Private Berlin (Private 5)

The waitress returned with their drinks. While she set them out, Mattie watched as the old man maintained a blank expression, zero reaction.

“Did Falk work for the Stasi?” Dietrich asked when the waitress left.

Fassbinder took a long sip of his vodka, coughed, and said carefully, “No. Not in any official capacity, and by that I mean that I believe you will never find a trace of him in the special Stasi archives, nor in the logs of Hohenschönhausen Prison, or anywhere else, I imagine. And, as I understand it, that slaughterhouse was destroyed just a few days ago. So there isn’t anything I can say that would not be conjecture and hearsay on my part.”

Mattie felt herself growing angry. “Well, Willy, or whoever you really are, there’s no hearsay or conjecture in the fact that I was in the subbasement of that slaughterhouse before it blew. I saw where the corpses of the tortured mothers were fed to rats while their children watched. I saw the bones myself.”

&nbs

p; That turned Fassbinder aghast and his skin ashen. “I…I had no idea that these things were occurring there, absolutely no idea. I will go to my grave telling you that.”

“But my father knew, didn’t he?” Dietrich demanded. “He found out about the slaughterhouse—he got very drunk one night, and he told you he could not stand being a part of these heinous crimes, and that he would not go down with whoever ordered the tortures and killings. Didn’t he?”

Fassbinder’s head tilted back as if pulled by some heavy weight before he sighed and nodded ever so slightly.

CHAPTER 114

FASSBINDER CLEARED HIS throat and said, “He, your father, had heard rumors, just as I had heard rumors of the secret crematoriums we were running where the bodies of the disappeared were being taken. Your father made a personal investigation. He found some truth, and more rumors. But it was enough to shake him, and Conrad Frommer was largely an unshakeable man.”

“He offered you no concrete proof?” Mattie asked.

Fassbinder looked at her as if she were naïve and laughed. “Concrete? Frau Engel, there was nothing concrete inside the Ministry for State Security. Everything was illusion, smoke and mirrors, gossip and accusations, outright lies and intricately manufactured half-truths. No one knew that better than Conrad.”

“Why?” Dietrich asked. “What exactly did my father do in the Stasi?”

Fassbinder’s eyebrows rose. “He never told you?”

“No,” the high commissar replied.

That surprised the old man even more. “You honestly have no idea?”

“None.”

Fassbinder laughed again, this time in some bewilderment at the mystery that had been Dietrich’s father. Then he leaned forward conspiratorially and in a voice that Mattie had to strain to hear, he said, “Your father was a good policeman, Hans, an excellent detective like you. He was so good, however, that he was chosen to work behind the scenes on secret investigations for Mielke. He was one of Mielke’s get-things-done men.”

“Mielke?” Dietrich cried. “You mean Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi?”

“I said your father was talented,” Fassbinder replied as if the high commissar were an imbecile. “Conrad worked for him directly on projects vital to Mielke’s personal agenda.”

Although Mattie was shocked and fascinated by this revelation, she asked, “But what about the slaughterhouse? What about Falk? Tell us what the high commissar’s father told you.”

The old man turned grim. “He said that he’d somehow discovered that the slaughterhouse in Ahrensfelde was being used as Mielke’s personal torture chamber, the place people were taken when he absolutely wanted to know their secrets.”

“And Falk was the torturer?”

“And executioner, as I understand it now,” Fassbinder said.

Over the course of the next half hour, the old Stasi told them what he knew, the fact, the rumor, and the conjecture.

Dietrich’s father never mentioned Falk’s first name, or if he did Fassbinder did not remember it. Falk’s father ran the abattoir for the state in the sixties and seventies. The boy grew up working in the slaughterhouse, and was said to be very close to his mother.

When Falk was ten, however, his mother was arrested, charged with crimes against the state, and taken to Hohenschönhausen Prison. She was a makeup artist with the German State Opera who had become involved in the underground railroad helping East Germans escape into the West, a crime considered high treason at the time.

The younger Falk was said to be extremely smart; he read all the time and excelled in school. But soon after his mother’s imprisonment, for whatever reason, he discovered that he enjoyed killing the animals coming in to slaughter.

Mattie squinted one eye, saying, “And what, Mielke recognized that part of him and encouraged it?”

“You’re asking me to explain a paranoid mad genius, Frau Engel. I can’t claim to know Erich Mielke’s mind or how he came to know of Falk. But however it happened, the high commissar’s father told me that the boy was enlisted into Mielke’s private army shortly after the slaughterhouse was closed as an abattoir in the late 1970s.”