The Nearest Exit (20 page)

“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 directly 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.

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 she’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?”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Then I don’t have to answer a thing.”

“In which case, I’d be very curious why you wouldn’t.”

Mihai blinked rapidly, perhaps a sign of an upcoming lie, perhaps not. “You know what I do for a living?”

“You’re a baker, and you help people move here.”

He smiled. “Yes, and no. It seems I spend most of my time answering police questions about the people I help. If pressed, I would have to say my main occupation is answering questions.”

“Then you’re experienced,” Erika said and opened a hand toward the car; Oskar was already starting it up. “Shall I occupy you a few minutes?”

Despite his attitude, Erika liked Mihai Stanescu. He was abrupt,
to the point, a quality Erika herself was often accused of. He, like his brother, was a small man, but heavier and with an excess of dark hair that grew too quickly on his face and spilled out under his neck when he took off his tie in the Kreuzberg coffee shop they settled on. Erika ordered espresso, but wished she hadn’t when Mihai ordered Trendelburger Feuergeist—“fire ghost,” an aptly named clear liquor she felt she could use right now. When she stared at his shot glass too long, he raised an eyebrow. “You are paying for this, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good.” He swallowed it all in one go, then said, “Who’s the bastard?”

She glanced at Hans Kuhn near the doorway—she’d asked him to stay back. “You didn’t meet Inspector Kuhn before?”