The Ice Queen: A Novel (33 page)

“That’s all nonsense.” Ritter made a dismissive gesture. “The whole family was jealous of my good relationship with Vera. I was a thorn in their side because they were afraid I might have too much influence on her. We parted on completely friendly terms.”

He sounded so convincing that Pia wouldn’t have doubted him if it hadn’t been for Anja Moormann’s account.

“Then what’s all the fuss about this missing trunk?” Bodenstein sipped at his coffee. Pia saw a flash of anger in Ritter’s eyes. He kept toying with the cigarette pack. She would have preferred to take it away from him; he was infecting her with his nervousness.

“I have no idea,” he replied. “It’s true that a trunk was supposedly missing from the storeroom at the mill. But I never saw it and I don’t know what happened to it.”

Suddenly, the young woman behind the buffet dropped a stack of plates, which shattered with a crash on the granite floor. Ritter jumped as if he’d been shot, and his face went snow-white. His nerves seemed to be in a bad way.

“So do you have any idea what might have been in this trunk?” Bodenstein asked. Ritter took a deep breath, then shook his head. He was obviously lying—but why? Was he ashamed? Or was he trying to avoid giving them any cause to suspect him? Without a doubt, he had been treated badly by Vera Kaltensee. The humiliation of his dismissal without notice, done so publicly, had to be hard to bear for any man with a shred of self-respect.

“What kind of car do you drive, by the way?” Pia asked, changing the subject abruptly.

“Why?” Ritter gave her an annoyed look. He went to get another cigarette out of the pack but found it empty.

“Pure curiosity.” Pia reached in her purse and set an unopened pack of Marlboros on the table. “Please, help yourself.”

Ritter hesitated for a moment but then took one.

“My wife has a Z three. That’s what I’m driving.”

“Also last Thursday?”

“Possibly.” Ritter snapped open his lighter, lit the cigarette, and sucked the smoke deep into his lungs. “Why do you ask?”

Pia exchanged a quick glance with Bodenstein and decided to take a wild shot. Maybe Ritter was the guy with the sports car.

“You were seen together with Robert Watkowiak,” she said, hoping she wasn’t wrong. “What did you discuss with him?”

Ritter’s almost imperceptible flinch signaled to Pia that she was on the right track.

“Why do you want to know?” he asked irritably, confirming her suspicion.

“You may have been one of the last people to speak with Watkowiak,” she said. “At the moment, we’re working on the assumption that he was the murderer of Goldberg, Schneider, and Anita Frings. Maybe you know that last weekend he took his own life with an overdose of prescription drugs.”

She noticed the relief that passed briefly over Ritter’s face.

“I heard that.” He let smoke escape from his nostrils. “But I had nothing to do with it. Robert called me. Once again, he had a problem. At Vera’s request, I’ve helped him out of a jam often enough, so he probably thought I could help him this time, too. But I couldn’t.”

“And it took you two hours with him in the ice-cream parlor to tell him that? I don’t believe you.”

“But it’s true,” Ritter insisted.

“You visited Goldberg in Kelkheim the day before he was shot. Why?”

Ritter glibly lied, looking Pia straight in the eye. “I used to visit him often. I don’t remember what we talked about that evening.”

“You’ve been lying to us for the past fifteen minutes,” Pia said. “Why? Do you have something to hide?”

“I’m not lying,” Ritter replied. “And I have nothing to hide.”

“Then why don’t you simply tell us what you really wanted at Goldberg’s house and what you talked about with Watkowiak?”

“Because I can hardly remember,” Ritter said, trying to talk his way out of it. “It must have been something trivial.”

“By the way, do you know Marcus Nowak?” Bodenstein interjected.

“Nowak? The guy who restores buildings? Not really. I met him once. Why do you want to know?”

“That’s odd.” Pia took her notebook out of her pocket. “Nobody in this case seems to know the others very well.”

She leafed a few pages back.

“Ah yes, here it is: His wife told us that you and Professor Kaltensee met several times with Marcus Nowak at his office after the accident in the mill and your termination without notice. And for hours at a time.” She fixed Ritter with her gaze, and he was visibly uncomfortable. With the arrogance of a man who considers himself smarter than the majority of his fellow human beings, especially the police, he had completely underestimated Pia, as he was now forced to realize. He glanced at his watch and decided on an orderly retreat.

“Unfortunately, I have to go,” he said with a forced smile. “An important appointment in the editorial office.”

Pia nodded. “Please don’t let us keep you. We’ll ask Mrs. Kaltensee about the real reason for your termination. Maybe she also has some idea what you discussed with Mr. Watkowiak and Mr. Goldberg.”

The smile froze on Ritter’s face, but he said nothing. Pia handed him her business card.

“Call us if the truth happens to occur to you.”

*   *   *

“How did you get the idea that the man in the ice-cream parlor might be Ritter?” Bodenstein asked as they walked through the palm garden on the way back to their car.

“Intuition.” Pia shrugged. “Ritter looks like the type who would drive a sports car.”

For a while, they walked side by side without speaking.

“Why do you think he was lying to us? I can’t imagine that Vera Kaltensee would fire her longtime assistant, who knows so much about her after eighteen years, all because of a missing trunk. There must be more to it.”

“But who would know?” Bodenstein said.

“Elard Kaltensee,” Pia suggested. “We ought to visit him again anyway. The missing trunk is in his bedroom, right next to the bed.”

“How do you know what’s in Elard Kaltensee’s bedroom?” Bodenstein stopped and looked at Pia with a frown. “And why didn’t you mention this earlier?”

“I didn’t think about it until we were in the workshop at Mühlenhof,” Pia replied, defending herself. “But I’m telling you now.”

They left the palm garden and crossed Siesmayerstrasse. Bodenstein unlocked his car with a press of the remote. Pia already had her hand on the door handle when her gaze fell on the building across the street. It was one of those elegant apartment houses from the nineteenth century with a carefully restored facade from the industrial age. Those spacious classic apartments went for sky-high prices on the real estate market.

“Take a look over there. Isn’t that our baron of lies?”

Bodenstein turned his head.

“It certainly is.”

Ritter had clamped his cell phone between his ear and shoulder and was fumbling with a bunch of keys as he stood at the bank of mailboxes by the front door. Then he unlocked the door, still on the phone, and vanished inside the building. Bodenstein closed the car door. They crossed the street and examined the mailboxes.

“So, there’s no magazine office here.” Pia tapped on one of the brass nameplates. “But somebody named M. Kaltensee does live here. What could that mean?”

Bodenstein looked up at the facade. “We’ll soon find out. First let’s drive over and visit your favorite suspect.”

*   *   *

Friedrich Müller-Mansfeld was a tall, slender man with a snow-white fringe of hair around a pate dotted with age spots. He had a long, furrowed face and red-rimmed eyes, which were unnaturally magnified by the thick lenses of his old-fashioned glasses. He had traveled to visit his daughter on Lake Constance and returned only last night. His name was one of those on the long list of residents and staff of Taunusblick, and Kathrin Fachinger harbored no great hope that she’d learn more from him than from the residents she’d already questioned. She politely asked the elderly gentleman the usual routine questions. For seven years, he had lived next door to Anita Frings, and he displayed the appropriate sorrow when he learned about the violent death of his neighbor.

“I did see her on the evening before I left,” he said in a hoarse, shaky voice. “She was in very good spirits.”

He grasped his right wrist with his left hand, but the tremor could not be overlooked.

“Parkinson’s,” he explained. “Most of the time I do well, you know, but the trip was a bit exhausting.”

“I won’t bother you for long,” said Fachinger kindly.

“Oh, go ahead and bother me as long as you want.” Old gentlemanly charm flashed in his blue eyes. “It’s a nice change of pace to speak with such a pretty young lady, you see. Otherwise, there are only old bags here.”

Fachinger smiled. “Good. So you saw Mrs. Frings on the evening of May third. Was she alone or accompanied by someone?”

“She could hardly move on her own. There was a lot going on here, including an open-air performance in the park. I saw her with the man who visited her regularly.”

Fachinger listened carefully.

“Can you remember about what time that was?”

“Of course. I have Parkinson’s, you know, not Alzheimer’s.”

It was supposed to be a joke, but since his expression didn’t change, the officer didn’t realize that at first.

“You know, I’m from East Berlin,” said the old gentleman. “I was a professor of applied physics at Humboldt University. In the Third Reich, I wasn’t allowed to practice my profession because I sympathized with the Communists. So I spent years abroad, but later in the German Democratic Republic, my family and I had a good life.”

“I see,” said Fachinger politely. She wasn’t quite sure what he was driving at.

“Naturally, I knew the whole ruling Socialist Unity Party leadership personally, even though I can’t really claim that they were particularly congenial. But as long as I was allowed to do research, the rest didn’t matter to me. Anita’s husband, Alexander, was in the Ministry of State Security; he was an officer in a special unit and responsible for covert operations in foreign-exchange management.”

Fachinger sat up and stared at the man.

“So you knew Mrs. Frings from before?”

“Yes. Didn’t I mention that?” The old man thought for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. “Actually, I knew her husband. Alexander Frings was a counterintelligence officer during the war in the Foreign Armies East department, and a close colleague of General Reinhard Gehlen. Perhaps that name means something to you?”

Fachinger shook her head. She was taking notes feverishly, sorry that she’d left her tape recorder sitting on her desk.

“In his capacity as counterintelligence officer in the Abwehr, Frings had an intimate knowledge of the Russians, you see. And after Gehlen and his whole department surrendered to the Americans in May 1945, they were attached to the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA. Later Gehlen founded, with the express approval of the United States, the Gehlen Organization, from which the West German Federal Intelligence Service was formed.” Fritz Müller-Mansfeld gave a hoarse laugh, which quickly changed to a cough. It took a while before he could speak again. “Within a very short time, dedicated Nazis became dedicated democrats. Frings didn’t go with them to the United States preferring to remain in the Soviet Occupation Zone. Also with the approval and knowledge of the Americans, he infiltrated the Stasi and was responsible for foreign-exchange procurement for the GDR, but he remained in contact with the CIC, later the CIA, and Gehlen in West Germany.”

“How do you know all this?” Fachinger asked, astounded.

“I’m eighty-nine years old,” replied Müller-Mansfeld amiably. “In my lifetime, I have seen and heard a great deal, and forgotten almost as much. But Alexander Frings impressed me, you see. He spoke six or seven languages fluently, was very intelligent and cultivated, and he played along with the game on both sides. He was the control for numerous Eastern Bloc spies, and was allowed to travel in the West at will. He knew high-ranking Western politicians and all the important industrial leaders. The arms lobbyists in particular were his friends.”

Müller-Mansfeld paused to rub his bony wrist.

“Why Frings was attracted to Anita—other than because of her looks—is to this day hard for me to understand.”

“Why’s that?”

“She was an ice-cold woman,” replied Müller-Mansfeld. “There was a rumor going around that she’d been an overseer at KZ Ravensbrück, you see. She had no intention of going to the West, where she would have risked being identified by former concentration camp inmates. She met Frings in Dresden in 1945. When they married, he was able to protect her from further criminal prosecution because by then he had contacts with both the Americans and the Russians. With her new name, she had also shed her Nazi views and made a career for herself with the Stasi. Although…” Müller-Mansfeld snickered maliciously. “Her weakness for Western consumer goods earned her the secret nickname ‘Miss America,’ which annoyed her no end.”

“What can you tell me about the man who was with her that evening?” Fachinger asked.

“Anita had visitors fairly often. Her childhood friend Vera was often here, and sometimes the professor, as well.”

Fachinger patiently waited as the old man rummaged through his memory and lifted his water glass to his lips with a trembling hand.

“They called themselves ‘the Four Musketeers.’” He laughed again, the sound hoarse and derisive. “Twice a year, they would meet in Zürich, even after Anita and Vera had buried their husbands.”

“Who called themselves the Four Musketeers?” asked Fachinger in bewilderment.

“The four old friends from before. They’d all known one another since childhood—Anita, Vera, Oskar, and Hans.”

“Oskar and Hans?”

“The arms dealer and his adjutant from the finance board.”

“Goldberg and Schneider?” Fachinger leaned forward excitedly. “Did you know them, too?”

Fritz Müller-Mansfeld’s eyes sparkled with amusement.

“You have no idea how long the days in an old folks home can be, even when it’s as luxurious and comfortable as this one. Anita liked to tell stories. She had no relatives anymore, and she trusted me. Anyway, I’m also one of those from Eastern Germany. She was cunning, but not nearly as crafty as her friend Vera. She’s a sly one. She’s done well for a simple girl from East Prussia, don’t you think?”