We pulled on a bell for several minutes before a gray-haired head appeared out of a dirty window.
“Yes?”
“Police,” said Heller. “Open up.”
“What’s the matter?”
“As if you don’t know,” I said. “Open up, or we’ll kick the door in.”
“All right.”
The head disappeared, and a minute or so later we heard the door open and we ran upstairs as if we actually believed there was a chance we might still apprehend Erich Mielke. In truth, neither of us thought there was much hope of that happening. Not in Gesundbrunnen. It was the kind of area where children were taught how to stay one step ahead of the cops before they learned long division.
At the top of the stairs, a man wearing trousers and a pajama jacket admitted us to a little flat that was a shrine to the class struggle. Every wall was hung with KPD posters, notices of strikes and demonstrations, and cheap portraits of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Marx, and Lenin. Unlike any of them, the man standing in front of us at least looked like a worker. He was around fifty, stocky and short, with a bull neck, a receding hairline, and an advancing waist. He stared at us suspiciously with small, close-set eyes that were like diacritical marks inside a naught. Short of wearing a towel and a silk dressing gown, he couldn’t have looked any more rough and pugnacious.
“So what does the Berlin polenta want with me?”
“We’re looking for a Herr Erich Mielke,” said Heller. His punctiliousness was typical. You didn’t get to be a counselor in the Berlin police without paying attention to detail, especially when you were also a Jew. That was probably the ex-lawyer in him. That was the part of Heller I didn’t care for—the punctilious lawyer. The stocky little man in the pajama jacket didn’t seem to like it either.
“He’s not here,” he said, barely concealing a smirk of pleasure.
“And who are you?”
“His father.”
“When did you last see your son?”
“A few days ago. So what’s he supposed to have done? Hit a policeman?”
“No,” said Heller. “On this occasion, it seems that he’s shot and killed at least one.”
“That’s too bad.” But the man’s tone seemed to suggest he didn’t think that it was too bad at all.
By now the resemblance between father and son was all too obvious to me, and I turned and walked into the kitchen just in case the temptation to hit him grew too strong for me.
“You won’t find him in there, either.”
I put my hand on the gas ring. It was still warm. A pile of half-smoked cigarettes lay in an ashtray as if put there by someone who was feeling nervous about something. No one in Gesundbrunnen would have wasted tobacco like that. I pictured a man sitting in a chair by the window. A man who’d been trying to occupy his mind with a book, perhaps, while he waited for a car to come and take him and Ziemer to a KPD safe house. I picked up the book that lay on the kitchen table. It was All Quiet on the Western Front.
“Do you know where your son might be now?” asked Heller.
“I haven’t a clue. Frankly, he could be anywhere. Never tells me anything about where he’s been or where he’s going. Well, you know what young men are like.”
I came back into the room and stood behind him. “You KPD?”
He looked over his shoulder and smiled. “It’s not illegal, is it? Yet?”
“Perhaps you were in Bülowplatz yourself last night.” While I spoke, I turned the pages of the book.
He shook his head. “Me? No. I was here all night.”
“Are you sure? After all, there were several hundred of your comrades there, including your son. Maybe as many as a thousand. Surely you wouldn’t have missed something as fun-packed as that?”
“No,” he said firmly. “I stayed at home. I always stay at home on a Sunday night.”
“Are you religious?” I said. “You don’t look religious.”
“On account of the fact that I have to go to work in”—he nodded at the little wooden clock on the tiled mantelpiece—“yes, in just two hours from now.”
“Any witnesses that you were here all night?”
“The Geislers, next door.”
“Is this your book?”
“Yes.”
“Good, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t have thought it was your taste,” he said.
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“I hear the Nazis want to ban it.”
“Maybe they do. But I’m not a Nazi. And neither is the police counselor, here.”
“All cops are Nazis in my book.”
“Yes, but this isn’t it. I mean your book.” I turned the page and removed the Ringbahn ticket that was marking the reader’s place. “This ticket says you’re lying.”
“What do you mean?”
“This ticket is for Gesundbrunnen Station, just a few minutes’ walk from here. It was bought at Schönhauser Tor at eight-twenty this evening, which is about twenty minutes after two policemen were murdered on Bülowplatz. That’s less than a hundred meters from the station at Schönhauser Tor. Which puts the owner of this book in the thick of it.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“Herr Mielke,” said Heller, “you’re in enough trouble as it is without putting the brakes on your mouth.”
“You won’t catch him,” he said defiantly. “Not now. If I know my Erich, he’s already halfway to Moscow.”
“Not nearly halfway,” I said. “And not Moscow, either, I’ll bet. Not if you say so. That means it has to be Leningrad. Which in itself means he’s probably traveling by boat. So the chances are he’ll be heading to one of two German ports. Hamburg or Rostock. Rostock’s nearer, so he’ll probably figure to second-guess us and head for Hamburg. Which is what? Two hundred and fifty kilometers? They might be there by now if they left before midnight. My guess is that Erich’s probably on the Grasbrook or Sandtor Dock at this very moment, sneaking onto a Russian freighter and boasting about how he shot a fascist policeman in the back. They’ll probably give the little coward an Order of Lenin for bravery.”
Some of this must have touched a nerve in Mielke’s changeling body. One minute his beer-swilling troll’s face was in ugly repose; the next the jaw had advanced belligerently and, growling abuse, he took a swing at me. Fortunately, I was half expecting it and I was already leaning back when it connected, but it still felt like I got hit by a sandbag. Feeling sick, I sat down hard on a soft chair. For a moment I had a new way of seeing the world, but it had nothing to do with Berlin’s avant-garde. Mielke senior was grinning now, his mouth a gap-toothed, moon-gnawing rictus, his big trench mace of a fist already heading Heller’s way; and when its orbit around Mielke’s body was complete it crashed into the surface of Heller’s skull like an asteroid, sending the police counselor sprawling onto the floor, where he groaned and lay still.
I got to my feet again. “I’m going to enjoy this, you ugly commie bastard.”
Mielke senior turned just in time to meet my fist coming the other way. The blow rocked the big head on his meaty shoulders like a sudden bad smell in his nostrils, and as he took a step backward, I hit him again with a right that descended on the side of his head like a Borotra first service. That lifted his legs off the ground like a plane’s undercarriage, and for a split second he actually seemed to fly through the air before landing on his knees. As he rolled onto his side I twisted one arm behind them, then the other, and managed to hold them long enough for a groggy-looking Heller to get the irons on his wrists. Then I stood up and kicked him hard, because I wasn’t able to kick his son and because I was wishing I hadn’t saved the young man’s neck. I might have kicked him again, but Heller stopped me and, but for the fact that he was a counselor and I was still feeling sick, I might have kicked him, too.