The Wolf Children Read online

  On the way he thought over what he had learned about the coal thieves. Revenge for the death of a friend was a good motive. All at once he had a dozen or two potential suspects. First and foremost had to be Jim Meinke, who was strong, had a Wehrmacht knife and was leader of the gang — the one the others all expected to deal with stuff. He also knew his way around the harbour. Even though he denied it, he might well have been down at Blohm & Voss; he certainly knew the lie of the land. It was a plausible story, maybe even good enough to convince Public Prosecutor Ehrlich to issue a warrant for his arrest. If it weren’t for one little detail: when the chief inspector had startled Meinke he had pulled his knife as quick as lightning, in his right hand. And according to Dr Czrisini, Adolf Winkelmann's killer had used his left.

  Stave wondered if a kid like Meinke might be ambidextrous. He tried to remember how the boy had climbed on to the coal wagon. He’d been strong, agile, but when he got up there he had held the sack open with his left hand and shovelled the coal in with his right. Typical right-handed behaviour. In any case, it would have been too simple, the CID man told himself. Also he didn’t think the boy capable of such a cold-blooded murder.

  The air in his office was stale with the smell of old paper: files, files and more files. And now he was about to add a few more. He would write a report on Meinke's interrogation and put it in the narrow green filing cabinet. He enjoyed doing reports on a Saturday because nobody interrupted him. Erna Berg was off, most of the other offices were empty, only from the far end of the corridor came the click of a typewriter: evidently one of his colleagues felt the same.

  As he walked over to his desk, it occurred to him that the Adolf Winkemann Murder’ file was going to be thicker than they had thought. On top of it was a note in MacDonald's careless handwriting.

  Old boy,

  I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours so I hope you get this note. I’ve been asking around among our people and I’ve found out a few things about Blohm & Voss. Our comrades in the Royal Air Force flew thirty-eight raids on the shipyard but even so it continued production right up until the end of the war. Even in February 1945, there were still 16,339 men employed. Now this is where it gets interesting. Most of them were forced workers. Some 600 prisoners from the Neuengamme concentration camp did shifts there; in fact they erected a subsidiary camp. Most of the rest were forced workers brought in from all over Europe, although mostly from the east. They were housed in twenty-six camps scattered all around the shipyard and out at Blohm & Voss's aircraft factory at Finkenwerder.

  Unfortunately there are a lot of gaps in the documentation. I’ve read through it all and not been able to find any link to the Winkelmann family and as far as I can tell no member of the Winkelmann family ever worked for Blohm & Voss. But, about half of the concentration camp inmates who worked there survived, and, as we noted, several thousand of the forced workers were still there at the end of the war. It is quite possible, though I have not been able to ascertain this yet, that a good number of them are still in Hamburg. Displaced Persons who don’t want to be repatriated to Eastern Europe. You know that a lot of DPs are now active as smugglers or black marketeers. They know the harbour area a lot better than you or I. And wasn’t Adolf Winkelmann in contact with smugglers? And black marketeers? Maybe that is a lead? He could have been doing business with DPs who used to work at Blohm & Voss, and then something went wrong — and his body ended up lying on that bomb.

  Enough questions to think about there on a fine Saturday afternoon. (Erna says you’re bound to be in the office.)

  MacDonald

  Stave rubbed his eyes. If he had to interrogate all the coal thieves and now all the DPs in Hamburg he was going to be working most weekends. He wasn’t keen on the lieutenant's theory but he could find nothing to say against it. So now he had two leads.

  He worded his report carefully, bashed out on the typewriter with his unskilled fingers, struggling with a loose ribbon and the cheap yellow paper. He had almost forgotten the time. The sunlight coming through his office window was no longer bright yellow but red and gold. He leapt to his feet. Anna!

  He took the tram, then walked the rest of the long way home. She hadn’t turned him down. He would tell her all his problems. He would tell her about his son, who was going to show up one of these days. No secrets, no gaps in his life from now on. They would sort it all out. Together. They would eat out on the balcony: at sunset even ruins could look romantic. And then, the night together.

  The stairwell was already as dark as the grave; the small window at the top hadn’t been cleaned for years and the glass was covered with layers of grease and dirt and pigeon droppings. Stave ran up the four floors, exhilarated now. Then he stopped. There was a shadow on the floor above, right outside the door to his apartment. He held his breath. His heart was pounding. He fumbled with his right hand beneath his jacket to reach for his FN22.

  Then a voice came from just above: Are you going to shoot your own son?’

  Stave thundered up the stairs. He hadn’t heard that voice for so many years. You mustn’t crack up. With shaking hands he reached for a match, lit it and held up the flame.

  ‘Karl...’

  ‘You’ve got a few grey hairs.’

  Stave climbed the last few stairs with uncertain steps. He wanted to embrace his son but didn’t dare. He fumbled clumsily with his keys in the lock, scarcely daring to glance at his son.

  ‘Come in,’ he whispered. ‘Have you been here long? How did you find me?’

  Sunlight flooded the apartment. Now Stave could see the hard lines in his son's face, his grey skin, the bags under his eyes. Karl was a head taller, he had always been thin but now he looked wasted, the skin on his cheeks pulled so tight you could see the bones. He was wearing a dirty blue dyed Wehrmacht greatcoat, draped over his body, and underneath trousers of an indeterminate colour, a ripped shirt, cloth shoes with holes in them, not the ones Stave had bought for him on the black market and sent to Vorkuta. The swine!

  Karl had the same pale blond hair as he did, but Margarethe's deep dark blue eyes. But they were no longer the eyes of a boy, not even of one of the little snot-dripping fanatics of the Hitler Youth — just tired, suspicious, hard. Nineteen years old, Stave thought to himself, and the war has turned him into a man, a damaged man. Stave blinked to hide his tears. He hadn’t cried since he was a child. This is no time for me to start howling. Who knows what Karl would think?

  ‘Still working away, Father? Even Saturdays, just like the old days?’

  ‘Were you waiting long?’ Stave's voice sounded awkward.

  ‘If there's one thing I’ve learnt to do, it's wait.’ Karl looked around the room. ‘Nothing from our old apartment here?’

  ‘It was all destroyed.’

  Stave closed his eyes. Please don’t let us start arguing again, he prayed. Where were you when the bombs hit our house? Why weren’t you with Mother? Karl himself had been on a camping trip with the Hitler Youth that night. It had saved his life. I suspect he feels guilty himself, Stave surmised.

  To his great relief his son said no more on the subject. He smelled of dirty clothes, sweat and disinfectant. He had no bag, no suitcase, Stave only just realised.

  ‘At long last, no barracks, no camp, no huts.’ His son wiped his eyes with one hand. ‘I sat for weeks in a cattle car going through Russia. I thought I’d be on the thing forever. Then eventually we reached Camp 96.’

  ‘Camp 96?’

  ‘Release facility, where they set free those POWs who’ve made it that far. In Gronenfelde, near Frankfurt on the Main. Because I’m from Hamburg, they put me on a train. This morning at the release facility by the Kunsthalle here, I got my discharge note. I’ve been debriefed. God, but I’m tired. And hungry.’

  Stave leapt to his feet. ‘I’ll surprise you.’

  He hurried into the kitchen, filled the little stove with kindling, little chopped bits of wood he’d found in the rubble days ago. He took the round ex-Wehrmacht
pot and set it on the coal oven in the kitchen from which he’d removed the hot plate. That way the smoke would go down into the ceramic tiled stove that heated the apartment and through its chimney out into the open air, rather than filling the room. It worked as long as he remembered to clean the pipes once a week. Otherwise the damp dirty wood filled it with a thick layer of greasy soot.

  Stave put a pot on the stove, carefully in case his wobbly construction tipped over. ‘Bahndamm soup with blocks of cement,’ he called to his son, trying his best to be light-hearted. ‘Vegetables like you find by the railway tracks, nettles, yarrow, semolina dumplings as hard as cement, accompanied by sausage made with whale meat and bonemeal.’

  ‘Smells good,’ his son replied in a tired voice. ‘For the past few years all I’ve had has been mouldy bread with kapusta.’

  ‘Kapusta?’

  ‘Russian cabbage.’

  Stave was about to reply when suddenly he saw a figure at the door of the apartment, which he’d forgotten to close.

  Anna. She was wearing a cream-coloured summer dress he hadn’t seen before, her long hair plaited. In her right hand was a little package, wrapped up. A surprise for him, he guessed. She was going to be the one surprised. She glanced swiftly from him to Karl. She had understood straight away.

  ‘Anna,’ Stave said. He couldn’t think of anything more sensible to say.

  She gave a forced smile. ‘Maybe it's better if I leave you alone?’ she managed to say.

  ‘Karl, may I introduce you. Anna von Veckinhausen. Anna, this is my son Karl.’ Stave felt ridiculous even as he said it.

  His son said nothing, just stared silently at the table.

  Anna was already back in the stairwell. ‘Wait!’ Stave called out, rushing after her. He didn’t know how to explain. ‘Won’t you stay?’

  For a moment he thought his lover was going to say something. But then she just brought her right arm up to her chest, as she always did when she felt under stress. ‘You need to spend the evening with your son. On your own.’

  ‘I had no idea he would be back today. I mean, obviously I’m pleased he's here,’ he stammered.

  ‘I’m pleased for you.’ She brushed her fingers briefly over his cheek. Tenderly, with no doubt that it was a parting gesture. He stood there a few minutes on the stairs, not knowing what to do, then he went back into the apartment.

  ‘A replacement for Mama? Nobility too, and you a secret Social Democrat all those years?’ His son hadn’t stirred from where he sat.

  Stave closed his eyes. ‘It's complicated. Too complicated for this evening. I’ll tell you everything.’ Already he was avoiding the truth, and his son had barely been home ten minutes. Not a great start. He was relieved when he heard a bubbling sound from the kitchen and ran to see to it, happy and sad all at once, confused and helpless. He was beginning to dread the evening ahead.

  While he stirred the soup and added salt, he surreptitiously watched his son. He's going to fall asleep before he gets anything in his stomach. I have to get a move on. ‘Just a few minutes more on this old stove,’ he called out.

  ‘Have you a cigarette?’

  Stave looked at him in surprise, but didn’t ask any questions. He put his hand in the pocket of his jacket hanging on a hook and tossed him a pack of John Player's. ‘You smoke too these days?’ Karl asked in surprise, taking a smoke from the crumpled packet and lighting up.

  ‘No, that's my substitute wallet. You get better value on the black market with cigarettes than you do with Reischsmark notes.’

  ‘Same thing in the POW camp.’

  ‘No mouldy bread or cabbage at least today.’

  ‘Nettle soup and whale sausage instead. The Russians won the war and we lost but in the end it hasn’t made much difference either way.’

  ‘Wait until you meet the British, then you’ll see the difference between winning and losing.’

  ‘That bad, is it?’

  Stave thought of MacDonald. ‘We’re lucky the Red Army didn’t get as far as Hamburg. When you think of what we did to the British, they treat us really rather fairly.’

  ‘You said “we”. You used to be proud of not being a Nazi.’

  ‘Which made you very angry,’ Stave could have bitten his tongue. It just came out. Talking to his son, thinking of MacDonald. There were minefields everywhere, and if he wasn’t careful everything would get blown to smithereens.

  Karl looked him in the eye again for the first time in minutes. ‘I’ve had it with the Nazis,’ he said wearily. ‘With politics in general, Nazis, Communists, Tommies, Amis, you’re welcome to them all. Liars all.’

  Stave said nothing. At least that's something, he thought to himself. The war had chased the brown fleas out of his head. He wondered to himself what his son had been through in the war. His head spun. Concentrate on the meal, he told himself.

  The soup was steaming. Along with it he had a few carrots and a little head of lettuce, bought on the black market from an allotment gardener. Karl took a bite of the vegetables, chewing the carrots carefully. ‘My teeth are loose,’ he explained and managed an awkward grin. Then he took a spoon and began gulping down the soup. Stave watched him: bent over the bowl, not looking up, short quick movements, one spoonful after the other, slurping greedily, like some half-starved animal. The he stopped and stared.

  ‘What happened to your finger?’ he asked. His son was missing the end of his right index finger.

  ‘One of the Ivans shot it off,’ Karl mumbled between bites, continuing to wolf down the soup. ‘I’ve got used to it.’

  The chief inspector couldn’t drag his eyes away from the red, scarred stump. It broke his heart. Did it happen at the front? Or in the camp? Did it still hurt? Could he still grip things, write? Stave didn’t dare ask.

  ‘Have you got another bowl?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Stave had cooked for two, but his son could have a double portion if he wanted. He needed it more.

  ‘Was it bad out in Vorkuta?’ he asked cautiously, putting the second bowl of soup down on the table.

  ‘First the Russians let go all our comrades from Austria. All of a sudden they weren’t German any more. We were jealous. Then they took all the SS men away, even those who had managed to find a Wehrmacht uniform before the Ivans captured them. They were led off, and we never saw any of them again. But I don’t think they were sent home like the Austrians. They got what they deserved from the Russians.’ He gave a short laugh, then bent down over his soup again.

  Stave was confused. What had he expected? An epic description of life in a camp on the icy steppes? He would have to figure it out from the few brief sentences his son said. It would take time. I will really listen to him, not like in the old days. He’ll tell me everything, sooner or later.

  He had kept two slices of crumbly bread and some reddish ersatz jam. With a cup of coffee, real Mocha, it had cost a fortune on the black market. Anna would have been delighted. It didn’t matter now.

  ‘Can you get this every day here?’ Karl asked in surprise. Before his father could answer, he nodded and his expression darkened a little. ‘The upper class lady? Did I spoil a romantic evening?’

  ‘You didn’t spoil anything,’ Stave replied, louder than he had intended. ‘But I can’t afford this every day, so eat up and enjoy.’

  ‘Sir, yessir, Herr ... what rank are you now? Did the Tommies promote you?’

  Stave felt himself blush. Don’t get provoked, he told himself. ‘Police Chief Inspector, it's a new rank the British introduced. That's what they call their people back in Scotland Yard, I’m told. But I’m still doing the same work as ever: murder squad.’

  ‘Fine,’ mumbled Karl, clearly a bit embarrassed by his own words. ‘Don’t mind me. I’m just tired.’

  Silence. His son chewed slowly on the bread and jam. The expression on his face was almost blissful. He supped ever so slowly at his coffee. Stave couldn’t think of anything to say. Gradually, darkness began to creep over t
hem. Stave fumbled around in a drawer until he found a stub of candle that gave a flickering light.

  ‘In Vorkuta we had one candle for each hut,’ Karl said without being asked. ‘In winter it was all the light we had.’ Then he struggled to his feet, reeling. ‘I need to go to bed.’

  The chief inspector led him into the room he had prepared for him. At last, Karl was there! He had to hold on to the wall to keep himself upright. His son didn’t notice his joy, just crawled on to the bed. ‘A mattress, and a sheet. I’m a civilian again.’ At last he took off his coat, shirt and trousers. He had no vest, underpants with holes in them, ribs sticking out below tight-stretched skin. He lay down on the bed and within five seconds was fast asleep.

  Stave looked down at him. In his sleep his features relaxed and he looked like a boy again, he thought to himself. But he had not forgotten that Karl had been a soldier. He didn’t dare to touch him, in case he woke up in fright and started lashing out. Who knows what he had been through? Stave just stood there next to the bed, looking down at the thin body, the haggard face, his maimed right hand. Even though it was still warm and there was no draught from the open window, he spread the woollen blanket carefully over his son. Gently he picked up the rags from the floor. He would put them all in the bin. He laid one of his shirts and a pair of trousers over the back of a chair. The trousers would be too short for Karl but they would have to do until he found some on the black market.

  He stood there in the door for a long time, the candle in his hand, not wanting to leave the room. Leave him to rest, he told himself in the end. Don’t get too sentimental. Karl has been through a lot. You have to take care of him.

  Stave went into his own room, but turned away from the bed and went out on to the balcony. The city was dark with just a few red candle lights glowing within the ruins, and just here and there a brightly lit window where they had electricity again. The headlights of a British Jeep, its growling engine. I hope the patrols don’t wake my boy. He waited with bated breath until the vehicle passed the length of Ahrensburger Strasse, listened out to hear if there was any noise from the other side of the closed door. Nothing. Karl was asleep.