“Four received a death sentence. Eleven were sent to a concentration camp. But it was another two years before three of those death sentences were actually carried out. That was typical of the Nazis. To keep a man waiting for years before they executed him. I expect the Nazis could still teach you Ami bastards something about cruelty. It was in all the newspapers, of course. May 1935? I can’t recall their names, the ones who went to the falling ax. But I often wondered how Mielke and Ziemer, safe in Moscow, felt about it. How much they were told. Oddly enough, it was the same month, May 1935, when Stalin decided that some of the many German and Italian communists who’d fled to Moscow after Hitler and Mussolini came to power could no longer be trusted. European communism was always too heterogeneous for Stalin’s taste. Too many factions. Too many Trotskyites. I suspect that Mielke and Ziemer were more worried about what might happen to them than what was already happening to old comrades like Max Matern. Yes, I remember now. He was one who went to the guillotine.

“Most of the German communists in Moscow were lodged at a Comintern hotel called the Hotel Lux. There was a purge, and some of the more prominent German communists—Kippenberger, Neumann, ironically the very men who’d ordered the murders of Anlauf and Lenck—they were all shot. Kippenberger’s wife was packed off to a Soviet labor camp and never seen again. Neumann’s wife also went to a labor camp, but I think she survived. At least she did until Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1939, at which point she was handed over to the Gestapo. I’ve no idea what happened to her after that.”

“You’re very well-informed. How come you know so much about this, Gunther? Mielke. The whole damned crew of German commies.”

“For a while he was my beer,” I said. “How do you say it? My pigeon. Up to 1946, there’s not much I don’t know about Erich Mielke.”

“And then?”

“And then I hadn’t really given him a thought until the lawyer from the Office of the Chief Counsel used the name. To be honest, I wish I’d never heard it.”

“But you did. So here you are.”

“The last time I saw him, he was—he was working for the OGPU after it became the MVD. That was seven years ago.”

“Have you heard of the East German Secretariat for State Security?”

“No.”

“Some Germans already call it the Stasi. Your friend Erich is the deputy chief of State Security. A secret policeman and probably one of the three most important men in the East German security apparatus, if not the whole country.”

“He’s survived Stalin, Beria, he even survived the downfall of Wilhelm Zaisser after last year’s workers’ uprising in Berlin. Survival is your friend Mielke’s specialty.”