Private Berlin (Private 5)

The door to Gabriel’s lab opened and Jack Morgan entered with Daniel Brecht. They were on their way out to catch Cassiano’s game at the stadium, but they wanted to bring everyone up to speed on Pavel, his background in the KGB, and his disappearance last evening, sometime after he’d vacated the room he’d shared with Perfecta.

“And I spoke with some old friends in Vegas,” Morgan said. “There was heavier than normal betting on the games where Cassiano played poorly. And get this: in every case, Hertha went into the games as five to three favorites.”

“I’m not following,” Katharina said.

“The odds were such that few flags would be raised on someone bett

ing on Cassiano’s opponents,” Morgan said.

“Pavel?” Mattie asked.

“That’s where my money is,” Dietrich said. “Here’s a picture of him.”

Mattie studied the photograph of the nightclub owner, but she could not tell if it was the man she’d seen at the Federal Archives that morning.

Then she told them all what she’d discovered in Halle.

When she finished, Gabriel abandoned the hard drive of the computer genius, went to Mattie, and pushed her out of her chair, flipping open the first file. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“Gabriel!” Katharina protested.

“The computer will take me hours,” he said. “This, minutes.”

The first file belonged to Ilse Frei, who had been one of the younger of the six children who’d arrived at Waisenhaus 44 on February 12, 1980.

Morgan and Brecht left for the game just before Gabriel found an Ilse Frei, correct age, living near Frankfurt.

“She’s a paralegal and lives in the suburb of Bad Homburg,” the old hippie said, now giving his computer a command to cross-reference her name against the various law-enforcement databases to which Private had access.

He immediately got a hit and looked pained.

“What is it?” Mattie asked, coming around the back of his chair.

“Ilse Frei was reported missing fifteen days ago.”

CHAPTER 59

MY FRIENDS, FELLOW Berliners, twenty years ago it would have taken me weeks to track down the address of Greta Amsel. I know this because nearly two decades ago, shortly after recuperating from my surgeries, I decided to find and kill the bitch that bore me.

It took me a solid month of painstaking document research to locate my dear sweet mother and end her life. But that is a story for another time.

It had taken me all of an hour on Google to pin down the fact that Greta Amsel was a nurse who lived alone in a small apartment building in the outskirts of West Berlin not far from Falkensee.

At the moment, I’m sitting in my blue workman’s van diagonally across the street from the apartment building, reviewing the actions I took after finding her. I’d had the good sense to call her phone number once I’d arrived. The voice on the machine was a stranger’s. Funny, I never would have recognized it.

I called the apartment manager next, a man named Gustav Banter, and posed as an electrical supply salesman from Mannheim who wanted to drop by later, around five thirty. Impossible, Banter told me. His shift ended at four thirty.

How sad, I said, and settled in to wait for Greta.

Again, I did not recognize her voice on her answering machine, but I know her the moment she rides by me on her bicycle at a quarter to five. She’s still got the naturally blond hair, the high cheekbones, and that lost look about her.

Greta Amsel locks her bike in a rack in front of the apartment building. I wait until she’s been inside ten minutes before taking the tool bag from the floor and setting it on the passenger seat beside me.

I wait until a man carrying a book bag comes down the street and heads for the front door of Greta’s building. As he puts his key into the lock, I’m angling in behind him.

In a heavy Slavic accent, I say, “Do you knows where I finds Herr Banter? The superintendent?”

The young man turns to look at me. “Banter? He’s long gone by now.”