Private Berlin (Private 5)

Niklas said, “Are you and Tom going to catch whoever killed Chris?”

“Most definitely.”

Mattie kissed him on the forehead. “Get some sleep, my little man.”

“Tom said I’m going to be big.”

“He did, didn’t he?”

She went to the door.

“Mommy?”

“Yes?”

“You’re not going to get killed trying to find out who did it, are you?”

Mattie turned and went straight back to him and wrapped her arms around him. “No. I’m going to be safe and here with you until you’re as big as Burkhart is.”

Niklas hugged her fiercely. “I love you, Mommy.”

Mattie started to tear up. “I love you too, Nicky. More than you can know.”

CHAPTER 69

FRIENDS, FELLOW BERLINERS, it’s not quite six in the morning, and I’m already on the road in the ML500. I have a long drive in front of me, four and a half hours to Frankfurt am Main if traffic on the autobahn cooperates.

Can there be a better time to hear a story than over a long stretch of road? I confess I love those audiobooks, don’t you?

Sit back, now, and listen closely:

As I indicated once before, two years after the wall fell, well after the surgeries in Africa, it took me a month to locate the bitch that bore me.

She was living in the sleepy hamlet of Biedenkopf near the Rothaargebirge Nature Park in west central Germany.

Do you know the place?

It doesn’t matter. Suffice it to say that my mother lived alone in a cottage on the outskirts of a rural village threatened by forest.

On a chill, dark, November night, I knocked at her door.

“Who’s there?” came a tremulous response.

“It is me, mother,” I said, and I repeated the name she’d given me at birth.

After a moment’s hesitation, the wooden door opened slowly, revealing an old, frail woman I almost did not recognize.

She was carrying an old Luger, which she pointed at me suspiciously.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“A lover of masks, Mother,” I said, and made that clicking noise in my throat. “Don Giovanni’s most of all.”

Her eyes peeled wide, and her mouth sagged open in sheer disbelief as her pistol slowly lowered. “Is it really you?”

“Of course,” I said. “Do you still have that old Papierkrattler mask?”

“They told me you died in Hohenschönhausen Prison!” she cried and threw herself at me, weeping.