by Philip Kerr
“Well, for the sake of argument, let’s just say it was you,” said Mielke. He finished the piece of chocolate he was eating, forked some pickled cucumber into his mouth, and then swallowed a mouthful of white Burgundy, all of which persuaded me that his taste buds were every bit as corrupt as his politics and morals. “The fact is that Hennig’s days were numbered anyway. As are Anne’s. The operation to discredit Hollis really only looks good if we try to eliminate her, too—as befits someone who betrayed us. And that’s especially important now that the French are trying to have her extradited back here to face trial for Hennig’s murder. Needless to say, that just can’t be allowed to happen. Which is where you come in, Gunther.”
“Me?” I shrugged. “Let me get this straight. You’re asking me to kill Anne French?”
“Precisely. Except that I’m not asking. The fact is that you agreeing to kill Anne French is a condition of remaining alive yourself.”
TWO
October 1956
I estimated once that the Gestapo had employed less than fifty thousand officers to keep an eye on eighty million Germans, but from what I’d read and heard about the GDR, the Stasi employed at least twice that number—to say nothing of their civilian informants or spylets who, rumor had it, amounted to one in ten of the population—to keep an eye on just seventeen million Germans. As deputy head of the Stasi, Erich Mielke was one of the most powerful men in the GDR. And as might have been expected of such a man, he’d already anticipated all my objections to such a distasteful mission as the one he had described and was ready to argue them down with the brute force of one who is used to getting his way with people who are themselves authoritarian and assertive. I had the feeling that Mielke might have grabbed me by the throat or banged my head on the dinner table and, of course, violence was a vital part of his character; as a young communist cadre in Berlin he’d participated in the infamous murder of two uniformed policemen.
“No, don’t smoke,” he said, “just listen. This is a good opportunity for you, Gunther. You can make some money, get yourself a new passport—a genuine West German passport, with a different name and a fresh start somewhere—and, most important of all, you can pay Anne French back, with interest, for the way she used you so ruthlessly.”
“Only because you told her to. Isn’t that right? It was you who put her up to it.”
“I didn’t tell her to sleep with you. That was her idea. Either way she played you like a piano, Gunther. But it hardly matters now, does it? You fell for her in a big way, didn’t you?”
“It’s easy to see what the two of you have in common. You’re both totally unprincipled.”
“True. Although in her case she was also one of the best liars I’ve ever met. I mean a real pathological case. I really don’t think she knew when she was lying and when she was telling the truth. Not that I think the immorality of subterfuge really mattered to her. Just as long as she was able to maintain that cool smile and satisfy her own greed for material possessions. She managed to convince herself that she wasn’t in it for the money; the irony is that she thought she was quite principled. Which made her an ideal spy. Not that any of this previous story really matters a damn.
“What’s important—at least to me—is that now someone has to kill her. I’m afraid that MI5 would be very surprised if we didn’t at least try to kill her. And the way I see it is that this someone might as well be you. It’s not like you haven’t killed people before, is it? Hennig, for example. I mean, that just had to be you who put a bullet in him and made it look like she’d done it.”
Mielke paused as our steak arrived and the half-eaten lobster was swept away. “We’ll carve that ourselves,” he told the waiter gruffly. “And bring us a bottle of your best Bordeaux. Decanted, mind. But I want to see the bottle it comes from, right? And the cork.”
“You don’t trust anyone, do you?” I said.
“That is one reason I have stayed alive for so long.” When the waiter had gone, Mielke cut the Chateaubriand in two, forked a generous half onto his dinner plate, and chuckled. “But I also look after myself, you know? I don’t smoke, I don’t drink very much, and I like to keep fit because at heart I’m an old street fighter. Even so, I find that people are more inclined to listen to a policeman who looks as if he can take care of himself than one who doesn’t. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve had to intimidate people in the SED Central Committee. I swear, even Walter Ulbricht is afraid of me.”
“Is that what you call yourself now, Erich? A policeman?”
“Why not? It’s what I am. But why should that bother a man like you, Gunther? You, who were a member of Kripo and the SD for almost twenty years. Some of those so-called policemen you reported to were the worst criminals in history: Heydrich. Himmler. Nebe. And you worked for them all.” He shook his head, exasperated. “You know, one day I really am going to look into your RSHA record and see what crimes you perpetrated, Gunther. I’ve a shrewd idea you’re nowhere near as clean as you like to make out. So let’s not pretend there’s anything separating us as far as moral superiority is concerned. We’ve both done things we wish we hadn’t. But we’re still here.”
Mielke fell silent as he cut his own steak into smaller squares.
“Having said all that, I don’t forget that it was you who saved my life, on two occasions.”
“Three,” I said bitterly.
“Was it? Perhaps. Well, like I say. Killing her. This is a good opportunity for you. To make a fresh start for yourself. A chance to come back to Germany and get away from this irrelevant place on the edge of Europe where a man of your talents is wasted, quite frankly. Assuming you’re wise enough to understand that.”
Mielke forked a square of steak into his big mouth and started chewing furiously.
“Am I arguing?” I asked.
“No. You’re not, for once. Which in itself is strange.”
I shrugged. “I’m willing to do what you ask, General. I’m broke. I have no friends. I live alone in an apartment that’s not much bigger than a lobster pot, and I work at a job that’s about to be folded away for the winter. I miss Germany. Christ, I even miss the weather. If killing Anne French is the price I have to pay to get my life back, then I’m more than willing to do it.”
“You were never easily influenced, Gunther. I’ll be honest. I expected more opposition. Perhaps you hate Anne French more than I thought. Perhaps you really do want to kill her. But in this case, to be willing is not enough. You must actually go to England and kill her.”
The waiter came back with a decanter of red wine and placed it on the table in front of us. Mielke took it from him, sniffed at the cork, and then nodded at the empty bottle of Château Mouton Rothschild that had been presented for his inspection.
“Taste it,” he told me.
I tasted it and, predictably, it was as good as the white I’d been drinking; perhaps better. I nodded back at him.
“As a matter of fact I do hate her,” I said. “Much more than I expected to hate her. And yes, I will kill her. But if you don’t mind I’d like to know a bit more about your plan.”
“My men will meet you at the railway station here in Nice, where you will be given your new passport, some money, and tickets on the Blue Train to Paris. From there you can transfer to the Golden Arrow for Calais and then to London. Upon arrival you’ll meet more of my men. They will brief you further and accompany you on your mission.”
“Is that where she’s living? London?”
“No, she’s living in a little town on the south coast of England. Fighting extradition, but without much success. MI5 seems to have abandoned her, more or less. My men will provide you with a detailed diary of the woman’s movements so you can accidentally meet her, and arrange to have a drink with her.”
“Suppose she doesn’t want to meet with me again? When we parted it was hardly on the best of terms.”
“Persuade her. Use a gun if you have to. We’ll give you a gun. But make her come with you. Somewhere public. That way she’ll be more trusting.”
“I don’t quite understand. Don’t you want me to shoot her?”
“Good Lord, no. The last thing I want is for you to be arrested so you can spill your guts to the British. You need to be a long way away from Anne French when she dies. Hopefully you’ll be back in Germany by the time that happens. Living under a new name. That will be nice for you, won’t it?”
“So, what, I’m to poison her tea, is that it?”
“Yes. Poison is always best in these situations. Something slow that doesn’t leave much trace. Recently we’ve been using thallium. Really, it’s a formidable murder weapon. It’s colorless, odorless, and tasteless and doesn’t make its effect felt for at least a day or two. But when it does—it’s devastating.” Mielke smiled cruelly. “For all you know, you might have ingested some in that wine you’re enjoying. I mean, you really wouldn’t know if you had. I could have had the waiter put the stuff in the decanter, which is why I let you taste it and not me. You see how easy it is?”
I glanced uncomfortably at the glass of Mouton Rothschild and made a fist on the table.
Mielke was clearly enjoying my obvious discomfort. “At first she’ll think she’s got a stomach upset. And then—well, it’s a very long, painful death, you’ll be glad to know. She’ll puke for a couple of days, and that will be followed by extreme convulsions and muscular pain. After that comes a complete personality change—hallucinations and anxiety; lastly there’s alopecia, blindness, a lot of agonizing chest pain, and then the end. You want to see it. Believe me, it’s a living hell. Death, when it comes, will seem like a mercy.”
“Is there an antidote?” I still had one eye on the wine I’d been drinking, wondering how much of what Mielke had told me was true.
“I’m told that Prussian blue, orally administered, is an antidote.”
“The paint?”
“Effectively, yes, it is. Prussian blue is a synthetic pigment that works by colloidal dispersion, ion exchange, something like that. I’m not a chemist. However, I believe it’s one of those antidotes that’s only marginally less painful than the poison, and the chances are that by the time an English hospital wakes up to the fact that poor Anne French has been poisoned with thallium and tries to give her any Prussian blue it will already be too late for her.”
“Jesus,” I said, and picked up my cigarettes. I put one in my mouth and was about to light it when Mielke snatched it away and threw it into a planter without apology.
“But like I said, by the time she’s dead you’ll be safely back in West Germany. Only not in Berlin. You’re no good to me in Berlin, Gunther. Too many people know you there. I think Bonn or maybe Hamburg would suit you better. More important, it would suit me if you went there.”
“You must have hundreds of Stasi agents all over West Germany, General. So what possible use could I be?”
“You have a particular skill set, Gunther. A useful background for what I have in mind. I want you to set up a neo-Nazi organization. With your fascist background this shouldn’t be difficult. Your immediate task will be to desecrate or vandalize Jewish sites throughout West Germany—cultural centers, cemeteries, and synagogues. You can also persuade or even blackmail some of your old RSHA comrades to write letters to the newspapers and the federal government demanding the release of Nazi war criminals or protesting against the trial of others.”
“What have you got against the Jews?”
“Nothing.” Mielke tossed another piece of chocolate into his omnivorous mouth alongside the piece of steak that was already in there; it was like having dinner with some Prussian farmer’s prize pig as it dined on swill that was made from the family’s choicest leftovers. “Nothing at all. But this will only lend credibility to our own propaganda that the federal government is still Nazi. Which it is. After all, it was Adenauer who denounced the entire denazification process and who brought in an amnesty law for Nazi war criminals. We’re just helping people see what is already there.”
“You seem to have thought of everything, General.”
“If I haven’t, someone else has. And if they haven’t, they’ll pay for it. But don’t let my jovial manner fool you, Gunther. I might be on holiday but I’m deadly serious about this. And you’d better be as well.”
He pointed his fork at me as if he was contemplating shoving it in my eye and I felt somewhat reassured that there was a piece of meat on the end of it.
“Because if you’re not, you’d better learn to be right now, or you’ll never see tomorrow. How about it? Are you serious about this?”
I nodded. “Yes, I’m serious. I want that English bitch dead every bit as much as you do, General. More, probably. Look, I’d rather not talk about what passed between us in any detail, if you don’t mind. It’s still a source of some grief to me. But I will tell you this, my only regret about what you’ve told me so far is that I won’t be there in person to see her suffering. Because that’s what I want. Her pain and her degradation. Now, does that answer your question?”
THREE
October 1956
I returned to my flat in Villefranche, satisfied only that I’d managed to convince Mielke that I was actually going to carry out his orders and travel to England to poison Anne French. The truth was that while I hated the woman for all the pain she’d given me, I didn’t quite hate her enough to murder her, and certainly not in the monstrous way that Mielke had described. I very much wanted a new West German passport but I also wanted to stay alive long enough to use it, and I had no doubt that Mielke was quite prepared to have his men kill me if he even half-suspected I was preparing to double-cross him. So it was that for a few moments I contemplated packing a suitcase immediately and leaving the Riviera for good. I had a bit of money under the mattress and a gun, and the car of course, but there was a good chance that his men would be watching my flat, in which case flight was probably futile. That presented the hair-raising prospect of my cooperating with Mielke’s plan long enough to get hold of the passport and the money, and then looking for an opportunity to give his men the slip, which left me somewhere between the tree and its bark. Most of the men in the Stasi had been trained by the Gestapo and were experts at finding people; giving them the slip would be like trying to evade a pack of English tracker hounds.
In order to see if I was under surveillance I decided to take a walk along the seafront, hoping that this might make the Stasi reveal themselves and also that the cool night air would help to clear my head enough to think of a solution to my immediate problem. Inevitably my feet took me to a bar in the correctly named Rue Obscure, where I drank a bottle of red and smoked half a packet of cigarettes, which achieved exactly the opposite result from the one I was hoping for. And I was still shaking my head and pondering my limited options when I walked, a little unsteadily, home again.
Villefranche is a strange warren of alleys and narrow backstreets and, especially at night and at the close of the season, resembles a scene from a Fritz Lang movie. It’s all too easy to imagine yourself being followed by unseen vigilantes through this dark, meandering catacomb of French streets, like poor Peter Lorre with a letter M chalked onto the back of your coat, especially when you’re drunk. But I wasn’t so drunk that I couldn’t spot the tail that had been pinned to my arse. Not so much spot it as hear the stop-start, clip-clop sound of their cheap shoes on the cobbled alleyways as they tried to match the erratic pace of my own footsteps. I might have called out to them, too, in mockery of their attempts to keep eyes on me but for the sense—the good sense, perhaps—that it might be best not to give them, and more important, the comrade-general, even the vaguest impression that I was anything but subordinate to him and his orders. The new Gunther had a much shorter spout than the old one, which was probably just as well; at least it was if I wanted t
o see Germany again. So I was surprised when I found my way back down to the esplanade blocked by two human bollards, each with absurdly blond, master-race hair of the kind that Himmler’s favorite barber would have put up on his hero-haircut wall. In the shadows behind them was a smaller man with a leather eye patch, whom I half-recognized from a long time ago but failed to remember why, if only because the two human bollards were already busy gagging my mouth and tying my wrists in front of me.
“I’m sorry about this, Gunther,” said the man I’d half-recognized. “It’s a shame that we have to meet again in these circumstances but orders are orders. I don’t have to tell you how that works. So nothing personal, see? But this is just how the comrade-general wants it.”
Even as he spoke the two blond bollards lifted me off my feet by the forearms and carried me to the end of the vaulted blind alley like a shop-window mannequin. Here a single streetlight singed the evening air a sulfurous shade of yellow until someone killed it with a silenced pistol shot, but not before I saw the wooden beam that crossed the vaulted roof and the plastic noose that was dangling off it with obviously lethal intent. The realization that I was about to be hanged summarily in that dim, forgotten alley was enough to lend a last spasm of strength to my intoxicated limbs and I struggled hard to escape the iron grip of the two Stasi men, but to no avail. Like Christ ascending into heaven I felt myself already rising up from the cobbled ground to meet the noose, where another obliging Stasi man, wearing a gray suit and a hat, was holding on to a street lamp like Gene Kelly to help lasso my neck with it.
“That’s it,” he said, when the lasso was in place. The Leipzig accent. The same man from the Hotel Ruhl, perhaps? Must have been. “Okay, boys, you can let go now. I reckon this bastard will swing like a church bell.”
As he steadied the noose under my left ear I sucked a quick breath and the next second the two human bollards let me go. The plastic noose slipped tight, the world blurred like a bad photograph, and I stopped breathing altogether. Desperately trying to find the uneven ground with the toecaps of my shoes, I only managed to turn myself around in space like the last ham in a butcher-shop window. I caught a brief glimpse of the Stasi men watching me hang and then pedaled some more on my invisible bicycle before deciding that it might go easier for me if I didn’t struggle and, in truth, it didn’t really hurt that much. It wasn’t pain I felt so much as a tremendous sense of pressure, as if my whole body might actually explode for want of an airhole. My tongue was like a baccarat pallet, it was so big, which was probably why most of it seemed to be outside my mouth, and my eyes were looking at my ears, as if trying to determine the source of the infernal racket I was hearing, which must have been the sound of the blood pounding in my head, of course. Most curious of all, I felt the actual presence of the little finger I had lost years before, in Munich, when another old comrade had cut it off with a hammer and chisel. It was as if all my being were suddenly concentrated in a part of my body that no longer even existed. And then 1949 and Munich and poor Vera Messmann seemed like ten minutes ago. The phantom finger swiftly spread and became a whole limb and then the rest of my body and I knew I was dying, which is when I pissed myself. I remember someone laughing and thinking that maybe, after all these years, I had it coming anyway and that I’d done pretty well to get this far without mishap. Then I was at the bottom of the cold Baltic Sea and I was swimming hard up from the wreck of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff to reach the undulating surface, only it was too far, and with bursting lungs I knew I wasn’t going to make it, which is when I must have passed out.