The Wolf Children Read online

  ‘Lots of them.’

  ‘And what would I learn?’ Hildegard Hüllmann pointed at the ruins the tram was rumbling through on its antiquated rails heading slowly north. The air between the ruins was filled with clouds of yellow dust floating above piles of rubble. ‘I don’t need to know my times tables out there. I’ve learnt everything I need to know. I’ll do OK.’

  They got out near Ohlsdorf Cemetery and went the rest of the way on foot. At this time of day Feuerbergstrasse was quiet. They walked past a few detached family homes built of brick, then a row of allotment sheds, small, old, crooked, like witches’ hats.

  The girls’ home lay at the end of a cul-de-sac between two railway cuttings. It was built to resemble a castle, like the old grammar schools from the days of the Kaisers: built of brick with a double staircase curving in from either side below white windows. It was impressive, and intimidating.

  Stave called at the porter's lodge near the entrance and waited until somebody turned up. A young woman with a fresh face and sprightly gait hurried up the internal staircase. Smiling.

  The chief inspector didn’t explain how he had come across Hil-degard Hüllmann. He just produced his ID, murmured something about how he had come across this orphan at the station. His young prostitute charge said nothing, just stared into the distance somewhere between the two of them.

  ‘We’ll look after her,’ the young woman said, taking Hildegard Hüllmann gently by the arm. Then she led her away. Neither of them looked back at Stave.

  It took a couple of stations on the tram, then a long walk before the chief inspector finally reached Harvesthude where he had agreed to meet Anna. They had arranged to meet only later in the afternoon, but he was not keen on just sitting in his empty apartment in the meantime. Part of him was actually afraid to be there — in case Karl suddenly knocked on the door. You’re being ridiculous, Stave told himself: you’re looking forward to seeing your son.

  All the same he needed to keep MacDonald up to speed, so why not do it now? As a result he found himself outside the requisitioned villa in Innocentia Strasse that was currently occupied by three young British officers. There was American jazz music coming from the room that would once have been the lounge. The lieutenant was at home and took him upstairs to his rooms, which Stave was surprised to discover had previously been two children's bedrooms. The wallpaper was white and pale pink. There were thin dark lines under nails hammered into it, and ghostly shapes of oval frames that must once have hung there. White curtains let enough of the sunlight through to create playful patterns.

  ‘I’ll need to get used to the décor, according to Erna.’ MacDonald had noticed Stave's reaction. ‘She means it's going to be a girl.’

  Stave thought back to Hildegard Hüllmann who would never see a room like this. ‘Speaking of girls,’ he replied, ‘I’ve just been talking to someone who might have a lead for us.’

  He gave a full account of his conversation with the young prostitute.

  ‘You think she is one of the wolf children,’ the lieutenant asked when he had finished. ‘I hope not. Their gangs are worse than the partisans. If our killer is one of them, he’ll just vanish for good.’

  ‘Thanks for referring to him as our rather than just your, Lieutenant. At least that way we’ll share blame for the failure to find him.’

  ‘Yes, but it we do fail, there's only one of us going to end up in Palestine or India.’

  For the first time, Stave noticed how young the Scot seemed. Worn out. ‘A divorce is always horrible. But it's not a reason to go to the other side of the world.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go willingly,’ MacDonald said, making a fist. Then he smiled. ‘No offence, old boy, you seem to be the only person in the empire who doesn’t object to me having fallen in love with Erna Berg. Despite the fact that you’ll be the worse off for it: she is after all your secretary.’

  ‘I’ll certainly miss her.’

  The lieutenant rubbed his temples and went over to a child's desk and opened the top drawer. ‘Whisky,’ he suggested, taking out a bottle and two glasses.

  Stave took one look at the amber liquid and was thirsty. But after the night before the last thing he wanted was to meet up with Anna smelling of alcohol. ‘Sorry, not on duty,’ he said.

  MacDonald shrugged and poured himself a two-finger measure. ‘A few of my colleagues have married German girls. Every soldier needs special permission from the governor to do so. So far, so good. But sometimes there are problems. I know one officer who married a Hamburg girl with all the papers and permission required. He’d thought of everything, except his own family. They were so furious at the thought of him bringing a German home with him that they threw him out of the house. Now he has a brand new wife, but no parents and no brothers or sisters any more. Not one member of his family will speak to him. I envy him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘More people than I’d like want to talk to me. It's not my family that are the problem, it's the army. Marrying a German girl is all well and good. But getting a married woman pregnant is a different matter altogether, not so good, even though it can be sorted out. A painful divorce? That's something else again. And when the husband was a soldier who lost a leg fighting the Russians, who could well be our next enemy? To steal the wife of a war veteran and cripple? Not exactly the conduct of a gentleman, and for an officer in the occupation forces, absolutely beyond the pale.’

  ‘So being sent to Palestine or India is a real possibility?’

  ‘One of the disadvantages of having a global empire. The men upstairs can always find a hot spot far away. The Jews and Arabs in Palestine. The Muslims and Hindus in India. Oh yes, they’ll be glad to see me.’

  ‘What if we solve our case?’

  ‘Then I have one more bargaining chip with the gentlemen involved to persuade them that I’m more use here in Hamburg, divorce or no divorce.’

  ‘So far I have two half-leads. Maybe Adolf Winkelmann got into a fight with the smugglers who do their dirty business between the Hansaplatz and the station, and which ended in his death. Or maybe he had a murderous enemy among the coal thieves. Both were just possibilities the young prostitute had hinted at. But it was clear that Adolf Winkelmann was one of the gang who robbed the coal trains coming into the Dammtor Station. That was a dangerous business, but a profitable one. In the past winter people had been murdered for a sack of coal.’

  ‘But you still refer to them as ‘half leads.’

  Stave raised his hands in apology. ‘What has either of these hypotheses got to do with the shipyard? Why was the boy hanging around Blohm & Voss?’

  ‘And that,’ MacDonald said with a wry smile, ‘is precisely the thing we need to find out.’

  Stave was exhausted by the time he finally sat down opposite Anna. They were in the Grimm Quell, not far from St Katherine's church. It had been an old corner bar; all that had survived was the remnants of the four walls. But where the ground floor had been there was now a small square, which was still paved with the tiles from the stairwell and living quarters, and a few wonky tables and chairs. The kitchen was in the cellar of the damaged house next door, while what was the old upright stump of the former heating stove stood in the middle of the square. A few red roses had been arranged in pots at the foot of the walls and the name of the establishment had been painted in overly large black letters on a whitewashed background. It was hardly romantic, Stave thought to himself, but it was possibly the right place to tell Anna about his son.

  He threw his jacket over the bare wooden back of the chair. A sign that reminded Stave of the ones put up by the Wehrmacht on route marches announced ‘Fresh daily: chicken broth and cold buffet’. Instead he ordered ersatz coffee and biscuits with ersatz marmalade for both of them.

  Stave didn’t know where to start and just made small talk for a while, realising how phoney it all sounded.

  ‘Is this a comedy?’ Anna interrupted him to ask.

  ‘Give me time,’ Stave replied. ‘I�
�ve got a lot on my plate at the moment. Too much. But it’ll get better.’ It didn’t sound much more convincing. He wished this tacky little café at least had sunshades. The air between the brick walls was like an oven, only one that stank of cement and stone dust and brackish water from the old drains.

  ‘Would you mind if I joined you for a few moments?’

  Stave, still lost in his thoughts, jumped at the voice of Public Prosecutor Ehrlich.

  He sprang to his feet, pulled up a third seat, and called the waiter over. Awkwardly he introduced Anna von Veckinhausen. On the one hand he would have preferred to be left alone with his lover, on the other he was relieved that he wouldn’t be able to raise the question of Karl.

  Ehrlich was suffering in the heat, beads of sweat on his bald head and dark patches below the armpits of his summer shirt. That didn’t stop him rubbing his hands together, eager to discuss business.

  ‘How's the case going?’ he asked the chief inspector. ‘Have you demanded the death penalty?’

  Anna shot him a shocked glance, but the prosecutor shook his head almost jovially: ‘This sorry business is going to take up a few days in court.’ Then he told Anna about the case. Stave was unhappy to see how keen an interest Anna took, and how well the public prosecutor could tell a story – far better than he could ever explain his cases.

  ‘So how are things going, Chief Inspector?’ Ehrlich finally got round to asking. He sipped at his nettle tea, causing his glasses to mist up. But the gaze of those bright eyes behind them was as alert as ever.

  Stave shifted back and forth on his seat in embarrassment. Was he to tell the whole story here and now in Anna's presence, including him approaching a fourteen-year-old prostitute at the station? A hooker he was already acquainted with? Instead he talked in vague terms about a street urchin as he recounted Hildegard Hüllmann's story. His own words seemed stale and almost phoney to himself, even though he was completely accurate in his account, save for that one small detail.

  As he came to an end, Anna said, ‘When I was making my way westwards, children among the trekkers would vanish every day Some of them ran off at night. Others were there one minute, then gone without trace the next. I used to think they had succumbed to hunger and cold or maybe the wolves.’

  Ehrlich shook his head: A lot of the children ended up here, or in Berlin, Dresden or another of the big cities.’

  ‘The little ghosts of 1945,’ Stave mumbled. For a moment the other two gave him a look of irritation.

  ‘Little ghosts indeed,’ the public prosecutor admitted. ‘It’ll take us years to get them reunited with their families. That's if any of their family are still alive. I’m afraid many of them will remain estranged from society, maybe from civilised life altogether.’

  ‘What will happen to them?’ Anna asked.

  ‘They will keep Stave and me in work until we’re pensioned off.’

  Stave was silent, thinking about his son and whether someone who at the age of just seventeen had already survived life in the Wehrmacht and Vorkuta gulag would be as lost as one of the wolf children. He was so sunk in his own thoughts that he hardly noticed when and how the other two changed the subject. He suddenly found himself left out of a conversation about art. Ehrlich was talking about his collection of Expressionist masters and their work. Anna's taste was more conservative, something she didn’t conceal, but she still managed to add little items of interest that even Ehrlich didn’t know. The pair of them were chatting enthusiastically, laughing and arguing about well-known artists and obscure pieces of art, about entartete Kunst — ‘unworthy art’ — the modernist works the Nazis had banned, and lost treasures from galleries that had been destroyed. Stave had nothing to say about any of it. He felt unnecessary and ignored.

  He would have preferred to stand up, take Anna by the arm and stroll off down the Alster, inhaling her perfume and finally telling her all about Karl and his worries for the future. But he didn’t want to seem impolite so he just sat there, silently, with a forced smile that began to make the corners of his mouth ache. I’ve made a real pig's ear of this, he thought to himself.

  The evening sun was sinking slowly over the ruins as they finally left the café. Ehrlich made his farewells politely and walked off, a contented, sweaty little figure. Anna watched him go, then finally turned to Stave with a disappointed look on her face. Stave tried to muttered some vague apologies but couldn’t find the right words.

  ‘I’m tired,’ Anna said at last. ‘I’m going home.’ She gave Stave a brief kiss on the lips without asking him if he wanted to come with her.

  Homecoming

  Monday, 2 June 1947

  Shortly before 8.00 a.m. Stave found himself at the gate of the school on Graudenzer Weg in Barmbek. He’d known of it for ages, from the newspapers. This was where in the summer of 1945, Hamburg's schools first reopened in peacetime with British occupation officers in dress uniform, a few German politicians with clean records, and masses of children. The school had been chosen because it was large and modern, built during the Weimar Republic. It also helped that it was one of the few educational establishments that had not been hit by bombs.

  The chief inspector looked at the interlocking brickwork on the main body of the building, the white-framed rows of windows that looked almost like they belonged to a military base, the tall towers of the stairwells. To him, having grown up with the nineteenth-century Kaiser Wilhelm schools with their curved staircase entrances, imposing pillars, allegorical statues over the doors, this institution looked more like a factory. But I suppose a bit of sobriety can do no harm, he told himself.

  All around him children were rushing to their classrooms, all boys: the girls were taught in separate premises a few metres down the street. They were thin kids in short trousers, tanned, tousled hair. The chief inspector noticed two fifth-graders wearing hand-sewn shoes. Most of the others wore sandals with soles made from the rubber of truck tyres. A few of them were barefoot. Those were the ones who dodged school in bad weather because it was too cold to go that far with nothing on their feet. He pushed the heavy handle of the gate and entered the building.

  He had to ask directions before he found himself in the rector's office.

  ‘Doctor Bruno Kitt,’ the rector introduced himself. He was a lean fifty-something wearing round glasses with curved rims, and had a goatee beard and ears that stuck out.

  Stave explained to him as gently as he could that one of his pupils had been murdered. The rector ripped his glasses off and wiped his eyes.

  ‘That's the third boy we’ve lost under frightful circumstances,’ he said quietly. ‘I tell the boys a thousand times that there's nothing good to come of the black market. Two others played with unex-ploded bombs, one of them still in hospital, the other in Öjendorf Cemetery. These are hardly the best years to be a child.’

  ‘When is a good time?’ Stave returned. ‘Did you know Adolf Winkelmann?’

  ‘The name rings a bell. I think he got told off not so long ago for skipping classes so often. But the fact that he did is probably why I can’t put a face to the name. He was probably hardly even here. I’ll look in the class rolls, he would most likely have been in the eight grade.’

  ‘How many children do you have per class?’

  ‘Fifty, maybe sixty, when they’re all here. Which is almost never the case.’

  The chief inspector cursed under his breath. How long was it going to take to interview all of Adolf's classmates?

  ‘Here we have him. He was in 8a. You’re in luck, they’ve just started their morning week.’

  ‘Morning week?’

  ‘As long as the other schools in the neighbourhood remain in ruins we have so many pupils that each classroom has to be used twice. One group has lessons there in the morning, the other in the afternoons. We swap over weekly, so that they all have to deal with getting up early. Today's the beginning of 8a's week. They’ll all be tired. I’ll take you down there.’

  The rector led him down
high-ceilinged corridors until they came to a door that was painted partly grey, partly orangey-beige. Stave thought of Karl. He had been a star at school. He had gone to the Matthias-Claudius grammar school and done so well that he had skipped a year. But what was it all for in the end? To get an emergency leaving certificate to be sent to the front line and spend the best days of his youth sitting in a gulag.

  But I’m lucky Stave persuaded himself. It could have been a lot worse. Dead in action. And even if he had stayed at school? Karl had been a brilliant scholar, but an out and out Nazi. He would have gone straight from grammar school to the Nazi Police Academy and then into the SS. And today? He’d be standing in front of Public Prosecutor Ehrlich listening to him demand the death penalty. He drove the thought from his mind.

  ‘I’ll wait in the hallway’ Stave said. ‘We don’t need the whole class to know all at once what's going on. I’d be grateful if you’d ask their teacher to step out.’

  ‘I hope,’ Kitt hesitated, you’ll be ... tactful.’

  ‘It's not the first time I’ve done this sort of thing.’

  The rector nodded, and disappeared through the door. A few minutes later a young man, as skinny as his pupils, with black hair, rather too long, and dark eyes, came out. Failed artist, Stave thought. The rector remained in the classroom, which was totally silent.

  ‘Dr Kitt tells me there's been an unfortunate incident.’

  ‘You might call it that,’ the chief inspector replied and repeated once again the story of the murdered boy. ‘Your name, please?’ he asked, taking out his notebook.

  ‘Johannes Thiele. I’m their form master: German and history.’

  ‘Have you known Adolf Winkelmann since the first year?’

  ‘No, I only came here in 1945. I wanted to go to university, but the English insisted I come here. There are a lot of vacancies.’

  ‘When did you last see Adolf Winkelmann?’