Good As Gone (Simon Fisk Novels)

by Douglas Corleone

  “Bateman,” I said. “Patrick Bateman.” It was the cover I had used last time Ostermann and I worked together. After he’d dubbed me an American psycho.

  “One moment, Herr Bateman.” The guard called upstairs, announced me as a visitor, took some instructions, then hung up the phone. To me, he said, “Fifth floor, Herr Bateman.”

  I made for the elevators. Rode one to the fifth floor. A sign indicated Ostermann’s office was at the end of the hall.

  “Guten Tag, Magda,” I said when I entered the small reception area. I was surprised to see Magda Gerhardt still working for Ostermann. Eight years ago Ostermann had started getting it on with the fetching brunette, and he’d told me her husband was already suspicious. I checked Magda’s finger for a ring and saw none.

  “Herr Fisk,” she said. Seemed she was even more surprised to see me. Not pleasantly, from the look on her face. “Excuse me. I will go and get Kurt.”

  “Danke,” I said.

  Magda remained in Ostermann’s office longer than it would take to announce me. I was becoming anxious, pacing around reception, picking up and flipping through old copies of Der Spiegel. Finally, Ostermann showed his face. He’d aged well. In his midforties, he maintained a fit physique and his hair was every bit as blond as the day I’d met him. His ice-blue eyes bore into me like a laser. I noticed Magda had remained behind in his office.

  “Simon,” he said, without extending his hand. “This is unexpected. What brings you to Berlin?”

  “A missing girl.”

  Ostermann smirked, regarded me silently for a few moments as though he thought I might be joking.

  Finally, he said, “Yes, well. Last time did not end with champagne and balloons.”

  “No, it certainly didn’t,” I said. “But this time is different.”

  Ostermann took a step back and appraised me. “Why? Because you’ve learned how to dress?”

  I watched for a smile but none was forthcoming. I was beginning to sense some hostility and I told him so.

  “Well, at least you have some sense,” he said, raising his voice.

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Well, Simon, you certainly did not show any sense by arriving in my office after eight years.”

  “Are you asking me to leave?” I said.

  “Asking you to leave?” he shouted. “You are lucky I do not cut off your balls, schwanzlutscher.”

  The door to his inner office opened and Magda poked her head out. Ostermann barked a command at her in German, then turned back to me as she disappeared.

  “You have one minute, Simon,” he said as his stern, pale cheeks turned crimson. “You have one minute to explain to me what the hell you are doing in Berlin.”

  I narrowed my eyes, then glanced at the door to the hall. I wanted like all hell to use it. But this wasn’t about me and Kurt Ostermann and the events that had transpired nearly a decade ago. It was about a child. And I knew damn well that I needed his help to find her.

  “This little girl I’m looking for, she wasn’t abducted by one of her parents,” I said evenly. “She was taken in the middle of the night from her hotel room in Paris.”

  Ostermann’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “The American girl?”

  “Lindsay Sorkin, yes.”

  He remained silent for a moment, then stuffed his hands into his pockets and said quietly, “I stayed at home watching the coverage all of yesterday. Magda and I, we have a boy, Jakob. He’s around Lindsay’s age.” His eyes dropped to the floor, then suddenly rose to meet mine. “But I heard nothing about this girl being in Berlin.”

  “The media have no idea,” I said. “And I intend to keep it that way.”

  Standing in his reception area, I briefed Ostermann on the events of the previous forty-eight hours. Being pulled over by the French police, then hauled by Davignon to an empty cottage in a rural suburb forty kilometers north of Paris. Facing threats of arrest for retrieving the boy in Bordeaux. Meeting Vince and Lori Sorkin and agreeing to inspect their suite at Hotel d’Étonner. Finding the crushed tab of Ecstasy, locating the dealer Remy, and learning whom he’d sold 007s to over the past ten days. Linking the buyers to the bellhop Johan Fleischer, tracking Fleischer’s girlfriend, Sandrine, then chasing Fleischer himself through the streets of the Left Bank. Dragging him back to a pizza parlor in the Bastille after he confessed to his role with his head in a women’s toilet. The Algerian waitress’s positive identification. Eliciting the names Dietrich and Karl from the desk clerk at Hotel Lyon. Sneaking up to the kidnappers’ room and finding the piss-covered train schedule.

  “Which brings me here,” I said.

  “In Berlin,” Ostermann said in apparent disbelief, “searching for two blond-haired, blue-eyed men named Dietrich and Karl.”

  “It’s more than I had when Davignon brought me up to the Sorkins’ hotel room in Paris,” I said.

  “I suppose it is.” Ostermann paced about without looking at me. His right thumbnail found its way between his teeth and he bit into it. These nervous tics seemed entirely out of character. For as long as I’d known him, Ostermann had always been as cool as the North Sea.

  “Simon,” he said finally, “we must—”

  The phone on Magda’s desk began to ring. Ostermann held a finger up to me and lifted the receiver. He spoke quickly in German, hung up the phone, and turned back to me.

  “That was the security desk downstairs,” he said. “The police have arrived.”

  “The police?”

  “I am sorry, Simon. I ordered Magda to call them a few minutes ago. Before I knew why you were here.” He shrugged and forced a smile. “You would have known if you had brushed up on your German.” He set aside the smile and raised a reassuring hand. “But it is all right. I just explained to security that the police must take the elevator and move all their men to the rear, because I do not want any media attention. We can take the stairs and exit through the front doors. You have a vehicle?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But why are the police after me?”

  Ostermann glared at me as though I should know.

  “The twelve-year-old girl Elise Huber,” he said. “From eight years ago.”

  “Eight years ago,” I said. “But surely Germany has a statute of limitations—”

  “Not for murder, Simon.”

  “Murder?”

  “Yes,” he said calmly. “The girl died from her injuries.” Ostermann grabbed my arm and pulled me to the door. “Now hurry, Simon. We do not have much time.”

  Chapter 13

  The police didn’t exactly follow Ostermann’s instructions. As soon as we entered the stairwell we heard a bevy of boots tramping up the steps.

  “Scheiβe,” Ostermann said.

  I stood in the stairwell, listening to the echoes of their footfalls, and suddenly found myself frozen with shock. Elise Huber was dead. I’d made plenty of mistakes in my post-marshal career but nothing on par with this. This was exactly what I had spent the past ten years of my life trying to prevent—a parent from losing her child. Elise Huber’s mother, Heidi, had been my client. She’d paid me and paid me well. I’d spoken to her just after the accident and she’d told me she would immediately fly to Berlin. Had she made it in time to see her daughter? Had she been by her daughter’s side when she died? Why hadn’t I ever heard from Heidi again?

  Of course, she would have had no reason to call me. I should’ve called her. Why hadn’t I phoned her to ask after Elise? Was it guilt? It had been an accident; as bad as I felt about the girl landing in the hospital, I’d never felt it was my fault. Or had I?

  I’d been chasing people my entire adult life, first with the marshals and since on my own. Running down fugitives and then child thieves, from country to country, all around the world. But was I running after them? Or was I really running away? At what point had my objective changed? After Hailey’s abduction, when I went out on my own? Had I been running these past ten years from what happened? Or had I b
egun this long before Hailey was gone?

  Maybe Tasha had been right to blame me. Maybe I had no business being in Bucharest when Hailey was taken. I’d begun my career with the marshals at the D.C. field office. Less than a year later, Hailey was born. It was around that time that I requested to be put on international investigations, tracking down wanted fugitives in foreign countries, bringing them back to the U.S. for prosecution. Had I pursued that position in order to flee from Tasha and Hailey? Had I abandoned my wife and daughter the same as my father had done to my mother and Tuesday when we left London all those years ago?

  After all I’d done to distance myself from him, was I no better than Alden Fisk?

  “Simon,” Ostermann was shouting in my ear. “Snap out of it. Up the stairs. Hurry.”

  We bounded past the door to the fifth floor and made for the roof.

  Ostermann burst through the steel door and suddenly we were outside in the frigid Berlin air. Only we were six stories too high. I didn’t care for heights. My father used to tell me that we came from a family of distinguished mountaineers. Said climbing was in our blood, tried to take me to the White Mountains in New Hampshire more than once. I refused to get out of the car. Told him to piss off. If he wanted to die at six thousand feet he was more than welcome to do so. Just be sure to leave me the keys to the house.

  “We jump to the next roof,” Ostermann said.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “I have done it before,” he said. “Seven years ago, when Magda’s husband finally found out about us.”

  “You jumped to the next roof?”

  “What was I to do? The psycho had a gun.”

  “I can’t do it in these shoes.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “I did it naked. Try leaping across buildings with your dick swinging through the air.”

  There was no more talk on the subject. Ostermann simply took off in a sprint to the edge of the building. Reluctantly, I followed, my heart pounding harder than it did during a chase. As I neared the edge I felt a surge of nausea, but it was too late. My momentum would take me over the side and drop me six stories if I tried to stop. Adrenaline pumping, I jumped just as the door to the roof burst open. It felt as though I were suspended in midair for minutes on end. Then my feet hit something solid. I braced my body and let myself tumble. When I finally came to a stop, I stayed down, just as Ostermann had. I glanced over at him. We were both badly out of breath. The gap between the buildings had to be eight or nine feet, at least.

  “What now?” I whispered, fearing they’d seen me leap.

  Ostermann put a finger to his lips. “We wait.”

  We waited several minutes. Apparently, the police hadn’t caught sight of me. We listened to the troops march around the roof, then back down the stairs. When we heard the steel door close, we surmised that the police had cleared the roof. Slowly, we rose to our feet.

  “Let’s go,” Ostermann said, moving toward this roof’s steel door. “I have friends in this building. They will help us wait out the storm.”

  I brushed myself off and walked alongside him.

  “Sorry about the suit,” Ostermann said, pointing from the torn elbow to the torn knee.

  “It’s all right,” I told him. “I have six others just like it.”

  *

  Ostermann had Magda check us in to the Ritz-Carlton right in Tiergarten. From the outside the Ritz looked an awful lot like New York’s Rockefeller Center. Inside, I marveled at the marble columns and gold leaf as we swiftly crossed the lobby. Ostermann and I went straight to our suite on the eighth floor, an ultracomfortable, well-appointed space with a Prussian Neo-Classicist design. Once we had safely locked ourselves inside the suite, we crashed on opposite ends of the uncompromising sofa situated in the middle of the sitting room. Ostermann didn’t bother to explain what Magda had told the police when they arrived at his office, and I didn’t ask. What he did do was apologize again.

  “But why call them in the first place?” I said, still trying to comprehend the goings-on of the past two hours.

  Ostermann sighed, glared at me as he had back at his office. “You cost me years of headaches with the police and politicians here in Berlin,” he said. “You fled Germany and left me holding the bag, Simon.”

  “I didn’t know the girl died,” I said.

  “To be perfectly honest, that thought never crossed my mind. How could you be so inconsiderate as not to check?”

  “I was devastated,” I said, thinking back, trying to assuage this sudden sense of guilt. “Just by the fact that the girl had been injured at all. I couldn’t sleep for weeks. But then I received a call from another desperate mother in San Diego. Her infant son had been stolen by his father and smuggled across the Mexican border. The mother was afraid that her ex-husband was involved with the cartels. She was sure her baby boy’s life was in danger. I immediately left for Tijuana.”

  “But there is the Internet,” Ostermann said. “You could have googled Elise Huber and discovered that she was dead. You could have made a single phone call, Simon. That is all it would have taken.”

  He was right, of course. I had no excuse. None, other than my damn obsession with every case I’d ever taken since leaving the marshals. My relationship with Ostermann had preceded the Elise Huber case. I’d met him a couple of years before, while tracking down a fugitive in Hannover. He’d come to my aid in a bar fight that erupted while I was trying to elicit information on my target. At the time he intervened, the business end of a broken bottle was being pressed against my throat. Fact is, Ostermann probably saved my life that night.

  Now we stared silently at each other for a while, neither of us knowing quite what to say.

  Finally, I realized it was my turn to apologize. Something that had never come easily for me. It was something my father had demanded from me almost daily, for even the slightest transgression. Now, whenever I had to utter the words I’m sorry, it felt as though I was being pressured and I instinctively fought to pull back. When the words finally came, they fell out of my mouth with a stiffness that undermined my sincerity. And there’s nothing worse than a disingenuous apology. It’s an admission and a surrender and a deception all tucked tightly into one overly used phrase.

  Christ, I thought. Had I even apologized to Elise Huber’s mother? Our first conversation after the incident was brief, just a rambling recitation of the facts. There was never a second conversation. Was that why? Because I couldn’t bring myself to apologize? Was that why I had never called?

  Ostermann solemnly acknowledged my apology, then reached over and roughed up my arm as though we were old friends, which I suppose, in a way, we were.

  “It’s all right, Simon,” he assured me. “So, tell me. Did you ever remarry?”

  “No,” I said.

  He leaned back, shook his head. “Neither did I.”

  “You and Magda haven’t tied the knot?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “She’s an adulterer. How could I ever trust her?”

  I waited for him to laugh but he never got there.

  After a moment, he said, “So, Simon, did you come to Berlin with a plan?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “But it didn’t involve dodging the German police.”

  He grinned. “That should not prove so difficult. The places we would likely find your Dietrich and Karl, the police do not frequent them.”

  “And where might that be?”

  “I suggest we start in Kreuzberg,” he said. “But I don’t advise bringing the BMW. Or, for that matter, the TAG Heuer around your wrist.”

  “How the hell will I know what time it is?”

  Chapter 14

  During the Cold War, Kreuzberg, known also as X-berg, was closed in by the Berlin Wall on three sides. After the wall fell, the area found itself in the heart of a major European city again. Twentysome years later, it’s still struggling to find its identity. Currently, among other things, Kreuzberg is widely known for its large number of Turkish i
mmigrants.

  “The Germans complain that the Turks refuse to integrate into our society,” Ostermann said as we made our way to the U-Bahn station. “But it’s not so. The criminals have integrated just fine. The law-abiding Turks could learn a lesson from them.”

  Night had fallen hours ago. I’d spent the downtime taking advantage of the Ritz-Carlton’s ridiculously comfortable bed, while Ostermann watched two pay-per-view Reese Witherspoon romantic comedies on the flat-screen television in the next room.

  “Really?” I’d said. “Reese Witherspoon?”

  “I never get to watch anything like this at home,” he said. “You know how it is when you have kids. Unless it’s some bloody Pixar movie it’s not finding its way into the Blu-Ray player. And forget asking Jakob to sit in his room and watch it alone so that Magda and I can watch something we’d like.”

  Soon as he said it, Ostermann turned to me and whispered, “I’m so sorry, Simon.”

  I grinned at him. “People all over the world have children. And I love hearing about every one of them.”

  And it was true. Growing up in Providence without my mother had made me more curious about the mother-son dynamic than just about anything else as a child. I learned as much as I could from the few friends I had at school, and accepted every kid’s invitation home to meet his parents. Even if I didn’t particularly like the kid, chances were I could learn something from his mother.

  It amazed me to observe how affectionate mothers could be with their sons, how generous and how forgiving. In the Fisk home, the prominent emotions were anger and occasional sadness. To witness these other, brighter emotions made me realize what I was missing. But by the time I hit high school, being around other kids’ families made me uncomfortable. I felt like an intruder no matter how much they professed to wanting me there. Just wasn’t my place, I told myself. I didn’t belong there.

  “Many young Germans have gone to work for Turkish organized crime,” Ostermann continued. “The Turks specialize in narcotics trafficking, predominantly heroin. See, strategically, Turkey is in a perfect position for the heroin trade. The country serves as a gateway from Asia to Europe, and has access to opium from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Here in Germany, Kreuzberg acts much like a retail store, with young Turkish immigrants as its sales force.”