Private Berlin (Private 5)

CHAPTER 54

IN THE HALLWAY, Mattie stopped to get out her flashlight. She shined it around, finding a room to her right that held the last relics of an office lying in leaves, fungus, and mold: a desk with two legs, a chair with the stuffing and rusted springs visible, and an overturned file cabinet with no drawers.

This was where the headmaster or mistress must have done their business, Mattie thought. She walked on, moving about the orphanage’s lower floor, which had been stripped of nearly everything.

She found the kitchen and the eating hall. They were stripped too.

As she climbed the stairs, she tried to imagine Chris in this horrid place, eight years old, motherless, fatherless. She thought of Niklas having to be put in an orphanage and felt on the verge of weeping again.

On the second floor, Mattie discovered the ruins of old classrooms and became aware that something about the background din of the rain falling and the tractor plowing had changed.

She ascended to the third floor and found dormitories set to either side of a long central corridor. The first was empty. The one across the hall held rusted bunk-bed frames bolted to the wall.

Mattie walked over creaking floorboards to the second set of dorms. In the first one she inspected, the roof was caved in on top of one of the steel bunk beds, the only one she’d seen that still had a mattress on it.

The mattress was black with filth and mold. There were puddles on it, and on the floor. For reasons she could not explain, Mattie felt drawn into the dorm, toward that bunk bed mattress.

The floorboards felt soft and rotted underfoot. But she went anyway and stood in the rain teeming through the hole in the roof, transfixed by the mattress and the splintered joists that stabbed it in several places.

Was this bed once Chris’s?

Mattie saw him lying on the bed as easily as another memory that came flooding in around her.

She and Chris were in bed at a ski condo they’d rented at Garmisch, a rare separation from Niklas.

Chris made her breakfast and brought it to her on a tray with a single rose, and a small box of chocolates wrapped in a bow. He watched her eat, amused. And then he was interested to see her opening the chocolate box.

Inside was a ring, two emeralds surrounding an emerald-cut diamond.

Suddenly, there in the wreckage of the orphanage, loss flowed everywhere around Mattie, an invisible, terrible hydraulic pressure built, making the room feel as menacing to her as the subbasement in the slaughterhouse.

Lightning flashed, almost blinding her.

Thunder cracked right overhead.

Mattie ducked, desperate now to leave this place, to get back to her car and go home to Niklas.

She ran from the room.

She raced to the staircase and then froze.

Standing in the shadows at the bottom of the staircase was a man in a long, black, hooded rain slicker.

His face was hidden beneath the hood.

He was aiming a double-barreled shotgun at her.

CHAPTER 55

“WHO ARE YOU?” the man with the shotgun growled. “And what in God’s name are you doing in here?”

For an instant, Mattie couldn’t answer.

He adjusted his aim. “I asked you—”

She reached to her coat pocket.

“Easy,” the man said, still aiming the gun.