The Wolf Children
Page 4
‘Do the British find it a bit awkward that the body's lying on one of their bombs?’ he asked Erna.
‘Not in the slightest – as far as they’re concerned, their bombs are our problem. They’re just a bit nervous about the fact he was found at Blohm & Voss.’
Stave gave a wry smile. ‘There's enough resentment at them having the works dismantled. I can imagine they’re not exactly happy at what's being said about a murdered boy turning up there.’
‘That's what James wants to talk to you about. He asked me to call and let him know when you got back.’
‘Can’t refuse a request from a member of the army of occupation,’ Stave shot back, opening the door to his own office. He wasn’t exactly pleased at the news. There could be problems if MacDonald turned up here at the office.
Half an hour later the lieutenant knocked on Stave's door and tiptoed in. ‘It seems we’re partners again, old boy,’ he said, taking Stave's hand. He had long given up the habit of greeting him with a salute. Stave looked at his blond hair, pink cheeks, watery blue eyes.
‘At least only half officially for the moment,’ MacDonald added. ‘I happened to be down at the Esplanade and got the nod from upstairs.’
The chief inspector nodded. Esplanade 6, he meant. Nice place, down on the west bank of the inner Alster Lake. That was where Vaughan Berry, the British civilian governor of Hamburg lived. He was a genial Labour politician who spoke excellent German, not a man to take rash decisions.
‘Mr Berry would prefer if we didn’t make a song and dance about my role in your investigation.’
‘Are you telling me I shouldn’t inform my superior officer that an English officer is involved in the investigation?’
‘I’m glad we understand one another,’ MacDonald replied with a smile. ‘Things are complicated enough as it stands.’
Stave mumbled under his breath, if only to give himself time to think. As the representative of the occupying force Governor Vaughan Berry was the most powerful man in Hamburg. But the British had allowed elections to be held, and that meant that ever since 1946 the city had its first post-war mayor, Max Brauer, from the Social Democrats (SPD). Brauer ran City Hall in a coalition with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) as well as four councillors from the Communist Party (KPD). That made carrying out an investigation at Blohm & Voss all the more complicated because it was the workers down there to whom the four communists owed their seats.
‘Is the governor aware of your special aptitude for this case?’ Stave eventually managed to ask, a discreet reference to the fact that their previous collaboration had revealed MacDonald belonged to a branch of the British secret service. Stave didn’t know all the details, but he knew enough to realise the young officer had more influence than most people thought.
‘That's precisely why Mr Berry asked me to look into the matter. The dismantling of the shipyard is causing a lot of resentment towards us. Personally I think it would have been fairer to leave standing whatever our Royal Air Force comrades didn’t take care of. But politics is politics. We are having the machinery dismantled and it's giving the communists the grounds they need to make life difficult for us.’
‘I thought Stalin was your ally?’ Stave replied, with just a hint of caustic irony in his voice.
‘He was our ally, as long as Hitler was perpetrating his atrocities. These days we’re not quite so matey with Uncle Joe over there in Moscow. The Russians have become the new Germans. And despite the fact that the day before yesterday we were bombing the hell out of the Germans, now we’d prefer to have you on our side rather than Moscow's.’
‘We’re supposed to be your new reserves, are we, like the Indians and the Africans?’ Stave asked sceptically. ‘We Germans have had our fill of war.’
‘There's always a few types who can never get their fill of war,’ MacDonald hit back. ‘And maybe one of those types happens to be a communist who needs nothing more than the dead body of a boy found lying on a British bomb as an excuse to mount a campaign against Her Majesty's forces.’
‘So that's why you’re here?’
‘Let's just say I’m here to prevent any fresh outbreak of hostilities.’
‘Very discreet.’
‘So discreet that when you solve the case, you will get all the glory. Officially I don’t exist. I’m only here to help out if in the course of the investigation you come across something politically sensitive.’
‘Such as?’
MacDonald shrugged. ‘Let's wait and see. The only ones who know of my involvement are you and Mr Berry. And Erna, of course, but she knows well enough to keep quiet.’
‘Well, I’m glad we can all rely on Frau Berg,’ Stave chortled. He was beginning to enjoy this.
‘So,’ MacDonald began, ‘what's your plan?’
‘As an old French philosopher said,’ Stave replied, ‘if you want to give God a good laugh, start telling him about your plans.’
It was muggy in the office, even though Stave had opened the window wide. You could see dust particles hovering in the air, and the room stank of the contents of old box files. Kienle dropped in and set a few still-damp photos down on the chief inspector's desk, adding an extra fine aroma of developing fluid to the atmosphere.
‘Pictures of the kid,’ Stave said. ‘I was waiting for these.’
‘To give God a good laugh?’
‘Indeed. Want to know what our plan is? First we find out who the kid is. Then we find whoever killed him.’
‘Does that mean back down to the Search Office in Altona?’
Stave nodded. ‘We have no name, no papers, no missing persons report. The boy was almost certainly a street kid. I’ve already rung the Search Office and registered the case. They didn’t sound exactly overjoyed. They had some 40,000 registered orphans in Hamburg. Over the past two years they’ve managed to find parents or other relatives for nearly half of them somewhere in the zones of occupation.’
‘That still leaves 20,000 unaccounted-for orphans.’
‘Including some 600 who don’t even know their own first names. The care staff just call them “love” or “poppet”.’
MacDonald looked down at the police photographer's blown-up picture of the boy's face. ‘Nobody called him “poppet”. He knew his own name.’
‘The question is whether or not he used it or whether he made up another name for himself
‘If he was up to something illegal?’
‘We found a sharpened screwdriver on him. And a packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes.’
‘Black marketeer?’
‘Maybe. A lot of the street kids do that. Arguments among black marketeers often end in a fight. But you don’t get many down by the docks, and there's never been a case in the shipyard. What would black marketeers be doing down there anyway?’
‘Nobody but the workers and military police should be down at Blohm & Voss.’
‘I’m hoping that's going to make the investigation easier. The boy ought not to have been there. If we can find out why he was, that might give us a motive and maybe even a murderer. You don’t get many people down there.’
‘Don’t you believe it. According to our military police they’re busy every night with looters and scavengers who break into the docks looking for valuables. Smugglers who find all sorts of things from cigarettes to penicillin and even gold on board the ships and take them to sell on the black market. They steal from the Allied ships as well as German fishing boats. Once we had a gang who specialised in looting the American CARE* aid packets and therefore only raided American freight ships.’
‘Sounds like people who know what they’re doing. Shady characters but not idiots. Doesn’t sound like the sort of people who willingly go near an unexploded bomb.’
‘They might do, depending on how much profit there was to be made.’
‘Or we could be dealing with a lunatic who just likes the idea of leaving a murder victim on a bomb. Or it has something to do with the Blohm & Voss dismantling.’
Stave was wondering if MacDonald or his military police knew that the workers were deliberately sabotaging the dismantling process. ‘Let's head down to the Search Office,’ he said.
Just then there was a knock on the door and Erna Berg stuck her head round to say, ‘There's a phone call from Police Station 31. They had a missing person reported a couple of hours ago: a boy from Barmbek, fourteen years old, last seen wearing Hitler Youth shorts -original colour – and a workman's shirt.’
‘I think I can hear God laughing,’ MacDonald said.
‘Where's the local station,’ the lieutenant asked as they climbed into his army Jeep outside the CID HQ.
‘Barmbek South. Drive us as far as the Alster and I’ll direct you from there.’ Stave dropped thankfully on to the hard passenger seat. ‘I’m relieved not to have to spend hours going through endless filing cards of nameless children.’
‘Yes, you’ve done enough of that,’ the British officer answered. After a brief pause he added, ‘Heard anything more from your son?’
‘He's still in Siberia,’ was all the answer the chief inspector made. He was embarrassed talking to other people about Karl, reluctant to let them see just how relieved he was that the boy was still alive. Or how afraid he was that something might happen to him in the POW camp. Or about how the boy might react when he turned up back home to find his father with a new woman.
All of a sudden a dreadful thought struck him: ‘If the Russians turn from being an ally of the British to an enemy, and we Germans are supposed to help the British, then Stalin might never release our captured soldiers?’
MacDonald was concentrating on seeing through the dirty windscreen, even though there was next to nobody on the streets.
‘Uncle Joe isn’t exactly the most generous of men,’ he answered at last. ‘Would you prefer it if I didn’t take part in this investigation?’
Stave sighed. ‘Whether I hunt down a child murderer on my own or in the company of a British lieutenant isn’t going to make the slightest difference to those making the decisions in Moscow.’
‘I enjoy the job,’ MacDonald said, with the ghost of a smile. He put his foot down and the Jeep hurtled bumpily along the Jungfernstieg.
They were driving along the east bank of the Alster, the latter shining in the sun to their left. They could see two small yachts with slack sails, and Stave wondered if their helmsmen were occupation officers, or maybe local people again.
The big solid buildings along the Jungfernstieg and the Inner Alster looked a bit decrepit after years of neglect: there was plaster peeling off the walls, a few shell holes in the walls, although most were more or less intact. After that they passed the smart villas down Uhlenhorst, mid-nineteenth century, tasteful, subdued lighting, shady trees.
MacDonald glanced at him. ‘You wouldn’t think there’d been a war around here, would you?’
‘Wait till you get to the next crossroads,’ the chief inspector replied, nodding over to the right. ‘Welcome to the wasteland.’
The lieutenant turned on to Mundsburger Damm. A sweating traffic policeman waved them through with a weary gesture. There were just three other cars, bumping their way over the cobbles. Lost in his own thoughts, Stave's eyes came to light on the number plate of an old, dented brown Opel Olympia trailing smoke from its exhaust: ‘HG-8734’ — Hamburg Government. We’ve become part of the British Empire, he thought to himself, like Calcutta or Hong Kong, but with bomb damage.
Where they were now it wasn’t even possible to recognise what sort of buildings might ever have lined the streets. There were mountains of bricks on either side of the road, here and there a few walls that had remained standing, steel-reinforced rod meshes like giant spider's webs. And in between them the Trummerfrauen, the women who worked tirelessly to clear the rubble, helped by teams of city workers, loading the debris on to carts. Dust hung in the shimmering air. The stench of petrol from the spluttering Opel mingled with the smell of mortar, sand, charred wood and open drains. Stave thought he could detect the sweet smell of corpses in the air, but told himself he had to be imagining it. That was how it had been during the great bombing raids when corpses lay decaying in the rubble for months on end. By now they were all dust and bones, though. At least he hoped so.
They continued along Oberaltenallee for a minute or two until, on Stave's instructions, MacDonald hit the brakes so hard that a cyclist riding alongside them nearly toppled and fell. The rider went red in the face and took a deep breath as if he were about to unleash a stream of invective, then recognised the Jeep and the British uniform. He muttered something under his breath and rode on.
‘I guess he’ll be voting Communist next time around,’ MacDonald said, though he didn’t look as if he’d care all that much.
Stave looked up at Police Station 31, a relic from the Kaiser's days when they still built them to look like little Renaissance palaces, from the outside at any rate. An architectural fantasy standing there intact amid a sea of rubble, looking at the same time much older than its fifty years and much younger, as if somebody had collected all the bricks from the ruins and built a brand new structure from them.
‘I guess your bomber boys didn’t get their aim right here,’ Stave said.
‘On the contrary, the boys knew there were Gestapo prisoners housed in cells above ground so they took care to drop their loads anywhere else.’
The chief inspector gave the lieutenant a quizzical look. Was he having a laugh at his expense? Or was this the secret service man talking, someone who knew more than most people? He shrugged his shoulders and pushed open the door.
Linoleum on the floor, wooden surfaces polished by countless hands. Somewhere in the distance the clatter of a typewriter. Stave could hear jazz coming from behind a closed door. The radio only broadcast classical music or pop during the day, so as not to have to deal with too many complaints about ‘negro music’. Clearly one of the staff had a gramophone in the office. Maybe it made interrogations easier. Stave had hoped it would be cooler inside, but he was disappointed. It was hot and muggy.
He showed his ID to the duty sergeant and told him why he was there. He didn’t bother to introduce MacDonald. One look at the lieutenant's uniform was enough for the man on the desk.
‘Please follow me, Chief Inspector.’
He took them into an adjoining office, apparently an interrogation room with a table, three chairs, and a lamp with its shade turned up towards the ceiling. Stave thought back to MacDonald's comment about the Gestapo, then dismissed it. Right now there were more important matters.
A few minutes later he had a copy of the missing persons report in his hand: Adolf Winkelmann, born 2 April 1933. The chief inspector skimmed over the details. Father had been a clerk in a registry office, mother a housewife, no brothers or sisters. The parents lived in Horn, a district that had been popular with clerical workers, Stave recalled, before it was completely flattened by the bombing in 1943. Father and mother dead, since then. The missing persons report had been filed by the boy's only remaining relative, his aunt Greta Boesel, with whom he had lived, a widow in Barmbek.
Stave showed the paperwork to MacDonald, pointing to a few lines of italic type: ‘Born 1933,’ he noted. ‘First name Adolf. I think we can guess how his parents voted.’
‘Didn’t do them much good,’ MacDonald replied, ignoring the shocked look the desk sergeant gave him.
‘But the boy survived all the bombing and even the winter of starvation that followed.’
‘A lucky lad who ran out of luck.’
Stave flicked through the documentation. ‘His aunt only reported him missing after he hadn’t come home for a week. Seems like he often didn’t spend the night there and she only began to get worried when she hadn’t heard from him for a few days.’
‘Is there a photograph?’
‘No. Not even an ID
card photo. The aunt said she didn’t have any pictures of him.’
MacDonald just nodded silently.
‘Adolf Winkelmann went to Hinschenfelde high school, but it seems they didn’t notice him missing either. I guess he played truant a lot.’
‘Do you reckon it is the boy found down at the docks? What would a boy from Barmbek be doing down there? It not exactly nearby’
‘It doesn’t look as if he hung around Barmbek all that much,’ Stave replied, tapping the paper. ‘The clothes and the age fit. Time to go and see his aunt.’
Stave took the missing persons report with them. Greta Boesel, 594 Fuhlsbüttel Strasse. ‘In the north of the city,’ he told MacDonald, ‘up near Ohlsdorf Cemetery. Abour four or five kilometres from here.’
‘Good job you’ve got me and the Jeep,’ the lieutenant laughed, and put his foot down.
They drove along Barmbeker Markt, snaking between heaps of rubble on streets that had still only been partially cleared, then down Fuhlsbüttel Strasse almost directly north. To their left and right stood the stumps of oak trees that had been burnt down or hacked to pieces for firewood, with here and there a tree that had somehow managed to survive all the attacks on it and had grown a crown providing welcome shade for people to sit in: men in linen suits with pork pie hats carrying briefcases, immediately recognisable as clerical workers in this sea of devastation; others in sweat-marked vests, tough-looking men, bleary from beer; women in blousy flowery dresses and headscarves, the colours faded, none of them wearing nylons, but that didn’t stop MacDonald staring at them long enough for Stave to worry about them crashing into an oak.
They passed Barmbek Hospital, a collection of red-brown buildings in an expansive park. Requisitioned by the British. The entrance was fenced off, with ‘Hospital 94’ marked above it, and military police dozing in the sun. Stave's son had been born here. All of a sudden he had a vision of Karl as a baby, so incredibly small and light in his arms. His wife Margarethe pale, drenched in sweat, exhausted, but impossibly happy. Stave turned his eyes left, away from the hospital, away from MacDonald.