Field Gray

by Philip Kerr

  “The commissioner says you look much better,” said Oltramare. “And I must say, I agree.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Bömelburg. “Much better. Yesterday can’t have been easy for you, Gunther. All that traveling when you were clearly not yourself. It’s commendable that you wanted to come at all, under the circumstances. I shall certainly say so to Colonel Knochen when I make my report in Paris. What with the good news I just had from Commissioner Matignon, this is turning out to be a very good day. Don’t you agree, Kestner?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What good news is that?” I asked, smiling with Toulouse-colored optimism.

  “Why, that we’ve got the Jew who assassinated vom Rath,” said Bömelburg. “Grynszpan.” He chuckled. “Apparently, he knocked on the door of the prison here in Toulouse and asked to be let in.”

  Oltramare was laughing, too. He said, “Apparently he speaks very little French, had no money, and thought that we might be able to protect him against you fellows.”

  “The stupid kike,” muttered Kestner. “I’m on my way to the prison now. With the Commissioner and Monsieur Savigny. To organize Grynszpan’s extradition back to Paris and then Berlin.”

  “The Führer wants a trial, apparently,” said Bömelburg. “At all costs there must be a trial.”

  “In Berlin?” I tried not to sound surprised.

  “Why not in Berlin?” said Bömelburg.

  “It’s just that the murder took place in Paris,” I said. “And it was my understanding that Grynszpan’s not even a German citizen. He’s a Pole, isn’t he?” I smiled. “I’m sorry, sir, but sometimes it’s hard for me to stop being a cop and thinking about little things like jurisdiction.”

  Bömelburg wagged his finger at me. “You’re just doing your job, old fellow. But I know this case better than anyone. Before I joined the Gestapo I was with our foreign service in Paris, and I spent three months working on this case. For one thing, Poland is now a part of the Greater German Reich. As is France. And for another, the murder took place in the German Embassy here in Paris. Technically, diplomatically that was German soil. And that makes a big difference.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said meekly. “That does make a big difference.”

  Certainly, it had made a big difference to Germany’s Jews. Herschel Grynszpan’s murder of a junior official in the Paris embassy in November 1938 had been used as an excuse by the Nazis to launch a massive pogrom against Germany’s Jews. Until the night of November 10, 1938—Kristallnacht—it was almost possible to imagine that I still lived in a civilized country. The trial was certain to be the kind the Nazis liked: a show trial, with the verdict a foregone conclusion. But if Bömelburg was being honest, at least Grynszpan wasn’t about to be murdered by the roadside.

  Leaving Kestner, Matignon, and Savigny to go to the Prison St. Michel in Toulouse, Bömelburg and I, accompanied by six SS men, set off on the sixty-five-kilometer drive south to Le Vernet. Frau Kemmerich did not come with us, as it seemed her husband was after all in another French concentration camp at Moisdon-la-Rivière, in Brittany.

  Le Vernet was near Pamiers and the camp was a short way south of the local railway station, which Bömelburg described as “convenient.” There was a cemetery to the north of the camp, but he neglected to mention if that was convenient, too, although I was sure it would be: Le Vernet was even worse than Gurs. Surrounded by miles of barbed wire in an otherwise deserted patch of French countryside, the many huts looked like coffins laid out after some giant’s battle. They were in a deplorable state, as were the two thousand men who were imprisoned there, many of them emaciated and guarded by well-fed French gendarmes. The prisoners labored to build an inadequate road between the railway station and the cemetery. There were four roll calls a day, each of them lasting half an hour. We arrived just before the third, explained our mission to the French policeman in charge, and he handed us politely over to the care of a vile-looking officer who smelled strongly of aniseed, and his yellow-faced Corsican sergeant. They listened as Oltramare translated the details of our mission. Monsieur Aniseed nodded and led the way into the camp.

  Bömelburg and I followed, pistols in hand, as we had been warned that the men of hut 32, the “Leper Barrack,” were considered the most dangerous in Camp Le Vernet. Oltramare followed at a distance, also armed. And the three of us waited outside while several French gendarmes entered the pitch-black barrack and drove the occupants outside with whips and curses.

  These men were in a disgraceful condition—worse than at Gurs, and even worse than Dachau. Their ankles were swollen and their bellies distended from starvation. They wore cheap-looking galoshes on their feet and the same ragged clothing they’d probably been wearing since the winter of 1937 when they had fled the advance of Franco’s Nationalist Army. Some of them were half naked. They were all infested with vermin. They knew what was coming but were too beaten to sing “The Internationale” in defiance of our presence.

  It took several minutes for the barrack to empty and the men to line up again. Just when you thought the barrack couldn’t contain any more men, others came out until there were 350 of them paraded in front of us. The judgment line from purgatory to hell could not have looked more abject. And with every second I was confronted with their emaciated, unshaven faces, the more I wanted to shoot Monsieur Aniseed and his fat gendarmes.

  While the Corsican called the roll, Bömelburg checked his clipboard, looking for names that tallied; and while they did that I walked between their ranks, like the Kaiser come to hand out a few Iron Crosses to the bravest of the brave, looking to see if I could pick out a man I hadn’t seen in nine years. But I never saw him there, and I never heard his name called out. Not that I put much faith in a name. From everything I’d read about him in Heydrich’s file, Erich Mielke was too smart to have been arrested and interned using his real name. Bömelburg knew this, of course. But there were others who had not been possessed of the same presence of mind as the German Comintern agent; and as these few men were identified they were led away to the administration barracks by the gendarmes.

  “He’s not in this barrack,” I said finally.

  “The adjutant says there’s another all-German barrack in this section,” said Oltramare. “This one is all International Brigade and it would make sense for Mielke to keep away from them, especially now that Stalin has closed his doors to them.”

  The men from barrack 32 were driven back inside and we repeated the whole exercise with the men from barrack 33. According to the yellow-faced Corsican—he looked like a careless tanner—these were all communists who had fled from Hitler’s Germany only to find themselves interned as undesirable aliens when war was declared in September 1939. Consequently, these men were in rather better shape than their comrades from the International Brigades. That wouldn’t have been difficult.

  Once again, I walked up and down the lines of prisoners while Bömelburg and the Corsican called the roll. These faces were more defiant than the others and most of the men met my eye with unshifting hatred. Some were Jews, I thought. Others were more obviously Aryan. Once or twice I paused and stared levelly at a man, but I never identified any of the prisoners as Erich Mielke.

  Not even when I recognized him.

  As the Corsican finished the roll call, I walked back to Bömelburg’s side, shaking my head.

  “No luck?”

  “No. He’s not there.”

  “Are you sure? Some of these fellows are a shadow of their former selves. After six months in this place, I doubt my own wife would recognize me. Have another look, Captain.”

  “All right, sir.”

  And while I looked at the prisoners again, I made an announcement, for the sake of impressing Bömelburg.

  “Listen,” I said. “We’re looking for a man called Erich Fritz Emil Mielke. Perhaps you know him by a different name. I don’t care about his politics—he’s wanted for the murders of two Berlin policemen in 1931. I’m sure many of you read about it i
n the newspapers at the time. This man is thirty-three years old, fair-haired, medium height, brown eyes, Protestant, from Berlin. He attended the Kollnisches Gymnasium. Probably speaks Russian quite well, and a bit of Spanish. Maybe he’s good with his hands. His father is a woodworker.”

  All the time I was speaking I could feel Mielke looking at me, knowing I’d recognized him the way he’d recognized me and doubtless wondering why I didn’t arrest him straightaway and what the hell was going on. I holstered my pistol and took off my officer’s cap in the hope I might look a little less like a Nazi.

  “Gentlemen, I make you this promise. If any one of you identifies Erich Mielke to me now, I will personally speak to the camp commander with a view to organizing your release as soon as possible.”

  It was the kind of promise that a Nazi would have made. A shifting promise that no one would have trusted. I hoped so. Because after what had happened to the prisoners from Gurs in the forest near Lourdes, the last thing I wanted to do was help the Nazis arrest any more Germans, even a German who had murdered two policemen. I couldn’t do anything about the other men who were on Bömelburg’s list, but I was damned if I was going to finger any more Germans for Heydrich. Not now.

  Once again I met Erich Mielke’s eye. He didn’t look away, and I suppose he guessed what I was doing. He was older than I remembered him, of course. Broader and more powerful-looking, especially across the shoulders. He wore a light beard, but there was no mistaking the surly-looking mouth, the watchful ruthless eyes, or the coxcomb of unruly hair on top of his largish head. He must have thought I was a beefsteak Nazi: brown on the outside, red on the inside. But he couldn’t have been more wrong. The murders of Anlauf and Lenck had been just about the most cowardly I’d ever seen, and nothing would have pleased me more than to have snapped him for it and for the Berlin courts to have sent him for a permanent haircut; but as much as I disliked him now, I disliked the casual, instinctive brutality of the Nazi police state even more. I almost wanted to tell him that but for the murders of eight men on a country road the day before he’d have been on his way to a date with a man wearing white gloves and a top hat.

  I turned away and walked back to Bömelburg with a shrug.

  “It was worth a shot,” he said.

  Neither of us expected what happened next.

  “I don’t know an Erich Mielke,” said a voice.

  The man was small and Jewish-looking, with short, dark, curly hair and shifty brown eyes. A lawyer’s face, which could have been why there was a large bruise on his cheek.

  “I don’t know an Erich Mielke,” he repeated, now that he had our attention, “but I would like to become a Nazi.”

  Some of the other prisoners laughed, some whistled, but the man kept going.

  “I was arrested by the French because I was a German communist,” he said. “I wasn’t an enemy of France then, but I am now. It’s true, I really hate and despise these people worse than I used to hate the Nazis. I spend all day moving latrine bins, and for the rest of my life I’m forever going to associate France with the smell of shit.”

  The Corsican’s eyes narrowed and he moved toward the man with his whip raised.

  “No,” said Bömelburg. “Let the fellow speak.”

  “I’m glad France was defeated,” said the prisoner. “And since I’m declaring myself to be an enemy of France, I’d also like to join the German army and become a loyal soldier of the fatherland and a follower of Adolf Hitler. Who knows? I know the war’s over, but I might just get the chance to shoot a Franzi, which would really make me very happy.”

  His fellow prisoners started to jeer, but I could see that Major Bömelburg was impressed.

  “So, if you don’t mind, sir, when you leave this shit hole, I’d like to come with you.”

  Bömelburg smiled. “Well,” he said. “I think you’d better.”

  And he did. But it said a lot about the rest of the Germans in barrack 33 that there was no one else who followed his example. Not one.

  21

  GERMANY, 1954

  Jesus Christ, Gunther,” exclaimed one of my American interrogators. “Are you trying to tell us that you had that communist bastard Mielke in your power and you let him go?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “What, are you crazy? That’s twice you saved his bacon. Did you ever think about that? Jesus.”

  “Of course I thought about it.”

  “I mean, didn’t you ever regret that?”

  “I don’t think I could have made myself clear,” I said. “Even while I was doing it, even while I was pretending I didn’t recognize him, I regretted it. Captain Anlauf’s murder left three orphaned daughters. You see, what you’ve got to remember is that for a while back there, in the dog days of Weimar, the communists were every bit as loathsome as the Nazis. Maybe more so. After all, it was the Comintern that ordered the German Communist Party to treat the country’s governing SPD as the main enemy, not the Nazis. Can you imagine it? In the Red Referendum of July 1931, the KPD and the Nazis marched together and voted together. That was the nonaggression pact in miniature. I always hated them for that. It was the Reds who really destroyed the Republic, not the Nazis.” I helped myself to another of the Ami’s cigarettes. “And if that wasn’t enough, there’s my own experience of Soviet hospitality to take into account as well. For why I hate the communists.”

  “Well, we all hate the Reds,” said the man with the pipe.

  “No. You hate the Reds because you’ve been told to hate them. But for five years they were your Allies. Roosevelt and Truman shook hands with Stalin and pretended he was different from Hitler. Which he wasn’t. I hate the Reds because I’ve learned to hate them the way a dog learns to hate the man who beats it regularly. During Weimar. During the war. On the Russian front. But most of the reason I hate them is because I spent almost two years in a Soviet labor camp. And until I met you boys I thought that was about as much hate as I could have for any one race of people.”

  “We’re not so bad.” The man with the pipe took it out of his mouth and started to refill it. “When you get to know us.”

  “You can get used to anything, it’s true,” I said.

  The man with the glasses tutted loudly. By now I vaguely recognized him from seven years earlier, at the Stiftskaserne hospital in Vienna.

  “After all the trouble we had getting you this exclusive suite,” he said. He started to clean his glasses with the end of his tie. “I’m hurt.”

  “When you’re done cleaning your glasses,” I said, “the windows in here could use a wipe, too. I’m particular about windows. Particularly when I know who’s been breathing on them. There’s nothing about this cell I like, now that I know who was in here last.”

  The man with the pipe was finally lighting up. Hitler would have hated his pipe. It looked as if I’d found one reason at last to like Adolf Hitler.

  The Ami sucked at the stem, blew out some sweet smoke, and said, “I watched an old newsreel the other day. Of Hitler making a speech at Tempelhof Field in Berlin. There were one million people that day. Apparently, it took twelve hours just to get everyone in there, and another twelve to get them all out again. I guess you were the only Berliner who stayed home that night.”

  “Berlin nightlife was much better before the Nazis,” I said.

  “That’s what I hear. People say it was quite something. Degenerate but lively. All those clubs. Striptease dancers. Naked ladies. Open homosexuality. What were you people thinking? I mean, no wonder the Nazis got an in.” He shook his head. “On the other hand. Munich’s kind of dull, I think.”

  “It has some advantages,” I said. “There are no Ivans in Munich.”

  “Is that why you lived there after you were in that POW camp? Instead of Berlin?”

  “One reason, I suppose.”

  “You were in and out of that camp relatively quickly.” He had finished cleaning his glasses and put them back on his head. They were still too small for him, and I wondered i
f American heads were like American stomachs and kept on growing faster than those in Europe. “In comparison with a lot of other guys. I mean, some of your old comrades are only just coming home now.”

  “I was lucky,” I said. “I escaped.”

  “How?”

  “Mielke was involved.”

  “Then we’ll pick it up there tomorrow, shall we? In here. Ten o’clock.”

  “You’d better clear that with my secretary,” I said. “Tomorrow’s the day when I start writing my book.”

  “What did I tell you? You know, this is a great room for a writer. Maybe the spirit of Adolf Hitler will come and help you out with a few pages.”

  “Seriously, though,” said the other Ami. “If you need pen and paper to make a few notes about Mielke, just ask the guard. Might help to jog your memory if you wrote a few things down.”

  “Why now? Why not before?”

  “Because things are starting to become more important. Mielke starts to become more important. So the more details you can remember, the better.”

  “I know one spirit that might help a lot,” I said. “And it isn’t Hitler’s.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m a little bit like Goethe,” I said. “When I’m writing a book, I find that a bottle of good German brandy usually helps.”

  “Is there such a thing as a good German brandy?”

  “I’ll settle for some cheap vodka, only a man needs a hobby when he’s got his feet in the cement. Something to take his mind off the present and put it somewhere in the past. About seven years ago, to be more accurate.”

  “All right,” said the man with the glasses. “We’ll get you a bottle of something.”

  “And I would like to catch up on my smoking. I’d given up until I left Cuba. Since I met you I’ve got a much better reason to kill myself.”