The Nearest Exit (19 page)

After finishing the files directly related to the case, she took her initial, small leaps outward. She remembered, first of all, that a recent World Bank report had placed Moldova, Europe’s poorest country, at the top of the immigrant remittances list, a dubious honor for any country that received more than 36 percent of its gross domestic
product from those who had emigrated and sent cash back to their families. This fact made humans Moldova’s most valuable export.

Did the Stanescus send money back home? She made a note to check on it.

These days, the Moldovan mafia spent much of its time stealing German cars to sell back home, and trafficking women westward, which was far more profitable. While there was no reason to connect the Stanescus to these criminals, she didn’t want her sense of propriety to limit the broadness of her survey, so in addition to the BND files on the subject she tracked down recent articles in
Der Spiegel, Stern
, and
Bunte
, refamiliarizing herself with that tiny, troubled country.

Much of its history she already knew. Stalin had carved the area known as Bessarabia out of Romania in 1940, then absorbed it into the Soviet Union as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. For the rest of his rule, deportations were commonplace, sending Bessarabians to the Urals, Kazakhstan, and Siberia. In the late forties, due largely to the Soviet quota system, a famine spread through the country, and in the fifties the deported and dead were replaced with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. To help suppress the desire to rejoin Romania, Soviet scientists talked up the independence of the Moldovan language, which, unlike Romanian, was still being written in Cyrillic. This reminded Erika of Serbs and Croats who for political reasons insisted their languages were utterly different—while to the rest of the world they sounded pretty much the same.

After its 1991 independence, and despite protests from the government based in Chisinau, Russian troops remained in the breakaway region of Transnistria, just across the Dniester River, to “protect” its population of imported Russians. This self-proclaimed Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic fought a brief 1992 civil war to gain autonomy. Its sovereignty was only recognized by itself; the international community still considered it a region of Moldova, though a lawless one run by criminals with a GDP of drugs, guns, and flesh.

The Stanescus were not from Transnistria, though; they were from the north of the country.

She returned to Mihai, the uncle. In 2002 he’d been arrested on
the Austrian border, driving a truck with a Moldovan family—husband, wife, and two children—hidden in the rear. A prosecutor in the case pushed for kicking him out of the country, but by then Mihai was a full-fledged German citizen. Six months in Moabit Prison and a ten-thousand-euro fine was the best he could manage.

One would have thought that this would end Mihai’s smuggling activities, but he was picked up again in 2005 with a young couple entering Germany from the Czech Republic. Again, they were Moldovan, and in the case that followed it turned out that they’d only paid him seven hundred euros—a sum that only covered the gas and bribes along the way. The defense made a talking point of this, and the jury became convinced that he had committed his crime solely out of conviction, not for profit. He was let off with a twelve-thousand-euro fine and no jail time.

She would have preferred that he was a profiteering smuggler who sent his cargo on for slave labor or prostitution—that kind of man could be understood and dealt with—but Mihai Stanescu was the worst type. He was a believer, and this was an age in which believers were to be feared.

With a sinking feeling, she realized that reading alone would not solve anything. She would have to talk with the Stanescus.

She made the call, and a young-sounding woman answered in a groggy singsong, “Hejsan.”

“Oskar, please.” When he came on, she apologized for waking them, then gave the bad news. “I’ll need you to be my driver tomorrow.”

“But it’s Saturday.”

“Yes, Oskar. It is.”

“Where?”

“Berlin.”

He sighed loudly. With a five-hour drive ahead of him, his entire weekend was shot.

“If you want,” she said, “you can bring along your little Swede. Maybe she’d enjoy a road trip.”

Oskar hung up.

She knew the rumors would begin in the morning. Oskar wouldn’t spread them, but the janitors would eagerly discuss the two empty bottles of Riesling in her wastebasket, because even the janitors had clearance to judge. By the time the bulk of the staff returned on Monday the rumors would grow to a level of truth that would have to be investigated, so that those above her—and besides Teddi Wartmüller, her direct superior, they were innumerable—could decide whether to graduate the rumors to a higher level or demote them. Not even demotion would make them vanish; instead, all rumors were filed away in case of future need.

So, if only to limit potential dissemination, she collected the bottles and plastic cup and slipped them into an overnight bag she kept in the closet and rolled it out past the night guards to the parking lot. It was two in the morning, and she drove very carefully out the gate, past Herr al-Akir’s closed store, through the thickly wooded Perlacher Forest, and on to home.

She spent Saturday morning sleeping off the wine in her bilevel, on a gentle green lane of secluded houses populated by successful businessmen, other BND administrators, and a few foreigners from the European Patent Office. Along the street, security cameras mounted on streetlamps made sure they slept easily.

When she woke at noon, she instinctively took a plastic bowl out
of the cabinet and searched for the bag of cat food—for Herr al-Akir had been partially right. Erika Schwartz had owned a single tabby, but a week earlier she had discovered his corpse by the back door. Even now, a week later, she would get halfway through the ritual of feeding Grendel before realizing she’d thrown away the cat food, and then remembering why.

She’d been suspicious because the cat’s body looked twisted by poison, but the BND forensics section explained that it had been twisted by cancer, not foul play. Despite the fact that she didn’t mix with her neighbors enough for them to build a grudge, she still maintained her suspicions.

Oskar picked her up at two with his Volkswagen, and during the drive up the A9 she used his BlackBerry—she still hadn’t succumbed to those ubiquitous beasts—to continue her online reading. Sometimes Oskar cut in, and she was obliged to fill him in on the little she had. “No, it’s not a pedophile ring. She wouldn’t have escaped in the first place. Even if she had, I don’t see how they could have tracked her unless they had a foothold with the French police.”

“It’s not impossible.”

“No,” she said quietly. “I suppose it’s not. We’ll have to keep it in mind.”

He smiled, pleased to have added something to the cloud of possibilities. So she decided to dampen his enthusiasm, just a little. “We’ll meet later on at the hotel. First, you’ll drop me off at Hans’s place, then go on to Gneisenaustrasse.”

He blinked. “Gneisenaustrasse?”

“Look for cameras. The police camera isn’t working, but there are bound to be shops with some kind of security.”

“Wonderful.”

“Don’t be down, Oskar. You’ve got a lifetime with the Swede ahead of you.”

He dropped her off at Hans Kuhn’s apartment over in Pankow, and she declined Kuhn’s offer of a drink. She wanted to know about the Stanescus. “What were your impressions?”

“Simple,” he said, sipping on a whiskey that dampened the ends of his white mustache. “Decent enough, very earnest. I was there
when the child called. Their hearts were on their sleeves. I’m sure they’re not involved.”

“And the uncle?”

“Mihai?” He rocked his head. “The brains of the family. Tough, too. But he’s a German citizen; he knows the lay of the land. The parents have that vague confusion all new immigrants have.”

“Maybe I should talk to them now,” she said, feeling impatient.

“They just received their daughter’s body.”

“Then they’re emotional. It’ll make an interrogation easier.”

“Interrogation? Christ, Erika. Give them a break. Talk to them tomorrow, after they get back from church.”

“Churchgoers?”

“Bulgarian Orthodox on Krausenstrasse. There aren’t any Moldovan churches here, and the closest Romanian church is in Nuremburg, so they make do.”

“It’s late, anyway.”

Hans Kuhn raised his glass. “And you’re being rude. Now, have a drink.”

Four whiskeys and a dish of Mecklenburg cod later, Erika was ready to leave. It wasn’t the alcohol or the overdone fish that soured her but the awkward emotional scene Kuhn put her through. Teary-eyed, he said, “I was sure she was dead. Convinced. I’d had a week for it to settle in. Then she wasn’t. God’s own miracle!” He raised his glass while his tongue rooted around in his mouth. “Then, once more. Dead. So much worse. Why couldn’t she have just died in the first place?” Later: “I hate my job.”

His guilt flickered into fits of anger, and he made unwise predictions about what he would do to the men who had kidnapped her, once he had them. That’s when she knew it was time to leave. She called a taxi, which took her to the Berlin Plaza Hotel in Kurfürstendamm, and, before checking in, bought a Snickers from a nearby convenience store. She ordered a bottle of Pinot Blanc from room service.

She had finished the Snickers and was halfway through the wine when Oskar knocked on her door. She had spent the preceding hour avoiding all thoughts of the case by using her deductive skills on a
television crime series starring a handsome cop and a dog that had a kilometer more charm and brains than his master. To her embarrassment, she still had no idea who the killer was.

She unlocked the door and paused to examine the bright red bruise around Oskar’s left eye, which seemed to reset all his features, making him look a few years younger. It was a curious effect. Coagulated blood marked a split in his eyebrow.

“You going to invite me in?” he said testily, then waved a shopping bag, heavy with a box that, through the thin plastic, she could see was a new Sony video camera. “This should at least entitle me to a free drink.”

She drenched a washcloth in hot water and set to cleaning off his face with the rough hand of an inexperienced caregiver. He winced and finally took it from her. He got up, one hand clutching the plastic cup of room-temperature wine, the other pressing the cloth to his brow. She took out the contents of his bag—one new video camera (“which I expect to be reimbursed for”) and a single mini DV cassette marked in quick black handwriting,
15-2-08, 16-21
.

“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “I should get a commendation.”

“I’ll buy you your own bottle next time. Now, talk.”

Funnily enough, it was a camera store, Drescher Foto, which sold a sketchy mix of antique and new video, 16 mm and still cameras stacked alluringly in the window. “They all pointed to the side, so you could see how pretty they were. Except one, up high in the corner. It pointed out to the street, and a little red light on it glowed. The owner had set up his own security system.”

“Very nice,” she said as she tipped the bottle for examination; it was empty. “Want me to call down for another?”

“Please.”

After she’d made the call, she settled back on the bed while he took a seat at the desk, which looked out over Berlin’s busy nightlife; shouts and car engines rose up to them.

“Of course,” he said, “Drescher Foto was closed. So I checked the list of names for the apartments overhead.”

“Let me guess: There was a Drescher residing in the building.”

“You should be a detective, Fraulein Schwartz.”

“Was he happy to meet you?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

Herr Drescher turned out to be a recluse, dividing his time between his shop and a filthy apartment stacked to the ceiling with mini DV cassettes and four televisions for watching the world pass by his store. Paranoid, perhaps, because at first he wouldn’t let Oskar come up. “I told him where I was from, and that seemed to cause more trouble than it solved. I had to finally threaten him with a search warrant—which, given what’s probably on some of those cassettes, worried him more than anything else.”

“I can imagine.”

After a conversation stalled by long silences and evasions, Herr Drescher finally admitted to having the tape from that day. Oskar asked if, when he heard about the missing girl, he had considered showing the tape to the authorities. All he would say was, “It’s none of my business. I keep to myself.”

Looking around the apartment, full of dirty plates balanced precariously on columns of cassettes, Oskar had no reason to doubt it.

“So we sat down and looked at it together. As you’ll see, the quality’s excellent, and it’s all time-coded. Better than that, there’s a perfect view of the entrance to the courtyard.”

“And?”

He got up and started unboxing the video camera. “And I’ll see if I can hook this thing up to the television.”

As he settled on the floor and took out the camera and instructions and the pages of obligatory, multilingual warnings, she said, “So when did he hit you?”

“Drescher?”