She shook her head. “Don’t know.”
Taylor asked, “Sedan? Van? Truck?”
Fatima replied, “I really don’t know. It wasn’t a giant truck. I guess I would have noticed that. Like, a regular car probably.”
Brodie asked, “What color? Dark? Light?”
Fatima thought for a moment. “Dark, I think. I could only really see the taillights. It was just driving, not, like, screeching away. I thought it was probably nothing. But then I heard on the news that a guy got shot, so…”
Brodie thought about that. Vance was seen on security tape leaving the metro station at 2:52A.M., and it was only a five- or six-minute walk between the station and the park. If Vance had gone directly to Körnerpark, he would have been waiting almost thirty minutes before the fatal shot. What was he doing in that thirty minutes? The footprints told two different stories. It was possible that Vance did meet with someone in the park before being sniped. That person spoke with Vance about something, then gave a signal to the gunman up on the street, who had plenty of time to line up his shot. The sniper pulled the trigger, and then the person who had been speaking to Vance took his cell phone, carved out his left eye, and left the park quickly, and both men left in the car.
Or maybe Vance went somewhere else to have the meet, and he was cutting through the park afterward on the way back to the train station. Or he stopped to get a drink or a coffee or to buy a pack of cigarettes before the Körnerpark rendezvous. There were two, three, or more scenarios that fit the bare facts. Well, at least they had an exact time of death, if Fatima had heard the shot.
Fatima was looking up at them, probably wondering when they were going to go bother someone else. Brodie asked, “Anything else you can think to tell us about this?”
“No,” said Fatima. She took a drag. “Everyone around here is scared. Whenever this neighborhood gets attention, it’s not for anything good and it’s not good for anyone here.”
Taylor said, “We hope with the cooperation of the people here, we can find the perpetrator and conclude this investigation. Quickly.”
Fatima laughed, took another drag. “You don’t get it. It doesn’t matter who did it, or why. When something bad happens near a bunch of Muslims, there’s things that happen. Mosques will be raided by the police. People will be harassed. I have a friend who’s Syrian, teaches art to children at a local school, but his cousin who he barely knows fought with the rebels in Aleppo, which of course means my friend must be in al Qaeda or ISIS. He’s followed all the time. I’m sure the police will find a reason to bring him in for questioning about this murder.”
Kim said something to her in Arabic, and whatever it was seemed to piss her off. She spat something back at him, and then Kim said to Brodie and Taylor, “Let’s go.”
Taylor thanked Fatima and they walked away, toward the southern edge of the park.
Brodie asked, “What was that about?”
Kim replied, “I told her that extremism is a community problem. The community suffers by it, but the community is also central to combatting terrorism, and the community is complicit when they don’t cooperate.”
“Sounds like an FBI brochure you’ve memorized,” said Brodie.
“More like an FBI brochure I wrote. And I believe it. Mosques wouldn’t be raided if they weren’t used for recruitment. And if a family member is a member of a terrorist group, the odds that other members of that family are also involved are statistically much higher. Will innocent people be hassled? Of course. But I’ll happily inconvenience and intimidate a hundred innocent people to save one innocent life.”
Brodie could easily agree with this point of view. Then again, Mr. Kim might be underestimating the psychological impact of the endless inconveniences and intimidations—not to mention humiliations—of being part of a religious, ethnic, or nationality group that is always suspected of violence and subversion. Brodie had seen that in Iraq. The real horrors of war got the headlines, like the massacre of civilians by Blackwater contractors, or the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. But it was the everyday grind—the military convoys barreling through neighborhoods, smashing cars and snarling traffic; the endless nighttime raids on houses and apartments that terrorized civilians and almost never netted any bad guys or weapons; the checkpoints, the blast walls, the Green Zone fortress in the middle of the capital—these were the things that pissed off and alienated the average Iraqi and made them feel like second-class people in their own country.
The dynamic here was different, of course. This was an immigrant community in an advanced Western country. But in a place like Neukölln, police and Intel people needed local support, and heavy-handed police tactics had a way of turning potential friends into potential foes.
Taylor, getting back to the case, said, “Fatima heard the shot at three-twenty-five. That’s an interesting timeline.”
Brodie nodded. “Vance may have stopped somewhere. Check what businesses between the metro station and this park would have been open after threeA.M.Sunday morning.”
Taylor took out her phone and ran a search while Brodie and Kim checked their phones for messages. After a minute she said, “I see three places either on or immediately off of Karl-Marx Straße, which was the road Vance probably walked down, that were open after three. A noodle shop called Wunderschön Saigon, a hookah bar called Ember Berlin, and what looks like a dance club called Proletariat.”
Did Harry Vance go clubbing for twenty minutes before a dangerous rendezvous? Probably not. But he could have stopped for some pho or a coffee and a smoke. Brodie said, “We should check out all three of those spots late tonight. If we’re lucky, we’ll find staff who are working the same shifts they did on Sunday and can maybe ID a photo of Harry Vance.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Taylor. She added, “It’s Turkish psychedelic rock tonight at Proletariat.”
“My favorite genre,” said Brodie. “Meanwhile, I want to take a look at the metro station where Vance got out. Let’s do his walk in reverse.” He looked at Kim, who was still checking his phone. “Are you joining us?”
“Yeah,” said Kim. “And I’ve got something to show you on the way.”
They turned at the corner onto Schierker Straße, and walked another block to Karl-Marx Straße, a larger four-lane road. As they walked south along Karl-Marx, they passed a number of handsome old five-story buildings with pitched roofs interspersed with nondescript prefab concrete apartment blocks. The street was lined with pharmacies, cell phone stores, delis, a couple of kebab takeout joints, and a Turkish café. The pedestrians appeared pretty diverse, and in general the place gave the impression of a bustling and vibrant working-class neighborhood.
The name of the street—Karl Marx—was obviously a leftover from when this was Communist East Berlin. Maybe, thought Brodie, in a year or two it would get its old name back—whatever that was. Or a new name: Diversity Straße.
As for the buildings, the nice ones were prewar, and the new ones marked the places where a thousand-pound British or American bomb had reduced the previous building to rubble.
Brodie considered his encounter with Amina and Fatima. Officially and publicly, the German government welcomed immigrants and refugees from the Mideast. And the government was probably sincere—and alsowanted to show the world how much nicer they were than the Nazis. The German people on the other hand… well, they were divided on the issue of immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants. And this division between liberal and traditional Germans was the fuel that fed the fire of what the Germans called the far-right political parties, but what other people called the neo-Nazis.
