The Wolf Children Read online

  ‘If you hadn’t already used that term to me over the telephone, I’d have to tell you I’d never heard it. Why have you come to see me?’

  ‘These children must get treated somewhere. Logic dictates that most cases would end up in the largest hospital.

  Degkwitz leaned back in his seat. ‘I’m a TB specialist. Over the past two years my experience in the field has improved dramatically. Unfortunately my capacity to treat cases has over the same time decreased dramatically. We get hundreds of cases of TB in all its stages here. Obviously that includes children. My colleagues here see children with severe starvation, with serious skin and genital problems, as well as wounds of every sort. The babies born here are sometimes so undernourished they look like little worms. Whether these kids are gutter vagabonds or nice children from good homes in Blankenese is a matter of the most complete indifference to me.’

  ‘But don’t you get concerned when a child is brought in who has no parents or relations?’

  ‘Not any more. If our little patients have no relatives, we inform the authorities. Usually sooner or later somebody comes and takes them to an orphanage. Sometimes the girls or boys run off before they can be collected.’

  The CID man had hoped the hospital might be able to put him in touch with some friend of the murder victim. But Stave now realised that no matter how badly wounded they might be, wolf children didn’t get noticed in the hospital. They were simply treated until they were on their feet again, and then they ran away. Obviously he would be able to go through the records here, and get details of the types of wounds common in conditions of war and strife, even attempted murder. But what help would that be, if he had no idea whether or not the victim was a wolf child?

  ‘I’d like to ask if you could find out whether an Adolf Winkelmann was ever treated here,’ he said, tired and already half-resigned to the answer.

  The professor shook his head sympathetically. ‘We have already gone through all the archives for the past few years, including before 1945. I’m glad to say we still have those records. No Adolf Winkelmann. Not to say that means he was never treated here. Boys who end up in here give us whatever name they like. How are we to check it out if they have no ID card, or no registered address? In any case, that's not our business. I’m fairly certain that the sort of children you’re looking for are exactly the sort who make up names for themselves. We have dozens of Peter Müllers and Heinrich Schmidts in our records, and that goes for the older patients too. There are more than enough adults around who don’t want to hear their real names mentioned again.

  On the long way back from the hospital to CID headquarters Stave kept an eye out for children on the street. And discovered they were everywhere. He hadn’t noticed before. Boys in short trousers chasing a ball made of rags. Girls in skirts their mothers had made out of bedsheets. Kids trundling tyres along the streets. Playing in the ruins as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if they were woods and forests — particularly the two older boys Stave passed who were building medieval castles out of broken bricks on the remnants of a Panzer's tank tracks, glittering in the hot sunlight.

  This isn’t my world, he thought to himself and all of a sudden felt a sorrow descend upon him like a yoke around his neck. Children, games, adventures. When had he last enjoyed any of that with Karl? The boy spent all his time with the Hitler Youth. Don’t feel sorry for yourself, it was your fault too. Who else would Karl have shared adventures with? With his father, who spent all his time at the police station? He had done overtime as well as his normal duty so as not to come to attention for political reasons, so that despite not being a Party member he could hang on to his job and his pension and that little taste of power and self-worth that even a policeman who’d been knocked off the promotion chain still possessed.

  I’ll do better this time, when Karl gets back from Vorkuta, he thought, straightened himself up and began to walk faster. But there was still that nagging doubt: would he make a hash of everything again? Things hadn’t got any better with Anna either: they hadn’t spoken properly to one another in days.

  Nor was he getting any further with the case. Sure, he had leads. But none of them led anywhere. Coal thieves? Smugglers? Family? School? Somewhere out there a secret was buried — a secret that would explain the brutal murder down at the shipyard. It was up to him to unearth it.

  Under the giant pillars that held up the front entrance to the CID headquarters he nodded in passing to the bronze elephant the lads in the office had nicknamed ‘Anton’ — the thing was a relic from the days when the eleven-storey building had been the headquarters of an insurance company. And the days when people had the money and enthusiasm to waste on such frippery. In the anteroom to his office Erna Berg looked up when he came in. She waved a newspaper printed on cheap yellowing paper at him: ‘Here, this will interest you.’

  ‘Sounds dangerous,’ he said, taking the newspaper from her. Die Zeit, four pages in small print – there was still a shortage of paper in the British zone. His secretary had folded it so that his attention fell on a single column story on page three: an article about young people stealing coal.

  Stave rustled the paper and said, ‘I owe you twenty pfennigs for this. I’ll read it in my office. Keep this up and we’ll soon be changing places.’

  ‘Men think about things, women feel them,’ she replied good-naturedly. ‘I already owe you for one favour or another. Most of your colleagues would have suggested I be fired in my situation, or would if they knew who the father of my baby was.’

  ‘Times change,’ said Stave, closing his office door behind him. He read the article through quickly, then a second time, more carefully. It was nothing particularly new. An estimate of how many tonnes of coal were stolen from the railway tracks in Hamburg, how many children were involved, where they emptied the freight cars and who benefited most from it.

  ‘Somebody here knows what they’re talking about, though,’ Stave whispered aloud. The author was an old acquaintance, Ludwig Kleensch, who’d written a report on the murderer in the ruins. Stave flicked though one of his old notebooks, which he kept, organised chronologically, in a drawer of his desk. It didn’t take long to find the journalist's number at the paper's editorial department.

  When he heard Stave's name at the other end of the line, Kleensch said nothing for a few seconds while he tried to place him. When he spoke he sounded curious.

  ‘I don’t speak often to the CID on the phone. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I need information.’

  ‘You don’t say! What about?’

  ‘Coal thieves.’

  ‘Ah, a reader! Congratulations. And what precisely do you want to know about the kids?’

  ‘Everything.’

  There was a long silence on the line. Then he could hear Kleensch taking a deep breath. ‘Not on the telephone, Chief Inspector. The line's so bad, I’d be hoarse from shouting by the time I’d finished, and my colleagues would all have gone deaf listening to me. Let's meet up at my apartment, at say five o’clock in the afternoon. Curienstrasse I. Sixth floor. Right next door to the Zeit offices.’

  ‘That's handy,’ Stave replied.

  Curienstrasse I was an eight-storey slab erected behind the Nazi-built ‘House of the Press’ which Zeit now inhabited. Stave's eyes lit on a relief in brown stone on the right above the entrance: a Kogge, the traditional Hanseatic trading vessel, in full sail and as large as two delivery trucks. On the leading sail was a motif, a round circle like a medallion, suspiciously empty, as was the rest of the relief.

  ‘There used to be a swastika there,’ Kleensch explained when Stave mentioned it at the door of his flat. ‘The building manager had it quickly removed in 1945, before one of the Tommies could get a closer look.’

  The journalist led him into a small room, with small windows, a hard couch for sleeping on and a piano that looked as if it had had to be squeezed in, and above it, a faded reproduction of a painting of an elderly grandmother.


  ‘The Madonna of Cologne, by Stefan Lochner. To remind me of home,’ Kleensch said.

  ‘You’re a Rhinelander?’

  ‘And Berliner, and Hamburger, and Russian nomad. Originally I was trained as a classical conductor, but then I became a reporter for the Vossische Zeitung, in Berlin.’

  ‘Were you in the Party?’

  He laughed and made a dismissive gesture.

  ‘The good old “Auntie Voss”, was the only rag in the brown country where there was still a bit of freedom. Not that it was a big bit. Following my articles, it was suggested rather pointedly to me at the outbreak of war that I would do well to sign up. Which I did. I became a Stuka pilot. Flew 250 missions over enemy territory in the east. Shot down twice.’

  ‘But never a prisoner of war,’ Stave muttered, ever so slightly enviously.

  ‘Lucky boy. To make it from the eastern front here to Hamburg and Die Zeit. and now here I am with a real “commissar” in my little place. Life is full of surprises.’

  The chief inspector gave Kleensch a quick once-over. Over thirty years of age, trim, freshly shaved, youthful-looking, hair an indeterminate colour somewhere between blond and brown. Could have been almost anyone anywhere. In the old days he wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention to someone like him, so friendly, harmless, run of the mill. Yet this man had flown 250 missions on the eastern front. What must it have been like to be shot down? Did he have to make a crash landing? Did he parachute out? The fire, the smoke, the stench of burning oil, wounds, pain. Did Kleensch still have nightmares about it?

  ‘Let's talk about the coal thieves,’ he said. ‘Where did you get all your information?’

  The journalist shrugged. ‘About the amount of missing coal? From the administration and the British. But I suspect you’re not as interested in the coal as in those who took it. I spoke to a few of the lads, but it wasn’t easy’

  The chief inspector explained his case. ‘The one thing that is certain is that from time to time he was involved in stealing coal. And it would appear that at least once he got into a fight with another of the gang. That's not much of a lead to go on, but at least it is a lead.’

  ‘Most of them are perfectly normal kids. For the younger ones it's almost a game, even if a very dangerous one. It can always happen that you try to jump on to a cart and end up under its wheels instead. Then they find an arm lying on the tracks, often a little arm.’

  ‘Do you know Adolf Winkelmann?’ Stave asked, showing him the photo.

  ‘Never seen him before.’

  ‘Did you hear anything about a big fight among the kids?’

  ‘There are fights all the time. Like I said, most of them are perfectly normal, but there are also the kids with no roots.’

  ‘Wolf children.’

  ‘Yes, that's what they call themselves. Kids from the east. Others link up with travelling artists or have run away from parents who beat them or from hard jobs cutting peat in Lower Saxony or forced labour in the uranium mines in the Sudetenland. Many of them are as crazy as grunts sent to the eastern front. And even more brutal. Then the fists fly. None of the vagabonds have ration cards. If they didn’t have coal to steal, they’d starve. So if anybody interferes they tend to take things into their own hands.’

  ‘For example somebody who dabbles in smuggling, sells boxing tickets on the black market, lives in the nice cosy home of his aunt and has no need to steal coal for himself,’ Stave replied softly, thinking it through. ‘Do you have any names?’

  Kleensch laughed. ‘I didn’t exactly get that close to them. In any case our editorial would have vetoed it.’

  ‘Afraid, are they?’

  ‘They’re afraid for their display windows. One of our photographers just happened to be on hand when two policemen arrested a particularly well-known black marketeer. They’d reacted fast and it made a good photograph. We printed it in the next edition. That was put up in the display case outside the building, and guess what: all of a sudden a few guys turn up in the editorial office and suggest rather strongly that we might like to change the display if we wanted to stay on good terms with the gentleman concerned. It's hard to get hold of glass these days, Chief Inspector, and we can’t afford to keep a guard looking after the display cases. So they changed the window and everything was OK. And I got a quiet word not to be quite so enthusiastic over the next few weeks. No names in the paper, no photos of that type. The big players on the market at least send out their tough guys to make their opinion known in advance. The vagabonds down at Bahndamm aren’t quite so polite.’

  ‘And the former Stuka pilot is content to hunker down at his desk?’

  Kleensch stared at him, then laughed and said, ‘Are you trying to provoke me? Aren’t you afraid you might get bad press? Whatever would the mayor say?’

  ‘I’m trying to find the killer of a fourteen-year-old boy’

  The journalist turned serious again, nodded and thought for a bit. ‘OK, I have an idea – an idea it might be better our editorial bosses heard nothing about. I’ll take you to the coal thieves. You can talk to them yourself, and risk your own neck. Meet me at Planten un Blomen, down where the park meets the railway tracks near Dammtor Station, Saturday, six in the morning. Saturday is a day off school for most of the kids, which means there’ll be more of them than on other days. We need to be there early because they’re only at it before the day really gets going when there aren’t many people about.’

  ‘I’m an early riser,’ said Stave, picking up his summer hat.

  He set off down the staircase with a spring in his step. At last a lead. A chance to take things a step further. One of the coal thieves is bound to have known Adolf Winkelmann. One of them would talk.

  He felt brave enough now to put the rest of his life in order. He missed Anna. Why not drop by and see her? They talked too rarely these days. Maybe Saturday will give him something to celebrate? He’d go down to the Bahndamm tomorrow and lie in wait for the kids. Maybe by the evening he’d have the case solved. He would invite her for dinner on Saturday evening. Back at his place. After that she’d be bound to stay the night. He could have whistled a little tune, if he didn’t think that would make him look silly.

  Röperstrasse led down towards the Elbe from elegant Palmaille, a cobbled cul-de-sac barely a hundred metres long. It could have been mistaken for an entrance to somewhere else because the only access to Röperstrasse was a big, U-shaped gate in a long rental apartment building on Palmaille. The four-storey rental blocks behind it were dilapidated but unmarked by bomb damage. Even the doors were pre-war: painted green with white wrought-iron depictions of seagulls. The street ended in a slope of grass, bushes and rubble that led down to the Elbe. Beckoning to foreign lands. Then Stave remembered that in her flight to the west Anna had nearly drowned on board the Wilhelm Gustloff. He wondered if seeing ships the moment she walked out of her door still frightened her. He would have to ask her some day.

  He knocked on the door to the basement apartment, but there was no answer. It was late afternoon; Anna would have left long ago to look for antiques amid the ruins. Stave tried not to be disappointed. He pulled a page out of his notebook and scribbled on it: ‘Dinner at my place Saturday evening? I’m cooking for two if you don’t tell me otherwise. E’ Minimalist stuff. He couldn’t bring himself to add anything more. He pushed the note into the gap between door and frame, then thought a moment, pulled it out and changed the ‘F’ to ‘Frank’.

  Saturday morning. It was still too early for the heat to have risen and Stave enjoyed the cool breeze on his skin. There was a haze in the air, milky light that made the rubble on either side of the street look like it had been rendered in pastel. The chief inspector was awake and up by 5.00 to be sure of getting to the meeting place on time.

  He reached the entrance to the park nearest to Dammtor Station. Before the war there had been a thatched park-keeper's house there, and a lecture hall for the university nearby. Now the chief inspector found himself carefu
lly stepping over black charred remains of both buildings. Beyond was the botanical garden with its exotic plants in straight rows, like soldiers on a permanently stationary parade. A few beautiful ancient trees emerged from the haze, their leaves silvery-damp. There was a smell of pine needles in the air. There was nothing left of the once great expanse of lawns ever since the city had allowed the people to plant potatoes in the park. Steam rose from the upturned earth, while the pathways in between were littered with the droppings of the oxen and carthorses that people had somehow got hold of to pull their makeshift ploughs. Throughout the park fearless black crows hopped here and there. Stave thought there were more of them than there used to be, a lot more. I’d rather not think about what they live on, he thought to himself.

  As he reached the rose garden on the other side of Dammtor Station he began to be more cautious, making his way through the shrubbery or in the shadow of big trees. The rose garden itself was round with a Turkish metal pavilion in the middle. The roses were red, yellow, pink and white, knee-high or on occasion twice the height of a man: bushes, climbers, arches, releasing a perfume that could have been that of a seductive woman.

  A small shadow appeared from within the pavilion: Kleensch.

  ‘Let's hide in the bushes,’ he whispered. There were bramble bushes behind the rose garden. Stave hoped the thorns wouldn’t tear his trousers. They were his second-to-last pair. The last thing he wanted to be forced into was paying a fortune on the black market for a new pair of trousers.

  The journalist swore under his breath, holding up his left thumb where a drop of blood was pooling. ‘Glad I was in the Luftwaffe,’ he whispered, ‘the comrades in the infantry had to endure that every day here. But we’re almost there.’ He pushed a twig to one side and nodded forwards.

  At the end of the park, between the zoo and the main road, the tracks curved towards Dammtor Station. On the main road there was a row of late nineteenth-century residential buildings, prestigious apartments: brick with white or pale yellow plasterwork. One corner building had even survived in a sort of orange colour with white Greek pillars supporting balconies, like antique temples, which seemed absurdly frivolous against the wasteland all around. Stave glanced up at the balconies and windows, looking for a sign that anybody was awake so early. There would be a good view of the park from up there. But there was nobody to be seen.