The Wolf Children Read online

  Ruins surrounded them on both sides, with just here and there almost obscenely well-preserved villas, façades plastered pale yellow, white or blue, some of them missing roof joists, as if somebody had taken a saw to them. Then a few hundred metres further on, three- or four-storey apartment blocks set back from the road by a patch of grass already gone yellow from the drought.

  There were few house numbers to be seen. Stave looked out until he found one and then tried to work out how far they had to go, but it wasn’t easy amid so much rubble. On the right there was a long row of three-storey apartment blocks with their roofs still intact, brick-built with balconies. They all had numbers.

  ‘There are worse places to live in Hamburg,’ Stave said, nodding for MacDonald to pull in to the kerb.

  ‘Not enough to keep the boy here, though,’ the lieutenant replied.

  There were doorbells by the entrance, more than there used to be, which was normal these days, with strips of paper with names and dates of birth scribbled on them, signs of life from the survivors, those whose homes had been bombed and had managed to find themselves somewhere else. The chief inspector finally found a brass plaque that read ‘Greta Boesel, 2nd Floor, Right.’ Obviously she’d lived there before the bombing. Next to it was a piece of cardboard, ripped from a faded hanging file on which was scrawled ‘Walter Kümmel, Adolf Winkelmann’.

  ‘Walter Kümmel,’ Stave muttered to himself. ‘That name seems somehow familiar.’

  ‘A customer of yours?’

  Stave just shook his head.

  They pressed the doorbell and waited. Nothing happened. They tried again, although Stave was fairly certain that the people upstairs had pulled the fuse out to save electricity. But they had to follow etiquette. The he grabbed the door handle and it creaked open.

  He entered the building, slowly, getting slower with every step on the way upstairs. What was he going to say to the boy's aunt? It was always hard to tell someone that a relative had died. And then to have to ask them questions. He noticed the look the lieutenant was giving him. Maybe MacDonald had never had to do it. Neither of them said a word until they found themselves at a door painted a long time ago in pale eggshell white.

  The chief inspector took a deep breath and knocked.

  He could hear the muffled sound of music, a woman's voice, a sentimental song that had been popular even in the Brownshirt days. It had to be a radio — the new North West German Radio station played old hits around this time of day. She obviously didn’t need to cut back on that much electricity. Eventually they heard footsteps approaching the door, and then the noise of the handle turning. Nor was she someone who felt obliged to ask from behind a closed door who was calling, not someone to put a chain on the door. Either she was very self-confident, or she was expecting someone. Maybe the boy. That’d be just great.

  He was greeted with a surprise. On hearing that she was a widowed aunt, Stave had automatically imagined a careworn old lady. But the woman who opened the door to him was a brunette of no more than forty, with long, wavy hair and doe eyes, whose curvacious shape was accentuated by a flimsy cream dress sewn from parachute silk. She had a small nose, lips painted red and a solid jaw line.

  ‘Can I help you?’ It was the husky voice of a long-term smoker.

  ‘CID,’ said Stave, because the sentence he had been rehearsing suddenly sounded absurd. He pulled out his ID. ‘It's about the boy you reported missing.’

  ‘Has Adolf nicked something?’ Even as she replied Greta Boesel opened the door to let them in. It wouldn’t do to let the neighbours hear.

  The hallway had a few nails in the wall serving as coat hooks, the floorboards were badly scratched and one half of the narrow space was crammed full of wooden boxes, tea chests from India, Stave noticed. Whatever was in them didn’t smell like tea.

  She led them down the hallway and into the living room. There was an old, comfortable-looking sofa, a heavy table and cupboard, a glass cabinet and a big valve radio, maybe dating back to the last year before the war – as well as boxes everywhere and a few jute sacks.

  Greta Boesel didn’t seem to notice their looks of surprise. She turned the radio off and went over to the open balcony door, which looked out on to Fulsbüttel Strasse. Somebody had cobbled together a construction of old pipes and some yellow material to make a sort of sunshade. It looked like an old sail, the chief inspector thought, maybe come from down by the docks.

  ‘It's not as muggy out here as it is inside,’ Greta Boesel said, gesturing towards four wicker chairs.

  Stave would have preferred to remain standing, but he couldn’t think of a way to refuse. He didn’t want to be any more brusque than he had to be. He took one of Kienle's police photographs out of his pocket and asked: ‘Is that your nephew?’

  He heard MacDonald catch his breath as though he was shocked at such a direct question. Stave ignored him. He would have preferred to lead in to the question a lot more subtly, but he hadn’t been able to find the right words.

  Greta Boesel took a look at the photo, which showed only the boy's head, not his bloodied body and certainly not the unexploded bomb he was lying on – but it didn’t take an expert to see that those staring wide-open eyes were never going to close again.

  ‘That's my Adolf,’ she said at last. Her voice had all of a sudden lost its huskiness and sounded flat, empty. She flexed the muscles of her jaw, but when she handed the photo back to Stave he could see that her hands weren’t even trembling.

  ‘He's always out somewhere or other. I’ve known for ages now that he would come to a bad end,’ she said.

  ‘How did you know he came to a bad end?’

  ‘Why else would you be here?’

  ‘He might have had an accident.’

  She shrugged her shoulders, went back inside, then came back out again with a lit cigarette.

  ‘What happened to him?’

  Stave thought of his son, of how much he had worried about him, tortured himself waiting for news, wondering if he would ever get another letter from the gulag, worried in case it was the wrong sort of letter, the sort that was written by some soulless bureaucrat: ‘We regret to have to inform you that your son Karl Stave ...’ Don’t event think about it. He ought to be thankful to Greta Boesel for not making a scene. She was just the boy's aunt, not his mother. And she was a widow; she was used to bereavement. He suppressed the initial anger he had felt at the apparent cold-heartedness of this elegant woman, and told her as briefly and tactfully as possible the circumstances under which Adolf Winkelmann's body had been found.

  ‘One of my colleagues will be along to take you to identify the boy's body down at the morgue. It's a formality, but an essential one, I’m afraid.’

  ‘So there's a few days to plan a funeral.’

  ‘When did you last see the boy?’ Stave asked.

  ‘A week ago. Adolf was always disappearing for a few days at a time, but never more than that. He got enough to eat here: a lad of fourteen puts away more than two full-grown men. At first I didn’t think anything of his absence. It was only when I hadn’t seen him for a week that I reported it to the police.’

  ‘What did Adolf get up to when he wasn’t here?’

  She shrugged. ‘He was very self-sufficient. He wouldn’t tell me anything.’

  ‘Where did he spend the nights?’

  Greta Boesel exhaled a ribbon of blue smoke and made an ‘o’ shape with her red lips. Stave found it almost obscene and tried to avoid staring at her mouth.

  ‘It might seem odd to you, Chief Inspector, but I was happy enough not to ask too many questions of Adolf. He let me get on in peace. It was a sort of private agreement between us. It can get crowded in here.’

  ‘It looks like a warehouse,’ Stave said.

  ‘It is.’ She sighed as if she’d already repeated what she was about to say a thousand times. ‘I’m the chief executive of a company called “Boesel and Co”, though you can ignore the “and Co”, there's just me. My husband fou
nded the company and built it up all through the difficult years after the crash of 1929, then through the Nazi period and even the war. But four months after the English arrived,’ she gave MacDonald a glance that seemed warm rather than frosty, ‘and the whole bloody mess was finally over, my husband got a lung infection and died. I had worked with him throughout all those long years, done the bookkeeping, dealt with the shipping papers and customs declarations. So I was able to keep the business going.’

  Stave thought of how few cars there were available, how little rationed fuel was available, thought of the blocked streets and ruined factories. ‘But how do you transport your goods? And what are they anyway?’

  ‘I have three trucks, two pre-war models and one that came from the Wehrmacht. They keep breaking down. I send them out with drivers all over the western occupation zones. I buy up stuff you can get relatively easily from the English — tea, John Player's cigarettes -take it down to the Mosel and exchange it for wine, or down to the Americans in Frankfurt or Nuremberg and swap it for chocolate or corned beef. I only deal in expensive stuff, in order to cover the fuel costs, etc. If my driver has to spend the night in a farmhouse that costs me 100 Reichsmarks or a few packets of cigarettes.’

  ‘How do you get hold of the fuel?’

  She shrugged her shoulders and smiled. ‘Is that question relevant to your investigation, Chief Inspector, or am I entitled to keep my business secrets to myself?’

  Stave was pretty certain that at least half of Greta Boesel's business involved breaking the law: infringement of trading regulations, smuggling, bribery probably. On the other hand, how could she have kept the business going? He was reluctantly in awe of the woman.

  ‘How did Adolf Winkelmann come to be living with you?’ he asked.

  ‘He's my sister's son. She and her husband died in the 1943 bombing.’ She glanced at MacDonald again, hesitantly, cautiously this time. But the lieutenant just looked back at her politely. She continued: ‘He came to us, there wasn’t anybody else left in the family. I hadn’t been particularly close to my sister, nor to her kid, but my husband said we should take him in, to succeed him in the business one day’

  ‘You have no children yourself?’

  She blew a cloud of smoke into the air, stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray, then lit up a new John Player's. A small fortune going up in smoke, literally, Stave reflected. The transport business had to be doing well.

  ‘Adolf's a difficult boy, was a difficult boy’ she corrected herself. ‘Hardly shone at school, lazy, cheeky. But he had something between his ears: good at arithmetic, gift of the gab – Goebbels could have learnt a trick or two from him.’

  ‘Was he a Party member?’

  She laughed: ‘He’d been a Pimpf,* and a member of the Hitler Youth, like they all were. My husband was a Party member, but only so he could keep the business going. We weren’t so close to the Brownshirts, not like my sister and brother-in-law: they were 150 per cent on side.’

  ‘What about after the war?’

  ‘Things didn’t exactly get better for him. When he was a Hitler Youth member he at least had to turn up regularly, for roll call, parades, physical exercise and stuff. That all ended in 1945. From then on the people he hung around with were even worse. One of the neighbours told me he’d seen Adolf hanging out with prostitutes at the station, kids who stole coal and a few Polish refugees. I can’t comment, he never brought people like that here. But there's no doubt he’d become a street kid.’

  ‘Did he work for your firm?’ Stave was thinking of the packet of Lucky Strike they’d found on the body.

  ‘Only very occasionally. Now and then he’d help load or unload a few things, But I could never rely on him turning up at a particular time and mucking in.’

  ‘He was a bit more reliable in his work for me,’ said a voice behind them. A man appeared in the doorway to the balcony: late forties, lean but with broad shoulders and the narrow angular facial appearance of a bird of prey, a long nose bent at the end as if from an old injury, like a hook, grey eyes, a crew cut, hard to say what colour, and a bright, light linen suit. ‘Kümmel,’ he said by means of introduction, holding out a scarred hand, ‘Walter Kümmel.’

  ‘My fiancé,’ Greta Boesel added, looking embarrassed for the first time since Stave had arrived.

  The chief inspector thought of his Anna. Would she introduce him to anyone as her ‘fiancé’? It was a stupid old concept. A remnant of a more civilised age, perhaps. These days, when so many men and women had died, people were lucky to have anyone at all. And when those who did hardly bothered with documentation, what was the point of talking about someone as a ‘fiancé’? He shook the man's hand. He had a strong grip. Greta Boesel was obviously relieved that he hadn’t made a face. The CID man explained why he was there.

  ‘What do you do for a living?’

  ‘I’m in boxing. A promoter.’

  ‘It was you who organised that fight between Walter Neusel and Hein ten Hoff!’ MacDonald unexpectedly cried out, recognising the man and taking him by the hand. ‘I was there.’

  It suddenly dawned on Stave too. This wasn’t one of the CID's old customers, this was a local celebrity, at least in the sporting world: Walter Kümmel had been an experienced jeweller, but changed occupation before the war. He had been an amateur boxer and realised it was more lucrative to get other people to do the fighting than climb into the ring himself.

  He handed over a business card, hand-typed on a piece of uneven cardboard: ‘Walter Kümmel, Hanseatic Boxing, Chile House, B, Hamburg.’

  Not a bad address, Stave thought to himself. ‘Boxing must pay well these days,’ he said.

  Kümmel laughed aloud, almost infectiously. It was the laugh of a self-confident man content with his lot in the world. ‘I had “Hanseatic Boxing” registered as a business back in the autumn of 1945. The civil servants gave me a look as if I was trying to refound the Nazi Party. My first fight was in Kiel, a week later. Only one boxer turned up; the other one was stuck on a damn train somewhere.’

  ‘You climbed into the ring yourself,’ MacDonald interrupted. ‘And won. It was a crazy story.’

  ‘You do what you have to. But that was the last time I had to improvise. Since then I’ve organised more than forty bouts. I have four German champions on contract, and pretty soon I’m going to be sending the first of my boys over the pond. There's big money to be made in America.’

  ‘And you employed a fourteen-year-old boy to run errands for you?’ Stave asked.

  Kümmel didn’t seem bothered by the question. He took a packet of English Woodbines out of his jacket pocket and offered them round. Greta Boesel took one. Is she trying to kill herself, Stave wondered. He declined politely, as did MacDonald. Kümmel himself didn’t light up, even though he had been the one to produce the packet.

  ‘I was just being polite,’ he said with a smile, noticing the expression of surprise on Stave's face. ‘I like to keep fit, and cigarettes don’t exactly help.’

  As he put the packet back in his jacket pocket the chief inspector caught sight of a little glass tube of white tablets. Maybe cigarettes aren’t enough any more, he thought. He remembered Kummel's powerful handshake, looked at his broad shoulders and the fluid way he moved. None of that suggested he was on hard drugs. Maybe they were steroids of some sort, things to improve the muscle tone. Maybe Kümmel was giving his boxers a little help on the side. That might explain why he had so many champions on his books.

  He put the thought to the back of his mind, concentrating instead on what the promoter was saying about the boy. ‘Adolf could have trained with my boys. In fact he did on occasion: but he was too unreliable. He didn’t turn up regularly at training. And when he did get into the ring, he’d end up getting hammered, even though he was big and strong enough for his age. He was somehow or other never quite there: more of a dreamer, a kid who was only ever working for himself. He needed a father's strong hand. I was just his aunt's fiancé – it wasn’t up to m
e. And anyway I was too busy.’

  ‘But he helped you out?’

  ‘He did that. He put up posters advertising fights for me. Sometimes he would sell tickets at the door — though I was never too happy about him sitting behind the till, not without someone to watch him, at least.’ He smiled and shrugged.

  ‘Adolf wasn’t exactly our little ray of sunshine,’ Greta Boesel added with a sigh.

  ‘So, who did it?’ Walter Kümmel asked.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Stave replied. ‘Not yet at least. Can I take a look at the boy's things?’

  Greta Boesel led him through her cluttered living room, down a poorly lit hallway, at the end of which a door opened into a tiny room, barely bigger than a decent wardrobe, with a little window the size of a handkerchief and a camp bed, neatly made-up, and a box on the floor. There was no bedside table, no picture on the wall.

  ‘Didn’t he have any photos of his parents?’

  ‘They were all in their apartment and got burnt.’

  ‘How was it that Adolf escaped?’

  ‘He was at a Hitler Youth gathering that evening. Or at least that's what he told us afterwards. Maybe he was just off somewhere on his own. At any rate he wasn’t in the building. Nobody who was survived the bombing.’

  Stave glanced around the little room: no books, no toys, no radio, no stamp collection, no letters. ‘May I?’ he asked, bending town to examine the box on the floor. He opened it without waiting for an answer, and rifled through the contents: a pair of long trousers, a pair of swimming trunks, underwear, a worn-down pair of sandals – too small for him, Stave reckoned, holding them up – a couple of patched shirts, a scrappy winter coat. And right at the bottom, three packets of Lucky Strike. Unopened.

  Greta Boesel gave the chief inspector a look of surprise. ‘If only I’d known ...’ she said.

  ‘If you’d known, you’d have smoked them,’ Walter Kümmel added with a laugh. ‘But I’d like to know what he did to earn that many cigarettes!’