The Wolf Children Read online

  He felt like a hunter at the edge of a jungle, staring into the thicket, eyeing out the lie of the land before entering. He checked out the platforms. Platform 4 had a train filling up with the ‘potato people’, those Hamburg folk who went out to Lüneberg with sacks, boxes or cases to head off into the countryside on foot and hand over their family heirlooms to farmers in exchange for anything edible. The British had ordered that the harvest be turned over to the German food distribution organisation so that it could be released to the public via their ration cards. Every now and then they would raid the station and search everybody coming back from the surrounding countryside. Even so, particularly on Sundays rather than weekdays, hundreds of them would charge down from the upper gallery where Stave was standing to storm the ‘potato train’. Housewives, schoolchildren, clerical workers, people who once upon a time would never have dreamed of breaking the law. The old steam locomotive had a train of standing-only coaches behind it, carriages where all the seating had been ripped out to fit more people inside.

  The chief inspector turned away. He wasn’t going to find who he was looking for among the ‘potato people’. A few tracks away there were trains on either side of the platform. Stave read the destinations on the boards: one with just open goods wagons attached was headed to Dortmund via Uelzen. The other, also with pre-war carriages, was headed for Munich. The journey cost seventy Reichsmarks, one-way There were only a few people waiting, but they were extremely well dressed, smoking and chatting to one another. Where on earth did they get that sort of money? That was the platform Stave wanted.

  These were long-distance passengers, people with luggage, money, cigarettes. That's where he would find the strays, the orphans, the drifters, the pickpockets, the black marketeers, the street girls. The chief inspector didn’t have a plan, he just hoped to come across a few orphans at the station, wanted to listen to the gossip, ask a few questions, show around the photo of Adolf Winkelmann that Kienle had given him.

  He went down to the platform and mingled with the passengers, feeling a bit out of place in his 1938 summer suit, the original white linen of which had taken on a yellowish tint. He stood at the back right next to one of the carriages, half in the shade, for five, maybe ten minutes or so, watching the passers-by. He had time.

  He spotted a skinny girl with strawberry-blond hair, woven into a plait, with green eyes, wearing a skirt, white knee socks and a ruched blouse that made her look like a ten-year-old although Stave reckoned she was at least fourteen. She gave off conflicting signals: the girlie eyes, the bright red mouth far too thick with lipstick, like a red light in the darkness. She was a station hooker.

  I’ve seen her somewhere before, the chief inspector thought. Then he remembered. The previous winter she had come on to him in the station, he had given her two cigarettes out of sympathy. She had had a Berlin accent.

  Slowly he wandered along in the shadow of the carriages until he was standing near the girl. She was looking as if she was just bored, but in reality she was checking out the people around her. She’d already noticed him. Her feline eyes dwelled on him a second longer than a casual glance would have done. She took in his shabby suit and then turned her eyes away to search out a better bet. But nobody was paying any attention to her.

  ‘On your own? The train won’t leave for another hour, at least.’ It was a little girl's voice, but with the same Berlin accent. He hadn’t got it wrong.

  Stave was standing right next to her now. He shook her hand as if greeting a friend. She gave him a look of irritation, unused to that sort of thing. But Stave didn’t let her hand go. Instead he put his other hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out his police ID. She tried to pull her hand away, but Stave held it tight. It was only a little hand.

  ‘Don’t try to make a run for it. I only want to ask you a few questions, and nothing to do with the business you’re in,’ he added to reassure her. ‘I’m not from the vice squad.’

  ‘I get it, you’re just a nice uncle from the church community’ She kept trying to wrench her right hand out of his grip.

  ‘Murder squad, actually.’

  She stopped resisting. Suddenly the girl began shaking. Stave let her go and gave her a handkerchief.

  ‘Wipe that lipstick off,’ the chief inspector didn’t want to be taken for a punter, standing there asking a young prostitute questions. He nodded to one of the carriages. ‘Let's sit in that carriage. If you were telling the truth about the train, then nobody will bother us.’

  He let her go first, opened the door of an empty compartment, pushed her over to the window on the other side and sat himself down next to the door. That way she couldn’t make a run for it. If they’d stayed standing on the station platform sooner or later she would have noticed his limp and made a dash for it. He felt slightly disappointed that she didn’t remember him or the conversation they had had and that he had given her a present in return.

  ‘What's your name?’

  ‘Inge Schmidt.’

  ‘The longer you keep lying to me, the longer we’ll keep sitting here.’

  ‘Hildegard Hüllmann.’

  ‘Age?’

  She looked him up and down, shrugged and said, ‘No point trying to fool you. Fourteen.’

  ‘Date of birth?’

  ‘15 March 1933.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Are you from the census office?’

  ‘Where.’

  ‘Köslin.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘East Prussia.’

  ‘You have a Berlin accent.’

  ‘Practised it, with a girlfriend. Blokes prefer it. Before I used to get called a “Polak whore” because of my accent, and they refused to pay me. Afterwards.’

  ‘And before this?’

  ‘I’ve been in Hamburg for a year,’ She sighed. ‘What is it you want anyway? You can check it all out with the vice squad. I’m sure they’ve got me on their books.’

  Stave took the police photo of Adolf Winkelmann out of his pocket. ‘Have you ever seen this boy?’

  Hildegard Hüllmann gave him a contemptuous look and took a disinterested glance at the picture, then suddenly put her hand over her mouth.

  Stave sprang to his feet and threw open the compartment door.

  ‘It's OK,’ she choked out. ‘I’m not going to throw up over the upholstery.’

  The chief inspector waited until she was breathing normally again.

  ‘Have you got a smoke?’ the young prostitute blurted out.

  Stave handed her a Player's and lit a match. Her hands were shaking so badly that Stave nearly had his fingers burnt before she managed to light the cigarette.

  ‘Where do you know him from?’ he asked, after she’d taken a few long draws.

  ‘I don’t know the lad. I’m just not used to people sticking photos of the dead below my nose.’

  The CID man gave her a long, hard look. ‘If you keep on like this, we’ll take this train all the way to Munich.’

  ‘It's the truth. Even if you beat me up.’

  ‘I’m not going to hit you.’ Stave realised there was no point in threatening the girl. He had to try another way.

  ‘If you stick to your story, you can go. But,’ he added in a gentle voice, ‘if you do, I may never find out who killed him.’

  The young prostitute hesitated.

  ‘I haven’t seen Adolf for ten days or so,’ she whispered eventually. ‘It wasn’t like him, just to disappear like that, without saying a word.’

  The chief inspector leant back in his seat. He felt sympathetic towards Hildegard Hüllmann, who right now, despite the cigarette, did indeed look like a ten-year-old: small, fragile, innocent. But he knew that he had to take advantage of her weakness and confusion to get as much information as possible out of her — information he might otherwise lose forever.

  ‘Did you know him long?’

  ‘What happened to him? You said you were from the murder squad. That means somebody must have kil
led him.’

  ‘You tell me your story first, then I’ll tell you mine.’

  ‘I got to know Adolf a few weeks ago. Here, at the station.’

  ‘A customer of yours?’ Stave asked in surprise.

  ‘No, no,’ she gave him an angry glance, then looked down at her feet on the dirty floor of the compartment. ‘I was waiting for the long-distance train from Ostende,’ she said softly. ‘For a punter. You often get punters on the long-distance trains. They’re in a strange city, a long way from mummy.’ She gave a harsh laugh. Adolf was waiting for a customer too, after a fashion. Even though I didn’t know it at the time. He took a suitcase from some man and was about to leave.’

  ‘What did this man look like?’

  She shrugged. ‘Just a man.’

  ‘Tall? Short? Fat? Thin? Hair colour? Old? Young?’

  She interrupted him with an impatient wave of her cigarette. ‘I don’t look at men, do I? The less you take in, the quicker you forget them. He could have been my father and I wouldn’t have noticed.’

  ‘Your father lives in Hamburg?’

  ‘No.’ She gave another harsh, humourless laugh. ‘He died in the war. 1943. Stalingrad. Just so you know.’

  ‘OK, go on.’

  ‘Adolf crashed into me carrying his suitcase, it was so heavy. We just collided. He went red and apologised. I found that funny and somehow or other ...’ She was looking for the right expression, but couldn’t find it. ‘Anyhow, nobody had apologised to me for anything in years. So we got talking. Then the next day I saw him again at the station and eventually the penny dropped.’

  ‘What penny?’

  Hildegard Hüllmann gave him an impatient look. Adolf was a smuggler. He picked up the stuff at the station and delivered it to the black marketeers on the Hansaplatz. And took stuff back from them to the long-distance trains heading over the border, to Belgium and the Netherlands in particular.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘He didn’t talk about it much. Sometimes it seemed the suitcases were very heavy. Sometimes they were light, maybe even empty. Once or twice he opened a suitcase for me to have a look. He often had cigarettes and was generous with them. Sometimes some sort of pills, on one occasion it was three watches. One time he had an entire suitcase full of Nazi medals. I’d like to know who buys that stuff these days.’

  ‘Didn’t he talk about his customers?’

  ‘Do you have another cigarette?’

  ‘It's my last.’

  She blew the sweet-smelling smoke towards the open window.

  ‘Adolf didn’t talk that much. I don’t even know his surname. I imagine he’d lost his parents.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just a feeling. He never spoke about them, never complained about his “old man”.’

  ‘Same as you?’

  ‘Don’t give me false sympathy.’

  ‘I ask the questions, you give the answers.’

  ‘You want to hear my story? My parents had a tailor's shop in Köslin. In 1945 my father was already dead by the time the Russians arrived. My mother didn’t want to leave our house, we didn’t run away. It wasn’t exactly her best idea.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Do I need to go on? I’m sure you can imagine the rest of the story’

  ‘I’d still like to hear it.’

  ‘An Ivan came in and raped my mother,’ she said in a voice devoid of emotion. ‘Then he smashed up everything he could find, fired his gun all around the place and threw us out of our house. It was freezing cold. We just set off, vaguely towards the west. After a few days my little brother Siegfried died of starvation. My mother put his body in a cardboard box and buried him next to the wall of a house. He was three months old. He wasn’t my father's child, but that's another story. My other brother, Hagen, was four years old. One evening he just leant against me and died. Just like that. I covered him with snow as a sort of burial. I couldn’t bury him properly because the ground was frozen solid. And in any case I was too weak. Then my mother died, of fever. Then some more Russians came. I have no idea where we were by then. This time they took me, there wasn’t another woman around. Afterwards I hid in a forest where I came across some other children.’

  ‘Wolf children.’

  ‘Yes. We stuck together. During the day we would stay hidden. At night we would sleep in ruins, or crawl into the barn of some Polish or Lithuanian farmer. We stole stuff, or ate what we could find in the forest. All the time heading westwards, as far as possible from the Ivans. One of our group was already sixteen and had served in the Wehrmacht. He knew what he was doing. I didn’t even know in which direction to go. We crossed rivers on tree trunks or rafts we cobbled together. Once we even managed several kilometres on the back of a Russian goods truck, but we were nearly caught. Eventually we ended up in Hamburg. Can’t say life here is much better than it was in East Prussia. But at least the Tommies aren’t as bad as the Ivans.’

  ‘Where do you live here?’

  ‘Here and there.’

  ‘That's not exactly the answer to give to a policeman.’

  ‘We wolf children are clever. When it's warm we sleep in cellars or knock up a shelter in the ruins. All we need is a few planks, some stones and a bit of cardboard. When it was cold sometimes we’d find shelter in one of the anti-aircraft bunkers. But after you’ve been in one of them for a few days, your clothes begin to stink of disinfectant, even your skin and hair begin to smell as if you’d used Lysol for perfume. Not exactly ideal if you’re in the business I’m in. So sometimes I spend a few days hanging around a client's apartment, but never more than a few days.’

  ‘Are they violent towards you?’

  ‘I can cope. It's apartments I can’t cope with. Those closed doors. Are you sure you don’t have another cigarette?’

  Stave shook his head. ‘How am I to see your relationship with Adolf? You were never at his place. You move around a lot. Where did the two of you meet?’

  ‘At the station. On the Hansaplatz. Mostly there. We would talk. Sometimes I would find a customer there, somebody who’d done a bit of business on the black market and had so many Reichsmarks they were burning a hole in his pocket and he had to get rid of them. Adolf would now and then take a break from ferrying stuff to the station and back and would stop and chat with me before disappearing into a hotel or café to collect or deliver a suitcase. A couple of times we met in the Planten en Bomen park. He knew it well because sometimes he had stolen coal from the railway lines nearby. But we just went for walks there.’

  Stave was astonished to see Hildegard Hüllmann blushing. She quickly turned and looked out the window. ‘Nothing more, Chief Inspector. I hadn’t known Adolf that long. And in any case he knew what I did for a living.’

  Stave tried to muster his thoughts. ‘Adolf Winkelmann, orphan, smuggler, ticket salesman, coal thief. Someone who hung around with wolf children like Hildegard, but never got close enough to them to tell them his surname or where he lived.

  ‘Now it's your turn to tell me a story,’ Hildegard interrupted his thoughts.

  Hildegard Hüllmann said she could cope, and Stave believed her. So he told her all he knew of Adolf Winkelmann — including how and where his body had been found. All the time he was speaking, the young prostitute sat and stared out of the window.

  ‘Did Adolf ever mention Blohm & Voss? Or say he had something to do down by the harbour?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Did he have other friends? Or do you know the men he did business with?’

  ‘I never saw them. He used to talk occasionally with other boys on the Hansaplatz. He also spoke to some boy down at Planten un Blomen, somebody he knew from stealing coal. It wasn’t exactly friendly.’

  ‘Did it feel threatening?’

  ‘No. More like a conversation between two people who can’t stand each other. A bit of teasing, a bit of needling. But Adolf didn’t take it seriously. He just laughed about it as we walked on. He
never introduced me to any of the other boys. I think he liked being with me.’ Yet again her cheeks burned bright red for a few seconds. ‘Not that it matters now,’ she said.

  ‘It does to me. I want to find his killer.’

  ‘Have you got any suspects?’

  ‘I’m casting my net wide. I’ll see who swims into it. Boys from the Damm tracks? From the Hansaplatz? Smugglers, black marketeers? Dock workers? Or maybe ... wolf children?’

  ‘Should I listen out for you?’

  Stave took a crumpled card out of his pocket and handed it to her. ‘My telephone number. You can call me any time anything occurs to you. Or if you hear something. But don’t start any investigations of your own, right? That's my job.’

  She nodded and took the card, ‘You are the first policeman to give me his telephone number,’ she replied, trying to accompany it with a cheeky grin that didn’t quite come off.

  ‘As an officer of the law, I’m afraid I can’t just let you out on to the station platform. Underage prostitution is a crime.’

  ‘I thought I wouldn’t get off that lightly.’

  ‘We’re going to go on a little trip together: to Barmbek.’

  ‘To the children's home for girls. Spare yourself the effort, Chief Inspector, I’ll do a runner straight away.’

  ‘I’m afraid it's part of my job to do things I know aren’t worth the effort. But I still have to do them.’

  ‘Sounds a bit like my job,’ she replied brazenly, and stood up.

  A quarter of an hour later they were sitting next to one another on the tram. Stave was relieved that Hildegard Hüllmann hadn’t tried to get away from him.

  ‘You could go back to school again,’ he said, just to break the silence between them

  ‘That's the most stupid idea I’ve heard since my mother decided she wasn’t leaving our house.’

  ‘It's the only way to get out of the shit you’re in,’ he said, unfazed by her cheekiness.

  ‘I went to school up to fourth grade back in Köslin,’ she said. ‘It made sense back then. I’m happy enough to be able to read and write a bit. But what school would take me?’