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.
3
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.”