The Wolf Children Read online

  The pathologist had by now taken a few deep drags on his cigarette and was a lot more relaxed.

  ‘So, who's our killer?’ Stave asked, half-jokingly.

  ‘One of the workers,’ said Czrisini without a shadow of a doubt in his voice. ‘I would say the killer had to be a strong man, according to the marks on the body. He obviously knows the terrain — he managed to get into the hangar through a door that is so well concealed that even we didn’t notice it at first. Nobody noticed him, or what he had done, so that means he can move around the docks without attracting attention. The only people allowed into the Blohm & Voss works are the workers. They’re all strong, and they know their way around.’

  ‘They all fancy themselves as hard men,’ Stave said after a moment or two of silent reflection. ‘Even in the trains they use to get here in the mornings you can see them punching and scuffling with one another. But to kill some teenaged kid? Why would anyone want to do something like that?’

  ‘Maybe it's got something to do with breaking up the yard? The workers are furious. They’re trying to conceal stuff from the English military police. The old guy told you straight out: they’re hiding bits of machinery that they’re supposed to be scrapping. Who knows what else they might be up to? Maybe the kid discovered them up to something they shouldn’t have been doing? And somebody decided to shut his mouth for him.’

  ‘In which case, why not simply throw the body into the Elbe? We’d probably never have found it. And even if we had, nobody would have made the link to Blohm & Voss. Instead of which we have the body laid out here as if on a presentation plate.’ The CID man was thinking back to Kienle's suggestion that the killer was trying to make a statement of some sort.

  Czrisini crushed the tiny butt of his cigarette between nicotine-stained fingertips. ‘That's a puzzle for you to solve. I’m going to take the Jeep back to my British colleague and then tackle the corpse as soon as they get it to the lab. In this heat it's a good idea to get to work on a dead body while it's still in a good condition.’

  Stave was thinking of the victims's matted hair, scratched arms, ragged clothing. ‘That lad hadn’t been in a good condition for some time,’ he replied, and shook hands in farewell.

  The chief inspector waited until the hearse arrived, trundling over the rough cobblestones. The undertakers arrived at the same time as a fire brigade team that had come to take away the defused bomb.

  Good job the petrol rations have been increased, Stave thought to himself. Six months earlier they’d have had to use hand carts to transport both. He gave a last few instructions to his men and left the scene.

  Between two damaged U-boats at one end of the Blohm & Voss basin a wooden pier jutted into the dirty water with a little barge tied up to it: a low motor boat with a little wheelhouse up front and a few rows of wooden benches on the deck behind it. Every morning and evening dozens of little barges like this would bob about on the waves taking tired argumentative workers back and forth between the public rail station and the docks on the other side of the Elbe. But it was midday by now and most of them were tied up by the riverbanks.

  There was only one barge under steam, with little black clouds coming from its stumpy funnel. Four men in shabby suits with leather briefcases in their hands were sitting on the open deck. One of them had a knotted sweat-stained white handkerchief on his head to protect him from the sun, another was using a big brown envelope alternatively as a fan and to shield his bald head. The other two just sat there stoically on the hard benches, maybe because they were too tired to worry about the heat.

  Stave and his men nodded silently to them, ignoring their inquisitive looks, and slumped down on the seats. A few seconds later the old steam engine below deck kicked in again, the iron hull creaked, water began gurgling behind them and the ageing vessel moved off.

  The chief inspector stared back at the docks as they shrank into the distance. The words Blohm & Voss still stood out in big white letters, albeit somewhat washed out, on the wall of the big flotation dock. He took a few deep breaths. When the wind blew from the north-west it brought the tang of the sea and a taste of salt from the North Sea all the way to Hamburg. He glanced at the funnel, at the sooty clouds puffing out and gradually dissipating in the wind, a wind that was blowing from the south-east only, and stank of rotting fish and the acid scent of burning coal in the barge's engine room. The previous winter they hadn’t had any coal because all the trains from the Ruhr had either been frozen in or their contents looted. Stave thought back on the icy conditions he had had to endure and swore he would never again complain about the stench of burning coal.

  The further the little vessel moved out into the centre of the river, the higher the waves on either side. One minute the bow would be rising high on a wave, the next the barge was rolling from side to side, then the stern would be lifted up. At times the chief inspector had the impression all of that was happening at once. Even though the harbour was only a shadow of what it had been, there were once again more than enough ships passing along the Elbe and in and out of the basins to plough up the waves.

  More than three quarters of the harbour had been destroyed by bombs. Stave couldn’t think of a single shed that hadn’t taken a hit. On some of the quays all the cranes were damaged. There were still wrecks lying in the river against the crumbled dock walls: ghost ships covered in white seagull shit, sometimes with only funnels, superstructure or just a bow or stern jutting from the water. By the end of the war the harbour had been blocked by more than 500 sunken ships.

  On their other side, the Leland Stanford stood by one quay, the star-spangled banner flying from its stern. A so-called ‘Liberty ship’, with dockers hauling sacks out of its hold and on to their backs as none of the cranes were working. It might be sugar, maybe grain – who cares as long as it fills our stomachs, Stave thought. Coal was being unloaded from other freighters, on to small sailing barges, flat-bottomed boats that disappeared with their grey-black loads down the confusion of small canals or up river inland.

  In between the steam barges, sailing skips and freighters, tugboats puffed back and forth. The Jan Molsen, a wide-bodied ancient sightseeing vessel was chuffing upriver. Three times a week it would make its way to Cuxhaven and back, often with thousands of people on its white-painted decks — not tourists these days, but the so-called Hamsterfahrer, scavengers who would take cigarettes and makeup to swap for potatoes or apples from the farmers of Holstein. People said the Jan Molsen was checked by the police a lot less frequently than the northbound trains. From its stern hung a red, white and blue striped flag, the international signal for the letter ‘C, with a triangular cutout. The Allies had banned the use of the old swastika flag as well as all other national colours. They had to use this grotesque striped ‘C’, a flag of shame that didn’t merit recognition from other ships. ‘C’ for ‘Capitulation probably, the chief inspector thought, and shrugged his shoulders. Serves us right.

  Their barge passed by an old antique-looking ship with two tall funnels and an upright prow, the Soviet flag showing up bright red in the dirty grey monotone of the harbour, even if it hung limp from its flagpole.

  Czrisini came up and pointed to the Cyrillic script on the stern. ‘Up until 1945 that used to be the Oceana, one of the Kraft durch Freude leisure steamers for the Nazi trades unionists. One of my friends took a trip on it, back in ‘35 or ‘36, it must have been.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I wasn’t populist enough to be a KdF member.’

  ‘Maybe you could go on it now. All you’d have to do is join the German Communist Party. Looks like it's a Soviet freighter nowadays.’

  ‘Indeed. The name on the stern now is Siberia, not quite as poetic as the old name.’

  ‘Hmm, Siberia,’ Stave mumbled under his breath.

  For the past two years his son Karl had been living in Siberia. He wondered what he looked like now. Before, he had been a sturdy, stubborn-minded kid who believed in Hitler and patriotism and had
signed up to fight in a war that had already been lost — who had labelled his father, who wasn’t even a member of the Party, a coward. For a long time Stave had heard nothing more of him. He was listed as ‘missing’. Then, at long last, a letter had arrived via the Red Cross: a few scribbled lines in Karl's schoolboy handwriting. But then there had been nothing more, nothing for weeks now. Stave wondered if it was as warm as Hamburg up there in the far north? Or maybe there was still snow on the ground? And when might Karl get to come home?

  Home. He thought of Anna, his lover. What a strange expression that was to use, not at all befitting an official in the CID. But for several months now they had been a couple, the happiest months Stave had known in years.

  Anna von Veckinhausen had moved out of the grimy Nissen hut she had been living in since 1945 and three weeks ago had got permission to move into a basement apartment in the Altona district, 6 Röperstrasse: a damp cellar with a solitary window at ceiling height, damp tiled walls with peeling grey-white oil paint and the stench of Lysol disinfectant — but it was still one step up from the corrugated tin hut. And it had a bit of privacy. Every now and then she would spend the night with him at his apartment in Wandsbek, but more often he spent the night with her. The neighbours in her cellar apartment in Altona were less nosy.

  It was impossible for her to move in with him, without a wedding certificate. Was that a possibility? Stave was a widower, but what about Anna? To this day he had no idea if she was unmarried, a widow or divorced — if there was a husband lurking like some ghost in her past. They were cautious in their conversation and referred to the years before 1945, if at all, only obliquely.

  Stave dismissed the matter and simply stood there looking out at the river, enjoying the cool breeze, and thought tenderly about the woman he loved. It was nice to be able to look forward to the evenings, rather than fret over the long empty hours before it was time to go back to work.

  By chance he caught sight of Kienle. The police photographer was standing a few paces away from him at the railings, with a very strange colour coming over his face: the green of seasickness overtaking the red of sunburn.

  ‘When times are better, I’m going to ask for a transfer to Bavaria,’ Kienle groaned when he spotted the chief inspector's worried look.

  ‘Then you can puke your guts up in Lake Constance,’ Stave replied in amusement. He nodded over the side of the ship: ‘We’re standing to windward,’ he explained, ‘the side the wind blows from. Anything that goes over the side here will come right back at you, if you get my meaning. You’d do better to find yourself a quiet spot on the leeward side.’

  Kienle gave him a brave smile: ‘There's only a few metres to the quayside,’ he whispered, but nonetheless staggered over to the other side of the deck.

  Stave looked after him with concern. Kienle was one of the few colleagues he actually liked. Stave had been an outsider back in the Nazis’ day. He wasn’t obviously suspicious to the Brownshirts in charge so they hadn’t sacked him as they had the Social Democrats who were in the Hamburg police, but they’d left him in a backwater, doing an unimportant job: dealing with scams and swindlers. His career had taken a new turn after 1945 when he was considered to have no dirty laundry in his closet. A lot of the CID people had been fired by the English; some of those who had worked for the Gestapo were still awaiting prosecution. A few others had quickly rebranded themselves in front of the occupying army's suspicious eyes and were taken on, but now had to accept Stave, the former loser, on a par with them.

  The CID chief himself – ‘Cuddel’ Breuer – had not only been a Social Democrat but a concentration camp inmate which made him even more of an outsider than Stave, and had been responsible for landing him in charge of this case, this horrible murder of a young boy. Stave wondered if he was dealing with some madman who had a thing about leaving the bodies of boys on unexploded bombs. He wouldn’t be able to sleep until he got to the bottom of this case. Maybe the killing did have something to do with the enforced dismantling of Blohm & Voss? In that case Stave would be dealing with a political hornet's nest, considering how much resentment there was in Hamburg over the matter. One way or the other, the chief inspector thought to himself, there was nothing much for him to win. But a lot to lose.

  The barge pulled up to the quayside, the metal hull squeaking against the wooden piles. Kienle jumped ashore with a relieved smile on his face, ahead of even the office workers who stood next to the railings impatiently waiting for the sailors to put the gangplank down. Stave and the other followed him. At the end of the quay were the structures that had looked down on it for half a century like some fairy-tale vision of an ancient city wall, several hundred metres across with semicircular gateways in ochre stone, adorned with arches and romantic sculptures, topped with a tower that would have done credit to some medieval city. Beyond rose the dome of the Elbe Tunnel, based on the Pantheon in Rome, inside it a few shabby restaurants, ticket counters and offices.

  Stave walked through one of the gateways: on the other side was a pre-war Mercedes-Benz, one of the police's duty vehicles, code-named Peter-2. The chief inspector insisted on driving himself. He enjoyed the feel of the big wooden steering wheel, the hoarse roar of the engine, the smell of petrol and hot oil. Kienle and the others packed in alongside and behind him – far more people than normally allowed in one vehicle, but who was going to stop them?

  The old Mercedes rattled their bones as much as some ancient stagecoach would have done as they trundled along the cobbles of Helgoland Allee. On their right side was a small park with a hill on which a gigantic stone Bismarck stood staring sternly into infinity, completely unmarked despite the hail of bombs that had fallen around it. They passed Millerntor, where the Reeperbahn went off to the left, awash with black marketeers and idlers, everything looking just that bit shabbier than usual. Women in faded blouses with knotted handkerchiefs on their heads to protect them from the sun passed along tiles, bits of concrete and shards of wood from a bomb site until they made a neat pile on the pavement, and male workers, their naked torsos glistening with sweat, piled it on to an already dangerously overloaded lorry with worn tyres. Barefoot children in short lederhosen ran along the roadside. Men had their trouser legs rolled up and were stripped down to sweaty vests. Beyond the pavements lay a sea of bombed-out houses, perilously leaning walls, but also the bright yellow of buttercups growing on wasteland, brambles growing over piles of stone, even young chestnut trees and maples growing out of the bowels of burned-out houses. They drove down Holstenwall, past the Museum for Hamburg History with its brick walls showing shrapnel damage and scorch marks, before reaching the CID head office on Karl Muck Platz, where Stave let the heavy old Mercedes coast to a standstill, and the engine splutter to a stop. The chief inspector turned to the men in the back and called out, ‘End of the road.’

  ‘I hope that doesn’t go for our investigation too,’ Kienle retorted as he climbed out.

  A Family in Mourning

  When Stave entered the anteroom to his office on the sixth floor, his secretary looked up in shock. She had been reading the newspaper, its yellow sheets lying on her typewriter like a spread-out map.

  ‘Chief Inspector, would it be too much to ask you to get some shoes with squeaky rubber soles?’

  ‘Yes, but I’ll tie a cowbell to my leg.’ He smiled at Erna Berg. She was blond, eternally optimistic and a bit more rounded than she used to be. She was pregnant, four or five months, the CID man guessed, although he wasn’t exactly an expert in such matters. It was nearly twenty years since his wife Margarethe had been pregnant with their only child. Between then and now Karl had become a ghost living in Siberia, and Margarethe's ashes were in Öjendorf Cemetery. The time when the two of them had been young and expecting a baby seemed to Stave as long ago as the heyday of the Roman empire.

  ‘Have you got yourself a pass yet?’ he asked, nodding at her baby bump. There was a curfew between midnight and 4.30 a.m. ‘If you go into labour at night, you’re g
oing to need that scrap of paper so that the military police don’t arrest you. It would be a pity if your baby were to be born in a British cell.’

  She laughed. ‘Application for special pass, apply at the City Hall, room number 306. I’ve done all my homework. But there's time yet.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid you’re not going to get much chance to enjoy it over the next few days. Have you heard about our new case yet?’ He was just being polite; obviously Erna Berg would have heard about it almost immediately through the office bush telegraph. There were times when he thought she knew more about what was going on than he did. Maybe I ought to hang around the office a bit more, have a cup of coffee and a slice of cake with the others, a chat in the washroom. Not keep rushing around to find out the latest news, just wait until it gets to me.’

  ‘A dead boy found lying on a bomb. James rang to tell me.’

  Lieutenant James C. MacDonald was a member of the occupying forces and also his secretary's lover and the father of her child. He would have been a pretty good catch for a secretary in the rubble that was Hamburg, if she weren’t already married with a child, and the husband she had thought dead hadn’t turned up suddenly on her doorstep a few months ago, after being released from a POW camp.

  Ever since Stave had worked with MacDonald on the ‘Ruins Murderer’ case, he had been a reluctant witness to their complicated romance. MacDonald had got Erna Berg an apartment of her own. There would be a divorce, which would be nasty because she was, after all, an adulterer. If everything went as normal she would lose custody of her son.

  Stave hadn’t seen much of MacDonald recently, usually just when he came to pick up Erna Berg from the office in the evening, but he liked the self-confident Brit. Secretly he envied the man's casual sophistication. He and MacDonald both acted rather embarrassed in each other's company, as if they shared some guilty secret. As if they had shared the same lover, Stave thought to himself, though all they had really shared was success in catching an SS killer, hardly something they needed to be embarrassed about.