'They formed the distinct impression that you knew him.'
'We've met. So what?'
'You must have known him quite well.'
'How did you figure that out?'
'You were looking out of a window at Erhard Milch, when he was being released from the front gate. How far is that?'
'Sixty, seventy feet. You must have good eyesight, Gunther.'
'For reading I wear glasses,' I said.
'You can have them. When you sign your confession.'
'What confession?'
'The one you're going to sign, Gunther.'
'I thought you said that Silverman and Earp had cleared me.'
'They did. This is our Ohio Casualty policy. It adds fidelity and surety to whatever you tell us about Erich Mielke.'
'That means we own your ass, Gunther.'
'What's in this confession?'
'Does it matter?'
He had a point. They could say anything they wanted and I'd have to like it. 'All right. I'll sign it.'
'You took that in your stride.'
'I used to be a tall man in a circus. Besides, I've been walking around for a while now and I'm tired. I just want to go home and give my long legs a rest.'
'How about you give us a different act? Like Mister Memory.'
'You haven't yet told me why you're so interested in him,'
I said. 'Which means I don't know what to leave in, or to leave out.'
'All of it,' said the other. 'We want all of it. Every detail. We'll get to why later.'
'You want the whole of Leviticus? Or just Mielke?'
'Let's go back to the beginning.'
'Genesis then. Sure. Darkness was upon the face of Berlin. For me at any rate. And Walter Ulbricht said let there be some communist thugs; and Adolf Hitler said, let there be some Nazi thugs, too. And Chancellor Bruning said, let the cops try to keep these two sides apart. And God said, why don't you give the cops something a little easier than that to do? Because the evening and the morning were just one thing after another. Trouble. And the name of the river was the Spree and we were fishing bodies out of it every day. One day a communist and the next day a Nazi. And some men looked at that and said that it was good. As long as they're killing each other then that's fine, isn't it? Me, I believed in the Republic and in the rule of law. But a lot of cops were Nazis and were not ashamed. From that moment on you might say Berlin and Germany were finished and all the host of them.' I sighed. 'I forget. Didn't you know? That's our national pastime in Germany.'
'So remember.'
'Give me a minute here. This is twenty-three years ago we're talking about now. You just don't cough that up like a fur ball.'
'1931.'
'An unlucky year for Germany. There were, let's see, how many? Four million unemployed in Germany? And a banking crisis. Austrian Kreditanstalt had collapsed, what, yes, a couple of weeks before. I remember now. That was May 11th. We were staring ruin in the face. Which is all the Nazis were waiting for, I suppose. To take advantage of that. Yes things were bad. But not for Mielke. His luck was about to take a turn for the better. Got your notebooks handy?'
'Like I was your girl Friday.'
CHAPTER ELEVEN: GERMANY, 1931
It was a Tuesday, May 23rd. I know that because it was my birthday. You tend to remember your birthday when you have to spend it in Tegel Prison, interviewing one of the men convicted in the Eden Dance Palace trial. An SA storm trooper by the name of Konrad Stief. He was just a kid, really, not much more than twenty-two, with a couple of convictions for petty theft, and he'd joined the SA the previous spring. For the last years of the Weimar Republic, his was a fairly typical Berlin story: on November 22nd 1930, Stief and three other chums from SA Storm 33 had gone to a dance hall. Nothing wrong with that except that they weren't going there to do the Lindy Hop; and instead of ties and neatly combed hair they took some pistols. You see, the Eden Dance Palace was frequented by a communist hiking club. Surprisingly, communist hiking clubs used to do what everyone else did in dance halls; they danced. But not that night. Anyway, when the Nazis arrived they went straight upstairs and opened fire. Several of the happy wanderers were hit and two of them seriously wounded.
Like I say, it was a typical Berlin story, and probably I wouldn't have remembered many of these details except for the fact that the Eden Dance Palace case at Berlin's Central Criminal Court in Old Moabit was hardly a typical trial. You see, the defence attorney, a fellow named Hans Litten, called Hitler to the stand and cross- examined him about his true relationship with the SA and its violent methods; and Hitler, who was trying to sell himself as Herr Law and Order, didn't much care for that, or for Herr Litten, who happened to be a Jew. Anyway, the four of them were convicted, Stief was sentenced to two and a half years in Tegel, and the very next day I drove over there to see if he could shed any light on another case. It was something to do with the murder of an SA man. The gun Stief had used in the Eden Dance Palace was used to murder another SA man. And my question was this: had the SA man been murdered by communists because he was in the SA? Or, as was beginning to seem more likely, had he been murdered by the Nazis because he was really a communist sent to spy on Storm 33?
Finally I got a name out of Stief, and a Storm tavern in the old town that was frequented by Storm 33. Reisig's tavern, in Hebbel Street, in the western district of Charlottenburg. Which wasn't so very far from the Eden Dance Palace. So when I left Tegel I decided to drop in there and take a look. But as soon as I arrived outside I saw a group of SA men piling into a truck. They were armed and clearly bent on some murderous mission. There was no time to phone headquarters, and thinking that I might for once prevent a homicide instead of merely investigating one, I followed.
If this sounds brave or foolhardy, it wasn't. In those days a lot of cops used to carry a Bergmann MP18 in the trunk of the car instead of a pistol. The Bergmann was a nine mill submachine gun with a thirty-two-shot magazine, perfect for sweeping crap off the streets. So I followed the gang all the way to Felseneck Colony in Reinickendorf-East, a communist party stronghold. Felseneck Colony was just a series of allotments for Reds who wanted to grow their own food; and what with money being so tight, a lot of them needed those vegetables just to live. Some of the Reds actually lived there. They had their own guards who were supposed to keep a lookout for Nazis, only they hadn't been doing their job. They'd run away or been tipped off, or maybe they were in on the attack, who knows?
But when I got there the Nazis were just about to lay down a beating on a young man of about twenty. I didn't get a good look at him immediately – there were too many storm troopers on him, like dogs. They probably figured to beat the crap out of the boy and then take him somewhere else and put a bullet in his head before dumping his body I swept the air over their heads with the Bergmann, marched them back to their truck and told them to beat it because there were too many of them to arrest. Then, in case they decided to come back I told the boy to get in my car and said I'd drop him somewhere – somewhere safer than where we were, anyway. He thanked me and asked me if I could take him to Bulowplatz, and that was the first time I got a good look at Erich Mielke. In my car, on the way to Berlin.
He was about twenty-four years old, five feet six inches tall, muscular with lots of wavy hair, and a Berliner – from Wedding, I think. He was also a lifelong communist, like his father, who was a carpenter or wheelwright. And he had two younger sisters and a brother who were also in the communist party. Or so he told me.
'So, it's true what they say,' I said to him. 'That madness runs in families.'
He grinned. Mielke still had a sense of humour in those days. That was before the Russians got hold of him.
