Private Berlin (Private 5)

CHAPTER 115

DIETRICH WATCHED THE old Stasi take a deep draw off his vodka and asked, “How long was it used as a torture chamber?”

“I don’t know that either,” Fassbinder replied. “But certainly until your father got wind of it, sometime in January or February of 1980. He was frightened to confront Mielke. That was what that drunken call you overheard was about.”

In his mind, the high commissar could see himself outside his father’s bedroom, listening to him rant. It was like yesterday. “Why was he so upset?”

“Your father, though a great patriot and party loyalist, refused on principle to engage in character assassination, torture, or murder. He dealt with facts. He confronted Mielke with facts, and demanded the operation be shut down. It was a very brave thing to do, Hans. It could have gotten your father sent to Hohenschönhausen, or to the slaughterhouse himself.”

Dietrich was stunned. For so many years, he’d thought of his father in a single, ruthless way—cruel and unprincipled, except for his devotion to the state. And now it turned out that he may have been the one who rescued the motherless children of Waisenhaus 44? Was the colonel there that night when they were all brought to the orphanage?

Before the high commissar put voice to these thoughts, Mattie asked Fassbinder, “Why would Mielke back down like that?”

Fassbinder shrugged. “I don’t know, though I suspect that Conrad must have had something on Mielke aside from the slaughterhouse, something that could not be simply found or erased. In any case, he closed the torture chamber and had all paper evidence of it destroyed, sometime in the spring of 1980, I’d presume.”

“And Falk?” Dietrich asked.

Fassbinder’s laugh was curt and cruel. “They threw him in Hohenschönhausen Prison for a few months. And then they retrained him.”

“Retrained him?” Mattie said. “As what? He was a sadistic psychopath.”

The old Stasi’s lips puckered before he asked, “Other than being an executioner, what’s the best profession for a man who genuinely enjoys killing?”

“Assassin?” Dietrich said.

Fassbinder reappraised him. “You are as quick as your father, Hans. The rumor was that Mielke had Falk trained to be a more perfect killer, one run by the state, or rather the head of the ministry.”

That took Dietrich aback. “He murdered people for Mielke? I didn’t think assassination was part of the Stasi playbook.”

“I can’t say that he actually carried out killings for Mielke, only that he was trained to do so,” Fassbinder replied.

“And then?” Mattie pressed.

Fassbinder shrugged again. “We were an institution fueled by suspicions invented by despots. Who could keep track of everything that happened and everyone who was involved in the last few years? Suffice it to say that one day, long before the wall fell, your father discovered that all records concerning Falk had disappeared. Until you walked into this bar tonight, I had not heard one word of Falk since then. He vanished as many people did when the wall fell. A myth. End of story.”

Fassbinder’s information gelled with much of what Ilona Frei and Kiefer Braun had testified to. But it also raised as many questions as it answered. Dietrich was about to launch into a litany of them when he noticed a reflection in the window behind the old Stasi.

Both Dietrich and Mattie twisted in their chairs to find Tom Burkhart looking at them with a somber expression. “There are no records of Falk in the special Stasi archives,” he said. “I spent most of the day there.”

“We just found that out ourselves,” Mattie replied.

Burkhart broke into a victorious grin. “But there were records in a church not far from the slaughterhouse. I found Falk’s baptismal certificate there. I know his first and middle names, and I believe I know exactly where we can find him.”

“Where?” Dietrich and Mattie demanded almost in unison.

“At his art gallery in Charlottenburg.”

CHAPTER 116

LESS THAN AN hour later, the intense flame of an acetylene torch cut through the iron security gate at the I. M. Ehrlichmann Gallery of Fine Art. Police barricades had gone up around the entire block.

Special weapons and tactical Kripo officers surrounded all exits, including the roof, which was being monitored by a helicopter flying in high winds.

Mattie was there with Burkhart and Dietrich, all suited up in bulletproof armor. To one side, Ilona Frei watched, wrapped in a blanket and trembling in the arms of the former Kiefer Braun.

“Three-story building; he owns the whole thing,” Dr. Gabriel told them. “He claims his residency on the second and third floors above the gallery.”

The torch died. Burkhart said, “We are go.”