Field Gray

15

I was summoned back to Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where the scene was frenetic to say the least. People were scurrying around with files. Phones were ringing almost continually. Couriers were running along corridors carrying important dispatches. There was even a gramophone playing the song “Erika,” as if we were actually with the motorized SS as they drove on toward the Normandy coast. And, most unusually, everyone was smiling. No one ever smiled in that place. But that day they did. Even I had a smile on my face. To defeat France as quickly as we did seemed nothing short of miraculous. You have to bear in mind that many of us sat in the trenches of northern France for four years. Four years of slaughter and stalemate. And then a victory over our oldest enemy in just four weeks! You didn’t have to be a Nazi to feel good about that. And if I’m honest, the summer of 1940 was when I came the closest to thinking well of the Nazis. Indeed, that was the time when being a Nazi hardly seemed to matter. Suddenly, we were all proud to be German again.

Of course, people were also feeling good because they thought—we thought—that the war was over before it had even begun. Hardly anyone was dead in comparison with the millions who’d died in the Great War. And England would have to make peace. The Russian back door was secure. And America wasn’t interested in getting involved, as usual. All in all, it seemed like some sort of miraculous reprieve. I expect the French felt very differently, but in Germany there was national jubilation. And frankly, the last person on my mind when I walked into Heydrich’s office that morning was a stupid little prick like Erich Mielke.

Seated at a table beside Heydrich was another uniformed SS man whom I didn’t recognize. He was about thirty, slightly built, with a full head of light brown hair, a fastidious, almost feminine mouth, and the sharpest pair of eyes I’d seen outside of the leopard’s enclosure at the Berlin Zoo. The left eye was particularly catlike. At first I assumed it was narrowed against the smoke from his silver cigarette holder, but after a while I saw that the eye was permanently like that, as if he had lost his monocle. He smiled when Heydrich introduced us, and I saw that there was more than a passing resemblance to the young Bela Lugosi, always supposing that Bela Lugosi had ever been young. The SS officer’s name was Walter Schellenberg, and I think he was a major then—much later on he became a general—but I wasn’t really paying attention to the pips on his collar patch. I was more interested in Heydrich’s uniform, which was that of a reserve major in the Luftwaffe. More interesting still was the fact that his arm was in a sling, and for several nervous minutes I supposed that my presence there had something to do with an attempt on his life he wanted me to investigate. “Oberkommissar Gunther is one of Kripo’s best detectives,” Heydrich told Schellenberg. “In the new Germany, that’s a profession not without some hazard. Most philosophers argue that the world is ultimately mind or matter. Schopenhauer states that the final reality is human will. But whenever I see Gunther I am reminded of the overriding importance to the world of human curiosity, too. Like a scientist or an inventor, a good detective must be curious. He must have his hypotheses. And he must always seek to test them against the observable facts. Is it not so, Gunther?”

“Yes, Herr General.”

“Doubtless he is even now wondering why I am wearing this Luftwaffe uniform and hoping secretly that it heralds my departure from Sipo so that he might enjoy an easier, quieter life.” Heydrich smiled at his little joke. “Come now, Gunther. Isn’t that exactly what you were thinking?”

“Are you leaving Sipo, Herr General?”

“No, I’m not.” He grinned like a very clever schoolboy.

I said nothing.

“Try to contain your obvious relief, Gunther.”

“Very well, General. I’ll certainly do my best.”

“You see what I mean, Walter? He remains his own man at all times.”

Schellenberg just smiled and smoked and watched me with his cat’s eyes and said nothing. We had one thing in common, at least. With Heydrich, nothing was always the safest thing to say.

“Since the invasion of Poland,” explained Heydrich, “I’ve been volunteering as aircrew on a bomber. I was a rear gunner in an air attack on Lublin.”

“It sounds rather hazardous, Herr General,” I said.

“It is. But believe me, there’s nothing quite like flying down on an enemy city at two hundred miles an hour with an MG 17 in your hands. I wanted to show some of these bureaucratic soldiers what the SS is made of. That we’re not just a bunch of asphalt soldiers.”

I assumed he was referring to Himmler.

“Very commendable, sir. Is that how you injured your arm?”

“No. No, that was an accident,” he said. “I’ve also been training as a fighter pilot. I crashed during takeoff. My own stupid fault.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Heydrich’s self-satisfied smile stalled midflight, and for a moment I wondered if I’d gone too far.

“Meaning what?” he said. “That it wasn’t an accident?”

I shrugged. “Meaning only that I imagine you would want to find out everything that went wrong before flying again.” I was trying to back up a little from what, unwisely perhaps, I’d already put in his mind. “What kind of plane was it, sir?”

Heydrich hesitated, as if debating the idea in his own mind. “A Messerschmitt,” he said quietly. “The Bf 110. It’s not considered a very agile plane.”

“Well, there are you. I can’t think why I mentioned such a thing. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that you aren’t a good pilot, General. I’m sure they wouldn’t let you get in the cockpit unless they were quite satisfied the airplane was airworthy. Me, I’ve never even been off the ground, but I should still want to be quite sure it wasn’t anything mechanical before I went up again.”

“Yes, perhaps you’re right.”

Schellenberg was nodding now. “It certainly couldn’t do any harm, Herr General. Gunther’s right.”

He had a curious, high-pitched voice with a slight accent I found hard to place; and there was something very neat and dapper about him that reminded me of a butler, or a menswear salesman.

An attractive-looking SS secretary—what we used to call a gray mouse—came in carrying a tray with three coffee cups and three glasses of water, just like we were in a café on the Ku-damm, and thankfully we were distracted from the subject of Heydrich’s accident—Schellenberg by the woman herself and Heydrich by the sound of the gramophone that was coming through the open door. For a moment he stamped his boots on the floor in time with the song and grinned happily.

“That’s a marvelous sound, isn’t it?”

“Wonderful, Herr General,” said Schellenberg, who was still eyeing Heydrich’s secretary, and the comment might just as easily have been about her as the music.

I could see his point. Her name was Bettina and she seemed too nice by half to be working for a devil like Heydrich.

When she went out again, the three of us started to sing. It was one of the few SS songs I didn’t mind at all, since it couldn’t have had less to do with the SS or even fighting a war. And, for a moment, I forgot where I was and whom I was with.

We sang all three verses, and by the end we were in such a jolly mood that Heydrich told Bettina to fetch us some brandy. A few minutes later we were toasting the fall of France, and then Heydrich was explaining the real reason for my presence in his office. He handed me a file, waited for me to open it, and said:

“You recognize the name on the file, of course.”

I nodded. “Erich Mielke. What about him?”

“You saved his life, and then he and an accomplice murdered two policemen. And then his arrest was bungled by the Jew in charge of the investigation.”

“You mean Kriminal-Polizeirat Heller,” I said. “Yes, I remember him. Wasn’t it Heller who successfully investigated the murder of that young SA fellow in the Beussellkeitz? The one who was stabbed to death by some communist thugs. What was his name? Herbert Norkus?”

“Thank you for the history lesson, Gunther,” said Heydrich patiently. “None of us is likely to forget Herbert Norkus.”

This was hardly surprising, as the murder of Norkus had been the subject of the very first Nazi propaganda movie, about the Hitler Youth. I hadn’t seen the movie myself, but I thought it unlikely that Heller’s part had even made it into the script. All the same, I thought it best not to push this detail any further with Heydrich.

“You’ll be glad to know that Foreign Intelligence has managed to keep track of Mielke since you and Heller allowed him to slip through your fingers,” he said. “Walter, why don’t you bring the chief inspector up to date with what we have on him now.”

“I’d be delighted, sir,” said Schellenberg. “In Moscow we know Mielke attended the Lenin School under the name Walter Scheuer. Then he was given the name Paul Bach, and we assume this was the same Paul Bach who gave evidence against many of the German communist cadres following the Stalinist purge at the Hotel Lux in May 1935. Naturally, the Gestapo was at the same time monitoring the Mielke family home; and soon after the murders of Anlauf and Lenck the family moved from the Stettiner Strasse apartment to an address in Grünthaler Strasse, where, in September 1936, Mielke’s younger sister Gertrud received a postcard from Madrid. This seemed to confirm what we already suspected, which was that Mielke had gone to Spain as a Chekist. During the civil war, he was going by the name of Captain Fritz Leissner and was assigned to a General Gomez, whom we know rather better as Wilhelm Zaisser, another German communist. It seems these bastards spent more time killing other Republicans than they did killing any Nationalists; and it’s no accident that the Thirteenth International Brigade, also known as the Dabrowski Brigade, mutinied soon after the Battle of Brunette in July 1937 because of the appalling casualties inflicted on them as a result of the incompetence of their officers.

“Following the Republican defeat in January 1939, Mielke was one of thousands who crossed the border into France. The French started locking them up almost immediately. In October 1939, one of our agents, who was posing as a member of the French Communist Party—they were also interned in the same concentration camps as the German communists—met a man he believed to have been Erich Mielke at the Buffalo Sports Stadium, in the south of Paris, which the French were using as a provisional camp for undesirable aliens. He said that Mielke told him he’d been transferred from another provisional camp, the Roland Garros Tennis Stadium. Soon after that, Mielke was transferred again, to one of two rather more permanent concentration camps in the south of France: the camp at Le Vernet, in Ariège, near Toulouse, or to Gurs, which is in the region of Aquitaine. We believe he’s still in one of these camps. He knows we’re looking for him, so naturally he’ll be using a false name. And while conditions in these camps are generally held to be abominable, nevertheless, since the Soviet Union signed the nonaggression pact with Germany, they might actually be the safest place for him. Stalin has already sent back here several German communists in order to demonstrate his goodwill toward the Führer. And it’s quite likely he would do the same with Erich Mielke. So, with France now in the hands of the Third Reich, this is our best chance in almost a decade to capture him.”

“And,” said Heydrich, “since you’re the only man in Sipo who’s ever had the pleasure to have met Mielke, that makes you uniquely qualified to go to France and make the arrest. The French are already proving to be extremely cooperative in this regard. They’re as anxious to get rid of some of their German undesirables as we are to get hold of them. And you certainly won’t find that you’re the only police officer making the journey down there to arrest a fugitive from German justice. Merely one of the most important ones. Because, make no mistake about it, Gunther, Erich Mielke is very near the top of our wanted list.”

“I have some questions, sir,” I said.

Heydrich nodded.

“First of all, I don’t speak French.”

“That’s not a problem at all. In Paris you will liaise with Hauptmann Paul Kestner, whom I believe you know from your time together in Kripo. Kestner is from Alsace and speaks fluent French. He’s ordered to offer you any assistance that you require. The two of you will report to my own deputy, General Werner Best of the Gestapo. Together with Helmut Knochen, who’s the senior commander of security in Paris, he’ll assign you some French police to assist in your mission, code-named Fafnir.”

I nodded. “Fafnir, right you are, sir. I’m glad you didn’t say Hagen.”

It didn’t happen very often, but Heydrich looked puzzled.

“In the Ring cycle, sir,” I explained, “Hagen kills Gunther.”

Heydrich smiled. “Well, I’ll kill you if don’t find Mielke,” he said. “Understand?”

I was glad he was smiling. “Yes, Herr General.”

“He’ll need a uniform, sir,” said Schellenberg.

“Have you a uniform, Gunther?”

“No, Herr General. Not yet.”

“I thought not. Good. That gives us an opportunity to talk privately. Come with me. And bring Mielke’s file with you. You’ll need it.”

He stood up, collected his hat, and walked to the door. I followed him to the outer office, where he was already telling Bettina to have his car brought to the front door and collecting a briefcase from Schellenberg. He took the file from me and placed it inside the briefcase.

“Are we going somewhere?” I asked.

“My tailor,” he said, and marched toward the huge marble staircase. “You can give me the clothing coupons later on.”

As we came out of the building the guards on Prinz Albrechtstrasse came to attention, and for a moment we waited for the car to appear. Heydrich permitted me to light his cigarette and then handed me the briefcase.

“Everything you need for Operation Fafnir is in that briefcase,” he said. “Money, passes, travel documentation, and more besides. Much more. Which is why I wanted to talk to you in private.” He glanced around at the two SS guards as if making sure they were out of earshot and then said the most extraordinary thing:

“You see, Gunther, we have something in common, you and I. Years ago, both of us were denounced as mischlings because, allegedly, we have a Jewish grandparent. Nonsense, of course. But not unconnected with what I told you before.”

“You mean about how someone is trying to kill you.”

“Yes. Having failed to persuade the Führer that there was any truth in these wicked rumors, it is certainly Himmler’s intention to have me assassinated. Of course, I am not without resources of my own. Certain records pertaining to my family’s past in Halle, and which might be open to misinterpretation, have been erased. And the person who denounced me—a naval cadet I knew at the academy in Kiel—that man met an unfortunate accident. He was killed in the Deutschland Incident of 1937, when the Republican Air Force attacked the port of Ibiza. That’s the official version, anyway.”

The car arrived. It was a large, open-top, black Mercedes. The driver, an SS sergeant, sprang out, saluted, and then opened the big suicide door and tipped the front seat forward.

“What took you so long, Klein?” said Heydrich.

“I’m sorry sir, but I was filling her up when your call came through. Where are we going?”

“Holter’s, the tailor.”

“Sixteen Tauenzienstrasse. Right you are, sir.”

We drove south, as far as the corner of Bulow Strasse, and then west.

“That briefcase I gave you,” said Heydrich. “It also contains a file about the man who denounced you, Gunther. In fact, that file is not unconnected with Mielke’s file, as you will discover. You see, the man who denounced you was Hauptmann Paul Kestner. Your former schoolmate and Kripo colleague.”

“Kestner.” I nodded. “I always thought that was someone else, sir. This girl I used to know, who also knew Mielke.”

“But you don’t look surprised that it was Kestner.”

“No, perhaps I’m not, Herr General.”

“He was a member of the KPD before he was a Nazi. Did you know that?”

I shook my head.

“It was Kestner who tipped off his friends in the KPD that you and he were traveling to Hamburg to arrest Mielke. After you left Kripo, he hoped to divert suspicion from himself by alleging that it was you who had tipped off Mielke. Something that was easier to do if it turned out that you were part Jew.”

I shook my head.

“Oh, it’s all in the file,” said Heydrich.

“No, that’s not it, Herr General. I’m just disappointed, that’s all. As you say, I’ve known Paul Kestner since we were at the same gymnasium, here in Berlin.”

“It’s always disappointing when one discovers that one has been betrayed. But in a sense it’s liberating, too. It serves as a reminder that ultimately one can only ever truly rely on oneself.”

“There’s something I don’t understand,” I said. “If you know all of this, why am I meeting up with Paul Kestner in Paris?”

Heydrich tutted loudly and looked away for a moment as we drove onto Nollendorf Platz. There he pointed at the Mozart Hall Movie Theater. “The Four Feathers,” he said. “A marvelous picture. Have you seen it?”

“Yes.”

“Quite right. It’s one of the Führer’s favorites. This is a movie about revenge, is it not? Albeit a very British and sentimental kind of revenge. Harry Favisham returns the four white feathers to the same men and woman who had accused him of cowardice. Absurd, really. Speaking for myself, I should have preferred to see my former comrades suffer a little more than they did. And perhaps die, although not without revealing myself as their nemesis. Do you follow me?”

“I’m beginning to, Herr General.”

“As your superior officer, I should inform you that it’s no crime to have been a Communist Party member before one saw the light and became a National Socialist. I should also inform you that Paul Kestner is not without connections in the Wilhelmstrasse, and that these people have decided to overlook his dishonest role in the Mielke affair. Frankly, if we were to cashier every Sipo officer with an unfortunate past, there would be no one left to wear the uniform.”

“Does he know?” I asked. “That his superiors are aware of what he did?”

“No. We prefer to keep things like that in reserve. For when we need to bring a man into line and persuade him to do what he’s told. However”—Heydrich flicked his cigarette into the street and lifted his injured arm—“as you can see, accidents happen. Especially in time of war. And if some harm were to befall Hauptmann Kestner while he was in occupied France, I doubt that anyone would be surprised. Least of all me. After all, it’s a long road between Paris and Toulouse and I daresay there are still a few pockets of French resistance. It would be a tragedy of war, just like the death of Paul Baumer reaching to protect a fledgling bird on the last page of All Quiet on the Western Front.” Heydrich sighed. “Yes. A tragedy. But hardly a matter for regret.”

“I see.”

“Well, it’s entirely a matter for you, Hauptsturmführer Gunther. Your chief inspector rank in Kripo entitles you to the rank of SS captain. The same as Kestner. It makes no difference to me if he lives or dies. It’s your choice.”

The car purred along Tauenzienstrasse toward the stalagmite steeples of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and came to a rumbling halt in front of a tailor’s shop. In the window was a tailor’s dummy, which looked like the torso at the scene of a crime, and several bolts of pewter-colored cloth. Pedestrians shot Heydrich a curious look as he climbed out of the car and walked his bowlegged walk to the front door of Wilhelm Holter. You could hardly blame them for that. With all the medals and badges on his Luftwaffe tunic he looked like an accomplished Boy Scout, albeit a rather sinister one.

I followed him through the door with the shop bell ringing in my ears, as if warning other customers of the plague we brought with us. Something fearful, anyway.

An unassuming man wearing pince-nez, a black armband, and a stiff collar came toward us washing one hand in the other like Pontius Pilate and smiling an intermittent smile, as if he were functioning on half power only.

“Ah yes,” he said quietly. “General Heydrich, isn’t it? Yes, please come through.”

He ushered us into a room that belonged in the Herrenklub. There were leather armchairs, a clock ticking on a mantelpiece, a pair of full-length mirrors, and several glass cases containing a variety of military uniforms. On the walls were an abundance of royal warrants and pictures of Hitler and Goering, whose fondness for wearing uniforms of all colors was well-known. Through a green velvet curtain I could see several men cutting cloth or pressing half-finished uniforms with a hot iron, and to my surprise one of these men was an Orthodox Jew. It was a nice example of Nazi hypocrisy to have a Jewish tailor making an SS uniform.

“This officer needs an SS uniform,” explained Heydrich. “Field Gray. And it has to be ready in one week’s time. Ordinarily, I should send him to the SS Quartermaster for an off-the-peg Hugo Boss uniform, but he’ll be traveling on the Führer’s personal train, so he’ll need to look smart. Can you do it, Herr Holter?”

The tailor looked surprised even to be asked such a question. He uttered a polite little guffaw and smiled with quiet confidence. “Oh, certainly, Herr General.”

“Good,” said Heydrich. “Send the account to my office. “You’ll receive the clothing coupons from my office by return of post. Gunther? I will leave you in Herr Holter’s capable hands. And make sure you get your men. Both of them.” Then he turned and left.

Holter produced a notebook and a pencil and began asking questions and noting the answers.

“Rank?”

“Hauptmann.”

“Any medals?”

“Iron Cross, with Royal Citation. Great War Participation Medal, with swords and wound badge. That’s it.”

“Trousers or riding breeches?”

I shrugged.

“Both,” he said. “Dress dagger?”

I shook my head.

“Hat size?”

“Sixty-two centimeters.”

Holter nodded. “We’ll have Hoffmann’s in Gneisenaustrasse send over a couple for you to try on. Until then, perhaps you’d like to slip off your jacket and I’ll take your measurements.” He glanced at a little calendar on the wall. “It’s always a hurry with General Heydrich.”

“Yes, it’s never a good idea to disagree with him.” I said, slipping off my jacket. “I do know that feeling. Where Heydrich is concerned, your black armband could be catching.”

It was after I’d been measured and I was on my way out of the door that I bumped into Elisabeth Gehler, who was coming into the tailor’s shop with a uniform box under her arm. I hadn’t seen her very much since that night in 1931 when she’d taken offense at my turning up at her apartment and asking for Mielke’s address. But she greeted me warmly, as if all that was forgotten now, and agreed to come and meet me for a coffee after she had delivered the uniform to Herr Holter.

I waited around the corner at Miericke, on Ranke Strasse, where the chocolate cake was still the best in Berlin.

When she arrived, she told me that since the beginning of the war she’d had little or no time for making dresses; everyone wanted her for tailoring uniforms.

“This war is over before it even got started,” I told her. “You’ll be back to dressmaking in no time at all.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said. “Even so, I suppose that’s why you were there, at Holter’s. To get yourself a uniform.”

“Yes. I have a police job to do in Paris next week.”

“Paris.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “What I wouldn’t give to be going to Paris.”

“You know, I was just thinking of you about an hour ago.”

She pulled a face. “I don’t believe you.”

“Honestly, it’s true. I was.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. I hardly wanted to tell her that I was being sent to Paris to hunt down her old friend Erich Mielke and that this was the reason she was in my mind again.

“Oh, I was just thinking that it would be nice to see you again, Elisabeth. Perhaps when I get back from Paris we could see a movie together.”

“I thought you said you were going to Paris next week.”

“I am.”

“Then what’s wrong with seeing a movie this week?”

“If it comes to that,” I said, “what’s wrong with tonight?”

She nodded. “Pick me up at six,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek.

We were on our way out of the coffee shop when she said, “I nearly forgot. I’m living somewhere else now.”

“No wonder I couldn’t find you.”

“As if you tried. Motzstrasse. Number twenty-eight. First floor. My name is on the bell.”

“I’m already looking forward to ringing it.”