The owner of Private thought about that. “Comrades in arms, dear friends, and an old and dear lover.”
“How did she die?” Mattie asked.
“Justine’s alive. What’s dead is what we had between us.”
“How long ago did that end?”
“A few years. Long enough I should have moved on.”
“You’re still not over her?”
“My relationship with Justine is like waves on a beach, coming and going, but always coming back. Especially because she works at Private in LA.”
“You have a complicated life, Jack,” Katharina said.
“Uh-huh.”
“No other love interests?” Mattie asked.
He laughed with little enthusiasm. “I’m always looking for love. I’m just not too good at creating it.”
“And I’m not good at holding on to it.”
“Seems to me like it was taken from you by forces beyond your control,” Katharina said. “I’m going after Hermann Krüger.”
Mattie nodded, her eyes watering. But she refused to cry again, and she got up from the table. “I’m going to find Gabriel. It’s time I figured out Chris’s terrible childhood secret once and for all.”
CHAPTER 43
WHEN MATTIE FOUND Dr. Gabriel in his lab on the second floor of Private Berlin, he was wearing black jeans, a red bandana, and a Jimi Hendrix “Live at the Monterey Pop Festival” sweatshirt that featured a burning red guitar.
She told him what she was after and he graciously put down what he’d been doing to help her. They used a giant translucent screen that allowed them to call up documents, pictures, and video and study them all at once, as if they were looking at them on a corkboard.
They mined Private’s records first and found Chris’s personnel file, including a digital scan of his birth certificate, which said that Christoph Rolf Schneider was born in Dresden in 1975 to Alfred and Maria Schneider.
They tried to match the birth certificate and fou
nd no Christoph Rolf Schneider registered in the Dresden files. They searched for Alfred and Maria Schneider in the marriage records and again came up empty-handed.
They expanded the search to include all of what had been East Germany, and found several men named Christoph Schneider, but none were remotely Chris’s age. And nowhere did they find a record of a marriage between an Alfred Schneider and a woman with the first name Maria.
They dug deeper, trying school databases. Again nothing.
“I’m beginning to think nothing about Chris was real,” Dr. Gabriel said.
“I know,” Mattie said, now seriously confused. “But he was real. Let’s go back. Do we have his army records in his personnel file?”
“I’m sure,” Gabriel said. He searched a minute and then called them up.
The picture of Chris made her smile. He looked so young. The base information was all in line with what he’d listed on his Private application after leaving the German military police: Same parental names, same bogus birth certificate from Dresden, and the same bogus address.
Mattie thought they had hit an impenetrable wall until she noticed something on the sheet in the army file that listed Chris’s educational history.
Listed under his place of primary and secondary education was “Waisenhaus 44,” an orphanage out in the countryside south of Berlin and east of the city of Halle.
“Ernst, where would they keep records of GDR-era orphanages?”
Dr. Gabriel thought about that. “I don’t know, the Federal Archives?”