The Nearest Exit

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Wonderful.”

  “Don’t be down, Oskar. You’ve got a lifetime with the Swede ahead of you.”

  He dropped her off at Hans Kuhn’s apartment over in Pankow, and she declined Kuhn’s offer of a drink. She wanted to know about the Stanescus. “What were your impressions?”

  “Simple,” he said, sipping on a whiskey that dampened the ends of his white mustache. “Decent enough, very earnest. I was there when the child called. Their hearts were on their sleeves. I’m sure they’re not involved.”

  “And the uncle?”

  “Mihai?” He rocked his head. “The brains of the family. Tough, too. But he’s a German citizen; he knows the lay of the land. The parents have that vague confusion all new immigrants have.”

  “Maybe I should talk to them now,” she said, feeling impatient.

  “They just received their daughter’s body.”

  “Then they’re emotional. It’ll make an interrogation easier.”

  “Interrogation? Christ, Erika. Give them a break. Talk to them tomorrow, after they get back from church.”

  “Churchgoers?”

  “Bulgarian Orthodox on Krausenstrasse. There aren’t any Moldovan churches here, and the closest Romanian church is in Nuremburg, so they make do.”

  “It’s late, anyway.”

  Hans Kuhn raised his glass. “And you’re being rude. Now, have a drink.”

  Four whiskeys and a dish of Mecklenburg cod later, Erika was ready to leave. It wasn’t the alcohol or the overdone fish that soured her but the awkward emotional scene Kuhn put her through. Teary-eyed, he said, “I was sure she was dead. Convinced. I’d had a week for it to settle in. Then she wasn’t. God’s own miracle!” He raised his glass while his tongue rooted around in his mouth. “Then, once more. Dead. So much worse. Why couldn’t she have just died in the first place?” Later: “I hate my job.”

  His guilt flickered into fits of anger, and he made unwise predictions about what he would do to the men who had kidnapped her, once he had them. That’s when she knew it was time to leave. She called a taxi, which took her to the Berlin Plaza Hotel in Kurfürstendamm, and, before checking in, bought a Snickers from a nearby convenience store. She ordered a bottle of Pinot Blanc from room service.

  She had finished the Snickers and was halfway through the wine when Oskar knocked on her door. She had spent the preceding hour avoiding all thoughts of the case by using her deductive skills on a television crime series starring a handsome cop and a dog that had a kilometer more charm and brains than his master. To her embarrassment, she still had no idea who the killer was.

  She unlocked the door and paused to examine the bright red bruise around Oskar’s left eye, which seemed to reset all his features, making him look a few years younger. It was a curious effect. Coagulated blood marked a split in his eyebrow.

  “You going to invite me in?” he said testily, then waved a shopping bag, heavy with a box that, through the thin plastic, she could see was a new Sony video camera. “This should at least entitle me to a free drink.”

  She drenched a washcloth in hot water and set to cleaning off his face with the rough hand of an inexperienced caregiver. He winced and finally took it from her. He got up, one hand clutching the plastic cup of room-temperature wine, the other pressing the cloth to his brow. She took out the contents of his bag-one new video camera (“which I expect to be reimbursed for”) and a single mini DV cassette marked in quick black handwriting, 15-2-08, 16-21.

  “It wasn’t easy,” he said. “I should get a commendation.”

  “I’ll buy you your own bottle next time. Now, talk.”

  Funnily enough, it was a camera store, Drescher Foto, which sold a sketchy mix of antique and new video, 16 mm and still cameras stacked alluringly in the window. “They all pointed to the side, so you could see how pretty they were. Except one, up high in the corner. It pointed out to the street, and a little red light on it glowed. The owner had set up his own security system.”

  “Very nice,” she said as she tipped the bottle for examination; it was empty. “Want me to call down for another?”

  “Please.”

  After she’d made the call, she settled back on the bed while he took a seat at the desk, which looked out over Berlin’s busy nightlife; shouts and car engines rose up to them.

  “Of course,” he said, “Drescher Foto was closed. So I checked the list of names for the apartments overhead.”

  “Let me guess: There was a Drescher residing in the building.”

  “You should be a detective, Fraulein Schwartz.”

  “Was he happy to meet you?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  Herr Drescher turned out to be a recluse, dividing his time between his shop and a filthy apartment stacked to the ceiling with mini DV cassettes and four televisions for watching the world pass by his store. Paranoid, perhaps, because at first he wouldn’t let Oskar come up. “I told him where I was from, and that seemed to cause more trouble than it solved. I had to finally threaten him with a search warrant-which, given what’s probably on some of those cassettes, worried him more than anything else.”

  “I can imagine.”

  After a conversation stalled by long silences and evasions, Herr Drescher finally admitted to having the tape from that day. Oskar asked if, when he heard about the missing girl, he had considered showing the tape to the authorities. All he would say was, “It’s none of my business. I keep to myself.”

  Looking around the apartment, full of dirty plates balanced precariously on columns of cassettes, Oskar had no reason to doubt it.

  “So we sat down and looked at it together. As you’ll see, the quality’s excellent, and it’s all time-coded. Better than that, there’s a perfect view of the entrance to the courtyard.”

  “And?”

  He got up and started unboxing the video camera. “And I’ll see if I can hook this thing up to the television.”

  As he settled on the floor and took out the camera and instructions and the pages of obligatory, multilingual warnings, she said, “So when did he hit you?”

  “Drescher?”

  “Yes, Drescher.”

  He touched his brow, grinning. “The light in his stairwell doesn’t work. I would have told you immediately, but you might not have let me in.”

  “You tripped and fell.”

  “I’d like to see how well you negotiate those stairs.”

  It took about fifteen minutes-

  Oskar, despite his boyish love of modern technology, wasn’t adept at using it-and during that time room service delivered another bottle of Pinot Blanc with two wineglasses. The young girl who brought it up seemed amused at first by the scene in front of her: wine for two, an enormous old woman, and a scrawny, mustached man in his thirties sitting on the floor. Then she noticed the video camera and the man’s swollen eye, and her amusement seemed to turn to disgust; she was gone before Erika could dig out a tip.

  Oskar had cued up the tape back at Drescher’s, at 16:13. The camera didn’t shoot straight across Gneisenaustrasse but at an angle, so that it could take in the store’s front door. From that angle the foreground included the sidewalk, parked cars, and the swish of traffic speeding past bare trees lining the median. The background was dominated by the apartment building and its wide courtyard entrance.

  “There he is,” said Oskar, pointing to a black BMW turning into the courtyard.

  She squinted at the hazy image, then reached for her reading glasses. “Did you get a license number?”

  “It’s clearer on the way out.”

  He fast-forwarded to 16:27, when a man emerged from the courtyard, checked his watch, and tried to look inconspicuous. He kept his head slumped between his shoulders, so that his face was hard to make out, but Erika guessed he was in his late thirties or early forties, 180 to 190 centimeters tall, dark-haired. Not heavy. Just like half Europe’s male population.

  Erika was momentarily shaken when the man seemed to look d
irectly at the camera, at her, and she said, “Does he see the camera?”

  “I noticed that, too,” Oskar said as he took a sip of wine. “I don’t think so. I think he’s looking at this car.” He touched, in the foreground, the dark blue, almost black, front hood of some unknown make of automobile.

  Between then and 16:37, the man disappeared from view again before reappearing and looking to his right, taking note of something and disappearing again. Among assorted people passing on the street, Erika spotted Adriana Stanescu. After all the photos that had been pasted across Europe over the last week, she didn’t need to see her in close-up to know. Tall for her age, almost swaggering with the public confidence that consumes pretty teenaged girls. She briefly considered telling Oskar that, many, many years ago, she had been as pretty as this Moldovan girl, then wondered why she would consider it, particularly when Oskar wouldn’t believe her.

  As she passed the courtyard, the man stepped out again and spoke to her. She didn’t stop immediately, but with the man’s second statement she paused and turned to him. Then he-and this struck her as remarkable-took a card out of his pocket and showed it to her. Business card? Driver’s license? Then she remembered-he’d pretended to be her father’s co-worker, which would require some ID. Even then Adriana hesitated, and Erika dug her chewed nails into her palms, muttering, “Good girl. You’re no one’s fool.”

  History had already written this story, though, which made it all the more difficult to watch. The man stepped aside to let her in first and then followed.

  “It’s fast,” said Oskar, finishing his glass.

  It was. Three minutes later, at 16:45, the BMW rolled slowly out to the street. One driver, no visible passengers. It turned right and left the frame.

  “Just a sec,” said Oskar.

  The BMW reappeared on their side of the street, heading in the opposite direction toward Mehringdamm. Then it was gone.

  “Watch this,” said Oskar.

  “Watch what?” she asked, a sudden depression filling her.

  Then she saw it: The blue car in the foreground, an Opel with Berlin plates, pulled out into the traffic and drove in the same direction.

  “Oh,” she said.

  They went through the tape two more times, Oskar making note of the most crucial time code: 16:39, when the man’s face was most visible. At that moment he was speaking with Adriana, his head raised to show what an open, friendly person he was.

  At 16:46, as he headed toward Mehringdamm, they got a clear shot of the BMW’s tags, which Oskar noted along with the Opel’s tags at the tail end of 16:47.

  By the time she called the Berlin office for an all-night courier, it was nearly one, and she was finally feeling a buzz from the wine and the realization that they were very close to something important. The courier brought an envelope, in which they put the cassette and a note asking the Pullach office to use its face-recognition software to identify the man talking to the girl at 16:39. She doubted they would come up with anything-the software was notoriously buggy-but at least they could clean up the image.

  The courier sealed the envelope in their presence and predicted that it would arrive by seven in the morning. He, too, seemed to note Oskar’s black eye, the empty wine bottles and glasses, and the video camera, but he was too well trained to show his emotions.

  4

  Erika knew surprisingly little about the Orthodox Church, most of her understanding coming from a single conversation she’d had in the eighties with a Romanian informer who had come to Vienna to discuss the terms of his employment. He’d been a professor of sociology, or whatever Nicolae Ceauşescu’s communist regime chose to call that field of study, and he was trying to explain why his price was so high: The Romanian mind was too conspiratorial for him to be able to do anything safely.

  Her job that day had been to keep his fee as low as possible-the West German economy was raging, but pressure from the Greens was throwing all future BND budgets into question.

  The professor had been a talker; she could hardly get a word in at all. A stream of sociocultural lessons poured from his mouth. On the subject of the conspiratorial Romanian mind, he started with the obvious variable: the Securitate, the regime’s feared secret police, which, according to rumors Erika didn’t believe, employed in some fashion a quarter of the population. When he saw this didn’t sway her, he turned to religion and democracy.

  He said, “Democracy functions in Protestant nations. It barely functions in Catholic nations. It doesn’t function at all in Orthodox nations.”

  It was a troubling statement, as West Germany’s boisterous ally on the other side of the Atlantic based its entire Cold War philosophy on the notion that all nations and cultures could, and should, embrace democracy.

  “It’s about independent thinking,” the professor explained. “How God’s word is interpreted. You Protestants, you believe that all it really takes is a Bible to work through who God is and what He wants. The Catholics read on their own, but they require a pope to help them through the difficult parts. They can’t absolve themselves of sin; the Church has to do that for them.”

  “And Orthodoxy?”

  He smiled. “An Orthodox church represents the link between the earthly and the spiritual. The dividing line is at the front of the church, at the iconostasis. Medieval images of Christ and the saints gaze out, as if heaven is on the other side of the screen, and the Holy peer through. Judging. Then it happens. The priest steps behind the screen into the sanctuary. After a little while, he steps out again to share what he’s learned. You see?”

  Erika, worried over the time and money already devoted to this questionable source, said, “No. I don’t see.”

  “Where does truth come from?” he asked rhetorically. “For Protestants, it comes from self-examination. For Catholics, from assisted examination. For Orthodox Christians, a man of importance steps behind a screen, talks to God in secret, and comes out to tell you what God wants. It works the same way with politics. Politics for us is a dark, smoky room where a few important people come to an agreement. Afterward, they step out into the morning light and tell the masses that, say, they now live in a communist country. Or that they live in a capitalist one-it doesn’t matter. What matters is that my people will never believe that they’ve taken history into their own hands. That’s not reality for them. In our reality, democracy will always be an illusion.”

  Erika nodded at this, if only to be polite, then realized she still didn’t have her answer. “And this is why you want double what we offered?”

  “My dear, in a world where all important things are run by men behind closed doors, those outside would kill their own mothers to gain the favor of those on the inside. They will turn in anyone who smells vaguely off and even those who smell of roses. You see, I don’t have to work for you to risk my life; all I have to do is take the train back to Bucharest. You’re not only paying for my cooperation; you’re paying for my return.”

  Nearly a quarter of a century later, Erika tried to align that assessment with the St. Tsar Boris the Converter Bulgarian Orthodox Church in the southeastern district of Neukölln, just below Kreuzberg. She stood in the back, the heavy smell of incense filling the gloomy air as the liturgy was almost hummed by a white-bearded man with a black cap and robes. The worshippers seemed to focus more on their hands, clutched in prayer, and most of them stood, which made her feel better hidden.

  She had spotted the Stanescus early on. They were near the front with Adriana’s uncle, Mihai. Other pale-faced worshippers had embraced them in their time of need, and despite herself she felt a brief warmth at the thought that here it didn’t matter that the Stanescus weren’t Bulgarian; they were just grieving parents, which anyone could understand.

  Then she cut the distracting thought from her head and stepped forward to get a better look. She wasn’t sure what she expected to find here inside the church, but she’d been in her particular line of work for so long that there was always the possibility sh
e’d recognize a person of interest. None of these faces were part of her extensive memories, so she left.

  She stepped out into the cool morning light and joined Hans Kuhn, who was waiting by the car. Inside it, Oskar tapped the wheel to the rhythm of a hip-hop CD he’d brought along.

  By the time the worshippers began to spill out onto the sidewalk, she and Kuhn had gone through two coffees apiece from a sausage vendor, and she had eaten two käsewurst. She sent Kuhn ahead so she could finish wiping greasy cheese off her chin.

  He returned with all three Stanescus. Andrei and Rada were small people who seemed smaller the nearer they were to Erika’s large frame. Both were in black, as was Mihai, the only one with dry eyes. It was Mihai who spoke first.

  “Leave them alone, all right? Can’t you see they’ve been through enough?”

  As if he’d said nothing, Erika introduced herself to the parents and offered a hand that would have taken rudeness to refuse; Andrei and Rada were not rude. Mihai, however, ignored her hand and went on. “They received their daughter’s body yesterday. My niece! Have some respect.”

  “We have new information,” she told them and produced a printed-out image from the videocassette that Pullach had cleaned up and e-mailed that morning. “Do you recognize this man?”

  Mihai grabbed the photo first, full of energy. Then he shook his head and passed it to Andrei, muttering something in Moldovan. Neither the mother nor father recognized him either.

  “I think this is the man who took Adriana,” she explained.

  Rada Stanescu began to cry, and her husband held her closer, an arm around her shoulders. “We answer your questions. Later, yes? Please.” Andrei had a pleading quality to his voice, and Erika remembered again why she hated going into the field.

  “I understand,” she said, then turned to Mihai. “Perhaps you can spare a few minutes?”

  He wasn’t as accommodating as his relatives, but as he watched his brother and sister-in-law walk away, he shrugged. “You can always take me down to the station if I refuse, yes?”