by Philip Kerr
“No. For the purposes of establishing some sort of provenance they were first given to the BBC’s Berlin office on Savignyplatz. I believe one of the BBC’s local correspondents works for the HVA and he was ordered to sell them to Hennig, as if he’d considered using them for broadcast and then decided to make money from them instead.”
Anne paused and asked for a glass of water, which was duly provided, before she continued with her bravura performance.
“My job was to meet with Gunther and Hennig and to report their operational progress to my controllers in the HVA by coded messages on a shortwave radio. Gunther and Hennig were to extract a large sum of money from Maugham and by extension the British secret service, and to hand over yet more tapes containing other false and misleading information about other secret service personnel. I believe there are other tiny details on the other tape recordings that might also help to discredit Hollis. I’m afraid I don’t know what those are. Any money they made from the blackmail operation was to be split between the three of us as a reward for loyal service and to fund future operations in this theater.”
“And these are the tapes you’ve provided for us. The ones you were keeping in your office at your rented villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer.”
“That’s right.”
Anne lied so smoothly, so expertly, that I almost believed her myself. She never hesitated, not for a moment, and I wondered if she had ever considered the possibility that the British might actually shoot me or Harold Hennig. Her voice was even and, it has to be said, sexy, too; a couple of times there was even a quaver in it, as if what she had to say was upsetting. She was very good. Mielke had chosen his Judas very well indeed. I doubt if Jean Simmons or Deborah Kerr could have given a better performance in that room than Anne French. But the hardest part of listening to all that was knowing that I loved her.
“And what was it persuaded you to change your mind about your involvement in this elaborate plot?” The monk was smiling kindly at her now, as if he pitied her for being used so egregiously by such unscrupulous people as Erich Mielke, Harold Hennig, and me.
Anne sighed.
“Take your time, my dear. There’s no rush. We don’t want to make any mistakes here.” The monk’s tone was solicitous, as if Anne was finding it difficult to betray me and, it had to be faced, Harold Hennig, too.
“Yes, take your time,” I said. “But if it helps you can kiss me on the cheek.”
She didn’t flinch.
“I joined the Communist Party because I believed in the absence of social classes and the state, but more particularly because I believed it was the best way of opposing British and French imperialism of the kind we can see happening now at Suez.”
“Let’s not get into that, shall we?” said the man with irregular teeth.
“No, well, I’m an idealist, you see,” continued Anne. “Like my father. Or at least I was. But during my association with these two men, Gunther’s wife, Elisabeth, told me that during the war he and Hennig had both been Fascists working for the SD and the Gestapo. It was she who gave me the photographs you’ve seen. And it was this that caused me finally to question my loyalty to the party and to the HVA. The notion that the German Communist Party could use former Nazis like these two men to further its ends still seems abhorrent to me. I asked Gunther about it once and instead of denying it or feeling any shame about it, he actually boasted about his Nazi past. He said that there was no difference between the Gestapo and the Stasi. That Fascism and Communism were coterminous. That their uniforms were still made by the same tailors and that even the same concentration camps were in use for today’s political prisoners. When I protested about this he seemed to think that was very funny and told me he thought I was extraordinarily naïve. Well, maybe I was. In fact, I’m sure I was.”
I tried to will her to catch my eye, but it was no good, and she carried on giving her deceitful evidence in a flat, steady voice.
“By the time he told me that some British spymasters had arrived on the Cap and were staying at the Belle Aurore Hotel, I’d already decided I didn’t believe in the party anymore—I mean, I couldn’t anymore, you do see that, don’t you? I felt completely disillusioned. As if the scales had fallen from my eyes.”
“Was it always the aim of the operation to have Maugham summon some friends from MI6 down here?”
“Yes. It seemed unlikely that he would buy the tape without some expectation that the British would underwrite its purchase. Nor that at his age he would wish to travel to London. Comrade Mielke always believed that the British would come here. And listen to the tape themselves.”
“And when Gunther told you that these spymasters were coming, what did you think?”
“I thought this was my chance to switch sides. To redeem myself. So I went to see them in person, threw myself on their mercy, and told them absolutely everything I knew about the plot to discredit this man Roger Hollis.” She sighed again. “Look, I won’t go to prison, will I?”
“That’s not up to me. But under the circumstances, no. I don’t think so. Provided you continue to cooperate, Miss French.”
“Thank you.”
“Is the HVA yet aware that you’ve told us all about Othello?’
“No, not yet. I made my last scheduled transmission two nights ago.”
“And your next scheduled transmission is tonight, I believe.”
“That’s correct.”
“At which point you will be required to report on the progress or lack of it on Othello? Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Thus the urgency of these proceedings,” said the monk. “But you’re quite happy to resume contact with the HVA and assure your controllers that the operation is still progressing. Is that correct?”
“Yes. Of course.”
There were many more questions like this, but it was already agonizingly clear to me that as soon as Elisabeth had returned home to Berlin, Erich Mielke must have squeezed her for as much information about my life on the Cap as she was able to provide. Probably she wouldn’t have even known he was asking the questions in pursuit of an HVA operation. At the same time, any pictures and files on me would have been easy to find for a man like Mielke. Nearly all of the police records at the presidium on Berlin Alexanderplatz had been captured by the Russians and were now the property of the Stasi. But I still couldn’t bring myself to believe that Elisabeth could ever have worked for the Stasi, although of course that was rumored to be their greatest skill—they were much better than the Gestapo at blackmailing people to spy on their nearest and dearest. By comparison the Gestapo had been amateurs. Possibly they had something on Elisabeth I didn’t even know about.
As for Anne French, I could see clearly now that I had no one to blame for what had happened but myself. I’d walked straight into Gethsemane as if a taxi had driven me there from an upper room on Mount Zion. She must have known how easy I’d be to snare after Elisabeth had left me. From the first minute Anne French had spoken to me at the hotel she’d been acting on Mielke’s orders and had used me with not much more thought than she’d used the swimming pool at the Grand Hôtel.
At the same time, I now understood the whole ghastly little trick that was being perpetrated by Mielke. And I had to admit it was a nice operation. The point of the whole scheme must have been to bolster Hollis’s reputation in MI5. What better way of doing that than to expose an ingenious scheme to discredit him? And just listening to all that Anne had said, the conclusion I’d come to was that Roger Hollis was indeed a spy, and a spy who must have been under a cloud of suspicion, too. After this operation, however, Hollis was surely in the clear. No one would ever suspect him now. Which was a lot more than I could say for myself. The case against Bernhard Gunther already looked watertight. Denying everything seemed pointless. I had no illusions about the probable fate that now awaited me. Thanks to Anne, I was as good as dead.
THIRTY
I stood up slowly, wearily, willing myself to become much smaller in their eyes, as if resigned to my probably ignominious fate. And in a way I was resigned to it, but a moment’s reflection had persuaded me that, as in a game of poker dice, I didn’t have to pick up and throw anything myself. All I had to do was close the lid on the cigar box handed to me by Anne French and make a bid that improved on the one I’d tacitly accepted. Sometimes, when you have nothing and you’ve got the stone face and the balls for it, those five dice in a closed box can get you much further than you might think is even possible. She was a pretty good liar, but, as Somerset Maugham had recently observed up at the Villa Mauresque, years of practice born of simple necessity had made me a damned good liar, too; perhaps an even better one than Anne French. That now remained to be seen.
“All right,” I said, staring unhappily at the monk, “you win, Englishman. You said before, when you were interrogating me, that you wanted a full confession. Well, I’ll give you one now. All of the dirt. The full unexpurgated version. Names, dates, everything. I’ll write it all out and sign it. Whatever you want.” I rounded my shoulders, lowered my battered head as if in penitence for what I had done, and pushed a hand through my greasy hair. I’d seen enough broken men in my time with the Murder Commission at the Berlin Alex to know the full pantomime for a true confession. “It was a put-up job, just like the bitch has said, to discredit Roger Hollis. To take your top man in MI5 and make him smell of yesterday’s shit.”
I let out a sigh, and shook my head as if in pity of the hopeless situation now affecting me. At the same time I was very careful to avoid her eye, just in case I was deflected by the incredulity I knew I would certainly meet there. This little performance was going to take all my powers of invention.
“What are you saying?” demanded Hennig. “She’s lying, you stupid idiot. Look, I don’t know what’s going on here but I think there’s been some sort of mistake.”
“Of course there’s been a mistake,” I shouted. “We got caught, thanks to her. Look, Harold, it’s no good. Don’t you see? The game is up for us now.”
“What game? There is no game.”
“The stupid bitch has betrayed us both. She’s told them almost everything now, and quite clearly they believe her. So, what’s the damned point of maintaining the fiction any longer? Eh? Answer me that. We might as well put our hands up to the whole thing. The party isn’t going to save us now. Nor the Stasi.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Gunther?”
He didn’t realize it quite yet, but his using my real name suited my purpose very well.
“And what’s more she’s right and you know it. The masters we work for in Germany today, they’re just as rotten as the bastards we served before. Perhaps worse. At least Hitler tried to be popular. This lot we have in Germany now, they just don’t care one way or another. Because they don’t have to. No one knows who the hell they are, anyway. They’re just a lot of faceless bureaucrats in Karlshorst.”
“You bloody fool, Gunther. Just shut the fuck up, will you? You’re going to get us both shot. Do you know that?”
“Can’t you see? The double-crossing bitch has done that already. Me, I’ve had enough of the whole damned business. I’m tired—so very tired. I think the best thing is if we just give them what they want and get this circus over with as quickly as possible. Come on, man. What do you say? Let’s make a clean breast of it and hope for the best.”
Hennig’s manacled hands were clasped tightly on his knees, as if in earnest prayer, and I could see his knuckles turning white as I was speaking. His jaw was shifting furiously, like two small tectonic plates, and his nostrils were flaring as wide as an emptying hot water bottle. He looked as if he wanted to strangle me. And this wasn’t so very far from the truth, as a moment later he stood up abruptly, ran across the room, and, screaming like Krampus, launched himself at my head in imitation of one intent on hauling me down to the underworld. Fortunately, one of the thugs from Portsmouth intervened just in the nick of time and sent Hennig sprawling on the threadbare carpet with an uppercut that would have floored Floyd Patterson.
“Get that bloody man out of here,” yelled the monk. It was the first and only time I heard him raise his voice. “Lock him up and keep him locked up until he’s learned to behave.” He might have been speaking about some unruly schoolboy instead of a blackmailer and probable Stasi spy.
I smiled because in the exclamatory, violent chaos of the moment I had seen Anne French staring at me, her face ugly with suspicion about what I might actually tell the British secret service men when the thugs had finished dragging Hennig’s semi-conscious body out of the room. Given all that she had said already, she could hardly contradict my own full confession now. It was, I hoped, the one thing her cynical masters in the Stasi could never have anticipated. That I might actually agree with her. Every word and more. And for the first time since I’d met her at the Grand Hôtel in Cap Ferrat there was real fear in her lovely eyes.
THIRTY-ONE
Give me another cigarette,” I told one of the thugs still in the room.
He looked at the monk, who nodded back at him. He took out a silver cigarette case, opened it, and pulled a face as I took two, slid one behind my ear for later, and then let him light me. I took a lungful of smoke, which wouldn’t have tasted any sweeter than if I’d been facing a firing squad.
“There’s not a great deal to say,” I began.
“For your sake, I hope that’s not true,” said the monk.
“The damn woman is right, of course.” I was looking straight at Anne when I said this and smiled as she tried to conceal her discomfort. “It was a put-up job from the start. And it would have worked, too. It would have worked if she hadn’t opened her stupid trap. It’s the one thing you can never anticipate in any clandestine operation—someone having a crisis of conscience and turning themselves in. No, indeed. So then. I’ll tell you everything. From the beginning.”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Operation Othello was run by Erich Mielke. I’ve known him for years—since before the Nazis came to power when he was just another KPD cadre with a gun and a Lenin cap. Put a lot of weight on since then. I mean, he wouldn’t recognize himself if the Erich Mielke from nineteen thirty-two was to meet today’s Erich Mielke. He murdered a couple of Berlin cops that year and I helped him to get away from the city before he could be arrested. I helped him escape from Berlin to Antwerp, where he and another Communist called Zimmer were smuggled onto a ship to Leningrad, just like your friends Burgess and Maclean. I wasn’t a party member then myself, but I hated the semi-Fascist government of von Papen and was determined to do all I could to stop Mielke from going to the guillotine. Besides, those two cops had it coming. Everyone said so. I also helped him to escape from a French internment camp at Le Vernet in nineteen forty when I was in the SD. I’d been sent there to try and identify him.”
“How does someone who had helped a KPD killer to escape end up working for the SD?”
“The same way that Burgess worked for MI5, I suppose. I was what they used to call a beefsteak Nazi: brown on the outside but red in the middle. Besides, I wasn’t the only Red working for the RSHA. Heinrich Müller—Gestapo Müller—he was a Red, too.”
“What were your duties in the SD?”
“Mostly I worked for General Reinhard Heydrich,” I said. “The so-called Protector of Bohemia. You might say I was a kind of troubleshooter. If I saw any trouble, I shot it.” I smiled at my own little joke. But no one else did.
“And when did you next see Comrade Mielke?”
“He helped me escape from that labor camp in nineteen forty-seven, which was when I did join the party and the Stasi. Yes, he and I—we’ve been looking out for each other for almost twenty-five years. My ex-wife has known him even longer than that because she helped to raise the young Mielke after hi
s real mother died. He’d do anything for Elisabeth, but the same is not true for me. He’s not my friend. You can’t be friends with a man like Comrade General Erich Mielke. He’d shoot me just as soon as have a beer with me. The same as Heydrich, really. Two chips off the same block of dirty ice.”
“Tell us about the tape,” said the monk. “Whose idea was that?”
“The tape was mostly Markus Wolf’s idea, I think. Unlike him, Mielke is not a man of great subtlety. More of a bully boy, really. A man of action. You want someone beaten up, intimidated, interrogated, killed, tossed into a labor camp, and forgotten, then Erich Mielke’s your man. He’s what you might call the blunt instrument of German Communism. But if you want an intellectually sharper approach to a problem, then you speak to Markus Wolf. Wolf’s the chess player. I met him only twice, in Berlin, before that business with the Americans in nineteen fifty-four, and we actually sat down and played a game together. He’s Jewish, and of course you know what they’re like. Scheming, clever, bookish—I swear he thinks everything out several moves ahead like a grandmaster. Brought up in Moscow, of course, where a lot of those German émigrés were weaned on chess and spying. Not for nothing is he known as ‘The Admiral’ around Stasi HQ in Karlshorst—after Canaris, of course, who was Hitler’s famous spymaster and whom I also met, but only once.”
By now I was lying so fluently I was starting to feel as if I might have missed my vocation. Maybe I could have been the German Somerset Maugham. Anne French must certainly have thought so, and, to me at least, she couldn’t have looked more uncomfortable knowing that mostly I was still agreeing with her entirely fictitious version of events. But like all good lies, this one had a reasonably substantial basis in fact. The best lies are always partly true.
“Anyway,” I continued, warming to my Münchhausen task, “Wolf had the bright idea of using Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to blackmail the British secret service almost as soon as they defected to the Soviet Union in nineteen fifty-one. But he needed Mielke to help him sell the whole idea to the GKO—the State Defense Committee—in Moscow. One thing you can say about Erich Mielke is that he’s a seasoned old party hand and knows his way around the Kremlin. Well enough to escape the big purge of nineteen thirty-seven, when a lot of those old German Communists were killed or sent to labor camps. Of course, Mielke was lucky enough to be out of the way in Spain then. He was a party commissar with the Republican faction.
