might have smiled at them, too, if what I was doing hadn't felt so vital to my own future and fortune.
I sat down and stared straight ahead and out of the window. All of the old police training was kicking in again: the way to follow a man without making yourself obvious. Mostly it was about keeping your distance and learning how to tail a man who was behind you as often as he was in front of you; or, as now, in the adjoining carriage. I could see him through the connecting window, still reading his newspaper. That made it easier for me, of course. And the thought that I was well on top of it made the discomfiture that was very likely being experienced by the Amis all the more enjoyable. Scheuer I almost liked, but Hamer and Frei were a different matter. I especially disliked Hamer, if only because of his arrogance and because he seemed to have a real dislike of Germans. Well, we were used to that. But it was still annoying.
Without moving my head, I rolled my eyes to one side like a ventriloquist's dummy. We were coming into Zoo station and I was watching the newspaper in the next carriage to see if it got folded away, but it stayed erect and remained that way through the stations at Tiergarten and Bellevue; but at Lehrter it finally came down and the reader stood up to disembark.
He went down the steps and walked north, with Humboldt Harbour on his right. Several canal boats moored together in one large flotilla shifted gently on the steel-blue water of the British sector. On the other side of the same harbour was the Charite Hospital and the Russian sector. In the distance East German or possibly Russian border guards manned a checkpoint on the junction of Invalidenstrasse and the Canal. But we were walking north, up Heide Strasse, until we came to the French sector, where we turned right along Fenn Strasse and onto the triangular Wedding Platz. I paused for a moment to take in the ruins of the Dankes church where I had married my first wife and then caught a last glimpse of my man as finally he went to ground in a tall building on the southern Schulzendorfer Strasse, overlooking the old disused brewery.
There was little or no traffic on the square. Almost as bankrupt as the British the French had little money to spend regenerating German business in the area, let alone for the restoration of a church that had been built in thanksgiving for the delivery of their ancient mortal enemy, Kaiser Wilhelm I, from an attempt made on his life in 1878.
I approached the building on the corner of Schulzendorfer Strasse and glanced down Chaussee Strasse. Here the border crossing point on Liesenstrasse was very close and probably just the other side of the brewery wall. I looked at the names on the brass bell pulls and figured that Erich Stahl was close enough to Erich Stallmacher for our clandestine operation now to proceed as planned.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: BERLIN, 1954
We moved to a small and very crummy safe-house on Dreyse Strasse, east of Moabit Hospital, in the British zone, which Scheuer said was as close to Stallmacher's apartment as we dared to get for the moment without tipping our hand to the Russians or, for that matter, the French. The British were told only that we were keeping a suspected black-marketeer under surveillance.
The plan was simple: that I, being a Berliner, would contact the owner of the building on Schulzendorfer Strasse and offer to rent one of several empty apartments using my wife's maiden name. The owner, a retired lawyer from Wilmersdorf, showed me around the apartment – which he'd furnished himself – and it was much better on the inside than it looked from the outside. He explained that the building had been owned and administered by his wife, Martha, until she had been killed by a bomb the previous year while visiting her mother's grave in Oranienburg.
'They said she never knew a thing,' said Herr Schurz. 'A two hundred and fifty kilogram American aerial bomb had lain there for almost ten years without anyone noticing. A gravedigger twenty metres away was digging and he must have hit the thing with his pickaxe.'
'That's too bad,' I said.
'They say Oranienburg is full of unexploded ordnance. The soil is soft there, you see, with a hard layer of gravel underneath.
The bombs would penetrate the earth but not the gravel.' He shrugged and then shook his head. 'Apparently there were a lot of targets in Oranienburg.'
I nodded. 'The Heinkel factory. And a pharmaceutical plant. Not to mention a suspected atomic bomb research plant.'
'Are you married, Herr Handloser?'
'No, my wife also is dead. She got pneumonia. But she'd been ill for a while, so it wasn't as great a shock as what happened to your wife.'
I went to the window and looked down onto the street.
'This is a big apartment for someone living by himself,' said Schurz.
'I'm planning to take in a couple of tenants to help me with the rent,' I said. 'If that's all right with you. Some gentlemen from an American bible school.'
'I'm pleased to hear it,' said Schurz. 'That's what the whole French sector needs now. More Americans. They're the only ones with any money. Talking of which.'
I counted some banknotes into his eager hand. He gave me a set of keys, and then I returned to the safe- house on Dreyse Strasse.
'As far as the landlord is concerned,' I said, 'we can move in tomorrow.'
'You said nothing to him about Stahl, or Stallmacher,' said Scheuer.
'I did exactly as you told me. I didn't even ask about the neighbours. So what happens now?'
'We move in and keep the place under close surveillance,' said Scheuer. 'Wait for Erich Mielke to visit his dad and then go upstairs to introduce ourselves.'
Frei laughed. 'Hello, we're your new neighbours. Can we interest you in defecting to the West? You and your old man.'
'What happened to the idea of making him into your spy?'
'Not enough leverage. Our political masters want to know what the East German leadership is thinking now, not what they're thinking in a year's time. So we grab him and take him back to the States to debrief him.'
'You're forgetting Mielke's wife, Gertrud, aren't you? And doesn't he have a son now? Frank? He won't want to leave them, surely.'
'We're not forgetting them at all,' said Scheuer. 'But I rather think that Erich will. From everything we know about him he's not the sentimental sort. Besides, he can always apply for them to come to the West, as well. And it's not like there's a wall that's stopping them from coming.'
'And if he doesn't want to defect?'
'Well then that's too bad.'
'You'll kidnap him?'
'That's not a word we use,' said Scheuer. 'The US Constitution permits public policy exceptions to the normal legal process of extradition. But I doubt any of this is going to matter. As soon as he sees the four of us he'll know the game is up and that he has no choice in the matter.'
'And when you do take him back? What then?'
Scheuer grinned. 'I don't even want to think about that until we've got him, Gunther. Mielke's the great white whale for the CIA in Germany. We land him we get enough oil to burn in our lamps to see what we're doing in this country for years to come. The Stasi might never recover from a blow like this. It could even help us to win the Cold War.'
'Damn right,' said Hamer. 'Mielke's the whole fucking ball game. There's very little that bastard doesn't know about communist plans in Germany. Will they invade? Will they keep to their side of the fence? How far are they prepared to go to hold on to the yardage they've already won? And just how independent of Moscow is the current East German leadership?'
Frei clapped me on the shoulder amicably. 'Gunther, old buddy,' he said, 'you help us get this bastard, you're set for life, do you hear? By the time Ike gets through thanking you, my German friend, you'll feel more American than we do.'
Hamer frowned. 'Don't you think it's time Gunther should maybe get some more intel from his lady friend?
