Field Gray

by Philip Kerr

  Seeing me standing there, they waved me inside and closed the door. I glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was eleven a.m. There was a microphone on the table and, I imagined, somewhere a large tape machine ready to record my every word. Next to the microphone was a spotlight, but it wasn’t switched on. Not yet. There was an undrawn black curtain beside the window. They invited me to sit down on a chair in front of the desk.

  “The last time I did this, I got twenty-five years hard labor,” I said. “So, if you’ll forgive me, I really don’t have anything to say.”

  “If you wish,” said one of the officers, “you may appeal the verdict. Did the court tell you that?”

  “No. What the court did tell me was that the Soviets are every bit as stupid and brutal as the Nazis.”

  “It’s interesting you say that.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “It seems to support an impression we have of you, Captain Gunther. That you’re not a Nazi.”

  Meanwhile, the other officer had picked up a telephone and was saying something in Russian that I could not hear.

  “I’m Major Weltz,” said the first officer. He looked at the man now replacing the telephone receiver. “And this is Lieutenant Rascher.”

  I grunted.

  “Like you, I am also from Berlin,” said Weltz. “As a matter of fact, I was there just last weekend. I’m afraid you’d hardly recognize it. Incredible the destruction that was inflicted by Hitler’s refusal to surrender.” He pushed a packet of cigarettes across the table. “Please. Help yourself to a cigarette. I’m afraid they’re Russian, but they’re better than nothing.”

  I took one.

  “Here,” he said, coming around the desk and snapping open a lighter. “Let me light that for you.”

  He sat down on the edge of the table and watched me smoke. Then the door opened and a starshina came in, carrying a sheet of paper. He laid it on the table next to the cigarettes and left again without saying a word.

  Weltz glanced at the sheet of paper for a moment and then turned it to face me.

  “Your appeal form,” he said.

  My eyes flicked across the Cyrillic letters.

  “Would you like me to translate it?”

  “That won’t be necessary. I can read and speak Russian.”

  “Very well, too, by all accounts.” He handed me a fountain pen and waited for me to sign the sheet of paper. “Is there a problem?”

  “What’s the point?” I said dully.

  “There’s every point. The government of the Soviet Union has its forms and formalities like every other country. Nothing happens without a piece of paper. It was the same in Germany, was it not? An official form for everything.”

  Again, I hesitated.

  “You want to go home, don’t you? To Berlin? Well, you can’t go home unless you’ve been released, and you can’t be released unless you appeal your sentence first. Really, it’s as simple as that. Oh, I’m not promising anything. But this form puts the process into motion. Think of it like that pithead winding gear outside. That piece of paper makes the wheel start to move.”

  I read the form forward and then backward: Sometimes, things in the Soviet Union and its zones of occupation made more sense if you read them backward.

  I signed it, and Major Weltz drew the form toward him.

  “So at least we know that you do want to get out of here,” he said. “To go home. Now that we’ve established that much, all we have to do is figure out a way of making that happen. I mean, sooner rather than later. To be exact, twenty-five years from now. That is, if you survive what anyone here will tell you is hazardous work. Personally, I don’t much care to be even this close to large deposits of uraninite. Apparently, they turn it into this yellow powder that glows in the dark. God only knows what it does to people.”

  “Thanks, but I’m not interested.”

  “We haven’t told you what we’re offering yet,” said Weltz. “A job. As a policeman. I would have thought that might appeal to a man with your qualifications.”

  “A man who was never a member of the Nazi Party,” said Lieutenant Rascher. “A former member of the Social Democratic Party.”

  “Did you know, Captain, that the KPD and the SDP have joined together?”

  “It’s a bit late,” I said. “We could have used the support of the KPD in December 1931. During the Red Revolution.”

  “That was Trotsky’s fault,” said Weltz. “Anyway. Better late than never, eh? The new party—the Socialist Unity Party, the SED—it represents a fresh start for us both to work together. For a new Germany.”

  “Another new Germany?” I shrugged.

  “Well, we can hardly make do with the old one. Wouldn’t you agree? There’s so much that we have to rebuild. Not just politics, but law and order, too. The police force. We’re starting a new force. For the moment, it’s being called the Fifth Kommissariat, or K-5. We hope to have it up and running by the end of the year. And until then we’re looking for recruits. A man such as yourself, a former Oberkommissar with Kripo, with a record for honesty and integrity, who was chased out of the force by the Nazis, is just the sort of principled man we need. I think I can probably guarantee reinstatement at your old rank, with full pension rights. A Berlin-weighted allowance. Help with a new apartment. A job for your wife.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Lieutenant Rascher.

  “Look, why don’t you think it over, Captain,” said Weltz. “Sleep on it. You see, to be perfectly honest with you, Gunther, you’re at the top of our list in this camp. And, for obvious reasons, we’d rather not stay here longer than we have to. I’m already a father, but the lieutenant here has no wish to damage his chances of having a son if and when he marries. Radiation does something to a man’s ability to procreate. It also affects the thyroid and the body’s ability to use energy and make proteins. At least, that’s what I think it does.”

  “The answer is still no,” I said. “May I go now?”

  The major adopted a rueful expression. “I don’t understand you,” he said. “How is it that you, a Social Democrat, were prepared to go and work for Heydrich? And yet you won’t work for us. Can you explain that, please?”

  It was now I realized who the major reminded me of. The uniform might have been different, but with the white-blond hair, blue eyes, high forehead, and even loftier tone—I was already thinking of Heydrich before he mentioned the name. Probably Weltz and Heydrich would have been about the same age, too. If he hadn’t been murdered in June 1942, Heydrich would have been about forty-two now. The younger lieutenant was rather more gray-haired, with a face as wide as the major’s was long. He looked like me before the war and a year in a POW camp.

  “Well, Gunther? What have you to say for yourself? Perhaps you were always just a Nazi in all but name. A party fellow traveler. Is that it? Did it take you this long to understand what you really are?”

  “You and Heydrich,” I said to the major. “You’re not so very different. I never wanted to work for him either, but I was afraid to say no. Afraid of what he might do to me. You, on the other hand, have shot your bolt there. You’ve already done your worst. Short of shooting me, there’s not much more you can actually do to me. Sometimes it’s a great comfort to know that you’ve already hit rock bottom.”

  “We could break you,” said Weltz. “We could do that.”

  “I’ve broken a few men myself in my time,” I said. “But there has to be some point to it. And with me, there isn’t, because if you break me, then you’d be doing it just for the hell of it, and what’s more, I’d be no good to you when you were finished. I’m no good to you now, only you just don’t know it, Major. So let me tell you why: I was the kind of cop who was too dumb to act smart and look the other way, or to kiss someone’s behind. The Nazis were cleverer than you. They knew that. The only reason Heydrich brought me back to Kripo was because he knew that even in a police state there are times when you need a real poli
ceman. But you don’t want a real policeman, Major Weltz, you want a clerk with a badge. You want me to read Karl Marx at bedtime and people’s mail during the day. You want a man who’s eager to please and looking for advancement in the Communist Party.” I shook my head wearily. “The last time I was looking for advancement in a party, a pretty girl slapped my face.”

  “Pity,” said Weltz. “It seems you’re going to spend the rest of your life dead. Like all of your class, Gunther, you’re a victim of history.”

  “We both are, Major. Being a victim of history is what being a German is all about.”

  But I was also a victim of my environment. They made sure of that. Soon after my meeting with the boys from K-5, I was transferred off the sorting detail and into the mine shaft.

  It was a world of constant thunder. There was the rumble of underground explosions that broke the rock into manageable chunks; and there was the crash of the cage doors before it slid down the guides and into the shaft. There was the din of rocks we split with pickaxes and then threw into the wagons, and the continual barrage as these moved backward and forward along the rails. And with each detonating noise there was dust and more dust, turning my own snot black and my sweat into a kind of gray oil. At night, I coughed great gritty gobs of saliva and phlegm that looked like burned fried eggs. It all felt like a high price to pay for my principles. But there was a camaraderie in the shaft that wasn’t to be had anywhere else in Johannesgeorgenstadt, and an automatic respect from the other plenis who heard our coughing and recognized their own comparative good fortune. Pospelov had been right about that. There’s always someone worse off than yourself. I hoped to get a chance to meet that someone before the work killed me. There was a mirror in the washroom. Mostly we avoided it, for fear that we’d see our own grandfathers or, worse, their decomposed bodies looking back at us; but one day I inadvertently caught sight of myself and saw a man with a face like the pitchblende rock we were mining. It was brownish black, lumpy and misshapen, with two dull opaque spaces where my eyes had once been, and a row of dark gray excrescences that might have been my teeth. I’d met a lot of criminal types in my life, but I looked like Mr. Hyde’s black-sheep brother. Acted like him, too. There were no Blues in the shaft, and we settled our differences with a maximum of violence. Once, Schaefer, another pleni from Berlin who didn’t much like cops, told me that he’d cheered when the leaders of the SDP had been chased out of Berlin in 1933. So I punched him hard in the face, and when he tried to hit me with a pickax, I hit him with a shovel. It was a while before he got up, and in truth, he was never quite the same again after that—another victim of history. Karl Marx would have approved.

  But after a while I stopped caring about anything very much, including myself. I would squeeze into tight spaces in the black rock to work in solitude with my pick, which was the most dangerous thing to do, since cave-ins were common. But there was less dust to breathe this way than when they used explosives.

  Another month passed. And then one day I was summoned to the office again, and I went along expecting to find the same two MVD officers and hear them ask me if my time in the mine shaft had helped to change my mind about K-5. It had changed my mind about a lot of things, but not German communism and its secret police force. I was going to tell them to go to hell, and perhaps sound like I meant it, too, even though I was ready for someone to come and put some plaster of Paris on my face. So I was a little disappointed that the two officers weren’t there, the way you are when you’ve worked up a pretty good speech about a lot of noble things that don’t add up to very much that’s important when you’re lying in the morgue.

  There was only one officer in the room, a heavyset man with receding brown hair and a pugnacious jaw. Like his two predecessors, he wore blue breeches and a brown gimnasterka tunic but was better decorated; as well as the veteran NKVD soldier badge and Order of the Red Banner, there were other medals I didn’t recognize. The insignia on his collar tabs and the stars on his sleeves seemed to indicate that he was at least a colonel, or perhaps even a general. His blue officer’s cap, with its squarish visor, lay on the table alongside the Nagant revolver in its bucket-sized holster.

  “The answer is still no,” I said, hardly caring who he was.

  “Sit down,” he said. “And don’t be a bloody fool.”

  He was German.

  “I know I’ve put on a bit of weight,” he said. “But I thought you of all people would recognize me.”

  I sat down and rubbed some of the dust from my eyes. “Now you come to mention it, you do seem kind of familiar.”

  “You I wouldn’t have recognized at all. Not in a million years.”

  “I know. I should lay off the chocolates. Get myself a haircut and a manicure. But I never do seem to have the time. My job keeps me pretty busy.”

  The officer’s pork-butcher’s face cracked a smile. Almost. “A sense of humor. That’s impressive in this place. But if you really want to impress me, then stop playing the tough guy and tell me who I am.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  He tutted impatiently and shook his head. “Please. I can help you if you’ll let me. But I have to believe you’re worth it. If you’re any kind of detective, you’ll remember who I am.”

  “Erich Mielke,” I said. “Your name is Erich Mielke.”

  25

  GERMANY, 1946

  You knew all along.”

  “There was a moment when I didn’t. The last time I saw you, Erich, you looked like me.”

  For a moment Mielke looked grim, as if he was remembering. “Fucking French,” he said. “They were as bad as the Nazis in my book. It still sticks in my throat they get to be one of the four victorious powers in Berlin. What did they do to defeat the fascists? Nothing.”

  “We can agree on something, anyway.”

  “Le Vernet was the second time you pulled my bread out of the oven. Why’d you do it?”

  I shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “No, that won’t do,” he said firmly. “Tell me. I want to know. You were dressed like a Gestapo officer. But you didn’t act like one. I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now.”

  “Between you and me and these four walls, Erich, I’m afraid the Gestapo were rather a bad lot.” I told him about the murders committed by Major Bömelburg and the SS storm troopers on the road to Lourdes. “You see, it’s one thing taking a man back to stand trial. It’s something completely different just to shoot him in a ditch at the side of the road. It was just your good fortune that we went to the camp at Gurs first, otherwise it might have been you who was shot while trying to escape. But given what I’ve seen since of your friends in the MVD, it’s probably what you deserved. Rats are still rats whether they’re gray, black, or brown. I just wasn’t cut out to be much of a rat myself.”

  “Maybe a white rat, eh?”

  “Maybe.”

  Mielke chucked a packet of Belomorkanal across the table at me. “Here. I don’t smoke myself, but I brought these for you.” He tossed some matches after the cigarettes. “It’s my opinion that smoking is bad for your health.”

  “My health has got more important things to worry about.” I lit one and puffed it happily. “But maybe you didn’t know. Russian nails are better for your health than American ones.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “Because there’s so little tobacco in them. Four good puffs and they’re gone.”

  Mielke smiled. “Talking about your health, I don’t think this place is good for you. If you stay here long enough, you’re liable to grow two heads. That would be a waste, in my opinion.” He came around the table and sat on the corner, swinging one of his polished riding boots carelessly. “You know, when I was in Russia, I learned to look after my health. I even won the sports medal of the Soviet Union. I was living in a little town outside Moscow called Krasnogorsk, and I used to go hunting at the weekend on a sporting estate once owned by the Yusupov family. Prince Yusupov was one
of those aristocrats who murdered Rasputin. There was all sorts of rubbish talked about the death of Rasputin, you know. That they had to kill him three or four times before he was actually dead. That they poisoned him, shot him, beat him to death, and then drowned him. In fact, they made it all up to make their futile deed seem more heroic. And the prince didn’t even do the deed himself. The truth was that Rasputin was shot through the forehead by a member of the British Secret Service. Now, I mention all of this to make the point that a man, even a strong man like Rasputin, or you perhaps, can survive almost anything except being killed. You, my friend, will die here. You know it. I know it. Perhaps you will be poisoned by the uraninite. Perhaps you will be shot, attempting to escape. Or when the mine floods, as I believe sometimes it does, then you will drown. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I want to help you, Gunther. Really, I do. But you’ll need to trust me.”

  “I’m all ears, Erich. Just two of them at the last count.”

  “We both know that you would make a very poor officer in the Fifth Kommissariat. First, you would have to attend the Anti-Fascist School in Krasnogorsk. For reeducation. To be turned into a believer. From our one meeting and everything I’ve read about you, Gunther, I’m quite convinced that it would be a waste of time trying to convert you into a communist. However, that still remains your best way out of here. To volunteer for K-5 and reeducation.”

  “It’s true, I’ve rather neglected my reading of late, but…”

  “Naturally, this would only be a smoke screen for your escape.”

  “Naturally. I suppose there’s no chance of me being shot through this smoke screen.”

  “There’s a chance of us both being shot, if you really want to know. I’m sticking my neck out for you, Gunther. I hope you appreciate that. Over the last ten or twelve years, I’ve become something of an expert at saving my own skin. I imagine it’s something we have in common. Either way, it’s not something I do lightly.”