“But I also knew about Mielke’s work in Spain. His work as a Chekist, with the military security service, torturing and killing those Republicans—anarchists and Trotskyites—who deviated from the party line as dictated by Stalin. Again, Heydrich strongly suspected that Mielke used his position as a political commissar with the International Brigade in Spain to eliminate Erich Ziemer. If you remember, Ziemer was the man who helped Mielke murder the two cops. And I think Heydrich was probably right. I think that Mielke may even have planned some political role for himself in Germany after the war; and he reasoned, quite rightly, that the German people—and more especially Berliners—would never take to a man who’d murdered two policemen in cold blood.”

“There was an attempt by the West Berlin courts in 1947 to prosecute him for those murders,” said the Ami with the bow tie. “A judge called Wilhelm Kühnast issued a warrant for Mielke’s arrest. Did you know about that?”

“No. By then, I wasn’t living in Berlin.”

“It failed, of course. The Soviets closed ranks in front of Mielke to shield him from further inquiry and tried their best to discredit Kühnast. The criminal records that Kühnast used to build up his case disappeared. Kühnast was lucky not to disappear himself.”

“Erich Mielke has survived numerous party purges,” said the Ami with the pipe. “He survived the death of Stalin, of course, and, rather more recently, the death of Lavrenty Beria. We think that he was never a relief volunteer for the Todt organization. That was just a story he gave you. If he had worked for them, he’d be dead like all the rest who came back and found a cold welcome from Stalin. To us it seems much more likely that Mielke got out of that French camp at Le Vernet quite soon after you saw him there, in the summer of 1940, and got himself back to the Soviet Union before Hitler invaded Russia.”

“Why not?” I shrugged. “He never struck me as the George Washington, ‘I cannot tell a lie’ type. So I’ll contain my obvious disappointment that he might have misled me.”

“Today, your old friend is East Germany’s deputy chief of the secret police. The Stasi. Have you heard of the Stasi?”

“I’ve been away for five years.”

“Okay. When Stalin died last year, there was this big workers’ strike in East Berlin, and then throughout the whole of the DDR. As many as half a million took to the streets to demand free and fair elections. Even policemen defected to the side of the protesters. This was the first big test of the Stasi as run by Mielke. And effectively, he broke the strike.”

“Big-time,” said the other Ami.

“At first martial law was declared. The Stasi opened fire on the protesters. Many were killed. Thousands were arrested and are still in prison. Mielke himself arrested the minister of justice, who’d questioned the legality of those arrests. Since then, Comrade Erich has been consolidating his position within the East German hierarchy. And he continues to expand the Stasi’s network of secret informers and spies, and to build the organization into the image of the Soviet KGB. The MVD, that was.”