Private Berlin Read online

At last Mattie spotted the roofline of the orphanage through a tangle of brush and woods. It sat next to a field being tilled by a farmer on a tractor.

  Between two stout wooden posts, a new steel cable stretched across the orphanage’s overgrown driveway. There were notices of condemnation in plastic sheeting stapled to both posts. A sign dangled from the cable: No Trespassing.

  Mattie parked her car on the shoulder, pulled up the hood of her rain jacket, and got out. She trotted across the road, jumped the cable, and moved down the driveway through sopping weeds and thorns that clawed at her slacks.

  Vines strangled the off-kilter walls of Waisenhaus 44, a large three-story building with a sagging roof. The windows of the old orphanage were gone, except for teeth-like shards that clung to the frames.

  Mattie stepped up on the front porch, which sagged off the building. The orphanage’s front door lay broken on the floor in the mouth of a long, gloomy central hallway.

  Something in her stomach told Mattie not to enter and to leave the secrets of Waisenhaus 44 alone.

  But then thunder cracked in the distance and the rain fell even harder.

  Feeling keenly on edge, wondering if she was crazy, she stepped inside.

  CHAPTER 54

  IN THE HALLWAY, Mattie stopped to get out her flashlight. She shined it around, finding a room to her right that held the last relics of an office lying in leaves, fungus, and mold: a desk with two legs, a chair with the stuffing and rusted springs visible, and an overturned file cabinet with no drawers.

  This was where the headmaster or mistress must have done their business, Mattie thought. She walked on, moving about the orphanage’s lower floor, which had been stripped of nearly everything.

  She found the kitchen and the eating hall. They were stripped too.

  As she climbed the stairs, she tried to imagine Chris in this horrid place, eight years old, motherless, fatherless. She thought of Niklas having to be put in an orphanage and felt on the verge of weeping again.

  On the second floor, Mattie discovered the ruins of old classrooms and became aware that something about the background din of the rain falling and the tractor plowing had changed.

  She ascended to the third floor and found dormitories set to either side of a long central corridor. The first was empty. The one across the hall held rusted bunk-bed frames bolted to the wall.

  Mattie walked over creaking floorboards to the second set of dorms. In the first one she inspected, the roof was caved in on top of one of the steel bunk beds, the only one she’d seen that still had a mattress on it.

  The mattress was black with filth and mold. There were puddles on it, and on the floor. For reasons she could not explain, Mattie felt drawn into the dorm, toward that bunk bed mattress.

  The floorboards felt soft and rotted underfoot. But she went anyway and stood in the rain teeming through the hole in the roof, transfixed by the mattress and the splintered joists that stabbed it in several places.

  Was this bed once Chris’s?

  Mattie saw him lying on the bed as easily as another memory that came flooding in around her.

  She and Chris were in bed at a ski condo they’d rented at Garmisch, a rare separation from Niklas.

  Chris made her breakfast and brought it to her on a tray with a single rose, and a small box of chocolates wrapped in a bow. He watched her eat, amused. And then he was interested to see her opening the chocolate box.

  Inside was a ring, two emeralds surrounding an emerald-cut diamond.

  Suddenly, there in the wreckage of the orphanage, loss flowed everywhere around Mattie, an invisible, terrible hydraulic pressure built, making the room feel as menacing to her as the subbasement in the slaughterhouse.

  Lightning flashed, almost blinding her.

  Thunder cracked right overhead.

  Mattie ducked, desperate now to leave this place, to get back to her car and go home to Niklas.

  She ran from the room.

  She raced to the staircase and then froze.

  Standing in the shadows at the bottom of the staircase was a man in a long, black, hooded rain slicker.

  His face was hidden beneath the hood.

  He was aiming a double-barreled shotgun at her.

  CHAPTER 55

  “WHO ARE YOU?” the man with the shotgun growled. “And what in God’s name are you doing in here?”

  For an instant, Mattie couldn’t answer.

  He adjusted his aim. “I asked you—”

  She reached to her coat pocket.

  “Easy,” the man said, still aiming the gun.

  “I’m going for—my badge—and ID,” she stammered.

  He picked his head up off the butt of the shotgun. “You police?”

  “I work for Private, Private Berlin.” She showed him the badge.

  He made a motion for her to come down the stairs toward him.

  “The gun, sir?” she asked. “It’s making me nervous.”

  At last he lowered the gun, and then pulled back the hood, revealing a rawboned man in his late thirties. He said, “I saw the car after I quit plowing. You’re not supposed to be in here. They’re demolishing this place next month.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mattie said, her wits returning. She started down the stairs toward him. “This was an orphanage. A…a close friend of mine lived here.”

  “Lot of people lived here. Can’t say many liked it, from what I’ve heard.”

  She stuck out her hand. “Mattie Engel.”

  “Darek Eberhardt,” he replied, not taking her hand. “You should leave, Frau Engel. This place is dangerous. Floorboards are all rotted. You could go through anywhere. Break a leg. Or a neck.”

  “My friend is…dead, murdered,” Mattie said. “He was more than my friend. He was my fiancé, and I’m just trying to understand his childhood.”

  Eberhardt studied her without emotion. “I’m sorry for your loss, but you won’t learn anything here. This place was abandoned twenty years ago. Looters stripped most of it. Took the government forever, but they finally got the land sold to some green energy company.”

  “I heard that. Lightbulbs.”

  Eberhardt turned without comment and started down the hall.

  Mattie hurried after him, saying, “The records about Waisenhaus 44 that are in the Federal Archives, they’re…they’re incomplete.”

  Eberhardt said nothing as he headed toward the front door.

  Mattie called after him, “I was hoping I could find someone who knows about the orphanage, someone who might have known Chris.”

  Eberhardt went out the front door. The rain had slowed. The thunder boomed and the lightning flashed to their east now.

  “I’ve got to get back to my tilling,” Eberhardt said.

  Mattie followed him, saying, “I’m sorry. I’d hoped…” She started to choke up. “It’s just so hard not understanding…why he died, who he was, this place.”

  She wiped at her tears with the sleeve of her rain jacket. Eberhardt had turned to face her, the shotgun held low at his side, his face a mystery.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’ll be going. I’m sorry to have bothered you and taken you away from your work.”

  Mattie pivoted and took several steps down the overgrown driveway toward the road.

  “Hariat Ledwig,” the farmer said. “She lives in a nursing home in Halle.”

  Mattie stopped and looked at him, puzzled. “Who is she?”

  “My father’s second cousin. She ran this place for twenty-two years.”

  CHAPTER 56

  THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, Mattie knocked and entered a room that reeked of old age, disease, and an antiseptic that smelled like citrus.

  Hariat Ledwig sat upright in a chair by a hospital bed, connected by a tube to an oxygen tent. A little bird of a woman in a nightgown, robe, and slippers, she was having a coughing fit. A blanket covered her legs. There were books stacked around her. One lay open in her lap cradling a magnifying glass.

  Whe
n the coughing subsided, Hariat Ledwig spit into a tissue and dropped it in a trashcan set among the books.

  “What do you want?” the old woman croaked suspiciously.

  Mattie identified herself, showed her the Private badge, and then said, “I met your second cousin’s son, Darek, out at the old Waisenhaus 44 building. He suggested I come talk to you.”

  Hariat Ledwig now turned highly guarded. “Who do you work for? The state?”

  “No, I…”

  The old woman picked up the magnifying glass and shook it at Mattie. “I was not a part of any forced adoptions. Never. Not once. I can prove it.”

  Mattie understood what she was talking about. During the communist reign in East Germany, children were sometimes taken from parents thought disloyal. The children’s names were changed, and then they were given over to families deemed true to the state.

  “That’s not why I’m here, Frau Ledwig,” Mattie assured her. “And there is no client. I’m just trying to find out about a very dear friend of mine who lived at Waisenhaus 44 in the seventies and eighties.”

  Hariat Ledwig watched Mattie the way a cobra might a mongoose. “Your friend’s name?”

  “Chris, uh, Christoph Schneider.”

  The old woman blinked. Confusion and then pain rippled through her.

  She started coughing again, hard and spastic convulsions, and she would not meet Mattie’s gaze.

  When the fit eased, Mattie said, “Did you know Chris?”

  Hariat Ledwig seemed in some kind of internal battle, but then she glanced sidelong at Mattie and said, “I had nothing to do with whatever happened to that boy. Absolutely nothing.”

  CHAPTER 57

  MATTIE FELT A pit opening in her stomach. She stared at the woman who’d run Waisenhaus 44 and said, “What happened to Chris?”

  “I don’t know,” Hariat Ledwig whispered.

  “You do.”

  The old woman shifted painfully. “I don’t. Why are you here? Why now?”

  “Because Chris was murdered last week.”

  Hariat Ledwig’s eyes unscrewed a moment as if she’d fallen into some time warp. Then she said, wheezing, “I’d always hoped he’d be safe and live a long life. I’d hoped they all would…I…I did nothing but try to help him as best I could, but it was beyond me. I was a good person caught in an impossible situation!”

  The old woman blubbered these last words: “I’m innocent.”

  “Innocent of what?” Mattie demanded. “Was Chris abused in your orphanage?”

  Hariat Ledwig forced herself to sit straighter. “Absolutely not. Whatever it was, it happened before he came, before they all came to Waisenhaus 44.”

  “All?”

  The old woman hesitated, but then, between hacking fits, she described the snowy winter night of February 12, 1980.

  A car and a police van came. A man got out of the rear of the car. He told Hariat Ledwig that he was with the state. Three girls and three boys between the ages of six and nine had been found wandering the streets of East Berlin. Waisenhaus 44 was the only orphanage around with vacancies.

  The children appeared to be in shock when they arrived. They clung to each other obsessively. Most had violent nightmares, and would wake up screaming for their mothers. Two of the girls were sisters and rarely let the other out of their sight. They all feared men.

  Over the course of years, Hariat Ledwig tried to coax out of them what had happened, but every time she did, they’d become terrified and refuse. The only thing Chris ever said about it was that some things were best forgotten.

  “So I did,” the old woman croaked. “From then on, I saw to their care as best I could. Made sure they were fed and clothed and educated. Some of the six did better than others, Chris and Artur probably the best.

  “And then they were teenagers, and word of the uprising in Berlin had reached even Waisenhaus 44. They all went up there one night. They came back, but not for long. They were of age. They could do what they wanted. I lost track of them, though I heard that Chris chose the army.”

  Mattie nodded. “But other than that and the fact that Chris lived at the orphanage, there’s nothing about his childhood that’s real. At least as far as documents go.”

  Hariat Ledwig fought for breath. “Because of me. I did that.”

  The old woman explained that after seeing the traumatized state the six children were in, and their pathological fear of being asked to talk about it, she came to believe that someone had threatened them if they ever talked.

  “I didn’t want whoever had tortured those children to be able to find them,” she said. “They came to me with no documents, so I invented documents for them. Even when the children were able to tell me their parents’ names, I changed them, and made the children memorize the new names I had written.”

  “And you told no one?”

  “It was a different time. As Chris said, one best forgotten.”

  “What was Chris’s real name?”

  “Rolf Christoph Wolfe.”

  “And his mother and father?”

  “I never knew. I guess I didn’t want to know.”

  “Earlier today, a man posing as a professor stole six of the Waisenhaus 44 files from the Federal Archives. I believe Chris’s file was among them.”

  Hariat Ledwig blinked, and then she seemed to shrink right in front of Mattie. “How could that possibly…?” She choked hard as if someone or something was strangling her. Then she said, coughing, “My God, they all came in on the same date. I sent the Federal Archives the chronological copy of the files.”

  The old woman broke down sobbing. “No, this is not right. I wanted them to be safe!”

  Mattie went to her side, squatted down, and put her hand on the blanket, through which she could feel the woman’s legs. They were like twigs. “Hariat, do you remember the names of the other five children?”

  Hariat Ledwig’s crying slowed. “I knew what would happen when the wall fell. I knew there would be a witch hunt. I kept copies of the files of every child who lived in my orphanage.”

  Mattie’s heart skipped a beat. “Can I see them? Make copies?”

  The old woman nodded. “They prove I was a decent person, not part of the sickness that seemed to afflict everyone around me in those days.”

  BOOK THREE

  THE MOTHERLESS CHILDREN

  CHAPTER 58

  “FIND THESE PEOPLE, Gabriel,” Mattie said, slapping down six blue files on the hippie scientist’s workbench at Private Berlin. “They’re the key.”

  “Wait a second,” Katharina complained. “I’ve got first dibs on him.”

  Dr. Gabriel was hunched over a computer, removing its hard drive.

  “Kat—” Mattie insisted.

  Her friend cut her off. “That computer belongs to Ernst Neumann, dead computer genius, doctoral student at Berlin Tech, and, according to his roommate, a freelance hacker who’d come into a lot of cash recently.”

  “Really?” Mattie said, impressed. “I’ll do my own research then.”

  Gabriel did not look up, just gestured with his screwdriver toward an iMac. “Use that machine.”

  Mattie started toward the machine with Katharina in tow. “What’s in those files?” she asked.

  “Fiction,” Mattie said, sitting down in front of the computer.

  The door to Gabriel’s lab opened and Jack Morgan entered with Daniel Brecht. They were on their way out to catch Cassiano’s game at the stadium, but they wanted to bring everyone up to speed on Pavel, his background in the KGB, and his disappearance last evening, sometime after he’d vacated the room he’d shared with Perfecta.

  “And I spoke with some old friends in Vegas,” Morgan said. “There was heavier than normal betting on the games where Cassiano played poorly. And get this: in every case, Hertha went into the games as five to three favorites.”

  “I’m not following,” Katharina said.

  “The odds were such that few flags would be raised on someone bett
ing on Cassiano’s opponents,” Morgan said.

  “Pavel?” Mattie asked.

  “That’s where my money is,” Dietrich said. “Here’s a picture of him.”

  Mattie studied the photograph of the nightclub owner, but she could not tell if it was the man she’d seen at the Federal Archives that morning.

  Then she told them all what she’d discovered in Halle.

  When she finished, Gabriel abandoned the hard drive of the computer genius, went to Mattie, and pushed her out of her chair, flipping open the first file. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  “Gabriel!” Katharina protested.

  “The computer will take me hours,” he said. “This, minutes.”

  The first file belonged to Ilse Frei, who had been one of the younger of the six children who’d arrived at Waisenhaus 44 on February 12, 1980.

  Morgan and Brecht left for the game just before Gabriel found an Ilse Frei, correct age, living near Frankfurt.

  “She’s a paralegal and lives in the suburb of Bad Homburg,” the old hippie said, now giving his computer a command to cross-reference her name against the various law-enforcement databases to which Private had access.

  He immediately got a hit and looked pained.

  “What is it?” Mattie asked, coming around the back of his chair.

  “Ilse Frei was reported missing fifteen days ago.”

  CHAPTER 59

  MY FRIENDS, FELLOW Berliners, twenty years ago it would have taken me weeks to track down the address of Greta Amsel. I know this because nearly two decades ago, shortly after recuperating from my surgeries, I decided to find and kill the bitch that bore me.

  It took me a solid month of painstaking document research to locate my dear sweet mother and end her life. But that is a story for another time.

  It had taken me all of an hour on Google to pin down the fact that Greta Amsel was a nurse who lived alone in a small apartment building in the outskirts of West Berlin not far from Falkensee.