Field Gray

27

From the grimy window in the holding cell at Paris’s Cherche-Midi prison I could just see the front of the Hôtel Lutetia, and for a long while I stood pressed into the cobwebbed corner, watching the hotel closely, as if I almost expected to see myself coming out of the door with poor little Renata Matter on my arm. It was hard to know whom I felt more sorry for, her or me, but eventually she edged it. She was dead, after all, when she would have had every reason to expect that she might still be alive. But for me. I didn’t spare myself anything in the way of reproach or blame. If only I hadn’t fixed her up with a job at the Adlon, I told myself, then she wouldn’t have been killed. If only I had left her here in Paris, then there would have been a small but nonetheless real possibility that she could have turned left out of the Lutetia, crossed the boulevard Raspail, and come to see me in the Cherche-Midi. It would have been easy enough. The Cherche-Midi was, after all, no longer a prison but a court, and like many others in Paris—most of them journalists—she might have gone there to see the trial of Carl Oberg and Helmut Knochen and seen me there, too, my hosts in the SDECE—a French counterespionage service—having thought it necessary to remind me that I was in their power, and that like Dreyfus, who had also been imprisoned in the Cherche-Midi, they could do what they liked with me now that I had been extradited to their custody.

Not that custody in Paris was such an enormous hardship. Not after everything else. Not after Mainz and the French Sûreté. They had been a little rough. And it was true that La Santé Prison, where I was currently held, wasn’t exactly the Lutetia, but the SDECE wasn’t so bad. Probably not as bad as the CIA, anyway; and certainly not as bad as the Russians. Besides, the food at La Santé was good and the coffee even better; the cigarettes were tasty and plentiful; and most of the interrogations at the Caserne Mortier—nicknamed “the Swimming Pool”—were conducted politely, often with a bottle of wine and some bread and cheese. Sometimes the French even gave me a newspaper to take back to La Santé. None of this was what I’d been expecting when I left WCPN1 in Landsberg. My French improved—enough to understand what was in the newspapers and a little of the proceedings on the day I went to court, which just happened to be the day when the military tribunal brought in its verdict and handed down the sentences. My hosts in French intelligence had a point they wanted to make, after all. I could hardly blame them for that.

We sat in the public gallery, which was full. A civil judge, M. Boessel du Bourg, and six military judges came into court and took their places in front of a large blackboard, so that I half expected them to write out the verdict and sentence with a piece of chalk. The civil judge wore robes and an extremely silly hat. The military judges were all wearing lots of medals, although it was unclear to me what any of these could have been for. Then the two accused were led into the dock. I hadn’t seen Oberg before, except on the German newsreels during the war. He wore a smart, double-breasted pin-striped suit and light-framed glasses. He looked like Eisenhower’s older brother. Knochen was thinner and grayer than I remembered: Prison does that to a man—that and a death sentence from the British hanging over your head. Knochen looked straight at me without showing any sign of his having recognized me. I wanted to shout at him that he was a damned liar, but, of course, I didn’t. When a man’s on trial for his life, it’s not good manners to bend his ear about something else.

At considerable length M. Boessel du Bourg read the verdict and then delivered the sentence, which was death, of course. This was the cue for lots of people in court to begin shouting at the two defendants, and—a little to my surprise—I found I was almost sorry for them. Once the two most powerful men in Paris, they now looked like two architects receiving the news that they hadn’t won an important contract. Oberg blinked with disbelief. Knochen let out a loud sigh of disappointment. And amid more abuse and jeers from all around me, the two Germans were led out of court. One of my SDECE escorts leaned toward me and said:

“Of course, they will appeal the sentences.”

“Still, I do get the point,” I said. “I am encouraged by Voltaire’s example.”

“You’ve read Voltaire?”

“Not as such, no. But I’d like to. Especially when one considers the alternative.”

“Which is?”

“It’s hard to read anything when your head is lying in a basket,” I said.

“All Germans like Voltaire, yes? Frederick the Great was a great friend of Voltaire, yes?”

“I think he was. At first.”

“Germans and French should be friends now.”

“Yes. Indeed. The Schuman plan. Exactly.”

“For this reason—I mean, for the sake of Franco-German relations—I think the appeal will be successful.”

“That’s good news,” I said, although I could hardly have cared less about Knochen’s fate. All the same, I was surprised at this conversational turn of events and I spent the drive back to the Swimming Pool feeling encouraged. Perhaps my prospects were improving after all. Despite the trial of Oberg and Knochen, and the verdict, there was perhaps good reason to imagine that the SDECE was keener on cooperation than coercion, and this suited me very well.

From the Cherche-Midi we drove east to the outskirts of Paris. The Caserne Mortier in the barracks of the Tourelles was a traditional-looking set of buildings near the boulevard Mortier in the Twentieth Arrondissement. Made of red brick and semirusticated sandstone, the C.M. held no obvious affinity with a swimming pool beyond an echo in the corridors and an Olympic-sized courtyard, which, when it rained, resembled an enormous pool of black water.

My interrogators were quiet-spoken but muscular. They wore plain clothes and did not give me their names. No more did they accuse me of anything. To my relief, they weren’t much interested in the events that had happened on the road to Lourdes in the summer of 1940. There were two of them. They had intense, birdlike faces, five-o’clock shadows that appeared just after lunch, damp shirt collars, nicotine-stained fingers, and espresso breath. They were cops, or something very like it. One of the men, the heavier smoker, had very white hair and very black eyebrows that looked like two lost caterpillars. The other was taller, with a whore’s sulky mouth, ears like the handles on a trophy, and an insomniac’s hooded, heavy eyes. The insomniac spoke quite good German, but mostly we spoke in English, and when that failed I took a shot at French and sometimes managed to hit what I was aiming at. But it was more of a conversation than an interrogation, and save for the holsters on their broad shoulders, we could have been three guys in a bar in Montmartre.

“Did you have much to do with the Carlingue?”

“The Carlingue? What’s that?”

“The French Gestapo. They worked out of rue Lauriston. Number ninety-three. Did you ever go there?”

“That must have been after my time.”

“They were criminals recruited by Knochen,” said Eyebrows. “Armenians, Muslims, North Africans, mostly.”

I smiled. This, or something like it, was what the French always said when they didn’t want to admit that almost as many Frenchmen as Germans had been Nazis. And given their postwar record in Vietnam and Algeria, it was tempting to see them as even more racist than we were in Germany. After all, no one had forced them to deport French Jews—including Dreyfus’s own granddaughter—to the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Naturally, I hardly wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings by saying so directly, but as the subject remained on the table, I shrugged and said:

“I knew some French policemen. The ones I’ve already told you about. But not any French Gestapo. Now, the French SS, that’s something else again. But none of them were Muslims. As I recall, they were nearly all Catholics.”

“Did you know many from the SS-Charlemagne?”

“A few.”

“Let’s talk about the ones you did know.”

“All right. Mostly they were Frenchmen captured by the Russians during the battle for Berlin in 1945. They were men in the POW camps, like I was. The Russians treated them the same way they treated us Germans. Badly. We were all fascists, as far as they were concerned. But really there was only one Frenchman in the camps I got to know well enough to call him a comrade.”

“What was his name?”

“Edgard,” I said. “Edgard de something or other.”

“Try to remember,” one of the Frenchmen said patiently.

“Boudin?” I shrugged. “De Boudin? I don’t know. It was a long time ago. A lifetime. Not a good lifetime, either. Some of those poor bastards are only just coming home now.”

“It couldn’t have been de Boudin. Boudin means ‘sausage’ or ‘pudding.’ That couldn’t have been his name.” He paused. “Try to think.”

I thought for a moment and then shrugged. “Sorry.”

“Maybe if you told us something of what you can remember of him, the name will come back to you,” suggested the other Frenchman. He uncorked a bottle of red wine, poured a little into a small round glass, and then sniffed it carefully before tasting it and pouring some more for me and the two of them. In that room, on that dull summer’s day, this small ritual made me feel civilized again, as if, after months of incarceration and abuse, I amounted to something more than just a name chalked on a little board by a cell door.

I toasted his courtesy, drank some wine, and said, “I first met him here in Paris in 1940. I think it must have been Herbert Hagen who introduced us. Something to do with the policy on Jews in Paris, I don’t know. I never really cared about that sort of thing. Well, we all say that now, don’t we? The Germans. Anyway, Edgard de something or other was almost as anti-Semitic as Hagen, if such a thing was possible, but in spite of that, I quite liked him. He had been a captain in the Great War, after which he’d failed in civvy street, and this had led him to join the French Foreign Legion. I think he was stationed in Morocco before being sent to Indochina. And of course, he hated the communists, so that was all right. We had that much in common, anyway.

“Well, that was 1940, and when I left Paris I didn’t expect to see him again, and certainly never as soon as November 1941 in the Ukraine. Edgard was part of this French unit in the German army—not the SS, that was later, but the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism, or some such nonsense. That’s what the French called it. I think we just called it the something infantry. The 638th. Yes. That was it. Mostly, the men were Vichy fascists, or even French POWs who didn’t fancy being sent to Germany as forced labor with the Todt organization. There were probably about six thousand of them. Poor bastards.”

“Why do you say that?”

I sipped some wine and helped myself to a cigarette from the packet on the table. Outside the window, in the central courtyard, someone was trying to start a motorcar without success; somewhere farther away, de Gaulle was waiting or sulking, depending on how you looked at it; and the French army was licking its wounds after getting its ass kicked—again—in Vietnam.

“Because they couldn’t have known what they were letting themselves in for,” I said. “Fighting partisans sounds fair enough back here in Paris. But out there, in Byelorussia, it meant something very different.” I shook my head sadly. “There was no honor in it. No glory. Not what they were looking for, anyway.”

“So what did it mean?” asked Eyebrows. “On the ground.”

I shrugged. “That kind of action was, quite often, nothing more than murder. Mass murder. Of Jews. All sorts of police actions and antipartisan activities were merely a euphemism for killing Jews. To be frank with you, the Wehrmacht High Command in Russia wouldn’t have trusted the 638th with any other kind of task but murder.”

“The name of the unit commander. Can you remember that?”

“Labonne. Colonel Labonne. After the winter of 1941, I lost touch with Edgard.” I clicked my fingers. “De Boudel. That was his name. Edgard de Boudel.”

“You’re quite sure of that?”

“I’m sure.”

“Go on.”

“Well, then. Let’s see. A couple of years later, I was briefly back in that theater to investigate an alleged war crime. That was when I heard that the 638th was now attached to an SS division in Galicia. And that it was pretty bad there. But I didn’t see de Boudel again until 1945, when the war was over and we were both at a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp called Krasno-Armeesk. As a matter of fact, there were quite a few French and Belgian SS there. And Edgard told me something of what he’d been up to. How the 638th ended up as a part of a French brigade of the SS and that kind of thing. Apparently, there was a recruiting drive here in Paris in July 1943. The French who joined had to prove the usual Himmler rubbish about not having any Jewish blood, and then they were in. A few weeks of basic training in Alsace and then at a place near Prague. By the late summer of 1944, the war in France was almost over, but there was a whole brigade of French SS ready to fight the Ivans. About ten thousand of them, he said. And they were called the SS-Charlemagne.

“The brigade got sent by train to the Eastern Front, in Pomerania, which wasn’t very far from where I was. Edgard said that as the train carrying the brigade pulled into the railhead at Hammerstein they came under attack by the Soviet First Byelorussian and were divided up into three groups. One group, commanded by General Krukenberg, made it north to the Baltic coast, near Danzig. Of these, quite a few managed to get themselves evacuated to Denmark. But some, like Edgard, fought on until they were captured. The rest were wiped out or fell back to Berlin.

“There were other French at Krasno-Armeesk who’d been captured at Berlin. I can’t say I remember any names. By all accounts, it was the SS-Charlemagne who were the last defenders of Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. I think they were the only SS happy to be caught by the Soviets rather than the Americans, because the Amis handed them over to the Free French, who shot them immediately.”

“Tell us about Edgard de Boudel.”

“In the camp?”

“Yes.”

“He was a decorated lieutenant colonel. In the SS, I mean. Easy to be with. Charming, even. Good-looking. Unscathed by the war, you might even say. He was one of those types who looked like he was always going to survive pretty much anything. He spoke good Russian. Edgard was the kind for whom languages are easy. His German was perfect, of course. Even I couldn’t have guessed that he was French if I hadn’t already known that about him. I think he might have spoken Vietnamese, too. It was his facility with languages that made him especially interesting to the MVD. In the beginning, they made life pretty difficult for him. And, of course, once they had got their hooks into you it was very difficult for any man to resist them. I know that from my own experience with them.”

“What specifically did they want him for? Do you know?”

“Well, it wasn’t K-5. That’s for sure.”

“That’s the forerunner of the Stasi.”

“Yes. I don’t know what they had in mind for him. But the next thing I knew, he’d been sent to the Anti-Fa School in Krasnogorsk for reeducation. As you know, I almost ended up there myself. They’d have got me, too, but for the fact that the MVD officer who interrogated me was a man I’d known from before the war. A man named Mielke. Erich Mielke. He was the German political commissar in charge of recruiting us plenis for K-5.”

The French asked me some more questions about Edgard de Boudel and then took me back to La Santé. It means “health,” but that didn’t have much to do with what went on inside the prison. It was called La Santé because of the prison’s proximity to a psychiatric hospital, the Sainte-Anne on the rue de la Santé, which was just east of the boulevard Raspail.

In La Santé I kept to myself as much as possible. I didn’t see Helmut Knochen, which suited me just fine. I read my newspaper, which reported that things in North Africa were as bad for the French as they had been in Vietnam. In spite of my new friends in the SDECE, this news was not displeasing to me. There were times when I was never very far away from the trenches. Especially given all the rats there were at La Santé. Real rats. They walked along the landings as coolly as if they’d been carrying keys.

Back at the Swimming Pool the next day, the French asked me about Erich Mielke.

“What do you want to know?” I asked, as if unaware of what my audience would best like to hear—or, to be more accurate, what it was best they were told. “It’s all ancient history. Surely you don’t want me to go over all that.”

“Everything you can tell us.”

“I can’t see how it’s at all relevant to my being here in Paris.”

“You should allow us to be the judge of that.”

I shrugged. “Perhaps if I knew why you were interested in him, I could be more specific. After all, it’s not like this is a story that takes only a couple of minutes to tell. Christ, some of this stuff is twenty years old. Or even older.”

“We’ve got plenty of time. Perhaps if you went from the beginning. How you first met and when. That kind of thing.”

“You mean the whole novel, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

“Precisely.”

“All right. If you really want to know this stuff. I’ll tell you everything.”

Of course, I hardly wanted to do that. Hell, no. Not all over again. So I gave them an edited, more entertaining version of what I’d already told the Amis. A French version. A smooth-tongued précis, if you like, that was not spoiled by the inclusion of too many facts and that, like the French themselves, was the result of an exhausted conscience wrestling with simple pragmatism and being very quickly overcome. A story that was the best kind of story being better told than believed.

“The decision was made in the Ministry of the Interior to let Mielke make his escape. Despite the fact that he had participated in the murders of two cops. It came about like this. Department IA had been brought into being to protect the Weimar Republic against conspirators on the left and on the right, and we decided that the best way to do this was to cultivate a few informers on both sides. But on the face of it, that hardly applied to a man like Mielke. We had arrested him and fully intended to send him to the guillotine. However, the Abwehr—German intelligence—persuaded the ministry that they might turn Mielke into their agent. And this is what happened. We were persuaded to let him escape so that he might become our long-term agent, the Abwehr’s Moscow mole. In return, we looked after his family. The Abwehr kept him going all the way through the thirties and the Spanish Civil War. As well as passing us some very important information on Republican troop movements that was extremely helpful to the Condor Legion, he was able to initiate several political purges of some of their best men, on the grounds that they were Trotskyites or anarchists. In that respect, Mielke was doubly useful.

“When the war broke out, the SD and the Abwehr decided to share Mielke. The trouble was, we’d lost him. So Heydrich sent me to France in the summer of 1940 to get him out of Gurs or Le Vernet, which is where we thought he must be. Which is what happened. I got him out of Le Vernet and across the sea to Algeria. From there, German agents managed to facilitate his return to Russia. I was his case officer at the SD for the next three years as he worked his way up through the party hierarchy. I lost contact with him in 1945, at the end of the war. However, he managed to track me down at the same time that he was recruiting German officers for the Stasi, and he helped me to escape back to Germany, where I negotiated a deal with some Amis in the Counterintelligence Corps on behalf of both of us.”

“What kind of a deal?”

“Money, of course. Lots of money. After that, I helped handle him in Berlin and Vienna until the CIC came to the conclusion that my SS background made me a possible embarrassment to them. So they assigned Mielke a new controller and got me out of the country on a ratline, via Genoa, to Argentina. And then Cuba. I’d still be in Havana but for American incompetence. Having gone to all that trouble to spirit me out of Germany, they sent me back there. A case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. And now here I am with you.”

“Is Mielke still working for the Americans?”

“I can’t imagine why not. Someone that highly placed? He was the mother lode of all their intelligence on the GDR. But they weren’t sharing. Even the GVL had no idea that Mielke was spying for the Amis. Gehlen knew the Amis had a very highly placed agent. When the Amis refused to reveal who this was, Gehlen decided to quit and throw in his lot with the West Germans.”

“So why would they risk letting you go to tell us?”

“Well, for one thing, they don’t know everything about me and Mielke. There were certain things I’ve told you that I never told them. But now it hardly seems to matter. Not anymore. I haven’t had any contact with Mielke since 1949, when I went to Argentina. Since then, Mielke has become the second or third most powerful man in the GDR, so who would believe me? How could I prove anything of what I’ve told you? It’s just my word, right? Besides, I have other things on my mind. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m rather more concerned that you believe it wasn’t me who shot those prisoners from Gurs on the road to Lourdes in 1940. I don’t think it’s even crossed their minds that you might be interested in Mielke. As far as they’re concerned, you’re only interested in settling old scores against people like me. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, gentlemen, they think your intelligence is snagged on the fence of Muslim extremism in Algeria and wholly irrelevant in their Cold War against Russian communism. You’re a sideshow. Even the British look more relevant to them than you do.”

None of this was what the French wanted to hear, of course; but it was what they expected to hear. The French were nothing if not pragmatic; facts were always of lesser importance than experience. It was, of course, the only way the French could live with themselves.

Later on, our conversation returned again to the subject of Edgard de Boudel, and one of the two SDECE men asked me the same question that Heydrich had posed about Mielke in 1940:

“Do you think you would recognize him again?”

“Edgard de Boudel? I don’t know. It’s been seven years. Maybe. Why?”

“We want to arrest him and put him on trial.”

“In the Cherche-Midi? How many trials have there been in that court? Hundreds, isn’t it? How many war criminals and collaborators have you sentenced to death? Let me tell you how many. It was in the newspaper. Six thousand five hundred. Four thousand of those sentences handed down in absentia. Don’t you think that’s enough? Or do you really mean it to feel like the French Revolution?”

They said nothing while I lit a cigarette.

“Why do you want to put him on trial? For being in the SS? Well, I’m not buying that. France is full of ex-Nazis. Besides, I liked him. I liked him a lot. Why should I betray him? Even if I could.”

“Since the death of Stalin last year, your President Adenauer has been negotiating the release of the last German POWs. These last are, perhaps, the worst of the worst—or merely the most important and, in Soviet eyes, the most culpable. Many of these men are wanted for war crimes in the West. Including Edgard de Boudel. We have received information that he plans to make his way back to Germany as part of one of these repatriations from the Soviet Union. From Germany we think he will, eventually, make his way back to France.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “If he was working for the KGB, why is he coming back as a POW?”

“Because, in his current role, he’s outlived his usefulness to them. The only way he can worm his way back into their favor is by doing what they tell him to do. And what they want him to do is pose as someone else. A German. A German who’s probably already dead. You said yourself he’s a fluent German speaker, that even you couldn’t fault his German. Many of these returning POWs are treated as heroes. A returning hero is a good place to begin rebuilding a career in German society. Perhaps in German politics. And then, one day, he’ll be useful again.”

“But what can I do?”

“You know the man. Who better than you to recognize if someone or something doesn’t look quite right?”

“Perhaps.” I shook my head. “If you say so.”

“All of the returning POWs arriving back in West Germany come through the station in Friedland. The next train is due in four weeks.”

“What do you want me to do? Stand at the end of the platform with a bunch of flowers in my hand, like some pathetic widow who doesn’t know her old man’s never coming home?”

“Not exactly, no. Have you heard of the VdH?”

I shrugged. “Something to do with the German government compensating returning German POWs, yes?”

“It’s the Association of Returnees. And that’s one of the things it’s about, yes. According to the West German POW Compensation Law passed in January of this year, there’s a flat rate payable to all POWs of one mark for every day spent in captivity after January first, 1946. And two marks for every day after January first, 1949. But the VdH is also a citizens’ association that advertises the advantages of German democracy to former Nazis. It’s denazification of Germans, by Germans.”

“Your background,” said the other Frenchman, “makes you ideally suited to be a part of this association. Not that this would be a problem. The Lower Saxony branch of the VdH is under our control. The chairman and several of his members are in the service of the SDECE. And working for us, it goes without saying you’ll be well paid. You’re probably even entitled to some of that POW compensation yourself.”

“And what’s more, we can make all this business with Helmut Knochen go away.” The Insomniac clicked his fingers. “Like that. We’ll put you up at a little boardinghouse in Göttingen. You’ll like Göttingen. It’s a nice town. From there it’s a short car ride down to Friedland.” He shrugged. “If things work out, we could perhaps make the arrangement more permanent.”

I nodded. “Well, it’s been a long time since I saw de Boudel. And naturally, I would like to get out of La Santé. Göttingen’s nice, as you say. And I do need a job. It all sounds very generous, yes. But there is something else I’d like. There’s a woman in Berlin. Perhaps the only person in the whole of Germany who means anything to me. I’d like to go and see her. Make sure she’s all right. Give her some money, perhaps.”

The Insomniac picked up a pencil and prepared to write. “Name and address?”

“Her name is Elisabeth Dehler. When I was last in Berlin, about five years ago, her address was twenty-eight Motzstrasse, off the Ku-damm.”

“You never mentioned her before.”

I shrugged.

“What does she do?”

“She was a dressmaker. Still is, for all I know.”

“And you and she were—what?”

“We were involved for a while.”

“Lovers?”

“Yes, lovers, I suppose.”

“We’ll check out the address for you. See if she’s still at that address. Save you the trouble if she’s not.”

“Thanks.”

He shrugged. “But if she is, we have no objections. It will be difficult. It’s always difficult going in and out of Berlin. Still, we’ll manage.”

“Good. Then we have a deal. If I knew the words, I’d sing ‘The Marseillaise.’”

“A signature on a piece of paper will do for now. We’re not much for singing here at the Swimming Pool.”

“There’s one question I have. Everyone calls this place the Swimming Pool. Why?”

The two Frenchmen smiled. One of them stood up and opened a window. “Can’t you hear it?” he said after a moment. “Can’t you smell it?”

I got up and went to his side and listened carefully. In the distance I could hear what sounded like a school playground.

“You see that turreted building over the wall?” he explained. “That is the largest swimming pool in all of Paris. It was built for the 1924 Olympics. On a day like today, half the children in the city are there. We go there ourselves sometimes when it’s quieter.”

“Sure,” I said. “We had the same thing in the Gestapo. The Landwehr Canal. We never went swimming there ourselves, of course. But we took lots of others there. Communists, mostly. That is, provided they couldn’t swim.”