Private Berlin (Private 5)

“Greta Amsel is dead,” Mattie insisted. “I was an eyewitness to Artur Jaeger’s murder. And I think that body with Chris’s was Ilse Frei’s.”

“Agnes Krüger is dead too,” Dietrich shot back. “And I’m beginning to believe Hermann killed Chris and the others.”

“No, that’s something different. I think.”

“Is it? Seems more likely than some crazy story about the slaughterhouse and a bogeyman named Falk.”

“Maybe Krüger is Falk,” Mattie said. “Or Pavel is Falk.”

Dietrich gritted his teeth. “Perhaps. I’ll ask them.”

Mattie’s voice came back bitter. “You’re saying you won’t talk to Ilona? Hear her entire story firsthand?”

Dietrich felt stronger now, charting his own way. “I will in due course, Frau Engel. Meanwhile, my time will be best spent hunting for Hermann Krüger.”

The high commissar stabbed the End button on his phone, and the moon fell full victim to the clouds, leaving the war memorial grounds so pitch-black that Dietrich thought for a moment he’d been blinded.

CHAPTER 93

I CONFESS, FRIENDS and fellow Berliners, that I’ve been drinking absinthe, the green fairy, since midnight.

Ordinarily I don’t indulge in any sort of intoxicant. But for the first time, I truly understand what it must be like to have escaped prison with dogs baying behind me. The green fairy is the only thing stopping me from panicked flight.

The instinct is, of course, to run and run hard. My drunken heart races at the idea I might have to abandon my life and disappear into yet another mask.

But I’ve done so much to craft this one, as carefully as the masks that line the walls of the room where I’m drinking absinthe and brooding.

My mind feels sullen and foggy, and I keep seeing myself sitting down the street from Mattie Engel’s apartment building, waiting for Tom Burkhart to leave. But he did not leave. The lights in her place went off with him inside, and me filled with the sudden and intense longing for the green distillation I’m using to deaden my growing agitation.

What did Ilona tell Engel and Burkhart?

It doesn’t matter. An insane woman’s ravings. That’s what they’ll think.

Unless they find Kiefer Braun.

But I’ve been using every search engine at my disposal. I’ve even hired several tracking services, and there’s no trace of him. Maybe my dear old friend Kiefer just decided to disappear into another life as I did.

Or maybe he left Germany.

Or died?

Well, then. If that’s the case, I’ve got nothing to worry about, do I? Kiefer’s long gone, and Ilona Frei’s a most unreliable witness, and I’m good. It’s as likely a scenario as another, I tell myself as I pour another drink.

Now the green fairy begins to seriously toy with my brain, and I look up at my collection of masks, running my eyes fondly over the creatures I have become behind them.

I’m smiling, my friends. I’m feeling among allies as true as you.

They say absinthe has hallucinatory properties. I can’t say for sure. But then, among the masks hanging on the wall, the faces of Mattie Engel and Tom Burkhart materialize and sharpen. They seem to laugh at me.

At first I’m shocked at this intrusion into my inner sanctum.

Then I turn violent.

I reel to the wall and pick off the masks where the faces of Private Berlin had mocked me, one carved of wood, the other molded and ceramic.

I beat them to shards and splinters on the tile floor.

When I’m done, when I’ve totally destroyed them, I get up and stand there weaving, panting, using the absinthe to summon every bit of my cunning while forcing myself to face the fact that if Ilona Frei talked someone will eventually believe her, which means the dogs are most certainly behind me.