The Wolf Children Page 12

  ‘Fourteen days ago. At the end of last week I went to see the rector about his repeated failure to turn up. He gave him detention. Not that that would have particularly worried him. If he were still alive, that is.’ The teacher blushed and turned to look out the window.

  ‘Did he often not turn up?’

  ‘Most of the time, actually.’

  ‘Did that not worry you?’

  Thiele sighed and looked at the chief inspector as if he were a particularly dim child. Stave had to make an effort to remain polite. ‘Do you know why most of these kids turn up to school? It's for the school dinners the English provide: hot soup every day, soya meal and meat extract or semolina with sugar. That's three hundred calories, three hundred good reasons not to miss school. Of my fifty, barely half of them have any interest in the subject. Not that I can make it any easier for them. The English have banned most textbooks from the Nazi era: too much propaganda. But there aren’t any new books. What am I to do? Well, I use the old German textbook and the old history textbook, but keep them under the desk, you might say. Always afraid that one of the lads will squeal on me to the Tommies.’

  ‘Was Adolf Winkelmann one of the types who might have squealed on you?’

  ‘He never bothered with books. Despite the fact that he was bright. I mean, if he had realised, as a few of them here have, that the only way to get out of this mess is with hard work, then he might have gone on from the 9th grade to a technical school or grammar school. Adolf was smart, but he had no ambition. Or to be more precise he had no ambition for what you learn in school.’

  ‘But for things you learn outside school?’

  ‘He was a good businessman. Coal, for example. During the last winter all the pupils were obliged to bring in coal, wood or briquettes to heat the school just a little. For some of them that was difficult because it was so bitterly cold, even at home. Not for Adolf, if he turned up. Twice he came in with an entire sackful of coal. He was very generous with it. And not stupid. It got him off detention or any other punishment. Who's going to reprimand a boy who brings so much coal? He was clever enough.’

  ‘And well-to-do, in a manner of speaking? It seems the school dinners didn’t matter much to him.’

  ‘Indeed. He's got it good.’

  ‘Had. Until last week,’ the chief inspector added.

  Stave spent a seemingly endless morning questioning the pupils, who had to come out one by one to talk to him in the corridor. In most cases the interrogation lasted only a few minutes. At the end the chief inspector knew that Adolf Winkelmann had no friends among his classmates. He was a loner. Someone the others were impressed by and afraid of. Impressed by the cigarettes he had and his worldly ways. Afraid of because of his shady contacts in the world of the black marketeers they’d all heard of, but knew little about. He hadn’t been in any punch-ups on the few days he turned up at school, no threats, none of the classmates or teachers who could be classed as his enemy. Nothing at all about his school life apart from the lessons.

  By the time Stave finally left the school he felt as if he was reversing out of a cul-de-sac. He had found no one new who might have been friendly with Adolf, no new leads. Only his activities as a coal thief.

  On his desk back at headquarters there was a note: ‘My report is ready. The boy died approximately twelve hours before the body was found. If you need more, see me. Czrisini.’ The night of Thursday to Friday, that meant, Stave calculated. Right now that wasn’t much more help than anything he’d heard at the school. It looks like the investigation is running into the sand. I’m going to have to start again from the beginning in case there's something I’ve overlooked. It can’t do any harm to have another chat with his aunt.

  An hour later he was ringing the bell of the apartment at Fuhlsbüttel Strasse 594. As Greta Boesel opened the door a trail of cigarette smoke came after her.

  ‘Go out on to the balcony,’ she said, hardly looking at him. ‘I’ll be with you in a second.’ Then she disappeared into another room, leaving the chief inspector alone. Taken aback and somewhat embarrassed he went out into the open air and sat under the sunshade. He could hear Boesel talking, but to whom? It was some time before Stave realised there wasn’t actually anyone else with her in the room.

  ‘You have a telephone?’ he asked in amazement when eventually she joined him. ‘In a private apartment?’

  ‘In my office. I’m a businesswoman with a telephone. Is that so extraordinary? Times are changing. Cigarette, this time?’ She went back into the living room.

  Stave declined. Before he got a chance to ask his questions he heard the sound of a key in the outside door and Walter Kümmel strode in, made straight for Greta Boesel and gave her a passionate kiss. A look of surprise and embarrassment crossed his face even as he was kissing her.

  ‘Don’t let me disturb you,’ said Stave. He was thinking of Anna and how long it had been since he had last kissed her like that.

  ‘Should I be jealous,’ the boxing promoter asked, nonetheless shaking his hand. ‘Any news about our Adolf? When will we be able to bury him?’

  ‘The boy's body is still in the morgue. But I think the doctors will soon release him. I have a meeting there later today. That's not why I’m here however, it's to ask you a few questions about the night of Thursday, the twenty-ninth of May, to Friday the thirtieth.’

  They both exchanged a brief look.

  ‘That's when Adolf died,’ the boy's aunt said, ‘and now you want to confirm our alibis?’

  ‘Where were you on that night?’

  ‘Here, in this apartment,’ Greta Boesel replied. ‘First of all I listened to music, the NDR channel, then I went to bed.’

  ‘Perhaps you remember what it was you were listening to?’ Stave took out his notebook. He could check whatever she said later with the radio station. So he was disappointed when she shook her head. ‘I never pay that much attention. I just have the radio on for company’

  ‘Is there anyone who could confirm you were here in the apartment?’

  Kümmel cleared his throat: ‘I can confirm it for the second half of the evening. I was working late at the office, but I came back about two in the morning and was here the rest of the night.’ Greta Boesel blushed slightly and nodded.

  ‘At two in the morning? That's after the curfew. How could you get here from the Chile House? Have you got a permit?’

  ‘I know my way around,’ Kümmel smiled. ‘I didn’t want to sleep at the office and made my way to Greta via the back way: paths between the ruins, streets that haven’t been cleared of rubble yet and are therefore impassible for Jeeps. The Tommies didn’t come across me. I hope you will forgive me, Chief Inspector.’

  Stave thought over what he had just heard. Neither Greta Boesel nor Walter Kümmel had an alibi for the time between dusk and 2.00 a.m., and after that their only support for their alibis was each other. There were no independent witnesses and their alibis were unconvincing, but not even such that he could test them out.

  ‘Can we talk about coal?’ he said, changing the topic.

  ‘Not our business,’ the transport manageress said.

  ‘But maybe it was Adolf's? I’ve been asking around. It seems the boy often,’ Stave swallowed the word he had been about to use, and said, ‘was involved in organising it.’

  Silence. The chief inspector could see the pair of them weighing up what they should say in reply.

  ‘There's nothing to be ashamed of, but it could be a lead for me.’

  Greta Boesel sighed. ‘Every now and then Adolf would bring home a sack of coal.’

  ‘We had a cellar full,’ her fiancé added, rather proudly.

  ‘Did it never occur to you to ask how a fourteen-year-old got hold of coal? In a winter where other people were freezing to death in their homes?’

  ‘He obviously stole it,’ the boy's aunt replied. ‘Like all good boys. What else was there to do? I never asked him about it, I didn’t want to know his business. But at least that way
he was paying his share of the cost of living.’

  ‘We all had to muddle our way through. Adolf was bright enough to realise that.’

  ‘Not bright enough to realise that going to school would have been more important. He hardly ever turned up.’

  ‘Last winter good schoolboys ended up dead schoolboys, frozen solid,’ Greta Boesel hit back. ‘No sentimentality. New times, new ways, Chief Inspector, and that doesn’t refer simply to the telephone. Half the world is lying in ruins and will remain that way for a good while yet. What's the use to a boy of declensions and quadratic equations? Better to get a good grip on life's realities.’

  ‘Did you ever hear the names of any of your nephew's friends? He was a bit of a loner, an outsider in the classroom, but apparently not on the Hansaplatz.’

  Shrugs.

  ‘No,’ Walter Kümmel said. ‘Not that I can recall.’

  ‘Hildegard Hüllmann?’

  ‘Who's that supposed to be?’

  ‘A friend of Adolf's. An acquaintance at any rate.’

  Greta Boesel laughed. ‘Boys that age tend to keep things about girls to themselves. Even good boys. Have you got children, Chief Inspector?’

  Stave wasn’t about to go into that. ‘Did your nephew ever talk about the main station?’

  ‘Was he on a train?’

  ‘He took things there and collected things.’

  Kümmel looked up and said in a voice more of recognition than surprise: ‘That would explain a few things.’

  ‘Did you know Adolf was also peddling tickets for your boxing matches on the black market?’

  ‘I had a suspicion, nothing more. Like we said, the boy knew how to help himself. But I wasn’t born yesterday either and I cut off his source. Mind you, it was after that that he stopped bringing home bags of coal. But then winter was over by then.’

  ‘Did he ever mention getting into a fight with coal thieves?’ The chief inspector could also imagine why the supplies dried up.

  ‘One time he turned up at home in a bit of a bad way. It was a long time ago,’ Kümmel replied.

  ‘Bit of a bad way?’

  ‘He had a nice big bruise.’

  ‘Why? Who gave it to him?’

  ‘He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. It's better if boys sort those things out between themselves.’

  Stave closed his eyes and thought to himself: Adolf Winkelmann worked as a courier for smugglers down at the Hansaplatz, ferrying hot goods to the station and back. He sold off tickets and maybe other things on the black market. He hung out with wolf children. He stole coal now and again, probably from freight trains. Somewhere at sometime he had a fight with somebody. His aunt and her fiancé didn’t know the details, but knew enough to have a rough idea of what the boy was up to. They tolerated it, even encouraged it, because at the end of the day they profited from it. Just an everyday story of family life these days.

  ‘I’ll keep you up to date,’ said Stave, getting up out of his chair.

  If it hadn’t been situated next to Dammtor Station, Neue Raben-strasse would have been idyllic. As it was, the dirty steam from the locomotives hung in the trees that lined it on both sides, while the screeching of wheels on rails and the hissing of the engine boilers was everywhere. The chief inspector strolled up to house number I, a villa that had had a bit of a bad time in the war years: there were scorch marks on the once gaily plastered façade, shell holes in the walls, windows boarded up. A bit of noise and dirt was something that most of its inhabitants these days could put up with, Stave thought to himself. This was in any case where Dr Czrisini and his colleagues from the pathology department sliced open the bodies brought to them.

  He met the pathologist in his small, smoky office. Official notices and typed reports lay on a desk covered with a dirty tablecloth. Shelves lined the walls to the ceiling filled, according to some incomprehensible system, partly with ring binders, partly with bottles storing shrivelled organs swimming in formaldehyde. The grime on the windows was so thick that even the blaring sunlight looked milky and pale as it pushed its way into the claustrophobic little room.

  ‘Your corpses have more room on the autopsy table than you have in here,’ the chief inspector said as he moved a load of ring binders off a seat, looked around for somewhere to put them and finally opted for the linoleum-covered floor.

  ‘There's no point in tidying up,’ the doctor quipped, ‘I have to move out soon.’

  ‘You’re being moved?’

  ‘We’re being moved,’ Czrisini laughed. ‘The whole institute. We bought this villa from the Catholic Church in 1938, legally as far as I know. But now my lords, bishops and prelates are demanding their house back, saying they were forced to sell. I’m fascinated to know what the church wants to do with a place that's been used to carve up hundreds of bodies over the last ten years.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll turn it into a school,’ Stave mumbled.

  ‘Is that a coded reference to the Adolf Winkelmann case?’

  ‘I got your report.’

  ‘Do you want the details or just the conclusion?’

  ‘I can get the details from the file. Right now I just want the abridged version.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ Czrisini said, but in a tone that reflected his irritation with the fact that his work wasn’t taken more seriously. ‘Time of death: Thursday night. Cause of death: violent attack, a dagger wound, straight to the heart. Massive damage to said organ. More than two litres of blood in the chest cavity. Stabbed with extreme force: the murder instrument cut clean through a rib.’

  ‘A knife?’

  ‘Probably, but probably not a kitchen knife. Their blades tend to bend or deflect when they come into contact with bone. My bet would be a big strong blade of the type used by soldiers, or maybe fishermen.’

  ‘Or seamen in general?’

  ‘Could be. No obvious signs that the victim tried to defend himself. No cuts to the hands as there might have been if the boy had tried to grab hold of the knife. No obvious signs of passive defence either, on the underarms for example, as you might expect if he had used his arms to shield his body. Looks more like the attacker took him by surprise.’

  ‘He wasn’t expecting the attack, and almost certainly hadn’t seen the weapon in his attacker's hand.’

  ‘Or he did see it, but didn’t reckon the killer was about to attack. Maybe the killer had been using the knife to open something, a parcel maybe. In which case it would have been normal for him to have a knife in his hand. Then one quick movement and — hey presto, a life gone.’

  ‘Anything else unusual?’

  ‘The contents of his stomach. Lots of edible grain, bread, fat, probably butter too. The boy might have been thin, but he was hardly undernourished. He was a lot better fed than the average child of his age in Hamburg today.’

  ‘Any traces of coal?’

  Czrisini stared at the chief inspector in puzzlement.

  ‘Sorry,’ Stave said. ‘That might explain the boy's affluence. He used to steal coal. I was wondering if there were any traces on the body. Under his fingernails for example, or in his hair?’

  The pathologist scratched his bald head then leafed through his report which he pulled out from the pile along with five others. ‘Nothing at all. In that respect at least, the boy was clean.’ He began coughing.

  Stave waited until the attack passed. Czrisini looked pale, beads of sweat on his forehead. ‘You really need a bit of fresh air in here,’ the chief inspector said, as he took his leave.

  Over the next few days Stave asked his colleagues from Department S, which dealt with the black market, to ask around among their informers. They told Stave about gangs of children who broke into shops and canteens and even English barracks to steal chocolate they could sell on the black market. The juvenile courts had dealt with more than 50,000 such cases in the past year alone, ten times more than had been the case in the 1920s. But it appeared that Adolf Win-kelmann was either a very small fish in the pond, or wasn’t invo
lved at all. He was never caught in a raid, never arrrested, never up before the juvenile court, no informer had ever mentioned his name to the police. He was a blank page.

  One morning Stave visited the University Clinic Eppendorf, the biggest hospital in the city; if he was going to get any information about sick or wounded children, that was the place to be.

  The main building on Martinistrasse, opposite Eppendorf Park, looked partly like an army headquarters, partly like a castle. This grandiose appearance was, however, marred by the presence of a cuboid concrete bunker sprouting from the ground next to it. Stave pressed down the handle of the gateway above which, in heavy gold lettering, the name University Clinic Eppendorf glistened.

  The chief inspector had an appointment with Professor Rudolf Degkwitz. Stave had his eyes on the swaying rear end of the nurse who led him to his office. He remembered that Karl had called nurses ‘Stukas’— the last time his father had seen him. By then he was already in the Wehrmacht, having been given a rushed school diploma in order that he might be sent to the final battle for Berlin. One evening, which until then had been spent in silence, he started talking about a military hospital the young recruits had been taken to visit. Why they’d been taken there he didn’t say, any more than what they’d seen there. He talked of only one thing: crude jokes about the nurses whose swaying rears were compared to the turned-up wings of the diver bombers. ‘You’ve never even seen a Stuka,’ his father said. They’d all been shot down by then. He hadn’t gone so far as to add that point but his son had got the message. Another argument. That was the last conversation they’d had, father and son.

  ‘The professor is expecting you.’

  Stave came back to earth and realised he was standing at a desk. He nodded to the nurse, grateful if slightly confused. She gave him the encouraging smile of a woman who was used to seeing more confusion than that on a daily basis.

  Degkwitz was an average-sized man of about fifty with brown hair sharply parted on one side. He shook Stave's hand and said, ‘Cigarette?’

  The chief inspector declined but encouraged the professor to go ahead and light up his own Lucky Strike. ‘What do you know about wolf children?’ he asked.