The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  Karl came by again four days later. They still didn’t have much to say to one another. On the fifth day Lieutenant MacDonald popped in.

  ‘I’m bringing you two medical items,’ the young British officer, with whom Stave had already solved two cases, told him, nodding at the brown paper bag in his hand. He dramatically pulled out a huge bar of chocolate. ‘Hershey's, genuine American calories. A comrade from the US Army gave it to me, but your ribs have more need of them than mine.’ Then he glanced at the screen, lowered his voice conspiratorially and pulled out of the bag a bottle full of amber liquid. ‘Whiskey, also from the American officer. “Old Tennessee”, lovingly nicknamed “Old Tennis Shoes” by its devotees. It's not exactly a Scottish single malt but it will get your pulse back up to speed.’

  Stave gave a dry smile. ‘A couple of sips and on his next visit the doctor will have to revise his diagnosis.’

  ‘It's a miracle cure.’

  ‘How are Erna and the baby?’ Stave's former secretary and the young lieutenant had become involved in a relationship, with a few serious consequences: a chubby, healthy daughter called Iris, born the previous summer; a horrible divorce case in which she had lost custody of her eight-year-old son to her former husband, a bitter, crippled Wehrmacht veteran; her resignation from the CID ‘in best mutual interests’, because she could no longer take the looks her colleagues gave her; and her wedding, carried out by a British military chaplain, which had transformed her into ‘Mrs MacDonald’.

  ‘The little one's teething,’ the officer answered with a laugh. ‘I’m nostalgic for the war. The nights were quieter.’

  ‘Teeth won’t take as long to come through as peace did.’

  ‘Put a word in God's ear. That would be one thing less for Erna and me to worry about.’

  Stave thought of Karl and the old saying that worries about children grow with them, but he didn’t mention it.

  ‘We need to get you out of here soon,’ MacDonald said, serious again. ‘We want to say goodbye properly.’

  The chief inspector hoped his shock at the announcement didn’t show. ‘You’re being transferred?’

  ‘It looks as if I’ll be out of here this summer. Rumours going around the Officers’ Club suggest I can count on a posting within Europe.’

  ‘Will Erna and Iris go with you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And Erna's son.’

  ‘I hope it won’t break her heart to have to leave him here in Hamburg.’

  ‘Won’t you make another attempt to get custody?’

  ‘The judge was very clear on that. My superiors too. A good soldier knows when a battle is lost.’

  Erna MacDonald, formerly Erna Berg, was paying a high price for her new life, Stave thought to himself. But then she wasn’t the only person in Hamburg who had paid a high price to be able to start over again after 1945.

  Another day he had a more surprising visit: Police Corporal Heinrich Ruge, a young uniformed policeman who had accompanied him on several cases. Stave hardly recognised him because it was the first time he had seen his colleague in plain clothes — a dark suit with jacket sleeves far too short so that his skinny forearms stuck out like those of a wooden puppet.

  ‘I brought you something,’ he said, embarrassedly setting a thin wrapped-up parcel on the bedside table. Chocolate. A small fortune for a young uniformed policeman. I must really look emaciated, Stave thought, very touched. Ruge was the only one of his colleagues who had come to see him.

  They chatted a bit. The longer the conversation went on, the more self-confident Ruge became. ‘It's a pity Frau Berg is no longer there.’

  ‘Mrs MacDonald now.’

  Ruge blushed. ‘That takes a bit of getting used to. It sounds a bit different to “Müller” or “Schmidt”.’

  ‘You mean not “Germanic” enough?’ the chief inspector asked in the mildest of voices.

  The policeman's face went even redder. ‘New times, new names. I don’t have a problem with that, quite the contrary. The lieutenant is...’ he searched for the right word, ‘so worldly wise. But some of our older colleagues have difficulties with the Veronikas.’

  ‘The Veronikas?’

  ‘That's what they call girls who go out with the Tommies.’

  ‘Is this just a CID thing? Or is it common all over Hamburg?’

  ‘All over. You know how it is, Chief Inspector. Suddenly a nickname like that pops up, from nobody knows where. But all of a sudden everybody's using it.’

  ‘I know how it is well enough. After 1933 overnight there were a few funny new names for certain people.’

  ‘Anyway, I want to join CID,’ Ruge suddenly let out. ‘I’ve already applied to do the entrance exam.’

  The chief inspector looked at him long and hard. Should he encourage the kid? ‘Who was it gave the “going-over” to the Baumwall murderer after he was arrested?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘Chief Inspector Dönnecke.’

  That old battleship. Cäsar Dönnecke, the man who’d been in CID since the days of the Kaiser. The man who, during the ‘brown years’, had carried out investigations with ‘colleagues’ from the Gestapo. And who had nonetheless somehow managed to get through the English ‘cleansing’ after the end of the war, even though the victors had fired men with less dirt on their hands than Dönnecke.

  ‘You can learn from people like him how not to behave.’

  ‘I’ll watch out for him. Maybe I might begin in your department.’ Ruge gave a shy laugh, then blushed again. ‘I mean, if I’m accepted, that is.’

  And if I’m back in harness by then, Stave thought, but said nothing.

  Later, after his visitor had left, the chief inspector stared up at the ceiling thinking to himself. About Erna Berg, Erna MacDonald. He wondered if she knew what her former colleagues were calling her? Of course she did. She knew everything that went on in CID; in fact she was usually the first to know. She probably knew before her pregnancy was that advanced that she wouldn’t be able to hold down the job. A ‘Veronika’. An Engländer flirt who abandoned the husband who’d lost a leg on the Eastern Front. Erna might not be so unhappy after all about her new husband's move.

  Cäsar Dönnecke, Gestapo Dönnecke. The colleague who could give prisoners a ‘going-over’ without fearing the consequences.

  ‘I don’t belong there any more,’ Stave mumbled, half to himself. Suddenly the humming from the other side of the screen stopped. The chief inspector suppressed the curse that nearly escaped his lips. He had made a decision: I need to change departments, he told himself. Homicide is no longer for me.

  Department S

  Friday, 11 June 1948

  Stave was standing next to the bronze elephant that the CID had nicknamed ‘Anton’. A work of art from the days when the CID headquarters had still been the head office of an insurance company, back in the long gone world of the twenties, before the war, when even the cold-blooded bean counters of a company could afford luxurious jokes such as a three-metre-high tonne-weight statue of an animal by their entrance. It was just 7 a.m. Even though it was one of the longest days of the year, the city was sunk in a grey light, fine veils of water hanging in the air, too heavy to be fog, too insubstantial to be rain; cold weather for an early summer day.

  The chief inspector took off his thin, square-shouldered overcoat while he was still in the stairwell. He took his time. There was nobody to see him at such an early hour. He limped up the steps, with their crazily patterned tiles; his old ankle wound from the bombing nights was playing up. He felt his more recent wound too, although not so obviously: a scar across his chest, still rather red, longer than his index finger, but already well healed, the doctors had assured him. Every now and then there would be a pain, or rather a twinge when he moved too quickly. And the occasional difficulty breathing if he exerted himself. That would pass. In civilian clothes nobody noticed anything wrong with him, except that he was a bit more gaunt than he had been.

  The corridor on the sixt
h floor was as abandoned as the Führerbunker had been in April 1945. The anteroom to his office had been the realm of Erna Berg. Erna MacDonald. He didn’t have a new secretary. Why would he? Initially, after the birth of Erna's daughter, there had been no qualified candidate. And then nobody had seen the point of installing someone as the secretary to a chief inspector lying in the University Hospital. The heavy black typewriter that had sat on her desk was gone. One or another of his colleagues had seen to that, Stave thought. Not that it mattered.

  His office. A thin layer of dust on the desk, no new files, no new reports, no photos from the lab, no autopsy reports from Dr Czrisini. He pulled open the drawer of a metal filing cabinet with hanging folders containing the files of his solved cases. The unsolved ones must have been taken and given to another officer. A drawer full of cardboard files, the achievements of a career. Doesn’t exactly look impressive, the CID man thought. But what matters is the things you can’t see: the jailed murderer. The justice handed down by the court. The compensation for the relatives of the victim — not much in the way of compensation, but all the same. And above everything, the satisfaction, the pleasure even, of having solved yet another puzzle.

  ‘But they don’t have to be murder cases,’ Stave mumbled, pushing the drawer back in so that it made a metallic clang as it hit the cabinet.

  He cleared out his desk systematically, throwing away bits of paper and notebooks filled on every page with his scribbles. In the end he was left with a few pencils and notebooks, his certificate of promotion to the CID, in itself a relic of the long gone Weimar Republic, his card index files with hundreds of addresses of culprits, victims, contacts, informants, suspects, that he had put together over the years, a map of pre-war Hamburg and a new Falkplan map showing the bombed-out districts in red and blue lines to indicate the British no-go area along the Alster river. A magnifying glass, a penknife. He had never bothered with souvenirs and other bits and pieces that some of colleagues collected. And he had never wanted to have photos of Karl or his late wife Margarethe in the office; and certainly no photo of Anna. It only occurred to him now that he didn’t even have a photo of her at home.

  He bundled it all into a leather briefcase, the lock of which no longer worked. He had picked it up on the black market — a good job none of his colleagues knew. Then he heard voices down the corridor, footsteps, doors opening and closing. Stave was about to officially report for duty and his boss wasn’t going to like what he was going to tell him.

  Cuddel Breuer forced his massive muscular body out of his seat as Stave entered, genuine pleasure on his face. Not making things any easier for me, the chief inspector thought.

  ‘I’d like to change departments,’ he said straight away.

  ‘Did that guy down at Baumwall shoot you in the head?’ his boss asked, falling back into his seat. He was still smiling but somehow a light in his eyes had gone out. ‘Come back here initially. Let yourself get back into the way of things. You don’t need to take on a new case straight away. Don’t need to plunge straight back in.’

  ‘Homicide just isn’t right for me any more.’

  ‘A gunshot wound like that can knock you off the rails. I mean not just physically. Think it through. Give yourself a bit of time.’

  ‘I had enough time in the hospital to think it through. It's not that I’ve suddenly become scared of something similar happening to me again.’

  ‘So why do you want to change? Only the very best get to work in Homicide. It was me who oversaw your transfer. The work was surely much more interesting than what you had been doing before.’

  It was an oblique reference to the fact that the Nazis had put Stave on ice – and that maybe the same thing could happen again. What was he to say in response? That he didn’t want to keep bumping into people like Dönnecke? That from now on he would be asking each and every one of his colleagues if they had labelled his former secretary a ‘Veronika’? That working in Homicide had got him so involved in his work that he no longer had time for his son or the only woman he loved?

  ‘It's a complicated story,’ he replied.

  ‘It's part of my job to get to the end of complicated stories,’ Breuer grumbled. ‘Are you afraid I’m going to blame you for getting shot? Or that I’m going to ask you about the “going-over” the guy in the ruins got?’

  ‘No. The former is a risk of the job. The latter a matter for you and Chief Inspector Dönnecke.’

  Breuer mumbled something Stave couldn’t make out, but he took out a folder and began leafing through the files in it. ‘Where do you want to move to?’

  ‘Department S.’

  His superior slammed the folder shut. ‘What's up with you, Stave? Why would somebody of your calibre want to work in the department that deals with the black market?’

  ‘It's important work.’

  ‘Important work! Were you totally unconscious during those last weeks in the hospital? Haven’t you heard anything?’

  ‘You mean about X-day.’

  ‘X-day indeed. There have been rumours going round for weeks. We’re getting new money. Out with the old worthless Reichsmark. That's just so much waste paper. Sometime soon the Allies are going to give us a new currency. Nobody knows when, nobody knows how it's all going to work out, but everybody is hoping for the best. Shop windows are emptier than they’ve ever been. People are gathering together their stocks of Reichsmarks and handing them over in bundles for anything they can still buy. You wouldn’t believe how full the cinemas and theatres are. There's never been such an interest in culture before, if only because culture effectively costs nothing any more. Who knows whether in a week's time the only use you’ll have for a thousand-Reichsmark note will be as toilet paper?’

  ‘Sounds like a golden era for the black market.’

  ‘Nonsense. This is the first time since the disappearance of the Nazis that I’ve seen the black marketeers look nervous. Nobody knows what the new currency will mean. Maybe the economy will collapse altogether and we’ll all become farmers digging up the fields in Holstein. But maybe it will work, and then people will have real money again and be able to buy real things in real shops, just like back in the good old days. One way or the other: who's going to need a black market? And you want to go over to Department S where the black market is what they deal with!’ Breuer thumped the folder in front to him. ‘I have a dozen requests in here from other colleagues wanting to be transferred out of Department S, no matter where! If I wanted to punish you, Stave, I would be transferring you to Department S.’

  ‘You’re rewarding me.’ For the first time the chief inspector smiled. ‘In the hospital there wasn’t a lot to do, apart from counting the cracks in the wall and thinking. I didn’t just think about the black market, I thought about the ruins, the destroyed streets, the electricity that keeps cutting out, the bombed docks, the ruined stations, the rickety, screeching pre-war cars with wood-burning engines, shoes made out of cut-up car tyres, clothes out of cut-up parachutes. There isn’t going to be a German marching into Russia or anywhere else in the world for the foreseeable future. The world has had enough of us. We’re on our own and there's nothing for it but to take the heap of rubble we’re left with and start to rebuild everything. A golden era for people with initiative, whether they’re black marketeers or honest businessmen. There's going to be a lot of money flowing, a serious lot of money. In whatever currency. And wherever there's money flowing, there are criminals not far behind. It may be that Department S itself ceases to exist, but it will be reincarnated as a department dealing with economic crime. It's inevitable. That's the future and that's where I want to be.’

  ‘Smugglers and fences instead of corpses and killers.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound such a bad alternative to me.’

  ‘You’re hearing a tune that nobody else in these corridors has heard yet.’ Breuer gave up trying to hide his disappointment. ‘Very well. I have a dozen officers here who would kiss the worn-out soles of my old shoes if I trans
ferred them to Homicide. I’ll pick one of them. You can take up your new position straight away. You know where it is. Go and report to Bahr and find yourself a new office. There's more than a few empty.’

  As Stave walked through the Homicide Department one last time to fetch his briefcase, an officer aged around sixty with a large, heavy skull ringed with hair like a laurel wreath on the head of an emperor and deep-set piercing eyes came up to him. Cäsar Dönnecke.

  ‘Welcome back, colleague.’ He held out his hand.

  ‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ the chief inspector answered. ‘I’m going to Department S.’ He tried to push past, but Dönnecke laid his great paw on his shoulder.’

  ‘I always knew you were too soft for this kind of work, Stave,’ he whispered, his breath reeking of cold tobacco. ‘But I didn’t think you were that soft. One bullet wound and then crawl away to somewhere nothing's going to happen. The black market is finished. Haven’t you heard? It's only a question of time before the Americans give us new money. Then Department S's clientele will disappear like a fart in the north wind.’ He made an astounding lifelike imitation of the sound and waved his hairy right hand. ‘Then? What’ll you do then?’

  ‘Then I’ll stand on a tub on Stephansplatz and direct the traffic.’

  ‘That might be better.’ Dönnecke laughed and let him past.

  Stave took two steps, then turned round. ‘What did you actually do to the guy down at Baumwall?’

  The thickset old man blinked in irritation for a moment, then rearranged his flabby features into a joyless grin. ‘That's all been sorted out. You could read all about it in the files, if you were still with Homicide.’

  Stave had just reached the door to his office when Dönnecke called after him, deliberately loud enough for all their colleagues to hear: ‘How's your secretary, by the way, that Erna – what was her surname?’