Brodie looked at Anna, who was staring back at them. He noticed a large painting on the wall behind her featuring thick black strokes on white canvas. On a closer look it appeared to be an abstract rendering of the Berlin Wall.
This city was full of ghosts—and ghost stories, like the one they’d just heard. The duplicitous American spy, Odin, who had been on the wrong side of history yet had somehow escaped its judgment. And the brave Stasi man, Anna’s father, secretly defying a dictatorship, betrayed and killed just before he could relish his own taste of freedom.
It was an interesting story. Maybe even a true one. But did it have anything to do with Harry’s murder? This Odin, whoever he was, would probably be at least seventy years old by now. More likely, he was dead. The past mattered. But thirty years later, did it matter enough to kill for?
Brodie asked Anna, “What was Harry actually doing to discover Odin’s identity?”
Anna shook her head. “He was keeping me in the dark. He said it was to protect me, which I thought was a bit melodramatic. To me this was like a curiosity, uncovering a sad piece of family history. Not something that was still… alive.” She looked at Brodie. “Something that could still hurt people.”
Taylor said in a soft voice, “Anna, we have information about why Harry was in Neukölln, and what he was investigating. We don’t have all the answers yet, but… he was a counterterrorism investigator. And what he was involved in, we believe is related to Islamic terrorism in one way or another.” She put the Stasi documents on the coffee table and asked, “Do the names Tariq Qasim or Abbas al-Hamdani mean anything to you?”
“No.” She looked between the two of them. “You don’t get it.This”—she pointed to the documents on the coffee table—“is what he was doing. He took it seriously. And so should you.”
“We do,” said Taylor. “But you need to consider the possibility that this… Odin case is not related to Harry’s death. Also, nothing you have told us justifies why you have not spoken to the authorities. We can arrange—”
Anna interrupted, “Theauthoritiesshot my father for treason and dumped him in a cold grave. Do you know that there were more people conducting surveillance at his funeral than actual mourners? Little men with their little cameras. Seeing who was there, who came to honor the memory of an enemy of the state. And if you had the audacity to weep, maybe you’d end up on one of their dreaded lists for the rest of your life.” She shook her head, lit up another cigarette. “Theauthorities. Fuck them.”
Taylor leaned forward. “I do not mean to minimize your grief, Ms. Albrecht, and I’m sorry if that’s how it came off. But that grotesque system is over, that country is done, those people are powerless. And now you have an obligation to help find Harry’s killer. The police are no longer your enemies.”
Anna smiled tightly. “So says the policewoman.” She looked down at the paperwork on the table. “I used to think, who cares who Odin is? Or was? East Germany killed my father. The system killed my father. This American traitor, Odin… I wasn’t going to pour all my anger and grief into him like my mother did. I wasn’t going to give him that power. Then Harry came into my life. I think it offended him on a personal and professional level, the idea of someone in the American military having done this, having betrayed his country and gotten away with it. Harry was doing what he thought was right. Stubborn, like my mother. And now dead like her too.” She took a long drag, then thought for a moment. “I’ll talk to your police friends. And if I mysteriously vanish, maybe then you’ll take this seriously.”
Taylor said, “That will not happen.”
Anna ignored that as she rose and walked back to the desk and pulled out another manila envelope. She handed it to Taylor. “Take this. Harry translated the Stasi report into English.”
Taylor slipped the envelope into her satchel. “Thank you. We’ll read it.”
Brodie asked, “When your mother first got this report, did she alert any government authorities?”
“Of course,” said Anna. “She wanted their help. She wanted to keep the original, so she gave them a photocopy and claimed it was the only version she was given. She made up some story of how she got the documents in order to protect her contact in the Records Agency. She knew that if the government doubted its authenticity, they’d try to procure the original. But her contact informed her that they never did. Which made her think that they already knew about Odin, as did your government.”
Brodie thought about that. If the U.S. and West Germany lost four undercover agents over the course of a decade, they obviously knew they had a mole. And when the Cold War abruptly ended one November evening in 1989, there were plenty of reasons why both countries might want the whole thing to be memory-holed. He asked, “What about the other three people? Their families? Do they know about this report?”
Anna nodded. “My mother contacted them, but… you will find that not many citizens of the former East Germany want to revisit the past.”
Taylor seemed incredulous. “Even those whose family members were executed?”
“What makes you so sure that those people didn’t believe that their husbands and fathers got what they deserved? Or that they weren’t at least ashamed of their actions? East Germany was full of true believers, and that faith in the virtues of the state didn’t just lift like a spell when Germany unified. After the Nazis, there was Nuremberg. They hanged the bastards. But after East Germany, there was no equivalent. Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, you know what happened to him? He died of old age. And the General Secretary, Erich Honecker? He was supposed to stand trial for his many crimes against the people, but they took pity on the bastard because he had terminal cancer. He was allowed to live in exile in Chile, where he died an old man. There was no justice and so there was no reckoning. No consequences. And therefore no redemption.” She took a long drag. “The world will never let us forget the Nazis, and why should they? But the Communists… that is something different. There is a permission to forget, and all too many Germans take permission.”
Brodie considered that. East Germany had lost the Cold War, and the price of defeat was full integration into a vibrant democracy that had become the economic powerhouse of Europe. And unlike other vanquishednations at the end of a war, the worst crimes committed by East Germany were against her own people. And even distinguishing the perpetrators from the victims was difficult in a system that had managed to turn half the country into collaborators and snitches. No wonder everyone wanted to forget. To move on.
Well, they’d really gotten into the weeds on this Cold War stuff, but Brodie still had some meat-and-potatoes investigating to do. He switched gears and asked, “How did you and Harry first meet?”
Anna took a deep breath. “I met Harry last July. I’m a curator at a gallery in Kreuzberg, and we’d just opened a new show. We’d been trying to highlight new voices, you know, marginalized voices. And especially with all the refugees coming in, I decided I wanted to find the artists among them, support them in creating new work. So I did. Artists from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq. Challenging subject matter. Some of it quite grim. I knew it might be too much for our regular clientele, and I was right. Visits dropped off. But this square-jawed American walks in one day. He’s drawn to the work, and we start talking. Harry tells me he is a military investigator, and he even tells me a little of what he does, and I have this terrible feeling that he’s come to my gallery looking for terrorists. But he said he was just in town for a meeting or something. But he was a naturally curious man. An empathetic man. And he…” She trailed off for a moment. Then she tapped her chest over her heart. “He held a lot of darkness in here. I could feel that. There was something about him I needed to understand, to figure out. Most of the men I date, they are shallow little boys pretending to be deep. But Harry was the opposite. A deep well, but trying to hide it. I was immediately drawn to him.”
Vance could be considered the strong silent type, and there was definitely a kind of woman attracted to a man with inner demons. Of course, Anna Albrecht had a few demons of her own. Maybe she’d recognized a fellow traveler.
Brodie wondered if Vance was really pulled in by the artwork he saw through the gallery window, or by the very attractive gallery curator. But maybe that was too cynical. All men are pigs, but some are more dedicated to the role than others.
Anna continued, “We had a nice couple of days. He left, but we stayed in touch. And then he would start visiting every few weeks.”
Brodie asked, “Did you know he was married?”
“Of course,” replied Anna, as if offended. “We shared everything. We did not lie to each other. He still loved his wife. He told me that. Who says that to the woman they are cheating with? Harry had a kind of stupid honesty about him.”
Taylor said, “His wife might disagree.”
Anna shot her a look. “That’s not my business.”
