He walked north along Karl-Marx, passing a number of closed halal groceries, Turkish coffee shops, and Middle Eastern restaurants. Up ahead an Arab teenager in a winter parka leaned against a lamp pole, watching him. Vance wondered if he was a dealer or maybe a corner boy for one of the Arab crime syndicates that operated in this area. Vance—with his barrel chest and a healthy paunch due to his love affair with dark German lagers—didn’t fit the profile of a heroin junkie looking for a fix. In fact, he probably looked to this kid to be exactly what he was—a plainclothes cop. As Vance got closer, the boy averted his eyes.
After a couple of blocks, he found the place he was looking for—a five-story apartment building with a hookah lounge on the ground floor called Ember Berlin. There were only a few customers sitting in the dim smoky lounge amidst Turkish tapestries, garish blue lighting, and thumping Arabic pop music.
Vance entered through the glass doors and looked around the lounge. A group of Turkish thirty-something guys were in one corner smoking and laughing, and a couple of old Arab men in tracksuits were sitting near the front door quietly sharing a hookah. The tracksuits scanned him and one of them let out a huge puff of apple-scented smoke.
Vance walked to the back where upholstered vinyl seating ran along the rear wall behind small tables and chairs. He took a seat facing the door and placed his hat on the table. He kept his coat on to make sure no one caught sight of his holstered M9.
A young Turkish waiter walked over and dropped a menu on the table. “Guten Abend. Huka? Kaffee?”
“Türkischer Kaffee, bitte.”
The young man nodded and walked off.
Vance checked his watch: 3:05A.M.He pulled his phone out and looked at the text thread he’d exchanged with the man he was there to meet, Abbas al-Hamdani. He’d received the man’s number from a local guy with connections. Hamdani wasn’t known to CID, and Vance hadn’t done much to verify al-Hamdani’s identity other than to request the man send a current photo of himself. Vance looked at the picture. Hamdani was aheavyset man in his seventies with a bushy gray mustache and large, sad eyes.
He looked at Hamdani’s last message:Ich werde da sein.I’ll be there.
The waiter returned with his coffee and he sipped it as he watched the door. The street outside was empty except for an occasional car or Vespa. After a few more minutes, he sent a text:Ich bin da.I’m here.
No response. Vance drank his coffee and began to wonder why he’d left a hot woman and a warm bed for this crap. Then again, the woman—Anna—was the reason he was here in the first place.
His wife used to tell him he had a savior complex. He became overly involved in other people’s problems instead of keeping his own house in order. She was right, of course. It was probably why he was a good investigator and a bad husband. After twenty-five years together, he and Julie had each other pretty well figured out. Which was the problem. Marriages, like criminal investigations, tend to be over when there’s no more mystery.
His phone vibrated. He checked it and saw a message that said in German:I can no longer meet there.
Vance tapped out a reply:We had an arrangement.
The reply came quickly:I cannot be seen with you.
Vance wrote:No one knows who I am.
No response for a moment. Then:Come to Thomashöhe Park. Up the road. Inside the park by the eastern entrance. This is better security for us both.
Vance waited to reply. He eyed the two old Arab guys in tracksuits and wondered if they knew Hamdani. Like a lot of immigrant and refugee communities, this place was insular, with complex alliances and resentments that dated back to their native lands, and probably to the beginning of time. Maybe Hamdani got tipped to these guys’ presence and didn’t want to be seen talking to a white guy at three in the morning. Too many questions.
Vance had insisted on a public place, and Hamdani could have picked anywhere, in any neighborhood. Why here, in his own backyard, if he was concerned about being seen? Something wasn’t adding up.
He looked at the map on his phone and saw that Thomashöhe Park was only a few blocks away. His CID training told him that meeting an unknown informant in a park in the middle of the night was a bad idea, but his ego and his Beretta assured him it would be fine. He decided to split the differenceand practice some minimal operational security. He spotted another park due south of Thomashöhe, called Körnerpark, and wrote back:Meet me in Körnerpark. Near the northern entrance off Jonasstraße. Fifteen minutes.He’d enter the park at the southern entrance and be there in five. If Hamdani balked, Vance would abort.
After a moment he received a response:Ok. See you there.
Vance knocked back the rest of the sludgy sweet Turkish coffee, put on his hat, then dropped some euros on the table and left.
He continued north along Karl-Marx Straße and after a few blocks made a left onto a side street. He walked a block and saw the entrance to Körnerpark, which was sunk about twenty feet below street level and ringed with stone balustrades. A staircase led down into the park, with a chain stretched across it to indicate it was closed.
Vance walked up to the balustrade and looked into the park, which was lit by scattered lampposts. Gridded paths, manicured hedges, and white stone statues gave the impression of a palace garden. The place was nice to look at, but turned out to be a bad tactical choice—a lot of open spaces, and anyone observing him from a distance could easily have the high ground.
He walked to the stairway and paused. A chill wind shook the bare branches of the trees around him, and the fat crescent moon cast a spectral pall over the frozen stone figures in the park.
I want to tell you what happened to my father.
He remembered just how Anna had said it, in her crisp German accent, and how she’d looked at the time—her stark features barely revealed through the dim light of the nightclub where she had taken him on one of their first dates, some trendy spot located in a former East Berlin brick factory. It was a real Anna kind of place—cool and hip but also heavy with the weight of history, where in the gloom beyond the dancers and club lights you could almost imagine the poor bastards in the sweltering brickworks, laboring toward a new world that would never come.
“He was betrayed,” Anna had said between blasts of industrial techno. “And then he was murdered.”
That’s when it had truly begun, this obsession of his. And it was why Vance was standing here now, knee-deep in an investigation of a cold case that he had no jurisdiction over, and which had occurred in a country thatno longer existed. Leaving his wife for a younger woman might have seemed like the obvious sign of a midlife crisis. But maybe the real crisis was here, in the freezing night, looking for justice in all the wrong places.
He slid his M9 out of the holster and held it inside the pocket of his topcoat, then ducked under the chain and descended the stairs into the park.
