Jenkins offered, “Prenzlauer Berg is kind of artsy, upscale, gentrified. Picturesque. One of the few parts of the city that didn’t get totally flattened in the war.”
Brodie looked at Jenkins. “Thank you for your help.”
Jenkins nodded, and they all rose from their chairs.
Taylor said, “This is the part where I would tell the person I’ve interviewed to call me if they think of anything else, but I know you’ve already run every angle and detail in your mind before we even walked in the door.”
Jenkins looked at her. “I appreciate you saying that. But the truth is I’m gutted by Harry’s death and not at the top of my game. If I do think of anything else—or if I get tailed again—I will let you know. I’m driving back to Kaiserslautern tomorrow.” He added, “I’d leave today, but Schröder asked me to stick around in case something comes up.”
Brodie wanted to suggest that Warrant Officer Jenkins cut back on the day drinking, but he said, “We will get justice for Harry.”
Jenkins looked him in the eyes. “I know you will.”
Jenkins walked them to the door and opened it. As they stepped into the hallway he hung in the doorway, something still on his mind. He said, “Harry wasn’t just my partner. He was a close friend. If he was investigating something and he was keeping it from me, it was big, and it was dangerous. So big and dangerous that he couldn’t take a single risk, of a single personknowing. Even a person who he trusted with his life.” He asked, not rhetorically, “What the hell could that be?”
Taylor said, “We’re going to find out.”
Brodie suggested, “Keep an eye on your ass.”
They turned and walked down the hall as Jenkins shut the door.
After a minute Taylor said, “He’s really hurting.”
Ms. Taylor had an excess of empathy, which Brodie thought made up for his deficit. He said, “He’s a walking example of being too close to a case to work it right.”
“I hope you’d be as torn up if something happened to me.”
“I’d be devastated,” he assured her.
“You’d drink yourself to death.”
“I’d at least start smoking again.”
They took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out into the bright winter day. The wind had died down but the day had grown colder, and a frozen stillness hung in the air.
Brodie looked around. Through the windows of a nearby café he could see that the tables were packed with a lunch crowd. Shoppers walked hurriedly in and out of the large department store on the western side of Alexanderplatz, and people flowed out of the train station that bisected the expansive plaza. Beyond the station, Brodie could see a line of tourists at the base of the TV tower, waiting their turn to ride an elevator to the top for a panoramic view of the city.
Something about this city felt so mundane, so banal, so at odds with its tragic and disastrous history. But the past never dies, even when it’s been bombed and bulldozed and replaced with a shopping mall. It’s still in the air, and in the earth beneath your feet, and in the hearts and minds of those old enough to remember.
Brodie spotted an old man sitting on a concrete bench ringing a graffiti-covered fountain in the center of the square. The man shakily brought a cigarette to his lips and took a drag.What has this man seen in his life?
A memory came back to Brodie of his last time here in 2000. He had been drinking with his old roommate Adam Kogan in a biergarten next to the Berlin Zoo. It was a perfect spring day—sun shining, birds chirping, two friends getting tipsy and scoping the pretty girls in their short dresses.
But Kogan had taken a dark turn, as he sometimes did after too many drinks. He was staring at an elderly German man—maybe early eighties—sitting alone at a nearby table having lunch.
“What’s he seen, Scott?” asked Kogan. “What’s he done?”
Brodie had looked at the man, who probably would have been in his early twenties at the start of World War II. “Maybe nothing,” said Brodie. “Maybe he was just a soldier doing his duty and following orders.”
Kogan had slammed his beer down. “No such thing as just a soldier doing his fucking duty and following fucking orders. He was a fucking Nazi!”
He’d said it loud enough for other patrons to hear, and maybe the old guy himself, though he didn’t react. Brodie and Kogan left soon after.
Brodie watched the old man by the Alexanderplatz fountain, who squinted against the harsh winter sun as he smoked his cigarette. He was probably born around the beginning of the war, and had spent his childhood in a country reduced to rubble and ash. A country of women and children, whose men were missing, dead, or maimed and broken… hard to comprehend all that.
Had this man lived in East Germany? Had he found a job with the state? The Stasi—the East German secret police—had deployed a spy or informer for every six citizens. It was the most heavily surveilled police state in history. And in the blink of an eye—when the Wall fell—the police state became a liberal democracy. But it doesn’t work that way.
What’s he seen? What’s he done?
