He was wearing an old loden coat and a hat with a goose feather in the silk band, and you could hear the nails in his shoes from the other side of the street. He was stout and balding and wore a different pair of glasses now. There was, without a doubt, a strong resemblance to Erich Mielke. He was about the same height, too. He checked his fly as if he’d been to the lavatory and walked south toward Kant Strasse. After a decent interval, I followed with one hand on my little knight’s head.
I felt even better now that I was walking alone. Well, almost alone. I glanced around and saw two of them—Frei and Hamer—about thirty meters behind me, on opposite sides of the street. I couldn’t see Scheuer and decided he’d probably gone to fetch the car so that they wouldn’t have to walk when, eventually, we tracked our man to his lair. Americans didn’t like walking any more than they cared to miss a meal. Since I’d started to spend some time with them I had observed that the average American—supposing that these men were average Americans—eats about twice as much as the average German. Every day.
On Kant Strasse the man turned right toward Savigny Platz; then, near the S-Bahn, a train pulled into the elevated station above his head and he broke into a trot. So did I, and I only just managed to buy a ticket and board the train before the doors closed and we were on our way, northeast, toward Old Moabit. Hamer and Frei weren’t so lucky, and just as the train pulled out I glimpsed them running up the stairs of Savigny Platz Station. I might have smiled at them, too, if what I was doing hadn’t felt so vital to my own future and fortune.
I sat down and stared straight ahead and out of the window. All of the old police training was kicking in again: the way to follow a man without making yourself obvious. Mostly, it was about keeping your distance and learning how to tail a man who was behind you as often as he was in front of you—or, as now, in the adjoining carriage. I could see him through the connecting window, still reading his newspaper. That made it easier for me, of course. And the thought that I was well on top of it made the discomfiture that was very likely being experienced by the Amis all the more enjoyable. Scheuer I almost liked, but Hamer and Frei were a different matter. I especially disliked Hamer, if only because of his arrogance and because he seemed to have a real dislike of Germans. Well, we were used to that. But it was still annoying.
Without moving my head, I rolled my eyes to one side like a ventriloquist’s dummy. We were coming into Zoo Station, and I was watching the newspaper in the next carriage to see if it got folded away, but it stayed erect and remained that way through the stations at Tiergarten and Bellevue; but at Lehrter it finally came down and the reader stood up to disembark.
He went down the steps and walked north, with Humboldt Harbor on his right. Several canal boats moored together in one large flotilla shifted gently on the steel-blue water of the British sector. On the other side of the same harbor was the Charité Hospital and the Russian sector. In the distance, East German or possibly Russian border guards manned a checkpoint on the junction of Invalidenstrasse and the Canal. But we were walking north, up Heide Strasse, until we came to the French sector, where we turned right along Fenn Strasse and onto the triangular Wedding Platz. I paused for a moment to take in the ruins of the Dankes Church, where I had married my first wife, and then caught a last glimpse of my man as finally he went to ground in a tall building on the southern Schulzendorfer Strasse, overlooking the old disused brewery.
There was little or no traffic on the square. Almost as bankrupt as the British, the French had little money to spend regenerating German business in the area, let alone for the restoration of a church that had been built in thanksgiving for the delivery of their ancient mortal enemy, Kaiser Wilhelm I, from an attempt made on his life in 1878.
I approached the building on the corner of Schulzendorfer Strasse and glanced down Chaussee Strasse. Here the border crossing point, on Liesen Strasse, was very close and probably just the other side of the brewery wall. I looked at the names on the brass bellpulls and figured that Erich Stahl was close enough to Eric Stellmacher for our clandestine operation now to proceed as planned.
38
We moved to a small and very crummy safe house on Dreyse Strasse, east of Moabit Hospital, in the British zone, which, Scheuer said, was as close to Stallmacher’s apartment as we dared to get for the moment without tipping our hand to the Russians or, for that matter, the French. The British were told only that we were keeping a suspected black marketeer under surveillance.
The plan was simple: that I, being a Berliner, would contact the owner of the building on Schulzendorfer Strasse and offer to rent one of several empty apartments using my wife’s maiden name. The owner, a retired lawyer from Wilmersdorf, showed me around the apartment—which he’d furnished himself—and it was much better on the inside than it looked from the outside. He explained that the building had been owned and administered by his wife, Martha, until she had been killed by a bomb the previous year while visiting her mother’s grave in Oranienburg.
“They said she never knew a thing,” said Herr Schurz. “A two-hundred-and-fifty-kilogram American aerial bomb had lain there for almost ten years without anyone noticing. A grave digger twenty meters away was digging, and he must have hit the thing with his pickax.”
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“They say Oranienburg is full of unexploded ordnance. The soil is soft there, you see, with a hard layer of gravel underneath. The bombs would penetrate the earth but not the gravel.” He shrugged and then shook his head. “Apparently, there were a lot of targets in Oranienburg.”
I nodded. “The Heinkel factory. And a pharmaceutical plant. Not to mention a suspected atomic bomb research plant.”
“Are you married, Herr Handlöser?”
“No, my wife also is dead. She got pneumonia. But she’d been ill for a while, so it wasn’t as unexpected as what happened to your wife.”
I went to the window and looked down onto the street.
“This is a big apartment for someone living by himself,” said Schurz.
“I’m planning to take in a couple of tenants to help me with the rent,” I said. “If that’s all right with you. Some gentlemen from an American Bible school.”
“I’m pleased to hear it,” said Schurz. “That’s what the whole French sector needs now. More Americans. They’re the only ones with any money. Talking of which.”
I counted some banknotes into his eager hand. He gave me a set of keys, and then I returned to the safe house on Dreyse Strasse.
“As far as the landlord is concerned,” I said, “we can move in tomorrow.”
“You said nothing to him about Stahl or Stellmacher,” said Scheuer.
“I did exactly as you told me. I didn’t even ask about the neighbors. So what happens now?”
“We move in and keep the place under close surveillance,” said Scheuer. “Wait for Erich Mielke to visit his dad and then go upstairs to introduce ourselves.”
Frei laughed. “Hello, we’re your new neighbors. Can we interest you in defecting to the West? You and your old man.”
“What happened to the idea of making him into your spy?”
“Not enough leverage. Our political masters want to know what the East German leadership is thinking now, not what they’re thinking in a year’s time. So we grab him and take him back to the States to debrief him.”
“You’re forgetting Mielke’s wife, Gertrud, aren’t you? And doesn’t he have a son now? Frank? He won’t want to leave them, surely.”