They drank.
She set her glass down and stared at the whiskey. After a moment she said, “It’s hard… to know that someone that you cared about died this way. My father. Harry. They did not just die. Someone took their life.”
Brodie nodded. “I served in the infantry in Iraq. I lost friends. And losing them like that, it hurts in a different way. It’s a different kind of grief.”
Anna’s look darkened. “Did you kill the people who killed your friends?”
“In battle it’s hard to know. But at least one time, yes.”
“Did it make you feel better?”
“For a moment.”
Anna nodded. “I see them sometimes. The Stasi men. Well, less now. But five years ago. Ten years ago. If you went to certain bars, you’d see them. Usually alone.”
“How would you know?”
Her face soured. “They had a bad, retro look about them. Cheap polyester suits. Too much hair gel. Like they were stuck in time. And they had this kind of air of self-importance that was a joke because they had no power and most of the time they had no money. They were like…” She thought a moment. “Captains without ships.”
Brodie imagined these old Stasi men whiling away their twilight years in dim bars, nursing grudges, and remembering when they were wolves at the top of the food chain. The Nazi Gestapo in the postwar years must have had the same experience. Lonely, maybe haunted men who’d gone from swaggering to staggering, without power and without pensions, hoping someone would buy them a drink.
Brodie recalled his new friend Friedrich, who probably wasn’t ex-Stasi, but could have been an informant, and was definitely frozen in time.
Anna continued, “I’ve had a fantasy of somehow… finding the man who ended my father’s life.”
Well, the man responsible for ending her father’s life was the American military officer code-named Odin. But absent any justice on that front, Anna must have imagined a more tangible villain—the Stasi executioner who had pulled the trigger. He was probably some low-level thug, the type of interchangeable functionary who did the dirty work of every oppressive regime in history. Not an important man in any real sense, but important to Anna Albrecht. Or at least, a stand-in for the real and more elusive enemy. Brodie asked her, “And what would you do if you found him?”
She thought a moment. “I would make him talk to me. This man… saw my father in his last moments. It is almost like he has secret knowledge.”
Brodie looked at her. “It’s terrible knowledge, Anna. It haunts him and it doesn’t need to haunt you too.”
She nodded as if she already knew that.
He added, “Maybe one of these days, that old file will be taped back together, and you’ll get a phone call. You’ll get a name.”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Bullshit. The Odin report was lucky. Like a strike of lightning. Or maybe someone knew just where to look for it. I’ll never know. But I heard a number once, of how many people work at the Stasi Records Agency doing this work, the puzzle women. Now about forty people. It was even fewer in the past. And each person can reconstruct about one sack of paper shreds per year. You know how many bags of this shit they have? Over fourteen thousand. It will take three hundred and fifty years to put it all together.” She poured more whiskey and knocked it back, then looked him in the eyes. “The government is not trying to finish the puzzle, Scott. They are just trying tolooklike they are.”
So, forty additional government employees would shave one hundred and seventy-five years off that task. Not too much to ask for in a rich country like Germany. Of course, the inefficiency was by design. Not everyone wanted to see the finished puzzle.
On that subject, Anna asked, “Did you read the Stasi report?”
Brodie nodded.
“And?”
“It’s disturbing that Odin was never found and never faced justice.” He added, “Your father was very brave to risk his life to work for the West.”
“Enough smoke up my ass. What can you tell me?”
“That I passed the report on to my colleagues in the FBI.”
She stared at him. “I didn’t give it to you to pass it on. I gave it to you to do something about it.”
“I understand.”
“Yes. And so?”
“And so, I don’t tell you how to run your art gallery.”
