Private Berlin (Private 5)

“Swedish financier,” Katharina said. “He launched a hostile take-over bid of your stepfather’s company an hour ago.”

Rudy’s breath came partly out in a rush. “Never heard of him.”

“Rude?” a woman’s voice called.

She was tiny, no more than one hundred pounds, with a pretty face and a haircut that made her look waifish. She wore a kaffiyeh scarf around her neck.

“This is Tanya,” Rudy said. “My…uh, student.”

“Right,” Katharina said.

“We’re due at the rally, Rude,” Tanya said.

Unzipping the painter’s coverall, revealing jeans and a dark sweater, Rudy told Mattie and Katharina, “If you’re here to ask me if my stepfather had something to do with Schneider’s death, I honestly don’t know.

“But if you’re here to ask whether I think he’s capable of it, my answer is that Hermann Krüger is capable of anything.”

CHAPTER 41

IT’S NINE ON the dot when I park the Audi A5 well down the street from the German Federal Archives in West Berlin.

Call it the German in me, call it how I was raised as a child, but I do so like to be punctual for an opening.

I check myself in the mirror. The makeup, gray hair color, and clothes I wear make me look elderly. I put on a Bavarian alpine hat that is too large for me, so the brim sits just above my eyebrows. I climb from the car with a satchel briefcase, and a cane.

As I approach the gatehouse to the archives I make myself shake every so often, as if I’ve had some kind of stroke and it’s left me palsied.

At the gate, I present an expertly forged identification card from Heidelberg University and portray myself as absentminded history professor emeritus Karl Groening, who has failed to bring his driver’s license after coming all the way to Berlin by train to do research into nineteenth-century agricultural policy.

The guards give me a blue researcher’s badge, and let me in.

The grounds of the archives look like a decaying college campus with huge spreading chestnuts and long empty lawns. I find the building I need on the far side of the complex.

When I enter the public reading room, like many of the other researchers, I don cotton gloves. Then I go to the archivist’s desk and request all documentation associated with East German orphanages in and around Berlin.

“It may take an hour or so for the files to come up,” the clerk says.

“This is okay, my dear,” I say. “I booked the late train to Heidelberg.”

CHAPTER 42

JACK MORGAN WAS sitting at the break table nursing a coffee and looking very hungover when Katharina and Mattie arrived at Private Berlin.

“You didn’t sleep here, did you, Jack?” Mattie asked, pouring herself a cup.

“No. I kept the room at the Hotel de Rome,” he said. “How’s your son taking all this?”

“As well as could be expected, thank you.”

Morgan nodded. “I liked Chris. He was a good person, and when good people die, it reminds you of everybody else you’ve lost.”

“I saw my mother in my dreams last night,” Mattie said. “She was right there with Chris.”

“Your dad, he lives in the US, a cop, right?”

“Chicago,” she replied.

Katharina asked, “Who have you lost, Jack?”