Private Berlin (24 page)

FASSBINDER CLEARED HIS throat and said, “He, your father, had heard rumors, just as I had heard rumors of the secret crematoriums we were running
where the bodies of the disappeared were being taken. Your father made a personal investigation. He found some truth, and
more rumors. But it was enough to shake him, and Conrad Frommer was largely an unshakeable man.”

“He offered you no concrete proof?” Mattie asked.

Fassbinder looked at her as if she were naïve and laughed. “Concrete? Frau Engel, there was nothing concrete inside the Ministry
for State Security. Everything was illusion, smoke and mirrors, gossip and accusations, outright lies and intricately manufactured
half-truths. No one knew that better than Conrad.”

“Why?” Dietrich asked. “What exactly did my father do in the Stasi?”

Fassbinder’s eyebrows rose. “He never told you?”

“No,” the high commissar replied.

That surprised the old man even more. “You honestly have no idea?”

“None.”

Fassbinder laughed again, this time in some bewilderment at the mystery that had been Dietrich’s father. Then he leaned forward
conspiratorially and in a voice that Mattie had to strain to hear, he said, “Your father was a good policeman, Hans, an excellent
detective like you. He was so good, however, that he was chosen to work behind the scenes on secret investigations for Mielke.
He was one of Mielke’s get-things-done men.”

“Mielke?” Dietrich cried. “You mean Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi?”

“I said your father was talented,” Fassbinder replied as if the high commissar were an imbecile. “Conrad worked for him directly
on projects vital to Mielke’s personal agenda.”

Although Mattie was shocked and fascinated by this revelation, she asked, “But what about the slaughterhouse? What about Falk?
Tell us what the high commissar’s father told you.”

The old man turned grim. “He said that he’d somehow discovered that the slaughterhouse in Ahrensfelde was being used as Mielke’s
personal torture chamber, the place people were taken when he absolutely wanted to know their secrets.”

“And Falk was the torturer?”

“And executioner, as I understand it now,” Fassbinder said.

Over the course of the next half hour, the old Stasi told them what he knew, the fact, the rumor, and the conjecture.

Dietrich’s father never mentioned Falk’s first name, or if he did Fassbinder did not remember it. Falk’s father ran the abattoir
for the state in the sixties and seventies. The boy grew up working in the slaughterhouse, and was said to be very close to
his mother.

When Falk was ten, however, his mother was arrested, charged with crimes against the state, and taken to Hohenschönhausen
Prison. She was a makeup artist with the German State Opera who had become involved in the underground railroad helping East
Germans escape into the West, a crime considered high treason at the time.

The younger Falk was said to be extremely smart; he read all the time and excelled in school. But soon after his mother’s
imprisonment, for whatever reason, he discovered that he enjoyed killing the animals coming in to slaughter.

Mattie squinted one eye, saying, “And what, Mielke recognized that part of him and encouraged it?”

“You’re asking me to explain a paranoid mad genius, Frau Engel. I can’t claim to know Erich Mielke’s mind or how he came to
know of Falk. But however it happened, the high commissar’s father told me that the boy was enlisted into Mielke’s private
army shortly after the slaughterhouse was closed as an abattoir in the late 1970s.”

DIETRICH WATCHED THE old Stasi take a deep draw off his vodka and asked, “How long was it used as a torture chamber?”

“I don’t know that either,” Fassbinder replied. “But certainly until your father got wind of it, sometime in January or February
of 1980. He was frightened to confront Mielke. That was what that drunken call you overheard was about.”

In his mind, the high commissar could see himself outside his father’s bedroom, listening to him rant. It was like yesterday.
“Why was he so upset?”

“Your father, though a great patriot and party loyalist, refused on principle to engage in character assassination, torture,
or murder. He dealt with facts. He confronted Mielke with facts, and demanded the operation be shut down. It was a very brave
thing to do, Hans. It could have gotten your father sent to Hohenschönhausen, or to the slaughterhouse himself.”

Dietrich was stunned. For so many years, he’d thought of his father in a single, ruthless way—cruel and unprincipled, except
for his devotion to the state. And now it turned out that he may have been the one who rescued the motherless children of
Waisenhaus 44? Was the colonel there that night when they were all brought to the orphanage?

Before the high commissar put voice to these thoughts, Mattie asked Fassbinder, “Why would Mielke back down like that?”

Fassbinder shrugged. “I don’t know, though I suspect that Conrad must have had something on Mielke aside from the slaughterhouse,
something that could not be simply found or erased. In any case, he closed the torture chamber and had all paper evidence
of it destroyed, sometime in the spring of 1980, I’d presume.”

“And Falk?” Dietrich asked.

Fassbinder’s laugh was curt and cruel. “They threw him in Hohenschönhausen Prison for a few months. And then they retrained
him.”

“Retrained him?” Mattie said. “As what? He was a sadistic psychopath.”

The old Stasi’s lips puckered before he asked, “Other than being an executioner, what’s the best profession for a man who
genuinely enjoys killing?”

“Assassin?” Dietrich said.

Fassbinder reappraised him. “You are as quick as your father, Hans. The rumor was that Mielke had Falk trained to be a more
perfect killer, one run by the state, or rather the head of the ministry.”

That took Dietrich aback. “He murdered people for Mielke? I didn’t think assassination was part of the Stasi playbook.”

“I can’t say that he actually carried out killings for Mielke, only that he was trained to do so,” Fassbinder replied.

“And then?” Mattie pressed.

Fassbinder shrugged again. “We were an institution fueled by suspicions invented by despots. Who could keep track of everything
that happened and everyone who was involved in the last few years? Suffice it to say that one day, long before the wall fell,
your father discovered that all records concerning Falk had disappeared. Until you walked into this bar tonight, I had not
heard one word of Falk since then. He vanished as many people did when the wall fell. A myth. End of story.”

Fassbinder’s information gelled with much of what Ilona Frei and Kiefer Braun had testified to. But it also raised as many
questions as it answered. Dietrich was about to launch into a litany of them when he noticed a reflection in the window behind
the old Stasi.

Both Dietrich and Mattie twisted in their chairs to find Tom Burkhart looking at them with a somber expression. “There are
no records of Falk in the special Stasi archives,” he said. “I spent most of the day there.”

“We just found that out ourselves,” Mattie replied.

Burkhart broke into a victorious grin. “But there
were
records in a church not far from the slaughterhouse. I found Falk’s baptismal certificate there. I know his first and middle
names, and I believe I know exactly where we can find him.”

“Where?” Dietrich and Mattie demanded almost in unison.

“At his art gallery in Charlottenburg.”

LESS THAN AN hour later, the intense flame of an acetylene torch cut through the iron security gate at the I. M. Ehrlichmann Gallery of
Fine Art. Police barricades had gone up around the entire block.

Special weapons and tactical Kripo officers surrounded all exits, including the roof, which was being monitored by a helicopter
flying in high winds.

Mattie was there with Burkhart and Dietrich, all suited up in bulletproof armor. To one side, Ilona Frei watched, wrapped
in a blanket and trembling in the arms of the former Kiefer Braun.

“Three-story building; he owns the whole thing,” Dr. Gabriel told them. “He claims his residency on the second and third floors
above the gallery.”

The torch died. Burkhart said, “We are go.”

The SWAT team assaulted the building from front and rear, blowing open the doors with rams and following with stun grenades.

They should have saved the explosives and the doors.

Matthias Isaac Falk, aka “I. M. Ehrlichmann,” aka “Isaac Matthias Ehrlichmann,” was gone.

The name switch seemed obvious when you saw it on paper, but Mattie decided she had to admire Burkhart’s clever instinct in
making the connection so quickly once he’d seen the baptismal certificate.

When they were cleared to go inside, Mattie held a kerchief to her mouth because the air was still acrid from the stun grenades.
Falk’s gallery was a warren of a shop, crammed wall to wall and floor to ceiling with primitive art, including a huge collection
on the walls surrounding his office area that featured masks from every corner of the world.

On the second floor, High Commissar Dietrich discovered a makeup kit. In the basement garage, he found eight vehicles, including
a blue panel van and an impeccably maintained Trabant 601.

Mattie made the biggest discovery. When she tried to open a locked upright filing cabinet behind the gallery desk, she noticed
that it rocked oddly.

She pushed and twisted the cabinet to the left and nothing happened. It felt bolted into the ground and to the wall. But when
she twisted it to the right, it disengaged and swiveled out along with a piece of the wall.

She pulled out a light, drew her pistol, and eased inside, finding herself in a narrow, high-ceilinged passage that ran the
length of the outer room. When she’d determined the space was clear of threat, she groped the wall by the door, felt a switch,
and turned it on, illuminating a secret gallery behind the gallery.

Mattie stood there, looking all around, confused at first as to what she was seeing, and what it all meant. The walls of the
secret gallery were decorated with a loose collage of trinkets, jewelry, and odd pieces of clothes; and toys, newspaper clippings,
and purses and wallets; and older and more recent snapshots of people, men and women and children.

Mostly children.

And suddenly, the collage made sense and the shock that followed was a blow to her stomach that rocked her mind.

“Mattie?” Burkhart called from outside. “You in there?”

“Yes,” she managed.

Burkhart ducked inside and looked around. “What is this?”

“I think it’s a trophy room.”

HIGH COMMISSAR DIETRICH wanted the secret gallery sealed the moment he saw it, which Mattie understood completely. It was a forensics investigator’s
mother lode of information and evidence.

“Let them see it before you do,” Mattie suggested.

“Who?” Dietrich asked.

“Frei and Krainer,” Mattie said. “See if they recognize anything. I think that gallery is a trophy room, but unless someone
can identify something in there, it’s just somebody’s weird obsession.”

She thought he was going to argue, but then he nodded and said, “I suppose it can’t hurt.”

Mattie went outside. There were television trucks at either end of the block and klieg lights flaring. She found Ilona Frei
still standing with Krainer. She told them what they’d found and asked if they’d be willing to go inside. Krainer said he
did not think he could. The tidal wave of emotions in the past several hours was too much to deal with as it was, though he
did say he’d be willing to look at a later time.

But Ilona Frei said, “I’ll go.”

“You sure?” Krainer asked.

She nodded, tucked her chin, and walked with Mattie into the main gallery. Her eyes perked up and she looked all around her
at the jumble of art as they walked toward the doorway into the secret gallery.

But then Ilona Frei stopped suddenly and stared up at the mask collection, her eyes roving all over them and fear building
in her carriage.

“What is it?” Mattie asked.

“They’re almost all of monsters, aren’t they?”

Mattie had not noticed before. But it was true. Falk’s monsters leered down as Mattie led Ilona inside the secret gallery.

Burkhart, Weigel, and Dietrich watched Ilona as her attention rolled slowly and carefully over the collage on the wall, her
mouth open as if in a trance, her fingers passing above the items.

“Don’t touch,” Mattie said, following her closely.

“No,” Ilona said. “These are haunted things, aren’t they?”

“I suppose they are.”

Ten feet into the gallery, looking at the right wall, Ilona made a little gasp and halted. “No.” Tears boiled from her eyes
as she moaned, “No.”

THE OLD, CURLING snapshot was thumbtacked to the wall. In it two girls in bathing suits were leaning up against the legs of a woman in a bathing
suit. Beside it, hanging on a chain from a nail, was an open tarnished silver locket with a tiny photograph inside of a beautiful
young woman.

“Is that you and Ilse at the beach?” Mattie asked her.

Ilona nodded through her tears. “And that’s my locket and my mother. She gave the locket and the picture of her to me when
I turned eight. It was her mother’s locket. Falk took it from me the night we were brought to the slaughterhouse.”

She wiped away her tears and reached for the locket with joy and disbelief, saying, “I haven’t seen a picture of her in thirty
years.”

Mattie caught her hand. “You can’t touch, Ilona. Not yet. But you’ll have the locket, I promise you.”

Ilona looked at it longingly and then suddenly appeared exhausted. “I need to go home, Mattie,” she said in a dull, flat voice.
“I need to sleep. And we need to be at the clinic early in the morning.”

Mattie wanted to look further, to see if there was any memento of Chris in the collage, but she checked her watch. It was
nearly 10 p.m. Niklas was already in bed. Aunt C probably was getting ready.

“Take her home,” Dietrich said. “There’s nothing more you can do here.”

“I’ll come with you,” Burkhart said.

Mattie said, “I don’t—”

“You do,” he said. “Falk is still out there.”

Mattie gave in because now she was suddenly too tired to argue. She’d done her job. They’d all done their job. They knew who
Falk was. They’d exposed his role in the death of Chris and dozens if not scores of others. Beyond this, the case was a manhunt
and nothing more.

They went out the back of Falk’s building with Dietrich, who was making sure that Kripo provided Krainer with protection overnight.
Krainer told Ilona Frei he would contact her soon.

Leaving by the rear allowed Mattie, Burkhart, and Ilona Frei to avoid the media circus at either end of the closed block and
to arrive quickly at Mattie’s car.

Mattie heard thunder rumbling in the distance as she climbed in the passenger seat. She thought to call home but then was
overwhelmed by fatigue. She drowsed in the front seat as Burkhart navigated them north toward Ernst-Reuter-Platz and Strasse
des 17 Juni, the street that celebrates Berlin’s reunification.

They were heading east when Mattie’s cell phone rang in her pocket.

She tugged it out and was surprised to see that Niklas was calling.

“What are you doing up?” she asked by way of greeting. “And why have you and Aunt C not been answering your phones?”

She heard a clicking on the line and then a smooth voice purred, “Dear Frau Engel, I’m afraid Aunt C’s rather tied up at the
moment. And Niklas has been with me since school let out, such a pleasant young man. We’ve taken a drive in the country. Why
don’t you and Ilona Frei come out and join us?”