Field Gray (39 page)

GERMANY, 1954

T
wo and a half hours later, we were in Frankfurt and heading across the Main into the north of the city. Our destination was an enormous curving, honey-colored marble office building with six square wings that lent the place a quasi-military aspect, as if any minute the clerks and secretaries inside might abandon their typewriters and comptometers and man some antiaircraft guns on the flat roofs. I hadn’t ever been there, but I recognized it from old newsreels and picture magazines. Completed in 1930, the Poelzig Ensemble, or Poelzig Complex, had been the largest office building in Europe and the corporate headquarters of the I. G. Farben conglomerate. This former model of German business and modernity had been the center for Nazi wartime research projects relating to the creation of synthetic oil and rubber, not to mention Zyklon B, the lethal gas used in concentration camps. It was now the headquarters of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany (the HICOG) and, it now seemed, of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The car passed through a couple of military checkpoints before we parked and entered a temple-like portico. Behind this were some bronze doors and on the other side a capacious hallway with a large American flag, several American soldiers, and two curving staircases covered with sheet aluminum. In front of the paternoster elevator I was invited to step aboard and to disembark on the ninth floor. A little nervously—for I had never before ridden one of these intimidating elevators—I complied.

The ninth floor was very different from those below. There were no windows. It was lit from skylights instead of banded glazing, which probably afforded the security-minded inhabitants yet more privacy. The ceiling was also much lower, which made me wonder if one of the qualifications to be an American spy in Europe might be a lack of height.

Certainly, the man to whom I was now introduced was not tall, although he was hardly short, either. He wasn’t anything you could have described, being unremarkable in almost every way. He was, I suppose, like an American professor, albeit one who spoke fluent German. He wore a blazer, gray flannel trousers, a button-down blue shirt, and some sort of club or academic tie—maroon with little shields. The introduction was not, however, illuminating in that he appeared to have no name, just a title. He was “the Chief,” and that was all I ever knew about him. I did, however, recognize the two men who were also waiting for me in that windowless meeting room. Special Agents Scheuer and Frei—were those their real names? I still had no idea—waited until the Chief had acknowledged their presence before nodding at me with silent courtesy.

“Have you been here before?” he asked. “I mean, when this building was owned by I. G. Farben.”

“No, sir.” I shrugged. “As a matter of fact, I’m surprised to find it’s still here. Apparently undamaged. A building this size, of such importance to the Nazi war effort—I’d always assumed it was bombed to rubble, like almost everything else in this part of Germany.”

“There are two schools of opinion on that, Gunther. Sit down, sit down. One school has it that the Americans forbidden to bomb it because of the building’s proximity to the Allied POW camp at Grüneburgpark. The other school would have you believe that Eisenhower had this building marked out as his future European headquarters. Apparently, the building reminded him of the Pentagon, in Washington. And I suppose, if I’m honest, it does look a little similar. So maybe that’s the real explanation after all.”

I drew a chair out from a long, dark wood table and sat down and waited for the Chief to get to the point of my being there. But it seemed he hadn’t yet finished with Eisenhower.

“The president’s wife wasn’t quite so enamored of this building, however. She took particular exception to a large bronze female figure—a nude that used to sit on the edge of the reflecting pool. She thought it wasn’t suitable for a military installation.” The Chief chuckled. “Which makes me wonder how many real soldiers she’s actually met.” He frowned. “I’m not sure where that statue went. The Hoechst Building, perhaps? That nude always did look like she needed some medicine, eh, Phil?”

“Yes, sir,” said Scheuer.

“You must be tired after your journey, Herr Gunther,” said the Chief. “So I’ll try not to fatigue you any more than I have to. Would you like some coffee, sir?”

“Please.”

Scheuer moved toward a sideboard where coffee things had been neatly assembled on a tray.

The Chief sat down and regarded me with a mixture of curiosity and distrust. If there had been a chessboard on the table between us, it might have made things feel a little easier for us both. All the same, a game was in progress and we both knew what it was. He waited until Scheuer—Phil—had set a cup of coffee in front of me and then began.

“Zyklon B. I assume you’ve heard of it.”

I nodded.

“Everyone assumes it was developed by I. G. Farben. But they merely marketed the stuff. It was actually developed by another chemical company called Degesch, which came to be controlled by a third chemical company, called Degussa. In 1930, Degussa needed to raise some money and so they sold half of their controlling interest in Degesch to their main competitor, I. G. Farben. And, by the way, the stuff, the actual crystals that exterminated insects with the speed of a cyclone—thus the name—well, that was made by a fourth company, called Dessauer Werke. You with me so far?”

“Yes, sir. Although I’m beginning to wonder why.”

“Patience, sir. All will be explained. So Dessauer made the stuff for Degesch, who sold the stuff to Degussa, who sold the marketing rights to two other chemical companies. I won’t even bother telling you their names. It would just confuse you. So, in fact, I. G. Farben held only a twenty percent share in the gas, with the lion’s share owned by another company, Goldschmidt AG of Essen.

“Why am I telling you this? Let me explain. When I moved into this building, I felt kind of uncomfortable at the idea that I might be breathing the same kind of office air as the folks who developed that poison gas. So I resolved to find out about it for myself. And I discovered that it really wasn’t true that I. G. Farben had had very much to do with that gas. I also discovered that back in 1929, the U.S. Public Health Service was using Zyklon B to disinfect the clothes of Mexican immigrants and the freight trains they were traveling in. At the New Orleans Quarantine Station. Incidentally, the stuff is still being manufactured today, in Czechoslovakia, in the city of Köln. They call it Uragan D2 and they use it to disinfect the trains that German POWs have been traveling on. Back to the Homeland.

“You see, Herr Gunther, I have a passion for information. Some people call that sort of thing trivia, but I do not. I call that truth. Or knowledge. Or even, when I’m sitting in my office, intelligence. I have an appetite for facts, sir. Facts. Whether it’s facts about I. G. Farben, Zyklon B gas, Mackie Messer, or Erich Mielke.”

I sipped my coffee. It was horrible. Like stewed socks. I reached for my cigarettes and remembered that I’d smoked the last of them in the car.

“Give Herr Gunther a cigarette, will you, Phil? That was what you were after, was it not?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Scheuer lit me with an armor-plated Dunhill and then lit one for himself. I noticed the shields on his bow tie were the same as the ones on the Chief’s, and I assumed they shared more than just a service, but a background, too. Ivy League, probably.

“Your letter, Herr Gunther, was fascinating. Especially in the context of what Phil here has told me and what I’ve read in the file. But it’s my job to discover how much of it is fact. Oh, I’m not for a moment suggesting that you’re lying to us. But after twenty years, people can easily make mistakes. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“Very fair.”

He regarded my undrunk coffee with vicarious disgust. “Horrible, isn’t it? The coffee. I don’t know why we put up with it. Phil, get Herr Gunther something stronger. What are you drinking, sir?”

“A schnapps would be nice,” I said, and glanced around as Scheuer fetched a bottle and a small glass from inside the sideboard and placed it on the desk. “Thank you.”

“Coaster,” snapped the Chief.

Coasters were fetched and placed under the bottle and my glass.

“This table’s made of walnut,” said the Chief. “Walnut marks like a damask napkin. Now, then, sir. You have your cigarette. You have your drink. All I need from you are some facts.”

In his fingers he held a sheet of unfolded paper on which I recognized my own handwriting. He placed a pair of half-moon glasses on the end of his snub nose and viewed the letter with a detached curiosity. He barely read the contents before letting the note fall onto the table.

“Naturally, I’ve read this. Several times. But now that you’re here, I’d prefer it if you told me, in person, what you have written to Agents Scheuer and Frei in this letter of yours.”

“So that you can see if I deviate from what I wrote before?”

“We understand each other perfectly.”

“Well,
the facts
are these,” I said, suppressing a smile. “As a condition of my working with the SDECE—”

The Chief winced. “Exactly what does that mean, Phil?”

“Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage,” said Scheuer.

The Chief nodded. “Go on, Herr Gunther.”

“Well, I agreed to work for them if they permitted me to visit Berlin and an old friend of mine. Perhaps the only friend I have left.”

“She have a name? This friend of yours?”

“Elisabeth,” I said.

“Surname? Address?”

“I don’t want her involved in any of this.”

“Meaning you don’t want to tell me.”

“That’s true.”

“You met her how and when?”

“Nineteen thirty-one. She was a seamstress. A good one, too. She worked in the same tailor’s shop as Erich Mielke’s sister, which was also where Mielke’s mother, Lydia Mielke, worked until her death in 1911. It was pretty hard for Erich’s father, bringing up four children on his own. His elder daughter went to work and cooked the family meals, and because Elisabeth was her friend, sometimes she helped out. There were even times when Elisabeth was like a sister to Erich.”

“Where did they live? Can you remember the address?”

“Stettiner Strasse. A gray tenement building in Gesundbrunnen, in northwest Berlin. Number twenty-five. It was Erich who introduced me to Elisabeth. After I’d saved his neck.”

“Tell me about that.”

I told him.

“And this is when you met Mielke’s father.”

“Yes. I went to Mielke’s address to try to arrest him, and the old man took a swing at me and I had to arrest him. It was Elisabeth who had given me the address, and she wasn’t very happy that I’d asked her for it. As a result, our relationship hit a rock. And it was very much later on, I suppose it must have been the autumn of 1940, before we became reacquainted, and the following year before we started our relationship again.”

“You never mentioned any of this when you were interrogated at Landsberg,” said the Chief. “Why not?”

I shrugged. “It hardly seemed relevant at the time. I almost forgot that Elisabeth even knew Erich. Not least because she’d always kept it a secret from him that we were friends. Erich didn’t like cops much, to put it mildly. I started seeing her again in the winter of 1946, when I came back from the Russian POW camp. I lived with Elisabeth for a short while until I managed to fin d my wife again in Berlin. But I was always very fond of her, and she of me. And recently, when I was in Paris, I got to thinking of her again and wondering if she was okay. I suppose you might say I began to entertain romantic thoughts about her. Like I said, there’s no one else in Berlin I know. So I was resolved to look her up as soon as possible and see if she and I couldn’t make another go of it.”

“And how did that go?”

“It went well. She’s not married. She was involved with some American soldier. More than one, I think. Anyway, both men were married, and so they went back to their wives in the States, leaving her, middle-aged and scared about the future.”

I poured a glass of schnapps and sipped it while the Chief watched me closely, as if weighing my story in each hand, trying to judge how much or how little he believed.

“She was at the same address as she’d been in 1946?”

“Yes.”

“We can always ask the French, you know. Her address.”

“Go ahead.”

“They might reasonably assume that’s where you’ve gone,” he said. “They might even make life difficult for her. Have you thought of that? We could protect her. The French aren’t always as romantic as they’re often portrayed.”

“Elisabeth lived through the battle of Berlin,” I said. “She was raped by the Russians. Besides, she’s not the type to give a man an injection of thiopental on the streets of Göttingen in broad daylight. When Grottsch tells his story, I imagine the French will think the Russians pinched me, don’t you? After all, that’s what you wanted them to think, isn’t it? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your men were speaking Russian when they grabbed him. Just for appearance’s sake.”

“At least tell me if she lives in the East or the West.”

“In the West. The French gave me a passport in the name of Sébastien Kléber. You’ll be able to check me coming through Checkpoint Alpha at Helmstedt, and into Berlin at the Dreilinger Crossing. But not leaving it to enter East Berlin.”

“All right. Tell me your news about Erich Mielke.”

“My friend Elisabeth said she’d seen Mielke’s father, Erich. That he was still alive and in good health. He was in his early seventies, she said. They went for a coffee at the Café Kranzler. He said he’d been living in the DDR but that he didn’t like it. Missed the football and his old neighborhood. While Elisabeth was telling me this, it was clear she had no idea what Erich junior had been doing. Who and what he was. All she said was that Erich visits his father from time to time and gives him money. And I assumed, given who he was, that this must be in secret.”

“From time to time. How often is that?”

“Regularly. Once a month.”