Philip Kerr - Field Grey

Mielke wore a mid-blue suit that appeared to be of much better quality than the suits worn by his men. Certainly his shoes were more expensive. These looked hand-made. A navy knitted tie look neat against a light blue shirt. His raincoat was probably British.

He was standing in the doorway of an old florist's shop. The windows were boarded up, but on a floor strewn with broken glass there was a lantern that gave enough light to see vases filled with petrified flowers or no flowers at all. Through an open door at the back of the shop was a yard, and parked at the end of the yard was a plain grey van which, I imagined, already contained the three American agents. The shop smelt of weeds and cat piss – a bit like the pension we had vacated earlier. Mielke closed the door and put on a leather cap that added a properly proletarian touch to his appearance. Although there was a big heavy padlock, he didn't secure the door, for which I was grateful. He was younger than me and probably armed and I wouldn't have cared to fight my way out of there.

We sat down on a couple of ancient wooden chairs that belonged in an old church hall.

'I like your office,' I said.

'It's very convenient for the French Sector,' he said. 'The security here is almost non-existent and it's the perfect spot to slip back and forth between our sector and theirs without anyone knowing about it. But oddly enough I can remember coming into this florist's shop as a kid.'

'You never struck me as the romantic type.'

He shook his head. 'There's a cemetery along the street. One of my old man's relations is buried there. Don't ask me who. I can't remember.'

He produced a packet of Roth-Handel and offered me one.

'I don't smoke myself,' he said. 'But I figured your nerves might be gone.'

'Very thoughtful of you.'

'Keep the packet.'

I pulled a little bit of tobacco out of the cigarette's smoking end and pinched it tight between thumb and forefinger, the way you did when you didn't really like the taste. I didn't, but a smoke was a smoke.

'What will happen to them? The three Amis?'

'Do you really care about them?'

'To my surprise, yes.' I shrugged. 'You can call it a guilty conscience, if you like.'

He shrugged. 'They'll have a pretty rough time of it while we find out what they know. But eventually we'll exchange them for some of our own people. They're much too valuable to send to the guillotine, if that's what you were thinking.'

'You don't still do that, surely?'

"The guillotine? Why not? It's quick.' He grinned, cruelly. 'A bullet is a bit of a let-off for our enemies of state. But it's a lot quicker than the electric chair. Last year it took Ethel Rosenberg twenty minutes to die. They say her head caught fire before she died. So, you tell me, which is more humane? The two seconds it takes for the axe to fall? Or twenty minutes in the Sing Sing chair?' He shook his head again. 'But no. Your three Americans. They won't be waiting for a delivery of bread.'

Seeing my puzzled expression, he added:

'So as not to cause our citizenry undue alarm, we send our falling axe around the DDR in a bread van, from the bakery in Halle. Wholegrain bread. It's better for you.'

'Same old Erich. You always did have a strange sense of humour. I remember once, on a train to Dresden, I nearly died laughing.'

'I think you had the last laugh on that occasion. I was impressed with the way you handled things. He wasn't an easy man to kill, that Russian. But I was rather more impressed with the way you handled everything afterwards. How you gave that money to Elisabeth. To be honest, until I got your letter I had no idea that you and she had ever become that friendly. Either way I suspect most men would have kept the money for themselves.

'And it made me think,' said Mielke. 'I asked myself what kind of man would do such a thing? Obviously a man who was not the predictable fascist I had thought he was. A man of hidden qualities. A man who might even be useful to me. You wouldn't be aware of this, but three or four years ago I actually tried to get in contact with you, Gunther. To do a job for me. And I discovered you'd disappeared. I even heard you'd gone to South America like all those other Nazi bastards. So when Elisabeth turned up at my office in Hohenschonhausen with your letter I was very pleasantly surprised. But even more surprised when I read the letter; and by the sheer audacity of your proposal. If I may say so, it was a real spymaster's stratagem, and you have my compliments on pulling it off. And what's more right under the noses of the Americans. That's almost the best part. They won't forgive you for that in a hurry.'

I said nothing. There wasn't much to say so I sucked at my cigarette and waited for the end. That part was, as yet, undecided. What would he do? Keep his side of the bargain as he had promised in his own letter to me? Or double-cross me like before? And what else did I really deserve? Me, the man who had just betrayed three other men.

'Of course, Elisabeth's the reason I knew I could really trust you, Gunther. If you'd truly been a creature of the Americans you would have told them where she lived and they'd have had her placed under surveillance. With the aim of burning me.'

'Burning?'

'It's what we call it when you let someone – someone in intelligence circles – know that you know everything about them, and that their whole life has gone up in smoke. Burning. Or for that matter when you don't let them know.'

'Well then, I guess they'd already tried to burn you.'

Some of what I now said I had already told him in the letter that Elisabeth had delivered: how the CIA had coached me to sell the French SDECE the idea that Mielke had been first a spy for the Nazis and then a spy for the CIA, at the same time leading them to suppose that I might be able to identify a French traitor named Edgard de Boudel, who had worked for the Viet Minh in Indo-China. But mostly I told him again as a way of getting the answers to a few questions of my own.

'The Amis had the idea that there's a communist spy at the heart of French intelligence and that he might be more inclined to believe what I told them about you playing both sides by my proving reliable in identifying Edgard de Boudel as he arrived back in Friedland as a returnee from a Soviet POW camp.'

'But the Amis canned that idea when you told them that you thought you had figured out a way of them getting their hands on me in person,' said Mielke. 'Is that right?'

I nodded. 'Which probably leaves your reputation undamaged.'

'Let's hope so, eh?'

'Is there a spy at the heart of French intelligence?'

'Several,' admitted Mielke. 'You might just as well ask if there are any communists in France. Or if Edgard de Boudel really did fight for the German SS and then the Viet Minh.'

'And did he?'

'Oh yes. And it's a shame the Americans should have told the French about him now. Someone in GVL – Gehlen's new intelligence organisation – must have told them. You see, we had a deal with the GVL and Chancellor Adenauer. That the German government would allow Edgard de Boudel back into Germany in return for allowing one of ours back. It's like this: de Boudel has inoperable cancer. But the poor fellow wants to die in his native France and this seemed to be the best way of doing it. To sneak him back into Germany as part of a POW repatriation and then into France without anyone objecting.'

'There's not much love lost between the CIA and Gehlen's GVL,' I said.

'It would seem not.'

'The German son seems to have turned his back on his American father.'

'Yes indeed.' said Mielke. 'It's odd, but you and Elisabeth are about the only two people who even know about my own father. So that was a real stroke of genius, my friend. Because, as it happens, a lot of what you imagined might be true is true. We don't really see each other much any more.'