Private Berlin (22 page)

“Hauptkommissar?” Inspector Weigel
said. She stood uneasily at the door to the interrogation room where Dietrich was sitting at the table, looking like he’d
lost a crucial game.

“Go away, Weigel,” he said. “I have to think.”

“Sir, if you please—” she began.

“I’m not pleased,” the high commissar snapped.

Inspector Weigel stood straighter and with a firm voice said, “Sir, I believe that with the help of Private Berlin I’ve made
a major break in the case.”

Dietrich’s brow knitted and he looked up at her. “With Private Berlin?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You mean, you’ve been cooperating with them without my knowledge?”

“Sir, you have not been yourself lately, and you placed me in charge while you dealt with your father’s—”

The high commissar slammed his hand on the table. “Don’t tell me who I’ve been, Weigel! I could destroy your career for this.
You’ll have to leave Kripo. You’ll be lucky to find a spot with city police, a meter maid, a traffic cop.”

Inspector Weigel’s face had turned a rose color and her voice shook as she said, “Be that as it may, sir, I’ve had a witness
brought in for questioning.”

“A witness?” Dietrich said, taken aback. “A witness to what?”

“Sir, if you’ll come with me, he’s in interrogation room B. I thought you’d want to observe.”

“Observe?”

“My interrogation, sir.”

Mattie watched the entire scene from behind the two-way mirror before finding her way to a similar room and similar two-way
mirror across the hall. A man in a beard and workman’s clothes sat alone at the table, staring at his hands and picking at
his calluses in frustration.

The door to the observation booth opened and High Commissar Dietrich entered. When he saw Mattie, his entire body tightened.
“You. What are you doing here? Who gave you permission to be here?”

“Inspector Weigel,” Mattie replied calmly.

“Weigel?” Dietrich cried as the door opened behind him. “She has no authority. She—”

“She has my authority, Hans,” said the tall bald man behind him. His name was Carl Gottschalk. He was the high commissar’s
supervisor.

“Yours, Carl? You can’t be serious,” Dietrich said.

“I’m always serious about murder, Hans,” Gottschalk said. “Let’s see where your young protégé takes us.”

On the other side of the two-way mirror, Inspector Weigel had entered the interrogation room and was moving toward the table
and the man waiting.

The high commissar seemed to notice him for the first time. He craned his head toward Mattie. “What nonsense have you been
feeding Weigel? Who is that man in there?”

Mattie gazed evenly at Dietrich and said, “He goes by several names, none of them correct.”

“CAN YOU TELL me your name for the record?” Inspector Weigel asked.

“Am I under arrest?” the man across the table from her demanded.

“We don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. You were brought in for questioning. Your name?”

“Gerhardt Krainer,” he replied.

“Occupation?”

“I own a construction business. We rehab apartment buildings.”

“How long have you been at this business, Herr Krainer?”

“Fifteen years. Look, I don’t understand what I’m being—”

“In due time, Herr Krainer,” Inspector Weigel said, cutting him off. “You’ve changed your name four times in your life.”

Krainer’s chin retreated toward his throat. “So? It was done legally. Every time, I wanted a new start. A completely new start.”

“You were once known as Kiefer Braun?”

He hesitated, but then nodded. “A long time ago.”

“You grew up in an orphanage, did you not? Waisenhaus 44?”

Krainer frowned and didn’t answer for a moment. “I did, but—”

Inspector Weigel cut him off again. “Tell me about the slaughterhouse.”

Krainer blinked several times, and Mattie thought he looked like a man waking up from hypnosis. He replied in a thin voice,
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The slaughterhouse,” Inspector Weigel insisted. “The abattoir south of Ahrensfelde.”

Krainer blinked again before saying, “I’m sorry. I grew up in Leipzig. My parents died in a car accident. I don’t know anything
about any slaughterhouse.”

Inside the observation room, High Commissar Dietrich made a harrumphing noise as if in satisfaction.

“What about a man named Falk?” Inspector Weigel asked.

“No. I don’t know him either. Never heard of him.”

Dietrich made that noise again and then said, “This is a waste of time. I’m leaving right—”

Carl Gottschalk caught him by the elbow. “Wait.”

Weigel had gotten up from the interrogation table. She went to the door and opened it. Ilona Frei shuffled in, her head bowed.

Krainer stared at her, trying to figure out who she was, until she said, “Hello, Kiefer. It’s me, Ilona. Ilona Frei.”

The man looked like he’d seen a ghost or a zombie, but he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know you.”

Ilona took that like a slap to the face. “I’m Ilse’s sister, Kiefer. Please. You know me, and you know what happened to us
in the slaughterhouse.”

“No, I don’t,” he said, but he would no longer look at her.

“Chris is dead!” Ilona screamed at him. “So is Greta! And Ilse! And Artur!”

Krainer’s head rocked back in disbelief. “What? I—”

“Falk’s alive,” she blubbered. “He tried to kill me last night. And he’ll try to kill you if he finds out who you are.”

Krainer was suddenly wrapped up in a faraway expression, as if he were watching some horror from a great distance.

“If you don’t tell, he’s won,” Ilona pleaded. “Please, tell them. They think I’m insane. Tell them or they won’t believe me.
Tell them, or we both die!”

KRAINER’S JAW WAS trembling, and tears came to his eyes when he at last allowed himself to look at Ilona Frei. In a voice that sounded to Mattie
like a lost boy’s, he said, “I’ve never spoken about it, Ilona…not one word.”

Ilona walked to him and put her hand on his shoulder, weeping. “I know. None of us did. None of us.”

“He said he’d kill us if we ever talked.”

“Falk’s already trying to kill you,” Inspector Weigel said. “We’re offering you protection, but only if you tell us what we
want to know.”

Over the course of the next hour, Krainer’s story came out in fits and starts, but it corroborated much of what Ilona Frei
had told Mattie and Burkhart the evening before.

Krainer was born in Leipzig, where he was christened Edmund Tillerman. When he was six, his father, an attorney who had been
speaking out against the communist government, simply disappeared.

Ilona Frei’s real name was Karin Klauser. Ilse’s was Annette. They were born and raised in Thüringen. Their father, a scientist,
vanished when Ilona was eight and Ilse was five.

Several weeks after their fathers’ disappearances, both Krainer and Ilona Frei remembered men pounding on their doors in the
middle of the night, and then their mothers crying and begging for mercy.

The men grabbed them from their beds.

They took their mothers too.

They were taken to the slaughterhouse in Ahrensfelde.

They were put in those rooms to either side of the anteroom hallway. There were bunks bolted into the walls, a metal pot,
and little else. At one point, fifteen women were held there along with their sixteen children.

In the dead of night, a young man, no more than twenty, would come. They knew him only as “Falk,” and most nights he would
select a mother and her child or children and bring them into the slaughterhouse itself.

Falk put the mothers through unimaginable pain, hanging them on meat hooks by their handcuffs so their arms dislocated. He
burned their feet with cigarettes. He whipped them, cut them, and raped them, trying to get them to turn evidence against
their husbands, their husbands’ friends, and their families.

Falk made Krainer, Chris, Ilona, and the other children watch what he did to their mothers. Falk said he thought it made the
mothers’ torture even more unbearable, and therefore made them more likely to talk about their crimes against the state.

If and when that didn’t work, Falk tortured the children in front of their mothers.

“And when he thought he’d gotten everything out of our mothers,” Krainer said, “Falk killed them with a screwdriver and dumped
their bodies in a well filled with rats.”

KRAINER BROKE DOWN completely, and Ilona Frei threw her arms around him, saying, “Thank you, Kiefer. Now they’ll believe. They’ll believe.”

“I’ll give you two a moment,” Inspector Weigel said. She got up, ashen-faced, and looked right at the two-way mirror before
heading to the door.

High Commissar Dietrich looked much sicker than a man with a brutal hangover, Mattie thought. He stared at the two people
in the interrogation room with an expression that was drifting toward hopelessness.

But when Inspector Weigel came into the observation room, carrying a manila folder that she handed to Carl Gottschalk, Dietrich
said, “This can’t be true. It would have come out after the wall fell. A place like the slaughterhouse would have come out.”

Mattie crossed her arms. “Not if all the files about it were destroyed before the uprising started, long before the wall came
down.”

“They burned files in every state agency,” Inspector Weigel said. “Everyone knows that. So which one was Falk working for?
The Stasi? The secret police?”

Dietrich said nothing. Mattie noticed Dietrich’s boss studying him intently.

“He had to have been Stasi,” Mattie said, watching Dietrich now as well. “They used torture and execution at Hohenschönhausen
Prison to make family members testify against one another. Starvation, sleep deprivation, mock drowning.”

“But this is beyond the pale,” Dietrich said in a hushed voice. “Depraved.”

“Yes,” Mattie said. “It was.”

The high commissar looked at his supervisor and said in a voice more sure of its convictions: “Carl, without some kind of
documentation—”

“Documentation?” Mattie cried, cutting him off. “You’ve got eyewitnesses! Look at them, High Commissar. Do they look like
they’re lying?”

Inside the interrogation room, tiny Ilona Frei was still holding on to Krainer, who was sobbing, “Falk stuck a screwdriver
in the back of my mother’s head, Ilona. And I just stood there and watched him do it.”

Dietrich’s shoulders suddenly rolled so far forward that he looked like a wading bird cowering in the shadows. In a shaky
voice, he said, “I’m sorry, Carl, I…I can’t believe that—”

“High Commissar,” Inspector Weigel said sharply. “Why have you been trying to steer this investigation as far from the slaughterhouse
and Falk as possible?”

Dietrich looked shocked and then indignant in his response to Carl Gottschalk. “I have not. And I certainly won’t have a rookie
investigator questioning my—”

“You
have
tried to slow or thwart this investigation from the beginning,” Mattie said firmly. “Inspector Weigel says that you considered
Burkhart and me enemies from the outset.”

“She was mistaken in my meaning,” he snapped. “Why would I have any interest in doing such a terrible, unproductive thing?”

“Because, Hauptkommissar,” Mattie said, “your father, Colonel Conrad Dietrich Frommer, was Stasi and, before
you
changed your name, you were Stasi too.”

“THAT’S AN OUT-AND-OUT lie!” Dietrich shot back. “You have no proof of that.”

Carl Gottschalk looked pained and pitying when he said, “Unfortunately, she does, High Commissar.” He placed a photocopied
document in front of Dietrich. “This is your application to become a trainee cadet at the GDR’s Ministry for State Security
as Hans Dietrich Frommer, son of Conrad Dietrich Frommer.”

Dietrich gazed in disbelief at the document. “This isn’t real. They—”

“That document is very real,” his supervisor stated flatly. “After Frau Engel and Inspector Weigel came to me with Ilona Frei,
I petitioned the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives to do a rapid search for us. She balked at first, but when I
told her it concerned an ongoing murder investigation, she agreed to help us.”

Carl Gottschalk’s face turned stony as he placed another paper in front of Dietrich. “This is a copy of your application to
Berlin Kripo, six months after you changed your name and thirteen months after the wall fell. You did not mention the name
change on your application. You did not disclose anything about the year you spent as a member of the East German secret police,
Hans. Nor did you disclose your father’s long involvement. You wrote in your application that your father was a carpenter,
a conveniently dead carpenter.”

Dietrich sighed and said nothing at first. Then he looked up at them all, a broken man. “I hid who I was because I wanted
to be a policeman, as my father had been, and my grandfather had been. I did not care for politics. I still do not. I have
only wanted to be one thing my entire life—a policeman.”

The high commissar explained that he had spent just eleven months as a recruit to the Stasi.

“I laid down my weapon after I was ordered to go to Gethsemane Church. I heard what they wanted me to do there, and I walked
away. I’d heard about people shredding paper as well. So I walked away three weeks before the wall fell and joined the protests.”

“Why lie, then?” Carl Gottschalk demanded.

“It was a strange time after the wall fell, Carl, remember?” Dietrich said. “I had no job. Little food. No place to live.
And there were many people from the East who wanted revenge on anyone associated with the Stasi, and they were right to want
it. I had done nothing wrong, but even so I could read the writing on the wall. Being a member and son of the Stasi would
only hurt me in the new Germany. So I lied.”

“What about the slaughterhouse?” Mattie asked. “Did you suspect it had been used as a torture chamber? Or did you know?”

Dietrich took a deep breath and said, “Suspected.”

The high commissar described a night when he was in his early teens. His father came home drunk. He got on the phone and Dietrich
overheard the colonel’s side of the conversation.

“He was ranting and raving about all sorts of things,” Dietrich recalled. “But then I heard him saying that he feared being
caught up in what he called, quote, ‘barbaric secrets’ associated with the auxiliary slaughterhouse in Ahrensfelde. He also
said that he would not go down for, quote, ‘that man.’”

“Who was he referring to?” Mattie asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ever ask him?” Inspector Weigel asked.

Dietrich cleared his throat. “I did, Weigel. Twice. Both times within the last five days. The first time he told me to stay
away from the slaughterhouse. The second time he had a stroke and died.”

“Who else knew about the slaughterhouse other than your father?” Mattie asked. “Do you know who he was talking to that night?”

“I don’t know for sure,” the high commissar replied. “But I suspect it was one of the men who helped bury my father yesterday.”