Field Gray

20

It was late afternoon when our convoy took to the road again. We were headed to Toulouse, about one hundred fifty kilometers to the northeast, and thought that we could probably make it before dark. We took Eva Kemmerich with us so that she might look for her husband when we visited the camp at Le Vernet the following day. And, of course, our eight prisoners. I hadn’t really looked at them. They were a miserable, malnourished, smelly lot and little or no threat to anyone, let alone the Third Reich. According to Karl Bömelburg, one of them was a German writer and another was a well-known newspaperman, only I hadn’t heard of either of them.

Outside Lourdes, in sight of the River Gave de Pau, we stopped in a forest clearing to stretch our legs. I was pleased to see Bömelburg extend the same facility to our prisoners. He even handed out some cigarettes. I was feeling tired but better. At least my chest was no longer hurting. But I still wasn’t smoking. I had another bite off Bömelburg’s flask and decided that maybe he wasn’t such a bad fellow after all.

“This whole area is full of caves and grottoes,” he said, and pointed at an outcrop of rock that hung above our heads like a thick gray cloud.

We caught a glimpse of Frau Kemmerich disappearing into the rock. After a minute or two Bömelburg said, “Perhaps you would be good enough to go and inform Frau Bernadette that we shall be leaving in five minutes.”

Instinctively, I glanced at my watch. “Yes, Herr Major.”

I walked up the slope to fetch her, calling her name out loud in case she was answering a call of nature.

“Yes?”

I found her sitting on a rock in a leaf-lined grotto, smoking a cigarette.

“Isn’t it lovely here?” she said, pointing over my head.

I turned to admire the view of the Pyrenees that she was enjoying.

“Yes, it is.”

“Sorry if I was a bitch back there,” she said. “You’ve no idea how bad the last nine months have been. My husband and I were in Dijon when war was declared. He’s a wine merchant. They arrested us almost immediately.”

“Forget it,” I said. “What happened back there…You were justifiably upset. And the camp did look bloody awful.” I nodded down the slope. “Come on. We’d better go back. There’s still a long way to go before we get to Toulouse.”

She stood up. “How long will it take to get there?”

I was about to answer her when I heard two or three loud bursts of machine-gun fire, none of them longer than a couple of seconds; but then, it takes only five seconds to empty an MP 40’s thirty-two-round magazine. The sound and smell of it were still hanging in the air by the time I had sprinted down the slope into the clearing. Two storm troopers were standing a couple of meters apart, their jackboots surrounded with spent ammunition that looked like so many coins tossed to a couple of buskers. As well-trained soldiers, they were already changing the toylike magazines on their machine pistols and looking just a little surprised at their murderous efficiency. That’s the thing about a gun: It always looks like a toy until it starts killing people.

A little farther away lay the bodies of the eight prisoners we had brought from Gurs.

“What the hell happened here?” I shouted, but I knew the answer already.

“They tried to make a run for it,” said Bömelburg.

I went forward to inspect the bodies.

“All of them?” I said. “In a straight line?”

One of the shot men groaned. He lay on the forest floor, his knees collapsed under him, his torso lying back on his feet in an almost impossible position, like some old Indian fakir. But there was nothing to be done for him. His head and chest were covered in blood.

Angrily, I walked toward Bömelburg. “They would have run away in several directions,” I said. “Not all of them down the same slope.”

A pistol shot bored another hole through the still air of the forest and the groaning man’s head. I turned on my boot heel to see Kestner holstering his Walther P38. Seeing my expression, Kestner shrugged and said:

“Best to finish him, I think.”

“Back at the Alex, we’d have called that murder,” I said.

“Well, we’re not back at the Alex, are we, Captain?” said Bömelburg. “Look here, Gunther, are you calling me a liar? Those men were shot while trying to escape, do you hear?”

There was a lot I could have said, but the only thing that was true was the fact that I had no business being there. It wasn’t just the bodies of fallen heroes that the Valkyries carried up to Valhalla but also those of Berlin chief inspectors who criticized their senior officers in remote French forests. After I remembered that, there seemed little point in saying anything; but there was still plenty I could do.

For his face and my neck I even offered an apology to Bömelburg when the toe of my boot would have seemed more appropriate. In my own defense, I should also add that the two MP 40 machine pistols were now reloaded and ready for lethal business.

We left the bodies where they lay and took our places in the buckets, only this time it was Kestner and not Oltramare who sat with me and Frau Kemmerich. Kestner could see I was upset about what had happened, and after my earlier remarks about his membership in the KPD he was in the mood to press home what he now perceived to be some kind of advantage over me.

“What’s the matter? Can’t bear the sight of blood? And I thought you were a tough guy, Gunther.”

“Let me tell you something, Paul. Although it’s none of your business. I’ve killed people before. In the war. After that I thought the whole world had learned a lesson, but it hasn’t. If I have to kill someone again, I’m going to make sure I make a good start by killing someone I want to kill. Someone who needs killing. So keep chirruping in my ear and see what happens, comrade. You’re not the only man in this bucket who can put a bullet in the back of another man’s head.”

He was quiet after that.

The evening turned to dusk. I kept my eyes on the trees above the road, and if I stayed silent it was because the noise inside my head was indescribable. I suppose it was the echo of those machine pistols. I would hardly have been surprised to find the ghosts of the men we had slain sitting in the buckets beside us. Silent and motionless, withdrawn into my own ego, I waited for the nightmare that was our journey to end.

Toulouse was called the Rose City. Almost all the buildings in the center of town, including our hotel, Le Grand Balcon, were pink, as if we had been looking through the chief inspector’s rose-colored spectacles. I decided to adopt this as a persona to help me achieve what I now needed to achieve. And my breathing was easier now, which also helped. So the following morning at breakfast, I greeted Major Bömelburg and the two French policemen warmly. I was even courteous to Paul Kestner.

“My apologies for yesterday,” I said generally. “But before I left Paris, the doctor at the hospital gave me something to help me carry out my duties. And he warned me that after it wore off I might behave in a peculiar way. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come at all, but as you can probably imagine, I was rather anxious to carry out the mission given to me by General Heydrich, at almost any cost to myself.”

Bömelburg was looking rather more thin and gray than the day before. Kestner might have spent the whole night polishing his bald head, so shiny did it seem. Oltramare said something in French to the commissioner, who put on his pince-nez and regarded me with indifference before nodding his apparent approval.

“The commissioner says you look much better,” said Oltramare. “And I must say, I agree.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Bömelburg. “Much better. Yesterday can’t have been easy for you, Gunther. All that traveling when you were clearly not yourself. It’s commendable that you wanted to come at all, under the circumstances. I shall certainly say so to Colonel Knochen when I make my report in Paris. What with the good news I just had from Commissioner Matignon, this is turning out to be a very good day. Don’t you agree, Kestner?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What good news is that?” I asked, smiling with Toulouse-colored optimism.

“Why, that we’ve got the Jew who assassinated vom Rath,” said Bömelburg. “Grynszpan.” He chuckled. “Apparently, he knocked on the door of the prison here in Toulouse and asked to be let in.”

Oltramare was laughing, too. He said, “Apparently he speaks very little French, had no money, and thought that we might be able to protect him against you fellows.”

“The stupid kike,” muttered Kestner. “I’m on my way to the prison now. With the Commissioner and Monsieur Savigny. To organize Grynszpan’s extradition back to Paris and then Berlin.”

“The Führer wants a trial, apparently,” said Bömelburg. “At all costs there must be a trial.”

“In Berlin?” I tried not to sound surprised.

“Why not in Berlin?” said Bömelburg.

“It’s just that the murder took place in Paris,” I said. “And it was my understanding that Grynszpan’s not even a German citizen. He’s a Pole, isn’t he?” I smiled. “I’m sorry, sir, but sometimes it’s hard for me to stop being a cop and thinking about little things like jurisdiction.”

Bömelburg wagged his finger at me. “You’re just doing your job, old fellow. But I know this case better than anyone. Before I joined the Gestapo I was with our foreign service in Paris, and I spent three months working on this case. For one thing, Poland is now a part of the Greater German Reich. As is France. And for another, the murder took place in the German Embassy here in Paris. Technically, diplomatically that was German soil. And that makes a big difference.”

“Yes, of course,” I said meekly. “That does make a big difference.”

Certainly, it had made a big difference to Germany’s Jews. Herschel Grynszpan’s murder of a junior official in the Paris embassy in November 1938 had been used as an excuse by the Nazis to launch a massive pogrom against Germany’s Jews. Until the night of November 10, 1938—Kristallnacht—it was almost possible to imagine that I still lived in a civilized country. The trial was certain to be the kind the Nazis liked: a show trial, with the verdict a foregone conclusion. But if Bömelburg was being honest, at least Grynszpan wasn’t about to be murdered by the roadside.

Leaving Kestner, Matignon, and Savigny to go to the Prison St. Michel in Toulouse, Bömelburg and I, accompanied by six SS men, set off on the sixty-five-kilometer drive south to Le Vernet. Frau Kemmerich did not come with us, as it seemed her husband was after all in another French concentration camp at Moisdon-la-Rivière, in Brittany.

Le Vernet was near Pamiers and the camp was a short way south of the local railway station, which Bömelburg described as “convenient.” There was a cemetery to the north of the camp, but he neglected to mention if that was convenient, too, although I was sure it would be: Le Vernet was even worse than Gurs. Surrounded by miles of barbed wire in an otherwise deserted patch of French countryside, the many huts looked like coffins laid out after some giant’s battle. They were in a deplorable state, as were the two thousand men who were imprisoned there, many of them emaciated and guarded by well-fed French gendarmes. The prisoners labored to build an inadequate road between the railway station and the cemetery. There were four roll calls a day, each of them lasting half an hour. We arrived just before the third, explained our mission to the French policeman in charge, and he handed us politely over to the care of a vile-looking officer who smelled strongly of aniseed, and his yellow-faced Corsican sergeant. They listened as Oltramare translated the details of our mission. Monsieur Aniseed nodded and led the way into the camp.

Bömelburg and I followed, pistols in hand, as we had been warned that the men of hut 32, the “Leper Barrack,” were considered the most dangerous in Camp Le Vernet. Oltramare followed at a distance, also armed. And the three of us waited outside while several French gendarmes entered the pitch-black barrack and drove the occupants outside with whips and curses.

These men were in a disgraceful condition—worse than at Gurs, and even worse than Dachau. Their ankles were swollen and their bellies distended from starvation. They wore cheap-looking galoshes on their feet and the same ragged clothing they’d probably been wearing since the winter of 1937 when they had fled the advance of Franco’s Nationalist Army. Some of them were half naked. They were all infested with vermin. They knew what was coming but were too beaten to sing “The Internationale” in defiance of our presence.

It took several minutes for the barrack to empty and the men to line up again. Just when you thought the barrack couldn’t contain any more men, others came out until there were 350 of them paraded in front of us. The judgment line from purgatory to hell could not have looked more abject. And with every second I was confronted with their emaciated, unshaven faces, the more I wanted to shoot Monsieur Aniseed and his fat gendarmes.

While the Corsican called the roll, Bömelburg checked his clipboard, looking for names that tallied; and while they did that I walked between their ranks, like the Kaiser come to hand out a few Iron Crosses to the bravest of the brave, looking to see if I could pick out a man I hadn’t seen in nine years. But I never saw him there, and I never heard his name called out. Not that I put much faith in a name. From everything I’d read about him in Heydrich’s file, Erich Mielke was too smart to have been arrested and interned using his real name. Bömelburg knew this, of course. But there were others who had not been possessed of the same presence of mind as the German Comintern agent; and as these few men were identified they were led away to the administration barracks by the gendarmes.

“He’s not in this barrack,” I said finally.

“The adjutant says there’s another all-German barrack in this section,” said Oltramare. “This one is all International Brigade and it would make sense for Mielke to keep away from them, especially now that Stalin has closed his doors to them.”

The men from barrack 32 were driven back inside and we repeated the whole exercise with the men from barrack 33. According to the yellow-faced Corsican—he looked like a careless tanner—these were all communists who had fled from Hitler’s Germany only to find themselves interned as undesirable aliens when war was declared in September 1939. Consequently, these men were in rather better shape than their comrades from the International Brigades. That wouldn’t have been difficult.

Once again, I walked up and down the lines of prisoners while Bömelburg and the Corsican called the roll. These faces were more defiant than the others and most of the men met my eye with unshifting hatred. Some were Jews, I thought. Others were more obviously Aryan. Once or twice I paused and stared levelly at a man, but I never identified any of the prisoners as Erich Mielke.

Not even when I recognized him.

As the Corsican finished the roll call, I walked back to Bömelburg’s side, shaking my head.

“No luck?”

“No. He’s not there.”

“Are you sure? Some of these fellows are a shadow of their former selves. After six months in this place, I doubt my own wife would recognize me. Have another look, Captain.”

“All right, sir.”

And while I looked at the prisoners again, I made an announcement, for the sake of impressing Bömelburg.

“Listen,” I said. “We’re looking for a man called Erich Fritz Emil Mielke. Perhaps you know him by a different name. I don’t care about his politics—he’s wanted for the murders of two Berlin policemen in 1931. I’m sure many of you read about it in the newspapers at the time. This man is thirty-three years old, fair-haired, medium height, brown eyes, Protestant, from Berlin. He attended the Kollnisches Gymnasium. Probably speaks Russian quite well, and a bit of Spanish. Maybe he’s good with his hands. His father is a woodworker.”

All the time I was speaking I could feel Mielke looking at me, knowing I’d recognized him the way he’d recognized me and doubtless wondering why I didn’t arrest him straightaway and what the hell was going on. I holstered my pistol and took off my officer’s cap in the hope I might look a little less like a Nazi.

“Gentlemen, I make you this promise. If any one of you identifies Erich Mielke to me now, I will personally speak to the camp commander with a view to organizing your release as soon as possible.”

It was the kind of promise that a Nazi would have made. A shifting promise that no one would have trusted. I hoped so. Because after what had happened to the prisoners from Gurs in the forest near Lourdes, the last thing I wanted to do was help the Nazis arrest any more Germans, even a German who had murdered two policemen. I couldn’t do anything about the other men who were on Bömelburg’s list, but I was damned if I was going to finger any more Germans for Heydrich. Not now.

Once again I met Erich Mielke’s eye. He didn’t look away, and I suppose he guessed what I was doing. He was older than I remembered him, of course. Broader and more powerful-looking, especially across the shoulders. He wore a light beard, but there was no mistaking the surly-looking mouth, the watchful ruthless eyes, or the coxcomb of unruly hair on top of his largish head. He must have thought I was a beefsteak Nazi: brown on the outside, red on the inside. But he couldn’t have been more wrong. The murders of Anlauf and Lenck had been just about the most cowardly I’d ever seen, and nothing would have pleased me more than to have snapped him for it and for the Berlin courts to have sent him for a permanent haircut; but as much as I disliked him now, I disliked the casual, instinctive brutality of the Nazi police state even more. I almost wanted to tell him that but for the murders of eight men on a country road the day before he’d have been on his way to a date with a man wearing white gloves and a top hat.

I turned away and walked back to Bömelburg with a shrug.

“It was worth a shot,” he said.

Neither of us expected what happened next.

“I don’t know an Erich Mielke,” said a voice.

The man was small and Jewish-looking, with short, dark, curly hair and shifty brown eyes. A lawyer’s face, which could have been why there was a large bruise on his cheek.

“I don’t know an Erich Mielke,” he repeated, now that he had our attention, “but I would like to become a Nazi.”

Some of the other prisoners laughed, some whistled, but the man kept going.

“I was arrested by the French because I was a German communist,” he said. “I wasn’t an enemy of France then, but I am now. It’s true, I really hate and despise these people worse than I used to hate the Nazis. I spend all day moving latrine bins, and for the rest of my life I’m forever going to associate France with the smell of shit.”

The Corsican’s eyes narrowed and he moved toward the man with his whip raised.

“No,” said Bömelburg. “Let the fellow speak.”

“I’m glad France was defeated,” said the prisoner. “And since I’m declaring myself to be an enemy of France, I’d also like to join the German army and become a loyal soldier of the fatherland and a follower of Adolf Hitler. Who knows? I know the war’s over, but I might just get the chance to shoot a Franzi, which would really make me very happy.”

His fellow prisoners started to jeer, but I could see that Major Bömelburg was impressed.

“So, if you don’t mind, sir, when you leave this shit hole, I’d like to come with you.”

Bömelburg smiled. “Well,” he said. “I think you’d better.”

And he did. But it said a lot about the rest of the Germans in barrack 33 that there was no one else who followed his example. Not one.