Basic Law

by J Sydney Jones

  Boehm ignores this as he keys something else and up pops a new screen, an ID sheet on Gorik, including, at the bottom, the news of his recent death.

  “It reads accidental,” Boehm says, facing the screen.

  Randall has come to the computer now and looks over the man’s massive shoulders along with Kramer. Facsimile fingerprints are included on the screen, as well as dates of birth and initial national registration.

  “So he first registered on January 22, 1990,” Kramer says, reading the screen. “Where was he before that date?”

  A grunt from Boehm as he hits the function key again to call up the next screen.

  “I’ll be damned,” Boehm mutters.

  Kramer, unfamiliar with the layout of the screen, has trouble deciphering the information at first, but two words leap out at him: Praha and Nachrichtendienst.

  “Jesus,” Kramer says.

  “What?” Randall says. “What’s it say?”

  Kramer glances sideways at him, “Seems Mr. Gorik was with East German intelligence, stationed in Prague.”

  “Yes!” Randall fists his hands, thumbs pointing up, as if winning a prize.

  Kramer speaks German to the Kommissar’s back, “A retired spook, right?”

  Boehm nods, escapes out of the database, keys into another, and spends the next few minutes in a profitless search for more evidence of Gorik’s doings. Kramer notices pockmarks at the base of the man’s hairline and cannot remember seeing such scarring on his face.

  “Nothing more,” Kommissar Boehm finally says, spinning around in his chair to face Kramer. “No warrants on him. I wonder what interest Frau Müller would have had in him.”

  Kramer can think of a million. One comes immediately to mind, and it is sufficient. “Pahlus said her informant had political dynamite. Something to make and break careers in Bonn. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to figure out the kind of information Gorik could share.”

  “Such as?” Kommissar Boehm says. “Conjecturally speaking, of course.”

  “Such as double-agent networks that were run in the former Federal Republic of West Germany. Traitors to the state who no one but men like Gorik know about. That sort of nice spy thing that died with the Cold War.”

  “Interesting.” Boehm says it with all the conviction of a bored priest listening to the hundredth confession of the day.

  “Can you come up with a better explanation?” Kramer says, beginning to feel pissed off.

  “I don’t have to, Herr Kramer.” A smile. He turns to the computer again and calls up the original record on Gorik. “It says here he retired in 1989. I like that. Not much of a job left to retire from, I’d say.”

  He taps the screen with a thick forefinger, underscoring the date.

  “So what’s our friend been doing the last years?” Boehm says, as if to himself.

  “By the looks of his apartment building,” Kramer offers, “one thing he wasn’t doing was worrying about money.”

  Boehm swivels in his chair to face them again, “I wonder how he was living, then. An interesting question. Perhaps I should get on to our tax friends and see if he ever filed a return.”

  Kramer doesn’t care about Gorik’s financial arrangements; the man is dead. Reni is dead. The memoirs are gone. That is the story, not Gorik’s tax status.

  Randall nudges him, “What the hell’s going on, Sam?”

  Kramer fixes his eyes on Boehm, answering Randall sotto voce in English, “He’s interested in Gorik’s tax record.”

  “For shit’s sake,” Randall sighs.

  “What does he say?” Boehm asks.

  Kramer feels like he’s at the UN. “Nothing. Just wants to get some dinner.”

  “An excellent idea. I can suggest the Restaurant zum Bad.” Then Boehm refocuses. “Leave this to me. I’ll let you know the progress of my inquiries.”

  Kramer stays put. “It’s not Gorik, you know. He’s only a pathway, not the destination.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “This: I believe Renata Müller was killed by someone who had a lot to lose if her memoirs were published.”

  He has not said this out loud before. The sound of the words, their finality, send a chill through Kramer. Murder. Homicide. They’re not his beat.

  Kommissar Boehm says nothing for a time, just looks down at the paperwork on his desk. When he finally does look up, his eyes meet Kramer’s. “Interesting theory. I’ll let you know if I discover anything about Herr Gorik. The restaurant is opposite the town hall, by the way.”

  “He’s an insufferable ass,” Randall says over a dinner of sauerbraten and wheat beer that has a heavy yeasty taste. “But at least he knows good restaurants.” He forks a piece of meat into his mouth and chews contentedly.

  “Kommissar Boehm is dancing with us. God knows why,” Kramer says.

  Randall swallows. “Do you think he believes in the memoirs?”

  Kramer shrugs. “Hard to tell. He’s seen it all. Cynics are hard to read. I think he’s a professional …”

  “But?”

  “Who knows? Police are part of the bureaucracy. Maybe he doesn’t want to rattle any cages.”

  “You really do believe this, then? The memoirs. Murder. The whole nine yards.”

  “After the revelation about Gorik, yes. Don’t you?”

  “Oh yeah. I’m a great believer in mysteries, in the darker side of life.” Another fork full of meat, more mastication. “Where to from here? Let the police handle things?”

  Kramer has wondered this himself. Will the Kommissar do any more than file a report to sit in some file in cyberspace? Does he really care? Do I? I’m a journalist, not a private detective.

  “Someone has to care.” The words are out before he realizes how he feels.

  Randall smiles with thin lips. “Watch out, Sam. You’re beginning to sound like an inspirational speaker.”

  Kramer says nothing.

  “Someone like us?” Randall says after a moment’s silence.

  Kramer thinks about this. “Yes.”

  A head nod from Randall. “In that case, I think we need to do some evaluating.” He takes a long draught of beer.

  “Such as?”

  Randall wipes foam from his beard with his cuff. “Such as suspects. Who might have wanted the memoirs?”

  “Good luck.” Kramer fidgets with his food; he has no appetite tonight. “Without the memoirs or Reni’s notes and tapes, there’s no way to know who Gorik named or in regard to what.”

  Randall finishes his food, looks longingly at Kramer’s.

  “You not going to eat those potatoes?”

  Kramer pushes his plate across. “Take it all. How the hell do you manage to eat so much and never gain weight?”

  Randall sets the plate in front of him, sighing. “All in the genes,” he says. “And irregular meals.”

  He moves aside the half-nibbled portions of Kramer’s meat, cuts into the untouched bit. They sit silently for a time as Randall disposes of Kramer’s meal, making a contented belch as he sets fork and knife at four o’clock on the plate.

  “So, what about the evaluation?” Kramer prompts.

  Randall wipes his mouth with the linen napkin. There are candles on the table, well-heeled customers speaking in undertones, beer served in tulip-shaped goblets. Let the plastic pay for it, Kramer thinks.

  “There’s nothing we can do about Gorik’s information,” Randall says, settling back in his chair. “Let Boehm tackle that one. He might just come up with something from the tax angle. After all, finances are important in this. Remember the eighty thousand marks from Real Editions? How much of that do you think went to Gorik? How much would it take to keep up a flat like he had? More than eighty thousand. How much do retired spooks get for a pension, especially when their former employer and country aren’t
around anymore?”

  It’s an angle Kramer has not seen until now. “Blackmail?”

  Randall shrugs. “Could be. A guy like Gorik’s got to know a lot of secrets. Some might be for sale for publication, others for privacy. But there are other leads beyond Gorik.”

  Kramer has thought of these. “Reni’s former political opponents in Bonn.”

  “Colleagues, too,” Randall adds. “How about some coffee?”

  They order two mochas from a waiter who is dressed better than either of them, and Randall has a piece of Schwarzwälder cake to fill any vacancies his stomach might be feeling in the next twenty-four hours.

  “Delicious,” he says through a mouthful of cake. “Try some?” He holds a fork full at Kramer who shakes his head.

  “The way I see it,” Randall says, “there are two angles here. Pahlus said Reni was writing memoirs about her own past and about the German present, which is Gorik, as far as we know. But there’s lots of past to deal with. Years and years.”

  Kramer thinks back to Reni’s funeral: a dripping yellow aspen at the grave site; the tight little group of mourners with umbrellas over their heads like so many mushrooms; the priest clutching a plastic sack full of consecrated dirt; Müller, hatless, in a black vicuna overcoat. And next to him in a Persian lamb coat and Italian boots was Eva Martok, one-time Green Party stalwart along with Reni, but now a top adviser to the conservative CDU chancellor. No more jeans or leftist politics for Martok, but at least she came to the funeral.

  “I guess we could start with Eva Martok,” Kramer says. “She knew Reni in Parliament, and I saw her at the funeral.”

  “Yes,” Randall says tentatively. “There’s a deeper past, too.”

  Kramer pretends not to understand. “Before Parliament?”

  “Come on, Sam. We’ve been skittering around this since learning of Reni’s death. Pahlus said it himself. Reni was going to come clean with all sorts of secrets, all sorts of skeletons out of the closet. Even from her radical student days. That’s us, Sam. That’s bloody well us!”

  His voice has gotten louder and more strident; diners turn toward their table at the last word.

  “What do we have to hide from back then? Who gives a damn?” But Kramer is lying to himself; he gives a damn and he’s been hiding from that time for a quarter century.

  Nothing is said for a moment and finally Kramer reaches into his jacket pocket; the photo is still there, the one he found among Gerhard’s effects at Inheritance. He pulls it out, setting it on the table in front of Randall.

  “Where did you find this?” Randall says, looking at the picture with amazement.

  Kramer explains.

  “Amazing. What a geek I was back then. Look at Maria.”

  Kramer has no wish to.

  “You ever hear from Rick or Helmut?” Randall asks.

  “Never. Not since 1969.”

  “Then maybe it’s time we do,” Randall says.

  “For what?”

  Randall squints at him. “Sam, we either play this open options or not at all. You don’t remember Prague Spring? You don’t remember what happened to Maria?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Monday morning is fresh and clear, as if last night’s decision to treat Reni’s death as murder and not a suicide has quite literally cleared the air.

  Kramer gets up early, dresses, and goes out for a walk, leaving Randall snoring lightly in the other twin bed. It feels good simply to be moving, to be breathing air sweet and tangy off the nearby Rhine.

  Not much activity in town this morning. Time was when merchants would have their shops open by seven; the local farmers would be in town unloading produce at the central market; shoppers would be out for early bread; smell of coffee and diesel in the air; voices chattering; wooden crates full of cauliflower booming to the ground as they were thrown off the ends of mud-splattered flatbed trucks.

  But no more. Now it’s still quiet at nine in the morning. The central market has been replaced by a couple of chic food boutiques. The town makes its living off tourists and commuters who have bought up the old freeholdings and converted them into quaintly rustic homes—part of a seamless suburbia from San Francisco to Singapore.

  Kramer liked the town much better in the 1970s, when living here with Reni. It was real then, pimples and all. A gritty little market town that had Bad in its name only by accident.

  The Romans found some natural hot springs here once, but the mineral waters dried up long ago and exist now only in the minds of the tourist board. A poor replica of the ancient baths has been recreated in the form of a fitness spa with weight machines, mindless aerobics, and mud baths—the mud imported from Pomerania.

  Kramer walks idly along the freshly cobbled pedestrian zone, his eyes free to look up rather than down, for there are no piles of dog crap littering the pavement as in Vienna and every other European city. Which means people have yards here, space. Blue sky overhead; a sudden covey of doves wheels in the sky toward the river. The old bakery is still in the Hauptplatz, its large front window steamed over, but now they serve croissants instead of cinnamon Schnecken—“snails”—baguettes instead of heavy black rye bread. Kramer recognizes no one from the time he lived here, not one shop owner or innkeeper. All retired to Portugal and the Costa del Sol.

  Kramer remembers when Reni settled here. Some money was left to her by her mother, Alice. Kramer met the woman only once and took an instant liking to her, so American in the old-fashioned, midwestern way. All honesty and no-nonsense. She’d been with the Red Cross in Germany just after the war and had met Karl-Heinz Müller as a result of shared work. He had been in a resettlement agency then, vetted and cleared by the First Army of any Nazi tendencies. Just another young soldier drafted into the Wehrmacht toward the end of the war. And the sensible American woman, daughter of a powerful Illinois banking family and saddened by the loss of her fiancé in one of the final bombing raids over Tokyo, took to the somewhat younger Müller, to his ambition and eternal optimism. Her money helped create his own banking empire and, when she died in 1970 of stomach cancer, she made sure to leave Reni a bit of independence. Reni promptly sank part of the money into the Inheritance, an old farm with, at the time, a few acres surrounding it.

  Remembrance of a better time, Reni explained then. This was when she and her father were at odds politically, and the old farm was where he had always brought the family to stay in the summer, renting the house every year. It was here that Reni had felt like a real kid, away from the Bonn scene, away from the center of power. And it was here that she and Kramer spent their first years together.

  Inheritance.

  Kramer’s mind clicks through several shutter openings: Reni mucking out the old stall, rubber boots on up to her knees, faded denims and a baggy sweater, hair worn braided and up, wisps of golden blonde hair curling at her neck, her face so intent with the manual labor, so determined. Or playing tag that one midsummer night, frolicking naked in the orchard, running from tree to tree, the incredibly sweet smell of apricots in the air. Or stoking up the old wood-burning stove in the kitchen, trying to get the five-gallon pot of water to boil for the noodles they were preparing for the reunion, watching it and watching it and then shouting for joy when finally the water surface broke with the first roll of boil.

  Pasta for the reunion. The Magnificent Seven joining up again, except that only Gerhard and Randall showed. No sign of Rick or Helmut. Maria lost to them all.

  Another flurry of mental shutter openings and Kramer is once again back in Vienna in early November of 1968 and Reni is asking the same question Randall asked last night, “But what about Maria? What happened to Maria?”

  Helmut cannot look them in the eye. He is haggard and filthy. He had to walk the final seven miles to the border in the middle of the night. There is a smell of terror on him like stale cigarette smoke.

  “Where the
fuck is Maria?” A scream this time; an animal sound.

  Kramer pulls her away from Helmut who places his hands around his head, squeezes his eyes shut.

  “Let him rest,” Kramer says.

  “We should never have sent her.” Rick, the artist among them, stands looking out the front window to the street below, careful not to let the curtain swing when he turns back to them. “Never.”

  Like a movie, Kramer flashes. We’re all characters in a bad spy film.

  “It’s too late for self-recriminations now,” Gerhard says. “The plan didn’t work. We begin from that point and move on.”

  Reni shakes off Kramer’s hands from her shoulders. “It’s my fault. It was my plan.”

  They’re at Reni’s place in the Jasomirgottstrasse; everyone else lives in the Internat dorm. It’s a tiny flat with furniture from the 1930s, but it’s private. Randall sits in the broken-down armchair, shaking his head.

  “You can’t plan for accidents like these. There’s no way.”

  “I should have thought. Western license plates. Christ, they’re like an invitation to vandalism.” Reni sucks in air like a tired swimmer.

  Helmut finally looks up, his eyes red-rimmed and bleary. “It was uncanny,” he says in his Gymnasium school English. “Even before we could begin throwing out the leaflets, we could see the smoke. We had no idea what it was. Maria looked down. She said, ‘That’s our car, Helmut. It’s burning.’ And then all hell broke loose up there. Security personnel, militia. Jesus.” He shakes his head.

  “What about Maria?” Reni insists, her voice less strident now.

  “They took her,” Helmut says. “The police. I escaped down the fire stairs. But they took Maria.”

  Kramer is dragged into the present by a hand grabbing his arm, jerking him back onto the sidewalk. He feels the brush of a car as it flies past him; his jacket is caught in the jet stream of its passing. By the time Kramer looks, he can only see the back of the car fishtailing around a corner and out of town. He cannot make the style or brand, but is sure of one thing: its color is purple.

  The man who pulled him out of danger still grips his arm. Kramer looks back at him, “Danke.”