by Philip Kerr
“Where is he?” I asked one of the Stasi men.
“If you mean the comrade general,” said the man, “he is waiting outside.”
I followed them out of the apartment and downstairs, wondering how they were going to deal with the security men in the CIA ambulance—or had they already dealt with them? But before we reached the ground floor, we went through a door that led out of the back of the building and down a fire escape to a courtyard that was about the size of a tennis court and enclosed on all four sides by tall black tenements, most of them derelict.
We crossed the courtyard and, in fading light, went through a low wooden door in the wall of the old Schulzendorfer Brewery. Underfoot the cobbles were loose, and in some places there were large potholes filled with water. The moon rippled in one of them like a lost silver coin. The three Americans did not resist, and to my experienced eyes, they already seemed to have acquired the compliant demeanor of POWs, with bowed heads and heavy, stumbling footsteps. A small tributary stream of the River Spree marked the edge of the narrowing courtyard. At its southern end was a building with broken, dirty windows and tall weeds growing on the roof; painted on the brickwork was a faded advertisement for “Chlorodont Toothpaste.” I’d have needed a whole tube of the stuff to get rid of the nasty taste I had in my mouth. Within the word “Tooth” was a door, which one of the Stasi men opened. We went into a building that smelled of damp and probably something worse. Advancing to one of the filthy windows, the team leader looked carefully out onto a street.
He waited cautiously for almost five minutes and, having checked his watch, produced a flashlight, which he then aimed at the building opposite. Almost immediately, his signal was answered by three short flashes of a small green light and, across the street, a door opened. The three American prisoners were hustled across the street, and it was only when I put my own head out the door that I realized we were on Liesenstrasse and that the building on the opposite side of the street was in the Russian sector.
As the last of the three Americans was pushed across the road in the all-enveloping darkness and on into the building, I saw a portly figure standing in the doorway. He looked up and down the street and then waved to me.
“Come,” he said. “Come quickly.”
It was Erich Mielke.
40
BERLIN, 1954
He was shorter than I remembered, and stockier, too—a powerful man who was square on his feet, with the air of a pugilist. His hair was short and thin, and so was his mouth, which made an attempt at a smile, only it came off as something sardonic, or whatever it is you call it when a man can laugh at things that other people don’t find the least bit amusing.
“Come,” he repeated. “It’s all right. You’re in no danger.”
The voice was deeper and also more gravelly than I remembered. But the accent was much the same as it had always been: an uneducated and truculent Berliner. I didn’t give much for the chance of the three Americans when they were interrogated by this man.
I looked both ways on Liesenstrasse. The CIA’s security ambulance was nowhere to be seen, and it would probably be hours before they worked out that the team of agents they were supposed to be guarding had been kidnapped right under their noses. I had to admit, the Stasi operation had been as neat as a freshly laid egg. True, it had been my own plan, but it had been Mielke’s idea to supply an actual East German border guard who looked like his own father for the CIA to follow around and lead them to the apartment on Schulzendorfer Strasse, where the Stasi kidnap team would be waiting.
The street was clear, but in the darkness I still hesitated to cross.
A little impatience edged into Mielke’s voice. We Berliners could get impatient with a newborn baby. “Come on, Gunther,” he said. “If you had anything to fear from me, you’d be in handcuffs like these three fascists. Or dead.”
And recognizing the truth of this, I walked across the street.
Mielke wore a mid-blue suit that appeared to be of much better quality than the suits worn by his men. Certainly, his shoes were more expensive. These looked handmade. A navy knitted tie was neat against a light blue shirt. His raincoat was probably British.
He was standing in the doorway of an old florist’s shop. The windows were boarded up, but on a floor strewn with broken glass there was a lantern that gave enough light to see vases filled with petrified flowers or no flowers at all. Through an open door at the back of the shop was a yard, and parked at the end of the yard was a plain gray van that, I imagined, already contained the three American agents. The shop smelled of weeds and cat piss—a bit like the pension we had vacated earlier. Mielke closed the door and put on a leather cap that added a properly proletarian touch to his appearance. Although there was a big heavy padlock, he didn’t secure the door, for which I was grateful. He was younger than me and probably armed, and I wouldn’t have cared to fight my way out of there.
We sat down on a couple of ancient wooden chairs that belonged in an old church hall.
“I like your office,” I said.
“It’s very convenient for the French Sector,” he said. “The security here is almost nonexistent, and it’s the perfect spot to slip back and forth between our sector and theirs without anyone knowing about it. But oddly enough, I can remember coming into this florist’s shop as a kid.”
“You never struck me as the romantic type.”
He shook his head. “There’s a cemetery along the street. One of my old man’s relations is buried there. Don’t ask me who. I can’t remember.”
He produced a packet of Roth-Händle and offered me one.
“I don’t smoke myself,” he said. “But I figured your nerves might be gone.”
“Very thoughtful of you.”
“Keep the packet.”
I pulled a little bit of tobacco out of the cigarette’s smoking end and pinched it tight between thumb and forefinger, the way you did when you didn’t really like the taste. I didn’t, but a smoke was a smoke.
“What will happen to them? The three Amis?”
“Do you really care?”
“To my surprise, yes.” I shrugged. “You can call it a guilty conscience, if you like.”
He shrugged. “They’ll have a pretty rough time of it while we find out what they know. But eventually we’ll exchange them for some of our own people. They’re much too valuable to send to the guillotine, if that’s what you were thinking.”
“You don’t still do that, surely?”
“The guillotine? Why not? It’s quick.” He grinned cruelly. “A bullet is a bit of a let-off for our enemies of state. But it’s a lot quicker than the electric chair. Last year, it took Ethel Rosenberg twenty minutes to die. They say her head caught fire before she died. So you tell me, which is more humane? The two seconds it takes for the ax to fall? Or twenty minutes in the Sing Sing chair?” He shook his head again. “But no. Your three Americans. They won’t be waiting for a delivery of bread.”
Seeing my puzzled expression, he added:
“So as not to cause our citizenry undue alarm, we send our falling ax around the DDR in a bread van, from the bakery in Halle. Whole-grain bread. It’s better for you.”
“Same old Erich. You always did have a strange sense of humor. I remember once, on a train to Dresden, I nearly died laughing.”
“I think you had the last laugh on that occasion. I was impressed with the way you handled him. He wasn’t an easy man to kill, that Russian. But I was rather more impressed with the way you handled things afterward. How you gave that money to Elisabeth. To be honest, until I got your letter I had no idea that you and she had ever become that friendly. Either way, I suspect most men would have kept the money for themselves.
“And it made me think,” said Mielke. “I asked myself what kind of man would do such a thing. Obviously, a man who was not the predictable fascist I had thought he was. A man of hidden qualities. A man who might even be useful to me. You wouldn’t be aware of this, but three or
four years ago I actually tried to get in contact with you, Gunther. To do a job for me. And I discovered you’d disappeared. I even heard you’d gone to South America like all those other Nazi bastards. So when Elisabeth turned up at my office in Hohenschönhausen with your letter, I was very pleasantly surprised. But even more surprised when I read the letter—and by the sheer audacity of your proposal. If I may say so, it was a real spymaster’s stratagem and you have my compliments on pulling it off—and what’s more, right under the noses of the Americans. That’s almost the best part. They won’t forgive you for that in a hurry.”
I said nothing. There wasn’t much to say, so I sucked at my cigarette and waited for the end. That part was, as yet, undecided. What would he do? Keep his side of the bargain, as he had promised in his own letter to me? Or double-cross me like before? And what else did I really deserve? Me, the man who had just betrayed three other men.
“Of course, Elisabeth’s the reason I knew I could really trust you, Gunther. If you’d truly been a creature of the Americans, you would have told them where she lived and they’d have had her placed under surveillance. With the aim of burning me.”
“Burning?”
“It’s what we call it when you let someone—someone in intelligence circles—know that you know everything about them, and that their whole life has gone up in smoke. Burning. Or, for that matter, when you don’t let them know.”
“Well, then, I guess they’d already tried to burn you.”
Some of what I now said I had already told him in the letter that Elisabeth had delivered: how the CIA had coached me to sell the French SDECE the idea that Mielke had been first a spy for the Nazis and then a spy for the CIA, at the same time leading them to suppose that I might be able to identify a French traitor named Edgard de Boudel who had worked for the Viet Minh in Indochina. But mostly I told him again as a way of getting the answers to a few questions of my own.
“The Amis had the idea that there’s a communist spy at the heart of French intelligence, and that he might be more inclined to believe what I told them about you playing both sides by my proving reliable in identifying Edgard de Boudel as he arrived back in Friedland as a returnee from a Soviet POW camp.”
“But the Amis canned that idea when you told them that you thought you had figured out a way of them getting their hands on me in person,” said Mielke. “Is that right?”
I nodded. “Which probably leaves your reputation un damaged.”
“Let’s hope so, eh?”
“Is there a spy at the heart of French intelligence?”
“Several,” admitted Mielke. “You might just as well ask if there are any communists in France. Or if Edgard de Boudel really did fight for the German SS and then the Viet Minh.”
“And did he?”
“Oh yes. And it’s a shame the Americans should have told the French about him now. Someone in GVL—Gehlen’s new intelligence organization—must have told them. You see, we had a deal with the GVL and Chancellor Adenauer. That the German government would allow Edgard de Boudel back into Germany in return for allowing one of ours back. It’s like this: De Boudel has inoperable cancer. But the poor fellow wanted to die in his native France, and this seemed to be the best way of doing it. Of sneaking him back into Germany as part of a POW repatriation and then into France without anyone objecting.”
“There’s not much love lost between the CIA and Gehlen’s GVL,” I said.
“It would seem not.”
“The German son seems to have turned his back on his American father.”
“Yes indeed,” said Mielke. “It’s odd, but you and Elisabeth are about the only two people who even know about my own father. So that was a real stroke of genius, my friend. Because, as it happens, a lot of what you imagined might be true is true. We don’t really see each other much anymore.”
“Does he live in the East?”
“In Potsdam. But he’s always complaining. Odd how your suggestion of him coming back to live in West Berlin is so nearly true. But then, you are a Berliner. You know how these things are. ‘I’ve got no friends in Potsdam,’ he says. That’s always the big complaint. ‘Look, Pa,’ I say, ‘there’s nothing to stop you from going into West Berlin and seeing your mates and coming home again.’ Incidentally, the mates—his mates—they thought I was dead. That’s what I told Pa to tell them, as early as 1937. I say, ‘See your friends quietly in the West and live quietly in the East. It’s not like there’s a wall or anything.’ Of course, since the inner border was closed he’s started to suspect the same would happen here in Berlin. That he’ll be trapped on the wrong side.” Mielke sighed. “And there are other reasons. Father-and-son reasons. Is your old man still alive?”
“No.”
“Did you get on with him when he was?”
“No.” I smiled sadly. “We never learned how.”
“Then you know what it’s like. My father is a very old-fashioned kind of German communist, and believe me, they’re the worst. It was the workers’ strike of last year that really did it for him. Trouble-makers, most of them. Some of them counterrevolutionaries. A few of them CIA provocateurs. But Pa didn’t see it that way at all.”
I flicked my cigarette onto the ground and was leaving it there, but Mielke ground it under the heel of his handmade shoe as if it had been the head of a counterrevolutionary.
“Since we’re being honest with each other,” he said, “there’s something I don’t understand.”
“Go ahead.”
“Why you did it. Why you betrayed them. To me. You’re not a communist any more than you were a Nazi. So, why?”
“You asked me a question like that before, don’t you remember?”
“Oh, I remember. I didn’t understand it then, either.”
“You might say that after spending six months in one American prison after another I began to hate them. You might say that, but it wouldn’t be true. Of course, the best lies contain some truth, so that’s not entirely false. Then you might say that I don’t share their worldview, and that wouldn’t be entirely false. In some ways I admire them, but I also dislike the way they don’t ever seem to live up to their own ideals. I think I might like the Amis a lot more if they were like everyone else. One might forgive them more. But they preach about the magnificence of their democracy and the enduring power of their constitutional freedoms, while at the same time they’re trying to fuck your wife and steal your watch. When I was a cop, we gave the people of whom more was expected severer sentences when they turned out to be crooks. Lawyers, policemen, politicians, people in positions of responsibility. Americans are like them. They’re the crooks who should know better.
“But you might also say I’m tired of the whole damned business. For twenty years I’ve been obliged to work for people I didn’t like. Heydrich. The SD. The Nazis. The CIC. The Peróns. The Mafia. The Cuban secret police. The French. The CIA. All I want to do is read the newspaper and play chess.”
“But how do you know I’m not going to oblige you to work for me?” Mielke chuckled. “Since you sent that letter to me, you’re halfway to working for the Stasi right now.”
“I won’t work for you, Erich, any more than I’ll work for them. If you make me, I’ll find a way to betray you.”
“And suppose I threaten to have you shot? Or send you to prison to await a delivery of whole-meal bread? What then?”
“I’ve asked myself this question. Suppose, I said, he threatens to kill you unless you work for the Stasi? Well, I decided that I’d rather die at the hands of my own countrymen than get rich in the pay of some foreigners. I don’t expect you to understand that, Erich. But that’s how it is. So go ahead and do your worst.”
“Of course I understand.” Mielke smacked himself proudly on the chest. “Before everything else, I am a German. A Berliner. Like you. Of course I understand. So, for once, I am going to keep my word to a fascist.”
“You still think I’m a fascist, then.”
“You
don’t know it yourself, but that’s what you are, Gunther.” He tapped his head. “In here. You may not ever have joined the Nazi Party, but in your mind you believe in centralized authority and the right and the law, and you don’t believe in the left. To me, a fascist is all you’ll ever be. But I have an idea that Elisabeth has some hopes of you. And because of my high regard for her. My love for her—”
“You?”
“As a sister, yes.”
I smiled.
Mielke looked surprised. “Yes. Why do you smile?”
I shook my head. “Forget it.”
“But I love people,” he said. “I love all people. That’s why I became a communist.”
“I believe you.”
He frowned and then tossed me a set of car keys.
“As we arranged, Elisabeth has quit her apartment and is waiting for you at the Steinplatz Hotel. So say hello from me. And make sure you look after that woman. If you don’t, I’ll send an assassin to kill you. Just see if I don’t. Someone better than the last one. Elisabeth’s the only reason I’m letting you go, Gunther. Her happiness is more important to me than my political principles.”
“Thanks.”
“There’s a car on Grenz Strasse. Go right and then left. You’ll see a gray Type One. In the glove box you’ll find two passports in your new names. I’m afraid we had to use your picture from your time as a pleni. There are visas, money, and air tickets. My advice would be to use them. The Amis aren’t stupid, Gunther. Nor are the French. They’ll each come looking for you both. So get out of Berlin. Get out of Germany. Get out while the going is good.”
