Private Berlin (Private 5)

HAVE YOU EVER se

en that old movie The Invisible Man?

Claude Rains, the same guy who played the enigmatic French captain in Casablanca, stars as a mad scientist who turns homicidal after he figures out how to erase his visible body.

Not surprisingly, it’s one of my absolute favorite films of all time.

One scene in particular never fails to leave me howling with laughter. In it, Rains is covered in bandages and has taken refuge at an inn run by the Irish actress Una O’Connor. She happens to enter Rains’s room when he’s removed the bandages on his head.

He looks decapitated, but alive.

O’Connor’s eyes bulge. She goes over-the-top insane. She starts to shriek bloody murder.

It’s my special moment. One I wish I could re-create in my own life.

But alas, attaining invisibility is an art more than a science.

For instance, I have found over the past twenty-five years that the best thing you can do to remain unseen is to relax and inhabit your mask so thoroughly that people come to think nothing of you, especially in Berlin, my beautiful city of scars.

I’m not being poetic here. I’m telling you the truth. Pay attention now.

My friends, let me state unequivocally that if you are relaxed in Berlin, comfortable in your own scarred skin, and not causing outward trouble, the millions of scarred Berliners around you will just go on about their silly days, unaware of beings like me.

Or at least not believing in their wildest nightmares that someone like me could still live among them.

Unexposed.

Unrecorded.

Still hunting.

With all that in mind, I am very, very cool as I drive an unmarked white panel van—one of a small fleet of vehicles I’ve collected over the years—through the rainy Berlin streets, past the scars of Hitler, and the Russians, and the Wall, way out to a forest north of Ahrensfelde, and down a wet wooded lane to a children’s camp on Liepnitz Lake not far from the sleepy village of Ützdorf.

Do you know Ützdorf?

It doesn’t matter.

Just understand that there is no one at that camp today. At least that’s how it appears at first glance. Then again, why would there be? It’s pouring out and cold and there’s dense fog building out on the water around the island.

I park near the dock. No sooner do I shut off the engine than my young genius friend appears on the porch of the boathouse.

He’s bearded, midtwenties, and his soaking-wet hair hangs on his fogged glasses. He takes them off and tries to dry them on a wet sweatshirt that features the emblem of the Berlin Technical University.

I take a gym bag from the passenger seat of my van and climb out, leaving the engine running.

“How did you get here?” I ask, climbing up onto the porch, out of the rain.

“Bus and walked, like you said. I got fucking soaked.”

“Ever heard of a raincoat?” I ask.

“Wasn’t raining when I started,” he says, irritated. “You have the money?”

I hold up the bag. “Twenty-five thousand euros, as agreed.”

“Let me see,” my friend says, reaching for the bag.

I keep it just out of his reach. “Not before I see what I’m buying.”