Private Berlin (Private 5)

They took their mothers too.

They were taken to the slaughterhouse in Ahrensfelde.

They were put in those rooms to either side of the anteroom hallway. There were bunks bolted into the walls, a metal pot, and little else. At one point, fifteen women were held there along with their sixteen children.

In the dead of night, a young man, no more than twenty, would come. They knew him only as “Falk,” and most nights he would select a mother and her child or children and bring them into the slaughterhouse itself.

Falk put the mothers through unimaginable pain, hanging them on meat hooks by their handcuffs so their arms dislocated. He burned their feet with cigarettes. He whipped them, cut them, and raped them, trying to get them to turn evidence against their husbands, their husbands’ friends, and their families.

Falk made Krainer, Chris, Ilona, and the other children watch what he did to their mothers. Falk said he thought it made the mothers’ torture even more unbearable, and therefore made them more likely to talk about their crimes against the state.

If and when that didn’t work, Falk tortured the children in front of their mothers.

“And when he thought he’d gotten everything out of our mothers,” Krainer said, “Falk killed them with a screwdriver and dumped their bodies in a well filled with rats.”

CHAPTER 107

KRAINER BROKE DOWN completely, and Ilona Frei threw her arms around him, saying, “Thank you, Kiefer. Now they’ll believe. They’ll believe.”

“I’ll give you two a moment,” Inspector Weigel said. She got up, ashen-faced, and looked right at the two-way mirror before heading to the door.

High Commissar Dietrich looked much sicker than a man with a brutal hangover, Mattie thought. He stared at the two people in the interrogation room with an expression that was drifting toward hopelessness.

But when Inspector Weigel came into the observation room, carrying a manila folder that she handed to Carl Gottschalk, Dietrich said, “This can’t be true. It would have come out after the wall fell. A place like the slaughterhouse would have come out.”

Mattie crossed her arms. “Not if all the files about it were destroyed before the uprising started, long before the wall came down.”

“They burned files in every state agency,” Inspector Weigel said. “Everyone knows that. So which one was Falk working for? The Stasi? The secret police?”

Dietrich said nothing. Mattie noticed Dietrich’s boss studying him intently.

“He had to have been Stasi,” Mattie said, watching Dietrich now as well. “They used torture and execution at Hohenschönhausen Prison to make family members testify against one another. Starvation, sleep deprivation, mock drowning.”

“But this is beyond the pale,” Dietrich said in a hushed voice. “Depraved.”

“Yes,” Mattie said. “It was.”

The high commissar looked at his supervisor and said in a voice more sure of its convictions: “Carl, without some kind of documentation—”

“Documentation?” Mattie cried, cutting him off. “You’ve got eyewitnesses! Look at them, High Commissar. Do they look like they’re lying?”

Inside the interrogation room, tiny Ilona Frei was still holding on to Krainer, who was sobbing, “Falk stuck a screwdriver in the back of my mother’s head, Ilona. And I just stood there and watched him do it.”

Dietrich’s shoulders suddenly rolled so far forward that he looked like a wading bird cowering in the shadows. In a shaky voice, he said, “I’m sorry, Carl, I…I can’t believe that—”

“High Commissar,” Inspector Weigel said sharply. “Why have you been trying to steer this investigation as far from the slaughterhouse and Falk as possible?”

Dietrich looked shocked and then indignant in his response to Carl Gottschalk. “I have not. And I certainly won’t have a rookie investigator questioning my—”

“You have tried to slow or thwart this investigation from the beginning,” Mattie said firmly. “Inspector Weigel says that you considered Burkhart and me enemies from the outset.”

“She was mistaken in my meaning,” he snapped. “Why would I have any interest in doing such a terrible, unproductive thing?”

“Because, Hauptkommissar,” Mattie said, “your father, Colonel Conrad Dietrich Frommer, was Stasi and, before you changed your name, you were Stasi too.”

CHAPTER 108

“THAT’S AN OUT-AND-OUT lie!” Dietrich shot back. “You have no proof of that.”