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“And then they were teenagers, and word of the uprising in Berlin had reached even Waisenhaus 44. They all went up there one night. They came back, but not for long. They were of age. They could do what they wanted. I lost track of them, though I heard that Chris chose the army.”
Mattie nodded. “But other than that and the fact that Chris lived at the orphanage, there’s nothing about his childhood that’s real. At least as far as documents go.”
Hariat Ledwig fought for breath. “Because of me. I did that.”
The old woman explained that after seeing the traumatized state the six children were in, and their pathological fear of being asked to talk about it, she came to believe that someone had threatened them if they ever talked.
“I didn’t want whoever had tortured those children to be able to find them,” she said. “They came to me with no documents, so I invented documents for them. Even when the children were able to tell me their parents’ names, I changed them, and made the children memorize the new names I had written.”
“And you told no one?”
“It was a different time. As Chris said, one best forgotten.”
“What was Chris’s real name?”
“Rolf Christoph Wolfe.”
“And his mother and father?”
“I never knew. I guess I didn’t want to know.”
“Earlier today, a man posing as a professor stole six of the Waisenhaus 44 files from the Federal Archives. I believe Chris’s file was among them.”
Hariat Ledwig blinked, and then she seemed to shrink right in front of Mattie. “How could that possibly…?” She choked hard as if someone or something was strangling her. Then she said, coughing, “My God, they all came in on the same date. I sent the Federal Archives the chronological copy of the files.”
The old woman broke down sobbing. “No, this is not right. I wanted them to be safe!”
Mattie went to her side, squatted down, and put her hand on the blanket, through which she could feel the woman’s legs. They were like twigs. “Hariat, do you remember the names of the other five children?”
Hariat Ledwig’s crying slowed. “I knew what would happen when the wall fell. I knew there would be a witch hunt. I kept copies of the files of every child who lived in my orphanage.”
Mattie’s heart skipped a beat. “Can I see them? Make copies?”
The old woman nodded. “They prove I was a decent person, not part of the sickness that seemed to afflict everyone around me in those days.”
BOOK THREE
THE MOTHERLESS CHILDREN
CHAPTER 58
“FIND THESE PEOPLE, Gabriel,” Mattie said, slapping down six blue files on the hippie scientist’s workbench at Private Berlin. “They’re the key.”
“Wait a second,” Katharina complained. “I’ve got first dibs on him.”
Dr. Gabriel was hunched over a computer, removing its hard drive.
“Kat—” Mattie insisted.
Her friend cut her off. “That computer belongs to Ernst Neumann, dead computer genius, doctoral student at Berlin Tech, and, according to his roommate, a freelance hacker who’d come into a lot of cash recently.”
“Really?” Mattie said, impressed. “I’ll do my own research then.”
Gabriel did not look up, just gestured with his screwdriver toward an iMac. “Use that machine.”
Mattie started toward the machine with Katharina in tow. “What’s in those files?” she asked.
“Fiction,” Mattie said, sitting down in front of the computer.
