Good As Gone (8 page)

Of course, she would have had no reason to call me.
I
should’ve called
her.
Why hadn’t I phoned her to ask after Elise? Was it guilt? It had been an accident; as bad as I felt about the girl landing in the hospital, I’d never felt it was my fault. Or had I?

I’d been chasing people my entire adult life, first with the marshals and since on my own. Running down fugitives and then child thieves, from country to country, all around the world. But was I running after them? Or was I really running away? At what point had my objective changed? After Hailey’s abduction, when I went out on my own? Had I been running these past ten years from what happened? Or had I begun this long before Hailey was gone?

Maybe Tasha had been right to blame me. Maybe I had no business being in Bucharest when Hailey was taken. I’d begun my career with the marshals at the D.C. field office. Less than a year later, Hailey was born. It was around that time that I requested to be put on international investigations, tracking down wanted fugitives in foreign countries, bringing them back to the U.S. for prosecution. Had I pursued that position in order to flee from Tasha and Hailey? Had I abandoned my wife and daughter the same as my father had done to my mother and Tuesday when we left London all those years ago?

After all I’d done to distance myself from him, was I no better than Alden Fisk?

“Simon,”
Ostermann was shouting in my ear. “Snap
out
of it. Up the stairs.
Hurry.
”

We bounded past the door to the fifth floor and made for the roof.

Ostermann burst through the steel door and suddenly we were outside in the frigid Berlin air. Only we were six stories too high. I didn’t care for heights. My father used to tell me that we came from a family of distinguished mountaineers. Said climbing was in our blood, tried to take me to the White Mountains in New Hampshire more than once. I refused to get out of the car. Told him to piss off. If he wanted to die at six thousand feet he was more than welcome to do so. Just be sure to leave me the keys to the house.

“We jump to the next roof,” Ostermann said.

“Are you
kidding
me?”

“I have done it before,” he said. “Seven years ago, when Magda’s husband finally found out about us.”

“You jumped to the next
roof
?”

“What was I to do? The psycho had a gun.”

“I can’t do it in these shoes.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “I did it naked. Try leaping across buildings with your dick swinging through the air.”

There was no more talk on the subject. Ostermann simply took off in a sprint to the edge of the building. Reluctantly, I followed, my heart pounding harder than it did during a chase. As I neared the edge I felt a surge of nausea, but it was too late. My momentum would take me over the side and drop me six stories if I tried to stop. Adrenaline pumping, I jumped just as the door to the roof burst open. It felt as though I were suspended in midair for minutes on end. Then my feet hit something solid. I braced my body and let myself tumble. When I finally came to a stop, I stayed down, just as Ostermann had. I glanced over at him. We were both badly out of breath. The gap between the buildings had to be eight or nine feet, at least.

“What now?” I whispered, fearing they’d seen me leap.

Ostermann put a finger to his lips. “We wait.”

We waited several minutes. Apparently, the police hadn’t caught sight of me. We listened to the troops march around the roof, then back down the stairs. When we heard the steel door close, we surmised that the police had cleared the roof. Slowly, we rose to our feet.

“Let’s go,” Ostermann said, moving toward this roof’s steel door. “I have friends in this building. They will help us wait out the storm.”

I brushed myself off and walked alongside him.

“Sorry about the suit,” Ostermann said, pointing from the torn elbow to the torn knee.

“It’s all right,” I told him. “I have six others just like it.”

*

Ostermann had Magda check us in to the Ritz-Carlton right in Tiergarten. From the outside the Ritz looked an awful lot like New York’s Rockefeller Center. Inside, I marveled at the marble columns and gold leaf as we swiftly crossed the lobby. Ostermann and I went straight to our suite on the eighth floor, an ultracomfortable, well-appointed space with a Prussian Neo-Classicist design. Once we had safely locked ourselves inside the suite, we crashed on opposite ends of the uncompromising sofa situated in the middle of the sitting room. Ostermann didn’t bother to explain what Magda had told the police when they arrived at his office, and I didn’t ask. What he did do was apologize again.

“But why call them in the first place?” I said, still trying to comprehend the goings-on of the past two hours.

Ostermann sighed, glared at me as he had back at his office. “You cost me years of headaches with the police and politicians here in Berlin,” he said. “You fled Germany and left me holding the bag, Simon.”

“I didn’t know the girl died,” I said.

“To be perfectly honest, that thought never crossed my mind. How could you be so inconsiderate as not to check?”

“I was devastated,” I said, thinking back, trying to assuage this sudden sense of guilt. “Just by the fact that the girl had been injured at all. I couldn’t sleep for weeks. But then I received a call from another desperate mother in San Diego. Her infant son had been stolen by his father and smuggled across the Mexican border. The mother was afraid that her ex-husband was involved with the cartels. She was sure her baby boy’s life was in danger. I immediately left for Tijuana.”

“But there is the Internet,” Ostermann said. “You could have googled Elise Huber and discovered that she was dead. You could have made a single phone call, Simon. That is all it would have taken.”

He was right, of course. I had no excuse. None, other than my damn obsession with every case I’d ever taken since leaving the marshals. My relationship with Ostermann had preceded the Elise Huber case. I’d met him a couple of years before, while tracking down a fugitive in Hannover. He’d come to my aid in a bar fight that erupted while I was trying to elicit information on my target. At the time he intervened, the business end of a broken bottle was being pressed against my throat. Fact is, Ostermann probably saved my life that night.

Now we stared silently at each other for a while, neither of us knowing quite what to say.

Finally, I realized it was my turn to apologize. Something that had never come easily for me. It was something my father had demanded from me almost daily, for even the slightest transgression. Now, whenever I had to utter the words
I’m sorry,
it felt as though I was being pressured and I instinctively fought to pull back. When the words finally came, they fell out of my mouth with a stiffness that undermined my sincerity. And there’s nothing worse than a disingenuous apology. It’s an admission and a surrender and a deception all tucked tightly into one overly used phrase.

Christ,
I thought. Had I even apologized to Elise Huber’s mother? Our first conversation after the incident was brief, just a rambling recitation of the facts. There was never a second conversation. Was that why? Because I couldn’t bring myself to apologize? Was that why I had never called?

Ostermann solemnly acknowledged my apology, then reached over and roughed up my arm as though we were old friends, which I suppose, in a way, we were.

“It’s all right, Simon,” he assured me. “So, tell me. Did you ever remarry?”

“No,” I said.

He leaned back, shook his head. “Neither did I.”

“You and Magda haven’t tied the knot?”

“Of course not,” he said. “She’s an adulterer. How could I ever trust her?”

I waited for him to laugh but he never got there.

After a moment, he said, “So, Simon, did you come to Berlin with a plan?”

“Yes,” I told him. “But it didn’t involve dodging the German police.”

He grinned. “That should not prove so difficult. The places we would likely find your Dietrich and Karl, the police do not frequent them.”

“And where might that be?”

“I suggest we start in Kreuzberg,” he said. “But I don’t advise bringing the BMW. Or, for that matter, the TAG Heuer around your wrist.”

“How the hell will I know what time it is?”

Chapter 14

During the Cold War, Kreuzberg, known also as X-berg, was closed in by the Berlin Wall on three sides. After the wall fell, the area found itself in the heart of a major European city again. Twentysome years later, it’s still struggling to find its identity. Currently, among other things, Kreuzberg is widely known for its large number of Turkish immigrants.

“The Germans complain that the Turks refuse to integrate into our society,” Ostermann said as we made our way to the U-Bahn station. “But it’s not so. The criminals have integrated just fine. The law-abiding Turks could learn a lesson from them.”

Night had fallen hours ago. I’d spent the downtime taking advantage of the Ritz-Carlton’s ridiculously comfortable bed, while Ostermann watched two pay-per-view Reese Witherspoon romantic comedies on the flat-screen television in the next room.

“Really?” I’d said. “Reese Witherspoon?”

“I never get to watch anything like this at home,” he said. “You know how it is when you have kids. Unless it’s some bloody Pixar movie it’s not finding its way into the Blu-Ray player. And forget asking Jakob to sit in his room and watch it alone so that Magda and I can watch something we’d like.”

Soon as he said it, Ostermann turned to me and whispered, “I’m so sorry, Simon.”

I grinned at him. “People all over the world have children. And I love hearing about every one of them.”

And it was true. Growing up in Providence without my mother had made me more curious about the mother-son dynamic than just about anything else as a child. I learned as much as I could from the few friends I had at school, and accepted every kid’s invitation home to meet his parents. Even if I didn’t particularly like the kid, chances were I could learn something from his mother.

It amazed me to observe how affectionate mothers could be with their sons, how generous and how forgiving. In the Fisk home, the prominent emotions were anger and occasional sadness. To witness these other, brighter emotions made me realize what I was missing. But by the time I hit high school, being around other kids’ families made me uncomfortable. I felt like an intruder no matter how much they professed to wanting me there. Just wasn’t my place, I told myself. I didn’t belong there.

“Many young Germans have gone to work for Turkish organized crime,” Ostermann continued. “The Turks specialize in narcotics trafficking, predominantly heroin. See, strategically, Turkey is in a perfect position for the heroin trade. The country serves as a gateway from Asia to Europe, and has access to opium from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Here in Germany, Kreuzberg acts much like a retail store, with young Turkish immigrants as its sales force.”

“And the girl?”

He sighed, shrugged his shoulders. “When the world economy collapsed, Simon, most groups decided to diversify. Many drug traffickers began trafficking in humans.”

“But an American girl of six, snatched from a hotel room in Paris? Surely that doesn’t fit any MO you’ve ever heard of.”

“No,” Ostermann conceded, “it doesn’t. But then, you must consider that Turkey lies next to Syria, Iraq, and Iran. If these two thugs, Dietrich and Karl, brought the girl here to Berlin, chances are this is just a stopping-off point.” He paused but continued walking. “That the girl’s father designs innovative weaponry not sanctioned by the U.S. government does not seem incidental to me. It is possible the girl was taken to lure the father. Perhaps this is Iran’s sordid way of extending Vince Sorkin an offer of employment.”

It was nearing 11:00
P.M.
when we entered the underground station. We stopped at an electronic ticket machine and purchased two one-day travel cards, then waited ten minutes on a platform with a smattering of other people until a mustard-yellow train arrived right on time. The train itself smelled of skunked beer, and looking around it was easy to see why. Of the dozen passengers nine were teenage boys, each with a large brown paper bag sitting between his thighs.

We got off the U-Bahn at Gneisenaustrasse after a brief ride, the Glock that Davignon had provided me weighing heavily in the holster against the side of my chest as we ascended the cement steps back to the street.

From there, Ostermann led us straight to Tunnelbar, a relatively well-lit establishment with a young, energetic crowd. Not at all what I had expected.

“You taking us to pick up women or look for criminal sorts?” I asked him.

“Patience, Simon,” Ostermann said. “This is where I usually find my favorite informant.”

We moved slowly through several loud, crowded rooms before stepping into a lounge-type area with a relaxed vibe. In the far corner two dark men reclined on a couch, while a third sat comfortably in an oversize chair, sipping from a dark red drink.

“Alim,” Ostermann said, “how nice to see you.”

Alim didn’t appear quite as pleased. He motioned for the two other men to leave the room and grudgingly offered us the couch. As his friends left, Alim called out, “Another Wodka Gorbatschow and cranberry.” He turned to us. “Would you gentlemen like anything to drink?”

“We’re fine,” Ostermann said. “You’ve been watching the news lately, Alim?”

The young Turk shrugged. “What do I care about news, unless it involves me.”

Ostermann nodded. “Well, allow me to update you, then. A few days ago, a six-year-old American girl was taken from her parents’ hotel room in Paris. My friend here, who is not a policeman but works privately like me, has obtained evidence that the girl was brought here to Berlin by two German men named Dietrich and Karl.”

Alim smiled smugly. “I know at least two dozen Dietrichs and twice as many Karls, Herr Ostermann. Tell your friend he should return to Paris and collect more evidence.”

Ostermann looked around the room at the young, mellow faces. The speakers in the lounge were turned low and everyone was seated, a drink in one hand, one leg folded over the other. Ostermann leaned toward Alim and said, “For the time being, this is all we have to go on. So tell me where I can find these two dozen Dietrichs and four dozen Karls, and my friend and I will be on our way.”