Field Gray

by Philip Kerr

  “What are you doing here?” asked Mielke.

  “I was fitting a dress for a client who’s an actress at the Schiller Theater.”

  “That’s a job I’d like,” I said.

  The brunette shot me a smile. “I’m a seamstress.”

  “Elisabeth, this is Kommissar Gunther, from the Alex.”

  “Are you in any trouble, Erich?”

  “I might have been, but for the Kommissar’s enormous bravery. He chased off some Nazis who were planning to give me a kicking.”

  “Can I give you a lift somewhere?” I asked the brunette, changing the subject.

  “Well, you could drop me anywhere near Alexanderplatz,” she said.

  She climbed into the backseat of the car and we set off east again, along Berliner Strasse, across the canal and through the park. At first I jealously supposed that the brunette was involved with Mielke, and she was, although not in the way I had supposed; it seemed that she had been a close friend of Mielke’s late mother, Lydia, who also had been a seamstress, and after her death, the brunette had tried to help Mielke’s widowed father to bring up his four children. Consequently Erich Mielke seemed to regard Elisabeth more like a big sister, which suited me just fine. That year I was keen on handsome brunettes, and there and then I resolved to try to see her again, if possible.

  Ten minutes later we were approaching Bülowplatz, which was Erich Mielke’s preferred destination, being the location of the KPD headquarters in Berlin. Occupying a whole corner of one of the most heavily policed squares in Europe, Karl Liebknecht House was a noisy indication of what all buildings might look like if the lefties ever got into power, each of its five stories decorated with more red flags than a dangerous beach and several bromide slogans in large white capital letters. If architecture is frozen music, then this was a partly thawed Lotte Lenya telling us we must die and not to ask why.

  Mielke slid down in the passenger seat as we entered the square. He said, “Drop me around the corner, on Linien Strasse. In case anyone sees me getting out of your car and thinks I’m a spy.”

  “Relax,” I said. “I’m in plain clothes.”

  He laughed. “You think that will save you when the Revolution comes?”

  “No, but it might save you this afternoon.”

  “Fair enough, Kommissar. If I sound ungrateful, it’s because I’m not used to getting a square deal from a Berlin bull. Pork Cheeks is the kind of polyp I’m used to.”

  “Pork Cheeks?”

  “That swine Anlauf.”

  I nodded. Captain Paul Anlauf was—among the communists at least—the most hated cop in Berlin.

  I pulled up on Weyding Strasse and waited for Mielke to get out.

  “Thanks. Again. I won’t forget it, polyp.”

  “Keep out of trouble, yeah?”

  “You, too.”

  Then he kissed the brunette on the cheek and was gone. I lit a cigarette and watched him walk back onto Bülowplatz and vanish into a crowd of men.

  “Don’t mind him,” said the brunette. “He’s really not so bad.”

  “I don’t mind him as much as he seems to mind me,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “I’m grateful for the lift. This is fine for me here.”

  She was wearing a bright print percale dress with a heart-shaped button waistline, a lacy collar, and cute puff sleeves. The print was a riot of red and white fruit and flowers on a solid black background. She looked like a market garden at midnight. On her head was a little white trilby with a red silk ribbon, as if the hat were a cake and it was someone’s birthday. Mine perhaps. Which, of course, it was. The smell of sweat on her body was honest and more provocative to me than some expensive, cloying scent. Underneath the midnight garden was a real woman with skin on every part of her body, and organs and glands and all the other things about women I knew I liked but had almost forgotten. Because it was the kind of day when girls like Elisabeth were wearing summer dresses again, and I remembered just what a long winter it had been in Berlin, sleeping in that cave with just my dreams for company.

  “Come for a drink,” I said.

  She looked tempted, but only for a moment. “I’d like to, but—I should really be getting back to work.”

  “Come on. It’s a warm day and I need a beer. There’s nothing like spending a couple of hours in the cement to give a man a thirst. Especially when it’s his birthday. You wouldn’t want me to drink alone on my birthday, would you?”

  “No. If it really is your birthday.”

  “If I show my identity card, will you come?”

  “All right.”

  So I did. And she came. Immediately next to the police station on Bülowplatz there was a bar called the Braustübl, and, leaving my car where it was, we went in there.

  The place was full of communists, of course, but I wasn’t thinking about them, or about Erich Mielke, although for a while Elisabeth kept on talking about him as if I were interested, which I wasn’t. But I liked watching her red lips open and close to show off her white teeth. I was especially taken with the sound of her laughter, as she seemed to like my jokes, and that was really all that mattered because when we parted she agreed to see me again.

  When she’d gone I bought some cigarettes, and heading back to my car I caught the eye of one of the uniformed cops on the square and stopped to chat with him in the sunshine. Bauer, that was his name, Sergeant Adolf Bauer. Our chat was the usual splash on the wall: the trial of Charlie Urban for a murder at the Mercedes Theater, Brüning’s emergency decrees, Hitler’s evidence at the court in Moabit. Bauer was a good bull, and all the time we were speaking I noticed how he had his eye on a car that was parked in front of Karl Liebknecht House, as if he recognized it or the man waiting patiently in the driver’s seat. Then we were both watching three other men come out of the Braustübl and get into the car with this other fellow. And one of the men was Erich Mielke.

  “Hullo,” said Bauer. “There goes trouble.”

  “I know the kid,” I said. “The one with the quiff. But I don’t know the others.”

  “The one driving is Max Thunert,” said Bauer. “He’s a low-ranking KPD thug. One of the others was Heinz Neumann. He’s in the Reichstag, although he doesn’t limit causing trouble to when he’s there. I didn’t recognize the other fellow.”

  “I was just in that bar,” I said. “And I didn’t see any of them.”

  “There’s a private room upstairs that they use,” said Bauer. “It’s my opinion that they keep some weapons there. Just in case we decide to search Karl Liebknecht House. Also, if the SA mounts a demo here they won’t be expecting anything from the top floor of that bar.”

  “Have you told the Hussar?”

  The Hussar was a uniformed sergeant called Max Willig, who was frequently about Bülowplatz and almost as unpopular as Captain Anlauf.

  “I’ve told him.”

  “Didn’t he believe you?”

  “He did. But Judge Bode didn’t when we went to get a warrant. Said we need more evidence than an itch on the end of my nose.”

  “Think they’re planning something?”

  “They’re always planning something. They’re communists, aren’t they? Criminals, most of them.”

  “I don’t like criminals who break the law,” I said.

  “What other kind are there?”

  “The kind that make the law. It’s the Hindenburgs and Schleichers of this world who are doing more to screw the Republic than the commies and the Nazis put together.”

  “You got that right, my friend.”

  I might never have heard the name of Erich Mielke again but for two things. One was that I saw a lot more of Elisabeth and, now and again, she’d say that she’d seen him or one of his sisters. And then there were the events of August 9, 1931. There’s not a policeman from Weimar Berlin who doesn’t remember August 9, 1931. The way Americans remember the Maine.

  12

  GERMANY, 1931

  To say the least, it had b
een a difficult summer. In spite of some new laws that made political violence a capital crime, Nazis were killing communists at the rate of almost two to one. After the March elections, in which the Nazis got more than three times as many votes as the KPD, the communists became increasingly violent, probably out of desperation. Then, in early August, there was a call for an election in the Prussian Parliament. Most likely this was something to do with the world economic crisis. After all, this was 1931 and we were in the middle of the Great Depression. Almost half the banks had failed in America, and in Germany we were still trying to pay for the war with almost six million men out of work. And you can blame the French with their Carthaginian peace for a lot of that.

  Prussian elections were always a barometer for the rest of Germany and usually bad-tempered affairs. For that you can blame the Prussian character. Jedem das Seine is a Prussian’s motto. Literally it means “To each his own,” but more figuratively it means everyone gets what he deserves. Which is why they put it on the gates at the Buchenwald concentration camp. And probably why, given the peculiar character of the Prussian Parliament, we got what we deserved when, on the ninth of August, the results were announced and it turned out that not enough people had voted to force an election at a national level. With no quorum for a vote, tempers all over Berlin got even worse. But especially on Bülowplatz outside Karl Liebknecht House. Figuring that some sort of dirty deal had been done between the Nazis and the Prussian administration, thousands of communists gathered there. Possibly, they were correct about a deal. But things turned ugly when the riot police showed up and started cracking Red heads like eggs. Berlin cops were always good at making omelettes.

  Probably the rain didn’t help, either. It had been warm and dry for several weeks, but that day it rained heavily and Berlin cops never did care to get wet. Something to do with all that leather on the shako helmets they wore. There was a cover you were supposed to put on it when the weather was bad, but no one ever remembered them, which meant you had to spend ages cleaning and polishing the shako afterward. If there was one thing guaranteed to piss off a Berlin bull, it was getting his hat wet.

  I guess the Reds decided they’d had enough. Then again, they were always shouting about police dictatorship, even when the police were behaving with exemplary fairness. The local police had been threatened before, but this was different. The talk was about killing policemen. About eight o’clock that evening, shots were fired and a full-scale gun battle between police and the KPD kicked off in a big way—the biggest we’d seen since the 1919 uprising.

  News started to come in to Police Headquarters on Berlin Alexanderplatz at around nine o’clock that several officers, including two police captains, had been shot and killed. We were already investigating the June murder of another cop. I’d helped to carry his coffin. By the time I and some other detectives reached Bülowplatz most of the crowds had left, but the gunfight was still very much in progress. The communists were on the rooftops of several buildings, and cops with searchlights were returning fire while, at the same time, they were searching apartment houses in the area for weapons and suspects. A hundred people were arrested, maybe more, while the battle continued. This meant that we couldn’t get near the bodies, and for several hours we traded shots with the Reds; one time a rifle bullet clipped off a piece of brickwork just above my head and, more in anger than the hope of hitting anything, I let fly with the Bergmann until the magazine was empty. It was one in the morning before we got to the stricken police officers who were lying in the doorway of the Babylon Movie Theater, by which time one communist had been shot dead and seventeen others wounded.

  Of the three policemen in the doorway, two were dead. The third, Sergeant Willig, “the Hussar,” was seriously wounded. He’d been shot in the stomach and in the arm, and his blue-gray tunic was purple with blood, not all of it his own.

  “We were set up,” he gasped as we sat with him and waited for the ambulance. “They weren’t on the rooftops, the ones who got us. The bastards were hiding in a doorway and shot us from behind as we walked past.”

  The officer in charge, Detective Police Counselor Reinhold Heller, told Willig to save his breath, but the sergeant was the kind who couldn’t do anything until he’d made his report.

  “There were two of them. Handguns. Automatics. Shot my pistol at them. A full clip. Couldn’t say if I hit either of them or not. Young they were. Tearaways. Twenty or so. Laughed when they saw the two captains hit the ground. Then they went into the theater.” He tried a smile. “Must have been Garbo fans. Never much liked her myself.”

  The ambulance men arrived with a stretcher and carried him away, leaving us with the two bodies.

  “Gunther?” said Heller. “Go and speak to the theater manager. Find out if anyone saw something more than just the movie.”

  Heller was a Jew, but I didn’t have a problem with that. Not like some. Heller was Bernard Weiss, the Kripo head’s golden boy, which would have been fine but for the fact that Weiss was also a Jew. I thought Heller was good police, and that was all that mattered as far as I was concerned. Of course, the Nazis thought differently.

  The movie was Mata Hari, with Garbo in the title role and Ramón Novarro as the young Russian officer who falls in love with her. I hadn’t seen it myself, but the movie was doing well in Berlin. Garbo gets shot by the treacherous French, and with a plot like that, it could hardly fail with Germans. The theater manager was waiting in the lobby. He was swarthy and worried-looking, with a mustache like a midget’s eyebrow, and to that extent, at least, rather resembled Ramón Novarro. But it was probably just as well the blonde from the box office didn’t look like Garbo, at least not like the Garbo on the lobby card; her hair was frightful-looking, like Struwwelpeter.

  Everything around us was red. Red carpet, red walls, red ceiling, red chairs, and red curtains on the auditorium doors. Given the politics of the area, it all seemed appropriate. The blonde was tearful, the manager merely nervous. He kept adjusting his cuff links as he explained, loudly, as if he were a character in a play, what he’d seen and heard:

  “Mata Hari had just finished seducing the Russian general, Shubin,” he said, “when we heard the first shots. That would have been at about ten past eight.”

  “How many shots?”

  “A volley,” he said. “Six or seven. Small arms. Pistols. I was in the war, see? I know the difference between a pistol shot and a rifle shot. I stuck my head through the box-office door and saw Fräulein Wiegand here on the floor. At first I thought there had been a robbery. That she’d been held up. But then there was a second volley and several of the bullets hit the cash window. Two men ran through the lobby and into the auditorium without paying. And since they were both holding pistols, I wasn’t about to insist that they buy tickets. I can’t say that I got a very good look at them, because I was scared. Then there were more shots, outside. Rifle shots, I think, and people started running in here to take cover. By now the projectionist had stopped the movie and switched on the lights. And the people in the auditorium were going through the exit door, onto Hirtenstrasse. It was plain from the noise and the crowd that the movie wasn’t going to continue, and before one of your colleagues came in here to tell me to stay inside, almost everyone had left the auditorium through the back door. Including the two men with guns.” He left his cuff links alone for a moment and rubbed his brow furiously. “They’re dead, aren’t they? Those two police officers.”

  I nodded. “Mmm hmm.”

  “That’s bad. That’s too bad.”

  “How about you, Fräulein?” I said. “The two with guns. Did you get a good look at them?”

  She shook her head and pressed a sodden handkerchief to her red nose.

  “It’s been a great shock to Fräulein Wiegand,” said the manager.

  “It’s been a great shock to us all, sir.”

  I went into the auditorium and walked down the center aisle toward the exit. I pushed open the door and was on a small red staircas
e. I tap-danced my way down to another door and then out onto Hirtenstrasse just as an underground train passed beneath my feet, shaking the whole area as if it hadn’t been shaken up enough already. It was dark and there wasn’t much to see in the yellow gaslight: a few discarded red flags, a couple of protest placards, and maybe a murder weapon if I looked hard enough. With so many cops around, it didn’t seem likely that the killers would have risked holding on to their guns for very long.

  Back in the movie theater doorway they were establishing a crime-scene gestalt, which is to say they were hoping that the whole could be bigger than the sum of its parts.

  Captain Anlauf had been shot twice in the neck and clearly had bled to death. He was about forty, heavyset, with a full face that had helped earn the Seventh Precinct commander his Pig Cheeks nickname. His weapon was still in his holster.

  “It’s too bad,” said one of the other detectives. “His wife died three weeks ago.”

  “What did she die of?” I heard myself ask.

  “A kidney ailment,” said Heller. “This leaves three daughters orphaned.”

  “Someone’s going to have to tell them,” said someone.

  “I’ll do that.” The man who spoke was in uniform, and everyone straightened up when we realized it was the commander of the Berlin Schupo, Magnus Heimannsberg. “You can leave that to me.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Heller.

  “Who’s the other man? I don’t recognize him.”

  “Captain Lenck, sir.”

  Heimannsberg leaned down to take a closer look.

  “Franz Lenck? What the hell was he doing here? This kind of police work wasn’t his sort of thing at all.”

  “Every available man in uniform was summoned here,” Heller said. “Anyone know if he was married?”

  “Yes,” said Heimannsberg. “No children, though. That’s something, I suppose. Look, Reinhard, I’ll tell her, too. The widow.”