After dinner they both had some cognac to brace themselves against the cold night ahead.
They left the restaurant and found their way back to Karl-Marx Straße, then headed south toward Wunderschön Saigon, the Vietnamese noodle shop that was the first stop in their quest to reconstruct what they thought could be Harry Vance’s late-night journey through Neukölln.
The air had grown colder, and a freezing gust barreled down the wide road. Taylor zipped up her long black winter coat and pulled down her knit wool cap.
It was half past ten and the streets were light on pedestrians, but the indoor cafés and bars were packed.
They reached Wunderschön Saigon, a narrow storefront with a lit-up sign and a front window covered with laminated pictures of big bowls of pho.
They entered and looked around. There were a few small tables, and a counter with stools that ran along the left wall. The place was full of multicultural patrons chatting and slurping. In the back was an ordering counter in front of an open kitchen.
They approached the counter, where a petite fifty-something Vietnamese woman in an apron had her back turned to them and was shouting something to the kitchen staff. She turned around and faced them. “Ja?”
“Guten Abend,” said Taylor. “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”
“Englisch? Nein.” The woman pushed a laminated menu across the counter and jabbed her index finger over the various pictures of pho. “Hühn-chen. Schweinefleisch. Gemüse. Okay?”
“Danke schön,” said Taylor. The woman moved on to another customer.
A voice from behind them said, “Hey, my friends.”
Brodie and Taylor turned as a teenager of African descent with close-cropped bleached-blond hair got up from his table and approached them. “I help you order, yeah?”
“Thank you,” said Brodie.
“You got it, my man. Best pho in the fucking city right here. Americans?”
“Yes,” said Taylor.
The kid nodded. “All right. Love America.”
“You don’t hear that every day,” said Brodie. “Listen, do you know about the murder in that park down the street?”
“Oh yeah,” said the kid. “Everybody knows about that, my man. Got sniped or something.”
“He was a friend of ours,” said Taylor. “We are helping his family try to figure out where he went on the night he was killed.” She nodded toward the Vietnamese woman behind the counter.
The kid looked like he regretted his offer to help. “Oh. So sorry. Yeah… I can try.” He approached the counter and said something loudly in German. The Vietnamese woman finished up an order, then walked toward them and listened as the kid spoke quietly. She glared at Brodie and Taylor and said something to them in harsh-sounding German.
The kid said to them, “Yo… She said she already talked to the police. She thinks you’re reporters or something and she don’t want to talk to you.”
“Tell her we’re friends of the victim,” said Brodie. “Can she tell us what she told the police?” He added, “We’ll pay her for her time.”
The teen said something to the woman, who shook her head and barked at him in German. “She says she knows nothing. That’s what she told the police. She says you need to order or leave.”
Taylor looked at the woman. “Danke.” She said to the teen, “Thanks for your help.”
“You got it, my friends. Sorry about your mate. It’s brutal out there.”
“It is,” said Brodie. “Take care of yourself.”
Brodie and Taylor stepped back out into the cold night and Taylor said, “I have a feeling that wherever we go, Chief Inspector Schröder will have already been.”
“We might be retracing Schröder’s steps, but we are looking with different eyes. Redundancy in an investigation is a good thing, a fail-safe against incompetence, bias, and—in this case—German arrogance.”
“What about American arrogance?”
“That’s what makes the world go round.”
