He drifted in and out of sleep. At one point he woke up and checked his watch again: 3:06A.M.He needed to leave. He gently separated himself from her, and she rolled toward him and whispered, “Stay…”
He pulled the comforter up over her chest and said, “I’ll be back.”
“Promise…”
“I promise.”
CHAPTER 34
The rain turned to a drizzle as Brodie walked alone through the dark streets of Prenzlauer Berg. The bars were all shuttered, and whoever was still looking to party on a Thursday morning at oh-dark-thirty had moved on to the clubs.
He passed under the elevated tracks of the U-Bahn with no particular destination in mind. He needed to wander, clear his head, and put some distance—physical and emotional—between himself and what had just happened at Anna’s apartment.
Promise.
Promise what? To stay? To solve the case? To fill the void left by a dead man? He wasn’t sure he was up for any of that. More importantly, he had orders to return to his duty station, so it really didn’t matter what Scott Brodie wanted. The military sometimes made your decisions easier by not letting you make them.
Brodie meandered through the side streets until he found himself on a main road. He spotted the lit-up Alexanderplatz TV Tower looming in the distance and headed toward it, passing a few pockets of young people and a couple of solitary drunks. He turned down a wide, desolate boulevard lined with modern residential housing blocks. A few cars and delivery trucks glided along the wet road.
He skirted the northern side of Alexanderplatz, then approached a bridge that crossed the Spree River onto what was known as Museum Island. On his right was the lit-up Berlin Cathedral, a handsome Baroque-style domed church that had either survived the war and the Communists or been rebuilt.
On his left was another Baroque building, massive with an even larger dome, which he assumed was the rebuilt Berlin Palace that their driver, Ulrich, had mentioned, the onetime home to the Hohenzollern royal dynasty. It had been damaged in the war and then razed by the Communists, who had built their own modernist “People’s Palace” on the site to house the East German Volkskammer, the so-called parliament. That eyesore had still been standing when Brodie visited in 2000, though when he saw it, it had been abandoned, and a few years later was condemned for demolition because it was filled with asbestos and had attracted vagrants and drug addicts. A squalid end for a squalid nation.
Now the People’s Palace was as obliterated from the cityscape as the original imperial palace, which had been reborn through careful re-creation. The Cold War might have ended thirty years ago, but Berlin was still a battlefield.
Brodie had thought the walk would clear his head, but it was doing the opposite. Seeing Berlin like this, desolate and dark, reminded him of all the mysteries and unfinished business he was leaving to others.
After another thirty minutes he began to recognize the area and thought he was in the northern section of Neukölln. He spotted a sign for Karl-Marx Straße and turned onto it, heading south.
His detective instincts kicked in and he turned down a few side streets until he was on Richardstraße, the narrow residential road where the bombing had occurred. He kept walking until he saw the damaged building up ahead.
The top floor where the bomb had detonated was covered with a thick tarp, and a small perimeter of crime scene tape was still established around the building. Two Berlin Police officers in body armor stood in front of the building, holding assault rifles. The debris had all been cleared, and the road appeared open to traffic.
Brodie spotted a young Arab man crouched outside the police tape, lighting candles on the sidewalk. As Brodie got closer, he noticed piles of rain-soaked flowers around the candles. A memorial to the victims of the blast, who were also the perpetrators.
The man saw him approaching and quickly stood. He looked apprehensive.
Brodie said, “Guten Abend,” then looked at the memorial. He noticedthree pieces of cut-out plywood amidst the flowers and candles, painted white with black Arabic script—presumably the names of the three men who had died in the bombing. Two of the plywood pieces were shaped like Muslim crescent moons. The third was a Christian cross.
Brodie hadn’t picked up much Arabic in Iraq, but he knew the word for “Christian.” He pointed to the cross and asked the man, “Masihiun?”
The young man nodded. “Ja. Masihiun.” He said something else in halting German.
“I don’t speak German. Or Arabic. Were you”—he pointed to the man, and then to the memorial—“friends? Habibi?”
The man nodded. “Ashab. Naeam faela.” He continued in Arabic, gesturing to the memorial.
Brodie interrupted, “Antazir. Law samaht,” which he was pretty sure meant “please wait.” His Arabic had sucked sixteen years ago and hadn’t gotten any better since. But he knew someone with good Arabic, who kept her phone on at all hours when on assignment and who was duty-bound to indulge him. He pulled out his cell and dialed Maggie Taylor.
It rang a few times before she picked up. “Scott? What’s up?” She sounded groggy and alert at the same time, which was impressive.
“I need your Arabic skills.”
“Okay… should I come to your room?”
“I’m actually on Richardstraße, at the site of the blast. There’s a young Arabic-speaking guy here that I need to talk to. I’ll put us on speaker.”
“No. I’m up now, and I need a jog. I’ll be there in ten. Can you hold him there?”
