Stone Cold (14 page)

“Thank you, sir,” he replied.

I reflected that this diamond seemed to bring misfortune in its wake. Bridey’s career ruined, Kinsella bankrupted, and now poor Cremer.

Annette telephoned the next afternoon, as good as her word. She said the diamond was described in the documents as having been mined in Uzbekistan. She told me it was brought to Cremer personally by Otto Mollering, and a courier took it back to him. She gave me his address. It was in Berlin.

CHAPTER NINE

I checked in at a small, modern, three-star hotel just off the Alexanderplatz. From my window I could see the top of the soaring TV tower and the rotating world clock. “Very useful. I might want to know the time in Shanghai,” I remarked to the pretty receptionist. She did not smile. “Well, not much conversation coming there,” I thought.

I called two people just to tell them I was here; old friends I had kept in touch with through occasional communications. Wolf Richter was an old buddy from my Free University year, a good friend, and I had worked with Fritz Thaelmann in my army days. Fritz was a member of the Bundesant fur Verfassungsschutz, the BIV, the German domestic counter-espionage and counter-terrorist agency. Neither of them was available. I left messages asking them to call me back.

I looked for Mollering’s telephone number and it was not listed, so I set out for the address I had. It was in Charlottenberg, on the western end of the city. I took the u-bahn, the German subway, just to remind myself of my student days. As always when you have lived in a city for a while, places have memories. Bismarckstrasse was where I got laid one night to my surprise; I was with a bunch of people at a café and I walked a girl home with no idea what she had in mind.

When we came to the Tiergarten stop, I remembered an argument I’d had with my flatmates. That was a serious one. We were strolling in the park and eyeing the swans and the girls, and I wanted us to go over to the Bendersblock at the far end of the park, to the Resistance Memorial Centre. I wanted to pay homage to the men who were hanged for the 1944 plot to kill Hitler. They sneered at this as establishment history, and said the plotters had served Hitler until they found out they were losing. I retorted, somewhat pompously I suppose, that they had paid for whatever sins they had committed earlier, and deserved our respect. In the end I went by myself. I decided that their rejection of their parents’ generation was total, and that it was peculiar to being someone born in post-war Germany. It must be uncomfortable, I thought.

Mollering’s apartment was on the second floor; I took the elevator up and rang the bell. A woman answered the door. A small boy behind her was looking at me curiously. “Herr Mollering? No. He doesn’t live here now,” she said. “We’ve been here for four months.”

My heart sank. “Do you have an address for him?” I asked.

She hesitated. “Are you a friend of his?” she asked.

“No. But I need to speak to him about a business matter.”

“I’m afraid you can’t. He’s dead,” she said.

I took a step back as if I had been struck a blow. I was stunned for the moment. Finally, I asked, “Do you know any members of his family?”

“No. I’m afraid not. I don’t know anything about him. He died before we moved in here.”

I stood there for a few moments. No doubt I showed my disappointment because she volunteered some more information. “I think he was murdered.”

“Murdered? Are you sure?”

“That’s what one of the neighbours told me.” That was all she knew. I left.

Once again, a rung in the ladder was missing, this time the top rung. I walked without thinking much and sat on a bench trying to digest this news. I took out my tablet, went to a German search engine and put in Mollering’s name. I got a brief newspaper story six months old. He had been murdered, shot dead with his own pistol, probably by an intruder. There was nothing more.

I could not accept the idea that I had come this far and reached a dead end. After all this travelling, my mission was a failure. My gloomy mood was reinforced by the weather. It was chilly, and a grey sky had replaced the blue sky of Holland’s Indian summer. I could not see a way to pick up the trail again. Perhaps Fritz Thaelmann could help me, with his intelligence sources and contacts with the police. I also reflected that this was one more disaster the diamond had brought to those who owned it.

My mobile rang and it was Wolf, my old friend from student days, returning my call. He was now the film critic and occasional cultural commentator on one of the more serious German newspapers. “You’re in Berlin, that’s great!” he said. “Let’s meet. How long are you here for?”

“I don’t know. Maybe only a short time.”

“Then we must meet this evening. I’m supposed to go to a press reception but fuck it, I’d rather see you. It’s been years.” Hearing his exuberant voice cheered me up a bit.

I said, “Good. Why don’t we meet at the Zum Alten? It’ll remind me of the old days.”

“Oh no. I was in there a few weeks ago. It’s full of idiotic kids getting drunk and listening to awful music.”

“Sounds like us,” I said. He suggested another bar that he said was more civilized.

*

At university Wolf was the most intelligent and least studious of my friends, and among a bunch of normally randy young men Wolf was one of the most randy. I had no trouble recognizing him when he walked in. He was still tall and lanky and as slim as ever; only some wrinkles on his face showed his age. He spotted me right away and came over and hugged me. We had beers and then dinner and we talked about our classmates and he told me who had done what and who was where and who was divorced and what assholes were still assholes.

I noticed that my German was getting rusty. I forgot words and made grammatical mistakes. My French was clearly better than my German. French was my mother tongue, or at any rate my mother’s tongue. What should I make of that? I’ll leave it to the psychoanalysts. Wolf corrected my grammar and my pronunciation. “You sound like a fucking Bavarian,” was the way he put it.

He grumbled that the Kreutzberg, with its bohemian reputation, where he and I had shared an apartment with two other students and a lot of insect life, wasn’t what it used to be, that trendy bars were opening up and the developers were moving in.

I asked about his sister, Helga. “Ah yes. You had your eyes on Helga, didn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t say that, but I liked Helga. Is she still in Berlin?”

“Yes but don’t get any ideas. She’s with a very good man. An academic. It suits her, my serious sister.”

“She was always complaining that you weren’t serious enough. You’ve got the laugh on her. Film critic and cultural commentator.”

“She’s not impressed. She thinks I spend my time sleeping with girls who think I can help them get into films.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

I chuckled. “Don’t ever change, Wolf.”

“David, tell me what you’re doing in Berlin. You said something vague about an investigation.” So I told him all about the diamond, after he promised to keep it secret, and my setback today.

“Maybe you can help me,” I said. “Can you find out from your newspaper files something about Otto Mollering’s murder?”

“I’ll find whatever we’ve got. When do you want it?”

“I don’t know. As soon as possible, I suppose.”

“Right. Let’s find out now. We’ll go over to the office.”

“Now? It’s ten-thirty at night.”

“So? A newspaper functions all the time.” This was typical of Wolf. Don’t sit around talking about it, just do it now. It had often worked with girls. We taxied over to the newspaper office, went to his desk, and got up a few stories from the newspaper files on his computer.

They were not long and they didn’t say much. Moller had been shot dead. The murder was six months ago. There was no break-in at Mollering’s apartment; he seemed to have let his killer in. There were signs of a struggle. The place had been ransacked and papers were strewn around, but it was not known whether anything was missing. The police did not seem to have any more clues.

We went to a bar around the corner which I guessed was the office bar, because I met a couple of his newspaper colleagues and drank and talked some more until the early hours. He held forth about post-Cold War, post-unification literature, and I guessed from the respect with which the others listened to him that his work at the paper was rather more serious than he had implied.

*

Fritz Thalemann invited me to lunch. He was still in the BIV, a mid-level bureaucrat now; he no longer chased around as a field operative, but lunched regularly at smart restaurants, like the glassy, glitzy place on the Kurfurstendam which he took me to. He was more corpulent, more serious-faced than the Fritz I used to know, as befits someone in his position. We tucked into a typically heavy German meal of pork schnitzel and dumplings with gravy. I looked across at Fritz and saw someone who now sat behind a desk all day and ate a lot of meals like this, the schnitzel showing in the beginnings of a double chin, the dumplings in a paunch.

He told me his work load was getting heavier; they have to worry about neo-Nazi gangs and home-grown Muslim terrorists. As he talked, I sensed that this Fritz Thaelmann was a careerist and his goal was successful investigations for which he could claim credit. The old Fritz was always looking out for number one, but his careerism was modified sometimes by adventurousness.

I told him about my mission in Berlin, and about Otto Mollering. “Perhaps your friends in the local police could tell me a little more about Mollering’s murder,” I suggested.

“My friends in the local police? David, I take it you’re being sarcastic. You remember how the police feel about the BIV.”

“Don’t you have any favours you could call in?”

“No. Even if they know anything, and it seems from what you say that they don’t, they’re not likely to do any favours for me. They don’t like the BIV, you know that. I have no official standing in this matter. If I find out anything, I’ll give you a call.” I did not have much hope. This Fritz was not likely to venture where he had no official standing to do an old friend a favour.

I told him about leaving the army and looking for a job. He told me about his wife and two children; he lived out in Wannsee and commuted daily. He also talked about Angela Merkel and Germany’s problems with the wretched Greeks and Spaniards who wouldn’t earn their own living. I was glad to see him again, but the warm, unguarded friendship that had grown up between us in our younger days was gone.

I walked away under that grey sky, sad for our younger selves, when friendships were forged more easily and we were all less hobbled by prudence. I worried about the dead end I had come to in the diamond mission, and how Jeremy would take it, after all the money I had spent. I wondered whether I should have remained in the army for a while longer, and whether I had made a mistake in moving to England. On this bustling, rich avenue of glittering store windows and sidewalks full of people with positive outlooks, the men striding towards their next success, the women comfortable in their position in life, I was an ambling package of worries and doubts.

I heard a cry. “David! Lieutenant Root!” I turned around and it was Maryika. “I looked for a long time before deciding it really is you,” she said.

Maryika was my girlfriend when I was stationed in Wiesbaden, chubby, sexy, and fun. Now here she was again, her face as round and rosy as an apple, beaming below fluffy blonde hair and above a fur wrap.

Maryika came from a poor family of Polish immigrants and had done well for herself, putting herself through university, landing a good job with an internet company and along the way learning English. We dated for a while but then I realized that she wanted to marry me. I suppose I would have been a further step up. I had confided to her my idea of becoming a military attaché in the diplomatic service, and she must have looked forward to being an embassy wife. And perhaps she thought she was in love with me. I made it clear to her that I was not interested in a lifetime relationship and she took it badly. Nonetheless I had happy memories of her.

Now she was all over me. “It’s really amazing bumping into you like this. You look well. What are you doing in Berlin? Are you married? You must tell me all about yourself.”

We went to a café and she ordered a pastry with her coffee. “I still have a sweet tooth,” she said giggling. I told her that I had been hired to carry out an international investigation and this had brought me to Berlin. She told me she was married and now living in Berlin, and was at pains to tell me how happily married she was. I got the subtext. This married bliss could have been mine.

“Hans and I have been married for eighteen months,” she said. “We have a lovely little apartment not far from the centre. And now I’m expecting a baby.”

“That’s great. When?”

“In about five months. It’ll start to show soon. Hans and I are so looking forward to it. He’ll be a wonderful father, I’m sure. You must meet Hans, you’d like him. He’s a lawyer. Are you going to be in Berlin for long?”

I said I didn’t know, I might be leaving in a day or two. “Then you must come to dinner this evening,” she insisted.

I liked seeing Maryika again but a whole evening of her demonstrating to me the joys of domestic life was going to be an ordeal. I decided I would rather wander around Berlin on my own renewing my acquaintance with the city. “I’d like to, but I have a meeting scheduled. It’s about this investigation I’m doing,” I said.

“Oh that really is too bad.” She was crestfallen. “Hans would enjoy meeting you, I’m sure. Can’t you put it off for another time?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What a pity. You and Hans would have a lot to talk about. Hans has been to America. He recently started an interesting new job.”