“AfD. You know this group?”
“No,” said Brodie, though he was sure Taylor could have supplied a twenty-minute briefing.
“Alternative für Deutschland,” said Ulrich. “They are a right-wing, populist political party. Very nationalist. Very… Well, some say too much admiration for… another time.”
“Right.” Brodie often relied on local cabbies and hired drivers to cut through the bullshit while on overseas assignments, and he figured he’d give Ulrich a try. “How do you feel about this group?”
Ulrich shrugged. “I think some of these people are maybe crazy. But they also have an argument. I have no hate in my heart, sir. But also I value tradition. Does this make sense?”
“Perfect sense,” said Brodie, who thought Ulrich had spent too much time around diplomats. “The news is saying this murder was an act of Islamic terrorism. I guess there are a lot of Muslims that live around where it happened?”
Ulrich nodded. “Yes, sir. Neukölln. These days we call it Little Damascus for all the Syrian refugees. The ones that the Chancellor let in.” He added, “As an act of compassion.”
Taylor asked, “Do you know this neighborhood?”
“I have no reason to go there, miss. But the young people like it. They are more adventurous. My granddaughter, for instance, she spends time there with her friends. Clubs and art galleries and things such as that.”
Brodie asked, “Is it dangerous?”
“Well… yes, maybe a little. But not because of terrorism or anything like this. It is a problem of drugs and gangs.” He hesitated and said, “This American was a detective, correct? I think it was a criminal gang who did it.”
Brodie nodded. The drug trade and terrorism were not mutuallyexclusive problems, with the former often funding the latter, so maybe that was what Vance was on the trail of. In which case his murder was not so much an act of terrorism as a gang hit to snuff out an investigation and preserve a lucrative criminal enterprise. But that didn’t explain why Vance was conducting his work in secret. Although it might explain his missing eye.
On a related subject, Brodie wasn’t so sure that Taylor booking them in a hotel in Neukölln was that good an idea after all. If a drug gang had killed one nosy American, two more would make three.
Ulrich turned onto a main road and they drove through a commercial area of car dealerships, gas stations, and light industry.
Ulrich asked, “Have you been to Berlin before?”
“I haven’t,” said Taylor.
“Once,” said Brodie. “In 2000. Did you live here then?”
“Yes. All my life. Friedrichshain. In the East. I was six years old when the Wall went up.”
“That must have been… traumatic,” said Taylor.
Ulrich nodded. “August thirteenth, 1961. We call it Stacheldrahtsonntag. Barbed Wire Sunday. My mother and I went out for a walk that morning, and we noticed many people out on the street, talking excitedly and moving toward a line of barbed wire, and soldiers and police along the main street. They had done this at night, while we slept, along the whole border. I asked my mother, ‘What is this?’ She didn’t know. She was frightened, I remember. All of our neighbors were as well. By the afternoon she must have heard the Party propaganda and told me the barbed wire was to keep the fascists out. Well, fascists meant Nazis, and those people destroyed Germany and the world. So I thought, this is good. But then… I saw that the barbed wire kept us in.” He was quiet for a moment, then said in a faraway tone, “We had family on the other side. Some we never saw again. The rest, not for twenty-eight years.”
“That’s very sad,” said Taylor. “Cruel.”
Brodie asked, “Did you witness the Wall coming down?”
Ulrich perked up as he said with pride, “I helped tear it down, sir. November 1989. You have seen those pictures of the people with sledgehammers? I was one of them.” He laughed and added, “The best labor of my life.”
Brodie said, “When I was here, a teenager sold me a piece of the Wall for twenty deutsche marks.”
“In 2000? I’m sorry to say that was a piece of sidewalk, Mr. Brodie.”
“It came with a certificate.”
Ulrich laughed again. “You know, the best part was seeing the Grenztruppen—the East German border guards—just watching me with my sledgehammer. They could do nothing. Those… bastards. Excuse me.”
Well, apparently Ulrich’s diplomatic reserve didn’t extend to the old regime that had oppressed him and stolen his childhood and his manhood.
He continued without prompting, “I learned something important in these moments. You see, the guards still had their guns as they watched us break their ugly Wall, climb over it, cross the border. But they could do nothing. The man holding the gun is not the problem. The problem is the people above this man who is carrying the gun, the puppet masters, pulling the strings.” Ulrich added, “But we cut all the strings. Not on the day the Wall fell, but in the months before, bit by bit. This is the real work of resistance. The part not on the television. And so, when the end came, it seemed to come quickly. Like a rotten tree that falls in a wind. It was already dead.”
This reminded Brodie of other conversations he’d had with people who lived in the former Soviet Bloc. The events of 1989 that had toppled Communist governments from Berlin to Bucharest seemed to happen all at once, at least from the point of view of an outsider. But the stage had been set in the months and years before. Not only by dissidents such as Ulrich, but by the totalitarian governments themselves, who built their regimes on a weak foundation of lies, repression, and stupidity. Many of the people who lived here knew it was coming. The CIA and other Western Intel agencies totally missed the signs.
