The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  ‘The spark plugs. Or the distributor,’ MacDonald speculated breezily. ‘Let's hope the old banger doesn’t fall to pieces beneath us. Who knows when the next patrol might come by to pick us up.’

  The CID man dreaded a long trek on foot in the rain. ‘What are our chances?’

  ‘Fifty-fifty. But you live on Ahrensburger Strasse, and that's just an extension of Reichsstrasse 75. With a bit of luck we’ll make it that far and I can drop you right outside your front door.’

  ‘You’re going to keep on driving?’

  ‘The army has a workshop on Holstenhofweg, just a few hundred yards from your house. Right on our route, even though it would be against the rules. I’ll force this old crate right through town to our fleet car park, return it officially, put in a report — and then, provided the engine hasn’t completely died, some bad-tempered sergeant will have to take it back to Holstenhofweg.’

  ‘In that case we can pass my house by. I’d also like to go into town.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Grindelallee. The exchange centre.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  And indeed half an hour later the Jeep, rattling and stuttering, was dragging itself down Grindelallee. Stave agreed to meet up with MacDonald the next day to keep him up to date with the progress of his enquiries — provided there was any progress to report. He sprang out of the vehicle with relief as it spluttered its way into the distance.

  The exchange centre was a long wall made of wooden boards from old crates by the side of the street, set up by somebody or other and tolerated by both the British occupation forces and the German administration. There were hundreds of notes pinned to the wooden wall, yellowed with age and soaked by the rain, the washed-out ink on many of them almost unreadable. This was where people who didn’t want to take the risks of the black market offered things. Every now and then the police sent a patrol car by, because it was illegal to offer things that were rationed – sugar or butter for example. But apart from that these ‘barter businesses’, as they were described officially by the police, were benignly tolerated because they helped to ease the shortages.

  It was a flea market in pieces of paper and even in this weather dozens of men and women were wandering up and down staring at the notices, so intently in places where the writing had been all but washed away by the rain, that they looked like entomologists studying a rare species.

  Stave joined the line and read: ‘Potatoes in exchange for a cycle lamp’; ‘Have coat, need shoes’; ‘Bedclothes on offer in exchange for rabbit (live)’.

  He was looking for a bicycle himself, because three years after the war the main streets were now mostly clear of rubble. And he was tired of having to plod through the streets on foot for hours. His old bike had been in the cellar of the rental building where he had lived until 1943 — it was probably still there, buried under tons of beams and bricks that had collapsed the night the bomb hit it.

  Stave came across a note that from its condition didn’t look as if it had been there all that long — maybe he wasn’t too late. ‘Man's bike in exchange for typewriter.’

  He had an old black Olympia at home. The typewriter stood on the table of the apartment he had been allocated after the bombing. Even now he had no idea who had lived there before him and what had become of them. He had never used the typewriter, but had been telling himself for years that he ought to hang on to it, to give it back to its former owners one day, should they ever knock on the door. But right now looking at the board with the offer pinned to it, he realised that nobody was ever going to knock on his door and demand the Olympia back. He took down the name and address of the other party. He hadn’t a telephone. Obviously.

  Stave was about to leave when he spotted another notice. It was the handwriting that drew his attention: blue ink, sloping a bit, uneven, an adult's handwriting, but one that still showed the exaggerated loops of a schoolchild. He recognised it. It was that of his son, Karl.

  All of a sudden he was worked up and interested to see what his son had to offer: ‘A Persil box full of dry tobacco, for Mommsen's Roman History.’

  The chief inspector remained there looking at the advert for so long that other people came up and joined him. Karl was growing tobacco on his allotment. Dried leaves cut up small could be rolled in newspaper to make homemade cigarettes people called ‘broomsticks’. It was an attractive offer in times like these. But why did his son want a book in return? He tried to remember why the name Mommsen seemed vaguely familiar. Was it a novel? Or non-fiction?

  The chief inspector looked around until he spotted an elderly bespectacled gentleman a few metres away, who looked like a retired teacher.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said to him, ‘but what is Mommsen's Roman History?’ and pointed to Karl's advert.

  The man looked at him as if he had asked who Kaiser Wilhelm was, then finally grinned condescendingly. ‘Theodor Mommsen was a great scholar at the end of the last century. His speciality was ancient history. His Roman History remains the standard work. I myself wouldn’t give up my own copy for a cardboard box full of tobacco. But I’m sure he’ll find somebody. There were dozens of editions of Mommsen's work. It was on the bookshelves of all the best houses, before times turned so barbaric.’ The man snorted and looked down his nose at him.

  Stave thanked him and looked back at the notice in confusion: why would his son want a book about the history of ancient Rome?

  Forgotten files

  Thursday, 17 June 1948

  In his office on the quiet floor in CID headquarters Stave sat flicking through his notebook, deciphering his scribbles from the day before. He found nothing that got him any further along.

  He looked up surprise when there was a knock on his door: Kienle.

  ‘I remember!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Your real name? You’re not Ansgar Kienle, but Martin Bormann, the Führer's vanished secretary. Ought I to arrest you?’

  ‘Maybe your new job should be renamed Department SS, for its bad jokes,’ the police photographer replied. ‘I remember the bronze bust found in the ruins — the woman.’

  ‘Anni Mewes. A film actress. By artist Toni Weber. I’ve got further than that.’

  His visitor was taken aback. ‘Maybe then the rest doesn’t matter now, even though it is rather odd,’ he murmured.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I saw her in the cinema.’

  ‘She was a movie actress.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean the woman. The bronze bust, the sculpture. I saw it in the cinema, must have been the end of the thirties. I just can’t remember which film. But I know I was in the Lichtspielhaus cinema and saw the bust really prominently in one scene and remember thinking it was a pity we only saw things like that in the cinema nowadays and no longer in art galleries.’

  Stave closed his eyes. ‘I’m an idiot,’ he mumbled. When Weber had told him about the propaganda films and getting props, he had thought he meant one of the usual things cobbled together for the weekly cinema news. Another broadcast about degenerate art, a few withering words, a couple of clips and then Goebbels or the Führer. For not one second had it occurred to him that he might have meant a feature film. ‘You are the best scene of crime expert in the Hamburg police,’ the chief inspector said in praise.

  ‘I’m just about the only one,’ Kienle reminded him calmly.

  Now Stave knew what he really should have asked Toni Weber yesterday. Was there any more he could tell him about this film in which the bronze bust had been used as a prop? The chief inspector had concentrated so much on a possible connection between the artist and Schramm that he had made a note of everything else but not really thought it through.

  For the CID man the cinema meant Berlin, UFA, the glitter of the capital. All long gone. Hamburg was the new movie capital, a lot shabbier than the old capital, but even so. People like Weber had come from the Spree to the Elbe after 1945, to escape the Russians. His former colleague Michel said Weber was working in the prop departme
nt again, but this time for Käutner in Hamburg.

  There had to be more survivors from the UFA days here. If Käutner was able to make movies here then he must have hired experienced people. Who knows: maybe one of them had also worked on the propaganda film in which the bust had featured? Maybe as a prop man? And he had got hold of it and afterwards passed it on to somebody.

  Stave stormed out of his tiny office, about to shout out, as he had in the days with Homicide, that he was off on an investigation, when he remembered just in time that Erna Berg was gone and there was no secretary sitting in an anteroom outside his office.

  He walked past the closed office doors and down the stairs to the vehicle fleet.

  ‘I need a car,’ he called to the mechanic on duty.

  ‘Don’t we all?’ The man hesitated a second. He wouldn’t have done that when I was still with Homicide, the chief inspector thought before swallowing his wounded pride. ‘I need to go out to Fuhlsbüttel, to the Ley huts on Langhorner Chaussee.’

  ‘Out to where the scum live? You don’t just need a patrol car, you need a couple of cops too.’

  ‘It's broad daylight.’

  ‘All I have is a pre-war Mercedes and we’ve just taken the radio out of it. Nobody from HQ will be able to get in touch with you.’

  ‘That means nobody will interrupt me en route.’

  ‘But if you have problems?’

  ‘I have my service pistol,’ Stave lied. The truth was his FN22 was hanging in its holster in a cupboard in his apartment.

  ‘Don’t get any holes in the bodywork.’

  ‘One more or one less wouldn’t make much difference to that car.’

  Five minutes later Stave roared off behind the wheel of an asthmatic, dark-coloured car on the long road to Hamburg's northern suburbs.

  The chief inspector wound his way through Harvesthude and Eppendorf. Now and then he would pass a forest of umbrellas on the pavement. People scurrying here and there. Odd, he thought. He braked and noticed that the passers-by were staring at empty shop windows. Some of them were chatting, others just gesticulating at the desolate display windows in the shops. We’re overdue for X-day, Stave thought, or gatherings like this will turn into demonstrations. He thought back to the forged notes found on Goldbekplatz, and suddenly understood rather better why MacDonald was so worried.

  A quarter of an hour later and the old Mercedes turned off Alsterkrugchaussee on to Langhorner Chaussee. Stave put his foot down. He had only a few kilometres to go, but the traffic in the northern suburbs was lighter. The Mercedes spluttered. When he got to the Ley huts he braked, parked and made sure both driver and passenger doors were locked. It was safer like that.

  Ley huts were like little rabbit hutches for humans: square, about twenty square metres in total, with lean-to roofs, basic flooring, one door, no heating, no bath. They were more like allotment sheds than real houses. Italian prisoners and forced labourers had made them in 1943 out of the cheapest material available, for the tens of thousands of homeless whose houses had been levelled in the bombing. Even after 1945 they had been popularly named after Robert Ley, the head of the German Workers Front, who had organised their construction.

  Along Langhorner Chaussee there were dozens of them in several rows, the entrance doorways under the sloping roof facing north, the sides with windows facing south. It was as if these miserable little dwellings made of waste wood had turned their back on the city in shame.

  At first they had been inhabited by families who had lost their home in the bombing raids and had nowhere else to live. But in the past two years many of them had moved back into the city to better accommodation. Those who were left were the people who even in the old days had little money — and then came refugees from the east, displaced persons and POWs coming home from the war with no family left. It was a settlement that counted as a impoverished district, even in a city that still lay half in ruins.

  Stave wondered why someone like Weber who apparently was earning good money hadn’t found somewhere else.

  It was midday by now. The chief inspector was hungry but also impatient. He asked two boys playing cowboys and Indians in torn shirts and lederhosen that were too short for them if they knew Toni Weber.

  ‘Have you got a cigarette?’ the older one, barely ten years old, asked him cheekily. The younger one made a howling noise, patting his mouth with his hand in what was supposed to be an Apache war cry – or maybe just a scornful laugh in disguise. The CID man wasn’t interested in telling him off and just produced a John Players from his coat pocket.

  ‘Weber lives over there. It's by far the warmest hut.’ The kid laughed ironically and pointed at the shed that lay furthest from Langhorner Chaussee, almost on the edge of a little copse. It was the only one to have been recently painted, the woodwork blue, the door and window frames white. There was a garden laid out around it with thorny roses next to the windows, their blossoms standing out in the grey drizzle. You could do worse, Stave thought, beginning to understand why somebody might choose to stay here. A little idyll – provided you had the time, the strength and the talent, to keep the cheap accommodation in good condition and close your eyes to the poverty all around.

  ‘He's a pretty boy, that Weber,’ the kid added, grinning.

  Stave ignored him and walked over to the hut. Before he could knock on the door it opened. ‘I happened to see you arrive,’ said Weber, looking tired and suspicious. ‘I just got back from Travemünde on the train. Late, as always.’ He waved him inside. He doesn’t like being seen standing outside his hut, Stave thought. You can hardly blame him, though. He walked through a windbreak curtain into a clean, surprising bright room. A shelf, a walled-in hole in the floor to keep sausages and yoghurt cool, two basic chairs, a table made out of an old door, probably salvaged from the ruins. On top of it lay a pile of thin paper with charcoal drawings. To the right, a wall made of thin boards cobbled together separated a second room with a curtain as a door. Stave glanced through and saw a single bed and a commode.

  ‘You live alone here?’

  ‘Yes. I’m better at drawing than I am with women. But that has its advantages these days.’ When the CID man gave him a questioning look, Weber shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have twenty square metres to myself here. How many people can say that nowadays? This little settlement is better than its reputation. My neighbours are decent people. Most of them don’t talk a lot, if you know what I mean.’ The chief inspector thought of the two kids, but said nothing. ‘And these huts will last for years yet,’ the artist added. ‘They could be the most solid memento of the Third Reich.’

  ‘The people who put them up weren’t exactly experts.’

  ‘But they were conscientious workers. It took a lot longer to build these than expected. After all, the longer they worked here the longer it was before they had to go back to the concentration camps. Did you know that even the deputy head of Nivea lived here? He wasn’t a hundred per cent Aryan, as far as I’ve heard. You just have to keep these places in good condition. The roofing back then was so useless that it's not much better at keeping water out than a torn towel. You have to keep climbing up there and putting down new layers. Then things are fine. But you haven’t come out here to see me just for a few DIY tips.’

  ‘I could do with some,’ the CID man said, but shook his head. ‘It's to do with the bust.’

  The artist stared at him in surprise. ‘Not the forged notes, then? I thought that was what you were really interested in.’

  ‘Possibly. But it's the bust I want to ask you a few more questions about. You said the last time you saw it was as a prop in a film. Was that in Berlin?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘In the cinema?’

  ‘No, when I was working: back in 1938 they were shooting a film for the Berlin film studio UFA at the same time as I was working on another one. I caught a brief glimpse of the bust, being used as an on-set decorative prop. It was some piece of stupid propaganda: they had built on the set a c
opy of some Jewish villain's house, or something similar. They brought a few pieces from the propaganda ministry's warehouse to Babelsberg and put them on the set. I was seriously shocked when I saw it because I was afraid somebody would recognise it as mine and blow the whistle. But nobody paid much attention to the artworks, they were just props like any other. After shooting was finished they disappeared again, probably back to the warehouse.’

  ‘I assume this propaganda ministry warehouse was in Berlin?’

  ‘Yes, as far as I know. Obviously I didn’t ask.’

  ‘But after 1945 a lot of movie companies moved from the capital to the banks of the Elbe. Do you know if anybody who was involved with that movie could be in Hamburg now?’

  ‘Are you joking?’ Weber stared at him, then shook his head. ‘How could you know that? You never worked for UFA. The director of that film lives in Hamburg. Very nicely, all things considered, at least as far as I know.’

  Stave held his breath. ‘Who?’

  ‘Veit Harlan.’

  The chief inspector turned to look out the window, to hide his surprise. ‘The most famous film director of the Third Reich,’ he muttered eventually.

  ‘Goebbels's darling. The director of Süss the Jew. The husband of actress Kristina Söderbaum. He took off quickly enough in 1945. One day he was shooting a B-movie, the next he vanished from Berlin only to turn up in Hamburg. Last year he was finally cleared by the courts: Category 5, just a “fellow traveller”.’

  ‘I recall the scandal. There were articles in the press. And some artists protested about his categorisation.’

  ‘None of which did Veit Harlan any harm. He lives down by the Alster. In a villa. Some people always land on their feet.’

  ‘How many movies did he make under the Third Reich?’

  ‘A dozen? I don’t know. Lots.’

  ‘Do you think he might remember some of the props?’