“Naturally, I’ve read this. Several times. But now that you’re here, I’d prefer it if you told me, in person, what you have written to Agents Scheuer and Frei in this letter of yours.”
“So that you can see if I deviate from what I wrote before?”
“We understand each other perfectly.”
“Well, the facts are these,” I said, suppressing a smile. “As a condition of my working with the SDECE—”
The Chief winced. “Exactly what does that mean, Phil?”
“Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage,” said Scheuer.
The Chief nodded. “Go on, Herr Gunther.”
“Well, I agreed to work for them if they permitted me to visit Berlin and an old friend of mine. Perhaps the only friend I have left.”
“She have a name? This friend of yours?”
“Elisabeth,” I said.
“Surname? Address?”
“I don’t want her involved in any of this.”
“Meaning you don’t want to tell me.”
“That’s true.”
“You met her how and when?”
“Nineteen thirty-one. She was a seamstress. A good one, too. She worked in the same tailor’s shop as Erich Mielke’s sister, which was also where Mielke’s mother, Lydia Mielke, worked until her death in 1911. It was pretty hard for Erich’s father, bringing up four children on his own. His elder daughter went to work and cooked the family meals, and because Elisabeth was her friend, sometimes she helped out. There were even times when Elisabeth was like a sister to Erich.”
“Where did they live? Can you remember the address?”
“Stettiner Strasse. A gray tenement building in Gesundbrunnen, in northwest Berlin. Number twenty-five. It was Erich who introduced me to Elisabeth. After I’d saved his neck.”
“Tell me about that.”
I told him.
“And this is when you met Mielke’s father.”
“Yes. I went to Mielke’s address to try to arrest him, and the old man took a swing at me and I had to arrest him. It was Elisabeth who had given me the address, and she wasn’t very happy that I’d asked her for it. As a result, our relationship hit a rock. And it was very much later on, I suppose it must have been the autumn of 1940, before we became reacquainted, and the following year before we started our relationship again.”
“You never mentioned any of this when you were interrogated at Landsberg,” said the Chief. “Why not?”
I shrugged. “It hardly seemed relevant at the time. I almost forgot that Elisabeth even knew Erich. Not least because she’d always kept it a secret from him that we were friends. Erich didn’t like cops much, to put it mildly. I started seeing her again in the winter of 1946, when I came back from the Russian POW camp. I lived with Elisabeth for a short while until I managed to fin d my wife again in Berlin. But I was always very fond of her, and she of me. And recently, when I was in Paris, I got to thinking of her again and wondering if she was okay. I suppose you might say I began to entertain romantic thoughts about her. Like I said, there’s no one else in Berlin I know. So I was resolved to look her up as soon as possible and see if she and I couldn’t make another go of it.”
“And how did that go?”
“It went well. She’s not married. She was involved with some American soldier. More than one, I think. Anyway, both men were married, and so they went back to their wives in the States, leaving her, middle-aged and scared about the future.”
I poured a glass of schnapps and sipped it while the Chief watched me closely, as if weighing my story in each hand, trying to judge how much or how little he believed.
“She was at the same address as she’d been in 1946?”
“Yes.”
“We can always ask the French, you know. Her address.”
“Go ahead.”
“They might reasonably assume that’s where you’ve gone,” he said. “They might even make life difficult for her. Have you thought of that? We could protect her. The French aren’t always as romantic as they’re often portrayed.”
“Elisabeth lived through the battle of Berlin,” I said. “She was raped by the Russians. Besides, she’s not the type to give a man an injection of thiopental on the streets of Göttingen in broad daylight. When Grottsch tells his story, I imagine the French will think the Russians pinched me, don’t you? After all, that’s what you wanted them to think, isn’t it? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your men were speaking Russian when they grabbed him. Just for appearance’s sake.”
“At least tell me if she lives in the East or the West.”
“In the West. The French gave me a passport in the name of Sébastien Kléber. You’ll be able to check me coming through Checkpoint Alpha at Helmstedt, and into Berlin at the Dreilinger Crossing. But not leaving it to enter East Berlin.”
“All right. Tell me your news about Erich Mielke.”
“My friend Elisabeth said she’d seen Mielke’s father, Erich. That he was still alive and in good health. He was in his early seventies, she said. They went for a coffee at the Café Kranzler. He said he’d been living in the DDR but that he didn’t like it. Missed the football and his old neighborhood. While Elisabeth was telling me this, it was clear she had no idea what Erich junior had been doing. Who and what he was. All she said was that Erich visits his father from time to time and gives him money. And I assumed, given who he was, that this must be in secret.”
“From time to time. How often is that?”
“Regularly. Once a month.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“I might have, if you’d given me enough time.”
“Did she say where Erich senior had been living? In the DDR?”
“The village of Schönwalde, northwest of Berlin. She said he told her he had a nice enough cottage there but that he was bored in Schönwalde. It’s rather a boring place. Of course, she knew that Erich senior had been a staunch communist and so she asked him if living in the West meant he had left the party. And he said that he had come to the conclusion that the communists were every bit as bad as the Nazis.”
“She said he said that?”
“Yes.”
“You know, we checked and there’s no record of an Erich Mielke living in West Berlin.”
“Mielke’s father isn’t called Mielke. His name is Erich Stellmacher. Mielke was illegitimate. Not that the father’s using the name of Stellmacher either.”
“Did she tell you what his name is?”
“No.”
“Give you an address?”
“Stellmacher isn’t that stupid.”
“But there is something. Something you’d like to trade.”
“Yes. Stellmacher told Elisabeth the name of a restaurant where he regularly likes to go for lunch on Saturdays.”
“And your idea is? What, exactly?”
“This is your area of expertise, not mine, Chief. I was never much of an intelligence officer. I didn’t have the kind of dirty mind to be really effective in your world. I was a better detective, I think. Better at uncovering a mess than creating one.”
“I see you have a low opinion of intelligence.”
“Just the people who work in it.”
“Us included.”
“You especially.”
“You prefer the French?”
“There’s something honest about their hypocrisy and self-regard.”
“As a former Berlin detective, what would you propose?”
“Follow Erich Stellmacher from his favorite restaurant to his apartment. And lay a trap for Erich Mielke there.”
“Risky.”
“Sure,” I said. “But now that you’ve pulled me, you’re going to do it all the same. You have to, now that you’ve partly undermined all that black propaganda I’d been giving to the French about Mielke being your agent—and before that, an agent of the Nazis. Without the cherry on the cake—me identifying de Boudel for them—maybe they won’t find all those lies I told about Erich so persuasive anymore.”