Murder on the Quai by Cara Black

Author:Cara Black
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Crime Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2016-04-06T19:25:11+00:00

Lichtenberg, Former East Germany

Saturday Morning

“You owe me this, Gerhard,” said Jean-Claude Leduc, pulling his wool scarf tighter in the slicing wind.

Gerhard, his contact, put his hands deep in his coat pocket. Jean-Claude heard coins jingle.

“And my contact owes me,” said Gerhard. He was an unusual-looking man, with high Slavic cheekbones, slanted eyes, and thick black hair. “You know how it works.”

Favors begat favors here on the grey street in Lichtenberg, where the Stasi had their headquarters on the outskirts of Berlin. The prewar buildings were pockmarked with bullet holes. The HQ, a stark, oyster-grey concrete building, stood next to a weed-choked bomb site. It had once housed the main office of the Soviet Military Administration in Berlin; before that it was a Wehrmacht officers’ mess.

“Et alors? I expected the documents ready and waiting for pickup. Like we’ve always done, Gerhard.”

“My contact went out celebrating,” said Gerhard. “He got drunk after the Wall fell, set fire to his Trabi. Expecting a Mercedes like everyone drives in the West.” Gerhard grinned. And when he did, the Asian in him surfaced. The child of a Mongolian soldier and Prussian mother, he’d been conceived in the Battle of Berlin as the Soviet troops invaded. Gerhard never knew his father. After a long night of drinking, he once told Jean-Claude he doubted his mother knew him either. She’d been hiding in the basement when a Soviet Mongolian troop found her. His mother hanged herself when he was two. There were many like Gerhard, Russenkind, though Gerhard said no one talked about them. He grew up in an orphanage in what became the East.

Jean-Claude rubbed his hands. So damn cold. “Why is it you’re just telling me now?”

“I’m not,” Gerhard replied. “When your daughter woke me up in the middle of the night, I told her, too.”

His heart caught. “She called you? Why? Something wrong?”

His little princess, worse than a squirrel after a nut.

“Nein. Not from what I heard. She was going to leave you a message at the hotel.”

Jean-Claude hadn’t had time to check in.

“What did you tell her exactly, Gerhard?”

Gerhard scanned the windblown street. “Your daughter? I said my contact went incommunicado, I think. She woke me up.”

A man in a leather jacket walked by, stopped to greet Gerhard in Russian. Gerhard spoke Russian, German, French, and British English, the Allies’ language of his childhood on the rubbled Berlin streets.

“Give me a little trinkgeld for my contact. You know, so he can get himself some schnapps for his hangover. Hair of the dog, you call it?”

Gerhard still surprised Jean-Claude with his inimitable Berliner gallows humor, cynical and irreverent. Not even the most hardened homicide flics he knew came close.

Reaching back in his overcoat pocket, Jean-Claude pulled out a handful of West German marks. “What else did my daughter say? You didn’t tell her anything, give any names, did you?”

Gerhard’s eyes narrowed as he looked over Jean-Claude’s shoulder. “There’s my contact, he’s going in the gate. If I don’t hurry I’ll miss him.”

Jean-Claude reached in another pocket and thrust a wad of American dollars in his hands.

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