Private Berlin (Private 5)

She was a makeup artist with the German State Opera and Ballet. She was also a traitor to her country, to her husband, and to me.

But those are stories for another time.

The masks.

As a child I lived with my mother and father in a prefabricated apartment building that the state erected in the far eastern rea

ches of Berlin, out where the city met farms where livestock was raised for milk and slaughter.

I note this, my friends, only because in addition to being a raging alcoholic, my father was a professional butcher.

The day I learned about the power of masks, my father was at work, and the opera house was dark for the season. I must have been about seven and had been sick with chicken pox.

Trying to cheer me up, my mother climbed into the attic and brought down a large trunk. She opened it, and I swore I could smell old people in there—you know, the scent of slow, inevitable decay?

She pulled out a Papierkrattler mask, which featured smirking, cartoon features: ruby lips, a gargantuan nose, wild eyes, and a raccoon tail for hair. She said it was last used fifty years before during a parade in Ravensburg, down near the Swiss border.

My mother said that the mask had once belonged to her mother, who had died in the bombing that reduced Berlin and my father to smoking rubble and desperation in the last year of Hitler’s war. The mask had somehow survived.

“This mask is a miracle,” my mother told me. “A miracle.”

She set it aside and brought out another mask, this one black, narrower, and fitted across the bridge of the nose like a criminal’s disguise.

“It’s from Don Giovanni, the opera,” she said as she slipped it on me.

“Who’s Don Giovanni?” I asked.

“A bad man who dies badly. That is how an evil person dies. The death of a sinner always reflects their life. Remember that.”

Of course I would later learn that this was complete and utter nonsense.

Death is never a form of retribution.

Death is a thing of beauty, something to behold, a moment to celebrate.

But good son that I was, I agreed earnestly. My mother brought out her makeup kit and showed me how to paint my face. She gave me surly lips, sunken eyes, and wicked brows that made me laugh.

After she’d added a wig and glasses, I remember looking in the mirror and thinking I really was someone else, most certainly not me anymore.

“Do you know why they use masks and makeup in the theater?” my mother asked.

I shook my head.

“A mask changes you. So does makeup. With the right mask you can be anyone you want to be. With a mask you can hide in plain sight. You can do what you want, act the way you want. With a mask, it’s almost like you’re invisible and free to be anyone or anything you desire. Like a prince. Or a tiger.”

I nodded, feeling possibility swelling inside me. “Or a monster?”

“Even a monster,” my mother said and kissed me on the head.

CHAPTER 4

A NEW VIDEO appeared on the screens to the right of Jack Morgan’s head.

It showed a woman wearing a shabby black dress over black denim jeans. Mattie’s initial thought was that at one time she must have been attractive.

But the woman’s hair was dry and mussed. Her skin was sallow. And her eyes were sunken and dark. She looked like she’d lived a very, very hard life.

“This is from our lobby camera, early morning, two Fridays ago,” Gabriel told them. “Here, Chris comes out to meet her.”