Field Gray

by Philip Kerr

“Please.”

  Scheuer moved toward a sideboard where coffee things had been neatly assembled on a tray.

  The Chief sat down and regarded me with a mixture of curiosity and distrust. If there had been a chessboard on the table between us, it might have made things feel a little easier for us both. All the same, a game was in progress and we both knew what it was. He waited until Scheuer—Phil—had set a cup of coffee in front of me and then began.

  “Zyklon B. I assume you’ve heard of it.”

  I nodded.

  “Everyone assumes it was developed by I. G. Farben. But they merely marketed the stuff. It was actually developed by another chemical company called Degesch, which came to be controlled by a third chemical company, called Degussa. In 1930, Degussa needed to raise some money and so they sold half of their controlling interest in Degesch to their main competitor, I. G. Farben. And, by the way, the stuff, the actual crystals that exterminated insects with the speed of a cyclone—thus the name—well, that was made by a fourth company, called Dessauer Werke. You with me so far?”

  “Yes, sir. Although I’m beginning to wonder why.”

  “Patience, sir. All will be explained. So Dessauer made the stuff for Degesch, who sold the stuff to Degussa, who sold the marketing rights to two other chemical companies. I won’t even bother telling you their names. It would just confuse you. So, in fact, I. G. Farben held only a twenty percent share in the gas, with the lion’s share owned by another company, Goldschmidt AG of Essen.

  “Why am I telling you this? Let me explain. When I moved into this building, I felt kind of uncomfortable at the idea that I might be breathing the same kind of office air as the folks who developed that poison gas. So I resolved to find out about it for myself. And I discovered that it really wasn’t true that I. G. Farben had had very much to do with that gas. I also discovered that back in 1929, the U.S. Public Health Service was using Zyklon B to disinfect the clothes of Mexican immigrants and the freight trains they were traveling in. At the New Orleans Quarantine Station. Incidentally, the stuff is still being manufactured today, in Czechoslovakia, in the city of Köln. They call it Uragan D2 and they use it to disinfect the trains that German POWs have been traveling on. Back to the Homeland.

  “You see, Herr Gunther, I have a passion for information. Some people call that sort of thing trivia, but I do not. I call that truth. Or knowledge. Or even, when I’m sitting in my office, intelligence. I have an appetite for facts, sir. Facts. Whether it’s facts about I. G. Farben, Zyklon B gas, Mackie Messer, or Erich Mielke.”

  I sipped my coffee. It was horrible. Like stewed socks. I reached for my cigarettes and remembered that I’d smoked the last of them in the car.

  “Give Herr Gunther a cigarette, will you, Phil? That was what you were after, was it not?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Scheuer lit me with an armor-plated Dunhill and then lit one for himself. I noticed the shields on his bow tie were the same as the ones on the Chief’s, and I assumed they shared more than just a service, but a background, too. Ivy League, probably.

  “Your letter, Herr Gunther, was fascinating. Especially in the context of what Phil here has told me and what I’ve read in the file. But it’s my job to discover how much of it is fact. Oh, I’m not for a moment suggesting that you’re lying to us. But after twenty years, people can easily make mistakes. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

  “Very fair.”

  He regarded my undrunk coffee with vicarious disgust. “Horrible, isn’t it? The coffee. I don’t know why we put up with it. Phil, get Herr Gunther something stronger. What are you drinking, sir?”

  “A schnapps would be nice,” I said, and glanced around as Scheuer fetched a bottle and a small glass from inside the sideboard and placed it on the desk. “Thank you.”

  “Coaster,” snapped the Chief.

  Coasters were fetched and placed under the bottle and my glass.

  “This table’s made of walnut,” said the Chief. “Walnut marks like a damask napkin. Now, then, sir. You have your cigarette. You have your drink. All I need from you are some facts.”

  In his fingers he held a sheet of unfolded paper on which I recognized my own handwriting. He placed a pair of half-moon glasses on the end of his snub nose and viewed the letter with a detached curiosity. He barely read the contents before letting the note fall onto the table.

  “Naturally, I’ve read this. Several times. But now that you’re here, I’d prefer it if you told me, in person, what you have written to Agents Scheuer and Frei in this letter of yours.”

  “So that you can see if I deviate from what I wrote before?”

  “We understand each other perfectly.”

  “Well, the facts are these,” I said, suppressing a smile. “As a condition of my working with the SDECE—”

  The Chief winced. “Exactly what does that mean, Phil?”

  “Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage,” said Scheuer.

  The Chief nodded. “Go on, Herr Gunther.”

  “Well, I agreed to work for them if they permitted me to visit Berlin and an old friend of mine. Perhaps the only friend I have left.”

  “She have a name? This friend of yours?”

  “Elisabeth,” I said.

  “Surname? Address?”

  “I don’t want her involved in any of this.”

  “Meaning you don’t want to tell me.”

  “That’s true.”

  “You met her how and when?”

  “Nineteen thirty-one. She was a seamstress. A good one, too. She worked in the same tailor’s shop as Erich Mielke’s sister, which was also where Mielke’s mother, Lydia Mielke, worked until her death in 1911. It was pretty hard for Erich’s father, bringing up four children on his own. His elder daughter went to work and cooked the family meals, and because Elisabeth was her friend, sometimes she helped out. There were even times when Elisabeth was like a sister to Erich.”

  “Where did they live? Can you remember the address?”

  “Stettiner Strasse. A gray tenement building in Gesundbrunnen, in northwest Berlin. Number twenty-five. It was Erich who introduced me to Elisabeth. After I’d saved his neck.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  I told him.

  “And this is when you met Mielke’s father.”

  “Yes. I went to Mielke’s address to try to arrest him, and the old man took a swing at me and I had to arrest him. It was Elisabeth who had given me the address, and she wasn’t very happy that I’d asked her for it. As a result, our relationship hit a rock. And it was very much later on, I suppose it must have been the autumn of 1940, before we became reacquainted, and the following year before we started our relationship again.”

  “You never mentioned any of this when you were interrogated at Landsberg,” said the Chief. “Why not?”

  I shrugged. “It hardly seemed relevant at the time. I almost forgot that Elisabeth even knew Erich. Not least because she’d always kept it a secret from him that we were friends. Erich didn’t like cops much, to put it mildly. I started seeing her again in the winter of 1946, when I came back from the Russian POW camp. I lived with Elisabeth for a short while until I managed to fin d my wife again in Berlin. But I was always very fond of her, and she of me. And recently, when I was in Paris, I got to thinking of her again and wondering if she was okay. I suppose you might say I began to entertain romantic thoughts about her. Like I said, there’s no one else in Berlin I know. So I was resolved to look her up as soon as possible and see if she and I couldn’t make another go of it.”

  “And how did that go?”

  “It went well. She’s not married. She was involved with some American soldier. More than one, I think. Anyway, both men were married, and so they went back to their wives in the States, leaving her, middle-aged and scared about the future.”

  I poured a glass of schnapps and sipped it while the Chief watched me closely, as if weighing my story in each hand, trying to judge how muc
h or how little he believed.

  “She was at the same address as she’d been in 1946?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can always ask the French, you know. Her address.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “They might reasonably assume that’s where you’ve gone,” he said. “They might even make life difficult for her. Have you thought of that? We could protect her. The French aren’t always as romantic as they’re often portrayed.”

  “Elisabeth lived through the battle of Berlin,” I said. “She was raped by the Russians. Besides, she’s not the type to give a man an injection of thiopental on the streets of Göttingen in broad daylight. When Grottsch tells his story, I imagine the French will think the Russians pinched me, don’t you? After all, that’s what you wanted them to think, isn’t it? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your men were speaking Russian when they grabbed him. Just for appearance’s sake.”

  “At least tell me if she lives in the East or the West.”

  “In the West. The French gave me a passport in the name of Sébastien Kléber. You’ll be able to check me coming through Checkpoint Alpha at Helmstedt, and into Berlin at the Dreilinger Crossing. But not leaving it to enter East Berlin.”

  “All right. Tell me your news about Erich Mielke.”

  “My friend Elisabeth said she’d seen Mielke’s father, Erich. That he was still alive and in good health. He was in his early seventies, she said. They went for a coffee at the Café Kranzler. He said he’d been living in the DDR but that he didn’t like it. Missed the football and his old neighborhood. While Elisabeth was telling me this, it was clear she had no idea what Erich junior had been doing. Who and what he was. All she said was that Erich visits his father from time to time and gives him money. And I assumed, given who he was, that this must be in secret.”

  “From time to time. How often is that?”

  “Regularly. Once a month.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I might have, if you’d given me enough time.”

  “Did she say where Erich senior had been living? In the DDR?”

  “The village of Schönwalde, northwest of Berlin. She said he told her he had a nice enough cottage there but that he was bored in Schönwalde. It’s rather a boring place. Of course, she knew that Erich senior had been a staunch communist and so she asked him if living in the West meant he had left the party. And he said that he had come to the conclusion that the communists were every bit as bad as the Nazis.”

  “She said he said that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, we checked and there’s no record of an Erich Mielke living in West Berlin.”

  “Mielke’s father isn’t called Mielke. His name is Erich Stellmacher. Mielke was illegitimate. Not that the father’s using the name of Stellmacher either.”

  “Did she tell you what his name is?”

  “No.”

  “Give you an address?”

  “Stellmacher isn’t that stupid.”

  “But there is something. Something you’d like to trade.”

  “Yes. Stellmacher told Elisabeth the name of a restaurant where he regularly likes to go for lunch on Saturdays.”

  “And your idea is? What, exactly?”

  “This is your area of expertise, not mine, Chief. I was never much of an intelligence officer. I didn’t have the kind of dirty mind to be really effective in your world. I was a better detective, I think. Better at uncovering a mess than creating one.”

  “I see you have a low opinion of intelligence.”

  “Just the people who work in it.”

  “Us included.”

  “You especially.”

  “You prefer the French?”

  “There’s something honest about their hypocrisy and self-regard.”

  “As a former Berlin detective, what would you propose?”

  “Follow Erich Stellmacher from his favorite restaurant to his apartment. And lay a trap for Erich Mielke there.”

  “Risky.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But now that you’ve pulled me, you’re going to do it all the same. You have to, now that you’ve partly undermined all that black propaganda I’d been giving to the French about Mielke being your agent—and before that, an agent of the Nazis. Without the cherry on the cake—me identifying de Boudel for them—maybe they won’t find all those lies I told about Erich so persuasive anymore.”

  “It’s true that we would like to get our hands on Mielke. With his father in our back pocket, we could even perhaps turn him into the spy you told the French he was. Of course, then we’d have to blacken your name to the French. To make sure they formed the correct impression about Mielke again. That he was and always had been a perfect communist bastard.”

  “You see, I knew you’d think of some way around these problems.”

  “And you. What will you want to help?”

  I frowned. “I can show you where the restaurant is. Maybe even get you a table.”

  “We shall want more help than that. After all, you’ve met Erich Stellmacher. He took a swing at you. You arrested him. You must have got a good look at him that day. No, Herr Gunther, we shall want more than your help in obtaining a table at this man Stellmacher’s favorite watering hole. We shall want you to identify him.”

  I smiled wearily.

  “Something funny about that?”

  “You’re not the first intelligence chief to have asked me to do this. Heydrich had the same idea.”

  “I’ve often wondered about Heydrich,” said the Chief. “They said he was the cleverest Nazi of the bunch. You agree with that?”

  “It’s true he had an instinctive understanding of power, which made him a very effective Nazi. You like facts, sir? Then here’s a fact about Reinhard Heydrich you might appreciate. His father, Richard Bruno, was a music teacher and before that a composer of sorts. Ten years before his son was born, Richard Heydrich wrote an opera entitled Reinhard’s Crime. Oh yes, and here’s another fact: Heydrich was murdered.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I was the investigating detective.”

  “Interesting.”

  “More interesting to me right now is the money that was taken from me when I was arrested in Cuba. And the boat that was impounded. That’s part of the price for my help. Actually, it was the price of the deal we had in Landsberg in return for me bullshitting the French, so you’re only agreeing to what your people have already agreed to. I want the boat sold and all of the money paid into a Swiss bank account, as we agreed. I also want an American passport. And, for delivering Erich Mielke, the sum of twenty-five thousand U.S. dollars.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Given that I’m about to deliver the deputy head of the East German State Security apparatus, I’d say it was cheap at twice the price.”

  “Philip?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “A price worth paying, would you say?”

  “For Mielke? Yes, sir, I would. I’ve always thought that, since the beginning of this whole intelligence effort.”

  “Because you know I shall want you to play the ringmaster at Herr Gunther’s show, don’t you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then I guess you know it now, eh, Philip?”

  Scheuer looked uncomfortable at being put on the spot like this. “Yes, sir.”

  “You too, Jim.”

  Frei raised his eyebrows at that but nodded all the same.

  I poured myself another glass of schnapps.

  “Why not?” said the Chief. “I think we could all use a drink. Don’t you agree, Phil?”

  “Yes, sir. I think we could.”

  “But not schnapps, eh? Forgive me, Herr Gunther. There’s a lot about your country I admire. But we’re not very keen on schnapps at the CIA.”

  “I imagine it’s rather hard to spike a glass this small.”

  “Don’t you believe it.” The Chief smiled. “Hmm. Yes, that’s quite a sense of humor you have
there, for a German.”

  Philip Scheuer produced a bottle of bourbon and three glasses.

  “Sure you won’t try any of this, Herr Gunther?” said the Chief. “To toast your deal with Ike.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Good man. We’ll make an American of you yet, sir.”

  But that was exactly what I was worried about.

  37

  BERLIN, 1954

  Most people go through life accumulating possessions. I seemed to have gone through mine losing them or having them taken away from me. The only thing I still had from before the war was a broken chess piece made of bone—the head of a black knight from a Selenus chess set. During the last days of the Weimar Republic this black knight had been consistently in use at the Romanisches Café, where, once or twice, I’d played the great Emanuel Lasker. He’d been a regular at the café until the Nazis obliged him and his brother to leave Germany forever in 1933. I could still picture him crouched over a board with his cigarettes and cigars and his Wild West mustache. Generous to a fault, he would give out tips or play exhibitions for anyone who was interested; and on his last day in the Romanisches Café—he went to Moscow and then to New York—Lasker presented everyone who was there to wish him good-bye with a chess piece from the café’s best set. I got the black knight. The way I’d been played over the years, I sometimes think a black pawn would have been more appropriate. Then again, a knight, even a broken one, seems intrinsically more valuable than a pawn, which was probably why I tried so hard to keep it through one adversity after another. The little bone base had become detached during the Battle of Königsberg and was lost soon afterward, but somehow the horse’s head had remained in my possession. I might have called it my lucky charm but for the salient fact that one way or another I’d not always had the best of luck. On the other hand, I was still in the game, and sometimes that’s all the luck you need. Anything—absolutely anything—can happen so long as you stay in the game. And lately, as if to remind myself of this fact, the little black knight’s head was often held tight in my fist the way a Mohammedan might have used a set of beads to utter the ninety-nine names of God and bring him closer during prayer. Only, it wasn’t being closer to God I wanted but something more earthly. Freedom. Independence. Self-respect. No longer to be the pawn of others in a game I wasn’t interested in. Surely that wasn’t so much to ask.