‘Better than the building control police,’ she said.
The chief inspector couldn’t help thinking how young she was. ‘Have you been living here long?’
‘Ever since the cold weather ended. Before that I was living in the flak bunker, and before that in Breslau.’
Stave nodded as if that was the most reasonable explanation in the world. He took out the photo of Adolf Winkelmann. ‘Did you ever come across this boy in the ruins around here?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she replied, closing her eyes wearily.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked again, holding the photo under her nose.
She just shook her head.
‘Thank you,’ he replied.
‘Poor thing,’ she said, leaving the chief inspector to wonder if she meant the boy in the photo, or him.
Adolf Winkelmann could, of course, have avoided the ruins altogether, and gone along Mönckeberg Strasse, before taking one of the many routes that led down to the landing stages. Before, people would have noticed a boy out in the streets, because all children that age were meant to be in school. But now, with lessons being given in shifts, Adolf could have wandered around Hamburg's busiest streets from dawn to dusk without anyone finding it in any way unusual.
Stave thought it all through again in his head. The Hansaplatz: as a courier for smugglers, Adolf Winkelmann knew his way around. At one stage he turns up with recording tapes. Stuff he had got hold of on the black market maybe? Unlikely: nobody was peddling something so useless. So was he there because the Hansaplatz had become a sort of second home and he hung out there with his friends? Maybe it was just on the route from where he picked up the tapes on his way down to the port? Or did he have a hiding place there, in some hotel room or in the corner of some bar — like lots of other smugglers.
But what was the way from the Hansaplatz to the harbour? There were lots of possibilities, from Mönckeberg Strasse to the footpaths through the ruins, to short cuts that were hardly even visible to the naked eye. There was no way he could reconstruct Winkelmann's route.
The only thing left to do was to go back down to the harbour itself and take a look around there.
He woke up the next morning sweaty and still exhausted. It was Friday the thirteenth. There was still no water from the taps, and the supply he had collected was fast running out. Stave looked in his cracked mirror and saw a haggard, badly shaved face staring back at him. If things keep on like this, he told himself, I’m going to look like a POW returned from the gulags. He took the tram because he was too tired to walk. He’d lain awake half the night thinking about what he should do next.
The port was enormous: kilometre after kilometre of quays and docks, most of them badly bombed. Dozens of foreign freighters were laid up, along with fishing boats and ferries, hundreds of wrecks. And then there were the warehouses, the cranes, shacks, railway sidings covering areas the size of football fields. There was no chance he could ever search it all, and certainly not in the few days MacDonald had left. I need a tip-off, he told himself— and there was only one man who might be able to supply it: Tattoo-Willy.
Willy was the oldest and best-known master of his craft, who’d been in the business since 1902, when he was fourteen years old. He had also been a goldsmith in his time. During the hyper inflation of the 1920s he’d survived by painting postcards. But his real skill was painting pictures on human skin. It took him no more than five minutes to paint a sailing ship or a naked woman on to one of his customers, and fill in the colours. Then out came the electric needle. Stave had called him as a witness once in a murder trial. Back in 1938. Tattoo-Willy was well known to the CID, which was how Stave knew he had survived the war. If anyone knew what went on down at the port, it was Willy who in the course of nearly half a century had decorated virtually every seaman who ever wandered down the Reeperbahn. I hope he remembers me, Stave thought.
At 10 in the morning the Reeperbahn was a sorry sight: scraps of newspaper floating in the muggy air, vomit on the pavement next to bombed-out buildings, the stench of cigarette smoke, stale beer and urine, the cracked façades. No dealers, no hookers, no old tarts. The chief inspector turned right at Nobistor into Grosse Freiheit, a lane that ran past several three-, four- and five-storey buildings, famous for its role in a film by Hans Albers. A few of the buildings had been destroyed, the others were bars, table-dancing venues or night clubs. The walls were covered with painted pictures of naked girls and adverts for sparkling wine and schnapps. There were no lights on. Stave got out of the way of a British patrol. Grosse Freiheit was so narrow he was afraid the oncoming Jeep would run him over, and squeezed tight against a wall to avoid it.
Down towards the end was one building that looked most out of place: the Catholic Church of St Joseph. Grey stone columns and entrance, massive brickwork, and nothing behind it. The nave had taken a direct hit.
Opposite was what remained of No. 38, the left half of a four-storey building with a bar on the ground floor and above it three apartments. The façade facing on to Grosse Freiheit was only two windows wide, the plaster was a dirty yellow, the doors and window frames a brown-ochre colour, the wall where the other half of the building used to be was blank. Tattoo-Willy had his shop on the first floor.
Stave felt his way up the grubby stairwell. Outside Willy's apartment were two neatly written signs: ‘Tattoos of all sorts in six colours, all guaranteed non-noxious. No side effects.’ And heavily underlined: ‘No black market deals.’ That was new, Stave thought to himself, knocking on the door.
He had to wait a minute or two before an average-sized, elderly man opened the door, sparse hair combed over his bald head. He was wearing a huge pair of wire-framed glasses, his face wrinkled, but his body still obviously strong. Tattoos on both lower arms, up to his rolled shirtsleeves, which was as far as Stave could see, as well as on both hands. Stave wondered briefly if the old man had tattooed his own hands.
‘Herr Kommissar,’ Tattoo-Willy greeted him loudly.
‘It's Chief Inspector now,’ Stave replied automatically It was one thing to draw a line under the Third Reich, but they might as well have kept the old system of ranks. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said.
The tattooist clapped a hand over his tight stomach. ‘I weigh 108 pounds these days. Was 240 before the war. The Third Reich was hardly a great success in the culinary field. Fancy a tattoo, do you? Maybe a sheriff’s star on your chest? Or a Soviet star, if you prefer? Very popular right now, especially among drunk English sailors. If their superior officers were to see ...’ He tittered, and led the chief inspector down a narrow little hallway into the kitchen, where two wooden chairs stood next to a table. ‘My workshop,’ he announced. ‘This is where they all sit: the Germans, the English, the Russians, the Dutch, the Americans. And now even a policeman.’
‘Is this an inconvenient time?’
‘Most of my customers roll in around eight in the evening, and then the trade is steady all night. I use the mornings for new drawings.’
‘For work purposes?’
‘Indirectly’ He laughed. ‘I got out of painting postcards. What would I put on them? Bombed churches? Sunken ships in the harbour? Not the sort of thing people send to their nearest and dearest back home. I draw ships, fjords, islands, lighthouses. I travelled a lot in the old days: America, Holland, Scandinavia. So I remember the pretty things and turn them into tattoos for my customers. Most of them, of course, just want naked women on their backs or a heart with a monogram, in six colours. But some want the Statue of Liberty from New York, or a Dutch barge. What do you fancy? A squad car?’
‘I’m just here for a chat.’
‘I though that might be the case,’ Tattoo-Willy said, disappointedly. ‘I could have tattooed your new ranks on to your chest. That would have been a first for me.’
Stave gave a thin smile, and silently took the photo of the murdered Adolf Winkelmann out of his pocket and laid it on the table.
‘This boy was found somewhere he had
no business being – down at the port.’
‘The boy from the shipyard? The one they found lying on an unexploded bomb down at Blohm & Voss?’
Stave's smile broadened. ‘At least that saves me explaining it to you.’
The tattooist raised his hands. ‘I didn’t know the boy. Never came across him, he never came in here, nor did I see him on the Reeper-bahn. He came to mind because I thought it had to be the poor bugger a couple of shipyard workers told me about.’
‘That's why I’m here. About the boy. And I’d like to know more about the shipyard workers. About sailors, casual workers, everybody who hangs about down around the port.’
Tattoo-Willy took another look at the photo. ‘You think one of them might have done this?’
‘The boy wasn’t killed by a bit of roofing falling on his head.’
‘Fire away’
‘Many of your customers mention the killing?’
‘They did on the day it was in the papers. Not so much now. Just the normal stuff.’
‘What's normal?’
He laughed. ‘Boxing matches, football, jazz music, schnapps. And women, mostly women.’
‘Nobody ever mentioned a possible suspect? Never let a name slip?’
‘No. The Blohm & Voss workers weren’t exactly thrilled to have the cops down at the shipyard. No offence meant. But you know a lot of them are communists. They’re mad enough at the way the works are being dismantled. I wouldn’t go down there on my own if I was British. But none of them had the faintest who might have killed the boy. Or what the kid might have been doing down there.’
‘Given that we know the victim was involved in smuggling, where would you find smugglers down at the docks?’
‘Everywhere.’ The tattooist leaned back and took a long cold look at Stave, not quite so friendly as he had been. ‘If you’re going to start stirring in dirty water like that, you’re going to disturb a lot of fish, and one or two sharks.’
‘Nobody will ever need to know who named the sharks?’
‘And you promise not to call me as a witness?’
‘Not if I can avoid it. All I really want is to find who killed the boy. And a fourteen-year-old girl.’
‘A girl too?’ Tattoo-Willy nodded thoughtfully. ‘OK, I’ll give you a little introduction in the less than 100 per cent legal world of the port economy. Cigarettes are involved, but that's hardly a surprise. Particularly on the British and American freighters, but sometimes also on the Soviet ships. But those Russian Papirosi aren’t quite so popular.’
Stave called up a vision of the giant freight ships tied up at the docks. ‘Whenever a ship arrives with a new load, the price on the black market must tumble.’
The tattooist shook his head. ‘They never bring a full load. It would be far too obvious. The British military police run checks. The smuggling is done privately by the sailors and sometimes the gentlemen officers too. They keep a supply in their cabins and bring a carton onshore stuffed up their jumper when they head out for the Reeperbahn.’
‘What do they take back in exchange?’
‘A half-hour of transient happiness, as a rule. Most of the ciggies are exchanged for schnapps and the services of the local girls.’
‘What about tattoos?’
‘That's not transient, that's for life. I don’t bother to check if tax had been paid on the cigarettes. You’re not going to rat on me, are you?’
Stave had no interest in causing Tattoo-Willy to stop talking. He waved his right hand in a dismissive gesture.
‘The wiser ones do better business than they could here,’ the old boy continued. ‘They go down to the black market towards the end of the Reeperbahn. On the corner with Hamburger Berg.’
‘What do they exchange them for?’
‘Anything small enough for them to hide in their cabins and get past the customs men in New York or Liverpool. Rings, watches, hard currency You wouldn’t believe where you can find dollars or pound notes. Notes from back before the war. I thought the Nazis had banned all that.’
‘What about recording tape?’
Tattoo-Willy stared at him in confusion. The chief inspector repeated the question. The old man shook his head, uncomprehendingly. ‘What sort of crazy idea is that? Never heard of anything of the sort. Is that something you smuggle in or out? Can’t imagine the British patrols paying much interest. Nor any customs officials on the other side of the big pond. And in any case tape recorders are big, at least bigger than a bundle of dollars. Why would anybody want to smuggle those?’
‘Yeah, I’ve asked myself the same question.’ Stave rubbed his forehead. The whole tape-recording thing just didn’t make sense any which way round. The air in the kitchen was sticky and smelled of chemicals. Probably the dye or maybe disinfectant. He had an idea.
‘What about medicine?’
‘Yes, but not often. And the other way round when pills are involved. They don’t make them in Germany any more. There aren’t any to smuggle out of the country’
‘What else goes on down at the docks? The sailors bring stuff in and take it out. But what about the workers? What do they get out of it?’
‘Sometimes the sailors and black market dealers need places to hide their stuff. And what could be more secure than the port or the shipyard? Your colleagues are always raiding the black market venues, and using grasses to rat on the dealers. But the harbour is British territory. Sometimes they carry out raids too, but the Tommies don’t know their way around very well. And old maps aren’t much use because so much was destroyed. There are thousands of places to hide a few cartons of cigarettes, or granny's old gold ring. A few of the workers got into the business straight away. There aren’t any other Germans with such access to foreign ships. Or so soon after their arrival. Those boys, the clever ones, do the best business before anyone else. Right now, for example, the American “Liberty ship” Leland Stanford is in port, carrying 3,700 tonnes of sugar from Cuba.’
Stave recalled seeing the ship when he crossed the Elbe on a ferry after the initial investigations down by Blohm & Voss.
‘The Tommies make sure nothing is stolen,’ Tattoo-Willy went on. ‘There are English military police all over the place. The opportunists can’t even pinch a grain of sugar. Not that they want to. They nip down to the hold and drop off something more valuable, like jewellery or gold. Then they pull out a couple of bags in some dark corner of the hold where all of a sudden they come across cartons of Lucky Strikes. The Tommies are only looking out for people trying to steal the sugar, to make sure the white gold isn’t being siphoned off. Meanwhile, right under their noses, the clever boys are taking thousands of ciggies. Then they’re stored in some half-ruined warehouse or somewhere in the shipyard until the Leland Stanford has been properly unloaded and the Tommies are gone. That's when they take their treasure down to the black market.’
‘Sounds as if these guys must be the richest men in Hamburg. So how come I’ve never been aware of this?’
‘There's only ever two or three of them down there at a time. Most of the workers are real proletariat. They don’t do stuff like that.’
‘Why not? Some sort of working-class pride? Or communist ideology?’
‘They’re just no good with money. They get ripped off by the real pros. And they know it. Most of them would be quite capable of dumping grandma's jewellery somewhere in the darkness of the hold, and then get palmed off with a couple of cigarettes from some Yankee sailor. Try lodging a complaint! That's why they’re happy enough to go through the dealers.’
‘So who are they then, these pros who know which end of the hold they should leave stuff for which American sailor?’
‘Lads with the right connections, international connections. Not the yobs hanging about the docks, but real businessmen in suits.’
Tattoo-Willy mentioned a few names that meant nothing to Stave. But he took note of them dutifully; they would be helpful to the boys from Department S. He was just about to close his notebook wh
en he heard the last name: ‘Walter Kümmel.’
‘The boxing promoter?’ Stave stammered, all of a sudden wide awake.
The old boy laughed. ‘He's right in the thick of it. Very smart.’
‘What do you mean “smart”?’
‘Smart enough to get into the smuggling business in a big way without anybody knowing what he deals in.’
Stave suddenly recalled that the first time he had met Kümmel in Greta Boesel's apartment he had noticed a tube of pills in the boxing promoter's pocket. ‘Penicillin?’ he asked Tattoo-Willy.
The man shrugged his shoulders slowly. ‘Pills are small, light, easy to hide and very profitable. Maybe, but I don’t know for sure. Like I said, nobody talks about what he deals in. Kümmel is into big business, but just what sort of business, nobody knows.’
‘That's about to change,’ Stave said, shaking the old man's hand.
The chief inspector wandered back through the rubble, watching the red light of the setting sun appear to transform the remnants of bombed houses into ancient Greek ruins. A man who painted postcards could do something with that, he thought. Maybe these ruins would be around as long as those of the ancient temples. At least then you could charge people to come and see them.
He was bursting with energy, even if his mouth was so dry he could hardly speak and his stomach was aching with hunger. He had a lead. Walter Kümmel – I’ll need to have a chat with him tomorrow. Stave had no idea who the boxing promoter was in league with or how he was making a profit, not had he any idea what his motive might have been in killing Winkelmann. What was the point? And did recording tape link him to the dead boy? Now all he needed for his mood to improve even further was the possibility that there might be somebody waiting for him back at his apartment. He forced himself not think about the empty rooms and the long lonely hours ahead of him.
Questions and Answers
Monday, 16 June 1947
A wasted weekend. Greta Boesel had told him her fiancé had taken a delivery for her down to the American zone and wouldn’t be back in his office in the Chile House until Monday morning. She had mentioned a few towns and trading partners he was due to call on, but said she had no idea in what order he would visit them. Stave rang the firms she mentioned and also the CID in Munich, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt and Nuremberg, asking them to look out for a truck with the registration number the dead boy's aunt had given him. None of them called back. It was as if Walter Kümmel had been swallowed up by an earthquake. The chief inspector had spent hours sitting in his office next to a silent telephone. But then he reckoned that was better than sitting alone in his silent apartment, longing for the company of Anna or his son and slowly going out of his mind.
The Wolf Children (Inspector Stave Book 2) Page 23