Philip Kerr - Field Grey

What was I doing here?

'Why did you have to suggest bibles?' Hamer grunted loudly as he put the box he'd been carrying down on the landing outside the first-floor apartment's door. He looked at the door with obvious displeasure. 'You sure about this place, Gunther? I've seen better-looking slums than this place.'

'Actually,' I said, 'there's a very nice view of the gasworks from the sitting room window.'

But in my imagination I saw only the CIA surrounding Mielke as he arrived to visit his father and I heard only their snarling pleasure as they bundled him into the apartment, snapped handcuffs on his wrists, hauled a canvas bag over his head and tripped him onto the floor. Maybe they would kick and abuse him the same way I had been kicked and abused until something in me had broken, the way they had wanted it broken. And I realised that I had at last become the thing that I abhorred; that I had crossed an invisible line of decency and honour: I was about to become the fascist I'd always detested.

'Stop complaining,' said Scheuer, glancing anxiously up the stairs at the landing above where he believed Erich Stallmacher's apartment was located.

I found the set of keys given to me by the landlord, and slid one into the strong Dom lock. The key turned and I pushed at the heavy grey door. A strong smell of floor polish greeted our nostrils as we entered our apartment. I waited in the largish hallway until the last of the Amis was inside and then closed the door. Then I locked it, carefully.

'What the fuck?' Agent Hamer's voice contained a tremor.

Agent Scheuer turned back to the locked door and was felled by a blow from a Makarov pistol to the back of the head.

Agent Frei was already in handcuffs. His face was pale and worried-looking.

There were six of them waiting for us in the apartment. They wore cheap grey suits and dark shirts and ties. All of them were armed with pistols – Soviet automatics with cheap plastic handles, but no less deadly for that. Their faces were impassive, as if they too were made of cheap Russian plastic, manufactured in quantity by some factory stolen from Germany and then reassembled on an eastern shore of the Volga. Just as cold as that river were their grey-blue eyes, and for a moment I saw myself in them: policemen doing their duty; taking no pleasure in these arrests but handling them quickly and with the efficiency of well-trained professionals.

The three Americans might have said something but their mouths were already stuffed with cloth and taped tight so that I only had their watery eyes to reproach me, although these were no less bitter for that.

I might have said something, too, but for the fact that the handcuffed men were already being marched downstairs – each between two Stasi men, as if they were being led to a firing squad. If I had spoken to them I might have adduced the months of ill-treatment I had endured at their hands, not to mention my desire to be away from their control and influence, but it hardly seemed appropriate, or for that matter proportionate to what I'd now inflicted on them. I might even have mentioned something about the unquestioning assumption of all Americans that they had right on their side – even when they were doing wrong – and the irritation that the rest of the world felt at being judged by them; but that would have been to overstate the matter on my part. It wasn't so much that I did not care to be judged – for a German in the Fifties that was, perhaps, unavoidable. It was simply that I did not care to be grateful for whatever it was the Amis were supposed to have done for us, when it was abundantly clear to me and many other Germans that really they had done it for themselves. And hadn't they intended some rather similar treatment for Mielke himself?

'Where is he?' I asked one of the Stasi men.

'If you mean the Comrade General,' said the man, 'he is waiting outside.'

I followed them out of the apartment and downstairs, wondering how they were going to deal with the security men in the CIA ambulance; or had they already dealt with them? But before we reached the ground floor, we went through a door that led out of the back of the building and down a fire escape to a courtyard that was about the size of a tennis court and enclosed on all four sides by tall black tenements, most of them derelict.

We crossed the courtyard and, in fading light, went through a low wooden door in the wall of the old Schulzendorfer Brewery. Underfoot the cobbles were loose and in some places there were large potholes filled with water. The moon rippled in one of them like a lost silver coin. The three Americans did not resist and, to my experienced eyes, they already seemed to have acquired the compliant demeanour of POWs, with bowed heads and heavy, stumbling footsteps. A small tributary stream of the River Spree marked the edge of the narrowing courtyard. At its southern end was a building with broken dirty windows and tall weeds growing on the roof; painted on the brickwork was a faded advertisement for Chlorodont Toothpaste. I'd have needed a whole tube of the stuff to get rid of the nasty taste I had in my mouth. Within the word 'Tooth' was a door, which one of the Stasi men opened. We went into a building that smelt of damp and probably something worse. Advancing to one of the filthy windows, the team leader looked carefully out onto a street.

He waited cautiously for almost five minutes, and having checked his watch, produced a torch, which he then aimed at the building opposite. Almost immediately his signal was answered by three short flashes of a small green light, and across the street a door opened. The three American prisoners were hustled across, and it was only when I put my own head out of the door that I realised we were on Liesenstrasse and that the building on the opposite side of the street was in the Russian sector.

As the last of the three Americans was pushed across the road in the all-enveloping darkness and on into the building, I saw a portly figure standing in the doorway. He looked up and down the street and then waved to me.

'Come,' he said. 'Come quickly.'

It was Erich Mielke.

He was shorter than I remembered and stockier, too; a powerful man who was square on his feet, with the air of a pugilist. His hair was short and thin and so was his mouth, which made an attempt at a smile, only it came off as something sardonic, or whatever it is you call it when a man can laugh at things that other people don't find in the least bit amusing.

'Come,' he repeated. 'It's all right. You're in no danger.'

The voice was deeper and also more gravelly than I remembered. But the accent was much the same as it had always been: an uneducated and truculent Berliner. I didn't give much for the chances of the three Americans when they were interrogated by this man.

I looked both ways on Liesenstrasse. The CIA's security ambulance was nowhere to be seen and it would probably be hours before they worked out that the team of agents they were supposed to be guarding had been kidnapped right under their noses. I had to admit, the Stasi operation had been as neat as a freshly laid egg. True, it had been my own plan, but it had been Mielke's idea to supply an actual East German border guard who looked like his own father for the CIA to follow around and lead them to the apartment on Schulzendorfer Strasse where the Stasi kidnap team would be waiting.

The street was clear but, in the darkness, I still hesitated to cross.

A little impatience edged into Mielke's voice. We Berliners could get impatient with a newborn baby. 'Come on, Gunther,' he said. 'If you had anything to fear from me you'd be in handcuffs like these three fascists. Or dead.'

And recognising the truth of this I walked across the street.