Field Grey by Philip Kerr

  'Yes, sir.'

  We drove west and north of the Ring to Biesenthaler Strasse, which was the address on Erich Ziemer's charge sheet. It was a dreary-looking building off Christiana Strasse and within snorting distance of the Lowen Brewery and the distinctive smell of hops that was always in the air over that part of Berlin.

  Ziemer had rented a big gloomy room in a big gloomy house that was owned by an old man with a face like the Turin Shroud. He was unhappy to be roused from his bed at such an early hour, but hardly surprised that we were asking questions about his tenant, who was not in his room and, it seemed, was unlikely to be returning to it; but we asked to see the room anyway.

  Up against the window was a dilapidated leather sofa that was the size and colour of a slumbering hippo. On the dampish wall was a print of Alexander von Humboldt with a botanical specimen on an open book. The landlord, Herr Karpf, scratched his beard and shrugged and told us that Ziemer had disappeared like fog the previous day owing three weeks' rent, taking his belongings, not to mention a silver and ivory tankard worth several hundred marks. It was difficult to imagine Herr Karpf owning anything valuable but we promised to do our best to recover it.

  There was a police call box on Oskar Platz, near the hospital, and from there we telephoned the Alex, where another officer had been looking for a crime sheet and an address for Erich Mielke, but so far without success.

  'That's that, then,' said Heller.

  'No,' I said. 'There's one more chance. Drive south, to the electricity works on Volta Strasse.'

  Heller's car was a neat little cream-coloured DKW cabriolet with a small two-cylinder 600 c.c. engine, but it had front- wheel drive and held on to the corners like a welded bracket so that we were there in no time at all. On Brunnen Strasse, opposite Volta Strasse, I told him to turn left on Lortzing Strasse and pull up.

  'Give me ten minutes,' I said and, stepping over the DKW's little door, I walked quickly in the direction of a lofty-looking apartment building that was all red and yellow brick with window-box balconies and a mansard roof that resembled a small Moroccan fortress.

  Elisabeth's shapeless landlady, Frau Bayer, was only a little surprised to see me at this early hour, as I had got into the habit of visiting the dressmaker whenever I came off duty. She knew I was a policeman, which was normally enough to silence her grumbling at being got out of bed. Most Berliners were always respectful of the law, except when they were communists or Nazis. And when it wasn't enough to silence her grumbling I slipped a few marks into her dressing-gown pocket by way of compensation.

  The apartment was a warren of shabby rooms full of old cherrywood furniture, Chinese screens, and tasselled lampshades. As always I sat in the living room and waited for Frau Bayer to fetch her lodger; and as always when she saw me, Elisabeth smiled a sleepy but happy smile and took me by the hand to lead me to her room where a proper welcome awaited me; only this time I stayed put on the living room sofa.

  'What's the matter?' she said. 'Is something wrong?'

  'It's Erich,' I said. 'He's in trouble.'

  'What kind of trouble?'

  'Serious trouble. Two policemen were shot and killed last night.'

  'And you think Erich might have something to do with it?'

  'It looks that way.'

  'Are you sure?'

  'Yes. Look, Elisabeth, I don't have much time. His best chance is if I find him before anyone else does. I can tell him what to say and, more importantly, what not to say. Do you see?'

  She nodded and tried to stifle a yawn.

  'So what do you want from me?'

  'An address.'

  'You mean you want me to betray him, don't you?'

  'That's one way of looking at it, yes. I can't deny that. But another way is this: that perhaps I can persuade him to make a clean breast of it. Which is the only thing that can save his life now.'

  'They wouldn't behead him, would they?'

  'For killing a policeman? Yes, I think they would. One of the cops who was killed was a widower with three daughters who are now orphaned. The Republic would have no choice but to make an example of him, or else risk courting a storm of criticism in the newspapers. The Nazis would just love that. But if I am the arresting officer I might be able to talk him into naming some names. If others in the KPD put him up to it, then he has to say so. He's young and impressionable and that will help his case.'

  She pulled a face. 'Don't ask me to turn him in, Bernie. I've known that boy for half his life. I helped bring him up.'

  'I am asking it. I give you my word I will do what I said and that I will speak up for him in court. All I'm asking for is an address, Elisabeth.'

  She sat down in a chair and clasped her hands tightly and closed her eyes almost as if she was uttering a silent prayer. Perhaps she did.

  'I knew something like this would happen,' she said. 'That's why I've never ever told him that you and I have been seeing each other. Because he would have been cross. And I'm beginning to understand why.'

  'I won't tell him that it was you who gave me an address, if that's what you're worried about.'

  'That's not what I'm worried about,' she whispered.

  'What then?'

  She stood up, abruptly. 'I'm worried about Erich of course,' she said, loudly. 'I'm worried about what's going to happen to him.'

  I nodded. 'Look, forget it. We'll have to find him some other way. Sorry I bothered you.'

  'He lives with his father, Emil,' she said dully. 'Stettiner Strasse, number twenty-five. The top flat.'

  'Thanks.'

  I waited for her to say something else and when she didn't I knelt down in front of her and tried to take her hand to give it a comforting squeeze, but she pulled it away. At the same time she avoided my eye as if it had been hanging out of its socket.

  'Just go,' she said. 'Go and do your duty.'

  It was almost dawn on the street outside Elisabeth's apartment building but I felt that something important had happened between us: that something had changed, perhaps for ever. I stepped into Heller's car and told him the address. From my expression I guess he knew better than to ask how I had come by it.

  We sped north up Swinemünder Strasse onto Bellermann Strasse and then Christiana Strasse. Twenty-five Stettiner Strasse was a grey tenement building around a central courtyard that would probably have collapsed in on itself but for several large support timbers. Although it could just as easily have been moss or mould, a green rug was hanging out of an open window on one of the upper floors, and it was the only spot of colour in that ghastly sarcophagus of raw brick and loose cobblestones. Even though this was fast becoming a bright summer's morning, no sun ever reached the lower levels of the tenements on Stettiner Strasse: Nosferatu could have spent the whole day quite comfortably in the twilight world of a ground floor Stettiner Strasse apartment.

  We pulled on a bell for several minutes before a grey-haired head appeared out of a dirty window.

  'Yes?'

  'Police,' said Heller. 'Open up.'

  'What's the matter?'

  'As if you don't know,' I said. 'Open up, or we'll kick the door in.'

  'All right.'

  The head disappeared. A minute or so later we heard the door open, and we ran upstairs as if we actually believed there was a chance we might still apprehend Erich Mielke. In truth, neither of us thought there was much hope of that happening. Not in Gesundbrunnen. It was the kind of area where children were taught how to stay one step ahead of the cops before they learned long division.

  At the top of the stairs a man wearing trousers and a pyjama jacket admitted us to a little flat that was a shrine to the class struggle. Every wall was hung with KPD posters, notices of strikes and demonstrations, and cheap portraits of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Marx and Lenin. Unlike any of them, the man standing in front of us at least looked like a worker. He was around fifty, stocky and short with a bull neck, a receding hairline and an advancing waist. He stared at us suspiciously with small, clo
se-set eyes that were like diacritic marks inside a nought. Short of wearing a towel and a silk dressing- gown, he couldn't have looked any more rough and pugnacious.

  'So what does the Berlin polenta want with me?'

  'We're looking for a Herr Erich Mielke,' said Heller. His punctiliousness was typical. You didn't get to be a counsellor in the Berlin police without paying attention to detail, especially when you were also a Jew. That was probably the ex-lawyer in him. It was also the part of Heller I didn't care for, the punctilious lawyer. The stocky little man in the pyjama jacket didn't seem to like it either.

  'He's not here,' he said, barely concealing a smirk of pleasure.

  'And who are you?'

  'His father.'

  'When did you last see your son?'

  'A few days ago. So what's he supposed to have done? Hit a policeman?'

  'No,' said Heller. 'On this occasion it seems that he's shot and killed at least one.'

  'That's too bad.' But the man's tone seemed to suggest he didn't think that it was too bad at all.

  By now the resemblance between father and son was all too obvious to me, and I turned and walked into the kitchen just in case the temptation to hit him grew too strong.

  'You won't find him in there, either.'

  I put my hand on the gas ring. It was still warm. A pile of half-smoked cigarettes lay in an ashtray as if put there by someone who was feeling nervous about something. No one in Gesundbrunnen would have wasted tobacco like that. I pictured a man sitting in a chair by the window. A man who'd been trying to occupy his mind with a book, perhaps, while he waited for a car to come and take him and Ziemer to a KPD safe-house. I picked up the book that lay on the kitchen table. It was All Quiet on the Western Front.

  'Do you know where your son might be now?' asked Heller.

  'I haven't a clue. Frankly, he could be anywhere. Never tells me anything about where he's been or where he's going. Well, you know what young men are like.'

  I came back into the room and stood behind him. 'You KPD?'

  He looked over his shoulder and smiled. 'It's not illegal is it? Yet?'

  'Perhaps you were in Bülowplatz yourself, last night.' While I spoke I turned the pages of the book.

  He shook his head. 'Me? No. I was here, all night.'

  'Are you sure? After all, there were several hundred of your comrades there, including your son. Maybe as many as a thousand. Surely you wouldn't have missed something as fun-packed as that?'

  'No,' he said, firmly. 'I stayed at home. I always stay at home on a Sunday night.'

  'Are you religious?' I said. 'You don't look religious.'

  'On account of the fact that I have to go to work in…' He nodded at the little wooden clock on the tiled mantelpiece. 'Yes, in just two hours from now.'

  'Any witnesses that you were here all night?'

  'The Geislers, next door.'

  'Is this your book?'

  'Yes.'

  'Good, isn't it?'

  'I wouldn't have thought it was your taste,' he said.

  'Oh? Why's that?'

  'I hear the Nazis want to ban it.'

  'Maybe they do. But I'm not a Nazi. And neither is the Police Counsellor here.'

  'All cops are Nazis in my book.'

  'Yes, but this isn't it. I mean, your book.' I turned the page and removed the Ring Bahn ticket that was marking the reader's place. 'This ticket says you're lying.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'This ticket is for Gesundbrunnen Station, just a few minutes' walk from here. It was bought at Schönhauser Tor at eight- twenty last night, which is about ten minutes after two policemen were murdered on Bülowplatz. That's less than a hundred metres from the station at Schonhauser Tor. Which puts the owner of this book in the thick of it.'

  'I'm not saying anything.'

  'Herr Mielke,' said Heller, 'you're in enough trouble as it is, without putting the brakes on your mouth.'

  'You won't catch him,' he said defiantly. 'Not now. If I know my Erich he's already halfway to Moscow.'

  'Not nearly halfway,' I said. 'And not Moscow either, I'll bet. Not if you say so. That means it has to be Leningrad. Which in itself means he's probably travelling by boat. So the chances are he'll be heading to one of two German ports, Hamburg or Rostock. Rostock's nearer so he'll probably figure to second- guess us and head for Hamburg. Which is what? Two hundred and fifty kilometres? They might be there by now if they left before midnight. My guess is that Erich's probably on the Gras- brook or Sandtor Dock at this very moment, sneaking onto a Russian freighter, and boasting about how he shot a fascist policeman in the back. They'll probably give the little coward an Order of Lenin for bravery.'

  Some of this must have touched a nerve in Mielke's changeling body. One minute his beer-swilling troll's face was in ugly repose, the next the jaw had advanced belligerently and, growling abuse, he took a swing at me. Fortunately I was half-expecting it and I was already leaning back when it connected, but it still felt like I got hit by a sandbag. Feeling sick, I sat down hard on a soft chair. For a moment I had a new way of seeing the world, but it had nothing to do with Berlin's avant-garde. Mielke senior was grinning now, his mouth a gap-toothed, moon-gnawing rictus, his big trench-mace of a fist already heading Heller's way; and when its orbit around Mielke's body was complete it crashed into the surface of Heller's skull like an asteroid, sending the police counsellor sprawling onto the floor, where he groaned and lay still.

  I got to my feet again. 'I'm going to enjoy this, you ugly commie bastard.'

  Mielke senior turned just in time to meet my fist coming the other way. The blow rocked the big head on his meaty shoulders like a sudden bad smell in his nostrils, and as he took a step backwards, I hit him again with a right that descended on the side of his head like a Borotra first service. That lifted his legs off the ground like a plane's undercarriage, and for a split second he actually seemed to fly through the air before landing on his knees. As he rolled onto his side I twisted one arm behind him, then the other, and managed to hold them long enough for a groggy-looking Heller to get the irons on his wrists. Then I stood up and kicked him hard because I wasn't able to kick his son and because I was wishing I hadn't saved the young man's neck. I might have kicked him again but Heller stopped me, and but for the fact that he was a counsellor and I was still feeling sick, I might have kicked him too.

  'Gunther,' he yelled. 'That's enough.' He let out a gasp and leaned heavily against a wall while he tried to recover all of his wits.

  I shifted my jaw; my head felt larger on one side than the other and there was something singing in my ears only it wasn't a kettle.

  'With all due respect sir,' I said, 'it's not nearly enough.'

  And then I kicked Mielke again before I staggered out of the apartment and onto the landing and, a minute or two later, puked over the banister.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: GERMANY, 1954

  I stopped talking. My throat felt tight but not as tight as the handcuffs.

  'Is that all there is?' demanded one of the two Amis.

  'There's more,' I said. 'A lot more. But I can't feel my hands. And I need to use the lavatory.'

  'You saw Erich Mielke again.'

  'Several times. The last time was 1946, when I was a POW in Russia. You see Mielke was-'

  'No, no. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We want everything in the correct order of appearance. That's the German way, isn't it?'

  'If you say so.'

  'All right then. You went to his home. You had a police witness. You found the murder weapons in the drain. I take it those were the murder weapons?'

  'A long-barrelled Luger and a Dreyse. 32. That was the standard police automatic back then. Yes, they were the murder weapons. Look, I really do need a rest. I can't feel my hands-'

  'Yes, you said that already.'

  'I'm not asking for apple pie and ice cream, just a pair of handcuffs off. That's fair, isn't it?'

  'After what you j
ust told us? About kicking Mielke's father when he was handcuffed and lying on the floor? That wasn't very fair of you, Gunther.'

  'He had it ordered, on room service. You hit a cop, you get trouble. I didn't hit you, did I?'

  'Not yet.'

  'With these hands? I couldn't hit my own knees.' I yawned inside the hood. 'No, really, that's it. I've had enough of this. Now that I know what you want that makes it easier for me to keep my peep. Regardless of the legalities or illegalities of this situation-'

  'You are in a place where there is no law. We are the law. You want to piss yourself then go ahead and make yourself comfortable. Then see what happens to you.'

  'I'm beginning to understand-'

  'I sure hope so, for your sake.'

  'You enjoy playing Gestapo. It's a little bit of a kick for you, doing it their way, isn't it? Secretly, you probably admire them and the way they went about extracting teeth and information.'

  They came close to me now, raising their voices beyond what was comfortable to hear.

  'Fuck you, Gunther.'

  'You hurt our feelings with that remark about the Gestapo.'

  'I take it back. You're much worse than the Gestapo. They didn't pretend they were defending the free world. It's your hypocrisy that's offensive, not your brutality. You're the worst kind of fascists. The kind that think they're liberals.'

  One of them started knocking at my head with the knuckle on his finger; it wasn't painful so much as annoying.

  'When are you going to get it into that fucking square head of yours-'

  'You're right. I still don't understand why you're doing this when I'm perfectly willing to cooperate.'

  'You're not meant to understand. When are you going to understand that, asshole? We want more than your willingness to cooperate. That implies you have some choice in the matter. When you don't. It's up to us to assess your level of cooperation, not you.'

  'We want to know that when you're telling us the truth there's absolutely no question it could ever be anything else. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Which means that we'll decide when you need a rest, when you need to go to the lavatory, when you see the light of day. When you breathe and when you fart. So. Tell us some more about Erich Mielke. Did he go to Hamburg or Rostock?'