Private Berlin Read online

  “We’re asking you if you think a fix was in,” Brecht said.

  The bookie shrugged and put the cigar down. “Hertha Berlin is second league. I haven’t seen deep action on any one of their games. Certainly not compared to what you’d see in the premier league.”

  “We wouldn’t expect so,” Morgan said after Brecht translated. “But maybe that helps. Do you know of any big payoffs on any of those games?”

  Tiny Heine shrugged again. “Not on my book, anyway. But you know, sports betting is changing in Germany. Every day.”

  “Explain that,” said Jack.

  “The government passed a gambling treaty a few years back that says they’re the only ones who can handle sports betting,” the bookie said, and then started chortling. “It’s supposed to limit gambling addiction.”

  “Not working?” Jack asked.

  “Doing the exact opposite,” the midget replied. “My business is up twenty-five percent this year. Online, it’s even bigger. Thirty percent.”

  “Online brokers in other countries?” Brecht asked.

  “It’s officially against the law, but there you go,” Tiny Heine said and started laughing again. “Stupid government bastards. They think because it’s a law that people will pay attention to it, especially addicts!”

  Brecht turned to Morgan. “I wonder just how many of these online betting ops there are.”

  “Thousands,” Morgan said. “All over the world. Maybe tens of thousands.”

  The bookie nodded after Brecht translated. “Who do you figure for the fix?”

  “What should I tell him?” Brecht asked in English.

  Morgan replied, “Ask him what he knows about Maxim Pavel.”

  That name seemed to impress Tiny Heine. “Oooh, that’s heavy. He plays the cool nightclub owner, but the way I hear it, that’s one mean, twisted motherfucker. Word on the street is he’ll kill you as soon as look at you. He’ll like killing you too.”

  “Russian mafia?” Morgan asked.

  “I have it on authority that he’s ex-KGB. And you think he was in on a fix?”

  “We don’t know for sure,” Brecht said.

  “Any way for us to find out what kind of betting volume was on the Hertha Berlin games?” Morgan asked.

  Tiny Heine thought about that. “I dunno. You got any contacts in Vegas?”

  Morgan brightened. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  CHAPTER 48

  AT HALF PAST noon, Agnes Krüger was already late for a luncheon date at Restaurant Quarré with Ingrid Dahl, an old friend. The billionaire’s wife wanted to talk to someone she could trust, someone outside her immediate family, and Ingrid Dahl, who was both discrete and wise, fit her needs perfectly.

  She had a driver at her beck and call, but that day she felt the strong need to make a visible show of independence. She’d drive herself. She took the elevator to the garage and found her black Porsche Cayenne among the myriad of other cars her husband stored there.

  Agnes Krüger hit the button that raised the garage gate and then pulled out, heading south toward Fasanenplatz, which was empty due to the heavy rain that was falling again.

  She pulled up to the intersection of Fasanen and Schaperstrasse. Before she could take a left onto Schaper, a figure in a black rain jacket with the hood up ran to her and knocked sharply on the window.

  The billionaire’s wife startled and then rolled down the window angrily.

  “What do you want?” she demanded. “I already told…”

  Agnes Krüger was suddenly staring at the empty bottom of a plastic Coke bottle that had been taped to the barrel of a pistol.

  “No, please—” she began.

  The shot hit her above the right eye at point-blank range, spraying her life across the passenger seat and window.

  Her foot came off the brake.

  The Porsche rolled across the street and crashed into a parked Fiat.

  Alarms began to wail as the killer walked off into the storm.

  CHAPTER 49

  IN THE AMPHITHEATER inside Private Berlin, Dr. Gabriel loaded a copy of the German Federal Archives surveillance tape featuring Dr. Groening.

  Mattie snapped shut her cell phone. “Surprise, no Professor Groening at Heidelberg. Not even close.”

  “I didn’t expect there would be,” Gabriel replied.

  Katharina Doruk shut her own phone. “That was Brecht. They went back to the nightclub and were told that Pavel hasn’t been seen since yesterday.”

  “So Hermann Krüger’s and Pavel’s whereabouts are now both unknown?”

  “Apparently,” Katharina said.

  The surveillance tapes appeared on the screen. Gabriel enlarged them.

  In the reading room, the professor did a remarkable job of keeping his hat tucked down over his eyes, but they saw how he managed to steal six files from the archives of Waisenhaus 44.

  “He’s very clever, whoever he is, and his hands are as fast as a close-up magician’s,” said Gabriel.

  Mattie nodded. “Zoom in on that briefcase.”

  Dr. Gabriel did. “Looks like old crocodile skin.”

  Mattie was positive there would be a better look at Dr. Groening at the front gate. But both entering and exiting, his body shook and quivered so much it was hard to get an image of him that wasn’t blurred. And even then, it was at a steep downward angle, from the upper-right corner of the guard’s shack.

  “Look at me watching him walk away,” Mattie cried after seeing herself step to the guard’s window. “I had this feeling about him, but I let him walk away because he reminded me of my mother and I pitied him!”

  “You couldn’t have known,” Katharina said.

  Mattie knew she was right, but it sure didn’t make her feel any better.

  Was that the man who killed Chris? Was that Krüger or Pavel in disguise?

  Pavel owned a nightclub for female impersonators. He’d know all about makeup, wouldn’t he? What about Krüger? A billionaire could hire someone to disguise him, right? Or he could have paid someone to steal the documents.

  She was lost in these thoughts when Katharina’s phone rang again.

  “What?” Katharina cried. She stabbed at her phone and the speaker came on.

  “He’s done it!” Rudy Krüger shouted over a background din of voices. “He’s killed my mother!”

  “Slow down, Rudy,” Katharina said.

  “She’s dead,” he said in a quivering voice. “I just got a call from Berlin Kripo. Someone shot her in her car near the house. It had to be Hermann. I know it. He did it or he had her killed. That fucking capitalist pig! He—”

  Rudy was choking. “Oh, God. He—I told her—”

  “Rudy, I know this is tough. Take a deep breath. Where are you?”

  “Leaving the rally. We were protesting corporate pigs like my stepfather who are trying to tear down Tacheles and turn it into another high-rise. The police want me to identify her.”

  “We’ll meet you there in ten minutes.”

  CHAPTER 50

  HAUPTKOMMISSAR HANS DIETRICH was already on the scene when Mattie and Katharina arrived. He was standing in the rain by the open door to the black Porsche Cayenne, grim, drawn, and gray, and even more hunched over.

  From behind the yellow crime scene tape, Mattie spotted Inspector Weigel and called to her. Weigel came over, puzzled.

  “What are you doing here?” the inspector asked.

  “Agnes Krüger was Chris Schneider’s client,” Mattie said. “Dietrich knows about it.”

  Suddenly annoyed, the young inspector glanced at the high commissar. “The man tells me nothing. It’s like I don’t exist. But he has a lot on his mind. His father died of a heart attack last night in Treptower Park. He found him.”

  “That’s awful,” Mattie said.

  “And he’s here at work?” Katharina asked.

  “The way I understand it, work is all Dietrich has,” the inspector replied.

  Mattie had heard the same thing and
was about to say so when she heard Rudy Krüger cry, “Where is she?”

  The billionaire’s stepson had just left a taxi and was rushing to them. He slowed when he saw the crashed Porsche on the other side of the street. He moaned, “Oh, God. What’s he done to her?”

  To Mattie, Rudy Krüger no longer looked the part of the arrogant artist and anarchist. He was just a boy who’d lost his mother.

  Tears came to his eyes and he rubbed fiercely at his cheeks. “What’s he done? What’s he done to her?”

  “Are you Rudy Krüger?” High Commissar Dietrich asked.

  He’d come over to Weigel and seen Rudy crying.

  “He is,” Mattie said.

  Dietrich ignored her. “Herr Krüger, I know this is hard, but I need you to identify your mother. Your stepfather is apparently nowhere to be found.”

  Sounding dazed, Rudy Krüger said, “It’s her.”

  “You can’t see her from here.”

  “It’s her car.”

  “Please, sir, I need you to look at her face. We’ll drape the wound.”

  Rudy looked at Katharina and Mattie. “Would you go with me?”

  Dietrich appeared displeased, but Mattie said, “Of course we will.”

  The billionaire’s stepson was shaking like a leaf. His lower lip trembled as he walked up beside his mother’s car. Mattie could see her in there. Her body was rocked to the right. A stream of drying blood ran out of her mouth.

  Tears rolling down his cheeks, Rudy Krüger nodded. “It’s her. My mother.”

  Then he spun around, doubled over, and vomited.

  CHAPTER 51

  WHEN RUDY KRÜGER’S spasms subsided, Mattie and Katharina led him away.

  “I need some water,” he said dully.

  “I’ll get you some,” Inspector Weigel answered and hurried off.

  The rain had stopped and the wind had picked up, blowing leaves from the trees in front of Agnes Krüger’s home. Rudy Krüger sat on the wet front steps looking wounded and alone.

  “Herr Krüger…” Dietrich began.

  Mattie stepped in front of the high commissar and in a low voice said, “Remember what you felt like last night? Give him a minute.”

  Dietrich was a man not used to taking orders and not used to other people knowing his affairs. But in a measured tone, he replied, “Just so, Frau Engel.”

  Weigel came up and handed the billionaire’s stepson a bottle of water. “Thank you,” Rudy Krüger said. “You’re very kind.”

  Dietrich waited until he’d drunk it before informing him that no witnesses to his mother’s murder had come forward yet. There’d been a driving rain at the time and none of the neighbors seemed to have heard anything unusual.

  “Where were you an hour ago?” Dietrich asked when he’d finished.

  “Me?” Rudy Krüger said. “I was at a rally for Tacheles.”

  “Anybody see you?”

  “Hundreds,” he said. “I was a speaker. I’ve been there since this morning.”

  “Any idea who’d want to kill her?”

  Rudy’s expression turned to outrage. “The same person who probably killed Chris Schneider: Hermann Krüger. Or someone working for him. I promise you. When will you arrest him?”

  “I’ve got to find him first,” Dietrich said. “Hear his side of things.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Rudy Krüger moaned. “Jesus, it’s just…”

  “What?”

  He was racked with anguish when he answered more to Mattie and Katharina than to Dietrich: “After you left, on the way to the rally, I talked with my mother on the phone. I asked her what she’d decided to do about Hermann. She said she was going to stay married to him.

  “Isn’t that just perfect?” he asked bitterly. “So Agnes, she went for the money. She’d decided to go on with their separate lives because of it. But he killed her before she even had the chance to tell—”

  Down the street, they had his mother’s body in a black bag and were loading it into an ambulance.

  Rudy Krüger let loose a sigh and seemed on the verge of crying again, but instead he said, “I better check on the house.”

  “I prefer you leave it the way it is,” Dietrich said. “We’ll want to search it.”

  That surprised the billionaire’s stepson for a moment, but then he said, “Of course, I’m sorry. I…I guess I’ll go home now?”

  Dietrich nodded. “You’ll want to notify her friends and family.”

  Rudy Krüger hung his head and said, “I have my first opening in two days. She was coming, you know? My mother said she was coming.”

  Then the high commissar’s cell phone rang. Dietrich answered it and walked off several paces.

  Rudy Krüger got up, appearing beaten. He looked at Mattie and Katharina. “Thanks. I couldn’t have done that alone.”

  “You have someone to go home to?” Katharina asked.

  “Tanya might be there after the rally,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  “You call us if you need us,” Mattie said.

  He nodded absently and walked off, a shattered man.

  Mattie heard Dietrich complaining, “I’m tied up here. Send someone else.”

  He hung up, shaking his head.

  “What is it, High Commissar?” Inspector Weigel asked.

  Dietrich hesitated, and then said, “Halle police found a floater in the river down there. They’ve identified him: a doctoral student at Berlin Technical University. Some kind of computer supergenius. They wanted our help. We’ve got too much to do already. I want Hermann Krüger found.”

  Mattie had wanted to tell Dietrich about the files stolen from the archives, but now she was consumed by this information in light of the fact that someone of tremendous skill had hacked into Private’s computer.

  So was Katharina, who said, “You have a name for this dead student?”

  “Weigel can get it for you,” Dietrich said, walking away.

  “I think I’ll go to the Technical University then,” Katharina said. “Dig around.”

  “Not me,” Mattie said. “I’m heading to Halle.”

  CHAPTER 52

  FRIENDS, FELLOW BERLINERS, it’s only three in the afternoon, but I must admit that I’m already bone tired from the many long and difficult tasks I’ve been forced to attend to already today. But I like to have things cleared away, cleaned up and polished like glass before I move on to something new.

  That’s the way of an invisible man.

  Some old habits never die.

  I look at my hands a moment and entertain the notion that I’ve never really seen myself, not without a mirror anyway; and mirrors are part of life’s illusion, aren’t they?

  I really don’t know what I look like at all, I decide, and I never will.

  And if I don’t, who will?

  Certainly not all those I’ve been forced to eliminate in the last two weeks. Not one of them recognized my new face.

  But they knew my voice.

  Before they died, when I was speaking to them, they looked at me like I was a scary puzzle with pieces missing.

  I laugh, feeling buoyed as I smear instant tanning lotion on my face and hands, and then use colored contact lenses to turn my eye color from brown to green. Then I glue on thick, dark eyebrows and a moustache and stuff rolls of cotton in my cheeks.

  I pull on a blue workman’s coverall embroidered with the name of a local plumbing company. It’s amazing what you can find in thrift stores if you really know what you’re looking for. I even found the matching cap there too.

  When I’m finished and satisfied that no one from my current life would recognize me, I fill a toolbox with wrenches, screwdrivers, and a mini blowtorch, making gentle clicking noises in my throat. It’s so important to have the right tools for the job, isn’t it, my friends? Hmmm?

  CHAPTER 53

  IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON by the time Mattie returned to Private Berlin, requisitioned a car, and drove the one hundred seventy kilometers south to the city of Hal
le.

  A gray, bleak city dominated by GDR-era architecture, Halle looked even more grim and somber in the mist that was swirling in advance of another storm.

  Mattie parked, wondering again if the body of the computer genius was indeed linked to the hacking at Private, Chris’s death, and now the murder of Agnes Krüger in broad daylight. Was Hermann Krüger behind all of it? Could someone of his stature afford to be so brazen and cold-blooded?

  In an effort to answer those questions, Mattie went to city hall and inquired at the clerk’s office about Waisenhaus 44. The tattooed emo girl who waited on her said she’d never heard of the orphanage, much less its records.

  But a middle-aged woman working at a desk behind the emo girl told Mattie that Waisenhaus 44 was out on the road from Klepzig to Reussen.

  “It’s still there?” Mattie asked.

  “Not for long,” she said. “Someone’s tearing it down next month and building a green lightbulb production facility.”

  “Records?” Mattie asked.

  “I think they were transferred to the Federal Archives after reunification.”

  “No other place they could be?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Mattie considered throwing in the towel. But then she decided to make the drive out to see the orphanage. She told herself it might help her to understand whatever it was that Chris went through as a kid.

  The thought of Chris as a boy made her think about Niklas. The two brought a lump to her throat, and tears to her eyes, and it took every bit of her strength to stay on the wet highway leading east out of Halle.

  The wind began to gust and the rain fell harder as Mattie drove north on the pot-holed secondary road from Klepzig to Reussen. The road wound through farmland, by stands of hardwood trees partially stripped of leaves, and past giant white wind turbines, their blades slicing the iron sky.