of tunnels for the railway line that runs through the Erzgebirge Mountains.
By the time I had defenestrated the two dead Germans I was exhausted, but working down the mineshaft had given me the capacity to go beyond the limits of my own exhaustion, to say nothing of a wiry muscularity in my arms and shoulders, and in this respect I was also fortunate. I might also add that I was desperate.
I wasn't sure if the Ukrainian was dead, but I hardly cared. His NKVD assassin's badge did not inspire my sympathy. In his pockets I found some money – quite a lot of money – and, more interesting, a piece of paper bearing an address in Cyrillic; but it was the same address as the envelope Mielke had given me for his friend. I guessed that, having killed me, my assassin was detailed to deliver the dollars in the envelope himself. That envelope had been a nice touch, partly allaying any fears of a double-cross on Mielke's part. After all, who would give an envelope full of money to a man he intended to have killed? There was also an identity document that gave the Ukrainian's name as Vasili Karpovich Lebyediev; he was stationed at MVD headquarters in Berlin, at Karlshorst, which I remembered better as a villa colony with a racecourse. He didn't work for the MVD but for the Ministry of Military Forces – the MBC – whatever that was. The Nagant revolver in his apparently lifeless hand was dated 1937 and had been well looked after. I wondered how many innocent victims of Stalin it had been used to kill. For that reason I took a certain pleasure in pushing his naked body out of the carriage window. It felt like a kind of justice.
I used the Ivan's tunic and my old uniform to mop the floor and wipe the walls of any remaining blood and brain tissue, and then threw them out of the window. I put the pieces of glass into the Russian's cap alongside his decorations and threw that out of the window, too. And when everything apart from me looked almost respectable, I dressed carefully in the lieutenant's blue breeches – the major's were too big around the waist – and his spare tunic, and prepared to face down any Ivans who might come aboard at Dresden. I was ready for that.
What I wasn't ready for was Dresden. The train went straight past the ruins of the city's eighteenth-century cathedral. I could hardly believe my own eyes. The bell-shaped dome was completely gone. And the rest of the city was no better. Dresden had never seemed like an important town, or one with any strategic significance, and I began to worry about what Berlin might look like. Did I even have a home town that was worth returning to?
The Red Army sergeant who came aboard the carriage at Dresden and asked to see my papers glanced at the broken window with mild surprise.
'What happened in here?' he asked.
'I don't know, but it must have been some party.'
He shook his head and frowned. 'Some of these young lads they have in uniform now. They're just kolkhozniks. Peasants who don't know how to behave. Half of them have never even seen a proper passenger train, let alone travelled on one.'
'You can't blame them for that,' I said generously. 'And for letting off a bit of steam now and again. Especially when you consider what the fascists did to Russia.' 'Right now I'm more concerned about what they've done to this train.' He glanced at Lieutenant Rascher's identity document and then at me.
I met his gaze with steady-eyed innocence.
'You've lost a bit of weight since that picture was taken.'
'You're right,' I said. 'I hardly recognise myself. Typhus does that to a man. I'm on leave back to Berlin after six weeks in hospital.'
The sergeant inched back a little.
'It's all right,' I said. 'I'm over the worst of it now. I picked it up in the POW camp at Johannesgeorgenstadt. Full of fleas and lice, it was.' I started to scratch for added effect.
He handed me back the documents and nodded a quick goodbye. I expect he washed his hands quite soon afterwards. I know I would have done.
I dropped down on the seat and opened the major's bag again. There was a bottle of Asbach brandy I'd been looking forward to all morning. I opened it, took a swig, and searched through the rest of his stuff. There were some clothes, some smokes, a few papers, and an early edition of poems by Georg Trakl. I'd always rather admired his work and one particular poem, 'In the Eastern Front', now seemed to match the time, and more especially, the place. I can still remember it by heart.
The ominous anger of the People
Is like the furious organ of the winter storm,
The purple wave of battle,
Like the leafless stars.
With broken brows and silver arms,
The night winks to dying soldiers.
In the shade of an autumn ash tree
The ghosts of the dead are sighing
A desert crown of thorns surrounds the city. From the bleeding stairs The moon chases the shocked women Wild wolves break through the door.* * Author's own translation.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: GERMANY, 1954
'And you think that Erich Mielke wanted you dead because he owed his life to you?'
My American friend tapped his pipe and let the burnt tobacco fall onto the floor of my cell. I wanted to scold him for it, to remind him that these were my quarters and to show a little respect. But what was the point? It was an American world I was living in now, and I was a pawn in a never-ending game of intercontinental chess with the Russians.
'Not just that,' I said. 'Because I could connect him with the murders of those two Berlin policemen. You see, Heydrich always suspected that Mielke felt a certain amount of embarrassment that he'd committed a crime as serious as the murders of policemen. That it was somehow unworthy of him. He thought it was almost certainly Mielke who fingered the two Germans who put him up to it – Kippenberger and Neumann – during Stalin's great purge of 1937. They both died in the labour camps. Their wives, too. Even Kippenberger's daughter was sent to a labour camp. Mielke really tried to clean house there.
'But I also knew about Mielke's work in Spain. His work as a Chekist, with the military security service, torturing and killing those Republicans – Anarchists and Trotskyites – who deviated from the Party line as dictated by Stalin. Again, Heydrich strongly suspected that Mielke used his position as a political commissar with the International Brigade in Spain to eliminate Erich Ziemer. If you remember, Ziemer was the man who helped Mielke murder the two cops. And I think Heydrich was probably right. I think that Mielke may even have planned some political role for himself in Germany after the war; and he reasoned, quite rightly, that the German people – and more especially Berliners – would never take to a man who'd murdered two policemen in cold blood.'
'There was an attempt by the West Berlin courts to prose cute him for those murders in 1947,' said the Ami with the bow tie. 'A judge called Wilhelm Kuhnast issued a warrant for Mielke's arrest. Did you know about that?'
'No. By then, I wasn't living in Berlin.'
'It failed of course. The Soviets closed ranks in front of Mielke to shield him from further inquiry and tried their best to discredit Kuhnast. The criminal records that Kuhnast used to build up his case disappeared. Kuhnast was lucky not to disappear himself.'
'Erich Mielke has survived numerous party purges,' said the Ami with the pipe. 'He survived the death of Stalin, of course and, rather more recently, the death of Lavrenty Beria. We think that he was never a relief volunteer for the Todt organisation. That was just a story he gave you. If he had worked for them he'd be dead like all the rest of them who came back and found a cold welcome from Stalin. To us it seems much more likely that Mielke got out of that French camp at Le Vernet quite soon after you saw him there, in the summer of 1940, and got himself back to the Soviet Union before Hitler invaded Russia.'
'Why not?' I shrugged. 'He never struck me as the George Washington 'I cannot tell a lie' type. So I'll contain my obvious disappointment that he might have lied to me.'
