Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'I can feel that. I can't feel my hands, but I can feel that. But I should warn you. I might be wearing a hood but I've seen your cards. You want something from me. And since it can't be my body it must be because you think I possess some information that's important to you. And believe me, it won't sound the same if you've just kicked my teeth in.'

'There are other things we can do to loosen your tongue, besides kicking your teeth in.'

'Sure. And I can do fiction as well as non-fiction. You won't even see the join. Look, the war is over now. I'm more than willing to tell you whatever you want to know. But you'll find I respond a lot better to sugar-bread than to the whip. So how about you take off these hand irons and find me some clothes? You've made your point.'

The two CIA agents were silent for a minute. I imagined one nodding at the other, who was probably shaking his head and mouthing a very clear 'No' like a couple of gossipy old women. Then one of them laughed.

'Did you see this guy bring a case full of samples in here?'

'A regular Fuller Brush man, isn't he?'

'Red Skelton with a bag over his head. Still trying to make a sale.'

'Not buying, huh?' I said. 'Too bad. Maybe I ought to speak to the man of the house.'

'I don't think a bag over his head was enough.'

'It's not too late for a noose. Maybe we should just hand him over to the Ivans and have done with it.'

'Aw, look, he's stopped talking now.'

'Did we get your attention, Red?'

'You don't want brushes,' I said. 'Okay. So why don't you tell me what you do want?'

'When we're ready, Gunther, and not before.'

'My friend here could tear a phone book in half but he prefers this as a demonstration of our power over you. It's a lot less effort and more than just seeing the power of the spirit, you can feel it, too. We wouldn't want you walking out of here and telling all your Nazi friends how soft we are.'

'We worked it out. People were more afraid of the Ivans than they were of us.'

'So you decided to be more like them,' I said. 'To play just as rough as they do. Sure, I get it.'

'That's right, Gunther. Which brings us back to brushes. Or rather one particular brush.'

'A name you mentioned to Silverman and Earl. Erich Mielke.'

'I remember. What about him?'

'They formed the distinct impression that you knew him.'

'We've met. So what?'

'You must have known him quite well.'

'How did you figure that out?'

'You were looking out of a window at Erhard Milch, when he was being released from the front gate. How far is that?'

'Sixty, seventy feet. You must have good eyesight, Gunther.'

'For reading I wear glasses,' I said.

'You can have them. When you sign your confession.'

'What confession?'

'The one you're going to sign, Gunther.'

'I thought you said that Silverman and Earp had cleared me.'

'They did. This is our Ohio Casualty policy. It adds fidelity and surety to whatever you tell us about Erich Mielke.'

'That means we own your ass, Gunther.'

'What's in this confession?'

'Does it matter?'

He had a point. They could say anything they wanted and I'd have to like it. 'All right. I'll sign it.'

'You took that in your stride.'

'I used to be a tall man in a circus. Besides, I've been walking around for a while now and I'm tired. I just want to go home and give my long legs a rest.'

'How about you give us a different act? Like Mister Memory.'

'You haven't yet told me why you're so interested in him,'

I said. 'Which means I don't know what to leave in, or to leave out.'

'All of it,' said the other. 'We want all of it. Every detail. We'll get to why later.'

'You want the whole of Leviticus? Or just Mielke?'

'Let's go back to the beginning.'

'Genesis then. Sure. Darkness was upon the face of Berlin. For me at any rate. And Walter Ulbricht said let there be some communist thugs; and Adolf Hitler said, let there be some Nazi thugs, too. And Chancellor Bruning said, let the cops try to keep these two sides apart. And God said, why don't you give the cops something a little easier than that to do? Because the evening and the morning were just one thing after another. Trouble. And the name of the river was the Spree and we were fishing bodies out of it every day. One day a communist and the next day a Nazi. And some men looked at that and said that it was good. As long as they're killing each other then that's fine, isn't it? Me, I believed in the Republic and in the rule of law. But a lot of cops were Nazis and were not ashamed. From that moment on you might say Berlin and Germany were finished and all the host of them.' I sighed. 'I forget. Didn't you know? That's our national pastime in Germany.'

'So remember.'

'Give me a minute here. This is twenty-three years ago we're talking about now. You just don't cough that up like a fur ball.'

'1931.'

'An unlucky year for Germany. There were, let's see, how many? Four million unemployed in Germany? And a banking crisis. Austrian Kreditanstalt had collapsed, what, yes, a couple of weeks before. I remember now. That was May 11th. We were staring ruin in the face. Which is all the Nazis were waiting for, I suppose. To take advantage of that. Yes things were bad. But not for Mielke. His luck was about to take a turn for the better. Got your notebooks handy?'

'Like I was your girl Friday.'

It was a Tuesday, May 23rd. I know that because it was my birthday. You tend to remember your birthday when you have to spend it in Tegel Prison, interviewing one of the men convicted in the Eden Dance Palace trial. An SA storm trooper by the name of Konrad Stief. He was just a kid, really, not much more than twenty-two, with a couple of convictions for petty theft, and he'd joined the SA the previous spring. For the last years of the Weimar Republic, his was a fairly typical Berlin story: on November 22nd 1930, Stief and three other chums from SA Storm 33 had gone to a dance hall. Nothing wrong with that except that they weren't going there to do the Lindy Hop; and instead of ties and neatly combed hair they took some pistols. You see, the Eden Dance Palace was frequented by a communist hiking club. Surprisingly, communist hiking clubs used to do what everyone else did in dance halls; they danced. But not that night. Anyway, when the Nazis arrived they went straight upstairs and opened fire. Several of the happy wanderers were hit and two of them seriously wounded.

Like I say, it was a typical Berlin story, and probably I wouldn't have remembered many of these details except for the fact that the Eden Dance Palace case at Berlin's Central Criminal Court in Old Moabit was hardly a typical trial. You see, the defence attorney, a fellow named Hans Litten, called Hitler to the stand and cross-examined him about his true relationship with the SA and its violent methods; and Hitler, who was trying to sell himself as Herr Law and Order, didn't much care for that, or for Herr Litten, who happened to be a Jew. Anyway, the four of them were convicted, Stief was sentenced to two and a half years in Tegel, and the very next day I drove over there to see if he could shed any light on another case. It was something to do with the murder of an SA man. The gun Stief had used in the Eden Dance Palace was used to murder another SA man. And my question was this: had the SA man been murdered by communists because he was in the SA? Or, as was beginning to seem more likely, had he been murdered by the Nazis because he was really a communist sent to spy on Storm 33?

Finally I got a name out of Stief, and a Storm tavern in the old town that was frequented by Storm 33. Reisig's tavern, in Hebbel Street, in the western district of Charlottenburg. Which wasn't so very far from the Eden Dance Palace. So when I left Tegel I decided to drop in there and take a look. But as soon as I arrived outside I saw a group of SA men piling into a truck. They were armed and clearly bent on some murderous mission. There was no time to phone headquarters, and thinking that I might for once prevent a homicide instead of merely investigating one, I followed.