by Philip Kerr
Not long after my arrival at Landsberg, Hermann Priess, the former commander of the offending SS troop at Malmédy, during the Battle of the Bulge, had told me about this kind of rough treatment at the hands of the Americans. Before their trial for the murder of ninety U.S. servicemen, Priess, Peiper, and seventy-four other men had been hooded and beaten and forced to sign confessions. The whole incident had caused quite a stink at the International Court of Justice and in the U.S. Senate. Since I hadn’t yet been beaten, it was perhaps a little too early to say that the American military was incapable of learning a lesson in human rights, but underneath my hood, I wasn’t holding my breath.
“Congratulations, Gunther. That’s the longest anyone wearing a hood in here has ever kept his mouth shut.”
The man was speaking German, quite good German, too, but I was sure it wasn’t Silverman or Earp. For the moment I kept my mouth shut. And what was there to say? That’s the thing about being interrogated: You always know that eventually someone is going to ask you a question.
“I’ve been reading over the case notes,” said the voice. “Your case notes. The ones made by Silverman and Earp. By the way, they won’t be joining us for the rest of your questioning. They don’t approve of the way we do things.”
All the time he was speaking, I was tensed for the blow I felt sure was coming. One of the other prisoners told me the Amis had beaten him for a whole hour in Schwabisch Hall in an effort to get him to incriminate Jochen Peiper.
“Relax, Gunther. No one is going to hit you. So long as you cooperate, you’ll be just fine. The hood’s for my protection. Outside of this place it might be awkward for both of us if you ever recognized me. You see, I work for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“And what about your friend? The other man in here? Does he work for the CIA as well?”
“You’ve got good ears, Gunther, I’ll say that for you,” said the other Ami. “Maybe that’s why you’ve lived so long.” His German was good, too. “Yes, I’m also with the CIA.”
“Congratulations. That must make you both very proud.”
“No, no. Congratulations to you, Gunther. Silverman and Earp have cleared you of any criminal wrongdoing.” This was the first voice speaking now. “They’re satisfied that you didn’t murder anyone. At least not by the inflated standard of everyone else who’s in here.” He laughed. “I know. That’s not saying much. But there it is. As far as Uncle Sam is concerned, you’re not a war criminal.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” I said. “If it wasn’t for these handcuffs, I might punch the air.”
“They said you had a smart mouth. And they’re not wrong. They’re just a little naïve, perhaps. About you, I mean.”
“Over the years,” said the other man, “you’ve caused us quite a few problems. Do you know that?”
“I’m pleased to hear it.”
“In Garmisch-Partenkirchen. In Vienna. As a matter of fact, you and I have met before. In the military hospital at the Stiftskaserne?”
“You didn’t speak German then,” I said.
“Actually, I did. But it suited me to let you and that American army officer, Roy Shields, think otherwise.”
“I remember you. Like it was yesterday.”
“Sure you do.”
“And let’s not forget our mutual friend, Jonathan Jacobs.”
“How is he? Dead, I hope.”
“No. But he’s still adamant you tried to kill him. Apparently, he found a box full of anopheles mosquitoes in the backseat of his Buick. Fortunately for him, they were all dead of cold.”
“Pity.”
“German winters can be brutal.”
“Not brutal enough, it would seem,” I said. “Almost ten years after the war, and you’re still here.”
“It’s a different kind of war now.”
“We’re all on the same side.”
“Sure,” I said. “I know that. But if this is how you treat your friends, I’m beginning to see why the Russians went over to the other side.”
“It wouldn’t be sensible to get smart with us, Gunther. Not in your position. We don’t like wise guys.”
“I always thought that being wise was a useful part of intelligence.”
“Doing what you’re told when you’re told is of greater value in our work.”
“You disappoint me.”
“That’s of no real consequence beside the fact that you don’t disappoint us.”
“I can feel that. I can’t feel my hands, but I can feel that. But I should warn you. I might be wearing a hood, but I’ve seen your cards. You want something from me. And since it can’t be my body, it must be because you think I possess some information that’s important to you. And believe me, it won’t sound the same if you’ve just kicked my teeth in.”
“There are other things we can do to loosen your tongue, besides kicking your teeth in.”
“Sure. And I can do fiction as well as nonfiction. You won’t even see the join. Look, the war is over now. I’m more than willing to tell you whatever you want to know. But you’ll find I respond a lot better to sugar bread than to the whip. So how about you take off these hand irons and find me some clothes? You’ve made your point.”
The two CIA agents were silent for a minute. I imagined one nodding at the other, who was probably shaking his head and mouthing a very clear “No” like a couple of gossipy old women. Then one of them laughed.
“Did you see this guy bring a case full of samples in here?”
“A regular Fuller Brush man, isn’t he?”
“Red Skelton with a bag over his head. Still trying to make a sale.”
“Not buying, huh?” I said. “Too bad. Maybe I ought to speak to the man of the house.”
“I don’t think a bag over his head was enough.”
“It’s not too late for a noose. Maybe we should just hand him over to the Ivans and have done with it.”
“Aw, look, he’s stopped talking now.”
“Did we get your attention, Red?”
“You don’t want brushes,” I said. “Okay. So why don’t you tell me what you do want?”
“When we’re ready, Gunther, and not before.”
“My friend here could tear a phone book in half, but he prefers this as a demonstration of our power over you. It’s a lot less effort, and more than just seeing the power of the spirit, you can feel it, too. We wouldn’t want you walking out of here and telling all your Nazi friends how soft we are.”
“We worked it out. People were more afraid of the Ivans than they were of us.”
“So you decided to be more like them,” I said. “To play just as rough as they do. Sure, I get it.”
“That’s right, Gunther. Which brings us back to brushes. Or rather, one particular brush.”
“A name you mentioned to Silverman and Earl. Erich Mielke.”
“I remember. What about him?”
“They formed the distinct impression that you knew him.”
“We’ve met. So what?”
“You must have known him quite well.”
“How did you figure that out?”
“You were looking out of a window at Erhard Milch when he was being released from the front gate. How far is that?”
“Sixty, seventy feet. You must have good eyesight, Gunther.”
“For reading I wear glasses,” I said.
“You can have them. When you sign your confession.”
“What confession?”
“The one you’re going to sign, Gunther.”
“I thought you said that Silverman and Earp had cleared me.”
“They did. This is our Ohio Casualty policy. It adds fidelity and surety to whatever you tell us about Erich Mielke.”
“That means we own your ass, Gunther.”
“What’s in this confession?”
“Does it matter?”
He had a point. They could say anything they wanted and I’d have to like it. “All right. I’ll sign it.”
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“You took that in your stride.”
“I used to be a tall man in a circus. Besides, I’ve been walking around for a while now and I’m tired. I just want to go home and give my long legs a rest.”
“How about you give us a different act? Like Mr. Memory.”
“You haven’t yet told me why you’re so interested in him,” I said. “Which means I don’t know what to leave in or to leave out.”
“All of it,” said the other. “We want all of it. Every detail. We’ll get to why later.”
“You want the whole of Leviticus? Or just Mielke?”
“Let’s go back to the beginning.”
“Genesis, then. Sure. Darkness was upon the face of Berlin. For me, at any rate. And Walter Ulbricht said let there be some communist thugs; and Adolf Hitler said let there be some Nazi thugs, too. And Chancellor Brüning said let the cops try to keep these two sides apart. And God said why don’t you give the cops something a little easier than that to do? Because the evening and the morning were just one thing after another. Trouble. And the name of the river was the Spree and we were fishing bodies out of it every day. One day a communist and the next day a Nazi. And some men looked at that and said that it was good. As long as they’re killing each other, then that’s fine, isn’t it? Me, I believed in the Republic and in the rule of law. But a lot of cops were Nazis and were not ashamed. From that moment on, you might say, Berlin and Germany were finished and all the host of them.” I sighed. “I forget. Didn’t you know? That’s our national pastime in Germany.”
“So remember.”
“Give me a minute here. This is twenty-three years ago we’re talking about now. You just don’t cough that up like a fur ball.”
“Nineteen thirty-one.”
“An unlucky year for Germany. There were, let’s see, how many? Four million unemployed in Germany? And a banking crisis. Austrian Kreditanstalt had collapsed, what, yes, a couple of weeks before. I remember now. That was May eleventh. We were staring ruin in the face. Which is all the Nazis were waiting for, I suppose. To take advantage of that. Yes, things were bad. But not for Mielke. His luck was about to take a turn for the better. Got your notebooks handy?”
“Like I was your girl Friday.”
11
GERMANY, 1931
It was a Saturday, May 23. I know that because it was my birthday. You tend to remember your birthday when you have to spend it in Tegel Prison, interviewing one of the men convicted in the Eden Dance Palace trial. An SA storm trooper by the name of Konrad Stief. He was just a kid, really, not much more than twenty-two, with a couple of convictions for petty theft, and he’d joined the SA the previous spring. For the last years of the Weimar Republic, his was a fairly typical Berlin story: On November 22, 1930, Stief and three other chums from SA Storm 33 had gone to a dance hall. Nothing wrong with that except that they weren’t going there to do the Lindy Hop; and instead of ties and neatly combed hair, they took some pistols because the Eden Dance Palace was frequented by a communist hiking club. Surprisingly, communist hiking clubs used to do what everyone else did in dance halls: they danced, but not that night. Anyway, when the Nazis arrived they went straight upstairs and opened fire. Several of the happy wanderers were hit and two of them seriously wounded. Like I say, it was a typical Berlin story, and probably I wouldn’t have remembered many of these details except for the fact that the Eden Dance Palace case at Berlin’s Central Criminal Court in Old Moabit was hardly a typical trial. You see, the defense attorney, a fellow named Hans Litten, called Hitler to the stand and cross-examined him about his true relationship with the SA and its violent methods; and Hitler, who was trying to sell himself as Herr Law and Order, didn’t much care for that, or for Herr Litten, who happened to be a Jew. Anyway, the four of them were convicted, Stief was sentenced to two and a half years in Tegel, and, the very next day, I drove over there to see if he could shed any light on a different case. It was something to do with the murder of an SA man. The gun Stief had used in the Eden Dance Palace was used to murder another SA man. And my question was this: Had the SA man been murdered by communists because he was in the SA? Or, as was beginning to seem more likely, had he been murdered by the Nazis because he was really a communist sent to spy on Storm 33?
“Finally, I got a name out of Stief, and a Storm tavern in the old town that was frequented by Storm 33. Reisig’s tavern, in Hebbel Street, in the western district of Charlottenburg. Which wasn’t so very far from the Eden Dance Palace. So when I left Tegel I decided to drop in there and take a look. But as soon as I arrived outside I saw a group of SA men piling into a truck. They were armed and clearly bent on some murderous mission. There was no time to phone headquarters, and thinking that I might for once prevent a homicide instead of merely investigating one, I followed.
“If this sounds brave or foolhardy, it wasn’t. In those days, a lot of cops used to carry a Bergmann MP18 in the trunk of the car instead of a pistol. The Bergmann was a nine-mil submachine gun and perfect for sweeping crap off the streets. So I followed the gang all the way to Felseneck Colony in Reinickendorf-East, a Communist Party stronghold. Felseneck Colony was just a series of allotments for Reds who wanted to grow their own food; and what with money being so tight, a lot of them needed those vegetables just to live. Some of the Reds actually lived there. They had their own guards, who were supposed to keep a lookout for Nazis, only they hadn’t been doing their job. They’d run away or been tipped off, or maybe they were in on the attack, who knows?
“But when I got there, the Nazis were just about to lay down a beating on a young man of about twenty. I didn’t get a good look at him immediately—there were too many storm troopers on him, like dogs. They probably figured to beat the crap out of the boy and then take him somewhere else and put a bullet in his head before dumping his body. I swept the air over their heads with the Bergmann, marched them back to their truck, and told them to beat it because there were too many of them to arrest. Then, in case they decided to come back, I told the boy to get in my car and said I’d drop him somewhere—somewhere safer than where we were, anyway. He thanked me and asked me if I could take him to Bülowplatz, and that was the first time I got a good look at Erich Mielke. In my car, on the way to Berlin.
“He was about twenty-four years old, five feet, six inches tall, muscular, with lots of wavy hair, and a Berliner—from Wedding, I think. He was also a lifelong communist, like his father, who was a carpenter or wheelwright. And he had two younger sisters and a brother who were also in the Communist Party. Or so he told me.
“So it’s true what they say,” I said to him. “That madness runs in families.”
He grinned. Mielke still had a sense of humor in those days. That was before the Russians got hold of him. About Marx and Engels and Lenin they never did have a sense of humor.
“There’s nothing mad about it,” he said. “The KPD’s the largest Communist Party in the world outside the Soviet Union. You’re not a Nazi, that much is obvious. I suppose you’re SPD.”
“That’s true.”
“I thought so. A social fascist. You hate us more than you hate the Nazis.”
“You’re right, of course. The only reason I helped you back there was because I want you to die of shame when you have to tell your lefty pals that it was a cop that supports the SPD who took your pot off the stove. Better still, I want you to go and hang yourself like Judas Iscariot for the betrayal of the movement brought about by a Red being indebted to a Republican.”
“Who says I’m even going to tell them?”
“I guess you’re right. What’s another lie on top of all the other lies told by the KPD?” I shook my head. “It’s a low, dishonest decade that’s ahead of us, make no mistake.”
“Don’t think I’m not grateful, polyp,” said Mielke. “Because I am. Those bastards would have cut my throat for sure. They wanted to kill me because I’m a reporter for The Red Flag. I was doing a story about the workers’ community at Felseneck Colony.�
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“Yeah, yeah. Brotherly love and all that crap.”
“Don’t you believe in brotherly love, polyp?”
“People don’t give a damn about brotherly love. They just want someone to love who loves them back. Everything else is bullshit. Most folk would give the keys to the door of workers’ paradise for a chance at being loved for themselves, not because they’re German, or working-class, or Aryan, or the proletariat. Nobody really believes in the euphoric dream that’s built on this book or that historic vision; they believe in a kind word, a kiss from a pretty girl, a ring on a finger, a happy smile. That’s what people—the individuals who make up a people—that’s what they want to believe.”
“Sentimental rubbish,” jeered Mielke.
“Probably,” I said.
“That’s the problem with all you democrats. You talk such unutterable nonsense. Well, there’s no time for that kind of clap-trap. You’ll be giving that speech in the cemetery if you and your class don’t wake up soon. Hitler and the Nazis don’t care for your individuals. All they care about is power.”
“And things will be different when we’re all taking orders from Stalin in some degenerate workers’ state.”
“You sound just like Trotsky,” said Mielke.
“Is he a Social Democrat, too?”
“He’s a fascist,” said Mielke.
“Meaning he’s not a true communist.”
“Exactly.”
Our route back into the center of Berlin took us along Bismarck Strasse. At a tram stop just short of the Tiergarten, Mielke spun around in his seat and said, “That was Elisabeth.”
I slowed the car to a halt and Mielke waved over a handsome-looking brunette. As she leaned in the window of the car I caught a distinct whiff of sweat, but I didn’t hold that against her on a hot day. I was feeling kind of warm myself.
