The Wolf Children Page 9

  ‘My colleagues got their hands on you.’

  ‘I was a bit careless down at the Damm tracks. Just bad luck.’

  ‘So why haven’t you done a runner, back to your widow?’

  Arne shook his head, in earnest. ‘I was threatened with being taken before one of those English kangaroo courts. It was better to be sent here. Keep my head down until the air clears, know what I mean? A couple more days and the Tommies will have forgotten all about me. You were lucky to find me here, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘What's the name of the wolf children Adolf Winkelmann was hanging around with?’

  Arne laughed. ‘They don’t even know their own names.’

  ‘Where do they live?’

  ‘Somewhere in the rubble. Like I said, I preferred to have nothing to do with them.’

  ‘When did you last see Adolf Winkelmann?’

  ‘I’ve been here for six days. Before that I saw him down by the Damm tracks, but not on the day your lot picked me up. So the last time I saw him was maybe ten or eleven days ago.’

  ‘Did anything about him strike you? Was he different in any way?’

  Arne thought for a minute, then shook his head.

  ‘OK, you can go.’

  ‘What about my cigarette?’

  Stave pushed the John Player's across the table to him and watched the boy get to his feet, his knees and elbows swollen. Probably got water in them, Stave thought. He wondered if Arne Thodden would ever get better. What would he be doing in ten years’ time? He’d probably end up as one of their ‘regular customers’, he told himself. Then he had an idea.

  ‘Have you ever been down at the Blohm & Voss shipyard?’ he called out as the boy reached the doorway.

  ‘That’d be another Player's.’

  Stave threw a cigarette to him impatiently.

  ‘No, never,’ Arne said with a laugh. ‘Now I’ve done better business than you, Chief Inspector.

  On the way back Stave drove slowly along the country roads. He needed to think. And he also wanted to save fuel. From time to time he listened to the noises coming from the engine. A breakdown was the last thing he needed: to be stuck somewhere south of the Elbe with the car the boss needed – and he had arranged to see Anna that evening.

  Just before he reached the Elbe, he ran into a British roadblock. A sweaty, bad-tempered sergeant waved him over. Stave handed him his police ID card and watched the man study it carefully. Stave was in a hurry, but he was wise enough not to let the man notice. It would not be nice if the sergeant ordered him out of the car as he and the two soldiers searched it. Eventually he was let go, and drove on down the street alone, alone with his thoughts.

  Wolf children. The chief inspector had heard of them, but rarely ever seen one, never interrogated one. Could it be true that Adolf Winkelmann had a girlfriend among them? Or that he was doing business with them? What sort of business? Stave could hardly imagine wolf children being very interested in tickets for boxing matches. But then maybe there were other goods: stolen from his aunt or her ‘fiancé’. Or maybe coal. It seemed the late victim had had a wide range of business interests. Time to go wolf hunting, Stave told himself. But what could these orphans or coal stealers have had to do with Blohm & Voss, that was what he couldn’t imagine. He was being nagged by the uncomfortable feeling that there was something he had overlooked.

  Eventually he made it to the police garage and delivered the Mercedes back to the mechanic. The man knocked on the tank and clicked his tongue: ‘I’m glad I’m not on the early shift tomorrow when the boss gets in.’

  Stave glanced at his watch. He had no time to go back to his apartment to change before heading to the Kammerspiele theatre. But if he went straight there he would be early. So he walked upstairs to his office. There was nobody in the corridors or in the anteroom. He flopped down on the seat, then glanced in annoyance at something lying on his desk.

  Then he saw it was a letter from the Red Cross.

  He stared at it long and hard. Swiss postage stamp. The address typed out: Frank Stave, Ahrensburger Strasse 91, Hamburg, British Occupation Zone, Germany. Number 91 – his old address, bombed out. A postal mistake. Stave sat there, still staring at the envelope without touching it. Lots of stamp marks all over it. It had gone back to Switzerland, then come back to Hamburg. Somebody somewhere had at some time put a line through the address in pencil and then, in a barely legible scribble, had written the address of the CID headquarters. How long ago had the letter been sent? He bent down over the envelope and made out the first date stamp: some four weeks ago.

  Eventually he touched it carefully, stroked it with his fingers. Then he took a deep breath and ripped it open, snatching out the sheet of paper inside. He closed his eyes, then opened them and read: ‘Dear Herr Stave, this is to inform you that ...’ It wasn’t a death report.

  He moved closer to the window, into the last rays of sunshine, with the letter in hands that were no longer shaking. Just a few lines in official bureaucratic German. Stave had to read them twice before he could cope with their meaning; Karl was being released. All of a sudden the office was too small for him. He leapt to his feet, ran through the anteroom out into the hallway and began walking up and down, for once ignoring his limp.

  Karl was being released.

  Joy, confusion, excitement. Happiness at the thought he might soon see his son again. Worry about his state of health. Would he recognise him again? All at once the chief inspector worried that he wouldn’t, and hoped that he would. Before his son had signed up as a volunteer in 1945, he had denigrated his father as ‘un-German’. He was a through-and-through Nazi by the age of just seventeen. Would he now be as cynical and brutalised as the boys in the home? Would he be as starved and sickly?

  So many thoughts were flowing through Stave's brain that it took more than a few minutes for him to realise the importance of one simple thing: the letter was already four weeks old.

  He scanned the last few lines again: ‘In approximately one month your son will be delivered to a reception and release centre in the Soviet Occupation Zone, from which he will be sent back to his home.’ One month! Stave suddenly had a vision of Karl standing outside the locked door of his apartment at this very minute. That was if Karl even knew where he lived. After the night of bombing in which his wife Margarethe had been killed, Karl had been taken in by a colleague in the Hitler Youth. Then he had signed up as a volunteer. Clearly nobody in the Red Cross had known that, not that that meant anything. They were hardly going to go around Siberia asking every POW about to be released where he lived. They would use the address given in the Wehrmacht records. And up until 1945 Stave had still officially been registered at the old address. Partly because he couldn’t bring himself to break what he felt was the last link to Margarethe, partly because he didn’t want to know who had lived in his new apartment.

  I need to go home, he told himself. Then he remembered: Anna was waiting for him.

  Think rationally: Karl was only going to be released in a month's time. Then he would be sent to a reception centre before being set on his way home. It was going to be five weeks at least. Maybe six weeks, seven, eight before he got back here. The letter was four weeks old at most. Don’t be stupid. There's no way Karl could be here yet. But soon ...

  What was he going to tell Anna? Should he tell her anything at all? Stave was afraid Anna would not take it well. He remembered the old saying: ‘Don’t count your chickens.’ Don’t go around telling people your son is coming home before he gets here. Anything could happen in his last days in the camp or in his final weeks in Siberia.

  The chief inspector carefully folded the letter until it was very small, tucked it into the inside pocket of his summer jacket, carefully closed the door to his office and left the CID headquarters. The doorman was dozing and hardly noticed as Stave went past him and muttered the usual word of greeting.

  Stave glanced at his watch; thirty minutes until the performance in the Kammerspiele theatre. He wou
ld make it. He hurried past the Planten en Bomen park and turned into Rothenbaum Chaussee, with its villas, many of them requisitioned by the British. Even the road surface here was undamaged, the pavements had been swept. There were people strolling up and down, some of them elegantly dressed, heading in the same direction as him. He passed the HSV Stadium where Walter Kümmel had staged some of his most popular boxing matches. Stave was too excited and emotional even to think about the murder case. Tomorrow would do. Tomorrow he would get back to normal and get things sorted out for his son's return. But what was there to do. He was systematic, he would make a list, little notes of things to do. He had to get everything right. Tomorrow.

  Fifteen minutes later he turned into Hartungstrasse, a narrow street, still cobbled, with four- and five-storey buildings from the mid-to-late nineteenth century. A few metres on he spotted the Kammerspiele, with a crowd of people outside, their voices and laughter rising into the pale blue sky, the sound of people anticipating a good time. The Kammerspiele was only a couple of years old, set up in an old cinema with an elegant façade that fitted in well with the grand buildings nearby, even if it was only a mere three storeys high. Stave wondered how Ida Ehre – the founder, manager, star actress and soul of the theatre – had managed to persuade the English to give her permission to open a venue here in the finest, least damaged part of the city. It would have made a grand officers’ club.

  ‘May I bring charges?’

  Stave flinched involuntarily. Anna was standing behind him, having moved away from the crowd. Stave hadn’t seen her, hadn’t even been paying attention. He pulled himself together and managed a slight bow.

  ‘Against whom do you wish to bring charges?’

  ‘My lover. Because he's not making advances towards me.’

  Stave felt himself blush. In the ‘brown years’ it had been frowned upon to show affection in public. And after the death of Margarethe it had been years since he had been close to another woman; he enjoyed the feeling of togetherness.

  ‘Consider it done,’ he said and kissed her.

  Anna took his arm and guided him slowly towards the entrance, where the theatre attendants opened the glass doors to the foyer for them.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, I was lost in thought. And I’m afraid I’m not exactly dressed for the occasion. I feel a bit shabby among all these finely dressed people.’

  ‘You’re not embarrassing me,’ she said with a laugh, then turned serious and asked: ‘Long day at the office?’

  Stave just nodded.

  ‘Successful?’

  ‘I’ve got a few more potential leads,’ he said, vaguely. His mind, of course, was not on the murder case but Karl's release, but he didn’t want to mention that.

  The two of them made their way silently to the cloakroom where they had to queue for minutes on end. Then, without speaking, they found their seats. Still silent they leafed through the programme brochure. Stave couldn’t help noticing that every now and again Anna would shoot questioning glances his way. He was glad when the lights went down.

  The play was The Skin of our Teeth, by Thornton Wilder. Stave could still remember the headline reviews it had had in March: ‘Glittering First Night! Modern, Elegance and Drama!’ A breath of fresh air from the big, wide world after all the dullness of the ‘brown years’. Stave had been very proud to have laid hands on tickets for Anna and himself. Tickets that should have been far too expensive for a CID official.

  But now he found himself hardly paying any attention. It wouldn’t have mattered to him if they’d been speaking Chinese rather than German. Only the title kept going round and round in his brain -the skin of our teeth — that was how close it had been, for both him and Karl. Karl, Karl, Karl.

  Afterwards, he and Anna walked hand-in-hand through the streets, still without saying anything. The chief inspector was aware of the awkward silence and wanted to break it, but he was afraid even to discuss the play, in case he ended up admitting he had hardly been listening. Should he try to talk about something else? But what? He had lost the power of having normal conversation.

  ‘What is the matter with you?’ Anna asked.

  Stave didn’t know how to reply. ‘The truth is always the easiest,’ that was what he was used to telling suspects he was interrogating. But he was afraid to tell her about Karl's release. He was afraid it might alienate her. He knew too little about her to have any idea how she would react to someone returning from the war and maybe coming between them. ‘I’m just tired,’ was all he could think of to say. It wasn’t a lie.

  It took them an hour to reach Altona. Eventually they began to speed up because both of them were by now in a hurry to reach the door of her apartment, to make an end to the evening.

  Röperstrasse 6 lay in darkness, with moonlight falling on to the cobbles between the tall, simple apartment buildings. The door leant at a bit of an angle and next to it were pieces of cardboard with the names of the inhabitants of the ten apartments. To the right was the basement window, at street level.

  A few hours earlier Stave would have been longing for this moment, the excited meeting of eyes as he and his lover crept into the building. They would have left the lights off, smiled at one another conspiratorially, kissed in the darkness, and then ...

  Now he gave Anna a quick kiss on the street, shyly. ‘One of these days,’ she whispered to him, ‘tell me what happened today. You’re not yourself

  Stave nodded, partly sad, partly relieved to be alone. ‘You’ll find out soon enough. I just have to ...’ he searched for the right words, ‘sort out a few things. Don’t worry.’

  She stroked his face gently and said, ‘Life would be boring if we had nothing to worry about.’

  He waited until he saw the glow of her 15-watt bulb in the cellar window, for maybe a quarter of an hour or so. Then all was dark again.

  ‘Sleep well,’ he whispered to the window, turned and started out on his long way home through the city.

  The Wolf Child

  Stave caught up on the sleep he had missed the night before, and regretted it. He woke up out of a coma-like sleep, but instead of getting up, he had just turned over and nodded off again. That was when the old nightmare came back to haunt him: the flames raging through the burning house, black smoke in the apartment, not the one where he and Margarethe had lived, but in his new home. In the dream his wife was still there with him, but strangely her body wasn’t on fire, it was shrinking to nothing until he could no longer see her. He screamed out her name until his lungs were bursting, and then he woke up with a burning in his throat. He probably really had screamed aloud. Good thing Anna hadn’t been there.

  Anna. It had hardly been the perfect evening the night before. Did she suspect something? He would have to make it up to her -and tell her the truth. At some stage. He had arranged to meet her that very afternoon in a café. They would talk, although he wasn’t sure what about.

  Stave sprang up, got washed and dressed and swallowed a couple of slices of bread washed down with a glass of water. The water was still only trickling out of the taps because the pressure was so low since the start of the heat wave that was currently plaguing Hamburg. The water that came out was lukewarm, reddish-tinged and tasted metallic. If only I had some coffee, he thought to himself.

  Stave turned on the old radio and waited for the valves to warm up. Classical music, the typical comforting sound of a Sunday morning, nothing too exciting, too modern. Mozart, he suspected. He turned the radio as loud as he could without causing the neighbours to complain. He found himself fussing about the room, moving a chair here, straightening something or other. In a little room that he had done out as his son's room, though Karl had never slept there, he made up the bed with the only spare clean sheets he had, and laid a woollen blanket on the end. It was, of course, stiflingly hot, but maybe Karl would be cold after endless months in Siberia?

  He looked at the bare walls. Maybe he should hang up some pictures — Karl's childhood drawings, their family
photos had been burned. All he had of Margarethe and Karl was their passport photographs, creased, slightly blurred, both of them staring into the camera with the same surprised, suspicious look on their faces. He carried them in his wallet. If the day ever came when film and developing fluid became available again, he would get copies of them made.

  Maybe he should ask Anna for one of the pictures she had salvaged out of the ruins. Something pretty, a landscape, or a seascape. But maybe Karl would refuse to have it on the wall when he found out where it had come from. Stave left the room as it was, but didn’t close the door. For the first time in years, he left the door open.

  But he was still a chief inspector and had an investigation on. He had left the apartment and was already in the stairwell when he stopped, turned around, went back in, found a 1946 calendar in a drawer under the kitchen table, pulled out a blank page and wrote on it: ‘Dear Karl, I’m out at work. Please wait for me, Dad.’

  It wasn’t exactly poetry but he couldn’t think of anything better. He found a tack and attached the note to the front door. Then he hesitated again. The neighbours: they would all see it. They would all find out that Stave was expecting his son. Sooner or later someone would accost him in the stairwell with nosy questions: well, is your boy back yet? Not yet? What can he have done for the Ivans to hold him so long? Or maybe he's become a communist?

  The chief inspector took the note down and then put it back again, this time with the written-on side to the door. That only meant some busybody had to lift it up and read what was on the other side. But would somebody dare do that? On a CID officer's door? Stave hurried down the stairs and out on to the street before he had any further doubts and took the note down altogether.

  Three quarters of an hour later Stave was at the central station, looking around the white steel concourse, tinged grey with smoke from the locomotives. The leaden air tasted bitter from the burning coal. Stave felt dirty. Bright rays of sunlight coming from the broken glass in the roof cut through the air like long knife blades. The whole building echoed with screeching brakes, hissing engine boilers, wheels scraping along the rails, incomprehensible loudspeaker announcements, guards’ whistles. It was as if he had been drugged.