Private Berlin Read online

  “No. I don’t know him either. Never heard of him.”

  Dietrich made that noise again and then said, “This is a waste of time. I’m leaving right—”

  Carl Gottschalk caught him by the elbow. “Wait.”

  Weigel had gotten up from the interrogation table. She went to the door and opened it. Ilona Frei shuffled in, her head bowed.

  Krainer stared at her, trying to figure out who she was, until she said, “Hello, Kiefer. It’s me, Ilona. Ilona Frei.”

  The man looked like he’d seen a ghost or a zombie, but he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know you.”

  Ilona took that like a slap to the face. “I’m Ilse’s sister, Kiefer. Please. You know me, and you know what happened to us in the slaughterhouse.”

  “No, I don’t,” he said, but he would no longer look at her.

  “Chris is dead!” Ilona screamed at him. “So is Greta! And Ilse! And Artur!”

  Krainer’s head rocked back in disbelief. “What? I—”

  “Falk’s alive,” she blubbered. “He tried to kill me last night. And he’ll try to kill you if he finds out who you are.”

  Krainer was suddenly wrapped up in a faraway expression, as if he were watching some horror from a great distance.

  “If you don’t tell, he’s won,” Ilona pleaded. “Please, tell them. They think I’m insane. Tell them or they won’t believe me. Tell them, or we both die!”

  CHAPTER 106

  KRAINER’S JAW WAS trembling, and tears came to his eyes when he at last allowed himself to look at Ilona Frei. In a voice that sounded to Mattie like a lost boy’s, he said, “I’ve never spoken about it, Ilona…not one word.”

  Ilona walked to him and put her hand on his shoulder, weeping. “I know. None of us did. None of us.”

  “He said he’d kill us if we ever talked.”

  “Falk’s already trying to kill you,” Inspector Weigel said. “We’re offering you protection, but only if you tell us what we want to know.”

  Over the course of the next hour, Krainer’s story came out in fits and starts, but it corroborated much of what Ilona Frei had told Mattie and Burkhart the evening before.

  Krainer was born in Leipzig, where he was christened Edmund Tillerman. When he was six, his father, an attorney who had been speaking out against the communist government, simply disappeared.

  Ilona Frei’s real name was Karin Klauser. Ilse’s was Annette. They were born and raised in Thüringen. Their father, a scientist, vanished when Ilona was eight and Ilse was five.

  Several weeks after their fathers’ disappearances, both Krainer and Ilona Frei remembered men pounding on their doors in the middle of the night, and then their mothers crying and begging for mercy.

  The men grabbed them from their beds.

  They took their mothers too.

  They were taken to the slaughterhouse in Ahrensfelde.

  They were put in those rooms to either side of the anteroom hallway. There were bunks bolted into the walls, a metal pot, and little else. At one point, fifteen women were held there along with their sixteen children.

  In the dead of night, a young man, no more than twenty, would come. They knew him only as “Falk,” and most nights he would select a mother and her child or children and bring them into the slaughterhouse itself.

  Falk put the mothers through unimaginable pain, hanging them on meat hooks by their handcuffs so their arms dislocated. He burned their feet with cigarettes. He whipped them, cut them, and raped them, trying to get them to turn evidence against their husbands, their husbands’ friends, and their families.

  Falk made Krainer, Chris, Ilona, and the other children watch what he did to their mothers. Falk said he thought it made the mothers’ torture even more unbearable, and therefore made them more likely to talk about their crimes against the state.

  If and when that didn’t work, Falk tortured the children in front of their mothers.

  “And when he thought he’d gotten everything out of our mothers,” Krainer said, “Falk killed them with a screwdriver and dumped their bodies in a well filled with rats.”

  CHAPTER 107

  KRAINER BROKE DOWN completely, and Ilona Frei threw her arms around him, saying, “Thank you, Kiefer. Now they’ll believe. They’ll believe.”

  “I’ll give you two a moment,” Inspector Weigel said. She got up, ashen-faced, and looked right at the two-way mirror before heading to the door.

  High Commissar Dietrich looked much sicker than a man with a brutal hangover, Mattie thought. He stared at the two people in the interrogation room with an expression that was drifting toward hopelessness.

  But when Inspector Weigel came into the observation room, carrying a manila folder that she handed to Carl Gottschalk, Dietrich said, “This can’t be true. It would have come out after the wall fell. A place like the slaughterhouse would have come out.”

  Mattie crossed her arms. “Not if all the files about it were destroyed before the uprising started, long before the wall came down.”

  “They burned files in every state agency,” Inspector Weigel said. “Everyone knows that. So which one was Falk working for? The Stasi? The secret police?”

  Dietrich said nothing. Mattie noticed Dietrich’s boss studying him intently.

  “He had to have been Stasi,” Mattie said, watching Dietrich now as well. “They used torture and execution at Hohenschönhausen Prison to make family members testify against one another. Starvation, sleep deprivation, mock drowning.”

  “But this is beyond the pale,” Dietrich said in a hushed voice. “Depraved.”

  “Yes,” Mattie said. “It was.”

  The high commissar looked at his supervisor and said in a voice more sure of its convictions: “Carl, without some kind of documentation—”

  “Documentation?” Mattie cried, cutting him off. “You’ve got eyewitnesses! Look at them, High Commissar. Do they look like they’re lying?”

  Inside the interrogation room, tiny Ilona Frei was still holding on to Krainer, who was sobbing, “Falk stuck a screwdriver in the back of my mother’s head, Ilona. And I just stood there and watched him do it.”

  Dietrich’s shoulders suddenly rolled so far forward that he looked like a wading bird cowering in the shadows. In a shaky voice, he said, “I’m sorry, Carl, I…I can’t believe that—”

  “High Commissar,” Inspector Weigel said sharply. “Why have you been trying to steer this investigation as far from the slaughterhouse and Falk as possible?”

  Dietrich looked shocked and then indignant in his response to Carl Gottschalk. “I have not. And I certainly won’t have a rookie investigator questioning my—”

  “You have tried to slow or thwart this investigation from the beginning,” Mattie said firmly. “Inspector Weigel says that you considered Burkhart and me enemies from the outset.”

  “She was mistaken in my meaning,” he snapped. “Why would I have any interest in doing such a terrible, unproductive thing?”

  “Because, Hauptkommissar,” Mattie said, “your father, Colonel Conrad Dietrich Frommer, was Stasi and, before you changed your name, you were Stasi too.”

  CHAPTER 108

  “THAT’S AN OUT-AND-OUT lie!” Dietrich shot back. “You have no proof of that.”

  Carl Gottschalk looked pained and pitying when he said, “Unfortunately, she does, High Commissar.” He placed a photocopied document in front of Dietrich. “This is your application to become a trainee cadet at the GDR’s Ministry for State Security as Hans Dietrich Frommer, son of Conrad Dietrich Frommer.”

  Dietrich gazed in disbelief at the document. “This isn’t real. They—”

  “That document is very real,” his supervisor stated flatly. “After Frau Engel and Inspector Weigel came to me with Ilona Frei, I petitioned the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives to do a rapid search for us. She balked at first, but when I told her it concerned an ongoing murder investigation, she agreed to help us.”

  Carl Gottschalk’s face turn
ed stony as he placed another paper in front of Dietrich. “This is a copy of your application to Berlin Kripo, six months after you changed your name and thirteen months after the wall fell. You did not mention the name change on your application. You did not disclose anything about the year you spent as a member of the East German secret police, Hans. Nor did you disclose your father’s long involvement. You wrote in your application that your father was a carpenter, a conveniently dead carpenter.”

  Dietrich sighed and said nothing at first. Then he looked up at them all, a broken man. “I hid who I was because I wanted to be a policeman, as my father had been, and my grandfather had been. I did not care for politics. I still do not. I have only wanted to be one thing my entire life—a policeman.”

  The high commissar explained that he had spent just eleven months as a recruit to the Stasi.

  “I laid down my weapon after I was ordered to go to Gethsemane Church. I heard what they wanted me to do there, and I walked away. I’d heard about people shredding paper as well. So I walked away three weeks before the wall fell and joined the protests.”

  “Why lie, then?” Carl Gottschalk demanded.

  “It was a strange time after the wall fell, Carl, remember?” Dietrich said. “I had no job. Little food. No place to live. And there were many people from the East who wanted revenge on anyone associated with the Stasi, and they were right to want it. I had done nothing wrong, but even so I could read the writing on the wall. Being a member and son of the Stasi would only hurt me in the new Germany. So I lied.”

  “What about the slaughterhouse?” Mattie asked. “Did you suspect it had been used as a torture chamber? Or did you know?”

  Dietrich took a deep breath and said, “Suspected.”

  The high commissar described a night when he was in his early teens. His father came home drunk. He got on the phone and Dietrich overheard the colonel’s side of the conversation.

  “He was ranting and raving about all sorts of things,” Dietrich recalled. “But then I heard him saying that he feared being caught up in what he called, quote, ‘barbaric secrets’ associated with the auxiliary slaughterhouse in Ahrensfelde. He also said that he would not go down for, quote, ‘that man.’”

  “Who was he referring to?” Mattie asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you ever ask him?” Inspector Weigel asked.

  Dietrich cleared his throat. “I did, Weigel. Twice. Both times within the last five days. The first time he told me to stay away from the slaughterhouse. The second time he had a stroke and died.”

  “Who else knew about the slaughterhouse other than your father?” Mattie asked. “Do you know who he was talking to that night?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” the high commissar replied. “But I suspect it was one of the men who helped bury my father yesterday.”

  CHAPTER 109

  INSIDE A FOURTH-FLOOR room at the Hotel de Rome, Jack Morgan paced, checked his watch, and glanced back and forth at the television and Daniel Brecht’s iPad.

  The television sportscaster was giving a spirited report on the manner in which Cassiano, in a rare afternoon match, had completely dissected the Düsseldorf defense, scoring four goals, two of them singlehandedly.

  Brecht’s screen, meanwhile, showed the exterior hallway, and the interior of the adjacent hotel room where Perfecta stood in a sheer white nightgown, looking in the mirror and tending to her makeup.

  “I still can’t understand why she went for Pavel’s scam,” Georg Johansson said. “I mean look at her. She could have anything she wanted.”

  Morgan shrugged. “I assume there’s more to this than she’s telling us. There always is. But twenty million euros is a solid motive for crime, no matter how beautiful you are.”

  “Here we go,” Brecht said, gesturing at the hallway feed, which showed an irate Maxim Pavel storming past the camera.

  They heard him pounding on the door offscreen and through the other feed inside Perfecta’s hotel room.

  The Brazilian model did not move, but then Brecht said, “Answer the door. Get him to talk.”

  Perfecta had a radio bud in her ear. “I can’t,” she whispered.

  “You can and will if you want any chance at a judge giving you leniency.”

  Perfecta nodded but went hesitantly to the door and opened it, saying, “Maxim! You’re early! I only just—”

  The Russian nightclub owner smacked her in the face so hard she stumbled backward and crashed to the hotel room floor. “You whore!” he seethed, kicking the door shut behind him. “You stupid Brazilian whore!”

  “What, Maxim?” Perfecta cried, cowering from him. “What did I do?”

  “Do?” he shouted. “Your husband played brilliantly this afternoon, and I lost millions on the spread! Millions!”

  With that Pavel threw himself on her, got his hands around her neck, and began to choke her.

  “Now!” Morgan said.

  Agent Johansson burst through the door into the next room, gun drawn, yelling, “BKA! German Federal Police!”

  He grabbed the nightclub owner by the collar and swung him up and around and slammed him against the wall. “You’re under arrest.”

  “For what?” Pavel managed to demand.

  “Assault, to start,” Johansson said, snapping the handcuffs on. “Fraud. Conspiracy. Attempted murder. There will be other charges, I’m sure.”

  “Like four counts of premeditated murder,” Morgan said as Johansson spun Pavel around and Brecht helped Perfecta up from the floor.

  Pavel looked at her and Morgan with contempt. “I’ve never killed anyone.”

  “That right?” Brecht said. “Where have you been the last few days? Take a trip to Frankfurt? Spend some time with Greta Amsel, Herr Falk?”

  “Falk?” the nightclub owner said. “Frankfurt? I don’t know any Greta.”

  “Then where have you been since we saw you last?” Morgan demanded.

  Pavel hesitated and then shrugged, saying, “I have an ironclad alibi. I was with my lover, my real lover. His name is Alex. He lives in Vienna.”

  “Alex?” Perfecta asked, incredulous. “You said you were straight.”

  The nightclub owner laughed at her. “And you’re dumber than I thought. I own a drag-queen club for God’s sake.”

  CHAPTER 110

  FORTY MINUTES LATER, as the sun began to set, Katharina Doruk wandered off Oranienburger Strasse into Tacheles. She walked through the art collective’s archway, which led to the large outdoor art area behind the building. The dusk throbbed with a blend of hip-hop and techno and glowed like a movie set.

  Spotlights were trained on the opening of Rudy Krüger’s Rude, Rot, Riot exhibition, which had attracted a crowd of anarchists, punks, street people, artists, musicians, poets, and other assorted Berliners who were drinking heavily from an open bar.

  Katharina Doruk spotted the man of the hour, dressed entirely in black, standing with his arm around his “student” Tanya. He was holding a beer bottle and shaking hands with an admirer who had a fluorescent green mohawk and tiny skulls on chains hanging from his pierced nose.

  Rudy Krüger spotted Doruk and grimaced when she came up to him after the mohawk man moved on. “Why are you here?” he asked caustically. “I’m not talking to you or anyone. You and Kripo let Hermann go, and now he’s shutting me out of planning for her funeral!”

  “I work for Private—letting your stepfather go wasn’t my call, and I can’t control his actions either,” Doruk said. “I came to support your opening. I figured you could use it. But I see you’ve got more than enough, and I’m not wanted here, so I’ll go.”

  Tanya frowned and squeezed him around the waist. “Rude, be nice. She’s just trying to help.” Doruk noticed then that Tanya was wearing a black leather jacket that had to have cost at least €1,500. It made Doruk more confident.

  “Okay, all right, I’m an asshole sometimes,” Rudy Krüger said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Apology acc
epted,” Doruk said. “Quite the bash.”

  He shrugged. “One thing I learned from Hermann, you want to be known, you better yell a lot. Want a beer?”

  “Maybe later,” Doruk said. “Did you know your stepfather maintains that your mother was divorcing him?”

  “He’s lying,” Rudy Krüger said immediately, and then hesitated. “I don’t know why, but he’s lying. That was the irony. She was staying with him, selling out for the money.”

  Katharina Doruk shook her head. “According to him, your mother had laid down the line. Despite the fact that he’d pledged to turn his pursuits to philanthropy, she’d decided to leave with her dignity intact. That’s the irony. If she’d done it, you were the one who would have been screwed, Rudy.”

  CHAPTER 111

  RUDY KRÜGER’S LIPS thinned. “What the fuck you talking about?”

  “Your mother’s prenuptial agreement,” Doruk said. “Before he left Kripo headquarters I asked Hermann if you were mentioned in the agreement. Know what he told me?”

  The billionaire’s stepson shrugged.

  “He said the deal worked like this,” Doruk said. “If your mother stayed married to Hermann until his death, she would inherit his entire fortune, which meant you would eventually inherit a fortune.”

  “I don’t care about money,” he said flatly. “And so what?”

  “It also stated that if your mother divorced Hermann, she would get only ten million.”

  “I told you that,” Rudy Krüger replied.

  “You did,” Doruk said. “But what’s interesting is that the third provision in the agreement states that if Agnes died first in marriage, her husband would provide you, Rudy, with a full tenth share of his fortune, which as of the close of trading today was worth close to four hundred million euros.”

  He stared at her. “If you say so. I told you I don’t care about money. I’ll probably give it to this place. Make sure it survives.”