Field Gray

by Philip Kerr

  “Perhaps you were in Bülowplatz yourself last night.” While I spoke, I turned the pages of the book.

  He shook his head. “Me? No. I was here all night.”

  “Are you sure? After all, there were several hundred of your comrades there, including your son. Maybe as many as a thousand. Surely you wouldn’t have missed something as fun-packed as that?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I stayed at home. I always stay at home on a Sunday night.”

  “Are you religious?” I said. “You don’t look religious.”

  “On account of the fact that I have to go to work in”—he nodded at the little wooden clock on the tiled mantelpiece—“yes, in just two hours from now.”

  “Any witnesses that you were here all night?”

  “The Geislers, next door.”

  “Is this your book?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought it was your taste,” he said.

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “I hear the Nazis want to ban it.”

  “Maybe they do. But I’m not a Nazi. And neither is the police counselor, here.”

  “All cops are Nazis in my book.”

  “Yes, but this isn’t it. I mean your book.” I turned the page and removed the Ringbahn ticket that was marking the reader’s place. “This ticket says you’re lying.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This ticket is for Gesundbrunnen Station, just a few minutes’ walk from here. It was bought at Schönhauser Tor at eight-twenty this evening, which is about twenty minutes after two policemen were murdered on Bülowplatz. That’s less than a hundred meters from the station at Schönhauser Tor. Which puts the owner of this book in the thick of it.”

  “I’m not saying anything.”

  “Herr Mielke,” said Heller, “you’re in enough trouble as it is without putting the brakes on your mouth.”

  “You won’t catch him,” he said defiantly. “Not now. If I know my Erich, he’s already halfway to Moscow.”

  “Not nearly halfway,” I said. “And not Moscow, either, I’ll bet. Not if you say so. That means it has to be Leningrad. Which in itself means he’s probably traveling by boat. So the chances are he’ll be heading to one of two German ports. Hamburg or Rostock. Rostock’s nearer, so he’ll probably figure to second-guess us and head for Hamburg. Which is what? Two hundred and fifty kilometers? They might be there by now if they left before midnight. My guess is that Erich’s probably on the Grasbrook or Sandtor Dock at this very moment, sneaking onto a Russian freighter and boasting about how he shot a fascist policeman in the back. They’ll probably give the little coward an Order of Lenin for bravery.”

  Some of this must have touched a nerve in Mielke’s changeling body. One minute his beer-swilling troll’s face was in ugly repose; the next the jaw had advanced belligerently and, growling abuse, he took a swing at me. Fortunately, I was half expecting it and I was already leaning back when it connected, but it still felt like I got hit by a sandbag. Feeling sick, I sat down hard on a soft chair. For a moment I had a new way of seeing the world, but it had nothing to do with Berlin’s avant-garde. Mielke senior was grinning now, his mouth a gap-toothed, moon-gnawing rictus, his big trench mace of a fist already heading Heller’s way; and when its orbit around Mielke’s body was complete it crashed into the surface of Heller’s skull like an asteroid, sending the police counselor sprawling onto the floor, where he groaned and lay still.

  I got to my feet again. “I’m going to enjoy this, you ugly commie bastard.”

  Mielke senior turned just in time to meet my fist coming the other way. The blow rocked the big head on his meaty shoulders like a sudden bad smell in his nostrils, and as he took a step backward, I hit him again with a right that descended on the side of his head like a Borotra first service. That lifted his legs off the ground like a plane’s undercarriage, and for a split second he actually seemed to fly through the air before landing on his knees. As he rolled onto his side I twisted one arm behind them, then the other, and managed to hold them long enough for a groggy-looking Heller to get the irons on his wrists. Then I stood up and kicked him hard, because I wasn’t able to kick his son and because I was wishing I hadn’t saved the young man’s neck. I might have kicked him again, but Heller stopped me and, but for the fact that he was a counselor and I was still feeling sick, I might have kicked him, too.

  “Gunther,” he yelled. “That’s enough.” He let out a gasp and leaned heavily against a wall while he tried to recover all of his wits.

  I shifted my jaw; my head felt larger on one side than the other and there was something singing in my ears, only it wasn’t a kettle.

  “With all due respect, sir,” I said, “it’s not nearly enough.”

  And then I kicked Mielke again before I staggered out of the apartment and onto the landing and, a minute or two later, puked over the banister.

  13

  GERMANY, 1954

  I stopped talking. My throat felt tight, but not as tight as the handcuffs.

  “Is that all there is?” demanded one of the two Amis.

  “There’s more,” I said. “A lot more. But I can’t feel my hands. And I need to use the lavatory.”

  “You saw Erich Mielke again.”

  “Several times. The last time was 1946, when I was a POW in Russia. You see, Mielke was—”

  “No, no. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We want everything in the correct order of appearance. That’s the German way, isn’t it?”

  “If you say so.”

  “All right, then. You went to his home. You had a police witness. You found the murder weapons in the drain. I take it those were the murder weapons?”

  “A long-barreled Luger and a Dreyse .32. That was the standard police automatic back then. Yes, they were the murder weapons. Look, I really do need a rest. I can’t feel my hands—”

  “Yes, you said that already.”

  “I’m not asking for apple pie and ice cream, just a pair of handcuffs off. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

  “After what you just told us? About kicking Mielke’s father when he was handcuffed and lying on the floor? That wasn’t very fair of you, Gunther.”

  “He had it ordered, on room service. You hit a cop, you get trouble. I didn’t hit you, did I?”

  “Not yet.”

  “With these hands? I couldn’t hit my own knees.” I yawned inside the hood. “No, really, that’s it. I’ve had enough of this. Now that I know what you want, that makes it easier for me keep my peep. Regardless of the legalities or illegalities of this situation—”

  “You are in a place where there is no law. We are the law. You want to piss yourself, then go ahead and make yourself comfortable. Then see what happens to you.”

  “I’m beginning to understand—”

  “I sure hope so, for your sake.”

  “You enjoy playing Gestapo. It’s a little bit of a kick for you, doing it their way, isn’t it? Secretly, you probably admire them and the way they went about extracting teeth and information.”

  They came close to me now, raising their voices beyond what was comfortable to hear.

  “Fuck you, Gunther.”

  “You hurt our feelings with that remark about the Gestapo.”

  “I take it back. You’re much worse than the Gestapo. They didn’t pretend they were defending the free world. It’s your hypocrisy that’s offensive, not your brutality. You’re the worst kind of fascists. The kind that think they’re liberals.”

  One of them started knocking at my head with the knuckle on his finger; it wasn’t painful so much as annoying.

  “When are you going to get it into that fucking square head of yours—”

  “You’re right. I still don’t understand why you’re doing this when I’m perfectly willing to cooperate.”

  “You’re not meant to understand. When are you going to understand that, asshole? We want more than your willingness to
cooperate. That implies you have some choice in the matter. When you don’t. It’s up to us to assess your level of cooperation, not you.”

  “We want to know that when you’re telling us the truth there’s absolutely no question it could ever be anything else. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Which means that we’ll decide when you need a rest, when you need to go to the lavatory, when you see the light of day. When you breathe and when you fart. So. Tell us some more about Erich Mielke. Did he go to Hamburg or Rostock?”

  “With Mielke senior safely in custody, myself and another detective caught the first train to Hamburg.”

  “Why you? Why not someone else? Why were you so central to the investigation? Why not leave it to the Hamburg police?”

  “I should have thought that was obvious. Or maybe you just weren’t listening, Yank. I’d met Erich Mielke. I knew what he looked like, remember? Besides, I had a personal stake in seeing him arrested. I saved his life. Of course, the Hamburg police were alerted to pick up Ziemer and Mielke. The trouble was someone inside the Alex had tipped them off, and by the time Kestner and I reached Hamburg—”

  “Kestner?”

  “Yes. He was with the political police. A detective sergeant. We were old friends, Kestner and I. Later on, when the Nazis won the election of March 1933, he joined the party. Lots of people did. The March violets or March fallen, we called them. Anyway, that was when we stopped being friends, he and I.

  “Later on, I learned that Mielke and Ziemer had been taken to Antwerp by agents of the Comintern. There they were given false passports and, posing as crew members, they were put on a ship to Leningrad. From there they were taken to Moscow for training in the OGPU—Stalin’s secret police.”

  “So there were communists as well as Nazis in the Berlin police.”

  “Yes. Eldor Borck—a retired police major I was friendly with—he estimated that as many as ten percent of the Berlin police sympathized with the Bolsheviks. But there were never the Red Schupo cells that the Nazis claimed existed. Most police were natural conservatives. Instinctive fascists rather than ideological ones. Anyway, Ziemer and Mielke spent the next five years in Russia.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ll come to that. Of course, even though we didn’t have the perpetrators of the murders of Anlauf and Lenck in custody, the Nazis were not about to allow a little fact like that stop them from making an example of people. There was a lot of propaganda value in making arrests and securing convictions.”

  “Of other commies?”

  “Of course of other commies. And it can’t be denied that Ziemer and Mielke did not act alone. Indeed, there was a strong case for believing that the whole riot on Bülowplatz had been engineered for the purpose of luring Anlauf and Sergeant Willig into a trap. As I said before, those two were really hated by the communists. Lenck was an accident, more or less. In the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “Soon after I left the police to go and work at the Adlon hotel, an arrest was made. Fellow called Max Thunert. Very probably they put a bag over his head and persuaded him to name names. And name names he did. Fifteen men went to trial in June 1933, among them several prominent communists. Who knows? Maybe some of them had put Mielke and Ziemer up to the killing after all.

  “Four received a death sentence. Eleven were sent to a concentration camp. But it was another two years before three of those death sentences were actually carried out. That was typical of the Nazis. To keep a man waiting for years before they executed him. I expect the Nazis could still teach you Ami bastards something about cruelty. It was in all the newspapers, of course. May 1935? I can’t recall their names, the ones who went to the falling ax. But I often wondered how Mielke and Ziemer, safe in Moscow, felt about it. How much they were told. Oddly enough, it was the same month, May 1935, when Stalin decided that some of the many German and Italian communists who’d fled to Moscow after Hitler and Mussolini came to power could no longer be trusted. European communism was always too heterogeneous for Stalin’s taste. Too many factions. Too many Trotskyites. I suspect that Mielke and Ziemer were more worried about what might happen to them than what was already happening to old comrades like Max Matern. Yes, I remember now. He was one who went to the guillotine.

  “Most of the German communists in Moscow were lodged at a Comintern hotel called the Hotel Lux. There was a purge, and some of the more prominent German communists—Kippenberger, Neumann, ironically the very men who’d ordered the murders of Anlauf and Lenck—they were all shot. Kippenberger’s wife was packed off to a Soviet labor camp and never seen again. Neumann’s wife also went to a labor camp, but I think she survived. At least she did until Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1939, at which point she was handed over to the Gestapo. I’ve no idea what happened to her after that.”

  “You’re very well-informed. How come you know so much about this, Gunther? Mielke. The whole damned crew of German commies.”

  “For a while he was my beer,” I said. “How do you say it? My pigeon. Up to 1946, there’s not much I don’t know about Erich Mielke.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I hadn’t really given him a thought until the lawyer from the Office of the Chief Counsel used the name. To be honest, I wish I’d never heard it.”

  “But you did. So here you are.”

  “The last time I saw him, he was—he was working for the OGPU after it became the MVD. That was seven years ago.”

  “Have you heard of the East German Secretariat for State Security?”

  “No.”

  “Some Germans already call it the Stasi. Your friend Erich is the deputy chief of State Security. A secret policeman and probably one of the three most important men in the East German security apparatus, if not the whole country.”

  “He’s survived Stalin, Beria, he even survived the downfall of Wilhelm Zaisser after last year’s workers’ uprising in Berlin. Survival is your friend Mielke’s specialty.”

  “I think I’m going to faint,” I said.

  “The Allied Control Commission made an attempt to arrest him in February 1947, but the Russians were never going to let that happen.”

  I had stopped listening. I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. Only, that wasn’t quite right. There wasn’t anything to listen to unless you counted the singing in my ears from when Erich Mielke’s father had hit me twenty-three years ago. Only, that wasn’t it either. Something cold and heavy was lying on the side of my head, and it was a moment or two before I realized it was the floor. The numbness in my hands was spreading through my whole body like embalming fluid. The hood over my head grew thicker and tightened, as if there were a hangman’s noose around my neck. It was difficult to breathe, but I didn’t care. Not anymore. I opened the bag and climbed inside. Then someone threw the bag off a bridge. I felt myself drop through the air for twenty-three years. By the time I landed, I had forgotten who and what and where I was.

  14

  GERMANY, 1954

  I felt myself being carried. Then I fainted again. When I came to again, I was lying facedown on a bed and they had removed the manacles from one of my wrists and I could almost feel my hands again. Then they lifted me up and let me stand for a minute. I was thirsty, but I didn’t ask for water. I just stood there waiting to be shouted at or struck on the head, so that I flinched a little when I felt a blanket on my shoulders and a chair behind my bare legs; and as I sat down again a hand held on to the bag, pulling it off my head.

  I found myself in a larger, more comfortably appointed cell than my own. There was a table with a little sill around the edge that might have stopped a pencil from rolling onto the floor and not much else, and on it a small potted plant that was dead. On the wall above me was a mark where a picture had been hanging, and in front of the double window—which was barred—was a washstand with a jug and a porcelain washbasin.

  There were two men in that room with me, and neither one of them looked much like a tortu
rer. They were wearing double-breasted suits and silk ties. One of them had a pair of horn-rimmed glasses on his nose and the other had a cherrywood pipe clamped, unlit, between his teeth. The one wearing the pipe in his face picked up the water jug and poured some water into a dusty-looking glass and handed it to me. I wanted to throw the water in his face, but instead I tossed it down my throat. The one with the glasses lit a cigarette and threaded it between my lips. I sucked at the smoke like mother’s milk.

  “Was it something I said?” I grinned feebly.

  Out of the first-floor window was a view of the garden and the conical roof of a little white tower in the prison wall. As far as I knew, it wasn’t a view that any red jacket in Landsberg was accustomed to seeing. Blinking against the sun streaming in through the window and the smoke streaming into my eye, I rubbed my chin wearily and took the cigarette from my mouth.

  “Maybe,” said the man with the pipe. There was a mustache on his upper lip that matched the size and shape of his little blue bow tie. He had more chin than would have made him handsome, and while it wasn’t exactly Charles V, there were some, myself included, who would have grown a short beard on it to make it seem smaller, perhaps. But in my eyes leprosy would have looked a lot better on him.

  The door opened. No keys were required to open this cell. The door just swung open and a guard came in carrying some clothes, followed by another guard bearing a tray with coffee and a hot meal. I didn’t much like the clothes, since these were the ones I’d been wearing the previous day, but the coffee and the food smelled like they’d been prepared in Kempinski’s. I started to eat before they changed their minds. When you’re hungry, clothes don’t seem that important. I didn’t use the knife and fork, because I couldn’t yet hold them properly. So I ate with my fingers, wiping them on my thighs and backside. I certainly wasn’t about to worry about my table manners. Immediately, I started to feel better. It’s amazing how good even an American cup of coffee can taste when you’re hungry.