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Krainer frowned and didn’t answer for a moment. “I did, but—”
Inspector Weigel cut him off again. “Tell me about the slaughterhouse.”
Krainer blinked several times, and Mattie thought he looked like a man waking up from hypnosis. He replied in a thin voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The slaughterhouse,” Inspector Weigel insisted. “The abattoir south of Ahrensfelde.”
Krainer blinked again before saying, “I’m sorry. I grew up in Leipzig. My parents died in a car accident. I don’t know anything about any slaughterhouse.”
Inside the observation room, High Commissar Dietrich made a harrumphing noise as if in satisfaction.
“What about a man named Falk?” Inspector Weigel asked.
“No. I don’t know him either. Never heard of him.”
Dietrich made that noise again and then said, “This is a waste of time. I’m leaving right—”
Carl Gottschalk caught him by the elbow. “Wait.”
Weigel had gotten up from the interrogation table. She went to the door and opened it. Ilona Frei shuffled in, her head bowed.
Krainer stared at her, trying to figure out who she was, until she said, “Hello, Kiefer. It’s me, Ilona. Ilona Frei.”
The man looked like he’d seen a ghost or a zombie, but he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know you.”
Ilona took that like a slap to the face. “I’m Ilse’s sister, Kiefer. Please. You know me, and you know what happened to us in the slaughterhouse.”
“No, I don’t,” he said, but he would no longer look at her.
“Chris is dead!” Ilona screamed at him. “So is Greta! And Ilse! And Artur!”
Krainer’s head rocked back in disbelief. “What? I—”
“Falk’s alive,” she blubbered. “He tried to kill me last night. And he’ll try to kill you if he finds out who you are.”
Krainer was suddenly wrapped up in a faraway expression, as if he were watching some horror from a great distance.
“If you don’t tell, he’s won,” Ilona pleaded. “Please, tell them. They think I’m insane. Tell them or they won’t believe me. Tell them, or we both die!”
CHAPTER 106
KRAINER’S JAW WAS trembling, and tears came to his eyes when he at last allowed himself to look at Ilona Frei. In a voice that sounded to Mattie like a lost boy’s, he said, “I’ve never spoken about it, Ilona…not one word.”
Ilona walked to him and put her hand on his shoulder, weeping. “I know. None of us did. None of us.”
“He said he’d kill us if we ever talked.”
“Falk’s already trying to kill you,” Inspector Weigel said. “We’re offering you protection, but only if you tell us what we want to know.”
Over the course of the next hour, Krainer’s story came out in fits and starts, but it corroborated much of what Ilona Frei had told Mattie and Burkhart the evening before.
Krainer was born in Leipzig, where he was christened Edmund Tillerman. When he was six, his father, an attorney who had been speaking out against the communist government, simply disappeared.
Ilona Frei’s real name was Karin Klauser. Ilse’s was Annette. They were born and raised in Thüringen. Their father, a scientist, vanished when Ilona was eight and Ilse was five.
Several weeks after their fathers’ disappearances, both Krainer and Ilona Frei remembered men pounding on their doors in the middle of the night, and then their mothers crying and begging for mercy.
The men grabbed them from their beds.
