“There are other ways of contacting relatives,” said Elisabeth.
“Not looking like this there aren’t. It’s only a matter of time before I’m picked up. And shot. Or sent back to the POW camp, which would be worse.”
“It’s true. Maybe it’s the uniform, but you don’t look so good. I’ve seen healthier skeletons.” She shrugged. “Very well. You can stay here. The first time you try any funny stuff, you’re on your toes. Meanwhile, I’ll see what I can find out about Kirsten.”
“Thanks. Look, I have a little money of my own. Perhaps you could find or even buy me some clothes, too.”
She nodded. “I’ll go to the Reichstag first thing in the morning.”
“The Reichstag? I was thinking of something a little less formal, perhaps.”
“That’s where the black market is,” she said. “The biggest in the city. Believe me, there’s nothing you can’t get there. From a pair of nylons to a fake denazification certificate. Perhaps I can get you one of those, too. Of course, it’ll mean I’m late for work.”
“Tailoring?”
She shook her head grimly. “I’m a servant, Bernie,” she said. “Like nearly everyone left alive in Berlin. I’m the housekeeper for a family of American diplomats in Zehlendorf. Hey, perhaps I can find you a job, too. They need a gardener. I can go into the labor office at McNair on my way back from work tomorrow.”
“McNair?”
“McNair Barracks. Just about everything to do with the U.S. Army in Berlin takes place at McNair.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but if you don’t mind, I’d rather not have a proper job at this moment. I’ve spent the last eighteen months working harder than a donkey with three masters. If I never see another pick and shovel again, it will be too soon.”
“Rough, huh?”
“Only by the standards of a Russian serf. Now that I’ve lived and almost died in the Soviet Union, it’s easy to see where they learn their manners. And where they find their sunny outlook on life. There’s not an Ivan I met who could ever be mistaken for an optimist.” I shrugged. “Still, our mutual friend seems to be well in with them.” I nodded at the envelope she was still holding. “Erich.”
“You have no idea how much I need this money.”
“Presumably he did, though. I wonder why he didn’t give it to you himself.”
“He has his reasons, I suppose. Erich doesn’t forget his friends.”
“I couldn’t argue with that, Elisabeth.”
“Did he really try to have you killed?”
“Only a bit.”
She shook her head. “He was a hothead when he was younger, it’s true. But he never struck me as a cold-blooded killer. Those two cops. I never believed he did that, you know. And I can’t believe he ordered someone to murder you.”
“The two Germans I was traveling with aren’t here to tell you you’re wrong, Elisabeth. They weren’t as lucky as me.”
“You mean they’re dead.”
“Right now that’s my working definition of unlucky.” I shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably it always was.”
30
On Monday morning, we drove out of East Germany and back to Hannover, where I spent another night in the safe house. And early the next day we drove south to Göttingen and checked into an old pension overlooking the canal on Reitstallstrasse. The pension was damp, with hard wooden floors, even harder furniture, high ceilings, and dusty brass chandeliers; and about as homely as Cologne Cathedral. But from there it was only a short walk to the VdH office in a half-timbered building on Judenstrasse that looked like it was home to a family of three bears. Everywhere in Göttingen was a bit like that, and quite a few of the people, too. The director of the local VdH, Herr Dr. Winkel, was a mild, bespectacled type who might once have been the court librarian to some ancient king of Saxony. And he informed me what we already knew, that a train carrying a thousand German plenis was due in Friedland the following week. For form’s sake we decided—I, Grottsch, and Wenger—to pay a visit to the refugee camp at Friedland.
Previously a research farm owned by Göttingen University, the Friedland Camp was in the British zone and composed of a series of what were called Nissen huts. If Nissen was a synonym of “grim and inhospitable,” then these half-cylindrical corrugated-iron structures were well named. The camp was a miserable-looking place, especially in the rain, an impression that was underscored by the muddy roads and the goose-shit green that everything was painted. And it was all too easy to give credence to the rumor that the Friedland Refugee Camp had been the location for anthrax experiments conducted by Nazi scientists during the war. As a reintroduction to homeland, freedom, and all things wholesomely German, the camp left a great deal to be desired and, in my expert opinion, was almost as bad as any of the labor camps that these German POWs had left behind. I might have succeeded in feeling sorry for these men had it not been for the fact that I was rather more concerned for my own welfare, as the prospect of mixing with a large number of plenis was not without its hazards. Even after an interval of six or seven years, it was possible I might be recognized and denounced as some sort of “comrade-killer,” a renegade or a collaborator. After all, as far as anyone back at the camp in Johannesgeorgenstadt was concerned, I had sold out to the Reds and gone to Russia for anti-fascist training at Krasnogorsk. And I was reminded of the precariousness of my position when I asked one of the Friedland camp police why they were needed at all.
“Surely,” I said, “Germans who have come back home know how to behave themselves.”
“That’s just the point,” said the policeman. “They’re not back home, are they? At least not at home. Some of them get a bit pissed off when they find out they’re going to be here, sometimes for as long as six to eight weeks. But it can take that long to get them sorted out with everything they’re going to need for life in the new republic. Then there are the prisoners intent on settling old scores with each other. Men who have denounced other men to the Ivans. Informers. That kind of thing. Deprivation of liberty, we call that kind of behavior if it leads to someone getting more ill-treatment from the Ivans, and we charge them under section 239 of the German Criminal Code. At the present moment, there are over two hundred pending cases involving ex-POWs. Of course, that’s just the ones we find out about, and just as often someone in the camp turns up dead, his throat cut, and no one saw or heard a thing. That’s not at all uncommon, sir. In this camp, we reckon on as many as one murder a week.”
Of course, I hardly wanted to inform the French Intelligence Service of my own fears. I had no appetite for an early return to La Santé, or indeed any other of the five prisons I’d been in since leaving Havana. And I was resigned to hoping that, come what may, the Franzis would protect me just as long as they thought I was their best chance of identifying and arresting Edgard de Boudel.
The fact that I had never seen or even heard of someone called Edgard de Boudel was neither here nor there. I was doing what I had been told to do by the Americans in Landsberg. And when I returned to my room at the Pension Esebeck in Göttingen, I wrote a note to my CIA handlers describing the full extent of my progress: how the French had listened to me paint a picture of de Boudel at the same time I had also been painting another picture, of Erich Mielke; and that they appeared to accept everything I had told them about Mielke—all of which was false—because of everything I had told them about Edgard de Boudel, which was true. This operation was what Scheuer called “the beautiful twin.” The French—and, more important, the Soviet agent whom the Americans knew to be at the heart of the SDECE in Paris—would, it was supposed, be more inclined to believe my lies and misrepresentations about Mielke if everything they were told about de Boudel coincided with what they knew about him, or strongly suspected. And the icing on this rich cake was a tip-off (supplied to them by the British, who, of course, had received it from the Americans) that Edgard de Boudel was arriving back in Germany as a returning POW, having served out his usefulness to the Russians in Indochina, where, as a political commissar, he had assisted the Viet Minh in the interrogation and torture of many captured French soldiers, most of whom still remained, until the Geneva negotiations were complete, prisoners of war in Indochina. All I had to do was identify de Boudel and the French would, it was supposed, treat me and my information about Mielke as gold-plated; and to this end, before my “deportation” from Landsberg to Paris, I had carefully studied the only known photographs of de Boudel. It was hoped that these two pictures, along with my own familiarity with the life of a German POW—not to mention my background as a Kripo detective—would help me spot him for the French, who forever thereafter would be in thrall to me as an intelligence source. Because Edgard de Boudel was one of the most wanted men in France.