The CID chief dragged his bulky body over to the window and began to use a sheet of paper as a fan. ‘This heat is making people crazy,’ he snorted. And crazy people have stupid ideas.’
‘Such as?’ Stave asked, sceptically.
‘Like strikes. Down at Blohm & Voss, for example.’
‘That’ll give the British something to think about besides sport.’
‘No stupid jokes. It's already taking up the time of our friends down at Esplanade 6. The workers want increased rations. And of course they want to see an end to the continuing dismantling of the shipyard. There was a collective meeting this morning. Lots of red flags and a lot of speeches that could have come directly from Moscow.’
‘If the English started dismantling our business, I’d consider becoming a communist myself
‘The Tommies did dismantle our business, and then they put it back together again. Otherwise an old red like you would hardly be sitting in an office here on Karl Muck Platz.’
‘Just along the corridor from you, boss.’
Breuer, who had been an old Social Democrat, nodded and smiled. ‘At this moment a deputation from the workers is having talks with Messrs Rudolf and Walther Blohm and Governor Berry,’ he continued. ‘As far as I can make out, that will take a day or two and then we’ll see what happens: either things will go back to normal or we’ll have a strike on our hands. Up until then things down at the shipyard are, shall we say, tense?’
‘As in just before the October Revolution?’
‘That's what the British are afraid of. That's why there's been a change of policy. The British are no longer considering the murder down at the shipyard as a priority. The last thing Governor Berry wants is police snuffling about at Blohm & Voss, provoking the workforce: giving them some sort of excuse.’
‘Am I to halt the investigation?’ Stave blurted out, hardly able to believe his ears.
‘No, I just don’t want you going down to Blohm & Voss over the next couple of days. You’re not to speak to any of the workers. Concentrate instead on the other aspects of the case. When the other matters have been resolved, then you can stick your nose back in down at Blohm & Voss.’
By then MacDonald was likely to be in Palestine, Erna Berg a divorcee and Walter Kümmel halfway across the Atlantic, the chief inspector reflected.
‘OK, I’ll concentrate on the other aspects of the investigation,’ he said blandly, hoping Cuddel Breuer would believe his lie.
When Stave got back to his office he surprised MacDonald and Erna Berg in an intimate embrace. ‘You’re not trying to induce the baby early, are you?’ he muttered.
The pair parted quickly. ‘Sorry,’ said MacDonald. ‘Have to take a chance when you can,’ and he patted down his uniform. ‘Actually it was you I was coming to see.’
The chief inspector shot Erna Berg a warning look. ‘What would you have done if it had been another of my colleagues bursting in here? Dönnecke, for example?’
‘Dönnecke would never come to see you of his own accord,’ his secretary replied, her face still red, but beaming. Her smile got to Stave. If I don’t come up with something, this time next week you’re out of here.
‘As it is you’ve turned up at the right moment,’ he said to MacDonald, nodding towards his office. ‘We have a few things to talk about.’
‘Business?’
‘Things that we need to talk about just between the two of us.’
He led the lieutenant into his office and, with an apologetic smile, closed the door on Erna Berg.
‘We are up to our necks in shit,’ he said as soon as he heard the door click closed.
MacDonald raised his eyebrows. ‘That wasn’t an expression they taught me in German classes.’
‘You know exactly what I mean.’
‘I’m sure there's another way to put it in English. I’ll think about it and tell you when it's the right moment.’
‘This is the right moment,’ Stave sighed, falling heavily on to his chair. Breuer was right. What they all needed was a thunderstorm. He looked out the window at a sky as grey as molten lead. The air above Karl Muck Platz was stagnant and there wasn’t a cloud to be seen on the horizon. Stave told MacDonald about his interview with Walter Kümmel and about the threat of a strike at Blohm & Voss.
‘Your boss doesn’t want you to go down to the docks. My boss doesn’t want me to either.’ MacDonald ran a hand through the little beads of sweat glistening in his blond hair. He had gone quite pale.
‘There's something rotten about the whole story,’ the chief inspector declared. ‘You could reach out and grab it, but I just can’t manage to pull the loose ends together. Why would a successful boxing promoter risk his future for a bit of smuggling? And if he is involved in smuggling, what is it that is going out of Germany or coming in?’
‘Even if we find out in the next couple of days, why would Kümmel have killed the boy?’
‘There is only one place we are going to find the answers to all those questions.’
‘Blohm & Voss.’
‘It's just a pity it's the one place we’re not allowed to ask questions.’
‘I’m beginning to feel that shit around my neck,’ MacDonald said. ‘Who down there would ask to see our permit?’
‘You still want to go down there, even though it's been expressly forbidden?’
‘The trouble with you Germans is that you forbid so many things, and then pay attention to the fact that they’re forbidden.’
‘And you’re a soldier telling me that?’
‘I spend half my time ignoring orders and the other half trying to find a way around them.’
‘That's the way to become a general.’
‘A general who has no misconceptions about people obeying his orders.’
Stave nodded at his uniform and said, ‘If you go down there dressed like that, you’ll be lynched.’
‘I can go in civvies, just like you.’
‘You want us both to go, together?’
MacDonald laughed. ‘Every morning hundreds of workers cross the Elbe on the ferries. And among them there are always a few men in suits with briefcases.’
‘Engineers and accountants.’
‘Soft types, like you and me. I’ll get hold of a briefcase. Nobody will spot us.’
‘Until you open your mouth. They’ll hear your British accent.’
‘Then you’ll have to do the talking for us. You’re the CID man, the pro.’
‘OK, let's assume we get across the Elbe without anybody picking us out. Then what?’
Stave was thinking of the cranes and gantries that had been blown up, the shipwrecks along the quays. ‘It's not exactly going to be easy to nose about over there, especially when we don’t even know exactly what we’re looking for.’
The lieutenant shrugged his shoulders. ‘We’ll play it by ear, see what we come up with.’
‘And if we’re found out?’
‘In that case,’ MacDonald said with a sardonic smile, ‘there’ll be nothing for it but to jump headlong into the Elbe.’
Docks
Tuesday, 17 June 1947
The temperature had reached 35 degrees. Stave would have preferred to go down to the landing stages in just a shirt and trousers but if he wanted to pass as an employee he’d have to put on a jacket and tie. The jacket at least concealed his holster and revolver. He had pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes, in case one or another of the workers who’d been there on the day they found the body recognised him.
At first he didn’t realise that the man who had came up to him in a dull suit somewhere between grey and blue was MacDonald. He, too, had pulled the brim of a hat down over his eyes, and in his right hand he really did have a briefcase.
Automatic weapon in there, is there?’ Stave whispered.
‘Two sandwiches and a flask of tea. Hungry?’
‘Just keep it closed. I feel about as inconspicuous as a man walking down Mönckeberg Strasse in his underwear.’
The chief inspector looked around apprehensively.
A carriage on the overhead railway rattled up to the station. The doors opened and out poured welders, tallymen, stevedores in grey corduroy trousers and collarless, striped shirts, some of them with caps, most of them bareheaded.
Alcohol was officially banned down at the docks. They spoke, if at all, in short, rough sentences, a few curses in Plattdeutsch dialect, or even Polish. DPs, the CID man realised. Most said nothing as they headed down to the pier.
The ferries were lined up along the quayside, the puttering of their engines competing with the few rough words exchanged. Stave was pleased to note that at least a few other men in jackets and ties had turned up. Most of the workers looked tired, undernourished, unshaven, and stank of sweat, oil and beer. The chief inspector and MacDonald let themselves be carried along with the flow, on to the next ferry. Stave couldn’t work out if there was supposed to be a system of some sort. We’ll be across in a few minutes, he told himself, bolstering his courage. They sat crammed together on the wooden benches, the ferry swaying as ever more men piled on board. Then the engine sprang properly to life, sending up a dirty black cloud of smoke. Somebody barked an order and the last tether to the quay was dropped. They were out on the Elbe now, no turning back, Stave thought, looking at the men standing on board the deck. He was wondering if it really had been such a good idea to continue their investigations at the docks. MacDonald smiled at him. The young Brit looked as if he was off to a football match. But then maybe this was nothing to what the lieutenant had experienced in the war.
The ferries creaked as they crept slowly across the grey surface of the Elbe. The chief inspector tried to count how many of them there were, but the morning mist and the black smoke from their funnels made it impossible, not to mention a tugboat that passed in front of them blocking his view.
‘On his way to fetch that tanker,’ said an enormous man sitting on the bench near Stave. The chief inspector wanted to say something non-committal in return before he noticed that it wasn’t him the man had been speaking to but his neighbour on the other side: all he could hear was a monologue in short, snappy sentences occasionally interrupted by a mumbled response from the other man who looked as if he could hardly keep his weary red eyes open. Stave tried to listen in, his head turned the other way – an old CID trick – so they wouldn’t notice. It didn’t take long for him to find out that the giant's name was Fietje Pehns. He was complaining about something called a ‘stall’. It took the chief inspector a few minutes to realise that this was a sort of job allocation desk somewhere in the docks. Pehns was one of thousands of unemployed workers or casual shift workers: they turned up at this ‘stall’ and were given a job for the day, if, for example, a ship had docked and there weren’t enough full-time employed dockers to unload it and load it again. Pehns was complaining about Rahlstedt, where he lived ever since the English had bombed his home in St Pauli to nothing. He had to get up at 4.30 in the morning and earned just 7.60 Reichsmatks a day. He complained too about the trades unions, who only really cared about the full-time employees.
Stave learned that a few days ago the casual workers had organised a wildcat strike, despite the opposition of the trades unions. He listened to Pehns cursing and looked at his massive hands and wondered to himself what on earth he would do if somebody like him got really angry. That would be no fun at all. He would as soon have given up their whole plan, but then he saw MacDonald squeezed up against the hull opposite, looking out silently, no longer daring even to whisper. He had heard Pehns's tirade too. He followed MacDonald's gaze to a boat next to the quay from which the workers were already unloading coal. The Blohm & Voss shipyard lay just ahead, and behind them the main pool of the port where a freighter was already tied up. As they got closer he recognised the straight sides, wide stern and tall funnel, as well as the American flag and eventually the name: Leland Stanford.
‘Bloody hell!’ he exclaimed.
Pehns gave him a look of astonishment. He hadn’t expected to hear an expression like that from a man in a suit. Then he smiled and clapped one of his giant paws on Stave's shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ he growled, ‘these Liberty ships break down all the time. It's absolutely normal for them to stay around after they’ve been unloaded. But no sooner does something go wrong than our lads fix it for them. The boys at the shipyard will have it sorted and out of here on time.’
‘That would be a relief,’ Stave muttered. His heart was pounding. He felt as if he’d been uncovered. If only the damn ferry would get to the other side. It just had to be the Leland Stanford, the ship Tattoo-Willy had mentioned as being one of the main ships used by the smugglers, and now here it was laid up at Blohm & Voss. ‘When is it supposed to set sail?’ he mustered up the courage to ask. Maybe that would make him seem like an idiot, but he couldn’t suppress his curiosity.
‘First tide day after tomorrow,’ Pehns said, scarcely paying attention. He turned back to his dozing colleague on the other side, to moan a bit more about the ‘stall’ and call for more strikes.
Tomorrow was their last day before the divorce hearing. If they still had nothing, then it was Palestine for MacDonald. Stave was sure he had heard the whole conversation. Then he felt an elbow nudge him. It was the lieutenant, who was once again nodding towards something going on over the side. It took the chief inspector a moment to understand what he was trying to tell him. They were passing Blohm & Voss. He could feel the blood in his temples throbbing. They had got on the wrong ferry. He could have kicked himself. He watched helplessly as they passed the shipyard and headed slowly onwards into the labyrinthine bowels of the vast port. On every side there were bombed-out warehouses. The ferry captain had to make a wide swing around the wreck of a steamship.
Now they were in Kuhwerder harbour, the next big basin beyond the shipyard: giant walls along the quayside, the grotesque sculpture of a bomb-hit crane, a large, relatively new freighter at one of the piers, a flag hanging limp from its stern. Stave noted the colours, blue, white and red, but he couldn’t make out the pattern. It clearly wasn’t a US ship or a British one. They were coming up to a little wooden quay. The workers were impatient, already on their feet even though the dock was still some ten metres away. MacDonald motioned to Stave that he should stay sitting. It wouldn’t do them any harm to be the last off.
The chief inspector looked round as the gangway clunked down on to the wooden quay, and the boat bumped up against the wooden stays. They were going to have to walk the length of the harbour basin and then turn north for a few dozen metres until they reached the shipyard. The only question was whether or not two men in jackets would make it all the way across the quays, railway lines and bomb-damaged warehouses.
Eventually he stumbled down the gangplank, his legs still half asleep from sitting on the hard wooden bench. The ferry captain gave him a look that Stave thought was both scornful and suspicious at the same time. But it could just have been an instinctive mistrust of men in suits, or then again that he had never come across people dressed like that on this particular ferry. He avoided the man's gaze and pulled the brim of his hat further down over his eyes. Most of the workmen with whom they’d just crossed the river were standing on the quayside next to the freighter queued up at the ‘stall’. ‘Not sure it's usually the sort of work these “casuals” do,’ Stave hissed between his teeth. They wandered on a bit until Stave could make out the name on the stern of the freighter: Presidente Errazuriz.
‘I read about this ship in Die Zeit,’ he said. ‘That explains the number of people.’ He didn’t reveal that an internal message had been sent round police headquarters about it. ‘The Presidente Errazuriz is a Chilean ship that docked last night with thirty-nine officer cadets on board, here for an official visit to Germany, which displeased Governor Berry, because officially Germany no longer exists. But there are 200 tonnes of food donated by “Friends of Germany” in Chile. I can imagine who those “friends” are: old Nazis who managed somehow o
r other to make their way to Chile after the end of the war.’
All of a sudden the crowd breathed in all at once. A crane, the only one still intact on this pier, was carefully lifting something from the hold of the ship. At first it looked to the chief inspector as if it were just a wooden case, but as it rose higher and higher he saw it was a sort of big cage with wooden flooring and latticework sides, with a bed of straw. MacDonald was staring at it in amazement.
‘The Chileans have sent Hagenbeck Zoo some exotic birds,’ he whispered. ‘And,’ he added, nodding with his chin at the floor of the cage where something could be seen moving, ‘several extremely old giant turtles.’
‘For turtle soup?’
‘Hagenbeck is a Hamburg institution.’
‘Hardly a priority in times like these. Just a few weeks ago there were people starving here and now you’re importing giant turtles for the zoo?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What do those things eat anyway?’
‘Englishmen,’ Stave hissed. He nodded towards a group of men who had got so close to the freighter that the sailors who had been standing guard were exchanging nervous glances. Suddenly a Jeep roared up with British military police on board.
‘If they recognise me, we really will be – to use your colourful expression — up to our necks in shit. What are they doing here?’
‘You need to read the German newspapers. It said in Die Zeit that the Presidente Errazuriz was going to take back some Germans who had family over there. And now half of Hamburg has discovered they have Chilean ancestors — or even Indians.’
And indeed they could now hear people in the crowd speaking Spanish. One man was waving papers in the clammy air. The sailors were shaking their heads, sweating and shouting out something nobody could understand.
The Wolf Children (Inspector Stave Book 2) Page 25
