Field Gray

30

On Monday morning, we drove out of East Germany and back to Hannover, where I spent another night in the safe house. And early the next day we drove south to Göttingen and checked into an old pension overlooking the canal on Reitstallstrasse. The pension was damp, with hard wooden floors, even harder furniture, high ceilings, and dusty brass chandeliers; and about as homely as Cologne Cathedral. But from there it was only a short walk to the VdH office in a half-timbered building on Judenstrasse that looked like it was home to a family of three bears. Everywhere in Göttingen was a bit like that, and quite a few of the people, too. The director of the local VdH, Herr Dr. Winkel, was a mild, bespectacled type who might once have been the court librarian to some ancient king of Saxony. And he informed me what we already knew, that a train carrying a thousand German plenis was due in Friedland the following week. For form’s sake we decided—I, Grottsch, and Wenger—to pay a visit to the refugee camp at Friedland.

Previously a research farm owned by Göttingen University, the Friedland Camp was in the British zone and composed of a series of what were called Nissen huts. If Nissen was a synonym of “grim and inhospitable,” then these half-cylindrical corrugated-iron structures were well named. The camp was a miserable-looking place, especially in the rain, an impression that was underscored by the muddy roads and the goose-shit green that everything was painted. And it was all too easy to give credence to the rumor that the Friedland Refugee Camp had been the location for anthrax experiments conducted by Nazi scientists during the war. As a reintroduction to homeland, freedom, and all things wholesomely German, the camp left a great deal to be desired and, in my expert opinion, was almost as bad as any of the labor camps that these German POWs had left behind. I might have succeeded in feeling sorry for these men had it not been for the fact that I was rather more concerned for my own welfare, as the prospect of mixing with a large number of plenis was not without its hazards. Even after an interval of six or seven years, it was possible I might be recognized and denounced as some sort of “comrade-killer,” a renegade or a collaborator. After all, as far as anyone back at the camp in Johannesgeorgenstadt was concerned, I had sold out to the Reds and gone to Russia for anti-fascist training at Krasnogorsk. And I was reminded of the precariousness of my position when I asked one of the Friedland camp police why they were needed at all.

“Surely,” I said, “Germans who have come back home know how to behave themselves.”

“That’s just the point,” said the policeman. “They’re not back home, are they? At least not at home. Some of them get a bit pissed off when they find out they’re going to be here, sometimes for as long as six to eight weeks. But it can take that long to get them sorted out with everything they’re going to need for life in the new republic. Then there are the prisoners intent on settling old scores with each other. Men who have denounced other men to the Ivans. Informers. That kind of thing. Deprivation of liberty, we call that kind of behavior if it leads to someone getting more ill-treatment from the Ivans, and we charge them under section 239 of the German Criminal Code. At the present moment, there are over two hundred pending cases involving ex-POWs. Of course, that’s just the ones we find out about, and just as often someone in the camp turns up dead, his throat cut, and no one saw or heard a thing. That’s not at all uncommon, sir. In this camp, we reckon on as many as one murder a week.”

Of course, I hardly wanted to inform the French Intelligence Service of my own fears. I had no appetite for an early return to La Santé, or indeed any other of the five prisons I’d been in since leaving Havana. And I was resigned to hoping that, come what may, the Franzis would protect me just as long as they thought I was their best chance of identifying and arresting Edgard de Boudel.

The fact that I had never seen or even heard of someone called Edgard de Boudel was neither here nor there. I was doing what I had been told to do by the Americans in Landsberg. And when I returned to my room at the Pension Esebeck in Göttingen, I wrote a note to my CIA handlers describing the full extent of my progress: how the French had listened to me paint a picture of de Boudel at the same time I had also been painting another picture, of Erich Mielke; and that they appeared to accept everything I had told them about Mielke—all of which was false—because of everything I had told them about Edgard de Boudel, which was true. This operation was what Scheuer called “the beautiful twin.” The French—and, more important, the Soviet agent whom the Americans knew to be at the heart of the SDECE in Paris—would, it was supposed, be more inclined to believe my lies and misrepresentations about Mielke if everything they were told about de Boudel coincided with what they knew about him, or strongly suspected. And the icing on this rich cake was a tip-off (supplied to them by the British, who, of course, had received it from the Americans) that Edgard de Boudel was arriving back in Germany as a returning POW, having served out his usefulness to the Russians in Indochina, where, as a political commissar, he had assisted the Viet Minh in the interrogation and torture of many captured French soldiers, most of whom still remained, until the Geneva negotiations were complete, prisoners of war in Indochina. All I had to do was identify de Boudel and the French would, it was supposed, treat me and my information about Mielke as gold-plated; and to this end, before my “deportation” from Landsberg to Paris, I had carefully studied the only known photographs of de Boudel. It was hoped that these two pictures, along with my own familiarity with the life of a German POW—not to mention my background as a Kripo detective—would help me spot him for the French, who forever thereafter would be in thrall to me as an intelligence source. Because Edgard de Boudel was one of the most wanted men in France.

Naturally, I was a little concerned about what might happen to me if I failed to identify de Boudel, so I wrote about that, too, mentioning my continuing concern that he might have changed more than just his name and identity if, as the Americans believed, the Russians were intent on infiltrating him back into West German society in the hope of reactivating him as their agent at some later date. I had little or no chance of success if de Boudel had undergone plastic surgery. I also mentioned what by then would have been obvious: that I was being watched closely.

When I finished writing, I went into the sitting room to speak to Vigée, who was the French officer in charge of the SDECE’s Göttingen operation.

“If you please,” I said, “I’d like to go to church.”

“You didn’t say you were religious,” he said.

“Did I need to?” I shrugged. “Look, it’s not mass, or even confession. I just want to go and sit in church for a while and pray.”

“What are you? Catholic? Protestant? What?”

“Lutheran Protestant,” I said. “Oh yes, and I’d like to buy some chewing gum. To stop me from smoking so much.”

“Here,” he said, and handed me a packet of Hollywood. “I have the same problem.”

I put one of the green chlorophyllic sticks in my mouth.

“Is there a Lutheran church near here?” he asked.

“This is Göttingen,” I said. “There are churches everywhere.”

St. Jacobi was a strange-looking church. Eccentric, even. The body of the building was ordinary enough, made of a handsome pinkish stone with darker pink perpendiculars. But the steeple, the tallest in Göttingen, was anything but ordinary. It was as if the lid of a pink toy box had burst open to permit the egress of a green object on top of a giant gray spring. As if some lazy Jack had tossed a handful of magic beans onto the floor of the church and these had grown so quickly that the stalk had forced its way through the simple church roof. As a metaphor of Nazism, it was perhaps unsurpassed in the whole of Germany.

The candy-striped interior was no less like a fairy tale. As soon as you saw the pillars you wanted to lick them, or to break off a piece of the medieval altar triptych and eat it, like sugarloaf.

I sat down in the front pew and bowed my head to the amnesiac gods of Germany and pretended to pray, because I’d prayed before and knew exactly what to expect of it.

After a while I glanced around, and observing that Vigée was occupied in the admiration of the church, I fixed the note for my CIA handlers underneath the pew with my Hollywood gum. Then I stood up and walked slowly to the door. I waited patiently for Vigée to follow, and then we went outside into the Rumpelstiltskin streets.