Free Spandau Phoenix by Greg Iles

recognize it. He stared in puzzlement at the painstakingly blocked characters.
Portuguese?
he wondered.
Italian maybe?
He couldn’t tell. A few words of German were sprinkled through the gibberish—names mostly—but not enough to get any meaning from. Frustrated, he walked into the bedroom, folded the pages, and stuffed them underneath the mattress at the foot of his bed. He switched on the television from habit, then kicked his mud-caked boots into an empty corner and dropped his coat on top of them. Ilse would scold him for being lazy, he knew, but after two straight shifts he was simply too exhausted to care.
    He ate his breakfast on the bed. As much as the Spandau papers, the thought of his father weighed on his mind. Captain Hauer had asked him why he’d come to Berlin. Hans often wondered that himself. Three years it had been now. He hardly thought of Munich anymore. He’d married Ilse after just five months here in Berlin. Christ, what a wedding it had been. His mother—still furious at him for becoming a policeman—had refused to attend, and Hauer had not been included in the plans. But he’d shown up anyway, Hans remembered. Hans had spied his rigid, uniformed figure outside the church, standing alone at the end of the block. Hanshad pretended not to notice, but Ilse had waved quite deliberately to him as they climbed into the wedding car.
    Angry again, Hans wolfed down another sausage and tried to concentrate on the television. A silver-haired windbag of a Frankfurt banker was dispensing financial advice to viewers saddled with the burden of surplus cash. Hans snorted in disgust. At fifteen hundred Deutschemarks per month, a Berlin policeman made barely enough money to pay rent and buy groceries. Without Ilse’s income, they would be shivering in a cold-water flat in Kreuzberg. He wanted to switch channels, but the old Siemens black-and-white had been built in the dark ages before remote control. He stayed where he was.
    He took another bite of sausage and stared blankly at the screen. Beneath his stockinged feet, the wrinkled sheaf of papers waited, a tantalizing mystery beckoning him to explore. Yet he had already hit a dead end. The strange, staring eye hovered in his mind, taunting him. After breakfast, he decided, he would take a shower and then have another go at the papers.
    He never made it off the bed. Exhaustion and the warm air overcame him even before he finished the sausage. He slid down the duvet, the unfinished plate balanced precariously on his lap, the Spandau papers hidden just beneath his feet.
    10:15 A.M. French Sector: West Berlin
    Ilse hated these visits. No matter how many times she saw her
Gynäkologe
, she never got used to it. Ever. The astringent smell of alcohol, the gleaming stainless steel, the cold table, palpating fingers, the overly solicitous voice of the physician, who sometimes peered directly into her eyes from between her upraised legs: all these combined to produce a primal anxiety that solidified like ice in the hollow of her chest. Ilse knew about the necessity of annual checkups, but until she and Hans had begun trying to have a child, she’d skipped more exams than she would care to admit.
    All that had changed eighteen months ago. She had been up in the stirrups so many times now that the stress of the ordeal had almost diminished to that of a visit to the dentist—but not quite. Unlike many German women, Ilsepossessed an extreme sense of modesty about her body. She suspected it was because she had never known her mother, but whatever the reason, being forced to expose herself to a stranger, albeit a doctor, for her required a considerable act of will. Only her strong desire to have children allowed her to endure the interminable series of examinations and therapies designed to enhance fertility.
    “All done, Frau Apfel,” Doctor Grauber said. He handed a slide to his waiting nurse. Ilse heard that hard
snap
as he stripped off his surgical gloves and raised the