Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

Image

She returned to the beginning. She called Hans Kuhn again to ask about police cameras in the area of the Lina-Morgenstern High School, where Adriana had disappeared.

“You think that didn’t occur to me over the last week, Erika?”

“I’m just asking a question.”

He sighed. “We had some protests last year. The Turks thought we were targeting them, so the order came down to remove a bunch of cameras. We kept one at the corner of Mehringdamm and Gneisenaustrasse, but some kids screwed with it a month ago. The city won’t repair them until the next budget comes through.”

“Those are busy streets. There had to be some witnesses.”

“Four thirty in the afternoon-it was so busy that no one noticed. Besides, they don’t trust us pigs.”

“I see,” she said. “Thank you, Hans.”

Oskar returned with her car keys and a second Riesling and asked if she wanted him to stay around. She didn’t. His company would just distract her, and he clearly wanted to get home to his girlfriend, a Swede he’d recently become infatuated with.

Once he was gone, she began her reading. It was a technique she’d not so much learned as fallen into decades ago when her gaze had been focused across that opaque border into the ironically named German Democratic Republic. She’d had to learn what was happening there not by direct observation but by inference. Crop reports, crime statistics, train schedules, export flows, and the sometimes panicked messages sent by lonely informers marooned on that side of the Curtain. In such a situation, little can be taken at face value, and Erika had learned to gather her intelligence from the cracks between the questionable facts that reached her desk. She learned to let her mind drift from the central subject in slow outward circles, making dubious connections along the way that would be held up against other dubious connections to gradually create a jigsaw picture that could be rearranged, pieces dropped out or repainted, until, eventually, enough pieces remained that the larger picture could be gleaned.

She didn’t need to hear what the office wits said to agree that she’d stumbled on this technique as a way to make her life a little easier. She’d been a big woman since the seventies, an obese one since the fall of the Wall, and as her desk life slowly grew to encompass her entire life, her body continued to grow until reading was the only feasible technique left to her.

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.