Anna's right, he thought. I need to sort myself out. Otherwise I’m not going to feel a hand on my shoulder to pull me out of the ruins a second time.
Concentrate on the case, on the shipyard, on the smugglers, on the night after next. Then you can sort out your private life. MacDonald and he would manage it. They would conceal themselves somewhere near the Leland Stanford and wait. But what if it was not just one smuggler but a whole gang of them? They had two guns, and the element of surprise. But don’t play hero, he told himself. Think about what you’re doing. Don’t start imagining yourself in some American gangster movie shootout, before you’ve even worked out how you’re going to get across the Elbe at night.
But he felt as if there was hot lead running down his head. He couldn’t think of anything that made sense. Later, he told himself, later it would be cooler. You can sit out on your balcony and work it out. There might even be water. A cold bath would be good.
When he finally reached the door of his apartment, he was so exhausted he at first didn’t even notice the little note on the floor. He stumbled into the bathroom and turned the tap: water! A rust-red trickle, lukewarm. He ripped off his sweaty clothes and threw himself into the bath, letting the water cover him. He lay there for a good hour before he started to get goose pimples. A clean shirt. He was halfway to the balcony before he glanced down at the floor and saw a note in Karl's handwriting.
‘Father, I’m coming round for supper tomorrow. I’ll bring a lettuce I got in exchange for a couple of tobacco leaves, and I’ll bring some tobacco too.’
Stave's heart was pounding, timings running through his head. Alternative strategies. No matter what time he left tomorrow and no matter how he managed to cross the river, it had to be dark by the time they lay in wait at Blohm & Voss. It was in any case going to be the shortest night of the year. What time would the sun set? Ten in the evening? Maybe even later. There was no way he would get back in time for supper. But he could hardly leave MacDonald in the lurch.
He would put a note on the door. He ripped a page from his notebook there and then, sat down at the kitchen table and wrote on it: ‘Wait for me! I’m running late, something urgent that I can’t put off. But I will be here.’
Stave read it through, crumpled it into a ball and threw it in the waste bin. Pathetic. He would write something else. A proper letter. He would think of something. He would be honest. He would save Karl. He would save Anna. He would save himself.
He would sort it all out when he got back from the shipyard. If he got back from the shipyard.
Under the Elbe
Wednesday, 18 June 1947
The next morning when Stave tried to take a breath he felt as if someone had placed a gag over this mouth and nose. His fingers were as swollen as if he’d been in a boxing match. If he had still worn his wedding ring it would have cut into his flesh. When he walked out on to the balcony and squinted into the bright sunlight it seemed as if the line of ruins had somehow grown overnight. A moment later he realised that on the horizon to the west a vast mountain of grey and black clouds were gathering low above the piles of rubble and half-destroyed houses. He licked his finger and held it up to test if there was a wind coming from the west. It would be a relief at last to have a storm hit Hamburg. Not a breath.
He searched his cupboards and desk drawers until he found an unused envelope and a clean sheet of paper. It had been ages since he’d last had any ink for his old fountain pen, even on the black market. A pencil would have to do. He sharpened it carefully with his penknife.
Then Chief Inspector Frank Stave sat down and wrote his son Karl the first ever long letter he had written him. He explained to him that he had never joined the Nazi Party because he had been put off by the endless atmosphere of aggression. That he had been saddened by the enthusiasm Karl had shown for the Hitler Youth. Admitted that he had never dared to persuade him otherwise, afraid that in the ‘brown years’ it would have cost him his career in the police, and in the hard times to come he would not have been able to feed his family. Then there was Margarethe's death. He described the terrible night of bombing in 1943 and how later, too late, he had found her body. He wondered if he ought to mention his crippled foot? Or tell Karl that after Margarethe's death he had spent the night standing on the banks of the Elbe? Later, he told himself, leave that for later. You’re already asking him to cope with a lot. Karl volunteering for the army. Then the end of the war, the arrival of the English. The new beginning, how he had been promoted because he had a clean reputation. How he began looking for his son, spent days on the station platforms. The killer in the ruins he had spent much of the winter tracking down. Anna. He tried to be discreet, only hinted obliquely at love, and admitted he had no idea whether or not they had a future together. Let Karl work that one out for himself, he said to himself.
He took a new sheet, one that had gone yellow and was torn at one corner, but it was all he had left. The case he was now dealing with: the murdered orphans with no one to grieve for them. The smuggling down at the port. The big dealers who orchestrated it all. The curious business with recording tape. He told him about Erna Berg and MacDonald. The lieutenant's deadline. He admitted to his son, who had gone to fight in the war, that this officer who not long ago would have been an enemy, had become his friend. Stave told him that tonight he had no choice but to investigate down at Blohm & Voss, that he might have the chance to arrest a smuggler who had also murdered three children. He ended with a promise:
I will be back this evening no matter what happens. It will be late. But I will be here. Please wait for me, even if I am not back before dark. You have a key.
I love you,
Your father.
On the outside of the envelope he wrote in large letters: FOR KARL STAVE, PRIVATE AND PERSONAL. When he finally left the apartment, the chief inspector tacked the envelope to the outside of the door, at eye level. Everybody would see it, but what the hell?
As he left the house at Ahrensburger Strasse 93, it seemed as if the dark clouds on the far horizon had risen slightly He felt more fit and confident than he had in days.
Down at headquarters Erna Berg was perched on the edge of her chair, drenched in sweat. She stared at her typewriter with the apathetic air of a badly bruised boxer who knew he still had to go back into the ring for the twelfth round.
‘We’ll have a thunderstorm by tomorrow at the latest, that’ll make things easier,’ he promised.
‘Tomorrow James will be on the way out of here, unless something dramatic happens,’ she whispered in return. ‘To Palestine ... do you think they’d let me go with him?’
We’re more likely to be voting for a new Reichschancellor than the British are to send a German woman to the Jews and Arabs, Stave thought to himself. But all he said was ‘Anything's possible’ and smiled. She had no idea what MacDonald and he had planned for that evening. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said.
‘You?’
‘Wait and see.’ You never know, he thought, I might just manage to make you happy. Of course, it was also possible that by this time tomorrow not only her lover might be gone, but her boss too, because he had got himself thrown out of the police. Erna Berg could find herself working for somebody like Cäsar Dönnecke. That gave him an idea.
‘I’m off to see the boss,’ he told her.
‘There is a very fine line between stubbornness and stupidity,’ Cuddel Breuer was telling him five minutes later, ‘and right now you’re treading on it.’
‘If you won’t give me the case, then let me see copies of the files,’ the chief inspector pleaded. What he wanted to find out was whether or not in the case of the murdered prostitute and coal thief, there had been any reference to tapes or the port. Anything that might give him a clue where they might be hiding them. That would be one more piece of evidence implicating Kümmel. Or an indicator as to whether or not the smuggler had accomplices.
‘No.’
‘Then at the very least tell me if my colle
ague, Herr Dönnecke, has arrested anybody yet?’
‘As far as I know, there have been no arrests, no new leads and nobody new interviewed.’
No interest, thought Stave to himself, he just isn’t interested.
‘So what about you? Have you made any progress in your case?’ Breuer's bright eyes studied him carefully. ‘The English are getting more and more nervous about the growing unrest down at Blohm & Voss. Governor Berry has invited me over for tea tomorrow afternoon. I suspect we aren’t going to talk about the weather.’
‘You’ll have something else to talk about,’ the chief inspector said, getting to his feet. He wasn’t going to make any progress here. He would have to ask somebody else for help. Someone he didn’t even want to exchange two words with at present. It was time to go and pay a visit to Public Prosecutor Ehrlich.
I just hope I don’t bump into Anna on the way, he said to himself as he headed towards the grand offices of the public prosecutor. That would be awkward. She would be convinced he was spying on her. And he would find it unbearable to find her close to Ehrlich again. Stave was lucky. The public prosecutor was alone in his office. His desk was covered with box files, letters, documents with official stamps – probably Wehrmacht orders, the chief inspector guessed. Ehrlich looked like the only person in the whole of Hamburg whose skin hadn’t seen the sun. Only his eyes, behind his oversized spectacles, looked red. ‘Not so long ago it was less of an administrative task to annihilate an entire race than it is now to bring one man to trial,’ Ehrlich sighed.
‘It's called progress, these days,’ Stave said, ‘and it will keep you in work for years.’
‘That depends if anyone still cares about these cases in a few years’ time.’ Ehrlich waved a circling fly away with his hand and added, ‘But I doubt you’re here to listen to me complain.’
The chief inspector smiled: at the end of the day it was difficult not to like Ehrlich. ‘Well yes,’ he said, ‘in fact, I’m about to break a few laws, and I’d like your help.’
Ehrlich raised his bushy eyebrows and said, ‘Actually I’m well up to speed on broken laws.’
In the briefest of terms, Stave told him his suspicions about the smuggling going on down at Blohm & Voss, about the Leland Stanford, about Walter Kümmel, the boxing promoter, the British soldiers’ friend, the big player on the smuggling scene, and the fact that he was left-handed. And he told him about his plan to go down to the docks that night.
‘Alone?’
‘With a ...’ Stave hesitated, ‘British friend.’
‘Whose superiors know as little about his plans as yours do about yours, I imagine.’
‘That's why I’m here to clear it with you.’
‘There's not a lot a German prosecutor can do in a case like this. If you’re caught, you’ll end up in a British court, not a German one. The case will never even come near my desk.’
‘Apart from trouble with the British, I’m also likely to face a few problems with my own people,’ Stave said.
‘There might be something I could do about that,’ Ehrlich said with a thin smile.
Stave leaned forward: ‘It has to be done tonight,’ he said with an urgency in his voice.
‘Why the hurry?’
‘Because the Leland Stanford weighs anchor in the morning. And because otherwise my British friend is going to be very unhappy, and so is a German girl.’
Ehrlich gave an ironic laugh. ‘Cherchez la femme. It's always the same romantic motive with some types of law breakers. With others,’ he tapped a hand on the pile of documents in front of him, ‘women aren’t that important.’
Just how important are women to you? was the question Stave didn’t dare ask. He hoped the public prosecutor wasn’t thinking of Anna. But the public prosecutor was dealing with another circling fly. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You and your English friend, whose name you aren’t going to tell me, but I think I can easily imagine, are determined to risk both your careers tonight. And given that our smuggler friends tend to react rather quickly when they’re disturbed, you are both risking your necks. There's nothing I can do about the latter, so you should be careful. But if you are caught I shall have a few words with my English friends. I have more of them than you do, and they’re in higher positions. Positions of some power. I suspect that if you are caught, the worst that will happen is that you’ll be put back in uniform on the streets for the rest of your career. But just about better than losing your job altogether.’
‘My lucky day,’ said Stave, and got up to go. But Ehrlich gestured for him to remain sitting.
‘What do you think might be on these tapes they are so determined to smuggle out of the country?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Stave replied cautiously, and not exactly dishonestly. ‘At first I assumed they were empty. Why would anyone want used tapes?’
The public prosecutor followed Stave's eyes and nodded somewhat ironically. ‘You obviously don’t have a tape recorder, Chief Inspector, and that excuses your assumptions. But tape is just raw material — it's only when there's something recorded on them that they become interesting and potentially valuable. Something,’ he paused for dramatic effect, ‘like incriminating material from the Third Reich.’
‘That had occurred to me,’ Stave admitted. ‘But what? Interrogations? I never heard anything about the Gestapo going to the effort of recording what they got up to in their cellars.’
‘Speeches,’ the public prosecutor told him. ‘Back then politicians, police, officials, captains of the economy, said things which today they might find, shall we say, embarrassing?’
Stave thought back to Rudolf Blohm and the old weekly newsreels before 1945. ‘Old speeches aren’t necessarily damaging today’
‘Blackmail. They are being smuggled out of Germany to be used later to blackmail someone.’
‘But why would the Americans pay for them? Why would a boxing promoter like Walter Kümmel get involved in something like that? I made inquiries. Kümmel was never in the Party, never caused any trouble. He was politically neutral. Now he's a business big shot. Why would he get involved in blackmail?’
‘Questions I hope you’ll be able to answer in a few hours’ time. I’ve got my fingers crossed.’
Stave found himself staring at the Barlach lithograph of the two skeletons on the wall behind Ehrlich. Those could be MacDonald and me, he thought to himself. And then he found his thoughts wandering in another direction. ‘Has Frau von Veckinhausen found any of your own missing art collection?’ he asked, hoping that he sounded casual enough.
Once again Ehrlich gave him an ironic look. ‘I’m afraid things don’t work quite so easily. The stolen paintings aren’t exactly hanging in some museum or other, but I’m hoping that Frau von Veckinhausen with her, shall we say,’ he searched for a way of putting it, ‘interesting connections to the art market as it is today, might eventually come across one or another piece which I used to be fond of
‘Are you in regular contact with her?’ Stave held his breath.
‘No. All I’ve had from her so far are a couple of notes, testing the water, you might call it. But unfortunately I’ve seen nothing of her.’ He stared out of the window.
The chief inspector had to work hard to suppress a sigh of relief. He just hoped Ehrlich hadn’t noticed. ‘Frau von Veckinhausen can be a bit taciturn at times,’ he added, and this time he really did get up to go.
‘Be careful,’ the public prosecutor called after him as he grasped the handle of the door. ‘I don’t want to see a request for an autopsy on my desk tomorrow morning, with your name on it.’
‘I’m not going to give Dr Czrisini the chance to cut me open.’
Stave had just got back to his office when the phone rang. MacDonald. ‘I’ve worked out how we can get across the Elbe tonight.’
‘We’re going to fly?’
‘No. We’re going to sail.’
Stave slammed the door to the anteroom, sat down at his desk and used his left hand to wip
e the sweat from his brow. ‘The line's bad. I think I must have misheard you.’
The lieutenant laughed. He hadn’t been in such good humour for days. ‘Britannia rules the waves, even the little waves on the Elbe. We’re taking a sailing boat.’
‘I can’t imagine anything likely to be more conspicuous than a sailing boat on the Elbe,’ Stave said, horrified by the idea.
‘There's always a light breeze across the river in the evenings. Nobody will hear us and nobody will see us. No engine noise, no lights.’
‘No sailing boat, either. How do you intend to get hold of one?’
‘Back in 1945 it wasn’t just a few villas and a few theatres we requisitioned, old boy. There are one or two yachts available to His Majesty's officers.’
‘What happened to the people they used to belong to?’
‘A few wealthy Hamburg folk who by 1945 had disappeared. Their sailboats were officially confiscated. Now lying around in a few harbours on the Elbe. I’m thinking of a rather nice one that's there by one of the piers down on Baumwall, just waiting for an adventure. The Albatross IV. Up until 1938 it belonged to a rich banker who turned out to have the wrong religion for the Third Reich. It ended up in the hands of an SS-Obergruppenführer, who strangely seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth since March 1945. Currently it's being used by a colonel who has good connections with our Ministry of Defence. It's likely to be renamed HMS Albatross IV. Sleek, fast, thirteen metres. Perfect racer.’
‘Sounds a bit beyond me!’
‘What? You’re not telling me you don’t sail?’
‘As a child I would chase the swans on the Alster in a dinghy. The swans usually won. That's the last time I sailed. I had a wife and child and a policeman's salary that was nowhere near enough to afford it.’
‘Well that's enough to qualify you as ship's mate. All you’ll have to do is help raise the sails, and pull a few ropes now and then. I’ll do the rest. It's not far. From the Baumwall we only need to cross the river directly and we’re at Blohm & Voss. Don’t worry’
The Wolf Children Page 28
