I might have said something, too, but for the fact that the handcuffed men were already being marched downstairs—each between two Stasi men, as if they were being led to a firing squad. If I had spoken to them I might have adduced the months of ill-treatment I had endured at their hands, not to mention my desire to be away from their control and influence, but it hardly seemed appropriate or, for that matter, proportionate to what I’d now inflicted on them. I might even have mentioned something about the unquestioning assumption of all Americans that they had right on their side—even when they were doing wrong—and the irritation that the rest of the world felt at being judged by them; but that would have been to overstate the matter on my part. It wasn’t so much that I did not care to be judged—for a German in the fifties that was, perhaps, unavoidable. It was simply that I did not care to be grateful for whatever it was the Amis were supposed to have done for us when it was abundantly clear to me and many other Germans that really they had done it for themselves. And hadn’t they intended some rather similar treatment for Mielke himself?

“Where is he?” I asked one of the Stasi men.

“If you mean the comrade general,” said the man, “he is waiting outside.”

I followed them out of the apartment and downstairs, wondering how they were going to deal with the security men in the CIA ambulance—or had they already dealt with them? But before we reached the ground floor, we went through a door that led out of the back of the building and down a fire escape to a courtyard that was about the size of a tennis court and enclosed on all four sides by tall black tenements, most of them derelict.