Private Berlin (23 page)

INSIDE A FOURTH-FLOOR room at the Hotel de Rome, Jack Morgan paced, checked his watch, and glanced back and forth at the television and Daniel
Brecht’s iPad.

The television sportscaster was giving a spirited report on the manner in which Cassiano, in a rare afternoon match, had completely
dissected the Düsseldorf defense, scoring four goals, two of them singlehandedly.

Brecht’s screen, meanwhile, showed the exterior hallway, and the interior of the adjacent hotel room where Perfecta stood
in a sheer white nightgown, looking in the mirror and tending to her makeup.

“I still can’t understand why she went for Pavel’s scam,” Georg Johansson said. “I mean look at her. She could have anything
she wanted.”

Morgan shrugged. “I assume there’s more to this than she’s telling us. There always is. But twenty million euros is a solid
motive for crime, no matter how beautiful you are.”

“Here we go,” Brecht said, gesturing at the hallway feed, which showed an irate Maxim Pavel storming past the camera.

They heard him pounding on the door offscreen and through the other feed inside Perfecta’s hotel room.

The Brazilian model did not move, but then Brecht said, “Answer the door. Get him to talk.”

Perfecta had a radio bud in her ear. “I can’t,” she whispered.

“You can and will if you want any chance at a judge giving you leniency.”

Perfecta nodded but went hesitantly to the door and opened it, saying, “Maxim! You’re early! I only just—”

The Russian nightclub owner smacked her in the face so hard she stumbled backward and crashed to the hotel room floor. “You
whore!” he seethed, kicking the door shut behind him. “You stupid Brazilian whore!”

“What, Maxim?” Perfecta cried, cowering from him. “What did I do?”

“Do?” he shouted. “Your husband played brilliantly this afternoon, and I lost millions on the spread! Millions!”

With that Pavel threw himself on her, got his hands around her neck, and began to choke her.

“Now!” Morgan said.

Agent Johansson burst through the door into the next room, gun drawn, yelling, “BKA! German Federal Police!”

He grabbed the nightclub owner by the collar and swung him up and around and slammed him against the wall. “You’re under arrest.”

“For what?” Pavel managed to demand.

“Assault, to start,” Johansson said, snapping the handcuffs on. “Fraud. Conspiracy. Attempted murder. There will be other
charges, I’m sure.”

“Like four counts of premeditated murder,” Morgan said as Johansson spun Pavel around and Brecht helped Perfecta up from the
floor.

Pavel looked at her and Morgan with contempt. “I’ve never killed anyone.”

“That right?” Brecht said. “Where have you been the last few days? Take a trip to Frankfurt? Spend some time with Greta Amsel,
Herr Falk?”

“Falk?” the nightclub owner said. “Frankfurt? I don’t know any Greta.”

“Then where have you been since we saw you last?” Morgan demanded.

Pavel hesitated and then shrugged, saying, “I have an ironclad alibi. I was with my lover, my real lover. His name is Alex.
He lives in Vienna.”

“Alex?” Perfecta asked, incredulous. “You said you were straight.”

The nightclub owner laughed at her. “And you’re dumber than I thought. I own a drag-queen club for God’s sake.”

FORTY MINUTES LATER, as the sun began to set, Katharina Doruk wandered off Oranienburger Strasse into Tacheles. She walked through the art collective’s
archway, which led to the large outdoor art area behind the building. The dusk throbbed with a blend of hip-hop and techno
and glowed like a movie set.

Spotlights were trained on the opening of Rudy Krüger’s
Rude, Rot, Riot
exhibition, which had attracted a crowd of anarchists, punks, street people, artists, musicians, poets, and other assorted
Berliners who were drinking heavily from an open bar.

Katharina Doruk spotted the man of the hour, dressed entirely in black, standing with his arm around his “student” Tanya.
He was holding a beer bottle and shaking hands with an admirer who had a fluorescent green mohawk and tiny skulls on chains
hanging from his pierced nose.

Rudy Krüger spotted Doruk and grimaced when she came up to him after the mohawk man moved on. “Why are you here?” he asked
caustically. “I’m not talking to you or anyone. You and Kripo let Hermann go, and now he’s shutting me out of planning for
her funeral!”

“I work for Private—letting your stepfather go wasn’t my call, and I can’t control his actions either,” Doruk said. “I came
to support your opening. I figured you could use it. But I see you’ve got more than enough, and I’m not wanted here, so I’ll
go.”

Tanya frowned and squeezed him around the waist. “Rude, be nice. She’s just trying to help.” Doruk noticed then that Tanya
was wearing a black leather jacket that had to have cost at least €1,500. It made Doruk more confident.

“Okay, all right, I’m an asshole sometimes,” Rudy Krüger said. “I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Doruk said. “Quite the bash.”

He shrugged. “One thing I learned from Hermann, you want to be known, you better yell a lot. Want a beer?”

“Maybe later,” Doruk said. “Did you know your stepfather maintains that your mother
was
divorcing him?”

“He’s lying,” Rudy Krüger said immediately, and then hesitated. “I don’t know why, but he’s lying. That was the irony. She
was staying with him, selling out for the money.”

Katharina Doruk shook her head. “According to him, your mother had laid down the line. Despite the fact that he’d pledged
to turn his pursuits to philanthropy, she’d decided to leave with her dignity intact. That’s the irony. If she’d done it,
you were the one who would have been screwed, Rudy.”

RUDY KRÜGER’S LIPS thinned. “What the fuck you talking about?”

“Your mother’s prenuptial agreement,” Doruk said. “Before he left Kripo headquarters I asked Hermann if you were mentioned
in the agreement. Know what he told me?”

The billionaire’s stepson shrugged.

“He said the deal worked like this,” Doruk said. “If your mother stayed married to Hermann until his death, she would inherit
his entire fortune, which meant
you
would eventually inherit a fortune.”

“I don’t care about money,” he said flatly. “And so what?”

“It also stated that if your mother divorced Hermann, she would get only ten million.”

“
I
told you that,” Rudy Krüger replied.

“You did,” Doruk said. “But what’s interesting is that the third provision in the agreement states that if Agnes died first
in marriage, her husband would provide you, Rudy, with a full tenth share of his fortune, which as of the close of trading
today was worth close to four hundred million euros.”

He stared at her. “If you say so. I told you I don’t care about money. I’ll probably give it to this place. Make sure it survives.”

“Maybe some of it,” Doruk replied. “But the rest, I think, you’ll use for your own gain and leisure.”

He laughed bitterly at her. “Fuck you. Who are you? You don’t know me. What are you trying to say, that I killed my mother?
I wasn’t anywhere near my mother when she was shot. I was here at a rally for Tacheles.”

“I know,” Katharina Doruk said. “We checked.”

“There you go, then,” he shot back. “So why don’t you take your vicious innuendo and get the hell out of here.”

Katharina ignored him, looking instead at his girlfriend and saying, “But you know, Tanya, very few people seem to remember
you being at the rally.”

“Me? I was there,” she said indignantly. “Lots of people saw me.”

“Name one,” Doruk said.

“Rude,” she said.

“Convenient.”

“There were others,” she protested.

Doruk shook her head. “No. You left the rally shortly after it began and went to Wilmersdorf. You knew Agnes was going out
to lunch because Rudy told you she was going to lunch with her friend Ingrid Dahl at Restaurant Quarré. You knew the route
she’d likely take leaving. You waited and you shot her.”

“You have no proof of that,” Tanya said, her voice breaking toward a whine.

“We will,” Doruk said. “Or rather Kripo will. They’re searching Rudy’s studio right now.”

“What?” Rudy Krüger yelled, pulling away from his girlfriend.

For a moment, Tanya looked too stunned to move. But then she tried to take off. Doruk was too quick. She grabbed Tanya and
shoved her arm up behind her back.

“I had no idea!” Rudy Krüger was shouting at Doruk. “If she did this, she did it on her own. Stupid, crazy bitch!”

At that Tanya went berserk and started spitting words at him. “What? This was your idea! You said no one would ever suspect
me! This was your idea! You said we could do good with that money. We could save Tacheles, and other places, and live a righteous
life.”

“That’s not true,” he said, and turned as if to get away from her.

But Inspector Weigel stood in his way.

MATTIE AND HIGH Commissar Dietrich exited the S-Bahn at Alexanderplatz. They crossed the plaza where the protests had peaked before the fall
of the wall.

Dietrich was on his cell phone. Mattie snapped hers shut in frustration; since leaving central Kripo headquarters, she’d been
trying unsuccessfully to reach her aunt Cäcilia, Niklas, and Tom Burkhart. She’d not heard from any of them the entire day.

Mattie glanced at the high commissar, who was listening closely. She had thought his career was finished when he admitted
to lying his way into Berlin Kripo, but his boss, Carl Gottschalk, had surprised her, telling Dietrich he would face a severe
disciplinary hearing and probably suspension, but in the meantime he was to use his father’s contacts to find Falk.

Dietrich hung up and smiled at her in chagrin. “Your associate, Frau Doruk, was right. Weigel just placed Rudy Krüger and
his girlfriend under arrest for Agnes’s murder.”

Mattie shook her head. “The anarchist did it for the money.”

They turned onto Karl-Marx-Allee just as night fully seized Berlin. The temperature had been climbing all afternoon, but a
wind was picking up. As they passed the Café Moskau, Mattie smelled ozone.

A storm was coming. Fast.

“There he is,” Dietrich said, slowing and gesturing toward a glass-walled and steel-framed box of a building that exuded a
soft, silvery glow. “Other side of the bar, his back to the wall.”

Mattie peered into the Bar Babette, one of the hippest watering holes in Berlin, with a retro 1960s décor and an artsy clientele.
The place was sparsely populated at this early hour of the evening. Even so, the stout old man in the gray suit and dark topcoat
looked jarringly out of place.

“Let me do the talking,” Dietrich said and went to the front door.

Mattie followed him into the bar and looked over his shoulder at the man sitting in the suit and topcoat before a tumbler
of vodka.

His face was rectangular, sloughing, and pale. Pouches of wrinkled skin hung below his watery eyes, which were huge, dull
blue, and watchful. He studied Dietrich and Mattie in turn.

“Who is this woman, Hans?” the old man asked.

“Her name is Mattie Engel, Willy,” Dietrich said. “She used to be a valued member of Kripo, but we lost her talents to Private
Berlin a few years ago. She’s been working on the same case.”

The man nodded and held out his hand. “You can think of me as Willy Fassbinder. It’s not my real name, but no matter. Hans
tells me you wish to talk about life in the East before the wall fell. Are you new to Berlin?”

“I grew up in West Berlin,” she said. “But to be more exact, we—”

But Fassbinder spoke right over her. “Did you know that this was the cultural center, the nucleus of the arts and society
in the GDR?” He pointed out the window. “The Kino International across the street was where all the great films premiered.
The Café Moskau was the most famous club in the East. Just next door here was the Mokka-Milch-Eisbar, the best place for children
to eat ice cream in all of East Germany. They had these little slivers of chocolate they’d put on sundaes that they called
Pittiplatsch.
My daughter loved them. Do remember the Eisbar, Hans? They wrote a song about it. A big hit.”

Dietrich replied, “I remember the song, but I never came here, Willy.”

“No?” Fassbinder said, seeming surprised. He smiled at Mattie. “And this place was a beauty salon: Babette’s Cosmetique. My
late wife would come here every other Tuesday to have her hair and nails done in the latest styles from Moscow and Leningrad.”
His face was melancholy with nostalgia. “It’s why I suggested this place to meet when Hans said you wanted to speak of the
past. I often come here to think of those days.”

A WAITRESS CAME to take their orders, espressos for Mattie and Dietrich and two more fingers of vodka on the rocks for Fassbinder.

As soon as she walked away, Dietrich said, “Actually, Willy, we wanted to talk to you about things and events that may have
occurred within the Ministry for State Security, things and events that my father may have described to you in a drunken late-night
telephone conversation many, many years ago.”

Fassbinder’s nostrils flared instantly, and Mattie sensed a wall go up around him. She doubted they would get cooperation
from the old man.

“Most Berliners have moved on, Hans,” Fassbinder said crisply after several moments of silence. “They no longer wish to talk
of the ministry.”

“Please, Willy. I tried to talk of these things with my father right before he collapsed and died. His secrets killed him.
I saw it with my own eyes.”

Fassbinder’s attitude changed several degrees, as though he were wondering about his own impending fate. Finally, he asked,
“What things?”

Mattie said, “The slaughterhouse in Ahrensfelde and a man named Falk. We believe he worked there for the Stasi.”

The waitress returned with their drinks. While she set them out, Mattie watched as the old man maintained a blank expression,
zero reaction.

“
Did
Falk work for the Stasi?” Dietrich asked when the waitress left.

Fassbinder took a long sip of his vodka, coughed, and said carefully, “No. Not in any official capacity, and by that I mean
that I believe you will never find a trace of him in the special Stasi archives, nor in the logs of Hohenschönhausen Prison,
or anywhere else, I imagine. And, as I understand it, that slaughterhouse was destroyed just a few days ago. So there isn’t
anything I can say that would not be conjecture and hearsay on my part.”

Mattie felt herself growing angry. “Well, Willy, or whoever you really are, there’s no hearsay or conjecture in the fact that
I was in the subbasement of that slaughterhouse before it blew. I saw where the corpses of the tortured mothers were fed to
rats while their children watched. I saw the bones myself.”

That turned Fassbinder aghast and his skin ashen. “I…I had no idea that these things were occurring there, absolutely no idea.
I will go to my grave telling you that.”

“But my father knew, didn’t he?” Dietrich demanded. “He found out about the slaughterhouse—he got very drunk one night, and
he told you he could not stand being a part of these heinous crimes, and that he would not go down with whoever ordered the
tortures and killings. Didn’t he?”

Fassbinder’s head tilted back as if pulled by some heavy weight before he sighed and nodded ever so slightly.