“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.
CHAPTER 15
“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.