The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  ‘One of many.’

  ‘In the clearing-up process the Trümmerfrauen came across some noteworthy objects.’ Stave took the pictures of the sculptures out of his coat pocket. ‘Do you recognise these?’

  ‘No.’

  Stave looked at Schramm in surprise. ‘Take your time. Have a good look.’

  ‘I have no problems with my vision or my artistic appreciation or my memory. These are not from my collection.’

  ‘Have you an idea why I have come to you with these photos?’

  Schramm sighed. ‘I am passionate about art. My wife was too. You could say it was the greatest passion we shared.’ He cleared his throat.

  ‘You were also a patron of contemporary artists.’

  ‘And I still am. Insofar as there still are talented young people around after twelve years of barbarism. It is easier to earn money than it is to create art, believe me.’

  Stave, thinking of his own petty paycheque, didn’t agree, but nodded all the same. ‘That is why, among all the tenants in the Reimershof, we came to you first.’

  ‘Why would I keep works of art in an office? I had taken a few rooms there, two for files and one with a desk and a telephone. Somewhere to retreat to, to get away from the hectic day-to-day at my bank. A place to...’ he hesitated briefly, ‘to deal with certain more confidential bits of business. So confidential that I, shall we say, didn’t want to deal with them within the official remit of my bank business.’

  ‘What sort of business?’

  ‘That falls within banking secrecy laws, but nothing illegal if that reassures you.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ the chief inspector replied, in a tone that made clear it certainly didn’t reassure him at all. ‘And this business didn’t involve art?’

  Schramm used his arthritic right hand to make an impatient gesture. ‘I have my art collection here. Who keeps things like that in the office? Especially modern sculptures like those? In the brown years?’ He nodded towards an oil painting near the heating stove, of a plane about to crash from a sky as black as night on to an uninhabited city. ‘It's by Radziwill. My wife loved it, especially after her diagnosis. She also like Seurat, who painted in a completely different style. I have two or three Liebermanns in the salon next door, a few from the New Objectivity movement, a couple of Fauves. Expressionists, too,’ he added, after a short hesitation. ‘But mostly drawings and oil paintings, no statuary.’ He nodded at the photos in Stave's hand. ‘Those are expressionist pieces. Solid work as far as I can tell from a police photo. Good, but not so good that you would have found them in the Galerie Flechtheim in Berlin back in the twenties. And of course after the twenties you wouldn’t have found them anywhere at all.’

  ‘So you’ve never seen these pieces?’

  ‘Not in any museum or gallery where I was a client, not in any of the studios of the artists directly supported.’

  ‘Who shared your offices in the Reimershof?’

  ‘Nobody. It was my refuge.’

  The chief inspector thought back to the dead man. ‘You didn’t have a secretary? Not even a messenger, or a caretaker?’

  ‘A cleaning lady came by once a week. I can’t imagine what she might have had to do with the works of art you found in the ruins.’

  ‘Nothing, I imagine. Dr Schramm, in the ruins of the Reimershof we also found the corpse of a man.’

  ‘That's very sad, but in this case you’re not asking the right man. There were other tenants there, but I hardly knew any of them.’ Schramm didn’t exactly seem to be shaken by the news.

  Stave handed the banker a card with his telephone number. Early that morning he had typed out his name, rank and number for his new department on several pieces of cardboard. It looked shabby, but that was hardly his chief priority at the moment. ‘Please get in touch if anything should occur to you,’ he said. ‘It's also possible I might have to talk to you again about this.’

  Schramm pulled out a leather wallet. For a moment the chief inspector thought he was going to be presented in turn with an undoubtedly much finer visiting card. But instead the banker took out a piece of paper that had been folded over several times. At the top of the yellow sheet it read, ‘The State Commissioner of the Hansestadt Hamburg for Denazification and Classification’, and typed beneath the banker's name. It was a discharge sheet, a clean bill of political health, nicknamed a ‘Persil note’ on the black market. Forgeries went for a fortune on the black market, passed from hand to hand. But this one looked like the real thing, Stave thought.

  ‘I’ve been cleared,’ Schramm said, his voice shaking with barely suppressed agitation. ‘I have the best of relations with the British occupation forces, and the mayor. For years I was interrogated again and again by those Gestapo thugs. They made an invalid of my wife and I had to sit and watch how those “gentlemen” just stared coldly. They almost certainly opened a file on her illness. But those times have gone. And you’re not going to bring them back. Or should I say “carry on”. I am a busy man. I’m not going to have you turn up here every day, parking your patrol car in full visibility on my drive, in order to ask me absurd questions in my own house about obscure works of art. You’ll need a good reason before you turn up here again, a very good reason. Have I made myself clear?’

  ‘Thank you for speaking so freely,’ Stave replied, and reached for his hat.

  A minute later he was sitting next to Ruge in the patrol car, turning the ignition key on the rattling eight-cylinder motor.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to have him for an enemy!’ the constable exclaimed, whistling between his teeth. He hadn’t dared even speak until they were a bit down the road.

  ‘Too late. You already have him as an enemy, but with a bit of luck he won’t have noticed either your name or your face.’

  ‘But you gave him your card.’

  ‘Didn’t you notice anything unusual?’

  ‘Apart from the huge villa, the expensive Mercedes, the well-maintained garden, the thick carpets, the oil paintings on the wall, the grand piano, the heating stove, and the tasty housemaid?’ The constable shook his head. ‘Nope, otherwise I didn’t notice anything. Joe Soap, just like you and me.’

  ‘What about the photo on the stove ledge?’

  ‘The woman in the wheelchair? Dreadful business.’

  ‘Forget about the poor dear.’

  ‘The men and women standing next to them? They didn’t exactly look happy either. Is one of them in our card index? I could take a more detailed look.’

  ‘The room, Ruge!’ Stave sighed. ‘Did you take a good look at the room where the photo was taken?’

  ‘Bigger than anything I have, that's for sure.’

  ‘And better furnished.’

  ‘Indeed, paintings and bookshelves and...’ All of a sudden his voice died away and he went pale.

  ‘...and sculptures on the shelf.’ As he turned right on to the street that bordered the Alster, Stave pulled one of Kienle's police photos out of his overcoat.

  ‘The bronze bust of a woman that was in the Reimershof,’ Ruge whispered.

  ‘Which Schramm insisted he had never seen before, even though until at least the end of 1938 it had been in his own villa, as evidenced by the photo with his unfortunate wife and the gloomy relatives. Behind the cosy family group that bust was standing on the shelf. I’d like to know what lies behind this strange gap in our banker's memory’

  ‘Could that be a reason for asking him a few more questions?’

  ‘A very good reason.’

  Back in his office Stave's confidence evaporated. It was silent, and the drizzle soaking the window fell in such microscopic droplets that it had the chief inspector yearning for a proper rain shower so that at least he could hear the pattering. There was a stench of foul air, bitter cleaning fluid and damp carpets. He had to admit to himself that he had nothing against Schramm. The banker hadn’t told him the truth about the bronze bust. What of it? A lie, but one that was to no one's loss but his own. Schramm was
rejecting a piece of art that had once belonged to him. Hardly a crime. And that was all Stave had. No motive, not even the slightest suspicion why the old man might have lied to him. Ehrlich wouldn’t open a case against such an influential man, one who had even been persecuted by the Nazi regime. It was a bagatelle. A case to be closed and filed.

  Yet even so, Stave was not happy with the idea that it should be just left to gather dust. That would never have happened in Homicide. At least not if he was in charge. No reason to start behaving like that just because he had moved to Department S. After all, this was the body that Dönnecke was doing nothing about. Schramm had rented two rooms, he had said so himself. The corpse had been lying in the pile of rubble that the chief inspector had surmised were the ruins of the room where the artworks had been kept. Was it Schramm's second office? Or was it just a coincidence? Was it the room of a different firm? If Stave had been in charge of that case he would have asked the old man about the corpse, and waited to see what reaction he got: embarrassment, shame, fear, just the tiniest hesitation, a flicker of the eyelids... But as things stood he would have to approach it via the artworks. The CID man sighed and at the same time laughed at himself for such a theatrical gesture. He had a few talents but it had been a long time since acting had been one of them. Maybe it was time to have a go.

  He put the narrow ring-folder in his filing cabinet, the first file in his new office. Slowly he began to make himself at home. He took an empty grey cardboard casebook out of his desk drawer and opened his second file: ‘Currency forger, Goldbekplatz.’ If he didn’t get any further with one case, he could always tuck into the second.

  A quarter of an hour later Stave found himself gradually coming to understand why his colleagues had nicknamed Department S, Department Deadend. It was cursed. His second case too had run into a brick wall. He had sent a few uniformed police down to Goldbekplatz, and others out to the Ley huts in Fuhlsbüttel. Nothing. Toni Weber, the artist and convicted forger, had disappeared into the drizzle. Maybe he was with one of his ‘Paragraph 175’ friends? He would have to ask his colleagues in Vice. Their relevant files had survived the surrender. But the chief inspector was reluctant to snuffle around in things like that. He thought it was nothing to do with a judge or a policeman who an adult human being shared his or her bed with.

  But what had happened to him? Was he still living in Hamburg? Had he anything at all to do with the forged notes? He had nothing more than a vague allegation against him.

  It's time for me to find out more about the guy, Stave decided, getting to his feet. Half an hour later he came back to his office with another file: the old investigation into Toni Weber's case. First of all, an anonymous allegation against him. The Vice Squad's investigation, a testimony by a rent boy. Then a charge of breaching Paragraph 175 and a fine. But no more. Earlier, Stave reflected, it had been punishable by several years in jail, or being sent to a concentration camp and forced to wear a pink triangle, being beaten up or even a miserable death being hung by piano wire.

  The second part of the file consisted of a couple of typed reports, bad photos of forged documents laid out on a table, copies of the charge and conviction for forgery. Apart from such sparse information as his date of birth and address, there was nothing personal. No name other than that of the rent boy mentioned in the first case, but in the second there was one more: Paul Michel.

  The chief inspector flicked through the interrogation notes. Even through the bureaucratic language you could feel the fear that Michel must have experienced. He was brought in as a witness, but he had known he could face charges too. On at least one occasion Michel had taken forgeries from Weber's printer down to the Gold-bekplatz — concealed in his steel leg. A disabled war veteran, Stave guessed, an old friend of Weber's, maybe a ‘special friend’, although if so, that had been of little interest to his questioner because Stave could find no precise mention of such a relationship anywhere, just here and there vague references in the witness's statement which were probably quite harmless but which anyone who had been so minded could have considered improper.

  Michel had insisted he didn’t know he was carrying forgeries: he had thought the ration cards were the real thing. A poor lie, not least because trading even in real ration cards was illegal. And also because he didn’t have an answer when asked by the CID man why, if he considered them to be genuine, he had concealed them in his prosthetic leg.

  Nonetheless Stave could find no other reference to Michel in the file. No charges, and therefore obviously no conviction. They had just let him walk. Maybe Michel had just been too small a fish. Maybe somebody had been sympathetic because he had only one leg. Stave didn’t like the idea of turning up in front of the man like a ghost from his past. But for now he constituted the only lead he had. He took down the man's address and set off.

  Lerchenstrasse was narrow, little more than an alleyway near Heiligengeistfeld in St Pauli. It wasn’t very far from the CID headquarters but Stave was soaked to the skin by the time he got there. He glanced briefly at the Schiller Theatre on Lerchenstrasse, a round building like a circus tent which up until 1945 had hosted crude comedies and operettas. He had been there once with Margarethe, 1938 or 1939, he didn’t remember exactly. Now the gutted building was used to house refugees and the homeless. Three teenagers were leaning against the outside wall, flat caps pulled down over their foreheads, hands in their trouser pockets, cigarettes between narrow lips. He could feel them watching him as he strode along the pavement.

  At Lerchenstrasse 23 there was an apartment block that had been virtually decapitated: a ground floor with fire-blackened brick walls, above it blown open, inaccessible apartments with drenched ceilings and floors, walls askew, plumbing pipes, remnants of heating-stove chimneys. All that remained of the roof was a charred beam standing out against the sky like a fallen tombstone cross. Somebody had scribbled the name ‘Michel’ on the blackened door in chalk. Nice handwriting, Stave thought.

  The man who opened the door to him was skeletal, bald and with skin as chapped as someone of venerable age, his dark eyes sunk deep into his skull, the scrawny left hand clutching a walking stick. Yet despite all that, the chief inspector reckoned he was only in his late forties. He glanced down briefly. The right foot of the man opposite was in an old slipper, but below his left trouser leg a leather shoe sat on the end of a leather frame.

  ‘Herr Michel? I need to talk to you,’ he said, and took out his police ID.

  The man went pale. ‘Not that old story?’

  ‘Up to a point. But it's nothing to do with you,’ the CID man said reassuringly. ‘May I come in?’

  ‘At your own risk. But take shallow breaths until you’ve got used to the smell.’ The stench of filth and faeces overwhelmed Stave like poison.

  ‘It comes from the drains sometimes,’ the one-legged man said. ‘There's nothing to be done about it.’

  Two bare rooms. A heating stove with an enamel plaque: ‘What stops you getting cold is every bit as good as gold.’ There were cracks in the walls, filled in with brown clay and old newspapers. Michel noticed Stave looking at them and raised his hands apologetically. ‘The cracks keep getting bigger. We fill them with whatever we have to hand, to stop the draughts.’

  ‘It's not making the walls any more stable.’

  ‘I know. Every storm makes the whole place sway as if you were on a ship. Sometimes when a door slams it sounds like an explosion and we all run out, just like we did back in ’43, in case the building really does collapse. Only now instead of running down into the cellar, we run out into the open air. These days the cellar belongs to the rats. Sometimes we get clouds of stone dust and we have to wrap damp cloths over our faces to stop from suffocating. One day the ruins above our heads will simply come tumbling down.’

  ‘You don’t live here on your own?’

  ‘With the wife and five children. They’re out fetching rations.’

  Michel led him over to two chairs next to a wooden oil paint-lacqu
ered table with an open packet sitting on it. Stave stared at the yellow cardboard carton with the words in black ‘CARE U.S.A.’ He was staring enviously at the tin cans inside, meat and margarine in boxes, sugar, honey, bacon, raisins, chocolate, and above all, two pounds of genuine coffee. The chief inspector didn’t know what to make of the aid parcels that kept arriving in ever-greater numbers, sent to Germany by charitable organisations overseas. He longed for such delicacies he had been deprived of for so long, but on the other hand he also felt a vague sense of humiliation looking at such generous gifts. Not that he himself had been tempted to accept such a token of sympathy: he knew nobody in America and was not on any distribution list run by Caritas or the Red Cross.

  ‘I just picked that up from the post office,’ said Michel, following his guest's gaze. ‘Cost me more than 44 Reichsmarks in duty and carriage costs.’

  ‘A small price for such a treasure trove of conserves.’

  ‘I have friends over there, who think about me. In Hollywood.’

  ‘Yes, my friend Charlie Chaplin sends me postcards now and again.’

  ‘I’m not joking. I was in charge of supplies at UFA film studios. A lot of our colleagues in the industry got homesick in 1943 and left for California. I kept in contact with them, at least as long as that was still allowed. But they never forgot me over there.’ He tapped the cardboard box. ‘I’d pack up my bags and leave this hole for California straight away if the Amis would let me in. But they’re not taking any German immigrants at the moment, least of all cripples like me.’

  ‘So far you’ve not been convicted of anything though,’ Stave growled, and noticed Michel's face muscles twitch. ‘And if you answer a few of my questions, you’ll never see me again.’

  The one-legged man let himself down on one seat and offered his guest the other. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Chief Inspector. I’ve had assurances before from the cops that I’d be left alone, but here you are. The next time it’ll be a different one of your colleagues, and you will still be able to say you kept your promise that you personally wouldn’t turn up again. But what good's that to me?’