'The guillotine? Why not? It's quick.' He grinned, cruelly. 'A bullet is a bit of a let-off for our enemies of state. But it's a lot quicker than the electric chair. Last year it took Ethel Rosenberg twenty minutes to die. They say her head caught fire before she died. So, you tell me, which is more humane? The two seconds it takes for the axe to fall? Or twenty minutes in the Sing Sing chair?' He shook his head again. 'But no. Your three Americans. They won't be waiting for a delivery of bread.'
Seeing my puzzled expression, he added:
'So as not to cause our citizenry undue alarm, we send our falling axe around the DDR in a bread van, from the bakery in Halle. Wholegrain bread. It's better for you.'
'Same old Erich. You always did have a strange sense of humour. I remember once, on a train to Dresden, I nearly died laughing.'
'I think you had the last laugh on that occasion. I was impressed with the way you handled things. He wasn't an easy man to kill, that Russian. But I was rather more impressed with the way you handled everything afterwards. How you gave that money to Elisabeth. To be honest, until I got your letter I had no idea that you and she had ever become that friendly. Either way I suspect most men would have kept the money for themselves.
'And it made me think,' said Mielke. 'I asked myself what kind of man would do such a thing? Obviously a man who was not the predictable fascist I had thought he was. A man of hidden qualities. A man who might even be useful to me. You wouldn't be aware of this, but three or four years ago I actually tried to get in contact with you, Gunther. To do a job for me. And I discovered you'd disappeared. I even heard you'd gone to South America like all those other Nazi bastards. So when Elisabeth turned up at my office in Hohenschonhausen with your letter I was very pleasantly surprised. But even more surprised when I read the letter; and by the sheer audacity of your proposal. If I may say so, it was a real spymaster's stratagem, and you have my compliments on pulling it off. And what's more right under the noses of the Americans. That's almost the best part. They won't forgive you for that in a hurry.'
I said nothing. There wasn't much to say so I sucked at my cigarette and waited for the end. That part was, as yet, undecided. What would he do? Keep his side of the bargain as he had promised in his own letter to me? Or double-cross me like before? And what else did I really deserve? Me, the man who had just betrayed three other men.
'Of course, Elisabeth's the reason I knew I could really trust you, Gunther. If you'd truly been a creature of the Americans you would have told them where she lived and they'd have had her placed under surveillance. With the aim of burning me.'
'Burning?'
'It's what we call it when you let someone – someone in intelligence circles – know that you know everything about them, and that their whole life has gone up in smoke. Burning. Or for that matter when you don't let them know.'
'Well then, I guess they'd already tried to burn you.'
Some of what I now said I had already told him in the letter that Elisabeth had delivered: how the CIA had coached me to sell the French SDECE the idea that Mielke had been first a spy for the Nazis and then a spy for the CIA, at the same time leading them to suppose that I might be able to identify a French traitor named Edgard de Boudel, who had worked for the Viet Minh in Indo-China. But mostly I told him again as a way of getting the answers to a few questions of my own.
'The Amis had the idea that there's a communist spy at the heart of French intelligence and that he might be more inclined to believe what I told them about you playing both sides by my proving reliable in identifying Edgard de Boudel as he arrived back in Friedland as a returnee from a Soviet POW camp.'
'But the Amis canned that idea when you told them that you thought you had figured out a way of them getting their hands on me in person,' said Mielke. 'Is that right?'
I nodded. 'Which probably leaves your reputation undamaged.'
'Let's hope so, eh?'
'Is there a spy at the heart of French intelligence?'
'Several,' admitted Mielke. 'You might just as well ask if there are any communists in France. Or if Edgard de Boudel really did fight for the German SS and then the Viet Minh.'
'And did he?'
'Oh yes. And it's a shame the Americans should have told the French about him now. Someone in GVL – Gehlen's new intelligence organisation – must have told them. You see, we had a deal with the GVL and Chancellor Adenauer. That the German government would allow Edgard de Boudel back into Germany in return for allowing one of ours back. It's like this: de Boudel has inoperable cancer. But the poor fellow wants to die in his native France and this seemed to be the best way of doing it. To sneak him back into Germany as part of a POW repatriation and then into France without anyone objecting.'
'There's not much love lost between the CIA and Gehlen's GVL,' I said.
'It would seem not.'
'The German son seems to have turned his back on his American father.'
'Yes indeed.' said Mielke. 'It's odd, but you and Elisabeth are about the only two people who even know about my own father. So that was a real stroke of genius, my friend. Because, as it happens, a lot of what you imagined might be true is true. We don't really see each other much any more.'
'Does he live in the East?'
'In Potsdam. But he's always complaining. Odd how your suggestion of him coming back to live in West Berlin is so nearly true. But then you are a Berliner. You know how these things are. 'I've got no friends in Potsdam,' he says. That's always the big complaint. 'Look, Pa,' I say, 'there's nothing to stop you from going into West Berlin and seeing your mates and coming home again.' Incidentally, the mates – his mates – they thought I was dead. That's what I told Pa to tell them, as early as 1937. I say, 'See your friends quietly in the West and live quietly in the East. It's not like there's a wall or anything.' Of course since the inner border was closed he's started to suspect the same would happen here in Berlin. That he'll be trapped on the wrong side.' Mielke sighed. 'And there are other reasons. Father and son reasons. Is your old man still alive?'
'No.'
'Did you get on with him when he was?'
'No.' I smiled sadly. 'We never learned how.'
'Then you know what it's like. My father is a very old-fashioned kind of German communist, and believe me they're the worst. It was the workers' strike of last year that really did it for him. Troublemakers most of them. Some of them counterrevolutionaries. A few of them CIA provocateurs. But Pa didn't see it that way at all.'
I flicked my cigarette onto the ground and was leaving it there but Mielke ground it under the heel of his hand-made shoe as if it had been the head of a counter-revolutionary.
'Since we're being honest with each other,' he said. 'There's something I don't understand.'
'Go ahead.'
'Why you did it. Why you betrayed them. To me. You're not a communist any more than you were a Nazi. So, why?'
'You asked me a question like that before, don't you remember?'
'Oh, I remember. I didn't understand it then, either.'
'You might say that after spending six months in one American prison after another I began to hate them. You might say that but it wouldn't be true. Of course the best lies contain some truth, so that's not entirely false. Then you might say that I don't share their world view, and that wouldn't be entirely false. In some ways I admire them but I also dislike the way they don't ever seem to live up to their own ideals. I think I might like the Amis a lot more if they were like everyone else. One might forgive them more. But they preach about the magnificence of their fucking democracy and the enduring power of their constitutional freedoms while at the same time they're trying to fuck your wife and steal your watch. When I was a cop we gave the people of whom more was expected severer sentences when they turned out to be crooks. Lawyers, policemen, politicians, people in positions of responsibility. Americans are like them. They're the crooks who should know better.
'But you might also say I'm tired of the whole damned business. For twenty years I've been obliged to work for people I didn't like. Heydrich. The SD. The Nazis. The CIC. The Perons. The Mafia. The Cuban Secret Police. The French. The CIA. All I want to do is read the newspaper and play chess.'
