Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“You must have hundreds of Stasi agents all over West Germany, General. So what possible use could I be?”

“You have a particular skill set, Gunther. A useful background for what I have in mind. I want you to set up a neo-Nazi organization. With your fascist background this shouldn’t be difficult. Your immediate task will be to desecrate or vandalize Jewish sites throughout West Germany — cultural centers, cemeteries, and synagogues. You can also persuade or even blackmail some of your old RSHA comrades to write letters to the newspapers and the federal government demanding the release of Nazi war criminals or protesting against the trial of others.”

“What have you got against the Jews?”

“Nothing.” Mielke tossed another piece of chocolate into his omnivorous mouth alongside the piece of steak that was already in there; it was like having dinner with some Prussian farmer’s prize pig as it dined on swill that was made from the family’s choicest leftovers. “Nothing at all. But this will only lend credibility to our own propaganda that the federal government is still Nazi. Which it is. After all, it was Adenauer who denounced the entire denazification process and who brought in an amnesty law for Nazi war criminals. We’re just helping people see what is already there.”

“You seem to have thought of everything, General.”

“If I haven’t, someone else has. And if they haven’t, they’ll pay for it. But don’t let my jovial manner fool you, Gunther. I might be on holiday but I’m deadly serious about this. And you’d better be as well.”

He pointed his fork at me as if he was contemplating shoving it in my eye and I felt somewhat reassured that there was a piece of meat on the end of it.

“Because if you’re not, you’d better learn to be right now, or you’ll never see tomorrow. How about it? Are you serious about this?”

I nodded. “Yes, I’m serious. I want that English bitch dead every bit as much as you do, General. More, probably. Look, I’d rather not talk about what passed between us in any detail, if you don’t mind. It’s still a source of some grief to me. But I will tell you this, my only regret about what you’ve told me so far is that I won’t be there in person to see her suffering. Because that’s what I want. Her pain and her degradation. Now, does that answer your question?”

I returned to my flat in Villefranche, satisfied only that I’d managed to convince Mielke that I was actually going to carry out his orders and travel to England to poison Anne French. The truth was that while I hated the woman for all the pain she’d given me, I didn’t quite hate her enough to murder her, and certainly not in the monstrous way that Mielke had described. I very much wanted a new West German passport but I also wanted to stay alive long enough to use it, and I had no doubt that Mielke was quite prepared to have his men kill me if he even half-suspected I was preparing to double-cross him. So it was that for a few moments I contemplated packing a suitcase immediately and leaving the Riviera for good. I had a bit of money under the mattress and a gun, and the car of course, but there was a good chance that his men would be watching my flat, in which case flight was probably futile. That presented the hair-raising prospect of my cooperating with Mielke’s plan long enough to get hold of the passport and the money, and then looking for an opportunity to give his men the slip, which left me somewhere between the tree and its bark. Most of the men in the Stasi had been trained by the Gestapo and were experts at finding people; giving them the slip would be like trying to evade a pack of English tracker hounds.

In order to see if I was under surveillance I decided to take a walk along the seafront, hoping that this might make the Stasi reveal themselves and also that the cool night air would help to clear my head enough to think of a solution to my immediate problem. Inevitably my feet took me to a bar in the correctly named Rue Obscure, where I drank a bottle of red and smoked half a packet of cigarettes, which achieved exactly the opposite result from the one I was hoping for. And I was still shaking my head and pondering my limited options when I walked, a little unsteadily, home again.

Villefranche is a strange warren of alleys and narrow backstreets and, especially at night and at the close of the season, resembles a scene from a Fritz Lang movie. It’s all too easy to imagine yourself being followed by unseen vigilantes through this dark, meandering catacomb of French streets, like poor Peter Lorre with a letter M chalked onto the back of your coat, especially when you’re drunk. But I wasn’t so drunk that I couldn’t spot the tail that had been pinned to my arse. Not so much spot it as hear the stop-start, clip-clop sound of their cheap shoes on the cobbled alleyways as they tried to match the erratic pace of my own footsteps. I might have called out to them, too, in mockery of their attempts to keep eyes on me but for the sense — the good sense, perhaps — that it might be best not to give them, and more important, the comrade-general, even the vaguest impression that I was anything but subordinate to him and his orders. The new Gunther had a much shorter spout than the old one, which was probably just as well; at least it was if I wanted to see Germany again. So I was surprised when I found my way back down to the esplanade blocked by two human bollards, each with absurdly blond, master-race hair of the kind that Himmler’s favorite barber would have put up on his hero-haircut wall. In the shadows behind them was a smaller man with a leather eye patch, whom I half-recognized from a long time ago but failed to remember why, if only because the two human bollards were already busy gagging my mouth and tying my wrists in front of me.

“I’m sorry about this, Gunther,” said the man I’d half-recognized. “It’s a shame that we have to meet again in these circumstances but orders are orders. I don’t have to tell you how that works. So nothing personal, see? But this is just how the comrade-general wants it.”

Even as he spoke the two blond bollards lifted me off my feet by the forearms and carried me to the end of the vaulted blind alley like a shop-window mannequin. Here a single streetlight singed the evening air a sulfurous shade of yellow until someone killed it with a silenced pistol shot, but not before I saw the wooden beam that crossed the vaulted roof and the plastic noose that was dangling off it with obviously lethal intent. The realization that I was about to be hanged summarily in that dim, forgotten alley was enough to lend a last spasm of strength to my intoxicated limbs and I struggled hard to escape the iron grip of the two Stasi men, but to no avail. Like Christ ascending into heaven I felt myself already rising up from the cobbled ground to meet the noose, where another obliging Stasi man, wearing a gray suit and a hat, was holding on to a street lamp like Gene Kelly to help lasso my neck with it.

“That’s it,” he said, when the lasso was in place. The Leipzig accent. The same man from the Hotel Ruhl, perhaps? Must have been. “Okay, boys, you can let go now. I reckon this bastard will swing like a church bell.”

As he steadied the noose under my left ear I sucked a quick breath and the next second the two human bollards let me go. The plastic noose slipped tight, the world blurred like a bad photograph, and I stopped breathing altogether. Desperately trying to find the uneven ground with the toecaps of my shoes, I only managed to turn myself around in space like the last ham in a butcher-shop window. I caught a brief glimpse of the Stasi men watching me hang and then pedaled some more on my invisible bicycle before deciding that it might go easier for me if I didn’t struggle and, in truth, it didn’t really hurt that much. It wasn’t pain I felt so much as a tremendous sense of pressure, as if my whole body might actually explode for want of an airhole. My tongue was like a baccarat pallet, it was so big, which was probably why most of it seemed to be outside my mouth, and my eyes were looking at my ears, as if trying to determine the source of the infernal racket I was hearing, which must have been the sound of the blood pounding in my head, of course. Most curious of all, I felt the actual presence of the little finger I had lost years before, in Munich, when another old comrade had cut it off with a hammer and chisel. It was as if all my being were suddenly concentrated in a part of my body that no longer even existed. And then 1949 and Munich and poor Vera Messmann seemed like ten minutes ago. The phantom finger swiftly spread and became a whole limb and then the rest of my body and I knew I was dying, which is when I pissed myself. I remember someone laughing and thinking that maybe, after all these years, I had it coming anyway and that I’d done pretty well to get this far without mishap. Then I was at the bottom of the cold Baltic Sea and I was swimming hard up from the wreck of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff to reach the undulating surface, only it was too far, and with bursting lungs I knew I wasn’t going to make it, which is when I must have passed out.