“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?”
“Yes, Drescher.”
He touched his brow, grinning. “The light in his stairwell doesn’t work. I would have told you immediately, but you might not have let me in.”
“You tripped and fell.”
“I’d like to see how well you negotiate those stairs.”
It took about fifteen minutes-
Oskar, despite his boyish love of modern technology, wasn’t adept at using it-and during that time room service delivered another bottle of Pinot Blanc with two wineglasses. The young girl who brought it up seemed amused at first by the scene in front of her: wine for two, an enormous old woman, and a scrawny, mustached man in his thirties sitting on the floor. Then she noticed the video camera and the man’s swollen eye, and her amusement seemed to turn to disgust; she was gone before Erika could dig out a tip.
Oskar had cued up the tape back at Drescher’s, at 16:13. The camera didn’t shoot straight across Gneisenaustrasse but at an angle, so that it could take in the store’s front door. From that angle the foreground included the sidewalk, parked cars, and the swish of traffic speeding past bare trees lining the median. The background was dominated by the apartment building and its wide courtyard entrance.
“There he is,” said Oskar, pointing to a black BMW turning into the courtyard.
She squinted at the hazy image, then reached for her reading glasses. “Did you get a license number?”
“It’s clearer on the way out.”
He fast-forwarded to 16:27, when a man emerged from the courtyard, checked his watch, and tried to look inconspicuous. He kept his head slumped between his shoulders, so that his face was hard to make out, but Erika guessed he was in his late thirties or early forties, 180 to 190 centimeters tall, dark-haired. Not heavy. Just like half Europe’s male population.
Erika was momentarily shaken when the man seemed to look directly at the camera, at her, and she said, “Does he see the camera?”
“I noticed that, too,” Oskar said as he took a sip of wine. “I don’t think so. I think he’s looking at this car.” He touched, in the foreground, the dark blue, almost black, front hood of some unknown make of automobile.
Between then and 16:37, the man disappeared from view again before reappearing and looking to his right, taking note of something and disappearing again. Among assorted people passing on the street, Erika spotted Adriana Stanescu. After all the photos that had been pasted across Europe over the last week, she didn’t need to see her in close-up to know. Tall for her age, almost swaggering with the public confidence that consumes pretty teenaged girls. She briefly considered telling Oskar that, many, many years ago, she had been as pretty as this Moldovan girl, then wondered why she would consider it, particularly when Oskar wouldn’t believe her.