“Finally, I got a name out of Stief, and a Storm tavern in the old town that was frequented by Storm 33. Reisig’s tavern, in Hebbel Street, in the western district of Charlottenburg. Which wasn’t so very far from the Eden Dance Palace. So when I left Tegel I decided to drop in there and take a look. But as soon as I arrived outside I saw a group of SA men piling into a truck. They were armed and clearly bent on some murderous mission. There was no time to phone headquarters, and thinking that I might for once prevent a homicide instead of merely investigating one, I followed.

“If this sounds brave or foolhardy, it wasn’t. In those days, a lot of cops used to carry a Bergmann MP18 in the trunk of the car instead of a pistol. The Bergmann was a nine-mil submachine gun and perfect for sweeping crap off the streets. So I followed the gang all the way to Felseneck Colony in Reinickendorf-East, a Communist Party stronghold. Felseneck Colony was just a series of allotments for Reds who wanted to grow their own food; and what with money being so tight, a lot of them needed those vegetables just to live. Some of the Reds actually lived there. They had their own guards, who were supposed to keep a lookout for Nazis, only they hadn’t been doing their job. They’d run away or been tipped off, or maybe they were in on the attack, who knows?

“But when I got there, the Nazis were just about to lay down a beating on a young man of about twenty. I didn’t get a good look at him immediately—there were too many storm troopers on him, like dogs. They probably figured to beat the crap out of the boy and then take him somewhere else and put a bullet in his head before dumping his body. I swept the air over their heads with the Bergmann, marched them back to their truck, and told them to beat it because there were too many of them to arrest. Then, in case they decided to come back, I told the boy to get in my car and said I’d drop him somewhere—somewhere safer than where we were, anyway. He thanked me and asked me if I could take him to Bülowplatz, and that was the first time I got a good look at Erich Mielke. In my car, on the way to Berlin.

“He was about twenty-four years old, five feet, six inches tall, muscular, with lots of wavy hair, and a Berliner—from Wedding, I think. He was also a lifelong communist, like his father, who was a carpenter or wheelwright. And he had two younger sisters and a brother who were also in the Communist Party. Or so he told me.

“So it’s true what they say,” I said to him. “That madness runs in families.”