Private Berlin Read online

  At the moment, I’m sitting in my blue workman’s van diagonally across the street from the apartment building, reviewing the actions I took after finding her. I’d had the good sense to call her phone number once I’d arrived. The voice on the machine was a stranger’s. Funny, I never would have recognized it.

  I called the apartment manager next, a man named Gustav Banter, and posed as an electrical supply salesman from Mannheim who wanted to drop by later, around five thirty. Impossible, Banter told me. His shift ended at four thirty.

  How sad, I said, and settled in to wait for Greta.

  Again, I did not recognize her voice on her answering machine, but I know her the moment she rides by me on her bicycle at a quarter to five. She’s still got the naturally blond hair, the high cheekbones, and that lost look about her.

  Greta Amsel locks her bike in a rack in front of the apartment building. I wait until she’s been inside ten minutes before taking the tool bag from the floor and setting it on the passenger seat beside me.

  I wait until a man carrying a book bag comes down the street and heads for the front door of Greta’s building. As he puts his key into the lock, I’m angling in behind him.

  In a heavy Slavic accent, I say, “Do you knows where I finds Herr Banter? The superintendent?”

  The young man turns to look at me. “Banter? He’s long gone by now.”

  I shake my head angrily. “I get call to come fix toilet leak on third floor.” I pat my pockets. “I got number and name here somewhere, but I supposed to meet Banter.”

  The young man shrugs. “Banter’s a worthless piece of shit. It’s just like him not to hang around when someone’s toilet’s leaking. I’m in two twelve. It’s not above me, is it? My ceiling could be falling in.”

  “No,” I say. “Three forty-seven, or something. Can I go in?”

  The young man nods absently, stopping at the mailboxes.

  By the time he’s got one open, the elevator door is shutting on me.

  I get off at the third floor, find the stairwell, and climb to the fourth floor.

  I find apartment four twenty-nine and knock. I look right at the peephole, and a shiver of excitement passes through me.

  “Yes?” I hear her call in that unfamiliar voice. “Who is it?”

  “It is plumber, Frau Amsel,” I say. “Herr Banter called. He says tenant in three twenty-nine is complaining of water from the ceiling. He wants me to check toilet.”

  There’s a long pause.

  And then I hear a chain slide and a dead bolt thrown.

  CHAPTER 60

  “WHO REPORTED HER missing?” Mattie asked, studying the PDF of a document carrying the letterhead of the police department of Frankfurt am Main.

  “Her sister, Ilona,” Dr. Gabriel said, tapping the section that identified the concerned relative.

  Mattie felt a chill. “Ilona was also one of the children who entered Waisenhaus 44 with Chris. She give an address?”

  “Just a cell number,” said Katharina, who was also looking at the document.

  Mattie whipped out her cell and dialed just as Tom Burkhart entered. He went straight to her. “I think I’ve got something.”

  She held up her finger, hearing Ilona Frei’s phone ring. A synthesized voice answered, telling her to leave a message and a callback number.

  “Hi, Ilona. My name is Mattie Engel. I am a friend of Chris Schneider’s. He and I work together at Private here in Berlin. If you could call me, I’d appreciate it. Any time. Day or night. Please, it’s important that I speak with you.”

  “Here’s a Greta Amsel, Mattie,” Dr. Gabriel said when she hung up. “She lives out by Falkensee. That’s twenty minutes, tops.”

  Mattie jotted down the address and moved toward the door. Again Burkhart said, “Engel, I said I think I’ve got something.”

  Mattie hesitated and then replied, “Come with me. Tell me on the way.”

  CHAPTER 61

  WHEN MY DEAR old friend Greta Amsel opens her door, she’s wearing an apron and I smell bacon frying. She studies my plumber’s disguise and then stands aside. “Down the hall on the right. You don’t suppose it’s a burst pipe?”

  I shrug, smile, and respond cheerily, “Who knows? I look, okay?”

  The smell of bacon surrounds me as I walk down a hall with bare walls. When I go into the toilet I notice she does not have the array of cosmetics, lotions, and soaps you’d expect.

  Greta Amsel lives a simple, austere life.

  I set the toolbox down and pull on rubber gloves. I look over my shoulder. She’s watching me. I smile again. “You cooking, yes? I knows in a minute if this is problem. If no, two minutes I be gone.”

  She hesitates, and then moves out of the doorway.

  I wait until I hear dishes rattle, and then a radio sputtering with news. I fish in the toolbox and come up with my flathead screwdriver and a clipboard with blank paper on it. I flush the toilet, and then, holding the screwdriver beneath the clipboard, I walk toward the smell of the bacon.

  “Hallo there?” I call pleasantly.

  Greta stands at the stove in a galley kitchen about six feet from me. She’s rolling bacon onto a paper towel on a plate. She looks up. “All done?”

  “Yes, no problem with toilet. Must be neighbors.” I hold out the clipboard. “You sign that I am here, make trip, for Banter, okay?”

  Greta steps toward me. And then I can’t help it. Being this close to her pleases me more than I’d anticipated, and I make that clicking noise in my throat.

  Puzzlement and then disbelief twist through Greta’s face.

  “You know me, Greta, hmmm?” I say. “A long time and still you know me.”

  She’s paralyzed with terror, but I’m thrilled and fluid when I drop the clipboard and launch myself at her.

  Greta grabs the skillet and throws the bacon grease at me. It scalds my face. But that only serves to infuriate me.

  She starts to scream, but I knock the pan from her hand and jam my fist into her mouth before she can get out much more than a squeal.

  She looks at me wide-eyed and makes soft whimpering noises.

  “You remember, don’t you, Greta?” I ask in a hoarse whisper. “All the fun we used to have? You and your mother, hmmm?”

  CHAPTER 62

  BURKHART PARKED THE Private car down the street from Greta Amsel’s apartment building just as an older man in a blue jumpsuit and matching cap left by the front door, carrying a toolbox.

  Mattie was trying Greta Amsel’s number for the third time. No answer. The workman climbed into a dark-blue panel van.

  Mattie was barely conscious of him. She was running through the information Burkhart had given her on the way over.

  The counterterrorism expert had discovered no other documents regarding the auxiliary slaughterhouse in Ahrensfelde. He’d looked in the Berlin city archives and in records repositories in Ahrensfelde, and there was nothing more than what they’d found already.

  People in the area immediately surrounding the blasted abattoir told Burkhart that they’d already spoken to Risi Baumgarten’s agents and knew nothing about the place other than they’d thought it represented a hazard to their children.

  Then Burkhart had stopped for lunch at a café not far from the slaughterhouse and met a retired shopkeeper and his lady friend.

  The shopkeeper grew up on a farm that used the slaughterhouse. He said a man he knew only as “Falk” ran the place, and he described Falk as an alcoholic with a bitter and gloomy attitude.

  Falk had a son who worked at the abattoir too. He couldn’t remember the younger Falk’s name, but he remembered that he was in his late teens the last time he saw him, and very smart despite limited schooling.

  The shopkeeper’s lady friend told Burkhart that she walked by the abattoir in the late seventies, late at night, and thought she heard a woman screaming, but it could have been a pig squealing. Pigs are smart, she told Burkhart. They know when there’s killing going on. She told her late husban
d about the incident, and he’d told her to plug her ears from now on.

  The blue workman’s van began to pull out.

  “You want to knock on the door?” Burkhart asked.

  “We’re here, right?” Mattie said, climbing out.

  The van drove past them. They barely gave it a glance.

  They tried the buzzer to Greta Amsel’s apartment twice. No answer.

  “Let’s come back tomorrow,” Burkhart said.

  An older gentleman walked up behind them. “Who are you looking for?”

  “Greta Amsel,” Mattie said.

  The man looked around. “That’s her bike. She’s here.”

  “She’s not answering her buzzer.”

  “Lots of the buzzers don’t work. But if her bike’s here, she’s here.”

  Burkhart flashed his Private badge. “Mind if we go upstairs and try her door?”

  “Hell, I don’t care,” he said, and let them in.

  They went to Greta Amsel’s apartment on the fourth floor, knocked, and got no answer. Then they noticed a strange smell coming from inside, a mix of bacon smoke and the acrid taint that lingers after hair catches fire.

  “Something’s wrong,” Mattie said.

  “I agree,” Burkhart said. He crouched and proceeded to pick the lock.

  Guns drawn, they entered the hallway. The smell was worse here, crossed with human feces.

  The light was on in the bathroom. The toilet seat was up. The fan was running.

  So was the one in the kitchen where Greta Amsel’s corpse lay, sprawled on her belly.

  Her hands were singed and her fingers charred black.

  CHAPTER 63

  THIRTY YARDS OUT from the goal, Cassiano came to a full stop, juggled, and then popped the ball over the head of the final Düsseldorf defender. With explosive speed, the Brazilian wove around the stunned sweeper and half-volleyed the bouncing ball left-footed into the upper right-hand corner of the net.

  The crowd inside the Hertha Berlin stadium went nuts. Jack Morgan and Daniel Brecht were up on their feet applauding.

  “That’s three,” Brecht crowed. “Absolutely super.”

  “No wonder Manchester United is interested,” Morgan said. “He’s incredibly good.”

  “Why would he risk his career to get involved with someone like Pavel?”

  “That’s exactly what he said, remember?” Morgan said.

  “But there’s no denying the way he looked in those six games,” Brecht countered. “He was simply not the same player.”

  Out on the field, the referee blew the whistle, ending the game. Cassiano jogged off, sweating, smiling, and waving to his adoring fans.

  Jack was silent for several moments watching him.

  “I think he’s telling the truth,” he said finally. “I don’t think he’d risk his career for someone like Pavel, but maybe Perfecta would.”

  “She did get naked for him.”

  “She did,” Morgan agreed. “I want to talk to Cassiano again. And his coach. And the club’s general manager. All together. Think you can set that up?”

  “When?”

  “Now sounds good.”

  CHAPTER 64

  “HAUPTKOMMISSAR DIETRICH?” MATTIE said into her cell phone. She was standing in the hallway of Greta Amsel’s apartment.

  “Who is this?” Dietrich replied in a thick, slow voice.

  “It’s Mattie Engel,” she said. “There’s been another murder.”

  There was a long silence before Dietrich said, “Who? Where?”

  “A childhood friend of Chris’s,” she said. “Greta Amsel. They lived in an orphanage together near Halle.”

  Another long silence. “And she’s dead?”

  “We just found her in her apartment. We haven’t touched a thing. I think we saw the killer. He was posing as a plumber. He was leaving as we arrived.”

  “Did you get a look at him?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  Dietrich’s third silence was the longest. She thought she heard him drinking something. “Call Inspector Weigel,” he said at last. “Have her bring in a forensics team and three Kripo detectives to canvass the building. I’ll see to this all tomorrow around noon.”

  Mattie hesitated, incredulous. “Tomorrow? With all due respect, Hauptkommissar, I think you should come here right now and listen to what we’ve found. Another of Chris’s childhood friends is missing.”

  The high commissar breathed heavily in response, almost laboring.

  Then he said, “Frau Engel, I must confess to you that it would be unprofessional of me to be at a crime scene in my current state. I am to bury my father in the morning, and I am drunk and well on the way to being drunker. You’ll have to call Weigel. I’ve left her in charge for the night. She’ll be helped by the rest of the Kripo homicide team.”

  The phone clicked dead.

  CHAPTER 65

  MY FRIENDS, I can’t help it. Two hours after the fact and I’m still shaking like a calf about to become veal. The smell of flesh burning and bacon still poisons my nose. The grease burn on my right cheek throbs.

  And thoughts crowd my head.

  I was in Greta’s apartment barely twelve minutes.

  I left the fans running.

  It should have been days until her body was discovered.

  But then I saw Mattie Engel and the big bald guy. And ever since then my mind’s been throttled with questions: How could they have found Greta? I took all the files from the archives. What do they know? What did Christoph tell them before he came after me?

  For the first time in nearly twenty-five years, I feel almost overwhelmed by the thought that my mask, my invisibility, might be weakening.

  Then I shake it off. They’ll find nothing that will link to the Invisible Man.

  But I am, above all, a realist. I can clearly see now that I have limited time in which to fully erase my past. Three other children are still unaccounted for.

  Just three and I’ll be free.

  Like it or not, my friends, tomorrow is shaping up to be a busy, busy day.

  CHAPTER 66

  IT WAS NEARLY eleven by the time Burkhart turned onto Mattie’s street.

  They’d been at the Amsel crime scene for hours, watching Inspector Weigel and the team of Kripo investigators and crime scene specialists document the body and the apartment.

  Weigel had seemed overwhelmed to be in charge of an investigation, even if it was only for one night, but she’d listened attentively and took copious notes when they gave their statement.

  Mattie had held nothing back. She told Weigel about the files stolen from the archives, Hariat Ledwig’s assertion that something terrible had happened to Chris and his friends, and the missing-persons report on Ilse Frei.

  Weigel had duly noted all of it before saying, “So you’re saying that there’s no connection between the deceased and Hermann Krüger?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Weigel looked uncomfortable as she said, “This afternoon, the higher-ups put a lot of pressure on the Hauptkommissar about Agnes Krüger’s murder. They think that is the key to all of this. Dietrich thinks so too.”

  Burkhart said, “You mean it’s more high-profile than, say, a nurse’s death?”

  Weigel appeared even more torn, but then she nodded and told them that she had talked with Hermann Krüger’s secretary in person. Weigel had gotten the secretary to admit that five days before, the billionaire told her he was going to be off on personal business for the next week, and then quite simply he’d vanished. Berlin Kripo had intelligence specialists trying to track his finances, but so far they were as shadowy as the man.

  No matter what had happened to Greta Amsel, Weigel believed the focus of the official investigation would be on Krüger until he was found and cleared.

  “It’s the six children,” Mattie insisted to Burkhart as he pulled up in front of her apartment building. “They’re the key, not Hermann Krüger.”

  “I agree,” Burkha
rt said. “But I can see how someone like Agnes Krüger being slain in broad daylight would have a way of distracting attention.”

  “We have to find the other children from Waisenhaus 44. We have to warn them.”

  “Gabriel said he was staying at the office until he found them,” Burkhart said.

  Mattie nodded, but she felt insanely frustrated that they’d been so close to saving Greta Amsel. The killer had walked right by them, and then driven right by them!

  She put her hand on the door handle and was about to pull it, when she stopped and looked at Burkhart. “Have you eaten anything?”

  “Not since lunch,” he admitted.

  “Feel like a home-cooked meal?”

  “You’re gonna cook after the day you had?” Burkhart asked.

  “My aunt does the cooking. When I get home this late, I warm it up.”

  CHAPTER 67

  CASSIANO ROARED IN Portuguese when his wife dropped her coat in the video Brecht had shot of the entrance to Pavel’s hotel room.

  Hertha Berlin’s star striker leaped from his chair in the team’s conference room and lunged toward the door, shouting like a wild man.

  Brecht grabbed the Brazilian and said something forcefully in his language. For a second Morgan thought Cassiano was going to pulverize Brecht, but then the striker softened and sat back down in his chair.

  “What was he yelling?” demanded the team’s general manager, Klaus Bremen, who sat next to the coach, Sig Mueller.

  Brecht said, “He wanted to get a machete, cut off Pavel’s balls, and shove them down Perfecta’s throat until she suffocated. I told him it was a bad idea for someone bound for the World Cup.”

  “So he’s saying he had no idea about this?” the coach asked. “Or about the betting?”

  Brecht posed the question in Portuguese. Cassiano shook his head.

  “Ask him about those games where he played horribly,” Morgan said.

  Brecht did so and the Brazilian began to shout at Morgan.