The Wolf Children Read online

  PRAISE FOR CAY RADEMACHER

  ‘Rademacher understands how to draw a living picture of the postwar period. The Wolf Children allows its readers to embrace history without an instructive tone, wonderfully packaged in a thriller’ Hessische Allgemeine

  ‘With his follow-up to The Murderer in Ruins, Rademacher has once again captured an intriguing view into a not-so-distant world in which everyone is fighting for survival’ Brigitte

  ‘Rademacher succeeds in describing history with tension’ Neue Presse

  ‘Impressively, Rademacher describes life in 1947 with all its hardships and hopes. A piece of history comes alive and is immensely touching’ Hamburger Morgenpost

  ‘Once again, Rademacher combines an exciting crime story with a detailed description of Hamburg in the post-war period’ Aachener Nachrichten

  ‘The name Cay Rademacher stands for historical competence. [...] In addition to its thrilling crime plot, The Wolf Children also provides a lively presentation of the oppressive black market conditions in the post-war years’ Geislinger Zeitung / Südwest Presse

  ‘The book sheds a light on a world out of joint. [...] A crime thriller with level and depth. Highly recommended’ Buch-Magazin

  ‘This is not just a vivid historical lesson, The Wolf Children is a nerve-racking hunt for a murderer and a great crime novel’ NDR Hörfunk

  Atmospheric, tight and gripping [...] A very successful mixture of crime and history’ Oberösterreichische Nachrichten

  ‘Exciting, authentic’ Gerald Schaumburg, Hessische Allgemeine

  THE WOLF CHILDREN

  CAY RADEMACHER was born in 1965 and studied Anglo-American history, ancient history, and philosophy in Cologne and Washington. He has been an editor at Geo since 1999, and was instrumental in setting up renowned history magazine Geo-Epoche. The Wolf Children is the second novel in the Inspector Stave series, following The Murderer in Ruins (Arcadia Books, 2015). He now lives in France with his wife and children, where his new crime series is set.

  PETER MILLAR is an award-winning British journalist, author and translator, and has been a correspondent for Reuters, The Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph. He has written a number of books, including All Gone to Look for America and 1989: The Berlin Wall, My Part in Its Downfall. He has also translated from German, Corinne Hofmann's best-selling White Masai series of memoirs, Martin Suter's A Deal with the Devil and Cay Rademacher's The Murderer in Ruins.

  THE WOLF CHILDREN

  CAY RADEMACHER

  Translated from the German by Peter Millar

  A

  Arcadia Books Ltd

  139 Highlever Road

  London W10 6PH

  www.arcadiabooks.co.uk

  First published in the United Kingdom 2017

  Originally published as Der Schieber by DuMont Buchverlag 2012

  Copyright © Cay Rademacher 2012

  English translation copyright © Peter Millar 2017

  Cay Rademacher has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  ISBN 978-1-910050-98-9

  Typeset in Garamond by MacGuru Ltd

  Printed and bound by TJ International, Padstow PL28 8RW

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  The Boy and the Bomb

  Friday, 30 May 1947

  The dead boy's blood coated the five-hundred-pound British bomb like a red veil. Light coming through the shattered roof of the warehouse fell on the corpse and on the unexploded bomb, a thing the size of a man, like some monstrous fish that had buried itself in the concrete flooring. The rest of the warehouse was in darkness. It was as if the sunlight shining in on the boy and the bomb was some giant theatrical floodlight, Chief Inspector Frank Stave of Hamburg CID thought to himself.

  Stave was in charge of a small team investigating the murder and had to prepare a report on the condition of the body and the presumed crime scene, take statements from witnesses, look for clues or traces of the killer. There was no question that the boy, aged about twelve, or fourteen at most, had suffered a violent death. But Stave was crouched down with a few other policemen behind the partially concealed steel frame of a broken crane, looking through a hole in the wall into the warehouse. There was just one man in the building, taking careful steps as he walked around the scrawny body of the boy and the fat bomb. He gave the corpse a brief glance before finally kneeling next to the bomb and gingerly setting down the big heavy leather bag he had been carrying in his right hand.

  He was a bomb disposal expert, sent to defuse the thing. As long as the detonator was still active, it was far too dangerous for the investigation team to approach the body. I just hope he doesn’t remove any traces the killer might have left, Stave thought to himself.

  The chief inspector had been alerted to the incident by a phone call just as he was starting his shift. He had gathered together a few uniformed police and set off from the CID headquarters on Karl Muck Platz. Most of them were young, wet behind the ears, appointed by the British occupation forces. Stave spotted among them Heinrich Ruge, a captain who had helped on previous enquiries.

  ‘The victim isn’t going to run off on us,’ Ruge had called out to him rather too snappily.

  Stave had said nothing, just gave a sympathetic look at the lad who had beads of perspiration leaking out from under his helmet and running down his temples. Even at the best of times the uniformed police called their tall, uncomfortable headgear ‘sweat boxes’. Today the temperature was nearly thirty degrees.

  Stave though back with a shiver to the previous winter, a merciless six months when the thermometer regularly showed between minus ten and minus twenty — sometimes even lower. And now this spring was as warm as anyone could remember. It was as if the weather was going as mad as humanity had done all too recently.

  The war's over, the chief inspector reassured himself. Ruge and another five uniforms were bent down next to him, shielded by the damaged crane, the sun right above their heads, no shade anywhere around them. He could smell their sweat evaporating. Was it just the heat? Or maybe it was fear that had them dripping with sweat?

  A small, scraggy red-haired man whose freckled face was already glowing red from the sun crouched alongside them. Ansgar Kienle was a police photographer and at the moment, for lack of alternatives, Hamburg CID's sole crime scene specialist.

  Only one person seemed to be suffering worse from the sun than Kienle — Dr Alfred Czrisini, the pathologist, whose bald head was going bright red. Czrisini just happened to have a British colleague visiting when Stave called him, and was able to borrow his Jeep to drive to meet them at the crime scene. Despite his sunburn, Czrisini looked pale as his shaking hands held a Woodbine to his lips.

  ‘Do you think that's a good idea when there's a five-hundred-pound bomb being defused nearby?’ Stave hissed between his teeth, even though he knew that nobody and no
thing, not even a bomb, would stand between Czrisini and his cigarettes. The doctor gave him a brief smile and shook his head, a little pale blue wisp of smoke rising from his mouth over the sea of ruins. Stave had brought his men across the Elbe in a launch to Steinwerder. Blohm & Voss shipyard lay at the hammer-shaped end of a peninsula on the southern side of the Elbe. There were two huge docks parallel to the river, and a third jutting diagonally into the shore like a giant sword. Behind the two big docks there was a third basin. All along the riverbank stood long brick warehouses, cranes lined up in rows like soldiers standing to attention, and the tangle of rails for the puffing narrow-gauge railways that brought boilers, gun barrels and steel bulkheads down to the docks. Or rather used to.

  It was only a few years ago that the battleship Bismarck had been built here by Blohm & Voss, and it was from here that nearly 50 per cent of the German U-boat fleet had first slid down the gangways into the sea. Stave could still see some fifteen almost-finished hulls, tubes of grey steel, some sixty or seventy metres long, with the closed torpedo door flaps in their hulls, rudders, gleaming propellor screws, a few of them so new they could almost set off immediately to patrol the seas, others already half-submerged beneath the waters of the basin, like stranded whales. Two or three of the wrecks looked as if they had been beaten to death by some giant right here in the shipyard. The British and Americans had bombed Blohm & Voss again and again.

  Stave looked at the mountains of rubble, stretching hundreds of metres in every direction: toppled chimneys lying on the two- to three-hundred-metre docks, the walls of which had been blown in, heaps of molten metal produced in a matter of seconds in the ferocious heat. Bracken and sorrel bushes sprouted from the broken cobblestones. The old bulkheads with their shattered concrete now covered in verdigris. Beyond the last of the docks the Elbe flowed on, fast and grey. And beyond that again ruins upon ruins with only the tower of St Michael's rising in the heat haze like some giant tombstone.

  Only a few years ago, even in the CID headquarters, they could hear the sound of the jackhammers echoing across the Elbe like a low humming, as continuous and unremarkable as the gurgling sound of a waterfall: after a while you simply didn’t notice it any more.

  Now it was almost totally silent. There were no ships in the docks, no sparks flying from welding machines or ice saws. The only noise came from a crane on rails at the far end of the dock, jerking and creaking as it pulled steel girders out of the ruins of a building and piled them on to a barge floating on the Elbe: material that could be melted down and recycled somewhere.

  A fireman colleague of the specialist in the warehouse crawled over to the crouching police.

  ‘How much longer is he going to take?’ Stave asked him. He noticed that he was speaking softly, as if a word pronounced too loudly might set off the unexploded bomb.

  The fireman spoke softly too, though: ‘Hard to say. Depends on what type of detonator it is, and what state it's in. We’ve seen hundreds of bombs like that. Most of them have an ordinary detonator, one that should set the explosives off the minute it hits. Sometimes they get stuck, either because they hit a roof that was already damaged or because they were screwed in wrongly in the first place. Those we can deal with quickly enough. But some of these beasts have timed fuses set to go off hours or even days later.’

  Stave nodded. He remembered how sometimes days after the horrific nights of the bombing raids, suddenly there would be an enormous boom and another building would collapse in ruins. The Americans and British had done it deliberately to make the job of clearing up the rubble more difficult — that was one of the reasons why the local Gauleiter Karl Kaufman had ordered prisoners from the Neugamme concentration camp into the ruins to do the clearing up. On two or three occasions he had been told to watch over them.

  ‘Those types of detonators,’ the fireman went on, ‘sometimes don’t work. When you look at them they can seem undamaged, but if you make the slightest mistake, even the tiniest vibration, the whole thing can explode in your face.’

  ‘Would human footsteps be vibration enough?’ the chief inspector asked him.

  The fireman smiled. ‘Sometimes, yes. But not in this case. My colleague has clearly already tested that.’

  ‘Risk of the job, I suppose,’ Stave muttered.

  ‘We get extra ration cards for doing difficult work.’

  ‘Sounds fair enough.’ The CID man looked round and saw, about fifty metres way, a group of workers watching them morosely. Then he turned back to the figure crouching next to him.

  ‘How long is he going to stay there leaning over the bomb?’

  The fireman nodded at the part of the roof that had caved in. ‘That's where the bomb hit,’ he said. ‘We call that a “wall hit”, where the bomb hits the wall first, goes into a spin and eventually hits the ground at such an oblique angle that the detonator doesn’t go off properly. It's complex. My colleague is going to be in there for an hour at least.’

  ‘Wait here,’ Stave ordered the uniformed policemen. They nodded, not exactly thrilled with the instruction. ‘Dr Czrisini, come with me. You too, Kienle. Won’t do any harm if we use the time to ask a few questions of the workers over there. They look like they’re bursting to help us.’

  ‘They look as if they think you’re more likely to explode on them than the bomb,’ replied the pathlogist. He pulled himself to his feet – no easy task given his weight – grunting with the effort, and followed the two CID men.

  Five men in dark reefer jackets over collarless blue-and-white striped shirts, corduroy trousers, peaked caps and with hands like shovels shot hostile looks at Stave and his companions as they approached. The chief inspector introduced himself, whipped out his police badge and handed round English cigarettes: John Player, a sailor wearing a life belt round his neck on the packet.

  The men looked surprised, then hesitated, before finally grabbing them, with sounds that might even be interpreted as thanks. Stave, who was a non-smoker, had been carrying a few spare cigarettes on him for a while now. At one time he had traded them with returning prisoners-of-war down at the station for any possible information on his missing son. But ever since he had found out that Karl was in a Soviet camp in Vorkuta, he no longer needed to do that. Now he used the cigarettes to make interrogations go a bit more smoothly.

  Czrisini put a Woodbine between his lips. The men stood there silently for a few minutes, blue wisps of smoke twisting in the air between the cracked brick walls, the smell of sweet oriental tobacco oddly comforting against the background aroma of bricks and lubricating oil. There was a heat haze in the air, and a stench of rubbish and dead fish rose from the Elbe. Stave could have done with a glass of water.

  The oldest worker present — Stave put him at sixty or more – cleared his throat and took a step forwards.

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Wilhelm Speck.’

  He was as skinny and hard packed as a smoked sausage. Stave didn’t like to think how many times he must have heard jokes about his surname – ‘bacon’.

  ‘Was it you who called us?’

  ‘No, that was the site manager.’ He nodded towards a square redbrick building a few hundred metres away, which Stave guessed was the administration building.

  ‘We found the bomb,’ the man hesitated a moment before continuing, ‘and the dead boy, just after we came on shift. We ran over to the office.’

  ‘How long have you been working for Blohm & Voss?’

  Speck gave him a surprised look. ‘Forever.’ He thought a moment and then added, ‘Forty-four years. If you can call the past few years “work”.’

  His colleagues muttered in agreement. Even that sounded threatening.

  ‘You don’t exactly look as though it's been a holiday.’ ‘I’m part of the shit squad,’ the old man announced proudly Stave stared at him in surprise.

  ‘Kettelklopper,’ Speck said, as if in explanation. Then he realised that the chief inspector still didn’t get the message and repeated, in sta
ndard German rather than the thick Hamburg dialect: ‘Kettle knocker: we climb inside the kettles — the hulls of ships laid up in the docks for refit – and knock on the walls to dislodge any dirt.’

  ‘That sounds like hard work, harder than what you’re doing now.’

  ‘Work?’ Speck said. ‘Work is building ships or refitting them. Hammering, riveting. You start out with an empty dock and at the end a ship slides down the slipway into the Elbe. That's what work is.’

  ‘And nowadays?’ The chief inspector knew what Speck was getting at, but he wanted to hear it from the man's lips. It would make it easier for a man who wasn’t used to speaking much to answer his other questions.

  ‘Nowadays?’ The man was getting worked up. ‘Nowadays we’re dismantling the yard. The English want us to destroy our own workplace. Or what's left of it after they bombed most of it to hell.’

  It was true enough that the giant shipyard had been bombed to hell. Officially. Any machinery and tools had been sent off to other countries in reparation for the damage the Germans had done to them in the war. In Hamburg it was an open secret that the British wanted to close down once and for all what had been one of the best shipyards in the world. They wanted to eliminate a rival that had not just turned out warships and U-boats, but in peacetime had also built hundreds of ocean liners and freighters, orders that had more often than not been snatched from shipyards in Liverpool or Belfast.

  Speck nodded towards a pile of machinery roasting in the sunshine some thirty metres away near one of the workshops: ‘Lathes, welding machines, riveting machines, milling machines,’ he said. ‘Nine months ago they made us dismantle all that stuff and leave it over there. It's supposed to be delivered to the Soviet Union. They sent in English military police specially to keep an eye on us. And now it's all lying there rusting away Comrade Stalin isn’t interested in our machinery The English just made us move it out there so it would fall apart.’