The Murderer in Ruins

by Cay Rademacher

  Stave described the victim as well as he could. ‘Do you recognise her?’

  Thuman gave a dirty laugh. ‘I know lots of naked young women. Some cost more than others. Could be any one of them, from the way you describe her.’

  The chief inspector took a deep breath, despite the foul air. ‘Is there any young lady who’s been living here who might meet that description? Mid-blond, medium-length hair, blue eyes, about 20 years old?’

  He laughed, then shook his head. ‘How would I know? I’m happy enough to have nothing to do with anybody else. Two doors along there’s that young drunk, out of his head day and night. Next door there was somebody with tuberculosis coughing all the time. Then after him some family turned up, none of whom spoke German; French probably, maybe DPs from some camp or other. Never exchanged a word with them though I heard them whispering to one another from time to time. The walls are thin. Then one of your colleagues came along and took them away. Now it’s vacant again, but sooner or later somebody will crawl their way into it. I couldn’t care less. Every night some woman screams as if somebody’s hacking her hand off. It’s dreadful. But if you think I might know who is wandering around in here? No idea. And I’ve only been to any of the other floors the one time. What’s the point? I don’t know anybody here and don’t go sniffing around anybody else, not even some young blond cutie. I just want a bit of peace. And that’s hard enough to find.’

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ Stave said, and left without saying goodbye.

  An hour later he met up with Officer Ruge at the entrance to the bunker. Stave took a breath of fresh air.

  ‘Never thought I’d be glad of this goddamn Siberian storm,’ he said, shaking his coat, as if he felt the stench of hopelessness would stick to his clothing.

  Even Ruge looked pale, tired and sweaty. ‘Bunker people!’ he wheezed as if that explained everything.

  The chief inspector nodded. The concrete caves were the last resort of outcasts, those who’d given up all hope, those who had nobody. Anyone who had a modicum of strength left escaped from them, built themselves a hut out of rubble and cardboard somewhere out in the ruins, rather than stay buried alive under six metres of reinforced concrete.

  ‘I came across one old boy,’ Stave said, ‘who went into his sleeping neighbour’s cubicle and tore down two pieces of paper from the wall: kids’ drawings. When I asked him why he did it, he just said he hated everything that made the bunker nicer. Mad.’

  ‘Nobody admits to having seen anything in the ruins opposite,’ Ruge said. ‘Nobody even admits being over there recently. Nobody noticed anything suspicious. Nobody knows any young woman. I’d have arrested the lot of them.’

  ‘Why? They’re already in a prison,’ Stave said wearily, bashing one hand on the concrete wall. ‘Nobody said anything sensible to me at all. I believe them. I think few of them ever go out.’

  ‘It looks like we have no witnesses, Chief Inspector.’

  By now it was nearly midday. Stave was hungry and tired. At least it’s good I don’t have to talk, he thought.

  Ruge drove the Mercedes past more piles of rubble, the heavy vehicle bumping in and out of potholes. Stave had to hold on tight, so as not to be thrown out of his seat.

  ‘Sorry,’ the young policeman said, his brow creased in concentration. ‘It’ll get better in a bit.’

  And indeed in the Old Town and New Town districts large areas of the main streets had been cleared. Stave leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes until they reached police headquarters.

  The tall building on Karl-Muck-Platz was an 11-storey sandstone colossus built back in the 1920s: reddish-brown stone with white windows, modern, no chimneys. It used to be the seat of an insurance company until the police crime squad moved in after the war. Most of the officers didn’t care much for the place, even though they appreciated the fact that it was mostly undamaged. Windows that closed properly were a rarity in Hamburg these days. Stave liked the building because it was the exact opposite of the great neo-baroque concert hall opposite – as if the crime squad wanted to demonstrate police strength and order in the face of light-hearted frivolity.

  Stave said a curt goodbye to Ruge and climbed out of the Mercedes. The building was fronted by a portico with ten mighty square columns. Blue, white and yellow lacquered tiles formed a pattern on the ceiling, a little hidden touch of colour in a grey city. The entrance hall was also decorated with coats of arms and allegorical figures in ceramic, including a three-metre-high bronze elephant that not even the Nazi raw-material requisitioners had dared touch. The crime squad lads nicknamed him ‘Anton’. Above the door the figure of a young woman held a gold, brown, blue and white model of a cog, the famous flat-bottomed trading ship of Hamburg and the Hanseatic League. Some of the officers called her the ‘Seaman’s Bride’, unless they were in a bad mood and she became the ‘Harbour Whore’.

  Stave had no idea what the figure had originally been meant to symbolise. He walked through the double doors of the headquarters, big enough for a sailing ship to pass through. Then he limped up the stairs with their red, brown and white pattern marked out in endless little tiles that, every time he walked up them, reminded him of the skin of some giant snake.

  Eventually he reached the sixth floor, and room 602. His office.

  In the anteroom, half hidden behind a great black typewriter, Erna Berg, his secretary, was sitting on a chair that looked as if it might collapse at any moment. Stave said hello to her, forcing himself to smile. No need to pass his bad humour to anybody else, just because he’d seen a naked corpse first thing in the morning. He liked Erna Berg. She was blond, blue-eyed, optimistic and slightly plump. God only knows how she keeps so much flesh on her ribs with the food rations, Stave thought.

  She was always full of energy, despite being a war widow. Back in 1939 she had married one of the soldiers being rushed to the front; a son arrived soon after. Her husband had been missing since 1945 and comrades returning from the war had told her he had been killed in action. But as it had not been formally confirmed that she was a widow, she got no widows’ pension. Stave knew that the bare minimum wage she got from the police wasn’t enough to keep her and her son and that she had to deal on the black market from time to time. He turned a blind eye.

  ‘The boss wants to see you,’ she said with a wink. ‘I heard about the body,’ she added in a whisper.

  ‘Word soon gets around,’ Stave grunted. ‘Open a new file. “Unknown murder victim, Baustrasse.” I’ll write up the report later. And put an autopsy request in to the public prosecutor’s office. Dr Czrisini knows all about it.’

  His secretary looked away. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to spell that for me,’ she groaned. ‘I can never remember his name.’

  Stave wrote the pathologist’s name down on a piece of paper and looked in vain for a free space on her tiny desk to set it down, eventually pinning it to the wall behind her desk. ‘I’m with the boss if anybody asks,’ he said, closing the door behind him.

  A few minutes later he was standing in the office of the chief of Hamburg police. Cuddel Breuer was an average-sized man with a round face, thinning hair and a pleasant smile. He could have been taken for a genial, deferential post-office clerk from the provinces. And more than a few police officers – and criminals – had made that mistake on first meeting.

  Breuer had sharp, quick eyes and shoulders far too wide for an ordinary person. While Stave admired his boss, he was wary of him.

  ‘Sit down, Stave,’ Breuer said, nodding at a wooden chair before his desk. Both of them still had their winter overcoats on; the temperature in the office was 10°C at most.

  ‘Coffee?’ the police chief asked. ‘Just the usual ersatz stuff, but at least it’s hot.’

  Stave nodded gratefully, and warmed his hands on the enamel cup.

  Breuer nodded at a piece of paper in a filing tray on his desk.

  ‘Last year’s figure,’ he said. ‘In 1946 there were 29 murders, 629 muggin
gs, 21,569 serious thefts and 61,033 everyday thefts. To be more precise: those are the crimes that were reported. On top of that we have rapes, assaults and smuggling in every form. “Poverty crime figures,” the public prosecutor calls it. And I fear he’s right. I also fear 1947 will be no better, especially not with a winter like this.’

  Stave nodded. A couple of days earlier a police patrol had run across two DPs with black market slaughterhouse meat. The culprits, two former Polish slave labourers, had immediately opened fire with guns. One of the policemen died and the other was still critically ill in hospital. The culprits had been arrested and a British military tribunal had sentenced them to death. They were now waiting for the sentence to be carried out.

  ‘But a naked strangled woman is something we haven’t had recently,’ Breuer continued. He sounded friendly still but added, ‘The word’s going to get around, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about. Freezing apartments, hardly any electricity, starvation rations, coal trains out there stuck in snowdrifts. Or looted the moment they arrive. British officers commandeering the best villa houses in the city and putting up notices saying, “Off limits for Germans!” Every day new refugees pouring into the city, from the eastern zone, from DP camps, freed prisoners-of-war. What are we to do with all of them? We can’t build new houses; in this weather it’s too cold even to stir cement. People are angry.’

  ‘And if they can’t vent that anger on anyone else, then they’ll make it hot as hell for us if we don’t catch the killer,’ Stave finished the thought for him.

  ‘You get my meaning,’ Breuer nodded with satisfaction.

  Stave gave his chief an outline of the case: the young unidentified victim, the lack of witnesses.

  ‘Is Dr Czrisini going to do an autopsy?’ Breuer asked.

  ‘Today.’

  Breuer leant back in his chair and crossed his hands behind his head. For minutes on end he said nothing, but Stave had learned not to be impatient. Eventually the police chief nodded to himself, lit up a Lucky Strike and inhaled the smoke with gusto.

  ‘In Hamburg we have 700 police to deal with crime,’ he said at last, letting the smoke drift from his mouth. ‘Most of them are new to the job, because so many of our former colleagues had the wrong politics.’

  Stave said nothing. Even before 1933 most of the police had been on the far right, and later, Hamburg Gestapo alone employed 200 men. When the British arrived, more than half of them were dismissed straight away. Without the political purge, Breuer would never have got behind the chief’s desk. And Stave’s career wouldn’t have gone anywhere either. Those were facts that did not exactly endear them to their former colleagues, not least because the difference between getting a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from the British was often a very close-run thing.

  ‘A victim whose name we don’t even know. A naked young woman. A criminal who even now in these difficult times commits an offence not out of necessity, but because he’s driven by some evil urge. A murderer who leaves no traces. And a city that demands we sort it out and quick,’ Breuer said, in an almost dreamy voice. ‘It’s a nasty case, this one, Stave. I can’t put some raw recruits on it and none of the older men are up to it.

  So you’re giving it to me, because nobody likes me, Stave thought to himself. ‘I’ll take it on, boss.’

  ‘Good. Now, do you speak any English?’

  Stave suddenly sat up in his chair. ‘A little, not much, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Breuer, then added dismissively: ‘Doesn’t matter, from what I hear your man has excellent German.’

  ‘My man?’

  ‘The British want to second a liaison officer to the investigation.’

  ‘Shit!’ Stave blurted out.

  ‘On account of the particular potential political and psychological influence on the population,’ his boss continued without commenting. ‘It’s an official request. I’m also seconding an officer from the vice squad to work with you, under your command, obviously.’

  ‘From the vice squad?’

  ‘The victim was naked,’ Breuer reminded him.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Inspector Lothar Maschke. He immediately volunteered.’

  ‘Not exactly my lucky day,’ Stave grumbled.

  Breuer smiled and called to his secretary, ‘Please show the two gentlemen in.’

  The first man was wearing the greenish-brown uniform of a lieutenant in the British army. Stave guessed him to be in his mid-twenties, though his bright, almost rosy countenance and short blond hair made him look even younger. Not very tall, wiry in build, with the sprightly step of a sportsman. Stave wondered what it was about the uniform, perfectly ironed but worn just a bit too casually, and the expression on the man’s face, though friendly and obliging, that gave him the air of being ever so slightly blasé?

  ‘Lieutenant James C. MacDonald of the British administration in Hamburg, Public Safety Branch,’ was how Breuer introduced him.

  The officer saluted briskly in greeting, leaving Stave, who had no idea of a military salute, not knowing what to do with his hand. MacDonald smiled for a second then reached out his right hand to shake Stave’s. ‘Pleased to meet you, Chief Inspector.’

  He spoke German with just a slight British accent, but Stave suspected that the pronunciation was MacDonald’s only weak point in the language. I wouldn’t be surprised if he can write reports in German better than many of my colleagues, he thought. Aloud he just said, ‘Welcome to CID, Lieutenant.’

  The second man followed the Brit into the office rather hesitantly. Stave put him at around 30, tall, lanky, in a rather tatty civilian suit that was far too broad for him. He had reddish-blond hair and a thin little moustache. The second and third fingers of his right hand were yellow with nicotine and his movements were a little twitchy – a chain smoker who couldn’t get his hands on enough cigarettes.

  Stave nodded to him. Inspector Lothar from vice. He already knew him. Maschke was not long out of police academy, and he had already managed to fall out with most of the people in CID although nobody could quite say why. Stave reckoned he had grown the moustache to try to make himself look older. And he had joked about Maschke in private because he still lived at home with his mother. A policeman! And in the vice squad at that!

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Breuer said, rubbing his hands together. ‘I can’t wait to see your results.’

  ‘Shall we go over to my office?’ Stave suggested.

  He nodded in farewell to his boss and directed the other two men down the corridor. Just what I needed, he thought to himself resignedly, lagging behind as they walked by the dim light of the 15-watt bulb.

  Stave’s own office was bright. The window looked out on to the Musikhalle, and the ruins beyond it. Stave’s old wooden desk looked as if it was swept and dusted on a regular basis. He was particular about putting everything away in the desk drawers, and every case file was duly annotated and kept in a huge metal cabinet.

  Erna Berg came in and gave him a large cardboard file with a sheet of paper in it: the new murder report.

  The chief inspector introduced the two men to his secretary. Maschke just nodded but MacDonald reached over to shake her hand.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said.

  Stave was amazed to see his secretary blush.

  ‘I’ll bring in another chair,’ she said, just a touch too quickly.

  ‘Let me,’ said MacDonald, springing to his feet and bringing in another chair from the outer office. Erna Berg smiled at him. Stave nodded at her, indicating she should leave them and shut the door behind her. Then he thought of Margarethe and how he had been when they first met: that mixture of enthusiasm and embarrassment. And suddenly he felt envious of the young British officer. Stuff and nonsense. He banished thoughts of all women, except for one: the naked corpse.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said formally. ‘I’ll give you an overview.’

  The chief inspector methodically went over the basics of the case: the naked body with an appendix scar
, the strangulation marks on her throat, the spot where the corpse was found, the two street lads, the questioning of the bunker-dwellers and the overall lack of leads. When he had finished, MacDonald took out a packet of English cigarettes and offered them around. Stave and Maschke hesitated, as if each was waiting for the other to react first. Then the chief inspector shrugged, and gratefully accepted the cigarette. In reality he had given up smoking but it was clear that Maschke had been waiting to see if Stave, now his boss for the duration of this investigation, was willing to take a gift from a former enemy. The vice squad inspector lit up and sucked so greedily on it that MacDonald, with a smile that was sarcastic and polite at the same time, forced a second on him.

  ‘So, what do we do now?’ he asked. ‘I’m a soldier, not a policeman,’ MacDonald added. ‘My experience is war, not murder investigations.’

  Maschke coughed so loudly that a cloud of blue smoke poured from both his nose and mouth.

  Stave forced himself to smile. ‘The more we know about the victim, the more we find out about the killer,’ he began. ‘Often the murderer and victim know one another. So first of all we’ll try to identify the victim. We’ll cut her open.’

  ‘We?’ said MacDonald, no longer smiling.

  ‘A pathologist will do it,’ Stave reassured him, smiling genuinely for the first time himself. The shocked naivety of his question had all of a sudden made the young Brit seem more likeable. Some soldier you are if you’re frightened of the dead. ‘We’ll just get the autopsy report. Then, hopefully, we’ll know a bit more – ideally the time of death. But I doubt there’s any pathologist in the world who could identify her.’

  ‘Save for the doctor who performed the appendectomy,’ Maschke interjected.

  ‘Yes,’ Stave said. ‘That’s a possibility. We’ll order up some copies and send them out to Hamburg hospitals. Perhaps somebody will identify her. On the other hand an appendix operation is routine and it’s not likely that any doctor or nurse would remember.’