Holter produced a notebook and a pencil and began asking questions and noting the answers.
“Rank?”
“Hauptmann.”
“Any medals?”
“Iron Cross, with Royal Citation. Great War Participation Medal, with swords and wound badge. That’s it.”
“Trousers or riding breeches?”
I shrugged.
“Both,” he said. “Dress dagger?”
I shook my head.
“Hat size?”
“Sixty-two centimeters.”
Holter nodded. “We’ll have Hoffmann’s in Gneisenaustrasse send over a couple for you to try on. Until then, perhaps you’d like to slip off your jacket and I’ll take your measurements.” He glanced at a little calendar on the wall. “It’s always a hurry with General Heydrich.”
“Yes, it’s never a good idea to disagree with him.” I said, slipping off my jacket. “I do know that feeling. Where Heydrich is concerned, your black armband could be catching.”
It was after I’d been measured and I was on my way out of the door that I bumped into Elisabeth Gehler, who was coming into the tailor’s shop with a uniform box under her arm. I hadn’t seen her very much since that night in 1931 when she’d taken offense at my turning up at her apartment and asking for Mielke’s address. But she greeted me warmly, as if all that was forgotten now, and agreed to come and meet me for a coffee after she had delivered the uniform to Herr Holter.
I waited around the corner at Miericke, on Ranke Strasse, where the chocolate cake was still the best in Berlin.
When she arrived, she told me that since the beginning of the war she’d had little or no time for making dresses; everyone wanted her for tailoring uniforms.
“This war is over before it even got started,” I told her. “You’ll be back to dressmaking in no time at all.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said. “Even so, I suppose that’s why you were there, at Holter’s. To get yourself a uniform.”
“Yes. I have a police job to do in Paris next week.”
“Paris.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “What I wouldn’t give to be going to Paris.”
“You know, I was just thinking of you about an hour ago.”
She pulled a face. “I don’t believe you.”
“Honestly, it’s true. I was.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. I hardly wanted to tell her that I was being sent to Paris to hunt down her old friend Erich Mielke and that this was the reason she was in my mind again.
“Oh, I was just thinking that it would be nice to see you again, Elisabeth. Perhaps when I get back from Paris we could see a movie together.”
“I thought you said you were going to Paris next week.”
“I am.”
“Then what’s wrong with seeing a movie this week?”
“If it comes to that,” I said, “what’s wrong with tonight?”
She nodded. “Pick me up at six,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek.
We were on our way out of the coffee shop when she said, “I nearly forgot. I’m living somewhere else now.”
“No wonder I couldn’t find you.”
“As if you tried. Motzstrasse. Number twenty-eight. First floor. My name is on the bell.”
“I’m already looking forward to ringing it.”
16
At least it wasn’t a black uniform. But in the Anhalter Bahnhof, waiting to board the Reich Railways train early that July morning, I felt oddly uncomfortable dressed as a Sipo captain in spite of the fact that almost everyone else was wearing a uniform. It was as if I’d signed a contract in blood with Hitler himself. In the event the great Mephistopheles chose not to visit the French capital by train. The Gestapo got wind of at least two plots to kill him while he was in Paris, and the word aboard the train was that Hitler had already returned from a flying visit to the jewel in his crown of conquest via Le Bourget, on June 23. Consequently, although quite luxurious in many respects—there were, after all, several senior Wehrmacht generals aboard—the train we traveled in was not the Amerika, the special train carrying the Führer headquarters and, by all accounts, the last word in Pullman-class comfort. That curiously named train—possibly it was a pun based on the Herms Niel song I had sung in Heydrich’s office—was, it seemed, back at the Tempelhof Repair Depot in the southwest of Berlin. Since meeting Elisabeth again, I rather wished I could have been there myself, for although a small part of me was looking forward to seeing Paris, mostly I felt a distinct lack of enthusiasm for my mission. A lot of people in Sipo would have leapt at an all-expenses-paid trip to the most glamorous city in the world. And a little bit of murder along the way wouldn’t have bothered them in the slightest. There were some on that train who looked like they’d been murdering people since 1933. Including the fellow sitting opposite me, an SS-Untersturmführer—a lieutenant I half recognized from police headquarters in Alexanderplatz.
His little rat’s eyes got there ahead of me, however.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said politely. “But aren’t you Chief Inspector Gunther? From the Homicide Division?”
“Have we met?”
“I was working Vice Squad at the Alex when I think I saw you last. My name is Willms. Nikolaus Willms.”
I nodded silently.
“Vice isn’t as glamorous as Homicide,” he said. “But it has its moments.”
He smiled without smiling—the sort of expression a snake has when it opens its mouth to swallow something whole. He was smaller than me, but he had the ambitious look of a man who might eventually swallow something larger than himself.
“So what takes you to Paris?” I asked without much interest.
“This isn’t my first trip,” he said. “I’ve been there for the last two weeks. I only came back to Berlin to attend to a family matter.”
“You still have some work to do there?”
“There’s plenty of vice in Paris, sir.”
“So I’m led to believe.”
“Although with any luck I won’t be stuck in Vice for very long.”
“No?”
Willms shook his head. He was small but powerful, and sat with his legs apart and his arms folded, as if watching a football match. He said:
“After the SD school in Bernau, I was sent on an exclusive leadership course in Berlin-Charlottenburg. It was the people who ran that course who organized this posting. I speak fluent French, you see. I’m from Trier originally.”
“So that’s what I can hear in your accent. French. I imagine that comes in handy in your line of work.”
“To be honest with you, sir, it’s rather dull work. I’m hoping for something a bit more exciting than a lot of French whores.”
“There are about five hundred soldiers on this train who would disagree with that, Lieutenant.”
He smiled, a proper smile this time, with teeth, only it didn’t work any better, the way a smile was supposed to work.
“So what are you hoping for?”
“My father was killed in the war,” Willms explained. “At Verdun. By a French sniper. I was two when that happened So I’ve always hated the French. I hate everything about them. I suppose I’d like a chance to pay them back for what they did to me. For taking my dad away from us. For giving me such a miserable childhood. My family should have left Trier, but we couldn’t afford to go. So we stayed. My mother and my sisters. We stayed in Trier and we were hated.” He nodded thoughtfully. “I should very much like to work for the Gestapo in Paris. Giving the Franzis a hard time sounds just about right to me. Cool a few, if you know what I mean, sir.”
“The war’s over,” I said. “I should think your chances for cooling any French, as you put it, are rather limited now. They’ve surrendered.”