Private Berlin (5 page)

I TAKE A left turn onto the lane that runs past the old slaughterhouse and see the police barrier immediately. A uniformed police
officer is letting two people leave, a tall man, imposing and bald, and a blond woman wearing a navy-blue rain slicker with
the hood up.

They walk toward me and a BMW parked on the shoulder.

For a second I can’t breathe. Dots dance before my eyes. I feel like they’re a pack of snarling dogs suddenly biting at my
ankles.

What have they found?

My young genius is wrapped in a blue tarp behind me on the van floor, but I’m not thinking of him. I’m being strangled by
that question.

What have they found?

Then old training kicks in. I get ahold of myself and quickly lower the sun visor. The passenger windows of my van are slightly
tinted. All the man and the woman will see is a silhouette of me as I pass them and the police barrier.

I take my first breath, then another, and by the fifth I have to fight not to hyperventilate. But I get the van turned into
an alley that runs between the two old apartment buildings up the hill from the slaughterhouse.

In seconds I’m out on a main drag, heading back toward the neighborhood of Mehrow. My stomach churns. The first chance I get,
I pull over, park, and put my head on the steering wheel.

What have they found? And who was that big bald guy with the woman?

The air around me suddenly seems negatively charged, and that sets off true panic in me. Sweat boils on my forehead and trickles
down my spine.

I force myself to go through everything that occurred inside the slaughterhouse three days ago. Everything.

What could be left? Blood stains on the bolt, perhaps. Or spinal fluid? Maybe some bone fragments, I decide at last.

But they won’t know whose blood or bone it is, now will they? Unless dear Chris left behind DNA samples. But those tests take
days. Weeks. Right?

There’s nothing else. I’ve seen to it all. I’m sure of it.

Unless Chris told someone where he was going?

No. It was personal. He came for me alone.

Given the lack of other evidence, I tell myself the police will soon let it go. A blood stain in an old slaughterhouse? They’ll
think someone tripped and gouged their leg or something. Right?

I almost convince myself before doubt takes a stroll through my mind.

What if they were to keep looking?

This possibility agitates me so much I twist around to look into the rear of the van at the shape of the corpse in the tarp.

Every cell in my body wants to drive by the slaughterhouse to get another look, try to get a sense of the scope of the police
action, but I know I can’t. Smart cops look for that kind of thing.

In the end, I tell myself to return home, or better to call and meet the woman who thinks I love her.

Put a sense of normality in my visible life, rebuild the mask once more.

I’ll come by tomorrow in a different vehicle.

If the police are gone, then I’ll dispose of the young genius’s body in the normal way and things will go on as they always
have.

But if they’re still there, I’ll have no choice but to erase the slaughterhouse and all its dirty little secrets forever.

“I SHOULD BE in there,” Mattie complained as Burkhart clicked open the doors of the BMW. The white panel van passing by barely registered
in her brain.

Burkhart shook his head and climbed in.

Mattie got in angrily beside him. “I should.”

“No. Dietrich’s right. They need impartial people in there.”

“You’re saying I’m not impartial?” Mattie demanded.

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying,” Burkhart said, starting the car. “You couldn’t be. If you were impartial in this situation,
I’d wonder about you as a human.”

Mattie did not know what to say. Burkhart turned on the windshield wipers, which slapped away the wet leaves.

Mattie threw up her hands. “I’ve got to do something. I can’t just—”

“We’re going to Chris’s apartment.”

Berlin is a huge city geographically, almost 341 square miles. And Chris Schneider lived far from Ahrensfelde, west of Tiergarten
Park and the zoo.

It took them forty minutes to get there in the late-afternoon traffic. Mattie had gone quiet again, looking out at the cityscape
as they crossed back from the old east into the west.

Mattie had lived in Berlin her entire life. She was a Berliner through and through. She loved the city, its architecture,
people, art, laid-back attitude, and entrepreneurial spirit.

But now, in light of the mystery surrounding Chris’s disappearance, Berlin seemed suddenly to her to be an alien place inhabited
by creatures who might cut a tracking chip out of a man’s back and feed it to rats.

They passed the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial, the roofless grand entry hall and wounded spire of a church that somehow
survived a bombing raid in 1943. The scorched ruins sat on a grand plaza beside an ultramodern belfry.

The ruins were among Chris’s favorite places in the city. He liked to sit and contemplate the spire, which looked like it
had been cleaved in two by the bomb. One side collapsed and fell. The other still stood, jagged against the sky.

“Left on Goethe, yes?” Burkhart asked, shaking Mattie from her thoughts.

She startled, looked around, and then said, “Correct.”

Chris lived in a second-floor apartment on Gutenbergstrasse in the Charlottenburg district of the city. It was a slightly
frumpy address for a man of Schneider’s age, but he’d loved the place because it gave him close access to the zoo and to Tiergarten
Park, where he liked to run.

Mattie had not been to Chris’s place in more than six weeks. Her last visit weighed heavily on her mind as they used her key
to open the door to the building. There was a courtyard with grass and raised garden beds. The one below Chris’s apartment
had been freshly tilled. There were bags of tulip bulbs sitting near a hoe and shovel. A BMW motorcycle was parked on the
grass.

Mattie frowned. She knew the superintendent of the building, a cantankerous man named Krauss. She’d never known him to allow
motorcycles in his courtyard, or bikes for that matter.

She put that aside and led Burkhart up an interior staircase to a second-floor landing. She hesitated. At some level, she
felt like this place was forbidden to her now, no matter what might have happened to Chris.

“That key doesn’t work on this door?” Burkhart asked. “Or are you worried Dietrich is going to have a shit fit if he finds
out we’ve been in here?”

“Screw Dietrich,” Mattie said and rammed the key into the lock.

She turned the knob and pushed the door open.

THE LEATHER COUCH and chairs had been overturned, the upholstery slashed, the stuffing torn out. Books littered the floor. The closets had been
opened, their contents strewn all about.

Mattie smelled trash rotting and heard a cat mewing.

“Socrates?” she called, walking inside. “Here kitty.”

“This is a crime scene now,” Burkhart said. “We can’t go in.”

“It’s a tossed apartment,” she shot back. “Let’s figure out what they took.”

Mattie stopped and donned the same latex gloves she’d worn at the slaughterhouse. The cat had stopped crying.

Burkhart grimaced, but then followed her lead.

She walked gingerly through the debris, including shattered glass from picture frames. Several of the pictures showed Chris
and Mattie, arms around each other, smiling as if they were the happiest couple on earth.

How had it all gone so wrong?

How had this happened? The chip. The hacking. And now his apartment is tossed. And why? What was Chris on to?

Mattie reached the alcove where Chris often worked at home. She spotted the smashed laptop on the floor and went to it. She
crouched and used a pen to push aside the pieces, barely aware of Burkhart picking up a photograph of Chris and a young boy.

“Engel, is this—?” Burkhart began.

“Fuck!” Mattie cried, cutting him off. “They got his hard drive. Fuck!”

“All right, we know what they were after then,” Burkhart said, setting the picture down. “We’re out of here. We call Kripo.”

Mattie stood and pushed by him. “I’m finding his cat. You wait at the car.”

She did not wait for an answer, but instead walked down the hallway past the kitchen, where dirty dishes and takeout Thai
food boxes contributed to a foul reek. She stopped breathing in through her mouth and went into the bedroom, which was painted
bright white.

The comforter was bright white too. So were the drapes, which billowed with the gusts of wind and rain blowing in through
the open French windows that overlooked the courtyard. Rain soaked the rug below the windows.

There was a wastebasket by the bed filled to the brim with papers, one of the few containers that had not been emptied in
the entire apartment. Mattie crossed to it and saw several crumpled pieces of paper on top.

She was picking one up when she heard a meow. She looked over and saw Socrates, Chris’s charcoal and gray tabby, coming out
of the bathroom.

Mattie took a step toward him, grinning. “There you are.”

Then she spotted the imprint of soles on the wet rug.

She followed the tracks with her eyes to the closet door at her immediate right, then slipped the crumpled paper into her
pocket, took a step toward the cat, and started to reach for her pistol, saying, “Good Socrates. You hungry?”

The closet door exploded outward.

A BURLY MAN in black leathers and a motorcycle helmet smashed into Mattie’s left side and blew her off her feet.

She crashed to the rug next to Socrates. The man tried to kick her in the stomach, but she saw it coming and curled up so
her thigh took the impact.

He took two steps to the window and jumped out.

Mattie fought to get to her feet, drawing her pistol. She heard the motorcycle engine growl to life and staggered to the window
just as he popped the clutch, throwing up grass as he wove toward the entry to the building.

Without thinking, Mattie jumped.

She landed in the soggy, freshly tilled bed and then rolled out of it as a parachutist might. She saw Krauss coming into the
courtyard from the opposite side, horror on his face.

“Mattie!” he cried.

She had no time to explain. The motorcyclist was getting away. She sprinted through the building’s main door, hoping to catch
the license plate.

The motorcyclist was accelerating west. She could see his back and helmet but no license plate.

“Shit!” she cried.

The BMW screeched up beside her, Burkhart at the wheel. “Get in.”

She jumped in the passenger seat and they went squealing after the motorcyclist, who braked and turned onto Englische Strasse,
heading south.

By the time they reached the corner he was turning west again, paralleling the canal and the campus of the Technical University.
Burkhart downshifted and almost caught him before he crossed the March Bridge onto campus.

Students were diving out of the way of the motorcycle and Burkhart’s car as they raced through campus.

At a roundabout the rider curled left onto Hardenbergstrasse and then crossed under the Zoologischer S-Bahn station, where
he wove hard to his right onto Joachimstaler, then sharply left onto Kantstrasse, heading east toward the ruins of the belfry
tower.

Despite the serpentine course they ran through the city, Burkhart had somehow managed to close the gap again when the man
who’d trashed Chris’s apartment dodged without warning across traffic and up onto the plaza that surrounded the ruins.

“Don’t you dare!” Mattie cried at Burkhart. “There are people all over that plaza. Take the next right at Budapester instead.”

Burkhart gritted his teeth but did as he was told, lucking out that the light was in his favor. The street ran parallel to
the plaza. Mattie could see the motorcyclist weaving through pedestrians, who scattered ahead of him.

“There’s got to be a cop there somewhere,” Mattie said.

“They’re never around when you need them,” Burkhart said, barreling down Budapester Strasse.

The motorcyclist veered off the plaza and out onto Budapester.

But Burkhart was right behind him.

“He’s got no license plate,” Mattie said.

“I imagine not,” Burkhart said as they shot off-road through the busy Palme-Platz.

Burkhart was a genius behind the wheel. He made every move the motorcyclist did, until they crossed the canal again east of
the zoo.

On the immediate north side, the motorcycle suddenly braked hard, as if trying to avoid something in the road ahead.

“Bastard, gonna knock you down,” Burkhart said, hammering the gas.

The BMW’s front left fender just missed the rear wheel of the motorcycle as it veered hard left onto Corneliusstrasse.

Burkhart slammed on his brakes, threw the car in reverse, and then squealed after the motorcyclist. But Mattie already had
a sinking feeling in her stomach.

She knew this part of Berlin well. She and Chris had run here often.

Straight ahead two blocks, the way west was blocked, except for pedestrians and bicyclists who could access a trail that ran
along the canal inside Tiergarten Park and between the zoo and Neuer Lake.

The last Mattie saw of the motorcyclist, he was accelerating west on the canal path, and then he disappeared behind the falling
leaves, the pouring rain, and the waning light of day.

“HAUPTKOMMISSAR?”

Hans Dietrich turned to his trainee. He towered over her, looking exasperated. “What is it, Weigel?”

Standing in the eastern end of the slaughterhouse, Inspector Weigel’s cheeks reddened, but then she stammered, “The technicians
have found blood samples. Many of them.”

Dietrich stiffened, hesitated, and then sputtered, “Well, I imagine so. It was a slaughterhouse.”

“Sir, they want to know what you want them to do.”

He hesitated again, and then said, “Take twenty random samples.”

The inspector paused, then nodded uncertainly. “Hauptkommissar, are you not feeling well?”

Dietrich stared at her a moment, and then he looked at his watch. Four ten.

He did his best to appear stricken. “No, as a matter of fact, I feel like I’m coming down with something. I…I think I shall
have to go home.”

“Sir?” Weigel said.

“A twelve-hour bug,” Dietrich said. “If you find something of significance, call me.”

Twenty minutes later, the high commissar was driving his old Opel down a corridor of horse-chestnut trees that lined both
sides of Puschkinallee, heading toward Treptower Park in southeast Berlin.

Dietrich glanced in his rearview mirror, seeing the television tower at Alexanderplatz framed in the road behind him. His
lip curled. He hated the tower. He hated everything it stood for.

He’d heard lately that real estate speculators were going to tear it down as part of the redevelopment of Alexanderplatz.
Dietrich thought the tower was a good thing to be rid of, a very good thing.

As an investigator he had learned well that the past is always eventually buried, especially in a city. It may take centuries,
it may take mass destruction, but the past is always eventually reduced to rubble, dust, and rumor.

As far as the high commissar was concerned, the sooner the burial happened in certain parts of Berlin the better.

Which is why, as he approached Treptower Park, Dietrich felt like he’d been forced to pick up a shovel and dig into a mound
of radioactive material; he knew he had to do it, but he feared he might be destroyed in the process.

He parked the Opel and checked his watch.

It was 4:40 p.m. He had twenty minutes.

He swallowed hard, grabbed his umbrella, and struggled from the car.

In a long, ungainly gait that caused his head to bob forward with every step, the high commissar hurried south on a lane that
ran through sopping autumn woods until he reached a vast rectangular opening in the forest.

He passed a statue of a mother crying, Mother Russia crying. He walked up a long promenade lined with weeping silver birches
toward two massive red monuments facing each other. The red granite had been taken from Hitler’s Chancellery and then carved
into giant stylized flags adorned with the Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle.

Below the flags, bronze statues of war-weary Russian soldiers knelt facing each other. In the distance, framed between the
two soldiers, stood a third statue. This warrior was ten times the size of the others. The noble Soviet carried a German child.
At his feet lay a broken Nazi swastika.

The high commissar climbed the stairs and walked between the kneeling statues. He looked out over a graveyard of five thousand
of Stalin’s soldiers who died in the battle for Berlin at the end of World War II.

But Dietrich was not looking at the sixteen crypts that held the bodies, nor was he thinking about Stalin, or the particulars
of the Soviet War Memorial. He was peering beyond all of it through the lightly falling rain to a path that ran parallel to
the cemetery through a grove of trees.

In the dull pewter light and the rain, a lone figure appeared from the trees in a black raincoat, jogging pants, and shoes.
He strode briskly down the path, arms pumping and his head up like a dog on alert.

The high commissar checked his watch.

Five p.m. on the dot.

He shook his head in mild disbelief. “Like fucking clockwork.”