“Gunther,” he yelled. “That’s enough.” He let out a gasp and leaned heavily against a wall while he tried to recover all of his wits.
I shifted my jaw; my head felt larger on one side than the other and there was something singing in my ears, only it wasn’t a kettle.
“With all due respect, sir,” I said, “it’s not nearly enough.”
And then I kicked Mielke again before I staggered out of the apartment and onto the landing and, a minute or two later, puked over the banister.
13
I stopped talking. My throat felt tight, but not as tight as the handcuffs.
“Is that all there is?” demanded one of the two Amis.
“There’s more,” I said. “A lot more. But I can’t feel my hands. And I need to use the lavatory.”
“You saw Erich Mielke again.”
“Several times. The last time was 1946, when I was a POW in Russia. You see, Mielke was—”
“No, no. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We want everything in the correct order of appearance. That’s the German way, isn’t it?”
“If you say so.”
“All right, then. You went to his home. You had a police witness. You found the murder weapons in the drain. I take it those were the murder weapons?”
“A long-barreled Luger and a Dreyse .32. That was the standard police automatic back then. Yes, they were the murder weapons. Look, I really do need a rest. I can’t feel my hands—”
“Yes, you said that already.”
“I’m not asking for apple pie and ice cream, just a pair of handcuffs off. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
“After what you just told us? About kicking Mielke’s father when he was handcuffed and lying on the floor? That wasn’t very fair of you, Gunther.”
“He had it ordered, on room service. You hit a cop, you get trouble. I didn’t hit you, did I?”
“Not yet.”
“With these hands? I couldn’t hit my own knees.” I yawned inside the hood. “No, really, that’s it. I’ve had enough of this. Now that I know what you want, that makes it easier for me keep my peep. Regardless of the legalities or illegalities of this situation—”
“You are in a place where there is no law. We are the law. You want to piss yourself, then go ahead and make yourself comfortable. Then see what happens to you.”
“I’m beginning to understand—”
“I sure hope so, for your sake.”
“You enjoy playing Gestapo. It’s a little bit of a kick for you, doing it their way, isn’t it? Secretly, you probably admire them and the way they went about extracting teeth and information.”
They came close to me now, raising their voices beyond what was comfortable to hear.
“Fuck you, Gunther.”
“You hurt our feelings with that remark about the Gestapo.”
“I take it back. You’re much worse than the Gestapo. They didn’t pretend they were defending the free world. It’s your hypocrisy that’s offensive, not your brutality. You’re the worst kind of fascists. The kind that think they’re liberals.”
One of them started knocking at my head with the knuckle on his finger; it wasn’t painful so much as annoying.
“When are you going to get it into that fucking square head of yours—”
“You’re right. I still don’t understand why you’re doing this when I’m perfectly willing to cooperate.”
“You’re not meant to understand. When are you going to understand that, asshole? We want more than your willingness to cooperate. That implies you have some choice in the matter. When you don’t. It’s up to us to assess your level of cooperation, not you.”
“We want to know that when you’re telling us the truth there’s absolutely no question it could ever be anything else. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Which means that we’ll decide when you need a rest, when you need to go to the lavatory, when you see the light of day. When you breathe and when you fart. So. Tell us some more about Erich Mielke. Did he go to Hamburg or Rostock?”
“With Mielke senior safely in custody, myself and another detective caught the first train to Hamburg.”
“Why you? Why not someone else? Why were you so central to the investigation? Why not leave it to the Hamburg police?”
“I should have thought that was obvious. Or maybe you just weren’t listening, Yank. I’d met Erich Mielke. I knew what he looked like, remember? Besides, I had a personal stake in seeing him arrested. I saved his life. Of course, the Hamburg police were alerted to pick up Ziemer and Mielke. The trouble was someone inside the Alex had tipped them off, and by the time Kestner and I reached Hamburg—”
“Kestner?”
“Yes. He was with the political police. A detective sergeant. We were old friends, Kestner and I. Later on, when the Nazis won the election of March 1933, he joined the party. Lots of people did. The March violets or March fallen, we called them. Anyway, that was when we stopped being friends, he and I.
“Later on, I learned that Mielke and Ziemer had been taken to Antwerp by agents of the Comintern. There they were given false passports and, posing as crew members, they were put on a ship to Leningrad. From there they were taken to Moscow for training in the OGPU—Stalin’s secret police.”
“So there were communists as well as Nazis in the Berlin police.”
“Yes. Eldor Borck—a retired police major I was friendly with—he estimated that as many as ten percent of the Berlin police sympathized with the Bolsheviks. But there were never the Red Schupo cells that the Nazis claimed existed. Most police were natural conservatives. Instinctive fascists rather than ideological ones. Anyway, Ziemer and Mielke spent the next five years in Russia.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’ll come to that. Of course, even though we didn’t have the perpetrators of the murders of Anlauf and Lenck in custody, the Nazis were not about to allow a little fact like that stop them from making an example of people. There was a lot of propaganda value in making arrests and securing convictions.”
“Of other commies?”
“Of course of other commies. And it can’t be denied that Ziemer and Mielke did not act alone. Indeed, there was a strong case for believing that the whole riot on Bülowplatz had been engineered for the purpose of luring Anlauf and Sergeant Willig into a trap. As I said before, those two were really hated by the communists. Lenck was an accident, more or less. In the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Soon after I left the police to go and work at the Adlon hotel, an arrest was made. Fellow called Max Thunert. Very probably they put a bag over his head and persuaded him to name names. And name names he did. Fifteen men went to trial in June 1933, among them several prominent communists. Who knows? Maybe some of them had put Mielke and Ziemer up to the killing after all.
“Four received a death sentence. Eleven were sent to a concentration camp. But it was another two years before three of those death sentences were actually carried out. That was typical of the Nazis. To keep a man waiting for years before they executed him. I expect the Nazis could still teach you Ami bastards something about cruelty. It was in all the newspapers, of course. May 1935? I can’t recall their names, the ones who went to the falling ax. But I often wondered how Mielke and Ziemer, safe in Moscow, felt about it. How much they were told. Oddly enough, it was the same month, May 1935, when Stalin decided that some of the many German and Italian communists who’d fled to Moscow after Hitler and Mussolini came to power could no longer be trusted. European communism was always too heterogeneous for Stalin’s taste. Too many factions. Too many Trotskyites. I suspect that Mielke and Ziemer were more worried about what might happen to them than what was already happening to old comrades like Max Matern. Yes, I remember now. He was one who went to the guillotine.