Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

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.”

“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.”