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Agnes Krüger gazed at Katharina and Mattie in turn before saying, “You’d have to talk with Rudy for any particulars, but evidently people who cross my husband have a way of disappearing or dying in convenient accidents.”
CHAPTER 35
THE RAIN LIFTED just before five that afternoon, casting the grounds of the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park in a light that looked nickel-plated to Hauptkommissar Hans Dietrich.
The homicide detective stood at the base of the dripping statue of the Soviet soldier carrying the German child. His cheek ached and felt swollen.
With an air of victory surrounding him, the colonel strode into view at precisely 5:07 p.m.
Again his eyes slashed all over his son, lingering on the bandage on his cheek before his lips twisted in contempt.
“Leave me alone, Hans,” he commanded.
“I will after tonight, Colonel,” the high commissar promised. “That slaughterhouse in Ahrensfelde—”
“I told you to leave that alone,” the colonel said and kept walking.
This night Dietrich did not reach out to grab his father. To his back, he said, “Someone blew it up this morning with GDR-era Semtex.”
The colonel stopped and turned, incredulous, but then said, “I thought I heard something like cannon fire.”
The high commissar nodded. “Before it went off, we found decomposing bodies and skeletons in a subbasement. Thirty of them.”
Dietrich always thought his father was unshakable, but that news rattled him. “No,” the colonel said in a voice that sounded suddenly old. “That’s not—”
“They were there,” Dietrich insisted. “What do you know?”
The colonel rubbed his left arm as if to soothe an ache. “I honestly don’t know anything.”
“But there were rumors,” Dietrich pressed. “I heard you one night—”
His father’s face twisted and he held his arm tighter as he hissed back, “There were rumors everywhere about everything and everybody. No one knew what was true and what was fiction. No one. And I still don’t.”
“Don’t you want to know?”
“No,” his father croaked, then turned, now clutching his left arm.
The colonel made three steps in the direction of the closest sarcophagus. He stopped, weaving unsteadily. Then he reeled to his right and pitched over on his side in a puddle on the gravel path.
For an instant Dietrich was too stunned to move. He did not think it possible that…“Papi!” he cried, rushing to his father’s side.
The colonel was choking and looking at him bug-eyed. Dietrich threw himself on his knees to perform CPR.
But his father’s right hand shot up and grabbed him by the collar of his jacket. “I know I wasn’t a good father,” he rasped. “But was I a good man?”
For once in his life, the high commissar did not know how to answer a question. His silence was a response that the colonel understood. The old man’s cheeks tightened. He turned his gaze away from his son to the statue of the triumphant Soviet warrior and the German child towering above them.
“I was a good citizen,” the colonel gasped. “You know I was.”
And then in a harsh sigh, the life went out of Dietrich’s father and his eyes took on the dull and glazed stare of fate.
CHAPTER 36
IT’S 8 P.M. WHEN I enter the Diana FKK, a high-class mega-brothel in a luxurious spa setting on the outskirts of West Berlin.
Indoor pools. Jacuzzis. Saunas. Masseuses. And beautiful women of every race and color parading around completely nude.
One would think that my thirst for flesh would have been satisfied by my late-afternoon interlude with my friend, the woman who honestly believes I love her. But the lethal events of the past two days seem to have filled me with an unquenchable desire for all things carnal.
