Private Berlin (Private 5)

The SWAT team assaulted the building from front and rear, blowing open the doors with rams and following with stun grenades.

They should have saved the explosives and the doors.

Matthias Isaac Falk, aka “I. M. Ehrlichmann,” aka “Isaac Matthias Ehrlichmann,” was gone.

The name switch seemed obvious when you saw it on paper, but Mattie decided she had to admire Burkhart’s clever instinct in making the connection so quickly once he’d seen the baptismal certificate.

When they were cleared to go inside, Mattie held a kerchief to her mouth because the air was still acrid from the stun grenades. Falk’s gallery was a warren of a shop, crammed wall to wall and floor to ceiling with primitive art, including a huge collection on the walls surrounding his office area that featured masks from every corner of the world.

On the second floor, High Commissar Dietrich discovered a makeup kit. In the basement garage, he found eight vehicles, including a blue panel van and an impeccably maintained Trabant 601.

Mattie made the biggest discovery. When she tried to open a locked upright filing cabinet behind the gallery desk, she noticed that it rocked oddly.

She pushed and twisted the cabinet to the left and nothing happened. It felt bolted into the ground and to the wall. But when she twisted it to the right, it disengaged and swiveled out along with a piece of the wall.

She pulled out a light, drew her pistol, and eased inside, finding herself in a narrow, high-ceilinged passage that ran the length of the outer room. When she’d determined the space was clear of threat, she groped the wall by the door, felt a switch, and turned it on, illuminating a secret gallery behind the gallery.

Mattie stood there, looking all around, confused at first as to what she was seeing, and what it all meant. The walls of the secret gallery were decorated with a loose collage of trinkets, jewelry, and odd pieces of clothes; and toys, newspaper clippings, and purses and wallets; and older and more recent snapshots of people, men and women and children.

Mostly children.

And suddenly, the collage made sense and the shock that followed was a blow to her stomach that rocked her mind.

“Mattie?” Burkhart called from outside. “You in there?”

“Yes,” she managed.

Burkhart ducked inside and looked around. “What is this?”

“I think it’s a trophy room.”

CHAPTER 117

HIGH COMMISSAR DIETRICH wanted the secret gallery sealed the moment he saw it, which Mattie understood completely. It was a forensics investigator’s mother lode of information and evidence.

“Let them see it before you do,” Mattie suggested.

“Who?” Dietrich asked.

“Frei and Krainer,” Mattie said. “See if they recognize anything. I think that gallery is a trophy room, but unless someone can identify something in there, it’s just somebody’s weird obsession.”

She thought he was going to argue, but then he nodded and said, “I suppose it can’t hurt.”

Mattie went outside. There were television trucks at either end of the block and klieg lights flaring. She found Ilona Frei still standing with Krainer. She told them what they’d found and asked if they’d be willing to go inside. Krainer said he did not think he could. The tidal wave of emotions in the past several hours was too much to deal with as it was, though he did say he’d be willing to look at a later time.

But Ilona Frei said, “I’ll go.”

“You sure?” Krainer asked.

She nodded, tucked her chin, and walked with Mattie into the main gallery. Her eyes perked up and she looked all around her at the jumble of art as they walked toward the doorway into the secret gallery.

But then Ilona Frei stopped suddenly and stared up at the mask collection, her eyes roving all over them and fear building in her carriage.

“What is it?” Mattie asked.

“They’re almost all of monsters, aren’t they?”

Mattie had not noticed before. But it was true. Falk’s monsters leered down as Mattie led Ilona inside the secret gallery.