Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

“Of course there’s been a mistake,” I shouted. “We got caught, thanks to her. Look, Harold, it’s no good. Don’t you see? The game is up for us now.”

“What game? There is no game.”

“The stupid bitch has betrayed us both. She’s told them almost everything now, and quite clearly they believe her. So, what’s the damned point of maintaining the fiction any longer? Eh? Answer me that. We might as well put our hands up to the whole thing. The party isn’t going to save us now. Nor the Stasi.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Gunther?”

He didn’t realize it quite yet, but his using my real name suited my purpose very well.

“And what’s more she’s right and you know it. The masters we work for in Germany today, they’re just as rotten as the bastards we served before. Perhaps worse. At least Hitler tried to be popular. This lot we have in Germany now, they just don’t care one way or another. Because they don’t have to. No one knows who the hell they are, anyway. They’re just a lot of faceless bureaucrats in Karlshorst.”

“You bloody fool, Gunther. Just shut the fuck up, will you? You’re going to get us both shot. Do you know that?”

“Can’t you see? The double-crossing bitch has done that already. Me, I’ve had enough of the whole damned business. I’m tired-so very tired. I think the best thing is if we just give them what they want and get this circus over with as quickly as possible. Come on, man. What do you say? Let’s make a clean breast of it and hope for the best.”

Hennig’s manacled hands were clasped tightly on his knees, as if in earnest prayer, and I could see his knuckles turning white as I was speaking. His jaw was shifting furiously, like two small tectonic plates, and his nostrils were flaring as wide as an emptying hot water bottle. He looked as if he wanted to strangle me. And this wasn’t so very far from the truth, as a moment later he stood up abruptly, ran across the room, and, screaming like Krampus, launched himself at my head in imitation of one intent on hauling me down to the underworld. Fortunately, one of the thugs from Portsmouth intervened just in the nick of time and sent Hennig sprawling on the threadbare carpet with an uppercut that would have floored Floyd Patterson.

“Get that bloody man out of here,” yelled the monk. It was the first and only time I heard him raise his voice. “Lock him up and keep him locked up until he’s learned to behave.” He might have been speaking about some unruly schoolboy instead of a blackmailer and probable Stasi spy.

I smiled because in the exclamatory, violent chaos of the moment I had seen Anne French staring at me, her face ugly with suspicion about what I might actually tell the British secret service men when the thugs had finished dragging Hennig’s semi-conscious body out of the room. Given all that she had said already, she could hardly contradict my own full confession now. It was, I hoped, the one thing her cynical masters in the Stasi could never have anticipated. That I might actually agree with her. Every word and more . And for the first time since I’d met her at the Grand Hotel in Cap Ferrat there was real fear in her lovely eyes.

Give me another cigarette,” I told one of the thugs still in the room.

He looked at the monk, who nodded back at him. He took out a silver cigarette case, opened it, and pulled a face as I took two, slid one behind my ear for later, and then let him light me. I took a lungful of smoke, which wouldn’t have tasted any sweeter than if I’d been facing a firing squad.

“There’s not a great deal to say,” I began.

“For your sake, I hope that’s not true,” said the monk.

“The damn woman is right, of course.” I was looking straight at Anne when I said this and smiled as she tried to conceal her discomfort. “It was a put-up job from the start. And it would have worked, too. It would have worked if she hadn’t opened her stupid trap. It’s the one thing you can never anticipate in any clandestine operation-someone having a crisis of conscience and turning themselves in. No, indeed. So then. I’ll tell you everything. From the beginning.”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Operation Othello was run by Erich Mielke. I’ve known him for years-since before the Nazis came to power when he was just another KPD cadre with a gun and a Lenin cap. Put a lot of weight on since then. I mean, he wouldn’t recognize himself if the Erich Mielke from nineteen thirty-two was to meet today’s Erich Mielke. He murdered a couple of Berlin cops that year and I helped him to get away from the city before he could be arrested. I helped him escape from Berlin to Antwerp, where he and another Communist called Zimmer were smuggled onto a ship to Leningrad, just like your friends Burgess and Maclean. I wasn’t a party member then myself, but I hated the semi-Fascist government of von Papen and was determined to do all I could to stop Mielke from going to the guillotine. Besides, those two cops had it coming. Everyone said so. I also helped him to escape from a French internment camp at Le Vernet in nineteen forty when I was in the SD. I’d been sent there to try and identify him.”

“How does someone who had helped a KPD killer to escape end up working for the SD?”

“The same way that Burgess worked for MI5, I suppose. I was what they used to call a beefsteak Nazi: brown on the outside but red in the middle. Besides, I wasn’t the only Red working for the RSHA. Heinrich Muller-Gestapo Muller-he was a Red, too.”

“What were your duties in the SD?”

“Mostly I worked for General Reinhard Heydrich,” I said. “The so-called Protector of Bohemia. You might say I was a kind of troubleshooter. If I saw any trouble, I shot it.” I smiled at my own little joke. But no one else did.

“And when did you next see Comrade Mielke?”

“He helped me escape from that labor camp in nineteen forty-seven, which was when I did join the party and the Stasi. Yes, he and I-we’ve been looking out for each other for almost twenty-five years. My ex-wife has known him even longer than that because she helped to raise the young Mielke after his real mother died. He’d do anything for Elisabeth, but the same is not true for me. He’s not my friend. You can’t be friends with a man like Comrade General Erich Mielke. He’d shoot me just as soon as have a beer with me. The same as Heydrich, really. Two chips off the same block of dirty ice.”

“Tell us about the tape,” said the monk. “Whose idea was that?”

“The tape was mostly Markus Wolf’s idea, I think. Unlike him, Mielke is not a man of great subtlety. More of a bully boy, really. A man of action. You want someone beaten up, intimidated, interrogated, killed, tossed into a labor camp, and forgotten, then Erich Mielke’s your man. He’s what you might call the blunt instrument of German Communism. But if you want an intellectually sharper approach to a problem, then you speak to Markus Wolf. Wolf’s the chess player. I met him only twice, in Berlin, before that business with the Americans in nineteen fifty-four, and we actually sat down and played a game together. He’s Jewish, and of course you know what they’re like. Scheming, clever, bookish-I swear he thinks everything out several moves ahead like a grandmaster. Brought up in Moscow, of course, where a lot of those German emigres were weaned on chess and spying. Not for nothing is he known as ‘The Admiral’ around Stasi HQ in Karlshorst-after Canaris, of course, who was Hitler’s famous spymaster and whom I also met, but only once.”

By now I was lying so fluently I was starting to feel as if I might have missed my vocation. Maybe I could have been the German Somerset Maugham. Anne French must certainly have thought so, and, to me at least, she couldn’t have looked more uncomfortable knowing that mostly I was still agreeing with her entirely fictitious version of events. But like all good lies, this one had a reasonably substantial basis in fact. The best lies are always partly true.