The Wolf Children Read online

  Pull yourself together, he told himself. You need to be here for Karl now. Look around: see any grasses? Any uniformed police? He limped along the little streets around the Hansaplatz: Ellmenreich-strasse, Bremer Reihe, Stralsunder Strasse. There were people out for a walk, children, one or two tired prostitutes, a few drunks – and lots of men and women with briefcases, shopping bags, old rucksacks, heading for the Hansaplatz. It was getting towards closing time, the square would be full.

  Eventually Stave dared to go out on to the square itself. He saw the figures in doorways, next to the fountain, all apparently wandering aimlessly over the cobbles. Whispers here and there, bundles of Reichsmarks, carefully counted cigarettes. Here and there young men dressed perfectly, with Swiss watches on their arms, the kings of the black market. Stave looked around again, wandered about. Even if he was here on business for his son, he couldn’t help thinking about what Hildegard Hüllmann had told him: recording tape. He spent more time on the Hansaplatz than he needed to, increasing his risk of being picked up, but he didn’t spot a tape recorder anywhere. Concentrate on Karl, he told himself.

  He had taken everything there was from his emergency supplies in the bottom drawer of his desk. ‘Men's trousers,’ he went around whispering, ‘shirt, shoes ...’

  Half an hour later he had paid out a small fortune in cigarettes. In exchange he now had a pair of light linen trousers, a crooked tear in the right leg sewn up with black thread. A shirt dyed to an indeterminate brownish-green colour, obviously a former uniform shirt. ‘Luftwaffe,’ the elderly lady who sold it to him had whispered, but Stave suspected it had probably been a Party uniform. It would have been golden brown until 1945. Shoes with tatty leather uppers and soles almost as thin as paper. He would have to pad them with newspaper, and they were almost certainly at least one size too big for Karl. And then a briefcase made of black leather, with a broken lock, so that he could carry his purchases home without it being too obvious.

  Stave left the square with a sigh of relief. At least there hadn’t been a raid. He could taste iron in his moth. When he reached Steindamm he took a long deep breath. What else? He felt around in his trouser pocket. He still had a bundle of leathery Reichsmarks. A hundred metres away there was a chemist's. The large owner, sweating heavily, was standing by the door struggling to fit a hook into a wooden shutter to pull it down over her empty shop window.

  Stave ran up to her. ‘Have you got skin powder?’ he asked. His voice was croaking. It was hardly an impressive way to introduce himself. The woman didn’t even turn to look at him; she’d finally managed to get the hook into the loop on the shutter.

  ‘We’re closed,’ she snorted. ‘In any case there's nothing left. And we’re not expecting more any time soon.’

  The chief inspector was thinking about Karl's dried and damaged skin. ‘I’ll pay UT,’ he whispered, even though he didn’t know the shop owner. He held his breath until at last she thought him worth even looking at. UT — under the table — a small, secret deal. Totally illegal. Against all the trade regulations set by the occupation forces. An English summary judge would give him on the spot a week in jail, maybe a month. I hope she doesn’t recognise that I’m a policeman, Stave prayed.

  ‘Let's see,’ she said at last. She pulled down the shutter and squeezed through the shop door. With a sigh of relief Stave followed her into the dimly lit interior.

  ‘Children's skin powder, ointment.’ She fished a tin and a bottle out of a cupboard beneath the counter. ‘The real stuff. The Diaderma brand.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Sixty cigarettes.’

  Stave made a face. He felt like a punter arguing with a prostitute over her price. ‘I’ve just used them all. All I have left is money’ A single John Player's cost seven Reichsmarks: he put 420 on the counter, hesitated for a moment, then added another tenner. Half a year's salary, but then what was money worth these days?

  The fat woman grabbed the cash surprisingly quickly and shoved it under her apron, not into the cash till, Stave noticed. You’re not on duty, he reminded himself, as he threw the ointment and powder into his briefcase, said goodbye and left.

  It was silent in his apartment. The bread, Quark and last few bits of sausage had gone. Karl must be asleep again, the chief inspector told himself for a second, but he already knew that couldn’t be the case. He could feel it: the apartment was too quiet. He couldn’t hear a breath. He dashed into the little bedroom in horror: it was empty.

  Stave set the briefcase down, his heart racing. He was at least relieved not have found Karl lying dead on the bed. Where could he be? He looked on the kitchen table and in the living room for a note, but there was nothing. The boy's just gone out to stretch his legs, he told himself.

  He laid out the items of clothing on the bed, noticing that his hands were shaking. He was glad nobody could see him. He turned the tap in the kitchen. Water gurgled out, reddish and tasting as metallic as blood. He drank some nonetheless, and wondered if he should stick his head under the tap. He would welcome the coolness but it might make him even dirtier than he was. In the end the heat won: he bent his head under the tap, and stood there for a while with his eyes closed, letting the water run over his skull, trying to think of nothing.

  The cloth he used to dry his head turned rust-red, but at any rate he felt freshened up. He went out again, this time with his ration book in his hand. Time to hit the shops before they closed. He had already used so many he wouldn’t have enough for the rest of the month, but Karl would get his own ration book soon.

  When he came back again, the apartment was still empty. Stave sat down on a kitchen chair, dumbstruck, staying there for an hour or so. How quiet the apartment could be. He had never noticed before, nor how shabby it was. He wondered where his son could be. Maybe he was out looking for a job? It wasn’t the first of the month, but it was a Monday. Maybe somebody might hire him for the week? Don’t fool yourself. Nothing happens that fast. Maybe he was meeting some friends? But they had all been in the Hitler Youth. Would they still be alive? And was that a good circle for him to get back into if they were? Unrepentant Nazis? Or those young ex-soldiers with the grim, hardened faces you saw on the black market? There was no end of things to worry about.

  Eventually he could take it no longer, he had to get away from the mugginess of the room, the endless silence. He ran down the stairs.

  Aimlessly he wandered the streets. Golden sunlight, floating dust particles. The piles of rubble had stored up the heat of the day like little volcanoes. Days after the bombing raids of 1943 the heaps of rubble still glowed. It was like wandering through an oven. Mar-garethe. What would his wife have done now? She would probably have spoken quite differently to their son. She would surely have thrown her arms around him long ago. Stave closed his eyes and walked on, across Ahrensburger Strasse, and shortly after came to the Wandse, a stream with parkland on either side, a green kilometre-long strip between collapsed houses and grey apartment blocks. It was like a meadow along its banks. New growth coming up where bushes had been hacked down. Grass. Dandelions. The black earth thrown up by moles in heaps between the sunbathers lying there. Couples lying out on torn sheets, children, families. One young woman was even wearing sunglasses. Stave stared at her until he realised how rude it was. The only sunglasses he had seen in years were those on the faces of occupation officers. Eventually the chief inspector ended up by the Outer Alster. There were four dinghies out on Hamburg's inland sea, their sails limp. The water was as grey and smooth as a sheet of polished lead. One oarsman in a single skull was cutting a neat ripple across the otherwise perfect surface on either side, like a giant line of stitching across the water. The villas on the bank and the green willow branches shimmered, the white slab of the Atlantic Hotel on the left, the spires of churches and the city hall in the distance. He thought of Anna, and the two of them walking along the banks here at the end of that terrible winter. Their first kiss. It wasn’t even that long ago. He turned left, limping a
long the bank. At some stage he found himself on the western side, turned right and wandered down Rotenbaumstrasse. How had he ended up here? Stave realised he had fooled himself, that he hadn’t been wandering as aimlessly as he imagined. He was only a few hundred metres from Dammtor Station and the line the coal thieves stole from was just on the other side. This case is consuming you, he thought. Tear yourself away from it, just for one evening. So he turned right, down the next side street, away from the main avenue. Hartungstrasse, he realised. He had been here with Anna a few days earlier.

  Stave came to a sudden stop, astonished to see his way blocked by elegantly dressed men and women. Ladies in high heels picking their way cautiously over the cobbles, gentlemen in dinner jackets, British officers in immaculately ironed dress uniforms. There had to be a première in the Kammerspiel theatre, Stave realised. He was about to turn away when he heard someone call out his name.

  An officer emerged from the crowd on the other side of the long shadows cast by the rows of houses. MacDonald. The lieutenant shook his hand. Not that long ago, such a thing had been forbidden: fraternisation with the enemy.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a theatregoer,’ Stave said.

  MacDonald laughed. ‘There's so much acting in the army, you soon get to be an expert.’

  ‘What's on?’

  ‘The stage version of a radio play. Draussen vor der Tür, by Wolfgang Borchert.’

  ‘That author is hardly likely to be there,’ Stave muttered. He vaguely remembered hearing that Borchert had died during the last winter, from some horrible fever he had probably brought back from Russia, where he had served in a penal battalion on the eastern front. NWDR radio had broadcast Draussen vor der Tür. He had sat down by the radio to listen to it, but had fallen asleep – or maybe the electricity had cut out. One way or another he had no idea what it was about.

  ‘Do you know something, old boy. I’ll invite you.’

  Stave blinked at the young lieutenant in astonishment. ‘You’ve got two tickets?’ He felt terribly shabby in his patched jacket, totally out of place among such elegant company. He looked for an excuse to turn down the invitation.

  ‘I had hoped to surprise Erna,’ MacDonald said. His voice sounded carefree, but the smile on his face had frozen.

  ‘She wasn’t feeling up to it, in her condition?’ the chief inspector suggested.

  ‘Let's say that was the official excuse. The reality is she didn’t feel she should be seen here.’ He wiped his hand across his eyes. ‘And she's probably right. Too many of my comrades here. They already chitchat enough about me and my little pregnant German girlfriend. If she’d come one or another of my senior officers might have thought I was taking the mickey.’

  ‘No scandal.’

  ‘No scandal, but I feel like some of the houses over there: all façade but nothing behind it.’

  ‘I accept your invitation.’

  MacDonald slapped him on the back. ‘A bit of culture never did anybody any harm, not even a chief inspector in the CID. Don’t worry, I won’t introduce you to anybody.’

  Twenty minutes later Stave was sitting next to the lieutenant in a middle row Somewhat embarrassedly, he flicked through the programme. Hans Quest as Sergeant Beckmann, Erwin Geschonneck as the cabaret director, Käte Pontow as the soldier's wife. Directed by Wolfgang Liebenbeiner. None of it meant anything to him. MacDonald is right: I really am a philistine, he thought. There are other things of interest in life beyond murders and killings. This is something I could tell my son about. Or Anna. If either of them ever turned up again.

  The lights went out and the chief inspector was transported into another world: Sergeant Beckmann, wearing a pair of glasses made out of a gas mask coming back from war. His wife with another man. His parents already ‘denazified’, if only by gassing themselves in their apartment. Just as he was about to throw himself into the Elbe even the river rejected him, and he found himself back in his miserable life.

  When the curtain came down, it was initially quiet in the auditorium. Only after a minute or so did the applause begin, slowly at first, then louder and louder. Stave clapped too, but didn’t dare glance at his neighbour. A good job Erna Berg hadn’t come along.

  Eventually MacDonald got to his feet. ‘Good actors,’ he said casually. ‘But the play was very German.’

  The chief inspector had no idea how to reply.

  ‘Should I drive you home? My Jeep's parked on Rothenbaum Chaussee.’

  Stave suddenly realised how exhausted he was. ‘Bit of a one-sided evening. You give me a free ticket, then you act as my chauffeur. I feel I’ve not paid my share.’

  ‘Think of it as a business engagement,’ MacDonald said, smiling for the first time in two hours.

  Outside it was as hot as ever. Hot enough that the lieutenant folded down the windscreen so that at least they got the full benefit of the breeze while they were driving. The off-road vehicle bounced over the holes in the road, the officer driving more slowly than he needed to. But then he was probably in no hurry to get back to his villa. He wondered where Erna Berg was spending the evening.

  In order to distract MacDonald from his thoughts and end the awkward silence, Stave thanked him for the note he’d left the previous weekend. He virtually had to shout aloud to be heard over the roar of the twelve-cylinder engine.

  ‘Doesn’t sound as if you think too much of my lead,’ MacDonald replied.

  The chief inspector felt as if he’d been caught out. MacDonald must have noticed his lack of enthusiasm. ‘Adolf Winkelmann hung around with wolf children,’ he said as if to justify himself. ‘Coal thieves, vagabonds. The older and brighter ones were possibly already big players on the black market. But none of them had anything to do with the shipyard.’

  ‘DPs and concentration camp prisoners from the east worked down at Blohm & Voss. The wolf children fled from the east. Maybe there's a connection of some sort?’

  ‘The forced labourers were Polish, Russian and Ukrainians. The wolf children are German. Not exactly the best basis for a friendship.’ The chief inspector remembered the expression of disgust Hildegard Hüllmann had given, even though prostitutes couldn’t exactly afford to be choosy.

  ‘In the world that boy inhabited,’ MacDonald replied, ‘nobody has friends. They don’t need them. Maybe Adolf Winkelmann found a business partner among them.’

  ‘If he did, it was pretty low-level business.’

  For a while they drove silently through the empty streets. Stave wondered if he should tell MacDonald that his son Karl had come home. But then family stories probably weren’t what he wanted to hear at the moment. On the other hand, the lieutenant himself was going to be a father soon. And so, he used the reference to the ‘east’ as a link and mentioned, as casually as he could, Karl's return from Vorkuta. To his surprise MacDonald clapped him on the shoulder, genuinely pleased for him.

  ‘You only mention this now. And here am I dragging you to the theatre, when you’d far rather have spent the evening at home with your son.’

  ‘We need to get to know each other again,’ Stave replied, embarrassed at having revealed so much personal detail.

  ‘I understand,’ MacDonald said, staring straight ahead.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if normal family life will ever be possible again after this war,’ Stave said wearily.

  ‘As long as there are lawyers and bureaucrats, my answer is always going to be: forget about it,’ the lieutenant added grimly.

  ‘Your divorce case?’

  ‘I would rather sign up for the next war than go into that courtroom. Not least because I am there as a powerless witness. Erna has to sort it out herself

  It would have been a hopeless case under normal circumstances: there was no way Erna Berg would have been granted custody. But MacDonald was her ticket to a better life, and the only one she was likely to get.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ asked Stave.

  MacDonald smiled, briefly, thankfully, but also somehow tri
umphantly. ‘To be honest I had hoped you would ask me that question, old boy. I wouldn’t have dared to ask.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘To call you into court. As a character witness. Say what you can about Erna. How hard she works. A chief inspector of police in the witness stand might give the judge cause to consider.’

  And it would become the talking point of the office, Stave thought to himself. He wished he’d never offered. But he had fallen into a trap of his own making and there was no way out. ‘I’ll do that,’ he promised.

  When they reached 93 Ahrensburger Strasse, Stave expected MacDonald to let him out and speed off. But the lieutenant switched off the engine. It was uncannily quiet. Somewhere they could hear baby rats squealing. The moon was like a thin sickle in a black sky. The ruins and the façades stood there like scenery in an Expressionist stage play. Stave felt as if he were an actor who had stumbled on to the stage without knowing which role he was supposed to play.

  ‘I’d invite you up for a glass, if I had anything decent to offer you,’ he said embarrassedly

  MacDonald smiled and reached behind the driver's seat. In the pale yellow light the chief inspector recognised a bottle of Dujardin Imperial brandy. ‘Time for the British and Germans to share their spoils of war,’ MacDonald said.

  On his first evening back Karl had come across Anna, without any prior warning, Stave was thinking as he dragged his feet up the staircase. Now here I am, bringing a British officer home. The boy is going to have to get used to changed times. But as he opened the door he realised that his son had not come back yet.’

  ‘Karl isn’t home,’ he said unnecessarily.

  ‘That means more brandy for us,’ MacDonald said, acting as if he wasn’t surprised.

  Over the next few hours they sank into a cosy warm mist. Stave hadn’t drunk alcohol for years. The sharp, amber liquid inflamed his throat, burned in his stomach and brought tears to his eyes. It took time to get used to it again. He and the lieutenant sat by the kitchen table, with two old water glasses on a wooden tray. They got drunk systematically and in silence. They finished the bottle in less than two hours. Eventually MacDonald staggered up from his chair, like an old man.