Field Gray

28

From La Santé I was transferred to the Pension Verdin at 102 avenue Victor Hugo in the suburbs of Sainte-Mandé, which was about a five-minute drive south from the Swimming Pool. It was a quiet, comfortable place with polished parquet floors, tall windows, and a lovely garden, where I sat in the sun awaiting my return to Germany. The pension was a sort of safe house and hotel for members of the SDECE and its agents, and there were several faces I half recognized from my time in the Swimming Pool, but no one bothered me. I was even allowed out—although I was followed at a distance—and spent a day walking northeast along the Seine as far as the Île de la Cité and Notre Dame Cathedral. It was the first time I’d seen Paris without the Wehrmacht everywhere, or without hundreds of signs in German. Bicycles had given way to a great many cars, which did little to make me feel any safer than I’d felt as an enemy soldier in 1940. But a lot of this was just nerves—cement fever after spending the last six months in one prison or another: I couldn’t have felt more like a big-house brother if I’d been carrying a ball and chain. Or looked like one. That was why they took me to Galeries Lafayette on boulevard Haussmann to get some new clothes. It would be an exaggeration to say that my new clothes made me feel normal again: Too much water had run off the mountain for that to happen. However, I did feel partly restored. Like an old door with a new lick of paint.

The French had not exaggerated the difficulty of traveling to Berlin. The inner German border between West and East Germany—the Green Border—had been closed since May 1952, with transport links between the two halves of the country mostly severed. The only place where East Germans were able to cross freely into the West was in Berlin itself; and getting in or out of the East was restricted to a few points along a heavily guarded and fortified fence, of which the largest and most frequently used was the Helmstedt–Marienborn crossing at the edge of the Lappwald. First, however, we had to go to Hannover, in the British zone of occupation.

We left the Gare du Nord on the overnight train—me and my two French handlers from the SDECE. They had names now—names and passports—although it seemed unlikely that their names were real, especially as I now had a passport myself—French—in the name of Sébastien Kléber, a traveling salesman from Alsace. The Frenchman with the eyebrows went by the name of Philippe Méntelin; the Insomniac was calling himself Émile Vigée.

We had a sleeping compartment to ourselves, but I was too excited to sleep, and when, nine and a half hours later, the train pulled into Hannover Railway Station, I uttered a quiet little prayer of thanks that I was back in Prussia. The equestrian statue of King Ernst August was still in front of the station, and City Hall with its red roofs and green cupolas looked much the same as I remembered, but elsewhere the city was very different. Adolf Hitler Strasse was now Bahnhofstrasse; Horst Wessel Platz was now Königswerther Platz; and the Opera House was no longer occupying Adolf Hitler Platz but Opern Platz. The Aegidienkirche on the corner of Breite Strasse was a bombed-out ruin, overgrown with ivy and left that way as a memorial to those who had died during the war. Elsewhere, the city was hardly recognizable. One thing hadn’t changed, however: It’s said that the purest German is spoken in Hannover; and that’s certainly what it sounded like to me.

The safe house was in the east of Hannover, in a large wooded area called the Eilenriede on Hindenburg Strasse, close to the zoo. The house was a largish villa in a smallish garden. It had a red mansard roof and an octagonal corner tower with a silver-steel cupola. This tower contained my room, and although my door wasn’t locked, it was hard to rid myself of the impression that I was still a prisoner. Especially when I mentioned to Émile Vigée that I’d seen two suspicious-looking men from my Rapunzel-like vantage point.

“Look there,” I said, inviting him into my room and over to the window. “On Erwinstrasse, is it?”

He nodded.

“Those two men in the black Citroën,” I said. “They’ve been there for at least an hour. From time to time, one of them gets out, smokes a cigarette, and watches this house. And I’m pretty sure he’s armed, too.”

“How can you tell from here?”

“It’s a warm day, but all three buttons on his suit are done up. And every so often he adjusts something on his breast.”

“You have keen eyes, Monsieur Kléber.”

Every time Vigée spoke to me now he called me Kléber, or Sébastien, to help me become accustomed to hearing this name.

“I used to be a cop, remember?”

“Nothing to worry about. They’re both with us. As a matter of fact, they’re going to drive you to Berlin and back here before going on to Göttingen and Friedland. They’re both German and they’ve made the drive many times before, so there shouldn’t be a problem. They both work for the VdH here in Hannover. He glanced at his watch. “I invited them both for dinner tonight. To give you a chance to meet them. They’re a little early, that’s all.”

We went to dinner at the nearby Stadthalle, formerly the Hermann Goering Stadthalle—a very large round building that was a bit like Fat Hermann himself. With its green roof the place was half concert hall and half circus tent, but according to Vigée, there was also a good restaurant.

“Not as good as Paris, of course,” he said. “But not bad for Hannover. With quite a reasonable wine list.” He shrugged. “I expect that’s why Goering liked it, eh?”

As we arrived for dinner, everyone else was leaving to go to the Friday-night concert, and I decided the French had probably timed it that way so we could talk without fear of being overheard. The music helped, of course. It was Mendelssohn’s Third Symphony, the Scottish.

The two Frenchmen were disappointed with the food, but to me, after months of prison fare, it was delicious. My two fellow Germans had also brought hearty appetites, although little in the way of conversation. They wore gray suits to match their gray skin. Neither was very tall. One of them had bright blond hair that must have come out of a bottle; the other might have come out of a bottle himself, he drank so much, although it appeared not to affect him at all. The blonder man was called Werner Grottsch; the other called himself Klaus Wenger. Neither seemed inclined to try to find out anything about me. Perhaps they were already well-informed on that subject by Vigée, but I thought it more likely that they knew better than to ask, and if so, it was a compliment I repaid by making no inquiries of them.

Eventually, Vigée brought the conversation around to the true purpose of our acquaintance.

“Sébastien’s not crossed the border before,” he said. “At least not since the implementation of the DDR’s special regime. Werner, perhaps you’d like to put him in the picture about what will happen tomorrow. You’ll be in a car with French diplomatic number plates. Even so, it’s always useful to know how to behave. What to expect.”

Grottsch nodded politely, extinguished his cigarette, leaned forward, and clasped his hands, as if he were going to lead us in prayer.

“It’s called the special regime because the measures are intended to keep out spies, diversionists, terrorists, and smugglers. In other words, people like us.” He smiled at his own little joke. “We’ll be crossing at Checkpoint Alpha. At Helmstedt. It’s the largest and busiest crossing point because it allows for the shortest land route between West Germany and West Berlin. It’s one hundred and eighty-five kilometers through East Germany to Berlin. The road runs through a fenced corridor that’s heavily guarded. A bit like No Man’s Land, if you remember that, and almost as dangerous, so if we have a breakdown, on no account get out of the car. We wait for assistance, no matter how long that takes. If you get out, you risk being shot, and people do get shot. The border police—the Grepos—are particularly trigger-happy. Do I make myself clear?”

“Abundantly clear, Herr Grottsch. Thank you.”

“Good.” Grottsch cocked an ear at the air and nodded his appreciation. “What a pleasure, to listen to Mendelssohn again. And not to be worried that one was being unpatriotic.”

“He was German, wasn’t he?” I said. “From Hamburg.”

“No, no,” said Grottsch. “Mendelssohn was a Jew.”

Wenger nodded and lit a cigarette. “That’s right,” he said. “He was. A Jew from Leipzig.”

“Of course,” Grottsch went on, “going in is one thing. Getting out is quite another. Inspection pits, mirrors, there’s even a mortuary where they can look inside coffins to check if an occupant who wanted to be buried in West Germany is really dead. Even Mendelssohn couldn’t leave these days without the proper paperwork. And he’s been dead for a hundred years.”

“Your lady friend,” said Wenger. “Fräulein Dehler. You’ll be pleased to know she’s still at the same address. But she’s no longer a dressmaker. She now runs a nightclub called The Queen on Auguste-Viktoria Strasse.”

“A straight kind of place?”

“As straight as they go.”

Helmstedt was an attractive little medieval town of brightly colored towers and unusual churches. The town hall looked like an enormous organ from a cathedral that, typically, no longer existed. The redbrick university building resembled a military barracks. I might have seen more of it, but my two companions were keen to get through Checkpoint Alpha so that we might reach Berlin before dark. And I could hardly fault them for that. From Marienborn, Berlin was a three-hour drive through an inhospitable landscape of barbed wire and, on the other side of the fence, men with dogs, and mines. But nothing compared with the inhospitable faces of the Grepos at Checkpoint Alpha. In their jackboots, cross-belts, and long leather coats, the border police reminded me strongly of the SS, and the long wooden huts from which they emerged were like something from a concentration camp. The swastikas were gone, replaced by the red stars and the hammer and sickle, but everything else felt the same. Except for one thing: Nazism had never looked quite so permanent as this. Or thorough.

Grottsch and Wenger shared the driving, which was straightforward enough; if you drive east on the A2 for long enough, you arrive in Berlin. But they remained wary of asking questions, as if the French had warned them against the answers. So when we spoke at all, it was concerning nothing of any real consequence: the weather, the scenery, the Citroën versus the Mercedes, life in the DDR, and, as we got nearer our destination, the Four Powers and their continuing occupation of the former German capital, which, we all agreed, none of us liked. It went without question that we thought the Russians the worst of all, but we spent at least an hour arguing which of the other three was going to take the silver medal. It seemed my two colleagues were of the opinion that the British had the same faults as the Americans—arrogance and ignorance—without any of their virtues—money—that made their arrogance and ignorance easier to ignore. The French, we decided, were simply the French: not to be taken seriously and, therefore, beneath any real contempt. Personally, I had my doubts about the British; and if I had any lingering doubts about my silver-plated dislike of the Americans, they were soon to be dispelled. Just southwest of Berlin, at the Dreilinden border crossing into the city in Zehlendorf, we were obliged to stop to present our papers again, and entering the American zone we parked our car and went into a shop to buy some cigarettes. I was used to seeing, and smoking, mostly American brands. It was all the other American brands in the shop that brought me up short: Chex breakfast cereal, Rexall toothpaste, Sanka caffeine-free coffee, Ballantine beer, Old Sunny-brook Kentucky whiskey, Dash dog food, Jujyfruits, Appian Way pizza mix, Pream, Nescafé, and 7Up. I might have been back in Berlin, but not so as you would have noticed.

We drove into the French sector, to a safe house on Bernauer Strasse that overlooked the Russian sector, which is to say the French controlled the north sidewalk and the Russians controlled the south. It hardly mattered. Even if it didn’t look like the Berlin I remembered—on the Soviet side of the street the bombed-out buildings remained in an appalling state of disrepair—it still felt and smelled much the same: cynical, mongrel—perhaps more mongrel than ever. In my head and heart, an orchestra the size of a division was playing “Berliner Luft” and I was clapping and whistling in all the right places for a true citizen. In Berlin it wasn’t about being German—Hitler and Goebbels never understood that—it was being a Berliner first and telling anyone who wanted to change that to go to hell. One day we would surely be rid of the rest of them, too. The Ivans, the Tommies, the Franzis, and yes, even the Amis. Friends are always harder to get rid of than enemies; especially when they believe they’re good friends.

The following day, the two Germans drove me to Motzstrasse in the American sector.

We drew up outside number twenty-eight. The building was in a much better state of repair than it had been the last time I was there. For one thing, it had been painted canary yellow; there were several window boxes filled with geraniums; and, in front of the heavy oak door, someone had planted a thriving lime tree. The whole area looked like it was doing well. Across the street was an expensive porcelain shop, and below Elisabeth’s first-floor apartment was an equally pricey restaurant called Kottler’s, where my two escorts elected to wait for me.

The street door was open. I went upstairs and rang the bell and listened. Inside Elisabeth’s apartment I could hear music, and then it stopped. A moment later, the door opened and she was standing in front of me. Five years older and at least seven kilos heavier. Before she’d been a brunette. Now she was a blonde. The weight suited her more than the hair color, which didn’t really match her widening brown eyes, but I hardly minded that, as it was six months since I’d even spoken to a woman, let alone one in her dressing gown. Just seeing Elisabeth like that reminded me of a more innocent time before the war, when sex still seemed like a practical proposition.

Her jaw dropped and she blinked deliberately, as if she really didn’t believe her own eyes.

“Oh, my God, it’s you,” she said. “I was afraid you were dead.”

“I was. Eternal life has its advantages, but it’s amazing how quickly you get bored. So here I am again. Back in the city of mahogany and marijuana.”

“Come in, come in.” She vacuumed me inside, closed the door, and hugged me fondly. “I don’t have any marijuana,” she said, “but I have good coffee. Or something stronger.”

“Coffee will be fine.” I followed her along a corridor and into the kitchen. “I like what you’ve done with the place. You’ve put furniture in it. The last time I was here, I think you’d sold everything. To the Amis.”

“Not everything.” Elisabeth smiled. “I never sold that. Lots did, mind. But not me.” She set about making the coffee and then said: “How long has it been?”

“Since I was last here? Six or seven years.”

“It seems longer. Where have you been? What were you doing?”

“None of that matters now. The past. Right now, the only thing that matters is right now. Everything else is irrelevant. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.”

“You really were dead, weren’t you?”

“Mmm hmm.”

She made coffee and led the way into a small but comfortable sitting room. The furniture was solid but unremarkable. Outside, the copper-colored leaves of the linden tree helped to shade the window from the bright autumn sun. I felt quite at home. As much at home as I was likely to feel anywhere.

“No sewing machine,” I observed.

“There’s not much call for expensive tailoring anymore,” she said. “Not in Berlin, anyway. Not since the war. Who can afford such things? These days I run a club called The Queen. On Auguste-Viktoria Platz. Number seventy-six. Drop by sometime. Not today, of course. We’re closed on Sundays. Which is why I’m here.”

“Is it a Sunday? I don’t know.”

“Dead and just coming back to life. That’s hardly respectable. But the club is. Probably too respectable for a man like you, but that’s what the customers want nowadays. No one wants the old Berlin anymore. With the sex clubs and the whores.”

“No one?”

“All right. The Americans don’t seem to want them. At least not officially.”

“You surprise me. In Cuba, they couldn’t get enough of the sex clubs. Every night there was a long line outside the most notorious club of all. The Shanghai.”

“I don’t know about Cuba. But here we get some very Lutheran Americans. Well, this is Germany, after all. It’s as if they think the Russians might use any sign of depravity as an excuse to invade West Berlin. They seem to want to make the Cold War as cold as possible for everyone involved. Did you know that you can get yourself arrested for nude sunbathing in the parks?”

“At my age, that’s hardly a concern.” I sipped her coffee and nodded my appreciation.

Elisabeth lit a cigarette. “So it was you. The person who sent me that money from Cuba. I thought it must be.”

“At the time, I had more than enough to spare.”

“And now?”

“I’m sorting things out.”

“You don’t look like someone who’s just back from the sun.”

“Like I said. At my age. I was never one for lying around in the sun.”

“Me, I love it. Whenever I can. After all, the winters we get. What sort of things are you sorting out?”

“The Berlin kind.”

“Hmm. That sounds suspicious. This used to be a city of whores. And you don’t look like a whore. Now it’s a city of spies. So—” She shrugged and sipped her coffee.

“I expect that’s why they don’t like joy ladies and sex clubs. Because they want their spies honest. And as for nude sunbathing, well, it’s difficult being something you’re not when you’ve got your clothes off.”

“I’ll bear that in mind. As a matter of fact, we get lots of spies in the club. American spies.”

“How can you tell?”

“They’re the ones not wearing uniforms.”

She was joking, of course. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. I glanced over at a radiogram the size of a drinks cabinet from which a low murmur was emanating. “What are we almost listening to?”

“RIAS,” she said.

“I don’t know that station. I don’t know any of the Berlin stations.”

“It stands for ‘Radio in the American Sector.’” She said it in English. Good English, too. “I always listen to RIAS on a Sunday morning. To help my English. No, to improve my English.”

I pulled a face. On the coffee table was a copy of Die Neue Zeitung. “American radio. American newspapers. Sometimes I think we lost a lot more than just a war.”

“They’re not so bad. Who’s paying your rent?”

“The VdH.”

“Of course. You were a prisoner yourself, weren’t you?”

I nodded.

“A couple of years ago, I went to one of those exhibitions put on by the VdH,” she said. “On the POW experience. They had reconstructed a Soviet POW camp, complete with a wooden watchtower and a four-meter-high barbed-wire fence.”

“Was there a gift shop?”

“No. Just a newspaper.”

“Der Heimkehrer.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a rag. Among other things, the VdH leadership believes that a free people cannot renounce in principle the protection of a new German army.”

“But you don’t believe that?”

I shook my head. “It’s not that I don’t think military service is a good idea. In principle.” I lit a cigarette. “It’s just that I don’t trust our Western allies not to use us as cannon fodder in a new war that some lunatic Confederate American general thinks he can safely fight on German soil. Which is to say, a long way from America. But which in reality no one can win. Not us. Not them.”

“Better Red than dead, huh?”

“I don’t think the Reds want a war any more than we do. It’s only the men who fought the last war, not to mention the one before that, who can really know how many human lives were wasted. And how many comrades were sacrificed needlessly. People used to talk about the phony war. Remember that? In 1939. But if you ask me, this war, this Cold War, that’s the phoniest war of the lot. Something dreamed up by the intelligence people to scare us and keep us all in line.”

“There’s a waiter at the club,” she said, “who’d disagree with you. He’s a former POW, too. He came home last year, still a rabid Nazi. Hates the Bolsheviks.” She smiled wryly. “I’m none too fond of them myself, of course. Well, you remember what it was like when the Red Army turned up in Berlin with a hard-on for German women.” She paused for a moment. “I had a baby. Did I ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“Well, he—the baby—died, so it didn’t seem important, I guess. He got influenza meningitis, and the penicillin they used to treat it turned out to be fake. That was—God, February 1946. They got the men who sold the stuff, I’m happy to say. Not that it really matters. Made in France, it was. Glucose and face powder dissolved in genuine penicillin vials. Of course, by the time anyone knew it was fake it was too late.” She shook her head. “It’s hard to remember what it was like back then. People would do or sell anything to make money.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, darling. It was a long time ago. Besides, even after I had it, the baby, I was never really sure I wanted it.”

“Under the circumstances, that’s hardly surprising,” I said. “You never told me this before.”

“Well, you had your own problems, didn’t you?” She shrugged. “And that, of course, is the real reason I never sold my body to the Amis, of course. Gang rape. It tends to take away your sexual appetite for quite a while. By the time I did start feeling inclined that way again, it was too late. I was on the shelf, more or less.”

“Nonsense.”

“Too late to find a husband, anyway. German men are still in rather short supply, in case you hadn’t noticed. Most of the good ones were in Soviet POW camps. Or Cuba.”

“I’m sure that’s not true. You’re a fine-looking woman, Elisabeth.”

She took my hand and squeezed.

“Do you really think so, Bernie?”

“Of course I do.”

“Oh, there have been men, all right. I’m not completely clapped out, it’s true. But it’s not like it used to be. Nothing ever is, of course. But…There was an American who worked for the U.S. State Department at HICOG, in the Headquarters Compound on Saargemünder Strasse. But he went home to his wife and children in Wichita. And there was a guy, a sergeant, who ran Club 48—that’s the U.S. Army’s NCO club. It was him who helped me to get the job at The Queen. Before he went home, too. That was six months ago. My life.” She shrugged. “It’s not exactly Effi Briest, is it. Oh, I do okay at the club. Pays well. The customers behave. Good tippers, I’ll say that for the Amis. At least they show their appreciation. Not like the British. Worst tippers in the world. Hell, even the French tip better than the British. You wouldn’t think they’d won the war, they’re so tight with their money. They say that even the mousetraps are empty in the British sector. I tell you, this fellow Nasser, I’m on his side. And when Uruguay beat England, I think I was even more happy than I was when West Germany won the actual trophy.”

“Talking of West Germany, Elisabeth, do you go there ever?”

“No. I’d have to cross the Green Border. And I don’t like to do that. I did it once. I felt like a criminal in my own country.”

“And East Berlin. Do you ever go there?”

“Sometimes. But there’s less and less cause to go. There’s not much there for those of us who live in West Berlin. Just before Jimmy—my American sergeant—went back to America, we took a trip around old Berlin. He wanted to buy a camera, and you can still get a good one for not much money in East Berlin. We got a camera, too, but not in a shop. On the black market. The only shop we visited, a department store the communists call H.O., had very little in it. And as soon as I saw it, I realized why so many East Germans turned up here last year to get a food parcel. And why quite a few of them never went back.”

“But you wouldn’t say it was dangerous.”

“For someone like me? No. You read about the odd person getting snatched by the Soviets. Injected with something and then bundled into a car. Well, I suppose if you were important, that might happen. But then, you wouldn’t go there in the first place if you were someone like that, would you? All the same, I wouldn’t have thought you would want to go across to the Russian sector. You having escaped from a POW camp and all.”

“Look, Elisabeth, there’s nobody left in Berlin I can really trust. If it comes to that, there’s no one left I even know. And I need a favor. If there was anyone else I could ask, I would.”

“Go ahead and ask.”

I handed her an envelope. “I was hoping I could ask you to deliver this. I’m afraid I don’t know the correct address, and I thought—well, I thought you might help. For old times’ sake.”

She looked at the name on the envelope and was silent for a moment.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “But it would help me a lot.”

“Of course I’ll do it. Without you, without that money you sent, I don’t know how I’d ever have hung on to this place. Really I don’t.”

I finished my coffee and then my cigarette. I must have looked as if I was about to leave, because she said, “Will I see you again?”

“Yes. Only, I’m not sure when. I’m not living in Berlin at the moment. For the foreseeable future, I’ll be staying in Göttingen.” She looked puzzled at that. So I explained: “With the VdH? Göttingen is near the Friedland Transit Camp for returning POWs. They’re there for only a couple of weeks, during which time they receive food, clothing, and medical aid. They’re also given army-discharge certificates, which they need to obtain a residency permit, a food-ration card, and a travel warrant to get home.”

“Poor devils,” she said. “How bad was it, really?”

“I’m not about to sit here and tell any woman from Berlin about suffering,” I said. “But maybe, because of it, we’ll know how and where to find each other.”

“I’d like that.”

“Do you have a telephone?”

“Not here. If I want to make a call, I always use the telephone at the club. If you ever need to get in contact with me, that’s the best place to do it. If I’m not there, they’ll take a message.” She found a pencil and paper and scribbled down the number: 24-38-93.

I put the number in my empty wallet.

“Or you could write to me here, of course. You should have written before to let me know you were coming. I’d have prepared something. A cake. I wouldn’t have been in my dressing gown. And you should have sent me an address in Cuba. So that I could have written back to thank you.”

“That might have been a little difficult,” I confessed. “I was living there under a false name.”

“Oh,” she said, as if such an idea had never occurred to her. “You’re not in any trouble, are you, Bernie?”

“Trouble?” I smiled ruefully. “Life is trouble. Only the naïve and the young imagine that it’s anything else. It’s only trouble that finds out if we’re up to the task of staying alive.”

“Because if you are in trouble…”

“I hate to ask you another favor….”

She took my hand and kissed the fingers, one by one. “When are you going to get it through your thick Prussian head,” she said. “I’ll help you in any way I can.”

“All right.” I thought for a moment and then, taking her pencil and paper, I started to write. “When you get to the club, I want you to make a call to this number in Munich. Ask for a Mr. Kramden. If Mr. Kramden isn’t there, tell whoever it is that you will call back in two hours. Don’t leave your name and number, just tell them that you want to leave a message from Carlos. When you get to speak to Kramden, tell him I’ll be staying with my uncle François in Göttingen for the next few weeks at the Pension Esebeck, until I’ve met Monsieur Voltaire off the train from the Cherry Orchard. Tell Mr. Kramden that if he and his friends need to contact me I’ll be going to the St. Jacobi Church each day I’m in Göttingen, at around six or seven o’clock in the evening, and to look for a message under the front pew.”

She looked over my notes. “I can do that.” She nodded firmly. “Göttingen’s quaint. Pretty. What Germany used to look like. I’ve often thought it would be nice to live there.”

I shook my head. “You and me, Elisabeth. We’re Berliners. Hardly cut out for fairy-tale living.”

“I suppose you’re right. What will you do after Göttingen?”

“I don’t know, Elisabeth.”

“It seems to me,” she said, “that if there’s no one else in Berlin you know, or who you can trust, then you should think yourself free to come and live here. Like you did before. Remember?”

“Why else do you think I sent you that money from Cuba? I hadn’t forgotten. Lately, I’ve had to do quite a bit of remembering one way or another. Telling my story to—well, it doesn’t matter who. A lot of stuff I’d rather forget. But I don’t forget that. You can depend on it. I never forgot about you.”

Of course, not everything had been told back at Landsberg.

A man should keep some secrets, after all, especially when he’s talking to the CIA.

Special Agents Scheuer and Frei might have opened a file in Elisabeth Dehler’s name if I’d told them every little detail about what happened on the train from the pleni camp in Johannesgeorgenstadt to Dresden, and then Berlin, in 1946.

I hadn’t wanted them bothering her, so I hadn’t mentioned the fact that the address on the envelope containing the several hundred dollars Mielke had given me was Elisabeth’s.