Private Berlin Read online

  His lips curled as if he’d tasted something sour. “Those are the rumors.”

  “From?”

  “The rumor mill,” he said.

  “Any particulars?” Mattie demanded.

  “Just look at his projects,” Rudy said. “It’s there if you really want to dig. Check Africa.”

  “We plan to,” Katharina said. “Is that what Chris Schneider called you about last Monday?”

  Mattie frowned. She knew nothing about any call to Rudy. The billionaire’s son looked surprised as well. “How did you…?”

  “We ran Schneider’s phone records,” Katharina said. “Yours came up.”

  “Why’d you look?”

  “He’s dead,” Mattie said. “Murdered.”

  Rudy appeared shocked but then said, “Yes, Schneider called me. He was about to meet with my stepfather and wanted to know if Hermann really is the ruthless corporate bastard he’s made out to be in the press.”

  “What did you say?” Katharina asked.

  Rudy’s smile resembled a hyena’s. “I said that my stepfather in person is much, much worse, someone who’d cut his mother’s throat if he thought it would fetch him a euro.”

  CHAPTER 40

  “WE GET IT—you don’t like your stepfather,” Katharina said. “Why?”

  Rudy Krüger picked up one of his paintbrushes from the palette and considered one of his masterpieces before responding. “Because Hermann is a pure corporate capitalist pig, emphasis on pig.”

  “Example?” Katharina pressed.

  He tossed the paintbrush back on the palette. “How about the way he treats my mother? Twenty years ago he made her sign a prenuptial agreement that limits what she’d get in a divorce. It’s what keeps her tied to him. She’ll never give up the money no matter what he does. Plus, she honestly believes he loves her deep down.”

  He snorted and shook his head.

  “How much does she get in a divorce?” Mattie asked.

  “Ten million euros.”

  “Not terrible,” Katharina observed.

  “If your husband is worth three and a half billion, and you were married to him when he made most of it?”

  Mattie said, “I see your point, but what can she do?”

  “What can she do?” Rudy Krüger laughed caustically. “She can show some backbone and character and leave him.”

  “That’s your advice?”

  “It’s either that or she learns to live with three mistresses and a house full of whores.”

  “What do you know about Olle Larsson?” Katharina asked.

  The billionaire’s son’s head pulled back like a turtle’s toward its shell. “Who?”

  “Swedish financier,” Katharina said. “He launched a hostile take-over bid of your stepfather’s company an hour ago.”

  Rudy’s breath came partly out in a rush. “Never heard of him.”

  “Rude?” a woman’s voice called.

  She was tiny, no more than one hundred pounds, with a pretty face and a haircut that made her look waifish. She wore a kaffiyeh scarf around her neck.

  “This is Tanya,” Rudy said. “My…uh, student.”

  “Right,” Katharina said.

  “We’re due at the rally, Rude,” Tanya said.

  Unzipping the painter’s coverall, revealing jeans and a dark sweater, Rudy told Mattie and Katharina, “If you’re here to ask me if my stepfather had something to do with Schneider’s death, I honestly don’t know.

  “But if you’re here to ask whether I think he’s capable of it, my answer is that Hermann Krüger is capable of anything.”

  CHAPTER 41

  IT’S NINE ON the dot when I park the Audi A5 well down the street from the German Federal Archives in West Berlin.

  Call it the German in me, call it how I was raised as a child, but I do so like to be punctual for an opening.

  I check myself in the mirror. The makeup, gray hair color, and clothes I wear make me look elderly. I put on a Bavarian alpine hat that is too large for me, so the brim sits just above my eyebrows. I climb from the car with a satchel briefcase, and a cane.

  As I approach the gatehouse to the archives I make myself shake every so often, as if I’ve had some kind of stroke and it’s left me palsied.

  At the gate, I present an expertly forged identification card from Heidelberg University and portray myself as absentminded history professor emeritus Karl Groening, who has failed to bring his driver’s license after coming all the way to Berlin by train to do research into nineteenth-century agricultural policy.

  The guards give me a blue researcher’s badge, and let me in.

  The grounds of the archives look like a decaying college campus with huge spreading chestnuts and long empty lawns. I find the building I need on the far side of the complex.

  When I enter the public reading room, like many of the other researchers, I don cotton gloves. Then I go to the archivist’s desk and request all documentation associated with East German orphanages in and around Berlin.

  “It may take an hour or so for the files to come up,” the clerk says.

  “This is okay, my dear,” I say. “I booked the late train to Heidelberg.”

  CHAPTER 42

  JACK MORGAN WAS sitting at the break table nursing a coffee and looking very hungover when Katharina and Mattie arrived at Private Berlin.

  “You didn’t sleep here, did you, Jack?” Mattie asked, pouring herself a cup.

  “No. I kept the room at the Hotel de Rome,” he said. “How’s your son taking all this?”

  “As well as could be expected, thank you.”

  Morgan nodded. “I liked Chris. He was a good person, and when good people die, it reminds you of everybody else you’ve lost.”

  “I saw my mother in my dreams last night,” Mattie said. “She was right there with Chris.”

  “Your dad, he lives in the US, a cop, right?”

  “Chicago,” she replied.

  Katharina asked, “Who have you lost, Jack?”

  The owner of Private thought about that. “Comrades in arms, dear friends, and an old and dear lover.”

  “How did she die?” Mattie asked.

  “Justine’s alive. What’s dead is what we had between us.”

  “How long ago did that end?”

  “A few years. Long enough I should have moved on.”

  “You’re still not over her?”

  “My relationship with Justine is like waves on a beach, coming and going, but always coming back. Especially because she works at Private in LA.”

  “You have a complicated life, Jack,” Katharina said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No other love interests?” Mattie asked.

  He laughed with little enthusiasm. “I’m always looking for love. I’m just not too good at creating it.”

  “And I’m not good at holding on to it.”

  “Seems to me like it was taken from you by forces beyond your control,” Katharina said. “I’m going after Hermann Krüger.”

  Mattie nodded, her eyes watering. But she refused to cry again, and she got up from the table. “I’m going to find Gabriel. It’s time I figured out Chris’s terrible childhood secret once and for all.”

  CHAPTER 43

  WHEN MATTIE FOUND Dr. Gabriel in his lab on the second floor of Private Berlin, he was wearing black jeans, a red bandana, and a Jimi Hendrix “Live at the Monterey Pop Festival” sweatshirt that featured a burning red guitar.

  She told him what she was after and he graciously put down what he’d been doing to help her. They used a giant translucent screen that allowed them to call up documents, pictures, and video and study them all at once, as if they were looking at them on a corkboard.

  They mined Private’s records first and found Chris’s personnel file, including a digital scan of his birth certificate, which said that Christoph Rolf Schneider was born in Dresden in 1975 to Alfred and Maria Schneider.

  They tried to match the birth certificate and fou
nd no Christoph Rolf Schneider registered in the Dresden files. They searched for Alfred and Maria Schneider in the marriage records and again came up empty-handed.

  They expanded the search to include all of what had been East Germany, and found several men named Christoph Schneider, but none were remotely Chris’s age. And nowhere did they find a record of a marriage between an Alfred Schneider and a woman with the first name Maria.

  They dug deeper, trying school databases. Again nothing.

  “I’m beginning to think nothing about Chris was real,” Dr. Gabriel said.

  “I know,” Mattie said, now seriously confused. “But he was real. Let’s go back. Do we have his army records in his personnel file?”

  “I’m sure,” Gabriel said. He searched a minute and then called them up.

  The picture of Chris made her smile. He looked so young. The base information was all in line with what he’d listed on his Private application after leaving the German military police: Same parental names, same bogus birth certificate from Dresden, and the same bogus address.

  Mattie thought they had hit an impenetrable wall until she noticed something on the sheet in the army file that listed Chris’s educational history.

  Listed under his place of primary and secondary education was “Waisenhaus 44,” an orphanage out in the countryside south of Berlin and east of the city of Halle.

  “Ernst, where would they keep records of GDR-era orphanages?”

  Dr. Gabriel thought about that. “I don’t know, the Federal Archives?”

  CHAPTER 44

  AT TEN O’CLOCK exactly, I hear: “Professor Groening?”

  German precision, my friends!

  Is there anything more reassuring?

  I smile and shuffle from my seat in the back left corner of the reading room, mindful of the cameras mounted to the ceiling.

  At the desk, I find sixteen boxes of files and am told that there are more waiting for me in the microfilm room down the hall.

  The kind clerk lady helps me roll the cart back to my spot.

  I start with the paper archive first, scanning rapidly. In the fourth box I find the records of Waisenhaus 44, an orphanage outside of Halle, about an hour south of Berlin. There are hundreds of names and they’re not listed alphabetically. They seem all jumbled and out of order.

  But then I study several closely and discover that they’ve been filed by date of admission.

  That brings a smile to my lips.

  In takes less than ten minutes to find the documents of six children, including snapshots taken on the day they were brought to Waisenhaus 44.

  For a moment, I linger on a picture of Christoph as a boy.

  Scrawny. Dark, sunken eyes showing fear and hatred.

  He’s exactly as I remember him as a boy.

  But I can’t afford to relive the good old days. I’ve got business to attend to.

  I count the pages in the six files. Fifty-six.

  I leave the files on the table, pick up my briefcase, and go to the toilet. From a secret side pocket in the interior of the briefcase, I retrieve a sheaf of white antique-finish paper covered in typed gibberish. I count out fifty-six pieces and slip them into several gray, well-worn legal-size files.

  I set them in the briefcase, and shut it. I return to the archive reading room and my spot, noting the position of other researchers. I set the satchel down, open wide to my right on the floor next to my chair.

  Then I wait. Five minutes pass.

  At the stroke of eleven, clerks wheel in fresh documents.

  Researchers who’ve been waiting charge toward the counter. All eyes rise and follow the rush of activity.

  In a series of fluid motions, I slip the six files off my desk into my briefcase, and return the phony files to the tabletop, immediately reaching past them to the box that held the real documents.

  They’re packed in less than a minute.

  I put those boxes on the cart, get up, and take my briefcase to the men’s room, where I slide the files into the interior side pocket of the valise.

  Then I go down the hall to the microfilm section, pick up the boxes I ordered, and retreat to the rear of the room behind a machine that faces the counter. I spin rapidly through the microfilm reels until I find more documents on the children, laid out one after another on almost twenty feet of film.

  I check. The clerks are busy.

  I reach into my pocket and pull out a razor-sharp folding knife. With no hesitation I cut the microfilm. I take the free end and wind it on my fingers until I get to the other end of the documentation and make a second cut. Then I put a rubber band around the microfilm and stick the tiny roll inside my jacket pocket.

  When I withdraw my hand, I’m holding my trusty tube of superglue.

  My friends, you can do so much with that stuff, can’t you?

  I scan the room for activity, and then run a bead of the glue on one end of the cut reel and press it to the other with a quarter-inch overlap.

  I hold it one minute, then take up the slack on the film reel and gingerly rewind. It holds. I set the reel back in the box and put the box neatly in the middle of the other microfilm boxes I have stacked beside it.

  I get up, take my briefcase, and head toward the door.

  “Are you returning today, professor?” the clerk asks.

  “Of course,” I reply. “A quick supper, and then back.”

  I can’t help it. I make that clicking noise in my throat, and smile.

  I make another clicking noise as I go out the door to the archives, flashing on that picture of Christoph as a boy.

  You didn’t have a chance, I think. And none of the others do either.

  CHAPTER 45

  MATTIE WALKED TO the front gate of the German Federal Archives. Inside the gatehouse, the guards were checking the briefcase of an elderly man in a long raincoat and a Bavarian hat whose hands shook as if he had a neurological disorder, like Parkinson’s disease, but not.

  Mattie knew what Parkinson’s looked like. Her mother had died of it. This rhythm of tic and tremor was different, however, and for some reason it made her feel odd. Still, Mattie could not help pitying the old man as he took back his briefcase and returned his researcher pass.

  Mattie never got a good look at his face, but for reasons she could not explain, she watched him shuffle down the sidewalk before showing the guards her badge and ID and turning over her weapon.

  She walked across the campus and found the archival reading room, where she asked one of the clerks how best to track down the files of an East German orphanage called Waisenhaus 44.

  The clerk frowned, and then went over to another archivist and had an intense conversation.

  She returned and said, “Those files are out with a researcher already.”

  That surprised Mattie and she instantly scanned the room. “Which one?”

  Flustered, the clerk said, “It’s not our policy to…”

  Mattie leaned over the counter, flashing her Private badge.

  “This is a murder investigation,” she said softly. “Which one?”

  The archivist’s brow knitted and she pointed over at a desk in the far left corner. “He was sitting over there, but then he went down to the microfilm room.”

  “What does he look like?” Mattie demanded.

  “An older man. A professor at Heidelberg, I think. He’s got Parkinson’s. You can’t miss him.”

  “I just did,” Mattie groaned. “Did you touch those boxes after he left?”

  “He wore cotton gloves, if that’s what you’re thinking,” the clerk said. “You don’t think he killed someone, do you? He couldn’t. He’s got Parkinson’s. He told me so himself. I don’t think that old man could hurt a fly.”

  CHAPTER 46

  TRYING NOT TO hyperventilate, I drive until I am well east of the archives before I tear off the wig.

  My friends, I recognized the woman at the archives gate. She was the same woman I saw with the big bald guy outside the slau
ghterhouse. There are dozens of pictures of her on Christoph’s hard drive.

  Her name is Mattie Engel. She and Christoph had been lovers, engaged I believe. She and Chris worked for Private. She has a son, Niklas.

  She’s looking for me, and that makes me agitated. But there’s more. Her face—it’s true, she resembles my mother, and that makes me infuriated.

  For an instant I fight the urge to clean out all my money and flee Berlin and all of Germany for that matter.

  South America?

  No, I decide, growing angrier, the bitch will find nothing.

  With no documents left in the archives, it’s as if Christoph and the others never existed. No masks, but they’re as invisible to the wide world as I am.

  And soon, very soon, they will cease to exist at all, while I will go on.

  Ten minutes later, I pull into my garage. I park between the white work van and the Mercedes, make sure I’m alone, and then leave the Audi coupe. I climb in the back of the van and start removing the makeup with wipes I keep there.

  I have several hours of real work to do. Clients and business associates to meet. I must be presentable for the time being.

  But as I stare into the rearview mirror, I flash once more on Mattie Engel, and get a nervous feeling that has served me well over the years. Christoph was her lover once. Even if their official relationship had ended, she must have feelings for him, which means she has a strong motivation to find me, which means she’s dangerous—very, very dangerous.

  Right there, my friends, I decide that if it comes to it, I’ll have to make Mattie Engel permanently invisible too.

  But until then, I’ve got other people to take care of, people who could identify me, people who could tear off my masks.

  CHAPTER 47

  THE MIDGET ROLLED an unlit cigar between his lips as he squinted at Daniel Brecht and Jack Morgan before saying in a raspy voice, “You think a fix was in?”

  Tiny Heine Wagner was a black-market bookie, someone Brecht had used as an informer for years. Around noon that day, Tiny Heine, Brecht, and Morgan were sitting at a table overlooking the Spree River inside the Georgebräu beer hall in central Berlin.