Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'So what did it mean?' asked Eyebrows. 'On the ground.'

I shrugged. 'That kind of action was, quite often, nothing more than murder. Mass murder. Of Jews. All sorts of police actions and anti-partisan activities were merely a euphemism for killing Jews. To be frank with you, the Wehrmacht High Command in Russia wouldn't have trusted the 638th with any other kind of task but murder.'

'The name of the unit commander. Can you remember that?'

'Labonne. Colonel Labonne. After the winter of 1941 I lost touch with Edgard.' I clicked my fingers. 'De Boudel. That was his name. Edgard de Boudel.'

'You're quite sure of that?'

'I'm sure.'

'Go on.'

'Well then. Let's see. A couple of years later I was briefly back in that theatre to investigate an alleged war crime. That was when I heard that the 638th was now attached to an SS division in Galicia. And that it was pretty bad there. But I didn't see de Boudel again until 1945 when the war was over and we were both at a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp called Krasno-Armeesk. As a matter of fact there were quite a few French and Belgian SS there. And Edgard told me something of what he'd been up to. How the 638th ended up as a part of a French brigade of the SS and that kind of thing. Apparently there was a recruiting drive, here in Paris, in July 1943. The French who joined had to prove the usual Himmler rubbish about not having any Jewish blood and then they were in. A few weeks of basic training in Alsace, and then at a place near Prague. By the late summer of 1944 the war in France was almost over but there was a whole brigade of French SS ready to fight the Ivans. About ten thousand of them, he said. And they were called the SS-Charlemagne.

'The brigade got sent, by train, to the Eastern Front, in Pomerania, which wasn't very far from where I was. Edgard said that as the train carrying the brigade pulled into the railhead at Hammerstein they came under attack by the Soviet First Byelorussian and were divided up into three groups. One group, commanded by General Krukenberg, made it north to the Baltic coast, near Danzig. Of these quite a few managed to get themselves evacuated to Denmark. But some, like Edgard, fought on until they were captured. The rest were wiped out, or fell back to Berlin.

'There were other French at Krasno-Armeesk who'd been captured at Berlin. I can't say I remember any names. By all accounts it was the SS-Charlemagne who were the last defenders of Hitler's bunker in Berlin. I think they were the only SS happy to be caught by the Soviets rather than the Americans, because the Amis handed them over to the Free French, who shot them immediately.'

'Tell us about Edgard de Boudel.'

'In the camp?'

'Yes.'

'He was a decorated lieutenant colonel. In the SS, I mean. Easy to be with. Charming, even. Good-looking. Unscathed by the war, you might even say. He was one of those types who looked like he was always going to survive pretty much anything. He spoke good Russian. Edgard was the kind for whom languages are easy. His German was perfect, of course. Even I couldn't have guessed that he was French, if I hadn't already known that about him. I think he might have spoken Vietnamese too. It was his facility with languages that made him especially interesting to the MVD. In the beginning they made life pretty difficult for him. And of course, once they had got their hooks into you it was very difficult for any man to resist them. I know that from my own experience with them.'

'What specifically did they want him for? Do you know?'

'Well, it wasn't K-5, that's for sure.'

'That's the forerunner of the Stasi.'

'Yes. I don't know what they had in mind for him. But the next thing I knew he'd been sent to the Anti-fa School in Krasnogorsk, for re-education. As you know, I almost ended up there myself. They'd have got me, too, but for the fact that the MVD officer who interrogated me was a man I'd known from before the war. A man named Mielke. Erich Mielke. He was the German political commissar in charge of recruiting us plenis for K-5.'

The French asked me some more questions about Edgard de Boudel and then took me back to La Sante. It means 'health', but that didn't have much to do with what went on inside the prison. It was called La Sante because of the prison's proximity to a psychiatric hospital, the Saint-Anne on the Rue de la Sante, which was just east of Boulevard Raspail.

In La Sante I kept myself to myself as much as possible. I didn't see Helmut Knochen, which suited me just fine. I read my newspaper, which reported that things in North Africa were as bad for the French as they had been in Vietnam. In spite of my new friends in the SDECE, this news was not displeasing to me. There were times when I was never very far away from the trenches. Especially given all the rats there were at La Sante. Real rats. They walked along the landings as coolly as if they'd been carrying keys.

Back at the Swimming Pool the next day the French asked me about Erich Mielke.

'What do you want to know?' I asked, as if I was unaware of what my audience would best like to hear; or, to be more accurate, what it was best they were told. 'It's all ancient history. Surely you don't want me to go over all that.'

'Everything you can tell us.'

'I can't see how it's at all relevant to my being here in Paris.'

'You should allow us to be the judge of that.'

I shrugged. 'Perhaps if I knew why you were interested in him, I could be more specific. After all, it's not like this is a story that takes only a couple of minutes to tell. Christ, some of this stuff is twenty years old. Or even older.'

'We've got plenty of time. Perhaps if you went from the beginning. How you first met and when. That kind of thing.'

'You mean the whole novel, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.'

'Precisely.'

'All right. If you really want to know this stuff. I'll tell you everything.'

Of course, I hardly wanted to do that. Hell, no. Not all over again. So I gave them an edited, more entertaining version of what I'd already told the Amis. A French version. A smoothtongued pr e cis if you like, that was not spoilt by the inclusion of too many facts and which, like the French themselves, was the result of an exhausted conscience wrestling with simple pragmatism and being very quickly overcome. A story that was the best kind of story, being better told than believed.

'The decision was made in the Ministry of the Interior to let Mielke make his escape. Despite the fact that he had participated in the murders of two cops. It came about like this. Department IA had been brought into being to protect the Weimar Republic against conspirators on the left and on the right; and we decided that the best way to do this was to cultivate a few informers on both sides. But on the face of it that hardly applied to a man like Mielke. We had arrested him and fully intended to send him to the guillotine. However the Abwehr – German intelligence – persuaded the Ministry that they might turn Mielke into their agent. And this is what happened. We were persuaded to let him escape so that he might become our long-term agent, the Abwehr's Moscow mole. In return we looked after his family. The Abwehr kept him going all the way through the Thirties and the Spanish Civil War. As well as passing us some very important information on Republican troop movements that was extremely helpful to the Condor Legion, he was able to initiate several political purges of some of their best men, on the grounds that they were Trotskyites or Anarchists. In that respect, Mielke was doubly useful.

'When the war broke out, the SD and the Abwehr decided to share Mielke. The trouble was we'd lost him. So Heydrich sent me to France in the summer of 1940 to get him out of Gurs or Le Vernet, which is where we thought he must be.