The Wolf Children Read online

  Anna just looked out over the city. She's so pretty, Stave thought to himself. I just wish she’d turn and look back at me.

  In the end she did, but there was no longer a smile on her face. ‘The Russians are there now, and they’re there to stay. They’ll never let me go back. And even if they did, there's nothing left.’

  Stave felt as if a huge weight had fallen from his shoulders, though he cursed himself for the fact that he was relieved to hear of all his lover had lost. But then he could not help thinking, ‘nothing left’ meant also ‘nobody left’.

  ‘Making a home on the Elbe isn’t that bad.’

  ‘“Home” to me sounds like something that's gone forever, like real coffee.’ She smiled now. ‘I don’t want to go back anyway,’ she said. ‘I ended up in Hamburg by chance. For months I thought of nothing but just staying alive. Now I’m beginning once more to make plans for the future.’

  ‘Do I figure in those plans?’

  She kissed him. ‘It's because of you I’m making plans again. But we need time to ...’ he could see her looking for the right word, ‘to open up to one another. And time is the one thing that, happily, nobody can bomb to nothing.’

  It was almost midday by the time they finally had to come in from the balcony because of the heat.

  ‘Do you have to work?’ Stave asked.

  ‘Don’t worry. I give up being a rubble looter at weekends. Too many people strolling about. Somebody might call the police. Early mornings are better, and evenings best of all, just before the curfew cuts in. I’m going down to Hansaplatz to get some wood glue. There's a picture frame I need to repair. Then later I have a meeting with a gentleman from the British occupation administration who wants an antique brooch as a present for his wife.’

  ‘And you have a meeting with me.’

  ‘This evening outside the Kammerspiele theatre.’ She kissed him before opening the door.

  He watched her go. A wave of the hand, a blown kiss, but no exchange out in the stairwell where there might be a neighbour spending the day hanging about listening to folk. The way it used to be.

  Stave stood in his kitchen, supping the remains of the Quark with a spoon. It was watery and tasteless. He had lost his appetite. But if he just left it, it would be gone off before the evening in this heat. And he wouldn’t be back in the apartment until then; he had work to do.

  Public Prosecutor Dr Albert Ehrlich was in his office seven days a week, at least when he wasn’t dealing with an accused in court. He was a brilliant lawyer but had been thrown out of public service by the Brownshirts back in 1933 because he was Jewish. In the wake of the Reichskristallnacht pogrom he was sent to a concentration camp for a while until he managed to get hold of a visa for England. His wife on the other hand wasn’t Jewish and couldn’t leave: instead she took her own life in 1941, in despair at how she was treated for having a Jew as a husband. Ehrlich had come back home with the British Army of Occupation, and now spent every waking moment hunting down Nazis.

  The chief inspector threw an old linen jacket that Margarethe had given him in the last summer before the war over his arm, put on a matching hat and went out into the blistering sunshine. He had left his service revolver hanging on a peg in his wardrobe, even though he had stuff to do today. He hoped it wouldn’t require a weapon.

  It took him an hour to walk to the impressive old building that housed the public prosecutor's office. He was sweating and thirsty. The door was opened by a bored, sleepy porter who’d been flicking through an old issue of Die Welt. The corridors were empty and quiet, save for the rattling of a typewriter. Stave smiled and pushed open the door of Ehrlich's office.

  ‘Are you trying to put your secretary out of work, Dr Ehrlich? Have a bit of sympathy: there aren’t many jobs out there.’

  Ehrlich — late forties, small with big eyes behind dark hornrimmed spectacles, with beads of sweat on his bald head — stopped and glanced up from his heavy Olympia typewriter.

  ‘I didn’t hear you coming in.’

  ‘I could have driven past in a Sherman tank and you wouldn’t have heard me. That thing is noisier than a machine gun.’

  ‘No, it's not, believe me. I was a volunteer in the First World War, a machine gunner on the western front.’ He sat up straight. ‘It was only later that my eyes went on me: the result of reading too many legal texts.’

  ‘It takes a public prosecutor to say something like that.’

  Ehrlich smiled and offered him a glass of water and a chair. Stave sat down on the uncomfortable visitor's chair and found himself staring over the brim of his water glass at two skeletons dancing through a forest. Taken aback, he commented, ‘That's new.’

  ‘You may not have seen it before, but it's not new. It's twenty-three years old, a lithograph of a work by Ernst Barlach, from his “Dance of the Dead” series. It's Expressionist. From my old private collection,’ Ehrlich explained in a low voice. ‘I confiscated it from a former top Gestapo official. He had it hanging in his interrogation room. I think he intended it as a bad joke. A Gestapo man who liked “unworthy art” — funny thing, taste.’

  ‘What happened to the rest of your collection?’

  ‘Still missing. For now. But I’m working on it.’ He waved a hand as if none of it really mattered. ‘Is this about the dead boy? I’ve already authorised the autopsy. It would seem you get all the really nasty cases.’

  ‘Somebody has to.’

  ‘You’re not the only one.’ The public prosecutor leaned back in his chair. ‘Go ahead, I’m all ears.’

  ‘You got my first report. There's not much more.’ The chief inspector briefly went over what he knew about the case, telling him in detail about his visit to Greta Boesel and her fiancé.

  ‘I doubt very much if there's ever been any allegations about Frau Boesel,’ the prosecutor said dismissively ‘Nor against her chum, even if his business is – how shall I put it – somewhat tasteless. Do you suspect the pair of them?’

  Stave raised his hands. ‘For now they’re simply the boy's next of kin, and I went there to inform them. I’ve got no witnesses and certainly no suspects. The only thing that can be said is that Greta Boesel's transport business involves occasional trips down to the docks. And the fact that that is where the boy was murdered.’

  ‘Yes, but in the shipyard, whereas you would expect a woman in the transport business to be down at the docks where the ships load and unload their cargo.’

  ‘Well, that's where the links in my chain come to an end.’

  ‘It's a pretty fragile chain. Are there no other suspects?’

  ‘Unless we’ve got it all wrong, Adolf Winkelmann hardly spent any time at home. He wandered the streets. But where and with whom, I have no idea. But that’ll change. We have to find out where he got hold of so many cigarettes. Did he steal them? Was it payment for some work he did? Did he get them in a swap for something else? He certainly didn’t get them as a present from his aunt. She was far too surprised at seeing three packets of Lucky Strike in Adolf's box.’

  ‘It sounds to me like an all too familiar tragic story of an orphan kid dealing on the black market. If it weren’t for the fact that the scene of crime had to be Blohm & Voss of all places ... that's what's making our British friends so jumpy.’

  Stave stared at the prosecutor's friendly face, damp with sweat, at his owl-like eyes, his gleaming bald pate. He looked so harmless. But somehow or other, Ehrlich already clearly knew about MacDonald's supposedly secret role in the investigation. Should he mention it outright? Or would that make him a loudmouth?

  ‘I’ve already had experience of jumpy British,’ he said. ‘The only thing that calms them down is results.’

  ‘So what will you do?’

  ‘I’m going on a day trip out into the country. There's an orphanage called Home and Work on the southern side of the Elbe. The police take any orphan boys they find there. Girls are taken to a home in Feuerbergstrasse in Barmbek.’

  ‘That's a long way apa
rt.’

  ‘Most of them run away after a few days. But as a few more get delivered on a daily basis there are always some there. I’m hoping one of them will know something about Adolf Winkelmann.’

  Stave pushed himself to his feet. He had his hand on the door knob ready to leave when he nodded at the typewriter and said, ‘So what's so important that you need to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon in the office?’

  ‘There's a trial coming up with eighteen people in the dock. That takes some preparations.’

  ‘Eighteen at once? Black marketeers or Nazis?’

  Ehrlich gave a humourless laugh: ‘Nazis. In March 1944 fifty English soldiers escaped from a POW camp, called Stalag Luft III near Sagan in Silesia. They were all rounded up, taken into the forest and shot.’

  ‘Executing prisoners of war? Sounds like eighteen death sentences to me.’

  The public prosecutor shook his head. ‘That's what I thought too, but have you ever heard of a Dr Anna Marie Oehlert?’

  Stave shook his head. ‘A doctor of medicine.’

  ‘I wish. She's a doctor of law, and one of just fifteen female advocates in Hamburg. She's young, slim, tall, dark eyes, long brown hair, clever, bewitching and unfortunately a lioness when it comes to fighting for her clients, and most unfortunately of all, she's representing two of the accused, number seventeen and eighteen. Seventeen is the man who drove the SS soldiers who committed the murder in 1944 into the forest. I can understand her defence in that instance maybe: the man was a driver, an accomplice – jail rather than the gallows. But number eighteen is one of those who was primarily responsible. How can an attractive and intelligent woman defend someone guilty of some fifty murders?’

  ‘Beauty is a law unto itself,’ said Stave, and nodded in farewell.

  As he was walking down the long quiet corridors, he thought over Ehrlich's description: young, slim, tall, dark eyes, long brown hair, clever, bewitching. It sounded a bit like the public prosecutor might have fallen in love with the honourable counsel for the defence. And why not? After all, Ehrlich had been a widower for six years now. And given that he’d gone into exile in England in 1939 it was eight years now since he’d last held his wife in his arms. Even the greatest of loves fades with time. And there are odder places for love to blossom than a Hamburg courthouse.

  It was only a short stroll to the CID head office. Stave had the floor to himself but even so closed the door of his muggy office. He could think better with the door closed. He took out his notebook and pencil and reached for the phone. Only a few people in Hamburg had a private line these days. One of them just happened to be his colleague in charge of Department S, responsible for policing the black market, who lived in the undamaged house that had belonged to his recently deceased parents who had got a telephone put in back in the thirties.

  His bad luck, Stave thought to himself as the dialled. A few minutes later he had his colleague on the line. He sounded as if he’d just woken up from an afternoon nap.

  ‘Has Greta Boesel ever been brought up for anything?’

  ‘No.’ He answered without the slightest hesitation. He might have been having a nap and in a bad mood but his memory for names was legendary. ‘Never caught her trying to buy something on the black market. She's neither a racketeer nor a smuggler.’

  ‘What about Walter Kümmel?’

  ‘The boxer boy? He hardly needs to buy stuff on the black market. He earns more than enough. Why the questions about those two?’

  ‘Enjoy the rest of the weekend,’ Stave replied and put down the receiver.

  Then he lifted it up again. He had just had another thought. MacDonald. Not even every British officer had a phone of their own, but one who worked for the secret service as well definitely did. He listened to the rustling, whispering noises on the line, feeling like some researcher listening into the ether, hearing ghosts, the voices of the dead, humming in the phone wires.

  Get a grip, he told himself, and was about to put the phone down when he heard MacDonald's voice.

  ‘It's me,’ said Stave.

  ‘Hello, old boy. Want a word with your secretary? Need to give Erna some dictation?’

  Stave knew she spent most of her time with her lover. But he was still so surprised at MacDonald's nonchalance that for a moment he was lost for words.

  ‘No, I’ve nothing to dictate. Not at the moment at least. I’m just looking for a bit of information before I head out on a trip to try to fill in a few gaps in my knowledge. Did you ask around among your colleagues? Does Boesel have any history with the Brits? Or her fiancé for that matter?’

  ‘That's a gap in your knowledge I could have dealt with on Monday The bloke, nothing. But Greta Boesel was stopped at a roadblock in Lower Saxony once. She was driving the truck herself. It was just routine. The MPs checked her documents. There was nothing wrong with them. Nor with her load either. She has a commercial licence. Clean. Neither of them have ever been caught out after curfew either, nor have they been up in front of one of our magistrates.’ He paused for a second, then said, ‘Where are you headed for on this trip of yours?’

  ‘An orphanage south of Hamburg. An hour's drive away at least. Maybe one of the boys there will turn out to have known our victim. It's a bit of a long shot. Want to come along?’

  Stave smiled to himself. You’re a hunter, my friend, he thought. You’re nosy, but on the other hand it's a Saturday and you’re probably in bed with your lover.

  ‘You can tell me all about it on Monday.’ MacDonald finally replied. ‘Have a nice trip.’

  Stave hung up, not sure whether he was annoyed at being rebuffed, or pleased that he would be able to carry out the investigation the way he preferred: on his own.

  He picked up an old Mercedes from the car pool, opened the petrol cap, sniffed, then tried to shine a torch in. The police mechanic who’d been watching him came over.

  ‘Are you going far, Chief Inspector? Have you got clearance from the Tommies?’

  ‘I don’t need it,’ Stave said. Journeys by Germans of more than 80 kilometres required permission from the Occupation Authorities. He reckoned it was about 50 kilometres to the orphanage, as long as the main roads were passable again as far as the other side of the Elbe. He did need to keep an official log of his journey, though; every German did. He entered his name, the date, time and purpose of the journey.

  ‘Do you reckon I’ve enough fuel?’ he asked the mechanic without turning to look at him.

  ‘There's enough in there for about 100 kilometres.’

  ‘In that case it’ll be empty when I bring it back this evening.’

  ‘The chief needs the car first thing in the morning. He won’t exactly be pleased. We won’t get any more fuel delivered until Monday at the earliest. An American tanker hit a mine in the North Sea, but I heard another one had arrived in port. Maybe there’ll be more than usual on board. But that's not much help on a Sunday morning.’

  ‘Cuddel Breuer has more than his fair share of sources in this city. That includes fuel sources. He’ll know somewhere he can fill up.’

  ‘He's still not going to be happy. He’ll look in the log book to see who's taken it out and he’ll see your name.’

  ‘He already knows it.’

  Stave roared out of the garage leaving the mechanic in a cloud of blue exhaust smoke. He rolled down the windows of the big old car and let the refreshing breeze wash over him.

  In the centre of town all the roads had been cleared of rubble, tank treads and wrecked car. There were lots of pedestrians out for a stroll, as well as a few cyclists, some of whom had got their hands on bicycle tyres again, while others just rode along on the rims. A British Jeep passed him and the driver gave him a suspicious look but didn’t pull him over. In theory Germans were not allowed to drive between 6.00 p.m. Saturday and 6.00 a.m. Monday, because fuel stocks were so low. But there were exceptions for doctors on call and for police. The Brit must have recognised the old Mercedes, Stave thought to himself. After all, t
here weren’t that many of them on the road.

  The car rattled over the Rathaus Platz, passed the empty plinth where a statue of the poet Heinrich Heine had stood. The Nazis had melted it down. He’d been Jewish. He negotiated his way carefully through the warren of streets beyond the city hall. In the old days he could have driven around Hamburg with his eyes closed, but these days he had to tack this way and that. Every so often a street he would have liked to take was blocked by the collapsed façade of a building, while others might be buried under a mountain of bricks, and then there were some that were clear but the heat of the Blitz had been so intense that the tarmac had melted, swollen up and then cooled down into a solid greyish black soup of strange bumps and ridges that the old car's steering couldn’t cope with.

  Nonetheless he found his way as far as the bridges over the Elbe, turned on to Bremen Chaussee and then a bit later, turned left again. He passed the ‘Undaunted’ barracks, which had been a base for the German army, then the British army and was now Hamburg's dumping ground for the hopeless: the place where doctors and police brought the terminally ill and the permanently bed-bound, to make space in the few hospitals that were still in one piece for those there was at least a hope of curing.

  Finally he was clear of the heaps of rubble and the stink of dirt and smoke from the steamers in the harbour. He was among fields where the wheat was already half-grown and shone yellow in the sunlight. There were a few fruit trees, copses of woodland, poppies by the side of the narrow cobbled country roads, as red as drops of blood on a skirt. There were blue flowering thistles, and a smell of dusty dry earth. Stave put his foot down and felt like singing out loud, except that he would have been embarrassed to do so.

  Eventually he had to make a U-turn after taking a wrong turn on a street with no signposts, so it was late afternoon before he reached Sodersdorf. There wasn’t a lot to it: a tiny station, a junk shop, so locked up he couldn’t tell if it was just closed for now or closed down forever, cobbled streets, a narrow bridge over the River Luhe which ran through the centre of the hamlet. Apart from that there were about a dozen farmhouses, undamaged, shimmering red in the setting sun, a couple of dogs that ran barking behind the growling Mercedes, until eventually they gave in and stood there panting with their tongues hanging out. In a field three cows were lying on the grass chewing the cud, along with an old, shaggy brown horse. Stave brought the Mercedes to a halt and sat there staring at them. When had he last seen live animals? Even most dogs had ended up in the cooking pot during that last winter of starvation.