Private Berlin (Private 5)

I look over my shoulder and see her, a ghost from my past, sweating, hair crazed, holding Eberhardt’s shotgun.

CHAPTER 131

FALK LOOKED AT Ilona in amusement.

“My dear old friend Ilona, this isn’t in you,” he began, turning toward her as Niklas scrambled away.

“It is in me!” Ilona screamed at him. “It was in Chris and Ilse and Artur and Greta and Kiefer. And all of them are in me now. They’re in me, Falk! I can hear them calling to me. Every one of them.”

“Don’t!” Mattie cried.

But Ilona yanked the trigger.

Twelve-gauge buckshot hit Falk and hurled him backward. He slammed off the wall and slid down, bleeding only slightly from his wounds to his face and neck.

Falk looked down at the bulletproof vest, which had taken the brunt of the blast. He started to laugh. “Don’t you know? You can’t kill what you can’t see?”

He looked up at Ilona, who now stood at point-blank range, aiming at his face. “What are you going to do?” he asked, his amusement deepening. “Shoot me in cold blood, become a person like me? Go to jail because of me?”

Ilona appeared on the verge of dissolving. Mattie thought to try to wrestle the gun from her. But then Ilona laughed with bitter delight, and called to Falk the way a mother might to a child.

“I’m insane, remember? No one would ever convict me. Lights-out time, Falk. Lights out for you. Forever.”

“My friend,” Falk began in a begging tone. “My, my fellow Berliner…”

Sirens came into the orphanage yard. Blue and red lights flashed through the open windows. And Mattie caught a split second of Falk stripped of disguise, a naughty little boy caught red-handed, before Ilona’s shotgun roared.

EPILOGUE

A BEAUTIFUL CITY OF SCARS

CHAPTER 132

THREE MONTHS LATER, just before Christmas, in memory of Chris Schneider and the other victims of Matthias Falk, the employees of Private Berlin and friends gathered at Gethsemane Church in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of East Berlin.

In 1989, the church had been a center of the opposition, and Mattie had felt it appropriate that the last victims of the Stasi be memorialized there.

There were blown-up pictures of Chris and the others arrayed in a semicircle at the front of the church.

Jack Morgan was one of the mourners. He sat with Mattie and Niklas, who held Socrates in his lap. Aunt Cäcilia, who’d been found knocked out and tied up in their apartment, told Niklas to stop fidgeting.

Behind them, Ilona Frei sat with Gerhardt Krainer, who’d testified so courageously on her behalf at the public inquest.

Inspector Weigel and High Commissar Dietrich, who was still serving his suspension, were across the aisle. Behind them, and in the aisle in a wheelchair, Hariat Ledwig dabbed at her eyes, looking at the photographs of the people the children of Waisenhaus 44 had become.

Just before the service began, an older, bent-over man in a dark suit entered the church in a slow shuffle and sat several rows back by himself, his hands resting on a cane.

The minister began the simple ceremony talking of the burdens some are called to endure in life, and spoke of the victims of Matthias Falk as innocent heroes forced to confront the deepest madness of the East German Republic.

Then, one by one mourners rose to talk. Morgan spoke once again about how great and fearless an investigator Christoph Schneider was, one of the best Private had ever seen.

Daniel Brecht talked of Chris’s courage and crazy sense of humor. Dr. Gabriel spoke of Chris’s professionalism and his refusal to be compromised, calling him the younger brother he never had.

Katharina Doruk recalled Chris’s true happiness with Mattie and Niklas.

Ilona Frei stood shakily and said, “Chris died trying to save my sister and trying to avenge the children of Waisenhaus 44. I’ll never forget him. Nor will I forget the other orphans who died at Falk’s hands. As horrible as it was, because of them, I feel like I got my sanity back.”

At last it was Mattie’s turn to stand and express her feelings.