“Most of the German communists in Moscow were lodged at a Comintern hotel called the Hotel Lux. There was a purge, and some of the more prominent German communists—Kippenberger, Neumann, ironically the very men who’d ordered the murders of Anlauf and Lenck—they were all shot. Kippenberger’s wife was packed off to a Soviet labor camp and never seen again. Neumann’s wife also went to a labor camp, but I think she survived. At least she did until Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1939, at which point she was handed over to the Gestapo. I’ve no idea what happened to her after that.”
“You’re very well-informed. How come you know so much about this, Gunther? Mielke. The whole damned crew of German commies.”
“For a while he was my beer,” I said. “How do you say it? My pigeon. Up to 1946, there’s not much I don’t know about Erich Mielke.”
“And then?”
“And then I hadn’t really given him a thought until the lawyer from the Office of the Chief Counsel used the name. To be honest, I wish I’d never heard it.”
“But you did. So here you are.”
“The last time I saw him, he was—he was working for the OGPU after it became the MVD. That was seven years ago.”
“Have you heard of the East German Secretariat for State Security?”
“No.”
“Some Germans already call it the Stasi. Your friend Erich is the deputy chief of State Security. A secret policeman and probably one of the three most important men in the East German security apparatus, if not the whole country.”
“He’s survived Stalin, Beria, he even survived the downfall of Wilhelm Zaisser after last year’s workers’ uprising in Berlin. Survival is your friend Mielke’s specialty.”
“I think I’m going to faint,” I said.
“The Allied Control Commission made an attempt to arrest him in February 1947, but the Russians were never going to let that happen.”
I had stopped listening. I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. Only, that wasn’t quite right. There wasn’t anything to listen to unless you counted the singing in my ears from when Erich Mielke’s father had hit me twenty-three years ago. Only, that wasn’t it either. Something cold and heavy was lying on the side of my head, and it was a moment or two before I realized it was the floor. The numbness in my hands was spreading through my whole body like embalming fluid. The hood over my head grew thicker and tightened, as if there were a hangman’s noose around my neck. It was difficult to breathe, but I didn’t care. Not anymore. I opened the bag and climbed inside. Then someone threw the bag off a bridge. I felt myself drop through the air for twenty-three years. By the time I landed, I had forgotten who and what and where I was.
14
I felt myself being carried. Then I fainted again. When I came to again, I was lying facedown on a bed and they had removed the manacles from one of my wrists and I could almost feel my hands again. Then they lifted me up and let me stand for a minute. I was thirsty, but I didn’t ask for water. I just stood there waiting to be shouted at or struck on the head, so that I flinched a little when I felt a blanket on my shoulders and a chair behind my bare legs; and as I sat down again a hand held on to the bag, pulling it off my head.
I found myself in a larger, more comfortably appointed cell than my own. There was a table with a little sill around the edge that might have stopped a pencil from rolling onto the floor and not much else, and on it a small potted plant that was dead. On the wall above me was a mark where a picture had been hanging, and in front of the double window—which was barred—was a washstand with a jug and a porcelain washbasin.
There were two men in that room with me, and neither one of them looked much like a torturer. They were wearing double-breasted suits and silk ties. One of them had a pair of horn-rimmed glasses on his nose and the other had a cherrywood pipe clamped, unlit, between his teeth. The one wearing the pipe in his face picked up the water jug and poured some water into a dusty-looking glass and handed it to me. I wanted to throw the water in his face, but instead I tossed it down my throat. The one with the glasses lit a cigarette and threaded it between my lips. I sucked at the smoke like mother’s milk.
“Was it something I said?” I grinned feebly.
Out of the first-floor window was a view of the garden and the conical roof of a little white tower in the prison wall. As far as I knew, it wasn’t a view that any red jacket in Landsberg was accustomed to seeing. Blinking against the sun streaming in through the window and the smoke streaming into my eye, I rubbed my chin wearily and took the cigarette from my mouth.
“Maybe,” said the man with the pipe. There was a mustache on his upper lip that matched the size and shape of his little blue bow tie. He had more chin than would have made him handsome, and while it wasn’t exactly Charles V, there were some, myself included, who would have grown a short beard on it to make it seem smaller, perhaps. But in my eyes leprosy would have looked a lot better on him.
The door opened. No keys were required to open this cell. The door just swung open and a guard came in carrying some clothes, followed by another guard bearing a tray with coffee and a hot meal. I didn’t much like the clothes, since these were the ones I’d been wearing the previous day, but the coffee and the food smelled like they’d been prepared in Kempinski’s. I started to eat before they changed their minds. When you’re hungry, clothes don’t seem that important. I didn’t use the knife and fork, because I couldn’t yet hold them properly. So I ate with my fingers, wiping them on my thighs and backside. I certainly wasn’t about to worry about my table manners. Immediately, I started to feel better. It’s amazing how good even an American cup of coffee can taste when you’re hungry.
“From now on,” said the man with the pipe, “this is your cell. Number seven.”
“Recognize that number?” The other Ami—the one wearing the glasses—had short gray hair and looked like any college professor. The arms of the glasses were too short for his head, and the hooks stood off his ears so that they looked like two small umbrellas. Maybe the glasses were too small for his face. Or maybe he’d borrowed them. Or maybe his head was abnormally large to accommodate all the abnormally unpleasant thoughts—most of them about me—that were in it.
I shrugged. My mind was a blank.
“Of course you do. It’s the Führer’s cell. Where you’re eating your food is where he wrote his book. And I don’t know which I find more disgusting. The thought of him writing down his poisonous thoughts, or you eating with your fingers.”
“I’ll certainly try not to let that thought spoil my appetite.”
“By all accounts, Hitler had an easy time here in Landsberg.”
“I guess you weren’t working here back then.”
“Tell me, Gunther. Did you ever read it? Hitler’s book.”
“Yes. I prefer Ayn Rand. But only just.”
“Do you like Ayn Rand?”
“No. I think Hitler would have liked her, though. He wanted to be an architect, too, of course. Only, he couldn’t afford the paper and the pencils. Not to mention the education. Plus he didn’t have a large enough ego. And I think you’ve got to be pretty tough to make it in that world.”