Field Grey by Philip Kerr

  I went through to the bar, bought some English cigarettes from the barman, and glanced around while he found me a light. Some men were playing dominoes in a snug little alcove. A dog was lying on the floor beside them, its tail periodically wagging. An old man sat in a corner nursing a beer and reading the previous day's edition of Die Zeit. I took a quick schnapps with the change, lit my cigarette and went back into the restaurant as a coffee machine howled like an Arctic wind. I sat down, stubbed out the cigarette, sawed off a corner of my uneaten schnitzel and said:

  'He's in there.'

  'My God,' said Frei. 'I don't believe it.'

  'Are you sure?' asked Hamer.

  'I never forget a man who's punched me.'

  'You don't think he recognised you?' said Scheuer.

  'No,' I said. 'He's wearing reading glasses. And there's another pair in his top pocket. My guess is he's long in one eye and short in the other.'

  A Bavarian-looking wall clock struck the half-hour. At the next table one of the Americans pushed his chair away with the backs of his legs. On the hard wooden floor of the restaurant it sounded like a drum roll.

  'So what happens now?' asked Hamer.

  'We stick to the plan,' said Scheuer. 'Gunther will follow him and we'll follow Gunther. He knows this city better than any of us.'

  'I'll need more money,' I said. 'For the U-Bahn or a tram. And if I lose you, I might have to get a taxi back to Ihnestrasse.'

  'You won't lose us,' Hamer smiled, confidently.

  'All the same,' said Scheuer, 'he's right.' He handed me some notes and some small change.

  I stood up.

  'Are you going to sit in the bar?' asked Frei.

  'No. Not unless I want him to recognise me later. I'm going to stand outside and wait for him there.'

  'In the rain?'

  'That's the general idea. You'd best stay out of the bar. We wouldn't want him to feel like he was of any interest to anyone.'

  'Here,' said Frei. 'You can borrow my hat.'

  I tried it on. The hat was too big so I handed it back to him. 'Keep it,' I said. 'I'll stand in a doorway on the opposite side of the road and watch from there.'

  Scheuer cleaned a patch of condensation from the window. 'And we'll watch you from here.'

  Hamer looked at my half-eaten food. 'You Germans eat too much anyway,' he observed.

  Ignoring him I said, 'I follow him. Not you. If you think I've lost him, don't panic. Just keep your distance. And don't try to find him again for me. I know what I'm doing. Try to remember that. I used to do this kind of thing for a living. If he goes in another building then wait outside, don't follow me in. He might have friends looking out of a window.'

  'Good luck,' said Scheuer.

  'Good luck to us all,' I said and drained the contents of my wine glass. Then I went outside.

  For the first time in a while I felt a spring in my step. Things were starting to work out nicely. I didn't mind the rain in the least. It felt good on my face. Refreshing. I took up a position in the doorway of the soot-blackened building opposite. A cold doorway. A policeman's true station, and blowing on my fingernails for want of gloves I settled in against the inside wall. Once, a long time ago, I'd lived not fifty or sixty metres from where I was standing, in an apartment on Fasanenstrasse. The long hot summer of 1938 when the whole of Europe breathed a collective sigh of relief because the threat of war had been averted. So we had thought, anyway. When Henry Ford had finished saying History is bunk he also said that most of us preferred to live in the present and not to think about the past. Or words to that effect. But in Berlin the past was rather harder to avoid.

  A man came down the stairs of the building and asked me for a cigarette. I gave him one and for a moment or two we talked, but all the time I kept one eye on the two doors of the Am Steinplatz. At the opposite end of Uhlandstrasse, near the eponymous square, was a hotel called the Steinplatz. The two establishments were owned by the same people; to the confusion of all Americans they even shared the same telephone number. The confusion of all Americans was just fine by me.

  It stopped raining and the sun came out, and a few minutes later so did my quarry. He paused, looked up at the clearing sky and lit a pipe, which was my chance to get another good look at him.

  He was wearing an old Loden coat and a hat with a goose feather in the silk band and you could hear the nails in his shoes from the other side of the street. He was stout and balding and wore a different pair of glasses now. There was, without a doubt, a strong resemblance to Erich Mielke. He was about the same height, too. He checked his flies as if he'd been to the lavatory and walked south, toward Kant Strasse. After a decent interval I followed, with one hand on my little knight's head.

  I felt even better now that I was walking alone. Well, almost alone. I glanced around and saw two of them - Frei and Hamer - about thirty metres behind me, on opposite sides of the street. I couldn't see Scheuer and decided he'd probably gone to fetch the car so that they wouldn't have to walk when, eventually, we tracked our man to his lair. Americans didn't like walking any more than they cared to miss a meal. Since I'd started to spend some time with them I had observed that the average American - supposing that these men were average Americans - eats about twice as much as the average German. Every day.

  On Kant Strasse the man turned right toward Savigny Platz; then, near the S-Bahn, a train pulled into the elevated station above his head and he broke into a trot. So did I and only just managed to buy a ticket and board the train before the doors closed and we were on our way, north-east, towards Old Moabit. Hamer and Frei weren't so lucky, and just as the train pulled out I glimpsed them running up the stairs of Savigny Platz station. I might have smiled at them, too, if what I was doing hadn't felt so vital to my own future and fortune.

  I sat down and stared straight ahead and out of the window. All of the old police training was kicking in again: the way to follow a man without making yourself obvious. Mostly it was about keeping your distance and learning how to tail a man who was behind you as often as he was in front of you; or, as now, in the adjoining carriage. I could see him through the connecting window, still reading his newspaper. That made it easier for me, of course. And the thought that I was well on top of it made the discomfiture that was very likely being experienced by the Amis all the more enjoyable. Scheuer I almost liked, but Hamer and Frei were a different matter. I especially disliked Hamer, if only because of his arrogance and because he seemed to have a real dislike of Germans. Well, we were used to that. But it was still annoying.

  Without moving my head, I rolled my eyes to one side like a ventriloquist's dummy. We were coming into Zoo station and I was watching the newspaper in the next carriage to see if it got folded away, but it stayed erect and remained that way through the stations at Tiergarten and Bellevue; but at Lehrter it finally came down and the reader stood up to disembark.

  He went down the steps and walked north, with Humboldt Harbour on his right. Several canal boats moored together in one large flotilla shifted gently on the steel-blue water of the British sector. On the other side of the same harbour was the Charite Hospital and the Russian sector. In the distance East German or possibly Russian border guards manned a checkpoint on the junction of Invalidenstrasse and the Canal. But we were walking north, up Heide Strasse, until we came to the French sector, where we turned right along Fenn Strasse and onto the triangular Wedding Platz. I paused for a moment to take in the ruins of the Dankes church where I had married my first wife and then caught a last glimpse of my man as finally he went to ground in a tall building on the southern Schulzendorfer Strasse, overlooking the old disused brewery.

  There was little or no traffic on the square. Almost as bankrupt as the British the French had little money to spend regenerating German business in the area, let alone for the restoration of a church that had been built in thanksgiving for the delivery of their ancient mortal enemy, Kaiser Wilhelm I, from an attempt made on his life in 1878.

 
; I approached the building on the corner of Schulzendorfer Strasse and glanced down Chaussee Strasse. Here the border crossing point on Liesenstrasse was very close and probably just the other side of the brewery wall. I looked at the names on the brass bell pulls and figured that Erich Stahl was close enough to Erich Stallmacher for our clandestine operation now to proceed as planned.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: BERLIN, 1954

  We moved to a small and very crummy safe-house on Dreyse Strasse, east of Moabit Hospital, in the British zone, which Scheuer said was as close to Stallmacher's apartment as we dared to get for the moment without tipping our hand to the Russians or, for that matter, the French. The British were told only that we were keeping a suspected black-marketeer under surveillance.

  The plan was simple: that I, being a Berliner, would contact the owner of the building on Schulzendorfer Strasse and offer to rent one of several empty apartments using my wife's maiden name. The owner, a retired lawyer from Wilmersdorf, showed me around the apartment - which he'd furnished himself - and it was much better on the inside than it looked from the outside. He explained that the building had been owned and administered by his wife, Martha, until she had been killed by a bomb the previous year while visiting her mother's grave in Oranienburg.

  'They said she never knew a thing,' said Herr Schurz. 'A two hundred and fifty kilogram American aerial bomb had lain there for almost ten years without anyone noticing. A gravedigger twenty metres away was digging and he must have hit the thing with his pickaxe.'

  "That's too bad,' I said.

  'They say Oranienburg is full of unexploded ordnance. The soil is soft there, you see, with a hard layer of gravel underneath.

  The bombs would penetrate the earth but not the gravel.' He shrugged and then shook his head. 'Apparently there were a lot of targets in Oranienburg.'

  I nodded. 'The Heinkel factory. And a pharmaceutical plant. Not to mention a suspected atomic bomb research plant.'

  'Are you married, Herr Handloser?'

  'No, my wife also is dead. She got pneumonia. But she'd been ill for a while, so it wasn't as great a shock as what happened to your wife.'

  I went to the window and looked down onto the street.

  'This is a big apartment for someone living by himself,' said Schurz.

  'I'm planning to take in a couple of tenants to help me with the rent,' I said. 'If that's all right with you. Some gentlemen from an American bible school.'

  'I'm pleased to hear it,' said Schurz. 'That's what the whole French sector needs now. More Americans. They're the only ones with any money. Talking of which.'

  I counted some banknotes into his eager hand. He gave me a set of keys, and then I returned to the safe-house on Dreyse Strasse.

  'As far as the landlord is concerned,' I said, 'we can move in tomorrow.'

  'You said nothing to him about Stahl, or Stallmacher,' said Scheuer.

  'I did exactly as you told me. I didn't even ask about the neighbours. So what happens now?'

  'We move in and keep the place under close surveillance,' said Scheuer. 'Wait for Erich Mielke to visit his dad and then go upstairs to introduce ourselves.'

  Frei laughed. 'Hello, we're your new neighbours. Can we interest you in defecting to the West? You and your old man.'

  'What happened to the idea of making him into your spy?'

  'Not enough leverage. Our political masters want to know what the East German leadership is thinking now, not what they're thinking in a year's time. So we grab him and take him back to the States to debrief him.'

  'You're forgetting Mielke's wife, Gertrud, aren't you? And doesn't he have a son now? Frank? He won't want to leave them, surely.'

  'We're not forgetting them at all,' said Scheuer. 'But I rather think that Erich will. From everything we know about him he's not the sentimental sort. Besides, he can always apply for them to come to the West, as well. And it's not like there's a wall that's stopping them from coming.'

  'And if he doesn't want to defect?'

  'Well then that's too bad.'

  'You'll kidnap him?'

  'That's not a word we use,' said Scheuer. 'The US Constitution permits public policy exceptions to the normal legal process of extradition. But I doubt any of this is going to matter. As soon as he sees the four of us he'll know the game is up and that he has no choice in the matter.'

  'And when you do take him back? What then?'

  Scheuer grinned. 'I don't even want to think about that until we've got him, Gunther. Mielke's the great white whale for the CIA in Germany. We land him we get enough oil to burn in our lamps to see what we're doing in this country for years to come. The Stasi might never recover from a blow like this. It could even help us to win the Cold War.'

  'Damn right,' said Hamer. 'Mielke's the whole fucking ball game. There's very little that bastard doesn't know about communist plans in Germany. Will they invade? Will they keep to their side of the fence? How far are they prepared to go to hold on to the yardage they've already won? And just how independent of Moscow is the current East German leadership?'

  Frei clapped me on the shoulder amicably. 'Gunther, old buddy,' he said, 'you help us get this bastard, you're set for life, do you hear? By the time Ike gets through thanking you, my German friend, you'll feel more American than we do.'

  Hamer frowned. 'Don't you think it's time Gunther should maybe get some more intel from his lady friend? Does Mielke come on a weekend? Does he come at the beginning or the end of the month? We could be in that apartment for weeks waiting for this Kraut to show up.'

  But Scheuer was shaking his head. 'No, it's best we leave things as they are. Besides, I think Gunther's already tested the limit of his friendship with this lady. If he asks her any more questions about Mielke she's just liable to start wondering who he's more interested in, him or her. And I wouldn't want her to become jealous. Jealous women do unpredictable things.'

  He went to the window of the safe-house, drew back a grey- white length of net curtain and looked out as an ambulance raced up Bendlerstrasse to the hospital, its bell ringing furiously.

  'That reminds me,' said Scheuer. He turned to look at Frei. 'Did you get hold of that ambulance?'

  'Yes.'

  'It's not for us.' Scheuer glanced at me. 'It's for the package.'

  'You mean Mielke.'

  'That's right. But from now on we never use that name. Not until he's on a private wing at the US Army hospital in Lichterfelde.'

  'I suppose you'll give him thiopental, too,' I said.

  'Only if we have to.'

  'Ain't like it's rationed,' said Frei.

  Hamer laughed. 'Not for us, anyway.'

  'By the way,' I said, 'feel free to pay me any day soon.'

  'You'll get your lousy money,' said Hamer.

  'I've heard that before.' I shot a sarcastic smile Hamer's way and then looked at Scheuer. 'Look, all I am asking is that I see a letter from the kind of Swiss bank that treats you like just another number. And all I want is what's mine.'

  'And where did that come from?' said Hamer.

  'None of your goddamn business. But since you ask so politely, Hamer, I won it gambling. In Havana. You can pay me the twenty-five thousand as a bonus if and when you collect the package.'

  'Gambling. Yeah, sure.'

  'When I was arrested in Cuba, I had a receipt to prove that.'

  'So did the SS when they robbed the Jews,' said Hamer.

  'If you're suggesting that's how I came by my money, you're wrong. The way you're wrong about nearly everything, Hamer.'

  'You'll get your money,' said Scheuer. 'Don't worry about it. Everything is in hand.'

  I nodded, not because I believed him but because I wanted him to believe that money was what motivated me now, when it wasn't. Not any more. I squeezed the black knight in my trouser pocket and determined to imitate its action on the chessboard. To move obliquely one square to the side before jumping two squares forward. In a closed position, what else cou
ld I do?

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: BERLIN, 1954

  The following afternoon, with our bags and suitcases packed - mine was the smallest - we prepared to leave the pension in Dreyse Strasse and move into the apartment on Schulzendorfer Strasse. None of us were sorry to be out of there. The landlady owned several cats and these were not much inclined to piss out of doors; even with the windows open, the place smelled like an old people's home. We filled a newish-looking VW transporter van with ourselves and our luggage and our equipment. Scheuer drove, with me sitting in the passenger seat and giving directions, while Hamer and Frei rolled around in the back with the bags, complaining loudly. Following at a distance was the ambulance containing what Scheuer called 'security' - CIA muscle with guns and shortwave radios. According to Scheuer's plan, the ambulance would park a short distance away from Schulzendorfer Strasse and, when the time came, these men were ready to help us grab Erich Mielke.

  I told Scheuer to drive north onto Perleberger Strasse, intending to go across the canal on Fennbrücke, but an old building on the corner of Quitzowstrasse had collapsed across the road and we were obliged by the local police and the fire brigade to go south down Heide Strasse.

  'We'd better not cross the canal on Invalidenstrasse,' I told Scheuer. 'For obvious reasons.'

  Invalidenstrasse, on the east side of the canal, was the DDR, and a new looking Transporter filled with Americans - not to mention an ambulance filled with armed men - was certain to attract unwelcome attention from the Grepos.

  'Go west on Invalidenstrasse until you're on Old Moabit and then right up Rathenower Strasse. We'll have to cross the canal on the Fohrer Bridge. If it's still there. It's been a while since I was up this way. Every time I come to Berlin it looks different from the last time I was here.'

  Scheuer shouted at the two in the back. 'That's why Gunther has the seat,' he said. 'So he can tell us where to go.'

  'I know where I'd like to tell him to go,' grumbled Hamer.