. Can I go in?”

The young man nods absently, stopping at the mailboxes.

By the time he’s got one open, the elevator door is shutting on me.

I get off at the third floor, find the stairwell, and climb to the fourth floor.

I find apartment four twenty-nine and knock. I look right at the peephole, and a shiver of excitement passes through me.

“Yes?” I hear her call in that unfamiliar voice. “Who is it?”

“It is plumber, Frau Amsel,” I say. “Herr Banter called. He says tenant in three twenty-nine is complaining of water from
the ceiling. He wants me to check toilet.”

There’s a long pause.

And then I hear a chain slide and a dead bolt thrown.

“WHO REPORTED HER missing?” Mattie asked, studying the PDF of a document carrying the letterhead of the police department of Frankfurt am Main.

“Her sister, Ilona,” Dr. Gabriel said, tapping the section that identified the concerned relative.

Mattie felt a chill. “Ilona was also one of the children who entered Waisenhaus 44 with Chris. She give an address?”

“Just a cell number,” said Katharina, who was also looking at the document.

Mattie whipped out her cell and dialed just as Tom Burkhart entered. He went straight to her. “I think I’ve got something.”

She held up her finger, hearing Ilona Frei’s phone ring. A synthesized voice answered, telling her to leave a message and
a callback number.

“Hi, Ilona. My name is Mattie Engel. I am a friend of Chris Schneider’s. He and I work together at Private here in Berlin.
If you could call me, I’d appreciate it. Any time. Day or night. Please, it’s important that I speak with you.”

“Here’s a Greta Amsel, Mattie,” Dr. Gabriel said when she hung up. “She lives out by Falkensee. That’s twenty minutes, tops.”

Mattie jotted down the address and moved toward the door. Again Burkhart said, “Engel, I said I think I’ve got something.”

Mattie hesitated and then replied, “Come with me. Tell me on the way.”

WHEN MY DEAR old friend Greta Amsel opens her door, she’s wearing an apron and I smell bacon frying. She studies my plumber’s disguise
and then stands aside. “Down the hall on the right. You don’t suppose it’s a burst pipe?”

I shrug, smile, and respond cheerily, “Who knows? I look, okay?”

The smell of bacon surrounds me as I walk down a hall with bare walls. When I go into the toilet I notice she does not have
the array of cosmetics, lotions, and soaps you’d expect.

Greta Amsel lives a simple, austere life.

I set the toolbox down and pull on rubber gloves. I look over my shoulder. She’s watching me. I smile again. “You cooking,
yes? I knows in a minute if this is problem. If no, two minutes I be gone.”

She hesitates, and then moves out of the doorway.

I wait until I hear dishes rattle, and then a radio sputtering with news. I fish in the toolbox and come up with my flathead
screwdriver and a clipboard with blank paper on it. I flush the toilet, and then, holding the screwdriver beneath the clipboard,
I walk toward the smell of the bacon.

“Hallo there?” I call pleasantly.

Greta stands at the stove in a galley kitchen about six feet from me. She’s rolling bacon onto a paper towel on a plate. She
looks up. “All done?”

“Yes, no problem with toilet. Must be neighbors.” I hold out the clipboard. “You sign that I am here, make trip, for Banter,
okay?”

Greta steps toward me. And then I can’t help it. Being this close to her pleases me more than I’d anticipated, and I make
that clicking noise in my throat.

Puzzlement and then disbelief twist through Greta’s face.

“You know me, Greta, hmmm?” I say. “A long time and still you know me.”

She’s paralyzed with terror, but I’m thrilled and fluid when I drop the clipboard and launch myself at her.

Greta grabs the skillet and throws the bacon grease at me. It scalds my face. But that only serves to infuriate me.

She starts to scream, but I knock the pan from her hand and jam my fist into her mouth before she can get out much more than
a squeal.

She looks at me wide-eyed and makes soft whimpering noises.

“You remember, don’t you, Greta?” I ask in a hoarse whisper. “All the fun we used to have? You and your mother, hmmm?”

BURKHART PARKED THE Private car down the street from Greta Amsel’s apartment building just as an older man in a blue jumpsuit and matching cap
left by the front door, carrying a toolbox.

Mattie was trying Greta Amsel’s number for the third time. No answer. The workman climbed into a dark-blue panel van.

Mattie was barely conscious of him. She was running through the information Burkhart had given her on the way over.

The counterterrorism expert had discovered no other documents regarding the auxiliary slaughterhouse in Ahrensfelde. He’d
looked in the Berlin city archives and in records repositories in Ahrensfelde, and there was nothing more than what they’d
found already.

People in the area immediately surrounding the blasted abattoir told Burkhart that they’d already spoken to Risi Baumgarten’s
agents and knew nothing about the place other than they’d thought it represented a hazard to their children.

Then Burkhart had stopped for lunch at a café not far from the slaughterhouse and met a retired shopkeeper and his lady friend.

The shopkeeper grew up on a farm that used the slaughterhouse. He said a man he knew only as “Falk” ran the place, and he
described Falk as an alcoholic with a bitter and gloomy attitude.

Falk had a son who worked at the abattoir too. He couldn’t remember the younger Falk’s name, but he remembered that he was
in his late teens the last time he saw him, and very smart despite limited schooling.

The shopkeeper’s lady friend told Burkhart that she walked by the abattoir in the late seventies, late at night, and thought
she heard a woman screaming, but it could have been a pig squealing. Pigs are smart, she told Burkhart. They know when there’s
killing going on. She told her late husband about the incident, and he’d told her to plug her ears from now on.

The blue workman’s van began to pull out.

“You want to knock on the door?” Burkhart asked.

“We’re here, right?” Mattie said, climbing out.

The van drove past them. They barely gave it a glance.

They tried the buzzer to Greta Amsel’s apartment twice. No answer.

“Let’s come back tomorrow,” Burkhart said.

An older gentleman walked up behind them. “Who are you looking for?”

“Greta Amsel,” Mattie said.

The man looked around. “That’s her bike. She’s here.”

“She’s not answering her buzzer.”

“Lots of the buzzers don’t work. But if her bike’s here, she’s here.”

Burkhart flashed his Private badge. “Mind if we go upstairs and try her door?”

“Hell, I don’t care,” he said, and let them in.

They went to Greta Amsel’s apartment on the fourth floor, knocked, and got no answer. Then they noticed a strange smell coming
from inside, a mix of bacon smoke and the acrid taint that lingers after hair catches fire.

“Something’s wrong,” Mattie said.

“I agree,” Burkhart said. He crouched and proceeded to pick the lock.

Guns drawn, they entered the hallway. The smell was worse here, crossed with human feces.

The light was on in the bathroom. The toilet seat was up. The fan was running.

So was the one in the kitchen where Greta Amsel’s corpse lay, sprawled on her belly.

Her hands were singed and her fingers charred black.

THIRTY YARDS OUT from the goal, Cassiano came to a full stop, juggled, and then popped the ball over the head of the final Düsseldorf defender.
With explosive speed, the Brazilian wove around the stunned sweeper and half-volleyed the bouncing ball left-footed into the
upper right-hand corner of the net.

The crowd inside the Hertha Berlin stadium went nuts. Jack Morgan and Daniel Brecht were up on their feet applauding.

“That’s three,” Brecht crowed. “Absolutely super.”

“No wonder Manchester United is interested,” Morgan said. “He’s incredibly good.”

“Why would he risk his career to get involved with someone like Pavel?”

“That’s exactly what he said, remember?” Morgan said.

“But there’s no denying the way he looked in those six games,” Brecht countered. “He was simply not the same player.”

Out on the field, the referee blew the whistle, ending the game. Cassiano jogged off, sweating, smiling, and waving to his
adoring fans.

Jack was silent for several moments watching him.

“I think he’s telling the truth,” he said finally. “I don’t think he’d risk his career for someone like Pavel, but maybe Perfecta
would.”

“She did get naked for him.”

“She did,” Morgan agreed. “I want to talk to Cassiano again. And his coach. And the club’s general manager. All together.
Think you can set that up?”

“When?”

“Now sounds good.”