Private Berlin (Private 5)
“This is recreation,” Cassiano said, indignant once again. “And my answer is still no. I was not taking a dive. I never take a dive. It is a matter of honor.”
“You know Maxim Pavel? He owns that drag-queen club, Cabaret.”
Cassiano looked insulted. “Do I look like fan of female impersonators?”
“Doesn’t answer the question,” Morgan shot back. “Do you know Pavel?”
Cassiano sighed. “Like I told Schneider, I met him once at another of his clubs, not Cabaret, Dance, I think.”
“Did you know he’s associated with Russian mafia?” Brecht asked.
“Not until Schneider asked me the same question,” he replied evenly. “Like I said, I met him once. We talk for maybe five minutes.”
“About what?”
“He says he is a big fan. Gets my autograph.”
“Can anyone corroborate this? Your wife?”
“Perfecta wasn’t with me when I went to the dance club. But Cabaret’s a ten-minute walk from here, so do the same thing I told Schneider to do. Go there and ask Pavel.”
CHAPTER 30
FIREMEN TRAINED HOSES on the smoking ruins of the slaughterhouse.
Her ears still ringing from the blast, her mind flashing with images of Chris’s corpse, Mattie sat on the bumper of an ambulance, wincing as an EMT used a butterfly bandage to close the scalp wound she’d gotten during the blast.
Burkhart sat next to her getting his arm wrapped with gauze. Next to him, High Commissar Dietrich was being treated for a cheek contusion.
They were facing Dr. Gabriel and Risi Baumgarten, a German federal agent who’d seized control of the investigation.
Dr. Gabriel said, “I just spoke with Jack Morgan. He’s given the okay for me to call in forensics teams from our offices in Amsterdam, Zurich, Paris, and London. Anything you want from Private is yours.”
“I think Private’s already been involved too much,” snapped Baumgarten, who stood a full six inches taller than the hippie scientist.
Mattie heard that through the ringing in her ears and said, “What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means perhaps this explosion would not have happened had you not gone down there, Frau Engel.”
“Someone had to go,” said Dietrich. “She was the right size, and we had no idea there was a bomb down there.”
Dietrich had seemed much less tightly wound and adversarial since the explosion. Mattie smiled grimly at him, thankful for the backup.
But Baumgarten was having none of it. “You sent in an amateur.”
“I am not an amateur,” Mattie cried.
“You set off a booby trap,” Baumgarten said.
“I did not set off anything. I did not trip anything.”
“So it’s simply a coincidence that the place blew right after you’d been down there?”
Burkhart shook his head. “If it was a booby trap and she tripped something, it would have gone off right away. I figure this was done remotely, by radio. We just got lucky getting out before it blew.”
Baumgarten eyed them all, and then looked at Gabriel. “You said there was a video of what Frau Engel saw in the subbasement.”
Gabriel nodded and cued it up on his computer. Baumgarten was sobered by the images from the boneyard. Mattie could not watch when the camera picked up Chris’s corpse. But she did see herself reaching up to tear green paper from one of the bomb packets. She dug it from her pocket and handed it to the federal agent.