I looked both ways on Liesenstrasse. The CIA’s security ambulance was nowhere to be seen, and it would probably be hours before they worked out that the team of agents they were supposed to be guarding had been kidnapped right under their noses. I had to admit, the Stasi operation had been as neat as a freshly laid egg. True, it had been my own plan, but it had been Mielke’s idea to supply an actual East German border guard who looked like his own father for the CIA to follow around and lead them to the apartment on Schulzendorfer Strasse, where the Stasi kidnap team would be waiting.

The street was clear, but in the darkness I still hesitated to cross.

A little impatience edged into Mielke’s voice. We Berliners could get impatient with a newborn baby. “Come on, Gunther,” he said. “If you had anything to fear from me, you’d be in handcuffs like these three fascists. Or dead.”

And recognizing the truth of this, I walked across the street.

Mielke wore a mid-blue suit that appeared to be of much better quality than the suits worn by his men. Certainly, his shoes were more expensive. These looked handmade. A navy knitted tie was neat against a light blue shirt. His raincoat was probably British.

He was standing in the doorway of an old florist’s shop. The windows were boarded up, but on a floor strewn with broken glass there was a lantern that gave enough light to see vases filled with petrified flowers or no flowers at all. Through an open door at the back of the shop was a yard, and parked at the end of the yard was a plain gray van that, I imagined, already contained the three American agents. The shop smelled of weeds and cat piss—a bit like the pension we had vacated earlier. Mielke closed the door and put on a leather cap that added a properly proletarian touch to his appearance. Although there was a big heavy padlock, he didn’t secure the door, for which I was grateful. He was younger than me and probably armed, and I wouldn’t have cared to fight my way out of there.

We sat down on a couple of ancient wooden chairs that belonged in an old church hall.

“I like your office,” I said.

“It’s very convenient for the French Sector,” he said. “The security here is almost nonexistent, and it’s the perfect spot to slip back and forth between our sector and theirs without anyone knowing about it. But oddly enough, I can remember coming into this florist’s shop as a kid.”

“You never struck me as the romantic type.”

He shook his head. “There’s a cemetery along the street. One of my old man’s relations is buried there. Don’t ask me who. I can’t remember.”

He produced a packet of Roth-Händle and offered me one.