She looked over my notes. “I can do that.” She nodded firmly. “Göttingen’s quaint. Pretty. What Germany used to look like. I’ve often thought it would be nice to live there.”
I shook my head. “You and me, Elisabeth. We’re Berliners. Hardly cut out for fairy-tale living.”
“I suppose you’re right. What will you do after Göttingen?”
“I don’t know, Elisabeth.”
“It seems to me,” she said, “that if there’s no one else in Berlin you know, or who you can trust, then you should think yourself free to come and live here. Like you did before. Remember?”
“Why else do you think I sent you that money from Cuba? I hadn’t forgotten. Lately, I’ve had to do quite a bit of remembering one way or another. Telling my story to—well, it doesn’t matter who. A lot of stuff I’d rather forget. But I don’t forget that. You can depend on it. I never forgot about you.”
Of course, not everything had been told back at Landsberg.
A man should keep some secrets, after all, especially when he’s talking to the CIA.
Special Agents Scheuer and Frei might have opened a file in Elisabeth Dehler’s name if I’d told them every little detail about what happened on the train from the pleni camp in Johannesgeorgenstadt to Dresden, and then Berlin, in 1946.
I hadn’t wanted them bothering her, so I hadn’t mentioned the fact that the address on the envelope containing the several hundred dollars Mielke had given me was Elisabeth’s.
29
Instead of pocketing this money, I’d resolved to deliver it to her myself—as the MVD assassin would have done if I hadn’t killed him first. Besides, I needed somewhere to stay, and where better to stay than with a former lover? So, when I got off the train from Dresden in the no-less-depressing ruin of Anhalter Station in Berlin, I’d quickly boarded a westbound tram and headed straight for the Kurfürstendamm.
From there I walked south, convinced that at least one of Hitler’s predictions had come true. In the early days of his success, he had told us that “in five years you will not recognize Germany,” and this was certainly true. Kurfürstendamm, formerly one of Berlin’s most prosperous streets, was now little more than a series of ruins. Even for me, a former policeman, it was hard to find one’s way around. Once, forgetting the uniform I was wearing, I asked a woman for directions and she hurried away without reply, as if I’d been the carrier of plague. Later on, when I heard about what the Red Army had done to the women of Berlin, I wondered why she’d not picked up a rock and thrown it at me.
Motzstrasse was not as badly damaged as some. Even so, it was hard to imagine anyone safely living there. One decent earthmover could probably have leveled the entire street. It was like walking through a scene from the apocalypse. Piles of rubble. Buttressed façades. Moon-sized craters. The prevailing smell of sewage. The road underfoot as uncertain as a mountain path. Burned-out armored vehicles. The occasional grave.
The window on the landing in front of Elisabeth’s apartment was gone and boarded over, but the weather-beaten door looked secure enough. I knocked at it for several minutes until a voice shouted down the stairs and told me that Elisabeth was out until five. I glanced at the dead major’s watch and realized I needed to kill some time without drawing too much attention to myself. It wasn’t that an MVD officer was unusual in the American sector, but I thought it best to avoid contact with anyone official, who might have asked what I was doing.
I walked until I found a church I almost recognized, on Kieler Strasse, although given the state of Kieler Strasse it might just as easily have been Düppelstrasse. The church was Catholic and strangely tall and angular, like a castle on a mountaintop. Inside there was a fine mosaic basilica that had escaped the bombs. I sat down and closed my eyes, not from reverence but sheer fatigue. But this was hardly the quiet sanctuary I had expected. Every few minutes an American serviceman would come in with loud, polished shoes, genuflect to the altar, and then wait patiently on a pew near the confessional. Business was brisk. After the day I’d had, I might have confessed myself, but I wasn’t feeling particularly sorry about that. I’d been wanting to kill a Russian—any Russian—ever since the Battle of Königsberg. I told Him that myself. I didn’t need a priest to come between us in what was, by now, an old argument.
I stayed there for a long time. Long enough to make peace with myself, if not God, and when I left the Rosary Church—for that was its name—I put a few of the MVD major’s coins into a collection box, for his sins, if not mine. Then I walked north again. And this time Elisabeth was at home, although she regarded my uniform with horror.
“What the hell are you doing here dressed like that?” she demanded.
“Ask me in and I’ll explain. Believe me, it’s not at all what it looks like.”
“It better not be, or you can be on your way again. I don’t care who you are.”
I entered her apartment, and it was immediately clear from the bed and the gas ring that she was living in just the one room. Seeing my eyebrows flex their surprise, she said, “It’s easier to heat like this.”
I dropped Major Weltz’s bag onto the floor and took the envelope of money from inside my gimnasterka tunic and handed it over. Now it was Elisabeth’s turn to exercise her eyebrows. She fanned herself with several hundred American dollars and then read Mielke’s note, which made everything clear.
“Did you read this?”
“Of course.”
“So where’s the Russian who was supposed to give me this?”
“Dead. This is his uniform I’m wearing.” I thought it best to keep things as simple as possible.
“Why didn’t you keep this for yourself?”
“Oh, I would have,” I said, “if it had been anyone else’s name on that envelope. After all, it’s not like we’re strangers.”
“No,” she said. “All the same, it’s been a long time. I thought you must be dead.”
“Why not? Everyone else is.” I told her, as briefly as possible, that I’d been in a Soviet POW camp and that I’d escaped. “I was supposed to be on my way to Berlin and then to the Anti-Fascist School near Moscow. All arranged by our mutual friend, of course. But I think he figured I knew too much about his past and decided the safer thing was to have me eliminated. So here I am. I thought that the woman named on that envelope might be prepared to overlook the fact that I left her for another woman and let me lie low for a couple of days. Especially when she saw those dollars.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “How is Kirsten?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen or heard from Frau Gunther since Christmas 1944. Earlier on today, I took a walk down my old street and found it isn’t there anymore.”
“I guess if it had been, then you wouldn’t be here now and I wouldn’t have this.”
“Anything’s possible.”
“Well, that’s honest, anyway.” She thought for a moment. “People who were bombed out usually leave a little red card on the ruins, with some sort of address, in case a loved one turns up.”
“Well, maybe that’s it. Loved one. Kirsten never was what you’d call loving. Unless you mean herself, of course. She always loved herself.” I shook my head. “There wasn’t any little red card. I looked.”