“And it made me think,” said Mielke. “I asked myself what kind of man would do such a thing. Obviously, a man who was not the predictable fascist I had thought he was. A man of hidden qualities. A man who might even be useful to me. You wouldn’t be aware of this, but three or four years ago I actually tried to get in contact with you, Gunther. To do a job for me. And I discovered you’d disappeared. I even heard you’d gone to South America like all those other Nazi bastards. So when Elisabeth turned up at my office in Hohenschönhausen with your letter, I was very pleasantly surprised. But even more surprised when I read the letter—and by the sheer audacity of your proposal. If I may say so, it was a real spymaster’s stratagem and you have my compliments on pulling it off—and what’s more, right under the noses of the Americans. That’s almost the best part. They won’t forgive you for that in a hurry.”

I said nothing. There wasn’t much to say, so I sucked at my cigarette and waited for the end. That part was, as yet, undecided. What would he do? Keep his side of the bargain, as he had promised in his own letter to me? Or double-cross me like before? And what else did I really deserve? Me, the man who had just betrayed three other men.

“Of course, Elisabeth’s the reason I knew I could really trust you, Gunther. If you’d truly been a creature of the Americans, you would have told them where she lived and they’d have had her placed under surveillance. With the aim of burning me.”

“Burning?”

“It’s what we call it when you let someone—someone in intelligence circles—know that you know everything about them, and that their whole life has gone up in smoke. Burning. Or, for that matter, when you don’t let them know.”

“Well, then, I guess they’d already tried to burn you.”

Some of what I now said I had already told him in the letter that Elisabeth had delivered: how the CIA had coached me to sell the French SDECE the idea that Mielke had been first a spy for the Nazis and then a spy for the CIA, at the same time leading them to suppose that I might be able to identify a French traitor named Edgard de Boudel who had worked for the Viet Minh in Indochina. But mostly I told him again as a way of getting the answers to a few questions of my own.