might have been an extravagance, but it was an extravagance that was very much in keeping with the kind of man who counted out every penny and measured its worth against its cost. Charlottenburg was an oasis of calm even in the days of the divided city.
He turned onto Schlossstrasse. It was easy to imagine the residents hidden behind those windows, safe in their ivory towers, untouched by the suffering it brought to their city. They would not be so distant today. That too was an element of the new fear-it was intimate.
A newspaper vendor on the street corner was shouting news of the tragedy to anyone who would listen and waving the latest edition, hot off the press, under their noses. Konstantin crossed the street to avoid the man. He counted the other people on the street. There were twenty-seven. One of the busiest streets in the city at what should have been one of the busiest times, and there were only twenty-seven people out about their business. There was a painted red kiosk selling bratwurst and other sausages. A single man sat huddled up against the cold with a half-eaten brat and dried onions slathered in mustard and ketchup. He was the closest thing to normal in the street.
How had it come to this? How had this kind of fear become so commonplace?
Metzger lived on the third floor behind a security intercom, through a marbled foyer and up a curving granite stair. Everything about the building said Old World affluence. He ran his finger down every one of the buttons until someone buzzed him in. People were careless like that, even in the anonymity of the big cities-especially in the anonymity of the big cities. He closed the door quietly behind him and took the time to wipe the street off his shoes on the mat, scuffing each sole backward and forward three times before he opened the second inner door and walked through to the foyer.
It was three degrees colder than it was in the street. The huge iron radiators were at least half a century old, and no doubt the boiler feeding them was just as decrepit. Brass mailboxes lined the right-hand side wall of the small antechamber. Konstantin ran his fingers over the names, stopping at G. Metzger. He didn’t have a key for the box. He didn’t need one. It wasn’t a particularly sophisticated lock. Mailboxes seldom were. The mail, it seemed, was sacrosanct. Again, that was a marked difference from his world, where the mail was monitored, censored and often used to incriminate, no matter that Stalin had been dead for the best part of sixty years. Old habits die hard.
He took his key chain out of his pocket, sorting through them until he found a small enough bump key. Konstantin took his left shoe off and set it down on the small shelf beneath the mailboxes. The theory behind the bump key was simple: all of the grooves filed down to their lowest peak setting. He slipped it all of the way into the lock, then eased it out a single notch. He applied the slightest of pressure to the key, as though beginning to turn it, then bumped the key with the heel of his shoe. The sudden sharp impact caused the pins to jump out of the rotator, giving him the fraction of a second he needed to turn the key. It took him four seconds to open the mailbox.
He sorted through the envelopes as he walked up the stairs. Every groove from every dragged foot was worn deep into the steps, and the wrought-iron filigree beneath the polished-smooth banister had oxidized to the richest red. There were more than twenty envelopes, and the majority of them were computer-generated mass-mailings or this month’s bills. Even with three flights of stairs to climb he hadn’t managed to read more than half of the dead man’s letter. He didn’t really need to read any more than that.
Only one envelope was handwritten. People didn’t send letters anymore. That made a handwritten envelope something of a curiosity. He teased one of the seams open, careful not to contaminate the glued edge. There was no way of knowing if the contents of the envelope were important, but there was no sense in treating them any other way. If needs be, the old man could get the saliva used to lick the stamp and seal the envelope analyzed, its DNA lifted for comparison or identification purposes. There was so much about this new world that was every bit as frightening as anything that had ever happened in Stalinist Russia.
He reached Metzger’s door. The brass number in the center of it had turned green. What he read caused him to check the ate stamped on the envelope. It had been posted the day before-the same day Grey Metzger had killed himself. The processing time was stamped at 16:0 °CET. The precise moment Metzger had hung up his phone and burned.
It was a love letter, but it talked about him, not to him, as though the writer knew he would never read it but needed to get these words down, to make them exist; as though, like the little girl with her paper cranes, by setting them down God would read them and would remember her man and her love for him-which, Konstantin extrapolated the thought, meant the writer had known Metzger was going to die when she wrote it. He grunted. That meant she had mailed it out with an almost prescient precision. Was she involved? No, he shook his head. This wasn’t the confession of his killer. There was no mocking tone, no gloating. Only sadness. Her words were so intense. It wasn’t about Metzger at all, it was about his woman. The one Lethe hadn’t been able to find on the paper trail.
It was about leverage.
They’d given her the chance to put it all down on paper, and they’d led her to the post office and mailed the letter out at the precise moment the man she loved burned himself alive.
Who were these people?
The strange tense wasn’t because she had known he was dead-she wasn’t mourning him-it was because she knew she was going to be dead when he read it. It had kept her quiet, given her something to focus on, but she would have known she was a dead woman walking. She hadn’t collapsed, she’d written the letter. That took strength. Strength meant she would almost certainly have tried to tell him what had happened to her, somehow, somewhere in the letter.
Did they have pet words? Did she say “remember when we sat on the steps of the Berliner Dom” or “I’ve never forgotten the rain-filled day we walked hand in hand in the shadow of Checkpoint Charlie”? Something, a reference to a place, a name, anything? There had to be something buried in all of these words of love, a clue that told them who had taken her, or where, something. There had to be. She had been strong enough to write the letter; that meant she had to be smart enough to help them now, from beyond the grave.
He stuffed it into his pocket and kicked his shoe off again. He’d finish it inside.
It only took him nine seconds to open Metzger’s front door in exactly the same way he had bumped the lock on the mailbox.
Konstantin closed the door behind him.The apartment was everything he would have expected from a middle-class existence. The hallway doubled as the library, shelved floor to ceiling with the battered spines of academia and the occasional concession to pop culture. There were very few novels, he noticed, scanning the titles. The books nearest the door were almost exclusively concerned with the Byzantine period. As he moved toward the living room the time line moved with him. The majority of interest seemed to be focused on Medieval Europe, which made sense.
The last bookcase was filled with cheap, trashy airport novels. The spines were creased, the pages dog- eared, as though each one had been read a dozen times. He took one down from the shelf and thumbed through it. On the inside he saw a price written in pencil and the stamp of a second-hand bookstore in the city. He tried three more, selected at random. They all bore the same secondhand stamp.
There was a television, a small portable set that had to be over twenty years old. It didn’t dominate the room. Indeed, given the angle it was on, it was almost certainly never watched. There was nothing to say it even worked. Konstantin assumed that these dog-eared paperbacks had replaced the television in Grey Metzger’s life. Like Russia, the Germans protected their language obsessively, dubbing the endless reruns of American sitcoms. It would have come as something of a culture shock to an Englishman who probably thought the world revolved around his mother tongue. Konstantin shelved the book.
The hallway opened into a high-ceilinged room. The drapes where thick, heavy green velvet, tied back with a thick gold brocade rope. The hook in the wall had an exquisitely molded lion’s head. It was a small detail, but as the KGB had drilled into him, the truth was in the details. There were dozens of tiny details, from the wainscoting on the sash window and the original ropes laid into the side of the frame to the black and white tiles that made a chessboard of the floor, or rather the three broken ones that might have been proof of a struggle. Konstantin walked slowly around the room, then sank into the faux Chesterfield sofa in the middle of the room.
He put his feet up on the granite-topped coffee table. The room barely looked lived in. He had expected it to be strewn with journals and academic literature, with forgotten coffee cups and other signs of the absent-minded professor, but Grey Metzger was meticulously ordered and fastidiously tidy. Like a man who had been a guest here, not the owner.
