Private Berlin Read online

  Brecht said, “He says he told you yesterday, he was sick. He did not take a dive and would like to slap you for saying so right after he found out his wife was having sexy-time with some old Russian bastard.”

  Morgan said nothing.

  Cassiano looked at his coach and babbled in Portuguese.

  “You believe me, yes, Sig?” Brecht translated.

  Bremen, the general manager, replied, “It’s not a matter of belief, Cassiano. We need proof you’re not involved.”

  After Brecht told Cassiano so in Portuguese, the Brazilian began to shout again indignantly.

  “How can I do this?” Brecht translated. “My wife is a whore and I am the victim of rumors. How can I prove that I am clean?”

  “Tell him to give us a hair sample,” Morgan said. “Private will take care of the rest.”

  CHAPTER 68

  “MOMMY!” NIKLAS CRIED when Mattie opened the door to the apartment.

  Her son was in his pajamas and ran to her.

  She took him up in her arms, scolding, “What are you doing up so late?”

  Aunt Cäcilia came behind her wearing her robe and curlers. “He wouldn’t listen. He’s been a crazy man, bouncing off the walls since that game ended, wanting to wait up and tell you all about it.”

  “Cassiano was unbelievable!” Niklas exulted. “He scored three. Three!”

  Burkhart appeared in the doorway looking somewhat awkward.

  Mattie smiled. “Niklas, Aunt C, this is Herr Burkhart. He works at Private too.”

  Aunt Cäcilia blushed, pulled her robe tighter, and complained, “Ohhh, Mattie, I didn’t know you were bringing company home.”

  “He drove me home and we both realized we were starving.”

  That broke whatever spell Burkhart’s arrival had held over her aunt, who turned and bustled toward the kitchen. “I have cold sausages, potato pancakes, and homemade applesauce. And cold beer. Give me just a minute!”

  “Say hello, Niklas,” Mattie said, setting down her son, who appeared shy.

  Burkhart crouched and held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Niklas.”

  Niklas hesitated and then shook it, saying, “You’re big.”

  “I know. You will be too someday.”

  “Am I gonna lose my hair too?”

  “Niklas!” Mattie scolded.

  But Burkhart just laughed. “Being bald has nothing to do with being big, Niklas. Being bald is a state of mind.”

  Mattie grinned. The tension of the day faded toward exhaustion. “I’ve got to get him to bed.”

  “Sure,” Burkhart said. “Maybe I better go?”

  “No, no, my aunt would not hear of it. Someone going hungry is a major injustice with her.”

  “I heard that!” Aunt Cäcilia shouted from the kitchen.

  Mattie put her hand on Niklas’s shoulder and said, “Say good night.”

  “Good night, Herr Burkhart,” Niklas said.

  “You can call me Tom.”

  Niklas grinned and took his mother’s hand and they went to his room. She tucked him into bed.

  Niklas said, “Are you and Tom going to catch whoever killed Chris?”

  “Most definitely.”

  Mattie kissed him on the forehead. “Get some sleep, my little man.”

  “Tom said I’m going to be big.”

  “He did, didn’t he?”

  She went to the door.

  “Mommy?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re not going to get killed trying to find out who did it, are you?”

  Mattie turned and went straight back to him and wrapped her arms around him. “No. I’m going to be safe and here with you until you’re as big as Burkhart is.”

  Niklas hugged her fiercely. “I love you, Mommy.”

  Mattie started to tear up. “I love you too, Nicky. More than you can know.”

  CHAPTER 69

  FRIENDS, FELLOW BERLINERS, it’s not quite six in the morning, and I’m already on the road in the ML500. I have a long drive in front of me, four and a half hours to Frankfurt am Main if traffic on the autobahn cooperates.

  Can there be a better time to hear a story than over a long stretch of road? I confess I love those audiobooks, don’t you?

  Sit back, now, and listen closely:

  As I indicated once before, two years after the wall fell, well after the surgeries in Africa, it took me a month to locate the bitch that bore me.

  She was living in the sleepy hamlet of Biedenkopf near the Rothaargebirge Nature Park in west central Germany.

  Do you know the place?

  It doesn’t matter. Suffice it to say that my mother lived alone in a cottage on the outskirts of a rural village threatened by forest.

  On a chill, dark, November night, I knocked at her door.

  “Who’s there?” came a tremulous response.

  “It is me, mother,” I said, and I repeated the name she’d given me at birth.

  After a moment’s hesitation, the wooden door opened slowly, revealing an old, frail woman I almost did not recognize.

  She was carrying an old Luger, which she pointed at me suspiciously.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “A lover of masks, Mother,” I said, and made that clicking noise in my throat. “Don Giovanni’s most of all.”

  Her eyes peeled wide, and her mouth sagged open in sheer disbelief as her pistol slowly lowered. “Is it really you?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Do you still have that old Papierkrattler mask?”

  “They told me you died in Hohenschönhausen Prison!” she cried and threw herself at me, weeping.

  I caught her as any loving son would. “They told me you died there too.”

  She pushed back in horror. “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “But they said you’d be told I went into the West.”

  “They said many things,” I replied. “I didn’t believe any of it.”

  “And I should not have. Come in! Come in out of the cold!”

  I smiled dutifully at her mothering, followed her inside, and shut the door behind me.

  My mother’s living area was a simple place with an overstuffed reading chair and a lamp and a fire burning in a wood stove. There were no photographs, which made my mission seem all the easier.

  She was looking at me in wonder and joy again. “I did not recognize you.”

  “It’s been too long,” I said.

  Timidly, she said, “Your father is dead, yes?”

  “Five years now.”

  “I’d heard that,” she said with a pained expression. “But I guess all things must pass,” she went on, and then swallowed and looked at me pleadingly. “Do you forgive me?”

  I could not control my reaction.

  My right hand shot out of its own accord and grabbed my dear mother by the throat. I lifted her dangling, bug-eyed, and choking into the air.

  “As a matter of fact, Mother,” I said, “I can honestly say I will never, ever forgive you for leaving me.”

  CHAPTER 70

  PRIVATE’S CORPORATE JET was a sleek Gulfstream G650, the gold standard in business aviation. At nine forty-five that morning, the jet’s landing gear descended in anticipation of landing at Frankfurt am Main airport.

  Mattie finished her coffee and handed it to the steward, and then looked at the front page of the Berliner Morgenpost. The newspaper was plastered with stories about Agnes Krüger’s murder and Hermann Krüger’s disappearing act.

  Berlin Kripo was executing a search warrant on his offices and all his known residences in the city. The price of Krüger Industries stocks had fallen in overseas trading. At the same time, Olle Larsson, the Swedish financier, had filed documents that indicated he’d increased his position in Krüger Industries from 5 to 10 percent.

  Mattie shook her head, puzzled, trying to stitch it all together. Was Krüger involved? Had he somehow known Chris when he was a child? Krüger was born in East Germany, wasn’t he?

&
nbsp; She turned to look at Burkhart. The counterterrorism expert was in the tan leather captain’s chair opposite her. His eyes were closed—his great shaved head lolled to the right—and his breath came slow and rhythmic.

  Mattie decided that she might have underestimated Burkhart. After shutting off Niklas’s light, she’d gone back to the kitchen and found Aunt Cäcilia laughing and Burkhart grinning, a plate of sausages and potato pancakes before him.

  “He’s funny,” Aunt Cäcilia said.

  “She’s a great cook,” Burkhart said, sipping his beer.

  “I know that,” Mattie said, taking her own plate and beer.

  They’d talked and eaten for almost an hour. Burkhart was funny and entertaining in a mordant way, a quality she attributed to the line of work he’d been in prior to joining Private Berlin.

  He thanked Aunt Cäcilia twice after he’d finished, and then Mattie saw him to the door.

  “That was the best meal I’ve had in a long time,” Burkhart said. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He smiled and said, “I’ll see you at the meeting, Engel?”

  “Call me Mattie. And I’ll be there,” she promised and shut the door.

  Burkhart was a good guy. But she didn’t think of him as she went to bed. All she could see as she plunged toward sleep were images of Chris and Greta Amsel walking into Waisenhaus 44.

  Her cell phone rang at 6:20 a.m., less than six hours after she’d gone to sleep. Dr. Gabriel had found another orphan. His real name was Artur Becker. He’d changed it to Artur Jaeger. He was a design engineer for BMW in Munich.

  Mattie called BMW security, looking for a phone number for Jaeger, but was told that he had gone to the IAA Motor Show in Frankfurt am Main, and the company had a policy against disclosing personal cell phone numbers. But Mattie insisted that Jaeger could be in danger, and the security person on duty relented.

  Mattie called the number immediately. Jaeger answered groggily. She identified herself and asked if his real name was Artur Becker.

  A pause. “I don’t know who you’re talking about. My name is Jaeger.”

  “Please, sir, I’m trying to warn you about—”

  Jaeger almost screamed at her, “I don’t know anyone named Artur Becker!”

  “I think you do, and other orphans,” she said. “You’re all in—”

  “This is a sick, sick joke,” he said, and hung up.

  She tried him back several times but got his voice mail. She left a detailed message, describing what had happened to Greta Amsel and to please call her back. Then in frustration she called Morgan, who told her to take the jet to Frankfurt.

  Finally she had called Burkhart, and he’d met her at the corporate terminal.

  She reached over and tapped him on the forearm. He startled and jerked awake.

  “We’re landing,” she said.

  Burkhart yawned. “Thanks. How far to the auto show?”

  “Fifteen-minute drive, tops,” Mattie said as the jet touched down.

  He sat up straighter, all business, and checked his watch, and his face turned grim. “Let’s hope we get there in time.”

  CHAPTER 71

  FOLLOWING SIX OLD men who carried the colonel’s ashes, Hauptkommissar Hans Dietrich trudged through wet grass toward an open grave in Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, the central cemetery in the Lichtenberg district of East Berlin. The high commissar’s head pounded from the vodka he’d consumed so copiously the night before, trying to deaden his mind so he would not drown in the dark, twisted quagmire that was his father.

  It had not worked.

  Dietrich’s drunken thoughts had not been where they should have been—on the slaughterhouse, say, or on Christoph Schneider, Agnes Krüger, and now this Amsel woman. Instead, he’d wallowed in memories of the colonel and the ruthless manner in which his father raised him.

  Indeed, brutally hungover, moving unsteadily toward the grave, the high commissar’s mind was still recalling the cold and often inexplicably cruel acts to which his father had treated him growing up.

  Dietrich was fifty-two. He’d been trying to understand the colonel since he was a child. But as he watched the old men observing his father’s urn being lowered into the grave, he realized once again that he could neither explain his father nor come to terms with him.

  The colonel was dead and about to be buried, yet the high commissar had the shuddering realization that the threat of the man might never die.

  Dietrich gazed blearily at the men gathered around his father’s final resting place. They were in their seventies and eighties, and they wore somber gray suits, dark raincoats, and fedoras.

  There was no minister present. The colonel might have risen from the grave in fury had there been.

  But one of the men, stout with rheumy eyes and gin blossoms on his nose, stepped forward at last, and said: “Conrad was one of the last of his kind, and to me it is fitting that he be given a final resting place close to the greats.”

  Dietrich looked off toward a circular brick wall strangled in vine. He knew there were many burial urns sealed in the wall. A tall upright stone slab cut like an ancient tombstone stood dead center of the yard inside the brick wall. Surrounding the tombstone were the graves of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Wilhelm Pieck, and seven other titans of the German communist movement.

  My father’s heroes, Dietrich thought bitterly. So close and yet so far.

  He looked back at his father’s mourners. They were looking at him expectantly and he realized the stout one had stopped speaking.

  The high commissar said nothing. He took two steps forward, picked up a clod of wet black earth, thought to hurl it, but then dropped it on the urn. He stepped back, aware of the mud on his hand and not caring.

  One by one, the pallbearers tossed dirt into the grave and then shook Dietrich’s hand, blackening it further.

  The last mourner, the stout man, said, “You have the condolences of the inner committee, Hauptkommissar. Your father was a valued member.”

  With a dull, flat expression, Dietrich nodded. “Thank you, Willy.”

  Willy hesitated, and then hardened. “I suppose you must feel relieved then, now that he’s gone.”

  Dietrich had to fight to quell the nausea roiling in his stomach as he said, “Actually, I feel cursed by him, by all of you. I won’t be free of that until I know that every last one of you is dead, and all your secrets are buried with you.”

  CHAPTER 72

  IT IS JUST past 10 a.m. when I turn the Mercedes into a parking structure on the northwest corner of the grounds of the IAA Motor Show, the largest car exhibition in the world. Gleaming exotic rides litter the parking lot, and I’m instantly a happy man. I love cars. They’re one of the best disguises there is.

  In the right car, my friends, you can be anyone, don’t you think?

  I park and study a photo of Artur Jaeger downloaded from the Internet, thinking about the helpful secretary who told me where I might find the engineer.

  I look in the mirror, checking the makeup job that makes me appear bald and much older. I zip up a blue windbreaker, and then put on a red one with an Aston Martin logo over it.

  I tug on a matching ball cap.

  I pause, forcing myself to breathe deep and slow.

  I know what a terrible risk I’m taking.

  It’s unlike me. I prefer to have the odds in my favor. But I have no choice.

  So I get the pistol and the suppressor from under my seat and slide the weapon into a holster I wear beneath the windbreaker.

  I open the door and make a show of pain as I get out. I’ve got a bad hip, or arthritis, or at least I do today.

  I gimp toward the galleria entrance, telling myself that if I am as cold and deadly as my father taught me to be, I just might leave Frankfurt an even more invisible man.

  CHAPTER 73

  THE TAXI FROM the airport dropped Mattie and Burkhart in front of the unequal twin towers called Kastor and Pollux that fro
nt the city entrance to the Frankfurt Messe trade fair. They paid for admission at the Festhalle entrance and entered a sprawling campus of gigantic halls linked by moving walkways and escalators.

  It was the second to last day of the show, but the place was still packed. Using a map, they navigated toward the BMW stand in hall number one and began looking for Artur Jaeger using a photo Dr. Gabriel had sent to their cell phones.

  Mattie spotted him up on a stage beside a beautiful woman in an evening gown. He held a microphone and was describing the intricacies of the sleek concept sports car that was turning on a revolving platform behind him.

  Mattie worked through the crowd toward the front. It was loud inside the massive hall, a general din that competed with Jaeger’s spiel, so she did not hear what caused the engineer to suddenly jerk, drop the mic, and collapse backward.

  But when Jaeger hit the stage floor, she saw the fine plume of blood that burst from his lips.

  “Shooter!” Burkhart roared. “Everyone down!”

  Chaos bloomed into pandemonium as people around the BMW exhibit began screaming, diving for the floor, or tripping toward the exits.

  Mattie drew her gun, her mind computing the rough angle from which Jaeger had to have been shot. She looked along that line of sight and spotted among those trying to flee an older man in a red windbreaker limping quickly away.

  “The guy in the red jacket!” Mattie shouted at Burkhart.

  He heard them. The old man began bulling his way through the melee, showing tremendous strength and agility.

  But Burkhart was like a rhino on steroids. He brushed people aside as if they were scarecrows, with Mattie trailing in his wake.

  The killer disappeared out into a crowded passage. Ten seconds later, Burkhart and Mattie exited the same doors and scanned the crowd, which was beginning to pick up on the frenzy inside the hall as more and more people ran from it talking about the shooting.

  The old man was gone.

  Or was he?

  Mattie spotted a red jacket on the floor.