“I’m all ears, Erich. Just two of them at the last count.”

“We both know that you would make a very poor officer in the Fifth Kommissariat. First, you would have to attend the Anti-Fascist School in Krasnogorsk. For reeducation. To be turned into a believer. From our one meeting and everything I’ve read about you, Gunther, I’m quite convinced that it would be a waste of time trying to convert you into a communist. However, that still remains your best way out of here. To volunteer for K-5 and reeducation.”

“It’s true, I’ve rather neglected my reading of late, but…”

“Naturally, this would only be a smoke screen for your escape.”

“Naturally. I suppose there’s no chance of me being shot through this smoke screen.”

“There’s a chance of us both being shot, if you really want to know. I’m sticking my neck out for you, Gunther. I hope you appreciate that. Over the last ten or twelve years, I’ve become something of an expert at saving my own skin. I imagine it’s something we have in common. Either way, it’s not something I do lightly.”

“Why do it at all? Why take the risk? I don’t get it the same way you didn’t get it.”

“You think you’re the only rat that’s not cut out for it? You think a Gestapo officer is the only man who can develop a conscience?”

“I was never a believer. But you—you believed it all, Erich.”

“It’s true. I did believe. Absolutely. Which is why it comes as a shock to discover that party loyalty can count for nothing, and everything can be taken away again at the stroke of a pen.”

“Why would they do that to you, Erich?”

“We all have our little secrets, that’s why.”

“No, that won’t do,” I said, parroting his earlier speech once more. “Tell me. I want to know. And then maybe I’ll trust you.”

Mielke stood up and walked around the room with his arms folded around himself in thought. After a while, he nodded and said:

“Did you ever wonder what happened to me after Le Vernet?”

“Yes. But I told Heydrich you joined the Foreign Legion. I’m not sure if he believed me.”

“I was interned at Le Vernet for another three years after I saw you in 1940. Can you imagine that? Three years in hell. Well, perhaps you can now—yes, I suppose you can. I was posing as a German Latvian called Richard Hebel. Then, in December 1943, I was conscripted as a laborer into Speer’s Ministry for Armaments and War Production. I became what had previously been known as a Todt worker. Effectively, I and thousands of others were slave labor for the Nazis. I myself was a woodcutter in the Ardennes Forest, supplying fuel for the German army. That’s where I became the man you see now. These are woodcutter’s shoulders. Anyway, I remained a so-called relief volunteer, working twelve hours a day until the end of the war, when I made my way back to Berlin and walked into the newly legalized KPD headquarters on Potsdamer Platz to volunteer my services to the party. I was extremely lucky. I met someone who told me to lie about what I’d been doing during the war. He advised me to say that I hadn’t been a prisoner at all, and certainly not a relief volunteer for the fascists.”