“Just speak—”
“Put him on.”
Brodie handed the phone to the man, who listened, nodded, and handed the phone back to Brodie, who put it to his ear and heard Taylor saying, “He’s staying. See you soon.”
Brodie replied, “Above and beyond.”
“Put that in your report.” She hung up, and he pictured her throwing on some jogging clothes to meet her partner before dawn on a cold, rainy morning, without even knowing exactly why. That was true dedication to duty. Or dedication to him. You never knew with Maggie Taylor.
The young man had returned to his task of lighting the candles, which must have been extinguished by the rain. Brodie wondered if this guy had been out here all night, keeping vigil at the scene of his friends’ deaths, and possibly protecting the memorial from desecration—a task that he might not have trusted to law enforcement.
Brodie eyed the two Berlin Police officers. The nearest one was keeping an eye on the Arab man and on Brodie. Brodie moved down the road to give the young man space and to assure the cops that no altercation was going to happen between them.
In about fifteen minutes Brodie spotted a figure jogging up the street from the south. It was Maggie Taylor, wearing her thick winter coat, sweatpants, running shoes, and her wool beanie. She stopped a few feet from him, took a deep breath, and looked him over. She asked, “Have you been out all night?”
“I needed a walk.”
She kept looking at him. “Drinking?”
“I made a few stops.”
“I would have gone with you.”
“Sorry. I needed to be alone.”
“Okay. But thanks for calling when you needed me.”
“Don’t make me feel guilty.”
“You can’t even spell it, let alone feel it.”
“You’d be surprised. Okay, so this guy—”
“His name is Kadeem.”
“Right. So he was a friend of the three deceased.”
“He said. Why do you need to talk to him?”
“I’ll show you.” He led her up the street.
Taylor greeted the young man by name and looked at the memorial. She said to Brodie, “There’s a cross.”
Brodie nodded. “You know any Christians in al Qaeda?”
Taylor had a brief exchange with the young man; then she said to Brodie, “Kadeem is from Syria and knew these three men there.” She and Kadeem had another back-and-forth, and then Taylor continued, “They all grew up together in a village outside of Idlib. One of the dead men, Yosef Rahman, was a Christian. After the jihadis took over the province, Christians were in danger. So Kadeem and these other two men helped Yosef escape intoTurkey. They all lived there together in Istanbul for a while and eventually took a boat to Greece, applied for asylum in Germany, and settled here in Neukölln. The three deceased rented this apartment together.”
Kadeem said something in Arabic, and he seemed to be getting emotional.
Taylor said, “He says his friends are not terrorists.”
Brodie looked again at the three name markers—the two crescents and the cross. He’d been to Syria once on CID assignment, about a year before the civil war began. Back then, Syrian Christians were a prominent minority community with full religious freedoms. Obviously, that changed once parts of the country fell to ISIS, al Qaeda, and other jihadi groups.
Taylor talked with Kadeem for a few more minutes, then offered him a twenty-euro note, which he politely refused. Taylor made the appropriate parting comments in Arabic, and led Brodie away, back toward the hotel. The two policemen watched them, and spoke to each other, probably wondering what was going on. And maybe thinking about asking. Or at least calling their superior. Indeed, Brodie thought, this was a city on edge.
Taylor said, as they walked, “Kadeem lives two blocks from here. He saw his friends the morning prior to the bombing and said they were not acting out of the ordinary. Kadeem relayed all of this to the Berlin Police officials who canvassed the neighborhood this evening looking for associates of the deceased men. He insisted to them that his friends had no terrorist links. The idea of it was absurd to him.”
“And what do you think?”
