Private Berlin (Private 5)

He was racked with anguish when he answered more to Mattie and Katharina than to Dietrich: “After you left, on the way to the rally, I talked with my mother on the phone. I asked her what she’d decided to do about Hermann. She said she was going to stay married to him.

“Isn’t that just perfect?” he asked bitterly. “So Agnes, she went for the money. She’d decided to go on with their separate lives because of it. But he killed her before she even had the chance to tell—”

Down the street, they had his mother’s body in a black bag and were loading it into an ambulance.

Rudy Krüger let loose a sigh and seemed on the verge of crying again, but instead he said, “I better check on the house.”

“I prefer you leave it the way it is,” Dietrich said. “We’ll want to search it.”

That surprised the billionaire’s stepson for a moment, but then he said, “Of course, I’m sorry. I…I guess I’ll go home now?”

Dietrich nodded. “You’ll want to notify her friends and family.”

Rudy Krüger hung his head and said, “I have my first opening in two days. She was coming, you know? My mother said she was coming.”

Then the high commissar’s cell phone rang. Dietrich answered it and walked off several paces.

Rudy Krüger got up, appearing beaten. He looked at Mattie and Katharina. “Thanks. I couldn’t have done that alone.”

“You have someone to go home to?” Katharina asked.

“Tanya might be there after the rally,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“You call us if you need us,” Mattie said.

He nodded absently and walked off, a shattered man.

Mattie heard Dietrich complaining, “I’m tied up here. Send someone else.”

He hung up, shaking his head.

“What is it, High Commissar?” Inspector Weigel asked.

Dietrich hesitated, and then said, “Halle police found a floater in the river down there. They’ve identified him: a doctoral student at Berlin Technical University. Some kind of computer supergenius. They wanted our help. We’ve got too much to do already. I want Hermann Krüger found.”

Mattie had wanted to tell Dietrich about the files stolen from the archives, but now she was consumed by this information in light of the fact that someone of tremendous skill had hacked into Private’s computer.

So was Katharina, who said, “You have a name for this dead student?”

“Weigel can get it for you,” Dietrich said, walking away.

“I think I’ll go to the Technical University then,” Katharina said. “Dig around.”

“Not me,” Mattie said. “I’m heading to Halle.”

CHAPTER 52

FRIENDS, FELLOW BERLINERS, it’s only three in the afternoon, but I must admit that I’m already bone tired from the many long and difficult tasks I’ve been forced to attend to already today. But I like to have things cleared away, cleaned up and polished like glass before I move on to something new.

That’s the way of an invisible man.

Some old habits never die.

I look at my hands a moment and entertain the notion that I’ve never really seen myself, not without a mirror anyway; and mirrors are part of life’s illusion, aren’t they?

I really don’t know what I look like at all, I decide, and I never will.

And if I don’t, who will?