“Not just that,” I said. “Because I could connect him with the murders of those two Berlin policemen. You see, Heydrich always suspected that Mielke felt a certain amount of embarrassment that he’d committed a crime as serious as the murders of policemen. That it was somehow unworthy of him. He thought it was almost certainly Mielke who fingered the two Germans who put him up to it—Kippenberger and Neumann—during Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937. They both died in the labor camps. Their wives, too. Even Kippenberger’s daughter was sent to a labor camp. Mielke really tried to clean house there.

“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?”