Private Berlin (Private 5)

CHAPTER 133

FOR A SECOND, Mattie did not know if she could do it, but then she looked down at Niklas and found renewed strength.

She got up and described the first time she and Chris met. She made the mourners laugh at his awkwardness when he’d asked her out on their first date. She told them about the joy that surrounded her when he asked her to marry him.

Then a somber expression came to her face, and she talked about the emptiness she always felt in him, the dark, hollow part. She also talked about the reaction to the whole story coming out in the press: the slaughterhouse, the bodies, the orphans, the murders, and Falk’s Stasi past.

“Over twenty years have passed since the wall fell, and what happened here in East Berlin has not left many of us,” she said. “People say we should forget what the secret police did to their fellow citizens. They say we should forget the culture of paranoia and brutality it promoted. They say we should forget what happened to people like Chris and Ilse and you, Ilona. We should move on, they say. Move on.”

Tears welled in Mattie’s eyes. “Yes, we should move on. Life is for the living. But we can’t forget that people like Matthias Falk existed and thrived in a darker world we only left behind two decades ago. And most of all, we can’t forget the good people Falk destroyed. They were real. They laughed and cried and cared for each other. They were children and mothers and fathers, and brothers and sisters and wives and…lovers.”

For a second, Mattie felt her entire body trembling with loss, but then, with a bittersweet smile, she pointed in the direction of the old man with the cane.

“In that vein, I’d like to introduce August Wolfe,” she said. “For the past eighteen years, Herr Wolfe has been a professor of literature at the University of Leipzig. For fifteen years before he took that position, he was in and out of Stasi prisons and torture chambers because of positions he took in the mid-1970s regarding the secret police and intellectual freedom.”

Mattie walked down the aisle and extended her hand. The old man took it and struggled to his feet. Mattie patted his arm and told the mourners, “This is also Chris’s father.”

For a moment, there was stunned silence.

Finally, High Commissar Dietrich began to clap. And then everyone was on their feet and clapping.

Chris’s father was overcome for several moments.

Then in the sure voice of a professor, he said, “I thought Chris had died with my wife thirty years ago. It’s what I was told happened, and there were no records. I had come to peace with my loss ten years before the wall fell.” He shook his head. “And then to hear that Chris lived and became a good man?” He shook his head again, tears streaming down his face. “It’s almost too much to bear.

“When Mattie found me last week, and told me, I didn’t believe her at first,” he went on. “And then I became very bitter at the fact that I hadn’t just lost an eight-year-old boy, I’d lost the man he’d become.”

He sighed. “But now, listening to you all describe him.” He choked. “It was a great, great help to me, an easing of my heartache. I want to thank you for being his friends all these years. Thank you from the bottom of my soul for what you all did to help my son and avenge his death.”

CHAPTER 134

THERE WASN’T A dry eye in Gethsemane Church when Mattie threw her arms around August Wolfe.

r /> When she broke from his embrace, she looked around and said, “I know this is a house of God. But those of us who knew Chris well knew that he loved beer. We have it and plenty of his favorite foods at a restaurant down the street. Let’s no longer talk of Chris’s death or the death of any of Falk’s victims. Instead I invite you to raise a glass to them and tell more stories about them and keep them alive in our hearts.”

The minister ended the ceremony and the mourners began to file out.

Morgan went to Chris’s father, introduced himself, and offered to help the older man outside. Doruk wheeled Frau Ledwig.

Mattie trailed Brecht and Dr. Gabriel, with one hand on Niklas’s shoulder, and the other holding Aunt Cäcilia’s hand.

When they reached the rear of the church off the lobby, she told her son and aunt to go on ahead. She’d be right out. They smiled knowingly and left.

Mattie turned and looked at Tom Burkhart, who leaned against the back wall of the church on crutches. His left forearm was wrapped in a bandage. His left leg was casted hip to ankle.

“Did I do good?” she asked. “Did I do Chris justice?”

“You did better than good,” Burkhart replied. “You had me bawling back here. Me!”

Mattie smiled. “You’re deeper than you let on, Burkhart.”

“Don’t tell anyone. It’ll screw up my image.”

She gazed at him for a long moment. “Did you know you were transmitting that night at Waisenhaus 44?”

Burkhart was genuinely puzzled. “Transmitting?”

“I could hear you talking to me after Falk shot you.” She paused. “I heard everything you said to me, Tom.”