Private Berlin (27 page)

THREE MONTHS LATER, just before Christmas, in memory of Chris Schneider and the other victims of Matthias Falk, the employees of Private Berlin
and friends gathered at Gethsemane Church in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of East Berlin.

In 1989, the church had been a center of the opposition, and Mattie had felt it appropriate that the last victims of the Stasi
be memorialized there.

There were blown-up pictures of Chris and the others arrayed in a semicircle at the front of the church.

Jack Morgan was one of the mourners. He sat with Mattie and Niklas, who held Socrates in his lap. Aunt Cäcilia, who’d been
found knocked out and tied up in their apartment, told Niklas to stop fidgeting.

Behind them, Ilona Frei sat with Gerhardt Krainer, who’d testified so courageously on her behalf at the public inquest.

Inspector Weigel and High Commissar Dietrich, who was still serving his suspension, were across the aisle. Behind them, and
in the aisle in a wheelchair, Hariat Ledwig dabbed at her eyes, looking at the photographs of the people the children of Waisenhaus
44 had become.

Just before the service began, an older, bent-over man in a dark suit entered the church in a slow shuffle and sat several
rows back by himself, his hands resting on a cane.

The minister began the simple ceremony talking of the burdens some are called to endure in life, and spoke of the victims
of Matthias Falk as innocent heroes forced to confront the deepest madness of the East German Republic.

Then, one by one mourners rose to talk. Morgan spoke once again about how great and fearless an investigator Christoph Schneider
was, one of the best Private had ever seen.

Daniel Brecht talked of Chris’s courage and crazy sense of humor. Dr. Gabriel spoke of Chris’s professionalism and his refusal
to be compromised, calling him the younger brother he never had.

Katharina Doruk recalled Chris’s true happiness with Mattie and Niklas.

Ilona Frei stood shakily and said, “Chris died trying to save my sister and trying to avenge the children of Waisenhaus 44.
I’ll never forget him. Nor will I forget the other orphans who died at Falk’s hands. As horrible as it was, because of them,
I feel like I got my sanity back.”

At last it was Mattie’s turn to stand and express her feelings.

FOR A SECOND, Mattie did not know if she could do it, but then she looked down at Niklas and found renewed strength.

She got up and described the first time she and Chris met. She made the mourners laugh at his awkwardness when he’d asked
her out on their first date. She told them about the joy that surrounded her when he asked her to marry him.

Then a somber expression came to her face, and she talked about the emptiness she always felt in him, the dark, hollow part.
She also talked about the reaction to the whole story coming out in the press: the slaughterhouse, the bodies, the orphans,
the murders, and Falk’s Stasi past.

“Over twenty years have passed since the wall fell, and what happened here in East Berlin has not left many of us,” she said.
“People say we should forget what the secret police did to their fellow citizens. They say we should forget the culture of
paranoia and brutality it promoted. They say we should forget what happened to people like Chris and Ilse and you, Ilona.
We should move on, they say. Move on.”

Tears welled in Mattie’s eyes. “Yes, we should move on. Life is for the living. But we can’t forget that people like Matthias
Falk existed and thrived in a darker world we only left behind two decades ago. And most of all, we can’t forget the good
people Falk destroyed. They were real. They laughed and cried and cared for each other. They were children and mothers and
fathers, and brothers and sisters and wives and…lovers.”

For a second, Mattie felt her entire body trembling with loss, but then, with a bittersweet smile, she pointed in the direction
of the old man with the cane.

“In that vein, I’d like to introduce August Wolfe,” she said. “For the past eighteen years, Herr Wolfe has been a professor
of literature at the University of Leipzig. For fifteen years before he took that position, he was in and out of Stasi prisons
and torture chambers because of positions he took in the mid-1970s regarding the secret police and intellectual freedom.”

Mattie walked down the aisle and extended her hand. The old man took it and struggled to his feet. Mattie patted his arm and
told the mourners, “This is also Chris’s father.”

For a moment, there was stunned silence.

Finally, High Commissar Dietrich began to clap. And then everyone was on their feet and clapping.

Chris’s father was overcome for several moments.

Then in the sure voice of a professor, he said, “I thought Chris had died with my wife thirty years ago. It’s what I was told
happened, and there were no records. I had come to peace with my loss ten years before the wall fell.” He shook his head.
“And then to hear that Chris lived and became a good man?” He shook his head again, tears streaming down his face. “It’s almost
too much to bear.

“When Mattie found me last week, and told me, I didn’t believe her at first,” he went on. “And then I became very bitter at
the fact that I hadn’t just lost an eight-year-old boy, I’d lost the man he’d become.”

He sighed. “But now, listening to you all describe him.” He choked. “It was a great, great help to me, an easing of my heartache.
I want to thank you for being his friends all these years. Thank you from the bottom of my soul for what you all did to help
my son and avenge his death.”

THERE WASN’T A dry eye in Gethsemane Church when Mattie threw her arms around August Wolfe.

When she broke from his embrace, she looked around and said, “I know this is a house of God. But those of us who knew Chris
well knew that he loved beer. We have it and plenty of his favorite foods at a restaurant down the street. Let’s no longer
talk of Chris’s death or the death of any of Falk’s victims. Instead I invite you to raise a glass to them and tell more stories
about them and keep them alive in our hearts.”

The minister ended the ceremony and the mourners began to file out.

Morgan went to Chris’s father, introduced himself, and offered to help the older man outside. Doruk wheeled Frau Ledwig.

Mattie trailed Brecht and Dr. Gabriel, with one hand on Niklas’s shoulder, and the other holding Aunt Cäcilia’s hand.

When they reached the rear of the church off the lobby, she told her son and aunt to go on ahead. She’d be right out. They
smiled knowingly and left.

Mattie turned and looked at Tom Burkhart, who leaned against the back wall of the church on crutches. His left forearm was
wrapped in a bandage. His left leg was casted hip to ankle.

“Did I do good?” she asked. “Did I do Chris justice?”

“You did better than good,” Burkhart replied. “You had me bawling back here. Me!”

Mattie smiled. “You’re deeper than you let on, Burkhart.”

“Don’t tell anyone. It’ll screw up my image.”

She gazed at him for a long moment. “Did you know you were transmitting that night at Waisenhaus 44?”

Burkhart was genuinely puzzled. “Transmitting?”

“I could hear you talking to me after Falk shot you.” She paused. “I heard everything you said to me, Tom.”

Burkhart’s eyebrows knitted and he looked away, flushing. “That right? Everything?”

“Every single word,” Mattie said and smiled again.

Burkhart grinned back at her. “So?”

Mattie put her hand on his. “So we move on, Burkhart. But we go slowly. Like so many Berliners, we’ve still got a lot of healing
to do.”

WE WOULD LIKE to thank the Berliners, native and adopted, who patiently took us through the city and helped us to understand its loss,
its triumphs, and its living scars. A great thanks goes to Claudia Elitok with the Berlin Kriminalpolizei for her time and
candid insight regarding homicide investigations before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Guide Philipp Stratmann was
a world of information about all things Berlin, from architecture to squatters to slaughterhouses. He also helped us grasp
the terror of the divided city, and to appreciate the amazing courage of the people who fought to end that terror. We are
grateful to Fulbright Scholar Nicholas Sullivan, who helped us negotiate the labyrinth of the German Federal Archives. Thanks
go as well to mountain bike guide Carissa Champlin, who led us along the ruins of the wall and into Treptower Park, dramatically
altering the dimensions of this story. Berlin primitive mask expert Peter Beller was kind enough to let us tour his shop and
patiently answered our questions.

Any mistakes or mischaracterizations of time, place, or events are our own.

DETECTIVE ALEX CROSS HUNTS
THREE SERIAL KILLERS—BUT IS
SOMEONE ELSE HUNTING HIM?

FOR AN EXCERPT,
TURN THE PAGE

IT’S NOT EVERY day that I get a naked girl answering the door that I knock on.

Don’t get me wrong—with twenty years of law enforcement under my belt, it’s happened. Just not that often.

“Are you the waiters?” this girl asked. There was a bright but empty look in her eyes that said Ecstasy to me, and I could
smell weed from inside. The music was thumping too, the kind of relentless techno that would make me want to slit my wrists
if I had to listen to it for long.

“No, we’re not the waiters,” I told her, showing my badge. “Metro police. And you need to put something on, right now.”

She wasn’t even fazed. “There were supposed to be waiters,” she said to no one in particular. It made me sad and disgusted
at the same time. This girl didn’t look like she was even out of high school yet, and the men we were here to arrest were
old enough to be her father.

“Check her clothes before she puts them on,” I told one of the female officers on the entry team. Besides myself there were
five uniformed cops, a rep from Youth and Family Services, three detectives from the Prostitution Unit, and three more from
Second District, including my friend John Sampson.

Second District is Georgetown—not the usual stomping grounds for the Prostitution Unit. The white brick N Street town house
where we’d arrived was typical for the neighborhood, probably worth somewhere north of five million. It was a rental property,
paid six months in advance by proxy, but the paper trail had led back to Dr. Elijah Creem, one of D.C.’s most in-demand plastic
surgeons. As far as we could make out, Creem was funneling funds to pay for these “industry parties,” and his partner-in-scum,
Josh Bergman, was providing the eye candy.

Bergman was the owner of Cap City Dolls, a legit modeling agency based out of an M Street office, with a heavily rumored arm
in the underground flesh trade. Detectives at the department were pretty sure that while Bergman was running his aboveboard
agency, he was also dispatching exotic dancers, overnight escorts, masseurs, and porn “talent.” As far as I could tell, the
house was filled with “talent” right now, and they all seemed to be about eighteen, more or less. Emphasis on the less.

I couldn’t wait to bust these two scumbags.

Surveillance had put Creem and Bergman downtown at Microbar around seven o’clock that night, and then here at the party house
as of nine thirty. Now it was just a game of smoking them out.

Beyond the enclosed foyer, the party was in full swing. The front hall and formal living room were packed. It was all Queen
Anne furniture and parquet floors on the one hand, and half-dressed, tweaked-out kids, stomping to the music and drinking
out of plastic cups, on the other.

“I want everyone contained in this front room,” Sampson shouted at one of the uniforms. “We’ve got an anytime warrant for
this house, so start looking. We’re checking for drugs, cash, ledgers, appointment books, cell phones, everything. And get
this goddamn music off!”

We left half the team to secure the front of the house and took the rest toward the back, where there was more party going
on.

In the open kitchen, there seemed to be a big game of strip poker in progress at the large marble-topped island. Half a dozen
well-muscled guys and twice as many girls in their underwear were standing around holding cards, drinking, and passing a few
joints.

Several of them scrambled as we came in. A few of the girls screamed and tried to run out, but we’d already blocked the way.

Finally, somebody cut the music.

“Where are Elijah Creem and Joshua Bergman?” Sampson asked the room. “First one to give me a straight answer gets a free ticket
out of here.”

A skinny girl in a black lace bra and cutoffs pointed toward the stairs. From the size of her chest in relation to the rest
of her, my guess was she’d already gone under the knife with Dr. Creem at least once.

“Up there,” she said.

“Bitch,” someone muttered under his breath.

Sampson hooked a finger at me to follow him, and we headed up.

“Can I go now?” cutoffs girl called after us.

“Let’s see how good your word is first,” Sampson said.

When we got to the second floor hall, it was empty. The only light was a single electric hurricane lamp on a glossy antique
table near the stairs. There were equestrian portraits on the walls and a long Oriental runner that ended in front of a closed
double door at the back of the house. Even from here, I could make out more music thumping on the other side. Old-school this
time. Talking Heads, “Burning Down the House.”

I could hear laughing too, and two different men’s voices.

“That’s it, sweetheart. A little closer. Now pull down her panties.”

“Yeah, that’s what you call money in the bank right there.”

Sampson gave me a look like he wanted either to puke or to kill someone.

“Let’s do this,” he said, and we started up the hall.