Private Berlin (Private 5)

CHAPTER 44

AT TEN O’CLOCK exactly, I hear: “Professor Groening?”

German precision, my friends!

Is there anything more reassuring?

I smile and shuffle from my seat in the back left corner of the reading room, mindful of the cameras mounted to the ceiling.

At the desk, I find sixteen boxes of files and am told that there are more waiting for me in the microfilm room down the hall.

The kind clerk lady helps me roll the cart back to my spot.

I start with the paper archive first, scanning rapidly. In the fourth box I find the records of Waisenhaus 44, an orphanage outside of Halle, about an hour south of Berlin. There are hundreds of names and they’re not listed alphabetically. They seem all jumbled and out of order.

But then I study several closely and discover that they’ve been filed by date of admission.

That brings a smile to my lips.

In takes less than ten minutes to find the documents of six children, including snapshots taken on the day they were brought to Waisenhaus 44.

For a moment, I linger on a picture of Christoph as a boy.

Scrawny. Dark, sunken eyes showing fear and hatred.

He’s exactly as I remember him as a boy.

But I can’t afford to relive the good old days. I’ve got business to attend to.

I count the pages in the six files. Fifty-six.

I leave the files on the table, pick up my briefcase, and go to the toilet. From a secret side pocket in the interior of the briefcase, I retrieve a sheaf of white antique-finish paper covered in typed gibberish. I count out fifty-six pieces and slip them into several gray, well-worn legal-size files.

I set them in the briefcase, and shut it. I return to the archive reading room and my spot, noting the position of other researchers. I set the satchel down, open wide to my right on the floor next to my chair.

Then I wait. Five minutes pass.

At the stroke of eleven, clerks wheel in fresh documents.

Researchers who’ve been waiting charge toward the counter. All eyes rise and follow the rush of activity.

In a series of fluid motions, I slip the six files off my desk into my briefcase, and return the phony files to the tabletop, immediately reaching past them to the box that held the real documents.

They’re packed in less than a minute.

I put those boxes on the cart, get up, and take my briefcase to the men’s room, where I slide the files into the interior side pocket of the valise.

Then I go down the hall to the microfilm section, pick up the boxes I ordered, and retreat to the rear of the room behind a machine that faces the counter. I spin rapidly through the microfilm reels until I find more documents on the children, laid out one after another on almost twenty feet of film.

I check. The clerks are busy.

I reach into my pocket and pull out a razor-sharp folding knife. With no hesitation I cut the microfilm. I take the free end and wind it on my fingers until I get to the other end of the documentation and make a second cut. Then I put a rubber band around the microfilm and stick the tiny roll inside my jacket pocket.

When I withdraw my hand, I’m holding my trusty tube of superglue.

My friends, you can do so much with that stuff, can’t you?

I scan the room for activity, and then run a bead of the glue on one end of the cut reel and press it to the other with a quarter-inch overlap.