Field Gray (35 page)

I shook my head. “You and me, Elisabeth. We’re Berliners. Hardly cut out for fairy-tale living.”

“I suppose you’re right. What will you do after Göttingen?”

“I don’t know, Elisabeth.”

“It seems to me,” she said, “that if there’s no one else in Berlin you know, or who you can trust, then you should think yourself free to come and live here. Like you did before. Remember?”

“Why else do you think I sent you that money from Cuba? I hadn’t forgotten. Lately, I’ve had to do quite a bit of remembering one way or another. Telling my story to—well, it doesn’t matter who. A lot of stuff I’d rather forget. But I don’t forget that. You can depend on it. I never forgot about you.”

Of course, not everything had been told back at Landsberg.

A man should keep some secrets, after all, especially when he’s talking to the CIA.

Special Agents Scheuer and Frei might have opened a file in Elisabeth Dehler’s name if I’d told them every little detail about what happened on the train from the
pleni
camp in Johannesgeorgenstadt to Dresden, and then Berlin, in 1946.

I hadn’t wanted them bothering her, so I hadn’t mentioned the fact that the address on the envelope containing the several hundred dollars Mielke had given me was Elisabeth’s.

GERMANY, 1946

I
nstead of pocketing this money, I’d resolved to deliver it to her myself—as the MVD assassin would have done if I hadn’t killed him first. Besides, I needed somewhere to stay, and where better to stay than with a former lover? So, when I got off the train from Dresden in the no-less-depressing ruin of Anhalter Station in Berlin, I’d quickly boarded a westbound tram and headed straight for the Kurfürstendamm.

From there I walked south, convinced that at least one of Hitler’s predictions had come true. In the early days of his success, he had told us that “in five years you will not recognize Germany,” and this was certainly true. Kurfürstendamm, formerly one of Berlin’s most prosperous streets, was now little more than a series of ruins. Even for me, a former policeman, it was hard to find one’s way around. Once, forgetting the uniform I was wearing, I asked a woman for directions and she hurried away without reply, as if I’d been the carrier of plague. Later on, when I heard about what the Red Army had done to the women of Berlin, I wondered why she’d not picked up a rock and thrown it at me.

Motzstrasse was not as badly damaged as some. Even so, it was hard to imagine anyone safely living there. One decent earthmover could probably have leveled the entire street. It was like walking through a scene from the apocalypse. Piles of rubble. Buttressed façades. Moon-sized craters. The prevailing smell of sewage. The road underfoot as uncertain as a mountain path. Burned-out armored vehicles. The occasional grave.

The window on the landing in front of Elisabeth’s apartment was gone and boarded over, but the weather-beaten door looked secure enough. I knocked at it for several minutes until a voice shouted down the stairs and told me that Elisabeth was out until five. I glanced at the dead major’s watch and realized I needed to kill some time without drawing too much attention to myself. It wasn’t that an MVD officer was unusual in the American sector, but I thought it best to avoid contact with anyone official, who might have asked what I was doing.

I walked until I found a church I almost recognized, on Kieler Strasse, although given the state of Kieler Strasse it might just as easily have been Düppelstrasse. The church was Catholic and strangely tall and angular, like a castle on a mountaintop. Inside there was a fine mosaic basilica that had escaped the bombs. I sat down and closed my eyes, not from reverence but sheer fatigue. But this was hardly the quiet sanctuary I had expected. Every few minutes an American serviceman would come in with loud, polished shoes, genuflect to the altar, and then wait patiently on a pew near the confessional. Business was brisk. After the day I’d had, I might have confessed myself, but I wasn’t feeling particularly sorry about that. I’d been wanting to kill a Russian—any Russian—ever since the Battle of Königsberg. I told Him that myself. I didn’t need a priest to come between us in what was, by now, an old argument.

I stayed there for a long time. Long enough to make peace with myself, if not God, and when I left the Rosary Church—for that was its name—I put a few of the MVD major’s coins into a collection box, for his sins, if not mine. Then I walked north again. And this time Elisabeth was at home, although she regarded my uniform with horror.

“What the hell are you doing here dressed like that?” she demanded.

“Ask me in and I’ll explain. Believe me, it’s not at all what it looks like.”

“It better not be, or you can be on your way again. I don’t care who you are.”

I entered her apartment, and it was immediately clear from the bed and the gas ring that she was living in just the one room. Seeing my eyebrows flex their surprise, she said, “It’s easier to heat like this.”

I dropped Major Weltz’s bag onto the floor and took the envelope of money from inside my
gimnasterka
tunic and handed it over. Now it was Elisabeth’s turn to exercise her eyebrows. She fanned herself with several hundred American dollars and then read Mielke’s note, which made everything clear.

“Did you read this?”

“Of course.”

“So where’s the Russian who was supposed to give me this?”

“Dead. This is his uniform I’m wearing.” I thought it best to keep things as simple as possible.

“Why didn’t you keep this for yourself?”

“Oh, I would have,” I said, “if it had been anyone else’s name on that envelope. After all, it’s not like we’re strangers.”

“No,” she said. “All the same, it’s been a long time. I thought you must be dead.”

“Why not? Everyone else is.” I told her, as briefly as possible, that I’d been in a Soviet POW camp and that I’d escaped. “I was supposed to be on my way to Berlin and then to the Anti-Fascist School near Moscow. All arranged by our mutual friend, of course. But I think he figured I knew too much about his past and decided the safer thing was to have me eliminated. So here I am. I thought that the woman named on that envelope might be prepared to overlook the fact that I left her for another woman and let me lie low for a couple of days. Especially when she saw those dollars.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “How is Kirsten?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen or heard from Frau Gunther since Christmas 1944. Earlier on today, I took a walk down my old street and found it isn’t there anymore.”

“I guess if it had been, then you wouldn’t be here now and I wouldn’t have this.”

“Anything’s possible.”

“Well, that’s honest, anyway.” She thought for a moment. “People who were bombed out usually leave a little red card on the ruins, with some sort of address, in case a loved one turns up.”

“Well, maybe that’s it. Loved one. Kirsten never was what you’d call loving. Unless you mean herself, of course. She always loved herself.” I shook my head. “There wasn’t any little red card. I looked.”

“There are other ways of contacting relatives,” said Elisabeth.

“Not looking like this there aren’t. It’s only a matter of time before I’m picked up. And shot. Or sent back to the POW camp, which would be worse.”

“It’s true. Maybe it’s the uniform, but you don’t look so good. I’ve seen healthier skeletons.” She shrugged. “Very well. You can stay here. The first time you try any funny stuff, you’re on your toes. Meanwhile, I’ll see what I can find out about Kirsten.”

“Thanks. Look, I have a little money of my own. Perhaps you could find or even buy me some clothes, too.”

She nodded. “I’ll go to the Reichstag first thing in the morning.”

“The Reichstag? I was thinking of something a little less formal, perhaps.”

“That’s where the black market is,” she said. “The biggest in the city. Believe me, there’s nothing you can’t get there. From a pair of nylons to a fake denazification certificate. Perhaps I can get you one of those, too. Of course, it’ll mean I’m late for work.”

“Tailoring?”

She shook her head grimly. “I’m a servant, Bernie,” she said. “Like nearly everyone left alive in Berlin. I’m the housekeeper for a family of American diplomats in Zehlendorf. Hey, perhaps I can find you a job, too. They need a gardener. I can go into the labor office at McNair on my way back from work tomorrow.”

“McNair?”

“McNair Barracks. Just about everything to do with the U.S. Army in Berlin takes place at McNair.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but if you don’t mind, I’d rather not have a proper job at this moment. I’ve spent the last eighteen months working harder than a donkey with three masters. If I never see another pick and shovel again, it will be too soon.”

“Rough, huh?”

“Only by the standards of a Russian serf. Now that I’ve lived and almost died in the Soviet Union, it’s easy to see where they learn their manners. And where they find their sunny outlook on life. There’s not an Ivan I met who could ever be mistaken for an optimist.” I shrugged. “Still, our mutual friend seems to be well in with them.” I nodded at the envelope she was still holding. “Erich.”

“You have no idea how much I need this money.”

“Presumably he did, though. I wonder why he didn’t give it to you himself.”

“He has his reasons, I suppose. Erich doesn’t forget his friends.”

“I couldn’t argue with that, Elisabeth.”

“Did he really try to have you killed?”

“Only a bit.”

She shook her head. “He was a hothead when he was younger, it’s true. But he never struck me as a cold-blooded killer. Those two cops. I never believed he did that, you know. And I can’t believe he ordered someone to murder you.”

“The two Germans I was traveling with aren’t here to tell you you’re wrong, Elisabeth. They weren’t as lucky as me.”

“You mean they’re dead.”

“Right now that’s my working definition of unlucky.” I shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably it always was.”

GERMANY, 1954

O
n Monday morning, we drove out of East Germany and back to Hannover, where I spent another night in the safe house. And early the next day we drove south to Göttingen and checked into an old pension overlooking the canal on Reitstallstrasse. The pension was damp, with hard wooden floors, even harder furniture, high ceilings, and dusty brass chandeliers; and about as homely as Cologne Cathedral. But from there it was only a short walk to the VdH office in a half-timbered building on Judenstrasse that looked like it was home to a family of three bears. Everywhere in Göttingen was a bit like that, and quite a few of the people, too. The director of the local VdH, Herr Dr. Winkel, was a mild, bespectacled type who might once have been the court librarian to some ancient king of Saxony. And he informed me what we already knew, that a train carrying a thousand German
pleni
s was due in Friedland the following week. For form’s sake we decided—I, Grottsch, and Wenger—to pay a visit to the refugee camp at Friedland.

Previously a research farm owned by Göttingen University, the Friedland Camp was in the British zone and composed of a series of what were called Nissen huts. If Nissen was a synonym of “grim and inhospitable,” then these half-cylindrical corrugated-iron structures were well named. The camp was a miserable-looking place, especially in the rain, an impression that was underscored by the muddy roads and the goose-shit green that everything was painted. And it was all too easy to give credence to the rumor that the Friedland Refugee Camp had been the location for anthrax experiments conducted by Nazi scientists during the war. As a reintroduction to homeland, freedom, and all things wholesomely German, the camp left a great deal to be desired and, in my expert opinion, was almost as bad as any of the labor camps that these German POWs had left behind. I might have succeeded in feeling sorry for these men had it not been for the fact that I was rather more concerned for my own welfare, as the prospect of mixing with a large number of
pleni
s was not without its hazards. Even after an interval of six or seven years, it was possible I might be recognized and denounced as some sort of “comrade-killer,” a renegade or a collaborator. After all, as far as anyone back at the camp in Johannesgeorgenstadt was concerned, I had sold out to the Reds and gone to Russia for anti-fascist training at Krasnogorsk. And I was reminded of the precariousness of my position when I asked one of the Friedland camp police why they were needed at all.

“Surely,” I said, “Germans who have come back home know how to behave themselves.”

“That’s just the point,” said the policeman. “They’re not back home, are they? At least not
at
home. Some of them get a bit pissed off when they find out they’re going to be here, sometimes for as long as six to eight weeks. But it can take that long to get them sorted out with everything they’re going to need for life in the new republic. Then there are the prisoners intent on settling old scores with each other. Men who have denounced other men to the Ivans. Informers. That kind of thing. Deprivation of liberty, we call that kind of behavior if it leads to someone getting more ill-treatment from the Ivans, and we charge them under section 239 of the German Criminal Code. At the present moment, there are over two hundred pending cases involving ex-POWs. Of course, that’s just the ones we find out about, and just as often someone in the camp turns up dead, his throat cut, and no one saw or heard a thing. That’s not at all uncommon, sir. In this camp, we reckon on as many as one murder a week.”

Of course, I hardly wanted to inform the French Intelligence Service of my own fears. I had no appetite for an early return to La Santé, or indeed any other of the five prisons I’d been in since leaving Havana. And I was resigned to hoping that, come what may, the Franzis would protect me just as long as they thought I was their best chance of identifying and arresting Edgard de Boudel.

The fact that I had never seen or even heard of someone called Edgard de Boudel was neither here nor there. I was doing what I had been told to do by the Americans in Landsberg. And when I returned to my room at the Pension Esebeck in Göttingen, I wrote a note to my CIA handlers describing the full extent of my progress: how the French had listened to me paint a picture of de Boudel at the same time I had also been painting another picture, of Erich Mielke; and that they appeared to accept everything I had told them about Mielke—all of which was false—because of everything I had told them about Edgard de Boudel, which was true. This operation was what Scheuer called “the beautiful twin.” The French—and, more important, the Soviet agent whom the Americans knew to be at the heart of the SDECE in Paris—would, it was supposed, be more inclined to believe my lies and misrepresentations about Mielke if everything they were told about de Boudel coincided with what they knew about him, or strongly suspected. And the icing on this rich cake was a tip-off (supplied to them by the British, who, of course, had received it from the Americans) that Edgard de Boudel was arriving back in Germany as a returning POW, having served out his usefulness to the Russians in Indochina, where, as a political commissar, he had assisted the Viet Minh in the interrogation and torture of many captured French soldiers, most of whom still remained, until the Geneva negotiations were complete, prisoners of war in Indochina. All I had to do was identify de Boudel and the French would, it was supposed, treat me and my information about Mielke as gold-plated; and to this end, before my “deportation” from Landsberg to Paris, I had carefully studied the only known photographs of de Boudel. It was hoped that these two pictures, along with my own familiarity with the life of a German POW—not to mention my background as a Kripo detective—would help me spot him for the French, who forever thereafter would be in thrall to me as an intelligence source. Because Edgard de Boudel was one of the most wanted men in France.

Naturally, I was a little concerned about what might happen to me if I failed to identify de Boudel, so I wrote about that, too, mentioning my continuing concern that he might have changed more than just his name and identity if, as the Americans believed, the Russians were intent on infiltrating him back into West German society in the hope of reactivating him as their agent at some later date. I had little or no chance of success if de Boudel had undergone plastic surgery. I also mentioned what by then would have been obvious: that I was being watched closely.

When I finished writing, I went into the sitting room to speak to Vigée, who was the French officer in charge of the SDECE’s Göttingen operation.

“If you please,” I said, “I’d like to go to church.”

“You didn’t say you were religious,” he said.

“Did I need to?” I shrugged. “Look, it’s not mass, or even confession. I just want to go and sit in church for a while and pray.”

“What are you? Catholic? Protestant? What?”

“Lutheran Protestant,” I said. “Oh yes, and I’d like to buy some chewing gum. To stop me from smoking so much.”

“Here,” he said, and handed me a packet of Hollywood. “I have the same problem.”

I put one of the green chlorophyllic sticks in my mouth.

“Is there a Lutheran church near here?” he asked.

“This is Göttingen,” I said. “There are churches everywhere.”

St. Jacobi was a strange-looking church. Eccentric, even. The body of the building was ordinary enough, made of a handsome pinkish stone with darker pink perpendiculars. But the steeple, the tallest in Göttingen, was anything but ordinary. It was as if the lid of a pink toy box had burst open to permit the egress of a green object on top of a giant gray spring. As if some lazy Jack had tossed a handful of magic beans onto the floor of the church and these had grown so quickly that the stalk had forced its way through the simple church roof. As a metaphor of Nazism, it was perhaps unsurpassed in the whole of Germany.

The candy-striped interior was no less like a fairy tale. As soon as you saw the pillars you wanted to lick them, or to break off a piece of the medieval altar triptych and eat it, like sugarloaf.

I sat down in the front pew and bowed my head to the amnesiac gods of Germany and pretended to pray, because I’d prayed before and knew exactly what to expect of it.

After a while I glanced around, and observing that Vigée was occupied in the admiration of the church, I fixed the note for my CIA handlers underneath the pew with my Hollywood gum. Then I stood up and walked slowly to the door. I waited patiently for Vigée to follow, and then we went outside into the Rumpelstiltskin streets.