Private Berlin (17 page)

“DEAD?” TINA HANOVER said twenty minutes later in a soft, sad voice. “And Ilse, too?”

They were sitting at a small table in a spartanly equipped kitchen, drinking coffee she’d made for them.

Mattie’s mind flashed on the woman’s corpse beside Chris’s. “I can’t say for sure. Her remains have not been tested, but there
was a woman’s body with his.”

Ilse Frei’s roommate’s shoulders slumped. Tears trickled down her cheeks as she shook her head slowly. “Poor Ilse. She was
right to be afraid. I told Chris she was afraid and to be careful. I guess I…”

She bit at her knuckles and turned away from them.

“Why was Ilse afraid?” Burkhart asked. “And why did Chris come to you?”

Tina Hanover made a puffing noise and wiped her tears with her sleeve. “He came because Ilse’s crazy sister, Ilona, asked
him to. He said they were all friends from childhood.”

Mattie put it together in an instant. Ilona Frei had to be the mystery woman who’d visited Chris a week before his disappearance.

“Start at the beginning,” Burkhart insisted.

Over the course of a half hour, Tina Hanover explained that Ilse Frei came home from work about two weeks ago as upset as
she’d ever seen her. But Ilse had refused to tell her roommate what had gotten her so worked up.

Stranger still, Ilse had gone straight to her room and called her sister in Berlin, which was very unusual. According to Tina
Hanover, Ilona Frei was the bane of Ilse’s existence. Ilona was a methadone addict who’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
She’d been in and out of institutions and was forever hounding her sister for money.

“How did you know Ilse called Ilona?” Burkhart asked.

Tina Hanover blushed and squirmed in her chair. “I…uh…” She turned defensive. “I listened at her door. She was so upset, I
couldn’t help it.”

“What did she tell her sister?” Mattie asked.

Ilse Frei’s roommate fidgeted again before replying, “I didn’t catch all of it because the doors are pretty thick. But I caught
the gist of it. She’d recognized someone from their past. She called him Falk and seemed terrified. I mean absolutely terrified
of him.”

“Falk?” Burkhart said. “Are you sure?”

Tina Hanover nodded and Mattie looked at Burkhart, puzzled.

He said, “The man who ran the slaughterhouse was named Falk.”

“But he couldn’t…” Mattie said, and then she remembered. “He had a son.”

“He had a son,” Burkhart said, nodding.

For the first time since she’d gotten word of Chris’s disappearance, Mattie believed they were homing in on the killer. “Did
you tell Chris all this?”

Tina Hanover nodded. “He seemed to know who Falk was.”

“What did he say?” Mattie pressed.

“Say? Nothing. But you could see it in his body language. He knew him.”

There was a moment of silence in the room before Burkhart said, “So where did Chris go from here? Ilse’s law firm?”

“The law firm?” Tina Hanover said, surprised. “No.”

“But you said she recognized Falk at work,” Mattie said, confused. “Was Falk a client at the firm? Someone she saw at the
courthouse?”

“No, no,” she protested, her face flushing. “Ilse…she…”

She got defensive again. “Ilse stopped working at the law firm eighteen months ago when she found out she could make more
money in half the time working at the Paradise FKK club north of town. She was a licensed, professional sex worker.”

THE PARADISE FKK club was situated amid agricultural fields on ten manicured acres north of Bad Homburg. Trees and a white wall surrounded
the compound. Despite the dismal weather there were fifteen or twenty high-end cars parked in the lot and taxis were traveling
to and fro.

Mattie and Burkhart walked on a cement path past gardens appointed with pale Grecian statues of naked men and women in erotic
poses. They came to a white building with columns that supported a portico over a grand entryway.

“A little over the top, don’t you think?” Mattie cracked uncomfortably as two men leaving the building walked by, staring
at her.

“I told you to stay in the car,” Burkhart replied.

Mattie’s cell phone rang and she answered it.

“You stole a car?” Katharina Doruk shouted in her ear.

Mattie cringed and held the cell at arm’s length a second before replying, “We were chasing Chris’s killer. He was getting
away.”

“You’re not the police!” Katharina shouted. “You don’t have the right to commandeer vehicles! Frankfurt Kripo is going ape-shit.
You’re wanted for questioning and—”

Mattie turned off her phone. “I’ll deal with her later.”

“When she’s calmer,” Burkhart agreed.

They went through wooden doors carved with explicit scenes from the
Kama Sutra
into a surprisingly utilitarian and small lobby. Loud disco music played somewhere beyond the room.

Two older women sat behind a counter at one end of the lobby. Stacks of Turkish towels and robes were piled on shelves behind
them. They eyed Burkhart and then Mattie and then each other.

One smiled knowingly.

The other shrugged and said, “Sixty-five-euro admission fee. You get use of the facilities, dinner, and coffee and soft drinks.
The girls are extra. Fifty euros for half an hour of straight loving. Fifty euros to climax orally. One hundred euros for
thirty minutes of anal eroticism.”

She said this all while smirking at Mattie, who refused to react even when the woman said to her, “You want them to go down
on you, honey? Negotiate.”

MATTIE PULLED OUT her badge.

The lady behind the counter stiffened. “This is a legal establishment.”

“We’re not police,” Burkhart growled. “We’re investigators with Private Berlin.”

Mattie added: “We’re looking into the disappearance of one of your workers, Ilse Frei, and the murder of a man we believe
came here looking for her last Tuesday.”

“I don’t know—” she began.

“I remember him,” the other old woman said. “He paid his way in, talked with several of the girls, and left in a hurry.”

“You know who he spoke with?”

“No. But go inside and find Michelle. Michelle knows all.”

Burkhart and Mattie moved toward the door into the brothel.

“No. Rules are rules,” the lady behind the counter said, holding out a robe to Mattie and a towel to Burkhart. “If you want
to take a walk through Paradise, you pay and you change out of your street clothes.”

Mattie thought to protest, but Burkhart said, “You take Visa?”

“Of course,” the woman said and cackled.

A few moments later they walked through a door into a T-shaped hallway with signs for men’s and women’s locker rooms.

Mattie soon found herself in an empty and surprisingly clean locker facility that easily rivaled the one where she worked
out. She hesitated but then took off her jeans and blouse and hung them with her holster and gun in the locker.

She put on the robe, which was entirely too large for her, and she had to cinch it tight about her waist. She found a pair
of sanitized rubber sandals and headed toward a staircase at the other end of the locker room that featured an arrow and the
word
Spa
.

At the top of the stairs, Mattie emerged into a large room with pools and Jacuzzis and exotic flowers growing everywhere.
There were beautiful naked women walking around and floating in the pools.

A dozen men dressed only in towels around their waists mingled about, appraising the women. Burkhart was one of them. He stood
near a bank of orchids, behind it actually. The towel they’d given him was barely enough to cover his massive physique, and
he was holding on to both ends of it for dear life.

Mattie couldn’t help it. She started laughing. “Don’t slip,” she said.

“You coulda stayed in the car, made this much easier,” Burkhart shot back.

“And miss the expression on your face?”

A tall blond woman with large natural breasts strolled up to them. She put her ruby fingernails on Burkhart’s chest, looked
at Mattie, and said in a Hungarian accent, “Is the rest of him as big?”

Mattie fought off a smile. “I wouldn’t know.”

The blonde’s eyes sparkled. “First date and you agree to come to Paradise? You must be sexy, girl. So, you want to party with
Michelle?”

MY FRIENDS, FELLOW Berliners, cruising at one hundred and thirty kilometers an hour, I should make it home to my city of scars just in time
for a late-afternoon appointment I cannot afford to miss.

I yawn. It took me more than an hour and a half to reach the train station and ride back to the auto show. But the Mercedes
was right where I left it, far from the police sure to be jamming hall number one.

I’ve been driving ever since, and I confess I’m tired.

I should pull over and sleep, my friends.

But there is so much left to do before I can even think of resting.

So I reach in the glove compartment and get out a bottle of amphetamines. I take two, think about it, and then down another.

I turn on the radio and listen to descriptions of Artur Jaeger’s murder and the chase on the autobahn. They’ve found the Maserati
and are taking DNA samples from it.

It doesn’t bother me. There’s nothing that can match me to the car.

As the uppers kick in, I glance over at the folder on the seat beside me. I open it and turn over the picture of Artur and
his mother from his archived file. Beneath it is a picture of two girls, one nine, one six. They’re hugging each other.

Ilona and Ilse.

I tried every trick I knew to get Ilse to tell me where Ilona lived. But she refused right up until the end. The only thing
she’d tell me was that Ilona was mentally ill and a methadone addict because of me.

And then it hits me.

Methadone addict.

It means she has a license. It means Ilona goes to a clinic.

She can be found.

She can die tonight, if I’m lucky, and with her almost all my secrets.

Ilona Frei? I muse. Ilona?

I glance at the photo.

Such a name someone gave you. Ilona. What did your name used to be?

No matter. I’d remember you no matter what they called you. You looked so very much like your younger sister, not like your
mother at all.

BURKHART AND MATTIE followed Michelle as she sashayed down a hallway at the Paradise FKK. There were doors on both sides.

“Where are we going?” Mattie asked, feeling uneasy.

“To talk to Genevieve,” Michelle said as she rounded a corner.

Mattie followed reluctantly, with Burkhart walking beside her, still clutching his towel. Set against the walls of the hall
and between the doors were gilded sofas with deep purple velvet upholstery. On one couch, a naked woman’s head bobbed in the
lap of a man whose eyes were closed.

“They’re doing it in public?” Mattie whispered sharply at Burkhart.

He sputtered, “It’s not my idea of fun.”

Michelle meanwhile went to the last door on the right, rapped loudly, and said, “It’s Michelle, Genevieve. Please stop what
you’re doing, and tell your client he will incur no charges for time spent.”

A moment later, an irate Italian man appeared in the doorway and started to upbraid Michelle for the interruption. Burkhart
stepped forward, towering over the guy, and told him to hit the showers. The man hesitated but then stormed away, railing
in Italian.

Genevieve, a beautiful young woman from Guadeloupe with smooth cocoa skin and long wavy hair, came to the door.

“I’m out a hundred and fifty euros,” Genevieve complained.

“We’ll compensate you for your time,” Mattie assured her.

Genevieve squinted and studied her. “Who are you?”

Michelle said, “Perhaps we’d better go inside.”

Genevieve shrugged and turned into the room, which was small and filled almost entirely with a bed. The walls were mirrors.
So was the ceiling. There were reflections of the two naked women, Mattie, and Burkhart at every angle.

Michelle introduced the Private investigators and told Genevieve that they were here to find out what happened to Ilse Frei,
and to Chris Schneider. Reluctantly Genevieve agreed to talk.

She corroborated much of what Tina Hanover had told them, but with more detail. She said that she was in the women’s locker
room two weeks before when Ilse ran in shaking and crying. Ilse told Genevieve that she had just overheard a customer talking
to one of the other girls in the lounge.

“Ilse said she did not know him by sight,” Genevieve said. “He looked completely different than she remembered him. But she
thought she knew his voice.”

“Why?” Mattie asked. “Whose voice was it?”

Genevieve bit her lip before replying, “Ilse said she thought he may have been the man who killed her mother.”

Mattie absorbed that, her mind wanting to leap in a dozen directions, but she reined it in when Burkhart said, “But she wasn’t
sure?”

“She was pretty sure,” Genevieve allowed. “But when we went back upstairs together to try to hear him again, he was gone.”

Mattie groaned. “So you can’t identify him?”

Perplexed, Genevieve looked at Michelle, who said, “If he’s the punter we think he is, he’s been here six or seven times in
the past few years.”

“So you know what he looks like?” Mattie said, excited.

“Not exactly,” Michelle cautioned.

“What does that mean?” Burkhart said.

“We think it’s the same guy,” Michelle explained. “But he looks different every time he comes in. Sometimes he’s blond and
blue-eyed. Other times brown with dark hair. His eyebrows. His cheeks. One time his hair was slicked black like a helmet.
Another time he wore a devil’s beard and—”

Genevieve interrupted. “He was green-eyed and redheaded last week when I saw him, about eight days after Ilse disappeared.”
Genevieve was openly agitated by the memory. “He’s a freak, you know? He likes to make you feel threatened. Gets off on it.”

“He give you a name?”

Genevieve’s eyes flashed darkly. “That night he called himself the Invisible Man.”

Michelle nodded grimly. “But we all call him the Mask.”