Oskar Leintz had a printed page in his lap that was almost destroyed by nervous folding and unfolding. “She’s dead.”
“When?”
“Body was found a half hour ago.”
“In Gap?”
“Outside. On the way to the airport. The French agent is dead, too.”
“Press?”
“Too late. They’re already running with it.”
While Oskar and Gerhardt, the driver, showed their papers to the guards manning the reinforced concrete gate, she took out her cell phone, and by the time they reached the modern building known as the Situation and Information Center, she had finished with Inspector Hans Kuhn of the Berlin Kriminalpolizei. “I don’t get it,” he kept repeating. “It makes no sense.”
“Of course it makes sense,” she snapped. Despite their long-standing friendship, the Berlin detective’s mawkish helplessness could be irritating. “We just don’t know the logic behind it yet.”
“But a girl. Fifteen years old…”
“That only limits the possibilities, Hans, which is good for us.”
The call had come that morning. Adriana Stanescu had found a way out of her captors’ small mountain cabin north of Gap, France, in the Hautes-Alpes département. She’d stumbled into town and chanced upon a farm couple who gave her their phone. Her call home was a particular surprise for Inspector Kuhn, who, as a veteran Berlin cop, had given up hope. For a week there had been no ransom calls, and so he’d gone with the textbook, which told him there was no hope. Adriana Stanescu’s kidnapper was a sexual predator, and by now she’d been shipped off somewhere, neutralized by drugs and violence, or she was dead. He’d only stayed with the Stanescus because of the publicity. If he dropped the case of an immigrant’s abducted child, the press would crucify him.
So he was there, with the Stanescus, when Adriana called. Remarkably, the girl was levelheaded enough to give a quick chronology: Kidnapped in Berlin by a man who pretended to be her father’s coworker: late thirties, dark hair. Transferred to a white van-Mercedes, she thought-and taken to France by three men, German, Spanish, and Russian. Held in the mountains. She’d escaped through a broken window.
He’d told the farmers to take her to the Gap police station, then asked Erika to liaise with the French Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire-DST-to fly her to Berlin.
“Who’s going to cover the costs?” Erika had asked.
“We can do that, if necessary.”
“It might be,” she told him, looking for an excuse not to be involved. “You know, the Gap police can take her to the airport without having their hands held. Why the production?”
“It just feels wrong,” Kuhn had explained, clearly frustrated that this was the best answer he could offer. She understood, though. According to Adriana’s story, there had been no rape, no attempt at rape, just three men keeping watch over her in France. Yet none of the men, according to her, were French. Nor were they Moldovan.
Why?
So Erika had done as he asked and called her DST contact and received the promise that by morning Adriana would be back home, with an escort.
It had kept her busy all day, distracted from more important business, and she had looked forward to nothing more than her nightly Riesling and Snickers. Now, this.
Because she moved so slowly, Oskar led the way up the steps, through the metal detectors and down the long corridor to Schwartz’s office in the back. He had turned on the lights and powered up her computer by the time she arrived, still clutching the wine and candy. She settled behind her desk and cleared away the day’s excess papers. Most were printouts of desperate e-mails from Belgrade worrying about the safety of their embassy. In light of the smoldering shell that was left of the American embassy from the previous night’s riot, they wanted to close down, but she had advised against it. The Serbs, despite history, had no problems with today’s Germany; it was America they hated, the way a poor child envies and hates a rich cousin who has taken something from him. Their hatred masked a long-standing love. Toward today’s Germans they felt nothing, and so there was nothing to worry about. The embassy had not been pleased with her explanation.
She looked through her top drawer, pushing around loose pens and paper clips and rubber bands before she gave up and ordered Oskar to find a bottle opener and a glass. “Two, if you want some.”
“No, thank you.”
“As you like.”
Once he was gone, she unwrapped her Snickers and checked the Reuters feed on her browser. A DST agent, Louise Dupont, had been found dead in her car from an accident. The fool hadn’t been wearing her seat belt. Much farther down the road, Adriana Stanescu’s body had been found by French police in the woods.
She pulled up the file on Andrei and Rada Stanescu, which had been updated over the last days as their faces had graced more and more periodicals. A taxi driver and a factory worker. They had arrived in Germany legally two years ago, a move facilitated by Andrei’s brother, Mihai, a baker who spent his spare time volunteering for the German branch of Caritas, the Catholic organization that worked for human rights and against poverty around the world. Caritas had recently been putting pressure on the EU to loosen its immigration policies, and she imagined that was why Mihai volunteered. According to a file she pulled up, Adriana’s uncle had been twice arrested in the last six years for helping easterners slip illegally into Germany. That, certainly, would merit further examination.
She got details of the girl’s murder from a phone call to Paris and Adrien Lambert, a French contact in the DGSE, Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. Though Lambert’s agency was not specifically responsible for the Stanescu case, he had already assembled the information in his Boulevard Mortier office, expecting her call. Stanescu’s neck had been broken by hand. The killer knew his way around a neck, he said, and had completed the task with one movement. Gap police had found the mountain cabin in which Adriana had been held. Forensics was working the place over, but it had been cleaned professionally, and they held out little hope. The cabin was owned by François Leclerc, a plumber from Grenoble who was on vacation in Florida with his family. He had no idea who would have been using his place.
“And you believe that?” Erika asked as Oskar returned with a plastic cup and a corkscrew and proceeded to open the bottle.
“More than I believe you,” said Lambert, “when you tell me you don’t know anything about this.”
“Believe it, Adrian. We’re all wandering in the dark.”
After hanging up, she sipped the wine Oskar had poured, took a bite of her Snickers, and peered through her assistant as if he weren’t there. She ran through what she did know. An immigrant girl kidnapped, no ransom requested. In a country with Germany’s racial tensions the kidnapping wasn’t unthinkable, nor was the lack of ransom. It was unthinkable that, for a whole week, the girl had not been harmed or killed.
So the crime was neither sexually nor racially motivated. The girl had escaped by her own means, and someone felt her death was so important that this person was willing to take out a French civil servant as well.
Or was that a coincidence? Had Louise Dupont had an accident, died, and then the girl, with the kind of ill luck you only find in Greek myths, had run into a local psychopath? She doubted it, but the facts did not rule it out, so it remained.
If not, then one of the three men holding her had done it. The German, the Spaniard, or the Russian. Why, though, had they let her live unmolested for a whole week? Did that suggest the involvement of another party? She couldn’t be sure of anything.
She drew back.
Perhaps it had nothing to do with the Stanescus at all. What if Adriana had, say, witnessed a murder, and the killers took her to keep her quiet? There would have been an argument about what to do with her, a schism among criminals. She’s let go by one of them, while another tracks her down and silences her.
Then what about the unknown man, late thirties, dark hair, who first captured Adrian
a, before these other three took her over?
Unnerved by the small eyes fixed blindly on him for so long, Oskar said, “You’re doing it again.”
A pause, eyes wide. “Doing what?”
“That stare. You’re freaking me out.”
She blinked finally, smiled, then looked at her desk. “Sorry, Oskar. I promise to work on my manners. In the meantime, would you please ask Gerhardt to go see Herr al-Akir? He can bring someone to drive my car back and…” She gazed at Oskar. “And we’ll need another bottle of Riesling. This is going to take all night.”
Image
She returned to the beginning. She called Hans Kuhn again to ask about police cameras in the area of the Lina-Morgenstern High School, where Adriana had disappeared.
“You think that didn’t occur to me over the last week, Erika?”
“I’m just asking a question.”
He sighed. “We had some protests last year. The Turks thought we were targeting them, so the order came down to remove a bunch of cameras. We kept one at the corner of Mehringdamm and Gneisenaustrasse, but some kids screwed with it a month ago. The city won’t repair them until the next budget comes through.”
“Those are busy streets. There had to be some witnesses.”
“Four thirty in the afternoon-it was so busy that no one noticed. Besides, they don’t trust us pigs.”
“I see,” she said. “Thank you, Hans.”
Oskar returned with her car keys and a second Riesling and asked if she wanted him to stay around. She didn’t. His company would just distract her, and he clearly wanted to get home to his girlfriend, a Swede he’d recently become infatuated with.
Once he was gone, she began her reading. It was a technique she’d not so much learned as fallen into decades ago when her gaze had been focused across that opaque border into the ironically named German Democratic Republic. She’d had to learn what was happening there not by direct observation but by inference. Crop reports, crime statistics, train schedules, export flows, and the sometimes panicked messages sent by lonely informers marooned on that side of the Curtain. In such a situation, little can be taken at face value, and Erika had learned to gather her intelligence from the cracks between the questionable facts that reached her desk. She learned to let her mind drift from the central subject in slow outward circles, making dubious connections along the way that would be held up against other dubious connections to gradually create a jigsaw picture that could be rearranged, pieces dropped out or repainted, until, eventually, enough pieces remained that the larger picture could be gleaned.
She didn’t need to hear what the office wits said to agree that she’d stumbled on this technique as a way to make her life a little easier. She’d been a big woman since the seventies, an obese one since the fall of the Wall, and as her desk life slowly grew to encompass her entire life, her body continued to grow until reading was the only feasible technique left to her.
After finishing the files directly related to the case, she took her initial, small leaps outward. She remembered, first of all, that a recent World Bank report had placed Moldova, Europe’s poorest country, at the top of the immigrant remittances list, a dubious honor for any country that received more than 36 percent of its gross domestic product from those who had emigrated and sent cash back to their families. This fact made humans Moldova’s most valuable export.
Did the Stanescus send money back home? She made a note to check on it.
These days, the Moldovan mafia spent much of its time stealing German cars to sell back home, and trafficking women westward, which was far more profitable. While there was no reason to connect the Stanescus to these criminals, she didn’t want her sense of propriety to limit the broadness of her survey, so in addition to the BND files on the subject she tracked down recent articles in Der Spiegel, Stern, and Bunte, refamiliarizing herself with that tiny, troubled country.
Much of its history she already knew. Stalin had carved the area known as Bessarabia out of Romania in 1940, then absorbed it into the Soviet Union as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. For the rest of his rule, deportations were commonplace, sending Bessarabians to the Urals, Kazakhstan, and Siberia. In the late forties, due largely to the Soviet quota system, a famine spread through the country, and in the fifties the deported and dead were replaced with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. To help suppress the desire to rejoin Romania, Soviet scientists talked up the independence of the Moldovan language, which, unlike Romanian, was still being written in Cyrillic. This reminded Erika of Serbs and Croats who for political reasons insisted their languages were utterly different-while to the rest of the world they sounded pretty much the same.
After its 1991 independence, and despite protests from the government based in Chisinau, Russian troops remained in the breakaway region of Transnistria, just across the Dniester River, to “protect” its population of imported Russians. This self-proclaimed Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic fought a brief 1992 civil war to gain autonomy. Its sovereignty was only recognized by itself; the international community still considered it a region of Moldova, though a lawless one run by criminals with a GDP of drugs, guns, and flesh.
The Stanescus were not from Transnistria, though; they were from the north of the country.
She returned to Mihai, the uncle. In 2002 he’d been arrested on the Austrian border, driving a truck with a Moldovan family-husband, wife, and two children-hidden in the rear. A prosecutor in the case pushed for kicking him out of the country, but by then Mihai was a full-fledged German citizen. Six months in Moabit Prison and a ten-thousand-euro fine was the best he could manage.
One would have thought that this would end Mihai’s smuggling activities, but he was picked up again in 2005 with a young couple entering Germany from the Czech Republic. Again, they were Moldovan, and in the case that followed it turned out that they’d only paid him seven hundred euros-a sum that only covered the gas and bribes along the way. The defense made a talking point of this, and the jury became convinced that he had committed his crime solely out of conviction, not for profit. He was let off with a twelve-thousand-euro fine and no jail time.
She would have preferred that he was a profiteering smuggler who sent his cargo on for slave labor or prostitution-that kind of man could be understood and dealt with-but Mihai Stanescu was the worst type. He was a believer, and this was an age in which believers were to be feared.
With a sinking feeling, she realized that reading alone would not solve anything. She would have to talk with the Stanescus.
She made the call, and a young-sounding woman answered in a groggy singsong, “Hejsan.”
“Oskar, please.” When he came on, she apologized for waking them, then gave the bad news. “I’ll need you to be my driver tomorrow.”
“But it’s Saturday.”
“Yes, Oskar. It is.”
“Where?”
“Berlin.”
He sighed loudly. With a five-hour drive ahead of him, his entire weekend was shot.
“If you want,” she said, “you can bring along your little Swede. Maybe she’d enjoy a road trip.”
Oskar hung up.
3
She knew the rumors would begin in the morning. Oskar wouldn’t spread them, but the janitors would eagerly discuss the two empty bottles of Riesling in her wastebasket, because even the janitors had clearance to judge. By the time the bulk of the staff returned on Monday the rumors would grow to a level of truth that would have to be investigated, so that those above her-and besides Teddi Wartmüller, her direct superior, they were innumerable-could decide whether to graduate the rumors to a higher level or demote them. Not even demotion would make them vanish; instead, all rumors were filed away in case of future need.
So, if only to limit potential dissemination, she collected the bottles and plastic cup and slipped them into an overnight bag she kept in the closet and rolled it out past the night guards to the parking lot. It was two in the morning, and she drove very carefully ou
t the gate, past Herr al-Akir’s closed store, through the thickly wooded Perlacher Forest, and on to home.
She spent Saturday morning sleeping off the wine in her bilevel, on a gentle green lane of secluded houses populated by successful businessmen, other BND administrators, and a few foreigners from the European Patent Office. Along the street, security cameras mounted on streetlamps made sure they slept easily.
When she woke at noon, she instinctively took a plastic bowl out of the cabinet and searched for the bag of cat food-for Herr al-Akir had been partially right. Erika Schwartz had owned a single tabby, but a week earlier she had discovered his corpse by the back door. Even now, a week later, she would get halfway through the ritual of feeding Grendel before realizing she’d thrown away the cat food, and then remembering why.
She’d been suspicious because the cat’s body looked twisted by poison, but the BND forensics section explained that it had been twisted by cancer, not foul play. Despite the fact that she didn’t mix with her neighbors enough for them to build a grudge, she still maintained her suspicions.
Oskar picked her up at two with his Volkswagen, and during the drive up the A9 she used his BlackBerry-she still hadn’t succumbed to those ubiquitous beasts-to continue her online reading. Sometimes Oskar cut in, and she was obliged to fill him in on the little she had. “No, it’s not a pedophile ring. She wouldn’t have escaped in the first place. Even if she had, I don’t see how they could have tracked her unless they had a foothold with the French police.”
“It’s not impossible.”
“No,” she said quietly. “I suppose it’s not. We’ll have to keep it in mind.”
He smiled, pleased to have added something to the cloud of possibilities. So she decided to dampen his enthusiasm, just a little. “We’ll meet later on at the hotel. First, you’ll drop me off at Hans’s place, then go on to Gneisenaustrasse.”
He blinked. “Gneisenaustrasse?”
“Look for cameras. The police camera isn’t working, but there are bound to be shops with some kind of security.”
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