“I should have thought that was obvious. Or maybe you just weren’t listening, Yank. I’d met Erich Mielke. I knew what he looked like, remember? Besides, I had a personal stake in seeing him arrested. I saved his life. Of course, the Hamburg police were alerted to pick up Ziemer and Mielke. The trouble was someone inside the Alex had tipped them off, and by the time Kestner and I reached Hamburg—”

“Kestner?”

“Yes. He was with the political police. A detective sergeant. We were old friends, Kestner and I. Later on, when the Nazis won the election of March 1933, he joined the party. Lots of people did. The March violets or March fallen, we called them. Anyway, that was when we stopped being friends, he and I.

“Later on, I learned that Mielke and Ziemer had been taken to Antwerp by agents of the Comintern. There they were given false passports and, posing as crew members, they were put on a ship to Leningrad. From there they were taken to Moscow for training in the OGPU—Stalin’s secret police.”

“So there were communists as well as Nazis in the Berlin police.”

“Yes. Eldor Borck—a retired police major I was friendly with—he estimated that as many as ten percent of the Berlin police sympathized with the Bolsheviks. But there were never the Red Schupo cells that the Nazis claimed existed. Most police were natural conservatives. Instinctive fascists rather than ideological ones. Anyway, Ziemer and Mielke spent the next five years in Russia.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ll come to that. Of course, even though we didn’t have the perpetrators of the murders of Anlauf and Lenck in custody, the Nazis were not about to allow a little fact like that stop them from making an example of people. There was a lot of propaganda value in making arrests and securing convictions.”

“Of other commies?”

“Of course of other commies. And it can’t be denied that Ziemer and Mielke did not act alone. Indeed, there was a strong case for believing that the whole riot on Bülowplatz had been engineered for the purpose of luring Anlauf and Sergeant Willig into a trap. As I said before, those two were really hated by the communists. Lenck was an accident, more or less. In the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Soon after I left the police to go and work at the Adlon hotel, an arrest was made. Fellow called Max Thunert. Very probably they put a bag over his head and persuaded him to name names. And name names he did. Fifteen men went to trial in June 1933, among them several prominent communists. Who knows? Maybe some of them had put Mielke and Ziemer up to the killing after all.