Private Berlin Read online

  “Maybe some of it,” Doruk replied. “But the rest, I think, you’ll use for your own gain and leisure.”

  He laughed bitterly at her. “Fuck you. Who are you? You don’t know me. What are you trying to say, that I killed my mother? I wasn’t anywhere near my mother when she was shot. I was here at a rally for Tacheles.”

  “I know,” Katharina Doruk said. “We checked.”

  “There you go, then,” he shot back. “So why don’t you take your vicious innuendo and get the hell out of here.”

  Katharina ignored him, looking instead at his girlfriend and saying, “But you know, Tanya, very few people seem to remember you being at the rally.”

  “Me? I was there,” she said indignantly. “Lots of people saw me.”

  “Name one,” Doruk said.

  “Rude,” she said.

  “Convenient.”

  “There were others,” she protested.

  Doruk shook her head. “No. You left the rally shortly after it began and went to Wilmersdorf. You knew Agnes was going out to lunch because Rudy told you she was going to lunch with her friend Ingrid Dahl at Restaurant Quarré. You knew the route she’d likely take leaving. You waited and you shot her.”

  “You have no proof of that,” Tanya said, her voice breaking toward a whine.

  “We will,” Doruk said. “Or rather Kripo will. They’re searching Rudy’s studio right now.”

  “What?” Rudy Krüger yelled, pulling away from his girlfriend.

  For a moment, Tanya looked too stunned to move. But then she tried to take off. Doruk was too quick. She grabbed Tanya and shoved her arm up behind her back.

  “I had no idea!” Rudy Krüger was shouting at Doruk. “If she did this, she did it on her own. Stupid, crazy bitch!”

  At that Tanya went berserk and started spitting words at him. “What? This was your idea! You said no one would ever suspect me! This was your idea! You said we could do good with that money. We could save Tacheles, and other places, and live a righteous life.”

  “That’s not true,” he said, and turned as if to get away from her.

  But Inspector Weigel stood in his way.

  CHAPTER 112

  MATTIE AND HIGH Commissar Dietrich exited the S-Bahn at Alexanderplatz. They crossed the plaza where the protests had peaked before the fall of the wall.

  Dietrich was on his cell phone. Mattie snapped hers shut in frustration; since leaving central Kripo headquarters, she’d been trying unsuccessfully to reach her aunt Cäcilia, Niklas, and Tom Burkhart. She’d not heard from any of them the entire day.

  Mattie glanced at the high commissar, who was listening closely. She had thought his career was finished when he admitted to lying his way into Berlin Kripo, but his boss, Carl Gottschalk, had surprised her, telling Dietrich he would face a severe disciplinary hearing and probably suspension, but in the meantime he was to use his father’s contacts to find Falk.

  Dietrich hung up and smiled at her in chagrin. “Your associate, Frau Doruk, was right. Weigel just placed Rudy Krüger and his girlfriend under arrest for Agnes’s murder.”

  Mattie shook her head. “The anarchist did it for the money.”

  They turned onto Karl-Marx-Allee just as night fully seized Berlin. The temperature had been climbing all afternoon, but a wind was picking up. As they passed the Café Moskau, Mattie smelled ozone.

  A storm was coming. Fast.

  “There he is,” Dietrich said, slowing and gesturing toward a glass-walled and steel-framed box of a building that exuded a soft, silvery glow. “Other side of the bar, his back to the wall.”

  Mattie peered into the Bar Babette, one of the hippest watering holes in Berlin, with a retro 1960s décor and an artsy clientele. The place was sparsely populated at this early hour of the evening. Even so, the stout old man in the gray suit and dark topcoat looked jarringly out of place.

  “Let me do the talking,” Dietrich said and went to the front door.

  Mattie followed him into the bar and looked over his shoulder at the man sitting in the suit and topcoat before a tumbler of vodka.

  His face was rectangular, sloughing, and pale. Pouches of wrinkled skin hung below his watery eyes, which were huge, dull blue, and watchful. He studied Dietrich and Mattie in turn.

  “Who is this woman, Hans?” the old man asked.

  “Her name is Mattie Engel, Willy,” Dietrich said. “She used to be a valued member of Kripo, but we lost her talents to Private Berlin a few years ago. She’s been working on the same case.”

  The man nodded and held out his hand. “You can think of me as Willy Fassbinder. It’s not my real name, but no matter. Hans tells me you wish to talk about life in the East before the wall fell. Are you new to Berlin?”

  “I grew up in West Berlin,” she said. “But to be more exact, we—”

  But Fassbinder spoke right over her. “Did you know that this was the cultural center, the nucleus of the arts and society in the GDR?” He pointed out the window. “The Kino International across the street was where all the great films premiered. The Café Moskau was the most famous club in the East. Just next door here was the Mokka-Milch-Eisbar, the best place for children to eat ice cream in all of East Germany. They had these little slivers of chocolate they’d put on sundaes that they called Pittiplatsch. My daughter loved them. Do remember the Eisbar, Hans? They wrote a song about it. A big hit.”

  Dietrich replied, “I remember the song, but I never came here, Willy.”

  “No?” Fassbinder said, seeming surprised. He smiled at Mattie. “And this place was a beauty salon: Babette’s Cosmetique. My late wife would come here every other Tuesday to have her hair and nails done in the latest styles from Moscow and Leningrad.” His face was melancholy with nostalgia. “It’s why I suggested this place to meet when Hans said you wanted to speak of the past. I often come here to think of those days.”

  CHAPTER 113

  A WAITRESS CAME to take their orders, espressos for Mattie and Dietrich and two more fingers of vodka on the rocks for Fassbinder.

  As soon as she walked away, Dietrich said, “Actually, Willy, we wanted to talk to you about things and events that may have occurred within the Ministry for State Security, things and events that my father may have described to you in a drunken late-night telephone conversation many, many years ago.”

  Fassbinder’s nostrils flared instantly, and Mattie sensed a wall go up around him. She doubted they would get cooperation from the old man.

  “Most Berliners have moved on, Hans,” Fassbinder said crisply after several moments of silence. “They no longer wish to talk of the ministry.”

  “Please, Willy. I tried to talk of these things with my father right before he collapsed and died. His secrets killed him. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  Fassbinder’s attitude changed several degrees, as though he were wondering about his own impending fate. Finally, he asked, “What things?”

  Mattie said, “The slaughterhouse in Ahrensfelde and a man named Falk. We believe he worked there for the Stasi.”

  The waitress returned with their drinks. While she set them out, Mattie watched as the old man maintained a blank expression, zero reaction.

  “Did Falk work for the Stasi?” Dietrich asked when the waitress left.

  Fassbinder took a long sip of his vodka, coughed, and said carefully, “No. Not in any official capacity, and by that I mean that I believe you will never find a trace of him in the special Stasi archives, nor in the logs of Hohenschönhausen Prison, or anywhere else, I imagine. And, as I understand it, that slaughterhouse was destroyed just a few days ago. So there isn’t anything I can say that would not be conjecture and hearsay on my part.”

  Mattie felt herself growing angry. “Well, Willy, or whoever you really are, there’s no hearsay or conjecture in the fact that I was in the subbasement of that slaughterhouse before it blew. I saw where the corpses of the tortured mothers were fed to rats while their children watched. I saw the bones myself.”

&nbs
p; That turned Fassbinder aghast and his skin ashen. “I…I had no idea that these things were occurring there, absolutely no idea. I will go to my grave telling you that.”

  “But my father knew, didn’t he?” Dietrich demanded. “He found out about the slaughterhouse—he got very drunk one night, and he told you he could not stand being a part of these heinous crimes, and that he would not go down with whoever ordered the tortures and killings. Didn’t he?”

  Fassbinder’s head tilted back as if pulled by some heavy weight before he sighed and nodded ever so slightly.

  CHAPTER 114

  FASSBINDER CLEARED HIS throat and said, “He, your father, had heard rumors, just as I had heard rumors of the secret crematoriums we were running where the bodies of the disappeared were being taken. Your father made a personal investigation. He found some truth, and more rumors. But it was enough to shake him, and Conrad Frommer was largely an unshakeable man.”

  “He offered you no concrete proof?” Mattie asked.

  Fassbinder looked at her as if she were naïve and laughed. “Concrete? Frau Engel, there was nothing concrete inside the Ministry for State Security. Everything was illusion, smoke and mirrors, gossip and accusations, outright lies and intricately manufactured half-truths. No one knew that better than Conrad.”

  “Why?” Dietrich asked. “What exactly did my father do in the Stasi?”

  Fassbinder’s eyebrows rose. “He never told you?”

  “No,” the high commissar replied.

  That surprised the old man even more. “You honestly have no idea?”

  “None.”

  Fassbinder laughed again, this time in some bewilderment at the mystery that had been Dietrich’s father. Then he leaned forward conspiratorially and in a voice that Mattie had to strain to hear, he said, “Your father was a good policeman, Hans, an excellent detective like you. He was so good, however, that he was chosen to work behind the scenes on secret investigations for Mielke. He was one of Mielke’s get-things-done men.”

  “Mielke?” Dietrich cried. “You mean Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi?”

  “I said your father was talented,” Fassbinder replied as if the high commissar were an imbecile. “Conrad worked for him directly on projects vital to Mielke’s personal agenda.”

  Although Mattie was shocked and fascinated by this revelation, she asked, “But what about the slaughterhouse? What about Falk? Tell us what the high commissar’s father told you.”

  The old man turned grim. “He said that he’d somehow discovered that the slaughterhouse in Ahrensfelde was being used as Mielke’s personal torture chamber, the place people were taken when he absolutely wanted to know their secrets.”

  “And Falk was the torturer?”

  “And executioner, as I understand it now,” Fassbinder said.

  Over the course of the next half hour, the old Stasi told them what he knew, the fact, the rumor, and the conjecture.

  Dietrich’s father never mentioned Falk’s first name, or if he did Fassbinder did not remember it. Falk’s father ran the abattoir for the state in the sixties and seventies. The boy grew up working in the slaughterhouse, and was said to be very close to his mother.

  When Falk was ten, however, his mother was arrested, charged with crimes against the state, and taken to Hohenschönhausen Prison. She was a makeup artist with the German State Opera who had become involved in the underground railroad helping East Germans escape into the West, a crime considered high treason at the time.

  The younger Falk was said to be extremely smart; he read all the time and excelled in school. But soon after his mother’s imprisonment, for whatever reason, he discovered that he enjoyed killing the animals coming in to slaughter.

  Mattie squinted one eye, saying, “And what, Mielke recognized that part of him and encouraged it?”

  “You’re asking me to explain a paranoid mad genius, Frau Engel. I can’t claim to know Erich Mielke’s mind or how he came to know of Falk. But however it happened, the high commissar’s father told me that the boy was enlisted into Mielke’s private army shortly after the slaughterhouse was closed as an abattoir in the late 1970s.”

  CHAPTER 115

  DIETRICH WATCHED THE old Stasi take a deep draw off his vodka and asked, “How long was it used as a torture chamber?”

  “I don’t know that either,” Fassbinder replied. “But certainly until your father got wind of it, sometime in January or February of 1980. He was frightened to confront Mielke. That was what that drunken call you overheard was about.”

  In his mind, the high commissar could see himself outside his father’s bedroom, listening to him rant. It was like yesterday. “Why was he so upset?”

  “Your father, though a great patriot and party loyalist, refused on principle to engage in character assassination, torture, or murder. He dealt with facts. He confronted Mielke with facts, and demanded the operation be shut down. It was a very brave thing to do, Hans. It could have gotten your father sent to Hohenschönhausen, or to the slaughterhouse himself.”

  Dietrich was stunned. For so many years, he’d thought of his father in a single, ruthless way—cruel and unprincipled, except for his devotion to the state. And now it turned out that he may have been the one who rescued the motherless children of Waisenhaus 44? Was the colonel there that night when they were all brought to the orphanage?

  Before the high commissar put voice to these thoughts, Mattie asked Fassbinder, “Why would Mielke back down like that?”

  Fassbinder shrugged. “I don’t know, though I suspect that Conrad must have had something on Mielke aside from the slaughterhouse, something that could not be simply found or erased. In any case, he closed the torture chamber and had all paper evidence of it destroyed, sometime in the spring of 1980, I’d presume.”

  “And Falk?” Dietrich asked.

  Fassbinder’s laugh was curt and cruel. “They threw him in Hohenschönhausen Prison for a few months. And then they retrained him.”

  “Retrained him?” Mattie said. “As what? He was a sadistic psychopath.”

  The old Stasi’s lips puckered before he asked, “Other than being an executioner, what’s the best profession for a man who genuinely enjoys killing?”

  “Assassin?” Dietrich said.

  Fassbinder reappraised him. “You are as quick as your father, Hans. The rumor was that Mielke had Falk trained to be a more perfect killer, one run by the state, or rather the head of the ministry.”

  That took Dietrich aback. “He murdered people for Mielke? I didn’t think assassination was part of the Stasi playbook.”

  “I can’t say that he actually carried out killings for Mielke, only that he was trained to do so,” Fassbinder replied.

  “And then?” Mattie pressed.

  Fassbinder shrugged again. “We were an institution fueled by suspicions invented by despots. Who could keep track of everything that happened and everyone who was involved in the last few years? Suffice it to say that one day, long before the wall fell, your father discovered that all records concerning Falk had disappeared. Until you walked into this bar tonight, I had not heard one word of Falk since then. He vanished as many people did when the wall fell. A myth. End of story.”

  Fassbinder’s information gelled with much of what Ilona Frei and Kiefer Braun had testified to. But it also raised as many questions as it answered. Dietrich was about to launch into a litany of them when he noticed a reflection in the window behind the old Stasi.

  Both Dietrich and Mattie twisted in their chairs to find Tom Burkhart looking at them with a somber expression. “There are no records of Falk in the special Stasi archives,” he said. “I spent most of the day there.”

  “We just found that out ourselves,” Mattie replied.

  Burkhart broke into a victorious grin. “But there were records in a church not far from the slaughterhouse. I found Falk’s baptismal certificate there. I know his first and middle names, and I believe I know exactly where we can find him.”

 
“Where?” Dietrich and Mattie demanded almost in unison.

  “At his art gallery in Charlottenburg.”

  CHAPTER 116

  LESS THAN AN hour later, the intense flame of an acetylene torch cut through the iron security gate at the I. M. Ehrlichmann Gallery of Fine Art. Police barricades had gone up around the entire block.

  Special weapons and tactical Kripo officers surrounded all exits, including the roof, which was being monitored by a helicopter flying in high winds.

  Mattie was there with Burkhart and Dietrich, all suited up in bulletproof armor. To one side, Ilona Frei watched, wrapped in a blanket and trembling in the arms of the former Kiefer Braun.

  “Three-story building; he owns the whole thing,” Dr. Gabriel told them. “He claims his residency on the second and third floors above the gallery.”

  The torch died. Burkhart said, “We are go.”

  The SWAT team assaulted the building from front and rear, blowing open the doors with rams and following with stun grenades.

  They should have saved the explosives and the doors.

  Matthias Isaac Falk, aka “I. M. Ehrlichmann,” aka “Isaac Matthias Ehrlichmann,” was gone.

  The name switch seemed obvious when you saw it on paper, but Mattie decided she had to admire Burkhart’s clever instinct in making the connection so quickly once he’d seen the baptismal certificate.

  When they were cleared to go inside, Mattie held a kerchief to her mouth because the air was still acrid from the stun grenades. Falk’s gallery was a warren of a shop, crammed wall to wall and floor to ceiling with primitive art, including a huge collection on the walls surrounding his office area that featured masks from every corner of the world.

  On the second floor, High Commissar Dietrich discovered a makeup kit. In the basement garage, he found eight vehicles, including a blue panel van and an impeccably maintained Trabant 601.

  Mattie made the biggest discovery. When she tried to open a locked upright filing cabinet behind the gallery desk, she noticed that it rocked oddly.