Field Gray

12

To say the least, it had been a difficult summer. In spite of some new laws that made political violence a capital crime, Nazis were killing communists at the rate of almost two to one. After the March elections, in which the Nazis got more than three times as many votes as the KPD, the communists became increasingly violent, probably out of desperation. Then, in early August, there was a call for an election in the Prussian Parliament. Most likely this was something to do with the world economic crisis. After all, this was 1931 and we were in the middle of the Great Depression. Almost half the banks had failed in America, and in Germany we were still trying to pay for the war with almost six million men out of work. And you can blame the French with their Carthaginian peace for a lot of that.

Prussian elections were always a barometer for the rest of Germany and usually bad-tempered affairs. For that you can blame the Prussian character. Jedem das Seine is a Prussian’s motto. Literally it means “To each his own,” but more figuratively it means everyone gets what he deserves. Which is why they put it on the gates at the Buchenwald concentration camp. And probably why, given the peculiar character of the Prussian Parliament, we got what we deserved when, on the ninth of August, the results were announced and it turned out that not enough people had voted to force an election at a national level. With no quorum for a vote, tempers all over Berlin got even worse. But especially on Bülowplatz outside Karl Liebknecht House. Figuring that some sort of dirty deal had been done between the Nazis and the Prussian administration, thousands of communists gathered there. Possibly, they were correct about a deal. But things turned ugly when the riot police showed up and started cracking Red heads like eggs. Berlin cops were always good at making omelettes.

Probably the rain didn’t help, either. It had been warm and dry for several weeks, but that day it rained heavily and Berlin cops never did care to get wet. Something to do with all that leather on the shako helmets they wore. There was a cover you were supposed to put on it when the weather was bad, but no one ever remembered them, which meant you had to spend ages cleaning and polishing the shako afterward. If there was one thing guaranteed to piss off a Berlin bull, it was getting his hat wet.

I guess the Reds decided they’d had enough. Then again, they were always shouting about police dictatorship, even when the police were behaving with exemplary fairness. The local police had been threatened before, but this was different. The talk was about killing policemen. About eight o’clock that evening, shots were fired and a full-scale gun battle between police and the KPD kicked off in a big way—the biggest we’d seen since the 1919 uprising.

News started to come in to Police Headquarters on Berlin Alexanderplatz at around nine o’clock that several officers, including two police captains, had been shot and killed. We were already investigating the June murder of another cop. I’d helped to carry his coffin. By the time I and some other detectives reached Bülowplatz most of the crowds had left, but the gunfight was still very much in progress. The communists were on the rooftops of several buildings, and cops with searchlights were returning fire while, at the same time, they were searching apartment houses in the area for weapons and suspects. A hundred people were arrested, maybe more, while the battle continued. This meant that we couldn’t get near the bodies, and for several hours we traded shots with the Reds; one time a rifle bullet clipped off a piece of brickwork just above my head and, more in anger than the hope of hitting anything, I let fly with the Bergmann until the magazine was empty. It was one in the morning before we got to the stricken police officers who were lying in the doorway of the Babylon Movie Theater, by which time one communist had been shot dead and seventeen others wounded.

Of the three policemen in the doorway, two were dead. The third, Sergeant Willig, “the Hussar,” was seriously wounded. He’d been shot in the stomach and in the arm, and his blue-gray tunic was purple with blood, not all of it his own.

“We were set up,” he gasped as we sat with him and waited for the ambulance. “They weren’t on the rooftops, the ones who got us. The bastards were hiding in a doorway and shot us from behind as we walked past.”

The officer in charge, Detective Police Counselor Reinhold Heller, told Willig to save his breath, but the sergeant was the kind who couldn’t do anything until he’d made his report.

“There were two of them. Handguns. Automatics. Shot my pistol at them. A full clip. Couldn’t say if I hit either of them or not. Young they were. Tearaways. Twenty or so. Laughed when they saw the two captains hit the ground. Then they went into the theater.” He tried a smile. “Must have been Garbo fans. Never much liked her myself.”

The ambulance men arrived with a stretcher and carried him away, leaving us with the two bodies.

“Gunther?” said Heller. “Go and speak to the theater manager. Find out if anyone saw something more than just the movie.”

Heller was a Jew, but I didn’t have a problem with that. Not like some. Heller was Bernard Weiss, the Kripo head’s golden boy, which would have been fine but for the fact that Weiss was also a Jew. I thought Heller was good police, and that was all that mattered as far as I was concerned. Of course, the Nazis thought differently.

The movie was Mata Hari, with Garbo in the title role and Ramón Novarro as the young Russian officer who falls in love with her. I hadn’t seen it myself, but the movie was doing well in Berlin. Garbo gets shot by the treacherous French, and with a plot like that, it could hardly fail with Germans. The theater manager was waiting in the lobby. He was swarthy and worried-looking, with a mustache like a midget’s eyebrow, and to that extent, at least, rather resembled Ramón Novarro. But it was probably just as well the blonde from the box office didn’t look like Garbo, at least not like the Garbo on the lobby card; her hair was frightful-looking, like Struwwelpeter.

Everything around us was red. Red carpet, red walls, red ceiling, red chairs, and red curtains on the auditorium doors. Given the politics of the area, it all seemed appropriate. The blonde was tearful, the manager merely nervous. He kept adjusting his cuff links as he explained, loudly, as if he were a character in a play, what he’d seen and heard:

“Mata Hari had just finished seducing the Russian general, Shubin,” he said, “when we heard the first shots. That would have been at about ten past eight.”

“How many shots?”

“A volley,” he said. “Six or seven. Small arms. Pistols. I was in the war, see? I know the difference between a pistol shot and a rifle shot. I stuck my head through the box-office door and saw Fräulein Wiegand here on the floor. At first I thought there had been a robbery. That she’d been held up. But then there was a second volley and several of the bullets hit the cash window. Two men ran through the lobby and into the auditorium without paying. And since they were both holding pistols, I wasn’t about to insist that they buy tickets. I can’t say that I got a very good look at them, because I was scared. Then there were more shots, outside. Rifle shots, I think, and people started running in here to take cover. By now the projectionist had stopped the movie and switched on the lights. And the people in the auditorium were going through the exit door, onto Hirtenstrasse. It was plain from the noise and the crowd that the movie wasn’t going to continue, and before one of your colleagues came in here to tell me to stay inside, almost everyone had left the auditorium through the back door. Including the two men with guns.” He left his cuff links alone for a moment and rubbed his brow furiously. “They’re dead, aren’t they? Those two police officers.”

I nodded. “Mmm hmm.”

“That’s bad. That’s too bad.”

“How about you, Fräulein?” I said. “The two with guns. Did you get a good look at them?”

She shook her head and pressed a sodden handkerchief to her red nose.

“It’s been a great shock to Fräulein Wiegand,” said the manager.

“It’s been a great shock to us all, sir.”

I went into the auditorium and walked down the center aisle toward the exit. I pushed open the door and was on a small red staircase. I tap-danced my way down to another door and then out onto Hirtenstrasse just as an underground train passed beneath my feet, shaking the whole area as if it hadn’t been shaken up enough already. It was dark and there wasn’t much to see in the yellow gaslight: a few discarded red flags, a couple of protest placards, and maybe a murder weapon if I looked hard enough. With so many cops around, it didn’t seem likely that the killers would have risked holding on to their guns for very long.

Back in the movie theater doorway they were establishing a crime-scene gestalt, which is to say they were hoping that the whole could be bigger than the sum of its parts.

Captain Anlauf had been shot twice in the neck and clearly had bled to death. He was about forty, heavyset, with a full face that had helped earn the Seventh Precinct commander his Pig Cheeks nickname. His weapon was still in his holster.

“It’s too bad,” said one of the other detectives. “His wife died three weeks ago.”

“What did she die of?” I heard myself ask.

“A kidney ailment,” said Heller. “This leaves three daughters orphaned.”

“Someone’s going to have to tell them,” said someone.

“I’ll do that.” The man who spoke was in uniform, and everyone straightened up when we realized it was the commander of the Berlin Schupo, Magnus Heimannsberg. “You can leave that to me.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Heller.

“Who’s the other man? I don’t recognize him.”

“Captain Lenck, sir.”

Heimannsberg leaned down to take a closer look.

“Franz Lenck? What the hell was he doing here? This kind of police work wasn’t his sort of thing at all.”

“Every available man in uniform was summoned here,” Heller said. “Anyone know if he was married?”

“Yes,” said Heimannsberg. “No children, though. That’s something, I suppose. Look, Reinhard, I’ll tell her, too. The widow.”

Lenck was also about forty. His face was leaner than Anlauf’s, with deep smile lines that were no longer being used. A pince-nez was still on his face, just about, and the shako remained on his head, with the strap tight under his chin. He had been shot in the back and, like Anlauf, had his weapon holstered, a fact that Heimannsberg now remarked upon.

“They didn’t even have a chance to get their weapons out,” he said bitterly. Nodding at a Luger by his boot, he added, “I assume this is Sergeant Willig’s gun.”

“He got off a whole clip, sir,” said Heller. “Before they ran in here.”

“Hit anything?”

Heller looked at me.

“I don’t think so, sir,” I said. “Mind you, it’s a little hard to tell in there. Everything’s red. Carpet, walls, curtains, you name it. Hard to see any bloodstains. They ran out the rear exit on Hirtenstrasse. Sir, I’d like a couple of men with flashlights to help me search the length of the street. People have chucked away red flags and placards; it’s possible they might have thrown the guns, too.”

Heller nodded.

“Don’t worry, lads,” said Heimannsberg, who, having started his career as an ordinary patrolman, was enormously popular with everyone in the police. “We’ll catch the bastards who did this.”

A few minutes later, I was walking along Hirtenstrasse with a couple of uniformed men. As we went farther west toward Mulack Strasse and the territory of the Always True, a notorious Berlin gang, they started to become nervous. We stopped next to Fritz Hempel, the tobacconists. It was closed, of course. I pointed my flashlight one way and then the other. The two Schupo men came toward me, relaxing a little as, in the distance, a police armored car pulled up on the corner.

“This close to Mulack Strasse and the Always True, they must have figured they could hold on to their guns,” said one of the bulls.

“Maybe.” I started to retrace my steps along Hirtenstrasse, still searching the ground until my eyes caught sight of a drain cover in the gutter. It was a simple cast-iron grate, but someone had lifted it, and recently: The dirt was missing from two of the bars where someone might have grasped it. One of the Schupo men pulled it up while I was removing my jacket and my shirt; and then, inspecting the cobblestones around the open drain, I decided to remove my trousers as well.

“He was a dancer at the Haller Revue before he was police,” said one of the cops, folding my clothes over his arm.

“Versatile, isn’t he?”

“If Heimannsberg were here,” I said, “he’d make you do it, so shut up.”

“I’d put my whole fucking head down that drain if I thought it’d find the Jew bastard who killed Captain Anlauf.”

I lay down next to the drain and plunged my arm into thick black water, right up to the shoulder.

“What makes you think it was a Jew?” I asked.

“Everyone knows that the Marxists and the Jews are one and the same,” said the Schupo man.

“I wouldn’t repeat that in front of Counselor Heller if I were you.”

“This town is sick with Jews,” said the Schupo man.

“Don’t mind him, sir,” said the other cop. “Anyone with a hat and a big nose is a Jew in his book. See if you can find any war reparations while you’re down there.”

“Funny,” I said. “If I wasn’t up to my shoulder in stagnant water, I might fucking laugh. Now put the cork back in.”

I felt a hard, metallic object and fished out a pistol with a long barrel. I handed it to the cop who wasn’t holding my clothes.

“Luger, is it?” he said, wiping some of the filth off the gun. “Looks like an artillery-corps version. That’ll put an extra keyhole in your door.”

I kept on searching the bottom of the drain. “No commies down here,” I said. “Just this.” I brought up the other gun, an automatic with a curious, irregular shape, as if someone had tried to break the slide from the muzzle.

We carried the two weapons over to a street water pump and washed some of the filth away. The smaller automatic was a Dreyse .32.

I washed my arm and put my clothes back on and took the two guns back to the Seventh Street Precinct Station on Bülowplatz. Back in the detectives’ room, Heller hailed my arrival with a verbal pat on the back.

“Well done, Gunther,” he said.

“Thanks, sir.”

Meanwhile, other cops were already gathering boxes of photo files to take over to the State Hospital for Sergeant Willig to look at when he came out of surgery. And after a while, I said, “You know, that’s going to take a while. I mean, before he’s conscious again. By then the killers will be out of the city. Maybe on their way to Moscow.”

“Got a better idea?”

“I might. Look, sir, instead of showing Sergeant Willig a picture of every Red who’s ever been arrested in this city, let’s just pull a few.”

“Like who? There are hundreds of these bastards.”

“The chances are the attack was probably orchestrated from K.L. House,” I said. “So how about we pull the records of just seventy-six Reds? Because that’s how many Reds were arrested when we raided K.L. last January. Let’s stick to those faces for now.”

“Yes, you’re right,” agreed Heller. He snatched up the telephone. “Get me the State Hospital.” He pointed at another detective. “Get onto IA. Find out who was on that raid. And tell the records boys in ED to find the arrest files and to meet us at the hospital.”

Twenty minutes later we were on our way to the State Hospital in Friedrichshain.

They were just wheeling Willig into the operating theater when we arrived bearing the K.L. House arrest files. The wounded man had already received an injection, but in spite of the opposition of the doctors, who were anxious to operate as quickly as possible, Willig understood immediately the urgency of what was being asked of him. And it took the sergeant no time at all to pick out one of his attackers.

“Him, for sure,” he croaked. “That one pulled the trigger on Captain Anlauf, for sure.”

“Erich Ziemer,” said Heller, and handed me the charge sheet.

“The other one was about the same age and build and coloring as this bastard. They might even have been brothers, they looked so alike. But he’s not here. I’m certain of it.”

“All right,” said Heller. He spoke some words of encouragement to the sergeant before his doctors took the patient away.

“I recognize this man Ziemer,” I said. “Back in May, I saw Ziemer in a car with three other men. They were outside K.L. House, and according to Sergeant Adolf Bauer, who was on patrol in Bülowplatz, one of those others was Heinz Neumann.”

“The Reichstag deputy?”

I nodded.

“And the other two?”

“One of them I don’t know. Perhaps Bauer will remember it.”

“Yes, perhaps.”

He paused expectantly. “And the Red that you do know?”

I told him about the day I had saved the life of Erich Mielke from a troop of SA intent on killing him.

“He was the fourth man in that car. And it’s true what Sergeant Willig says. He looks a lot like Erich Ziemer.”

“So. You believe that we’re looking for two Erichs, yes?”

I nodded again.

“Gunther? I’d hate to be known around the Alex as the man who saved the life of a cop killer.”

“I hadn’t really thought about that, sir.”

“Then perhaps you should. And from this moment on, my advice to you is this: that you make no further mention of exactly how you came to be acquainted with this Erich Mielke until he is safely in custody. Especially now. This is the kind of story the Nazis love to use to beat those of us in the police force who still count ourselves as democrats, is it not?”

“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 Löwen 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 color 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-colored DKW cabriolet with a small two-cylinder, six-hundred-cc engine, but it had front-wheel drive and held on to the corners like a welded bracket, so 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 tasseled lampshades. As always, I waited in the living room 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 were uttering a silent prayer. Perhaps she was.

“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 forever. 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 gray tenement building around a central courtyard that would have probably collapsed in on itself but for several large support timbers. Although it could just as easily have been moss or mold, a green rug was hanging out of an open window on one of the upper floors, and it was the only spot of color 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 gray-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, and 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 pajama 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, close-set eyes that were like diacritical marks inside a naught. 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 counselor in the Berlin police without paying attention to detail, especially when you were also a Jew. That was probably the ex-lawyer in him. That was the part of Heller I didn’t care for—the punctilious lawyer. The stocky little man in the pajama 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 for me.

“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 counselor, 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 Ringbahn 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 this evening, which is about twenty minutes after two policemen were murdered on Bülowplatz. That’s less than a hundred meters from the station at Schönhauser 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 traveling 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 kilometers? They might be there by now if they left before midnight. My guess is that Erich’s probably on the Grasbrook 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 counselor 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 backward, 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 them, 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 counselor 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.