by Philip Kerr
The flight to Berlin from Frankfurt aboard a DC-7 took just under an hour. Traveling with me were Scheuer, Frei, and a third man—the man with the heavy-framed glasses who had kidnapped me in Göttingen; his name was Hamer. A black Mercedes was waiting for us in front of the airport building at Tempelhof. As we drove away, Scheuer pointed out the monument to the Berlin airlift of 1948 that occupied the center of Eagle Square. Made of concrete and taller than the airport building itself, the monument was supposed to represent the three air corridors that were used to fly in supplies during the Soviet blockade. It looked more like the statue of a comic-book ghost, arms raised, leaning over to scare someone. And as I glanced back at the airport, I was rather more interested in the fate of the Nazi eagle that surmounted the center wall of the airport building. There could be no doubt about it: The eagle had been Americanized. Someone had painted its head white so that now it looked more like an American bald eagle.
We drove west, through the American sector, which was clean and prosperous-looking, with lots of plate-glass shop windows and garish new movie houses showing the latest Hollywood movies: Rear Window, On the Waterfront, and Dial M for Murder. Ihnestrasse, close to the university and the new Henry Ford Building, looked much the same as it had before the war. Lots of chestnut trees and well-kept gardens. The American flags were new, of course. There was a large one on the flagpole in front of the American Officers’ Club at Harnack House—formerly the guest quarters of the famous Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Scheuer told me proudly that the club had a restaurant, a beauty parlor, a barbershop, and a newsstand and promised to take me there. But somehow I didn’t think the Kaiser would have approved: He was never very fond of Americans.
We stayed in a villa farther down the street from the club. From my dormer window at the back you could see a small lake. The only sounds were the birds in the trees and the bicycle bells of students going to and from the Free University of Berlin like little couriers of hope for a city I was finding it hard to love again, in spite of the instant service that came with my room in the shape of an obsequious valet in a white mess jacket who offered to bring me coffee and a donut. I declined both and asked for a bottle of schnapps and some cigarettes. Worst of all was the music: hidden speakers playing some honey-voiced female singer who seemed to follow me from the dining room, through the hall, and into the library. It wasn’t particularly loud or obtrusive, but it was there when it didn’t need to be. I asked the valet about it. His name was George and he told me that the singer was Ella Fitzgerald, as if that made it okay.
The furniture looked like it was original to the house, so that was all right, although the water cooler in the library seemed somehow out of place, as did the periodic eructations of air that passed through the water like an enormous belch. It sounded like my own conscience.
The Am Steinplatz restaurant was at 197 Uhlandstrasse, southwest of the Tiergarten, and dated from before the war. The dilapidated exterior of the building belied a restaurant that was good enough to warrant inclusion in the U.S. Army’s Berlin booklet, which meant that the place was popular with American officers and their German girlfriends. There was a bar with a dining room serving a mixture of American and Berlin favorites. The four of us—me and the three Amis—occupied a table window in the dining room. The waitress wore glasses and wore her hair shorter than seemed right, as if it had yet to grow back after some personal disaster. She was German, but she spoke English first, as if she knew that there were few Berliners who could have afforded the prices on the extensive menu. We ordered wine and lunch. The place was still more or less empty, so we knew Erich Stellmacher wasn’t yet there. But it quickly filled up until there was only one table left.
“He probably won’t come,” said Frei. “Not this time. That’s always been my experience of stakeouts. The target never comes the first time.”
“Let’s hope you’re not wrong,” said Hamer. “The food in here’s so damn good I want to come back. Several times.”
Rain hit the steamed-up window of the restaurant. A cork popped from a bottle of wine. The officers at the next table laughed loudly, like men who were used to laughing in wide-open spaces, possibly on horseback, but never in small Berlin restaurants. They even clinked their glasses with more panache and noise than was properly required. In the kitchen someone shouted that an order was ready. I looked at Scheuer’s watch—my own was still in a paper bag back at Landsberg. It was one-thirty.
“Maybe I’ll check the bar,” I said.
“Good idea,” said Scheuer.
“Give me some money for cigarettes,” I told him. “For appearance’s sake.”
I went through to the bar, bought some English cigarettes from the barman, and glanced around while he found me a light. Some men were playing dominoes in a snug little alcove. A dog was lying on the floor beside them, its tail wagging periodically. An old man sat in a corner nursing a beer and reading the previous day’s edition of Die Zeit. I took a quick schnapps with the change, lit my cigarette, and went back into the restaurant as a coffee machine howled like an arctic wind. I sat down, stubbed out the cigarette, sawed off a corner of my uneaten schnitzel, and said:
“He’s in there.”
“My God,” said Frei. “I don’t believe it.”
“Are you sure?” asked Hamer.
“I never forget a man who’s punched me.”
“You don’t think he recognized you?” said Scheuer.
“No,” I said. “He’s wearing reading glasses. And there’s another pair in his top pocket. My guess is he’s long in one eye and short in the other.”
A Bavarian-looking wall clock struck the half hour. At the next table, one of the Americans pushed his chair away with the backs of his legs. On the hard wooden floor of the restaurant it sounded like a drumroll.
“So what happens now?” asked Hamer.
“We stick to the plan,” said Scheuer. “Gunther will follow him and we’ll follow Gunther. He knows this city better than any of us.”
“I’ll need more money,” I said. “For the U-Bahn or a tram. And if I lose you, I might have to get a taxi back to Ihnestrasse.”
“You won’t lose us.” Hamer smiled confidently.
“All the same,” said Scheuer. “He’s right.” He handed me some notes and some small change.
I stood up.
“Are you going to sit in the bar?” asked Frei.
“No. Not unless I want him to recognize me later. I’m going to stand outside and wait for him there.”
“In the rain?”
“That’s the general idea. You’d best stay out of the bar. We wouldn’t want him to feel like he was of any interest to anyone.”
“Here,” said Frei. “You can borrow my hat.”
I tried it on. The hat was too big, so I handed it back to him. “Keep it,” I said. “I’ll stand in a doorway on the opposite side of the road and watch from there.”
Scheuer cleaned a patch of condensation from the window. “And we’ll watch you from here.”
Hamer looked at my half-eaten food. “You Germans eat too much anyway,” he observed.
Ignoring him, I said, “I follow him. Not you. If you think I’ve lost him, don’t panic. Just keep your distance. And don’t try to find him again for me. I know what I’m doing. Try to remember that. I used to do this kind of thing for a living. If he goes in another building, then wait outside, don’t follow me in. He might have friends looking out of a window.”
“Good luck,” said Scheuer.
“Good luck to us all,” I said, and drained the contents of my wineglass. Then I went outside.
For the first time in a while, I felt a spring in my step. Things were starting to work out nicely. I didn’t mind the rain in the least. It felt good on my face. Refreshing. I took up a position in the doorway of the soot-blackened building opposite. A cold doorway. A policeman’s true station, and blowing on my fingernails for want of gloves, I settled in against the inside wall. Once, a long time ago, I’d
lived not fifty or sixty meters from where I was standing, in an apartment on Fasanenstrasse. The long, hot summer of 1938, when the whole of Europe breathed a collective sigh of relief because the threat of war had been averted. So we had thought, anyway. When Henry Ford had finished saying history is bunk, he also said that most of us preferred to live in the present and not to think about the past. Or words to that effect. But in Berlin the past was rather harder to avoid.
A man came down the stairs of the building and asked me for a cigarette. I gave him one and for a moment or two we talked, but all the time I kept one eye on the two doors of the Am Steinplatz. At the opposite end of Uhlandstrasse, near the eponymous square, was a hotel called the Steinplatz. The two establishments were owned by the same people; to the confusion of all Americans, they even shared the same telephone number. The confusion of all Americans was just fine by me.
It stopped raining and the sun came out, and a few minutes later so did my quarry. He paused, looked up at the clearing sky, and lit a pipe, which was my chance to get another good look at him.
He was wearing an old loden coat and a hat with a goose feather in the silk band, and you could hear the nails in his shoes from the other side of the street. He was stout and balding and wore a different pair of glasses now. There was, without a doubt, a strong resemblance to Erich Mielke. He was about the same height, too. He checked his fly as if he’d been to the lavatory and walked south toward Kant Strasse. After a decent interval, I followed with one hand on my little knight’s head.
I felt even better now that I was walking alone. Well, almost alone. I glanced around and saw two of them—Frei and Hamer—about thirty meters behind me, on opposite sides of the street. I couldn’t see Scheuer and decided he’d probably gone to fetch the car so that they wouldn’t have to walk when, eventually, we tracked our man to his lair. Americans didn’t like walking any more than they cared to miss a meal. Since I’d started to spend some time with them I had observed that the average American—supposing that these men were average Americans—eats about twice as much as the average German. Every day.
On Kant Strasse the man turned right toward Savigny Platz; then, near the S-Bahn, a train pulled into the elevated station above his head and he broke into a trot. So did I, and I only just managed to buy a ticket and board the train before the doors closed and we were on our way, northeast, toward Old Moabit. Hamer and Frei weren’t so lucky, and just as the train pulled out I glimpsed them running up the stairs of Savigny Platz Station. I might have smiled at them, too, if what I was doing hadn’t felt so vital to my own future and fortune.
I sat down and stared straight ahead and out of the window. All of the old police training was kicking in again: the way to follow a man without making yourself obvious. Mostly, it was about keeping your distance and learning how to tail a man who was behind you as often as he was in front of you—or, as now, in the adjoining carriage. I could see him through the connecting window, still reading his newspaper. That made it easier for me, of course. And the thought that I was well on top of it made the discomfiture that was very likely being experienced by the Amis all the more enjoyable. Scheuer I almost liked, but Hamer and Frei were a different matter. I especially disliked Hamer, if only because of his arrogance and because he seemed to have a real dislike of Germans. Well, we were used to that. But it was still annoying.
Without moving my head, I rolled my eyes to one side like a ventriloquist’s dummy. We were coming into Zoo Station, and I was watching the newspaper in the next carriage to see if it got folded away, but it stayed erect and remained that way through the stations at Tiergarten and Bellevue; but at Lehrter it finally came down and the reader stood up to disembark.
He went down the steps and walked north, with Humboldt Harbor on his right. Several canal boats moored together in one large flotilla shifted gently on the steel-blue water of the British sector. On the other side of the same harbor was the Charité Hospital and the Russian sector. In the distance, East German or possibly Russian border guards manned a checkpoint on the junction of Invalidenstrasse and the Canal. But we were walking north, up Heide Strasse, until we came to the French sector, where we turned right along Fenn Strasse and onto the triangular Wedding Platz. I paused for a moment to take in the ruins of the Dankes Church, where I had married my first wife, and then caught a last glimpse of my man as finally he went to ground in a tall building on the southern Schulzendorfer Strasse, overlooking the old disused brewery.
There was little or no traffic on the square. Almost as bankrupt as the British, the French had little money to spend regenerating German business in the area, let alone for the restoration of a church that had been built in thanksgiving for the delivery of their ancient mortal enemy, Kaiser Wilhelm I, from an attempt made on his life in 1878.
I approached the building on the corner of Schulzendorfer Strasse and glanced down Chaussee Strasse. Here the border crossing point, on Liesen Strasse, was very close and probably just the other side of the brewery wall. I looked at the names on the brass bellpulls and figured that Erich Stahl was close enough to Eric Stellmacher for our clandestine operation now to proceed as planned.
38
BERLIN, 1954
We moved to a small and very crummy safe house on Dreyse Strasse, east of Moabit Hospital, in the British zone, which, Scheuer said, was as close to Stallmacher’s apartment as we dared to get for the moment without tipping our hand to the Russians or, for that matter, the French. The British were told only that we were keeping a suspected black marketeer under surveillance.
The plan was simple: that I, being a Berliner, would contact the owner of the building on Schulzendorfer Strasse and offer to rent one of several empty apartments using my wife’s maiden name. The owner, a retired lawyer from Wilmersdorf, showed me around the apartment—which he’d furnished himself—and it was much better on the inside than it looked from the outside. He explained that the building had been owned and administered by his wife, Martha, until she had been killed by a bomb the previous year while visiting her mother’s grave in Oranienburg.
“They said she never knew a thing,” said Herr Schurz. “A two-hundred-and-fifty-kilogram American aerial bomb had lain there for almost ten years without anyone noticing. A grave digger twenty meters away was digging, and he must have hit the thing with his pickax.”
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“They say Oranienburg is full of unexploded ordnance. The soil is soft there, you see, with a hard layer of gravel underneath. The bombs would penetrate the earth but not the gravel.” He shrugged and then shook his head. “Apparently, there were a lot of targets in Oranienburg.”
I nodded. “The Heinkel factory. And a pharmaceutical plant. Not to mention a suspected atomic bomb research plant.”
“Are you married, Herr Handlöser?”
“No, my wife also is dead. She got pneumonia. But she’d been ill for a while, so it wasn’t as unexpected as what happened to your wife.”
I went to the window and looked down onto the street.
“This is a big apartment for someone living by himself,” said Schurz.
“I’m planning to take in a couple of tenants to help me with the rent,” I said. “If that’s all right with you. Some gentlemen from an American Bible school.”
“I’m pleased to hear it,” said Schurz. “That’s what the whole French sector needs now. More Americans. They’re the only ones with any money. Talking of which.”
I counted some banknotes into his eager hand. He gave me a set of keys, and then I returned to the safe house on Dreyse Strasse.
“As far as the landlord is concerned,” I said, “we can move in tomorrow.”
“You said nothing to him about Stahl or Stellmacher,” said Scheuer.
“I did exactly as you told me. I didn’t even ask about the neighbors. So what happens now?”
“We move in and keep the place under close surveillance,” said Scheuer. “Wait for Erich Mielke to visit his dad and th
en go upstairs to introduce ourselves.”
Frei laughed. “Hello, we’re your new neighbors. Can we interest you in defecting to the West? You and your old man.”
“What happened to the idea of making him into your spy?”
“Not enough leverage. Our political masters want to know what the East German leadership is thinking now, not what they’re thinking in a year’s time. So we grab him and take him back to the States to debrief him.”
“You’re forgetting Mielke’s wife, Gertrud, aren’t you? And doesn’t he have a son now? Frank? He won’t want to leave them, surely.”
“We’re not forgetting them at all,” said Scheuer. “But I rather think that Erich will. From everything we know about him, he’s not the sentimental sort. Besides, he can always apply for them to come to the West as well. And it’s not like there’s a wall that’s stopping them from coming.”
“And if he doesn’t want to defect?”
“Well, then that’s too bad.”
“You’ll kidnap him?”
“That’s not a word we use,” said Scheuer. “The U.S. Constitution permits public policy exceptions to the normal legal process of extradition. But I doubt any of this is going to matter. As soon as he sees the four of us, he’ll know the game is up and that he has no choice in the matter.”
“And when you do take him back? What then?”
Scheuer grinned. “I don’t even want to think about that until we’ve got him, Gunther. Mielke’s the great white whale for the CIA in Germany. We land him, we get enough oil to burn in our lamps to see what we’re doing in this country for years to come. The Stasi might never recover from a blow like this. It could even help us to win the Cold War.”