by Philip Kerr
'On the positive side, the food here is good and plentiful and brutality is kept to a minimum. There are good washing facilities - after all this was a German camp before it was a Russian one - and we're allowed a day off once a week; but only because they have to check the lifting gear and the gas levels. Radon gas, I'm told. Colourless, odourless, and that's about all I know about it except I'm sure it's also hazardous. Sorry that's another negative. And since we're back on the side of the debits I may as well mention now that in this camp, the MVD employs a number of Germans as recruiting officers for some new People's Police they're planning to create in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. A secret police designed to be a German arm of the MVD. The establishment of such a police force in Germany is banned by the rules of the Allied Control Commission, but that doesn't mean they're not going to do it under the table, by subterfuge. But they can't do it at all if they don't have the men to do it, so be careful what you say and do, for they will most certainly interrogate and interview you at length. D'you hear? I want no renegades under my command. These Germans the Ivans have working for them are communists, veteran communists from the old KPD. What we were fighting against. The ugly face of European Bolshevism. If there were some among you who doubted the truth of our National Socialist cause I imagine you have learned that it was you who were mistaken, not the leader. Remember what I've said and watch yourself.'
I was one of the lucky ones in that I wasn't ordered down the pit immediately. Instead I was put on the sorting detail. Wagonloads of rock were brought up from the mine and emptied onto a large conveyor belt that was running between two lines of plenis. Someone showed me how to inspect the pieces of brownish-black rock for veins of the all-important pitchblende. Rocks without veins were thrown away, the others graded by eye and tossed into bins for further selection by a Blue holding a metal tube with a mica window at one end: the better the quality of the ore the more electric current that was reproduced as white noise by the tube. These higher-quality rocks were taken away for processing in Russia, but the quantities considered useful were small. It seemed that tonnes of rock would be needed to produce just a small quantity of ore and none of the men working at the Johannesgeorgenstadt mine were of the opinion that the Ivans would be building an atom bomb any time soon.
I'd been there almost a month when I was told to report to the mine office. This was housed in a grey stone building next to the pithead winding gear. I went up to the first floor and waited. Through the open door of the office I could see a couple of MVD officers. I could also hear what they said, and I realised that these were two of the Germans General Klause had warned us about.
Seeing me standing there they waved me inside and closed the door. I glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was eleven a.m. There was a microphone on the table and, I imagined, somewhere a large tape machine ready to record my every word. Next to the microphone was a spotlight but it wasn't switched on. Not yet. There was an undrawn black curtain beside the window. They invited me to sit down on a chair in front of the desk.
'The last time I did this I got twenty-five years hard labour,' I said. 'So, if you'll forgive me, I really don't have anything to say.'
'If you wish,' said one of the officers, 'you may appeal the verdict. Did the court tell you that?'
'No. What the court did tell me was that the Soviets are every bit as stupid and brutal as the Nazis.'
'It's interesting you say that.'
I didn't reply.
'It seems to support an impression we have of you, Captain Gunther. That you're not a Nazi.'
Meanwhile the other officer had picked up a telephone and was saying something in Russian, that I could not hear.
'I'm Major Weltz,' said the first officer. He looked at the man now replacing the telephone receiver. 'And this is Lieutenant Rascher.'
I grunted.
'Like you, I am also from Berlin,' said Weltz. 'As a matter of fact I was there just last weekend. I'm afraid you'd hardly recognise it. Incredible the destruction that was inflicted by Hitler's refusal to surrender.' He pushed a packet of cigarettes across the table. 'Please. Help yourself to a cigarette. I'm afraid they're Russian but they're better than nothing.'
I took one.
'Here,' he said, coming around the desk and snapping open a lighter. 'Let me light that for you.'
He sat down on the edge of the table and watched me smoke. Then the door opened and a starshina came in, carrying a sheet of paper. He laid it on the table next to the cigarettes and left again without saying a word.
Weltz glanced at the sheet of paper for a moment and then turned it to face me.
'Your appeal form,' he said.
My eyes flicked across the Cyrillic letters.
'Would you like me to translate it?'
'That won't be necessary. I can read and speak Russian.'
'Very well, too, by all accounts.' He handed me a fountain pen and waited for me to sign the sheet of paper. 'Is there a problem?'
'What's the point?' I said, dully
'There's every point. The government of the Soviet Union has its forms and formalities like every other country. Nothing happens without a piece of paper. It was the same in Germany, was it not? An official form for everything.'
Again I hesitated.
'You want to go home, don't you? To Berlin? Well, you can't go home unless you've been released and you can't be released unless you appeal your sentence first. Really, it's as simple as that. Oh, I'm not promising anything, but this form puts the process into motion. Think of it like that pithead winding gear outside. That piece of paper makes the wheel start to move.'
I read the form forwards and then backwards: sometimes, things in the Soviet Union and its zones of occupation made more sense if you read them backwards.
I signed it, and Major Weltz drew the form towards him.
'So, at least we know that you do want to get out of here,' he said. 'To go home. Now that we've established that much all we have to do is figure out a way of making that happen. I mean sooner rather than later. To be exact, twenty-five years from now. That is if you survive what anyone here will tell you is hazardous work. Personally, I don't much care to be even this close to large deposits of uranite. Apparently they turn it into this yellow powder that glows in the dark. God only knows what it does to people.'
"Thanks, but I'm not interested.'
'We haven't told you what we're offering yet,' said Weltz. 'A job. As a policeman. I would have thought that might appeal to a man with your qualifications.'
'A man who was never a member of the Nazi Party,' said Lieutenant Rascher. 'A former member of the Social Democratic Party.'
'Did you know, Captain, that the KPD and the SDP have joined together?'
'It's a bit late,' I said. 'We could have used the support of the KPD in December 1931. During the Red Revolution.'
'That was Trotsky's fault,' said Weltz. 'Anyway. Better late than never, eh? The new party - the Socialist Unity Party, the SED - it represents a fresh start for us both to work together. For a new Germany.'
'Another new Germany?' I shrugged.
'Well, we can hardly make do with the old one. Wouldn't you agree? There's so much that we have to rebuild. Not just politics, but law and order, too. The police force. We're starting a new force. For the moment it's being called the Fifth Kommissariat, or K-5. We hope to have it up and running by the end of the year. And until then we're looking for recruits. A man such as yourself, a former Oberkommissar with Kripo, with a record for honesty and integrity, who was chased out of the force by the Nazis, is just the sort of principled man we need. I think I can probably guarantee reinstatement at your old rank, with full pension rights. A Berlin weighted allowance. Help with a new apartment. A job for your wife.'
'No thanks.'
'That's too bad,' said Lieutenant Rascher.
'Look, why don't you think it over, Captain?' said Weltz.
'Sleep on it. You see, to be perfectly honest with you, Gunther,
you're at the top of our list in this camp. And, for obvious reasons, we'd rather not stay here longer than we have to. I'm already a father, but the lieutenant here has no wish to damage his chances of having a son if and when he marries. You see radiation does something to a man's ability to procreate. It also affects the thyroid and the body's ability to use energy and make proteins. At least, that's what I think it does.'
'The answer is still no,' I said. 'May I go now?'
The major adopted a rueful expression. 'I don't understand you,' he said. 'How is it that you, a social democrat, were prepared to go and work for Heydrich? And yet you won't work for us. Can you explain that please?'
It was now I realised who the major reminded me of. The uniform might have been different but with the white blond hair, blue eyes, high forehead and even loftier tone, I was already thinking of Heydrich before he mentioned the name. Probably Weltz and Heydrich would have been about the same age, too. If he hadn't been murdered, Heydrich would have been about forty-two now. The younger lieutenant was rather more grey- haired, with a face as wide as the major's was long. He looked like me before the war and a year in a POW camp.
'Well, Gunther? What have you to say for yourself? Perhaps you were always just a Nazi in all but name. A Party fellow traveller. Is that it? Did it take you this long to understand what you really are?'
'You and Heydrich,' I said to the major. 'You're not so very different. I never wanted to work for him either, but I was afraid to say no. Afraid of what he might do to me. You, on the other hand, have shot your bolt there. You've already done your worst. Short of shooting me there's not much more you can actually do to me. Sometimes it's a great comfort to know that you've already hit rock bottom.'
'We could break you,' said Weltz. 'We could do that.'
'I've broken a few men myself, in my time,' I said. 'But there has to be some point to it. And with me there isn't, because if you break me then you'd be doing it just for the Hell of it and what's more I'd be no good to you when you were finished. I'm no good to you now, only you just don't know it, Major. So let me tell you why. I was the kind of cop who was too dumb to act smart and look the other way, or to kiss someone's behind. The Nazis were cleverer than you. They knew that. The only reason Heydrich brought me back to Kripo was because he knew that even in a police state there are times when you need a real policeman. But you don't want a real policeman, Major Weltz, you want a clerk with a badge. You want me to read Karl Marx at bedtime and people's mail during the day. You want a man who's eager to please and looking for advancement in the Communist Party.' I shook my head wearily. 'The last time I was looking for advancement in a party a pretty girl slapped my face.'
'Pity,' said Weltz. 'It seems you're going to spend the rest of your life dead. Like all of your class, Gunther, you're a victim of history.'
'We both are, Major. Being a victim of history is what being a German is all about.'
But I was also a victim of my environment. They made sure of that. Soon after my meeting with the boys from K-5 I was transferred off the sorting detail and into the mine.
It was a world of constant thunder. There was the rumble of underground explosions that broke the rock into manageable chunks; and there was the crash of the cage doors before it slid down the guides and into the shaft. There was the din of rocks we split with pickaxes and then threw into the wagons; and the continual barrage as these moved backwards and forwards along the rails. And with each detonation there was dust and more dust, turning my snot black, and my sweat into a kind of grey oil. At night I coughed great gritty gobs of saliva and phlegm that looked like burnt fried eggs. It all felt like a high price to pay for my principles. But there was a camaraderie down the shaft that wasn't to be had anywhere else in Johannesgeorgenstadt, and an automatic respect from the other plenis who heard our coughing and recognised their own comparative good fortune. Pospelov had been right about that. There's always someone worse off than yourself. I hoped to get a chance to meet that someone before the work killed me.
There was a mirror in the washroom. Mostly we avoided it for fear that we'd see our own grandfathers, or worse, their decomposed bodies, looking back at us; but one day I inadvertently caught sight of myself and saw a man with a face like the pitchblende rock we were mining: it was brownish- black, lumpy and misshapen, with two dull opaque spaces where my eyes had once been, and a row of dark grey excrescences that might have been my teeth. I'd met a lot of criminal types in my life, but I looked like Mister Hyde's black-sheep brother. Acted like him, too. There were no Blues down the shaft and we settled our differences with a maximum of violence. Once, Schaefer, another pleni from Berlin who didn't much like cops, told me that he'd cheered when the leaders of the SDP had been chased out of Berlin in 1933. So I punched him hard in the face and when he tried to hit me with a pickaxe, I hit him with a shovel. It was a while before he got up, and in truth he was never quite the same again after that - another victim of history. Karl Marx would have approved.
But after a while I stopped caring about anything very much, including myself. I would squeeze into tight spaces in the black rock to work in solitude with my pick, which was the most dangerous thing to do, since cave-ins were common. But there was less dust to breathe this way than when they used explosives.
Another month passed. And then one day I was summoned to the office again and I went along expecting to find the same two MVD officers and hear them ask me if my time down the mineshaft had helped to change my mind about K-5. It had changed my mind about a lot of things but not German communism and its secret police force. I was going to tell them to go to Hell and, perhaps, sound like I meant it, too, even though I was ready for someone to come and put some plaster of Paris on my face. So I was a little disappointed that the two officers weren't there, the way you are when you've worked up a pretty good speech about a lot of noble things that don't add up to very much that's important when you're lying in the morgue.
There was only one officer in the room, a heavyset man with receding brown hair and a pugnacious jaw. Like his two predecessors he wore blue breeches and a brown gimnasterka tunic, but he was better decorated; as well as the veteran NKVD soldier badge and Order of the Red Banner there were other medals I didn't recognise. The insignia on his collar tabs and the stars on his sleeves seemed to indicate that he was at least a colonel, or perhaps even a general. His blue officer's cap with its squarish visor lay on the table alongside the Nagant revolver in its bucket-sized holster.
'The answer is still no,' I said, hardly caring who he was.
'Sit down,' he said. 'And don't be a bloody fool.'
He was German.
'I know I've put on a bit of weight,' he said. 'But I thought you of all people would recognise me.'
I sat down and rubbed some of the dust from my eyes. 'Now you come to mention it, you do seem kind of familiar.'
'You, I wouldn't have recognised at all. Not in a million years.'
'I know. I should lay off the chocolates. Get myself a haircut and a manicure. But I never do seem to have the time. My job keeps me pretty busy.'
The officer's pork butcher's face cracked a smile. Almost. A sense of humour. That's impressive, in this place. But if you really want to impress me then stop playing the tough guy and tell me who I am.'
'Don't you know?'
He tutted impatiently and shook his head. 'Please. I can help you if you'll let me. But I have to believe you're worth it. If you're any kind of detective you'll remember who I am.'
'Erich Mielke,' I said. 'Your name is Erich Mielke.'
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: GERMANY, 1946
'You knew all along.'
'There was a moment when I didn't. The last time I saw you, Erich, you looked like me.'
For a moment Mielke looked grim, as if he was remembering. 'Fucking French,' he said. 'They were as bad as the Nazis in my book. It still sticks in my throat they get to be one of the four victorious powers in Berlin. What did they do to
defeat the fascists? Nothing.'
'We can agree on something, anyway.'
'Le Vernet was the second time you pulled my bread out of the oven. Why'd you do it?'
I shrugged. 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'
'No, that won't do,' he said firmly. 'Tell me. I want to know. You were dressed like a Gestapo officer, but you didn't act like one. I didn't get it then and I don't get it now.'
'Between you and me and these four walls, Erich, I'm afraid the Gestapo were rather a bad lot.' I told him about the murders committed by Major Bomelburg and the SS storm troopers on the road to Lourdes. 'You see, it's one thing taking a man back to stand trial. It's something completely different just to shoot him in a ditch at the side of the road. It was just your good fortune that we went to the camp at Gurs first, otherwise it might have been you who was shot while trying to escape. But given what I've seen since of your friends in the MVD, it's probably what you deserved. Rats are still rats whether they're grey, black or brown. I just wasn't cut out to be much of a rat myself.'
'Maybe a white rat, eh?'
'Maybe.'
Mielke chucked a packet of Belomorkanal across the table at me. 'Here. I don't smoke myself but I brought these for you.' He tossed some matches after the cigarettes. 'It's my opinion that smoking is bad for your health.'
'My health has got more important things to worry about.' I lit one and puffed it happily. 'But maybe you didn't know. Russian nails are better for your health than American ones.'
'Oh? Why's that?'
'Because there's so little tobacco in them. Four good puffs and they're gone.'
Mielke smiled. 'Talking about your health, I don't think this place is good for you. If you stay here long enough you're liable to grow two heads. That would be a waste, in my opinion.' He came around the table and sat on the corner, swinging one of his polished riding boots carelessly. 'You know, when I was in Russia I learned to look after my health. I even won the sports medal of the Soviet Union. I was living in a little town outside Moscow called Krasnogorsk and I used to go hunting at the weekend on a sporting estate once owned by the Yussupov family. Prince Yussupov was one of those aristocrats who murdered Rasputin. There was all sorts of rubbish talked about the death of Rasputin, you know. That they had to kill him three or four times before he was actually dead. That they poisoned him, shot him, beat him to death and then drowned him. In fact, they made it all up just to make their futile deed seem more heroic. And the prince didn't even do the deed himself. The truth was that Rasputin was shot through the forehead by a member of the British Secret Service. Now I mention all of this to make the point that a man, even a strong man like Rasputin, or you perhaps, can survive almost anything except being killed. You, my friend, will die here. You know it. I know it. Perhaps you will be poisoned by the uranite. Perhaps you will be shot, attempting to escape. Or when the mine floods, as I believe sometimes it does, then you will drown. But it doesn't have to be that way. I want to help you, Gunther. Really, I do. But you'll need to trust me.'