'Which part?'
'The southern half. Argentina, mainly. You wouldn't like Argentina, Martin. It's hot. Lots of insects. Plenty of Jews. But you're only allowed to kill the insects.'
'But lots of Germans, too, I hear.'
'No. Just Nazis.'
Sandberger grinned. Probably he meant it well, but it felt like seeing something unpleasant and atavistic toward the end of a seance. Evil flickering on and off like a faulty light bulb.
'Well,' he said, full of patient menace. 'Let me know if I can help. My father is a friend of President Heuss.'
'And he's trying to help free you?' I tried to contain the surprise in my voice. 'To get you a parole?'
'Yes.'
'Thanks.' I walked away before he could see the look of horror on my face. It was beginning to look as if the only way I was ever going to have any friends in the new Germany was to have friends I really didn't like.
My American friends, both of them, were in cell seven when, after breakfast, I was returned there by one of the guards. This time they'd brought a little tape recorder in a leather case with a microphone not much bigger than a Norelco shaver. One was filling his pipe from a pouch of Sir Walter Raleigh; the other was adjusting his clip-on bow tie against his reflection in my cell window. There was a short-brimmed Stetson on my bed and both men smelled lightly of Vaseline hair-tonic.
'Make yourselves at home,' I said.
'Thanks, we already did.'
'If you're here to record my singing voice I should warn you fellows I already made a deal with Parlophone.'
'This is for our listening pleasure,' said the one puffing some heat into his Sir Walter Raleigh. 'We're not planning on a general release. Not this Christmas.'
'We think we're getting to the interesting part,' said the other. 'About Erich Mielke. At long last. The part that affects us now.' He snapped on the machine and the spools began to turn. 'Say something for recording level.'
'Like what?'
'I dunno. But let's just hope that the oral tradition is not yet dead in Germany.'
'If it isn't, it must be the only thing in Germany that's not dead.'
A few seconds later I heard for the first time the sound of my own voice uttered by someone other than myself. There was something about it I didn't like. Mostly it was the laconic way I had of speaking. It was five years since I'd seen my home city but I still sounded as unhelpful as a Berlin gravedigger. It was easy to see why people didn't like me very much. If ever I was going to make a useful contribution to society I was going to have to fix that. Maybe take some lessons in courtesy and charm.
'Think of us like the Brothers Grimm,' said the Ami smoking the pipe. 'Gathering material for a story.'
'I try not to think of you at all if I can help it. But the Brothers Grimm works for me. I never liked their stuff very much. I especially hated the story about the village idiot with the pipe and the bow tie and his wicked Uncle Sam.'
'So, then. After Paris. You went home to Berlin.'
'Briefly. I organised Renata a job at the Adlon and lived to regret it. The poor kid was killed in the first big bombing raid on Berlin, in November 1943. Some help I was.'
'And Heydrich?'
'Oh he was killed earlier than 1943. Only he had it coming and on a silver salver. But that's another story.'
'Did he believe you? About not finding Mielke?'
'Maybe. Maybe not. You never knew with Heydrich. We talked it over in his office at the Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Next thing I knew I had orders to go to the Ukraine. I might have taken that personally if it wasn't that everyone had the same orders.' I shrugged. 'Well, I expect your friends Silverman and Earp told you all about that. Then I was in Berlin for a while before going to Prague. That was the summer of 1942. Let's see now. A year later I was in Smolensk, with the War Crimes Bureau. As an Oberleutnant. But after the battle of Kursk we were out of that whole theatre pretty quickly. The Red Army was in the driver's seat, you might say. I got a leave. I got married. To a schoolteacher. Then I was recruited into the
Abwehr – military intelligence – and promoted to captain again.'
'Why were you demoted?'
'Because of what happened in Prague. I stepped on someone's corns, I guess.' I shrugged. 'Anyway, February 1944 I joined General Schorner's Northern Army as an intelligence officer. I spoke a fair bit of Russian by then. And a bit of Polish, too. The work was mostly interpreting. At least it was until the fighting started. Then it was just fighting. Kill or be killed. Tell me something, did either of the Brothers Grimm see combat?'
'Nope,' said the man with the pipe. 'I was flying a desk for the whole of the war.'
'I was too young,' said the man with the bow tie.
'I didn't think so. You get to recognise that in a man's eye. It might interest you to know that by 1944 there was no such thing as 'too young' for the German Army. There was no 'too old' either. And no one was left flying a desk, as you put it, when they could fly a plane, or sit in a tank, or man an anti-aircraft battery. Boys of thirteen marched alongside men aged sixty-five and seventy. You see, it wasn't until the Red Army reached East Prussia that German civilians began to suffer in the way Russian civilians had suffered. This meant that there was more for us to fight for; and it was why men and boys of all ages were conscripted into the Army. Nothing and no one was to be spared, least of all ourselves. Total war was what Goebbels called it. And it means what it says, which was rare for him. Total means everything. All in, nothing left out.
'You Amis talk about this Cold War of yours with no understanding of what it means to fight a cold, pitiless war without mercy and against an enemy who never stops coming. Oh, believe me, I know. I was killing Ivans for fourteen months and I can tell you this – there's no end to them. As many as you can kill they keep on coming. So remember that, if the time ever comes when you have to do the same. Not that anyone believes you'll stop them. Why would you fight to save Europe, to save Germans? That's the only reason we fought. To stop the Ivans from slaughtering the population of East Prussia. You might say that this was what we had done to the Jews, and you'd be right. But there were no war crimes trials for Soviet officers, no Ivans here in Landsberg. You would have to see what happens to a crowd of civilians when a Russian tank drives straight through its middle, or watch a fighter strafe a line of civilian refugees, to know what I'm talking about. Sepp Dietrich and his men shot how many Americans at Malmedy? Ninety? Ninety. A war crime you call it. For the Russians, in East Prussia, ninety wasn't even an infraction, it was a misdemeanour. Except that it's hardly a misdemeanour when the general demeanour of your soldiery is one of barbarous cruelty.'
I was silent for a moment.
'Something wrong?'
'I never talked about this before,' I said. 'It's not easy. What does Goethe say? About sun and worlds I can tell you but little. All that I can see is the suffering of humanity. Still, it's right that you should hear it. The trouble with you Amis is that you think it was you who won the war, when everyone knows it was the Ivans. Without you and the British they'd have taken longer to beat us. But they'd have beaten us all the same. Stalin's maths, we used to call it. When there were just five of us left there would be twenty Russians. And that was how Stalin was going to win. You'd better remember that if the Ivans ever invade West Berlin.'
'Sure, sure. Let's talk about Konigsberg. You were taken prisoner at Konigsberg.'
'Don't rush me. I have to tell this in my own way. When something has been asleep for this long you don't just shake it by the shoulder and shout in its ear.' 'Take your time. You've got plenty.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: GERMANY AND RUSSIA, 1945-1946
Konigsberg is, was, important to me. My mother was born in Konigsberg. When I was a child we used to go on holiday to a seaside town near there called Cranz. Best holiday we ever had. My first wife and I went there on
