The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  To his amazement Stave noticed that Ramdohr had suddenly adopted an almost military stance. ‘Chief Inspector Dönnecke is coming,’ he hissed.

  Stave's massive colleague was climbing over the rubble, accompanied by three younger officers. ‘You’ve only just left our department and already you’re getting in my way, Stave,’ he grumbled.

  ‘Your corpse, my artworks.’

  ‘You artworks don’t look in much better condition than my old corpse.’

  ‘The two things may be related.’

  ‘And the world is flat and the Führer is just hiding in the Alps. Don’t tell me fairy tales, dear colleague. You’re not getting back into Homicide, even by the back door.’

  ‘The dead body and these objects are in the same building.’

  ‘Now that you mention it, I see what you mean. Maybe they were both taken out by the same bomb. So what? I will ascertain that the cause of death was the result of the war, and then I’ll find out who the victim was. You deal with your own discovery. It may well be that my corpse was the owner of your artworks. In which case we can pool our files and hand them in to the store for files to be forgotten. But until then, do not set foot in my office. Is that clear?’

  Ramdohr grinned, then noticed that Stave was looking at him and straightened his face. ‘Always a pleasure to work with you,’ Stave replied, and made a gesture to the uniformed policemen: ‘Get hold of crates or cartons. When Kienle has finished taking his photographs we’ll pack these things up and take them in the patrol car to headquarters.’

  Stave followed the sergeant major who had disappeared through a gap in the wall, then glanced briefly at Dönnecke who hadn’t even bothered to get down into the trench where the body lay. A couple of younger officers were crawling around in a manner that suggested to Stave they didn’t really know what they were doing. A third stood next to their boss with a notebook out, ready to take dictation. But it seemed Dönnecke hadn’t much to say; the pencil with its chewed end hardly moved. He's not even pretending to take the case seriously, Stave thought, and then shrugged. Why should he? Tens of thousands died in the bombing raids on Hamburg. Police had been finding bodies for years and it would probably continue for years. Not my problem any more, he told himself.

  Dr Czrisini, the pathologist, turned up, dragging his doctor's bag as if it was filled with lead plates. Normally rather portly, he had lost weight and the skin of his face had a yellowish note to it, his eyes sunk deep in black-rimmed holes in his face. Only the Woodbine glowing between his lips was the same as ever.

  ‘You need a holiday,’ Stave said. ‘A couple of weeks on the North Sea would do you good.’

  ‘I can have a rainy summer just as easily here in Hamburg,’ Czrisini answered, spluttering. Then he lowered his voice, ‘I believe you’re no longer one of the team?’

  ‘I’m in art and embezzled butter now.’

  ‘There's no future in the black market, Stave. Department S is a dead end.’

  The chief inspector laughed. ‘I thought your department was a dead end.’

  ‘Not for those who can still walk on two legs. Take this as a piece of medical advice: move back to Homicide.’

  ‘So that you don’t have to deal only with the Dönneckes?’

  ‘I don’t care about Dönnecke,’ Czrisini managed to say before succumbing to a coughing fit.

  Stave had a long wait before Kienle arrived. ‘Did you know that my Leica used to belong to a war reporter,’ the photographer said, as he clambered down into the dip where the CID man was standing. ‘The French campaign, Norway, the Eastern Front, a U-boat expedition, it came through all of them. But this goddamn Hamburg rain is going to be the ruin of it.’

  ‘How did you get your hands on a war reporter's camera.’

  ‘I was the war reporter,’ Kienle laughed. ‘One of my pictures even made it on to the front of Signal magazine. After 1945 the Tommies wouldn’t let me continue to work as a photographer, but when Cuddel Breuer offered me a job with CID, they had no objection. There's no understanding the English.’

  ‘Did you take a lot of photos, over there?’

  ‘Of the corpse? No, I didn’t even use up half a 24-frame film roll. I’ll use the remainder on your discoveries, then it's off to the lab. I just hope I don’t get them mixed up afterwards. This head doesn’t look much better than that of the guy in the other ditch.’

  ‘Bomb victim?’

  ‘That's what Chief Inspector Dönnecke suspects.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I don’t have suspicions, I take photographs.’

  Stave got out of Kienle's way and watched the young man crawl around the objects, getting down on his knees, changing the aperture on his Leica, occasionally clicking the shutter, all the time making sure his own shadow didn’t fall on the artworks. He would need all he could get of the pale light. Kienle wasn’t one to waste expensive flashbulbs.

  As he listened to the clicks of the shutter and the quiet scrape of the film moving on in the Leica, Stave wondered to himself why Kienle had been passed over: he didn’t just take photographs, he was the CID's only crime scene expert. After three years with CID in which he spent practically every day examining crime scenes, he was an experienced man, whatever job he might have done before – much more experienced than many officers who only saw the scene of crime every couple of weeks. It would be interesting to know what had happened to Kienle, the chief inspector thought. But he didn’t know him well enough to ask such a personal question.

  By the time the photographer wound on the film in his Leica and climbed out of the ditch, Dönnecke and his team had already disappeared in a Mercedes blowing out a cloud of smoke. He hadn’t even interviewed the Trümmerfrauen, it dawned on Stave.

  ‘Dönnecke will wait for my photos, then he’ll put them in the file and close it once and for all. A few more pictures nobody will ever look at.’

  ‘You’d like to be on the cover of a newspaper again?’

  ‘There are times when I’m nostalgic for the good old days.’

  ‘I’ll show your pictures around. They might provoke some interest.’

  ‘Editors?’ Kienle tried to sound sarcastic, but Stave thought he could hear just the tiniest trace of hope.

  He shook his head sympathetically. ‘No, but art experts,’ he replied. ‘I’d like to know what we’ve actually found here.’

  Kienle nodded towards the bronze head of the woman. ‘I’ve seen that lady somewhere or other.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘No idea. I can’t remember. But it wasn’t in a gallery or a museum. It was more like...’ He hesitated. ‘What I mean is that I’ve seen the head before, but it was smaller, if you know what I mean. I don’t recall it being life-size.’

  ‘A smaller copy? A model of some sort?’

  ‘No. Rather, as if I’d seen this work of art in a photo. When I was with the press I didn’t just take photographs myself. I’ve no idea how many photos I’ve seen: shots taken by my colleagues, huge piles of photos lying around on tables in the editorial. There must have been thousands. And this head was in one of them. I just have no idea who could have taken it. Or when.’

  ‘If you remember, come and see me. My office is one floor lower.’

  ‘I won’t get lost. Things are pretty quiet at present in Department S.’

  Stave remained standing in the ditch, watching as Rambohr packed up the artworks in a case, not exactly with the greatest of care. He didn’t have to wait next to him, but he wanted to remain in the ruined house until Dr Czrisini had finished his initial inspection of the body, and the bearers had taken it away on a black stretcher.

  ‘Is it one of the many bombing victims?’ he asked the pathologist finally, hoping he sounded casual.

  ‘You can’t give up, can you? Take my advice: murders are good for your mental health.’

  ‘I’m just curious.’

  ‘More than that — you’re suspicious.’

  The chief inspector smiled.
‘You should be a psychiatrist. But isn’t it a surprise that the body still has traces of clothing on it?’

  ‘Not many people die naked.’

  ‘This place was hit by incendiary bombs.’ Stave continued, not to be distracted. ‘I spotted the weights they attached to the bottom of incendiary bombs. And a few melted coins. I recall – it must have been in the autumn of 1943 – I was called out with a couple of colleagues to the cellar of a bombed house. We searched the shelves for stolen goods but all we found were dozens of jars of homemade jam. But even though the last bombing raid had been a day or two earlier, the jam in the jars was still boiling away. It must have been unimaginably hot in this house.’

  ‘Boiling jam and melted money,’ Czrisini repeated, ‘but our corpse still has clothing on. No heat. Or at least not enough to burn the shirt off his back.’

  ‘And the artworks aren’t melted either. There must have been flames blazing in the attic and upper storey. The objects must have already been here on the ground floor, or maybe the first floor, and only fell through into the cellar when the whole building collapsed. But that must have been hours after the bombs hit, when the worst of the heat had died down.’

  ‘And you think our friend here must have been in the lower part of the Reimershof?’

  ‘Not far from the artworks. Incendiary bombs are treacherous but their explosive force is fairly limited and they aren’t particularly heavy. They set the attic on fire, but anyone who had been on the lower floors would have had time enough to escape from the house. Czrisini, you know yourself that back then people actually ran up into the attics to throw the bombs out of the building with their bare hands or pour sand over them. It usually worked too.’

  ‘Usually isn’t the same as always.’

  ‘Yes, but if our unknown corpse had just been unlucky, he would have been burned. And he wasn’t.’

  ‘No. A fractured skull. His top storey was smashed too, but not by one of the Tommies’ incendiary bombs. There's a hole right in the sutura sagittalis, the part at the top of the skull where it joins together. A hole with a quite noticeable irregular shape.’

  ‘Could beams or concrete blocks in a collapsing house have caused a wound of that sort?’

  ‘No. Given the size of the fracture, I would be more inclined to say it was a small hammer. The irregular shape however suggests otherwise. A stone? I found nothing inside the skull: a stone could either have got stuck in the bone or would be lying inside the heads.’

  ‘As if someone pulled it out again after the deed?’

  ‘Like I said, you can’t give up. It might have been a stone, or it might have been a paperweight or an inkwell. This was an office building, after all. It didn’t fall on his head by accident.’ Czrisini laughed but it turned into another coughing fit.

  ‘Have you thought about Switzerland?’ Stave asked.

  ‘I don’t need a magic mountain. It isn’t tuberculosis. You should worry more about yourself.’

  ‘What was Dönnecke's response to all these indications?’

  ‘He didn’t notice the remains of clothing: either he didn’t understand the implication or couldn’t care less. As for the fracture, he put it down to a “typical shrapnel wound”. Shrapnel from a bomb that had exploded near the house was blown through the windows and killed him.’

  ‘Did you tell him what you just told me?’

  ‘Of course. Dönnecke just replied that in the bombing raids shrapnel flew in every possible direction, hitting people.’

  ‘Hitting them in the forehead, maybe, the back of the head, the face, but not in the middle of the top of the skull. If something comes flying through the window it hits people from the side, whether they’re sitting or standing, but not from above.’

  ‘In that case he must have been lying with his head facing the window.’

  ‘Anyone lying on a bed or a sofa would be below the level of the window. The shrapnel wouldn’t have hit them at all.’

  ‘Maybe he was lying on his desk.’

  ‘With his head facing the window, during a bombing raid?’ The chief inspector could hardly bring himself to conceal his anger. Dönnecke was a sloppy investigator whose only interest was to close the file as soon as possible. But this wasn’t some traffic accident with a dented bodywork: this was a dead man, damn it.

  ‘It's not your case, Stave,’ the pathologist replied, sticking another Woodbine between his lips to replace the last. ‘But as you’re so curious, you may come and see me at the institute this evening. You never know what you’re going to discover on the autopsy table.’

  ‘I ought not to do that,’ the chief inspector replied. ‘If Dönnecke finds out there’ll be trouble.’

  ‘See you later, then,’ Czrisini said, holding up a hand in farewell.

  A little later Stave was standing in front of a group of twenty women, who had found shelter from the rain under the concrete roof of another almost completely destroyed building nearby. Most of them were wearing old blouses or smocks in faded colours, heavy shoes and had tied scarves around their head to protect them from the dust. A few of them were wearing leather workers’ gloves and many of them had protective glasses that had once been worn by Wehrmacht despatch riders, pushed up on to their foreheads in this forced pause in their work schedule. When they were working the glasses would have protected their eyes from the biting stone dust.

  One of them, whose age the CID man put at about forty, came up and shook his hand. Her skin was raw, and, despite the damp, floury grey dust had become entrenched in her eyebrows.

  ‘Karla Riel,’ she said. ‘When can we get back to work?’

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve had to wait. And also that you had to see the dead body.’

  ‘I’ve seen more dead bodies than you have,’ the woman replied casually. ‘And we’ve found bodies in the rubble that looked a lot worse than that guy.’

  ‘Worst of all are the bodies of children,’ another of the women added. The others just stared at him — Stave didn’t know whether they were scornful or warning him off.

  ‘I’m interested in the artworks.’

  ‘They send a cop here specially for that?’ Karla Riel looked at him in surprise and slightly suspiciously. ‘You don’t want to know anything about the corpse?’

  ‘My colleague's working on that.’

  ‘Not exactly working overtime, is he? Are those things valuable?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Why are you asking us about them then? We don’t normally see a sergeant turn up when we pull a stovepipe or an electricity meter out of the rubble.’

  ‘I suspect they’re worth more than a stovepipe.’

  ‘Looked pretty grim, that metal head lying in the dirt.’ Karla Riel gave a nervous laugh. ‘Somehow it was even more shocking than a real skull would have been. Strange, isn’t it?’

  Stave asked another couple of questions. Trümmerfrauen dragged countless cubic metres of rubble out of the devastated city with their bare hands. Without them getting rid of the rubbish, Hamburg would suffocate beneath its own ruins – and without the bricks that they carefully piled up, and without the piping they reclaimed, the cables, the doors and windows, there wouldn’t be enough to rebuild a single house. He took care not to be too severe in his questioning of Karla Riel and her colleagues. He remained polite and before long he was fairly certain that the Trümmerfrauen weren’t keeping anything back: there was no other bronze that one of them was trying to smuggle out under her smock. Nor had they any idea who the owner might have been, they hadn’t found a briefcase, or any other clue that might have helped with the case. He took note of their names and nodded. ‘The Reimershof is all yours again. But please ring the police if you find any other artworks.’

  ‘I certainly wouldn’t have one of those on my sideboard at home,’ Karla Riel replied, tightening the knot in her headscarf.

  In the pathology lab

  That evening Stave strolled over to the Institute for Pathology and Forensic Science
in Neue Rabenstrasse. The rain had become a fine mist. The CID man felt as if he was walking through soft, cool silk handkerchiefs. The damp slowly penetrated the thin soles of his shoes, and his feet turned clammy, as if he was hiking through mudflats. Czrisini's empire consisted of an old villa with a few boarded-up windows and plasterwork that in the damp air had turned the yellowish colour of cheap paper.

  ‘So where is the object of my curiosity?’ the chief inspector asked.

  ‘In the cooler. I’ve had less free time than I expected. I had to stand in for a sick colleague and show a few students a trick or two.’ He nodded towards a skull, the knitted bones of which had come apart. Stave walked over to it curiously. ‘You’ve put peas in it?’ he said, in surprise.

  ‘You put dried peas into the skull from below, then pour water over them. The peas swell up and all of a sudden, “knack”, all the fontanels spring open. Very instructive.’

  ‘Very rich in calories. When I think how few rations I have on my card per week, I need the peas more than this skeleton.’

  ‘You also needed well-trained doctors, not that long ago.’

  ‘Okay, so you were busy with your students and their peas. Would it be better if I came back tomorrow?’

  ‘I still managed to find out a few things about our friend. Chief Inspector Dönnecke insisted on a report.’

  ‘He's keen to close the file.’

  ‘He didn’t find it necessary to tell me why he was so eager to have the report urgently. I took a quick look at the body and scribbled down a few lines. Then I set the body aside for later.’

  ‘Might it be possible you have a summary of your report.’

  ‘I do, but it's not for you. Don’t get me wrong, but I wouldn’t like our esteemed colleague to come across a document in your hands that shouldn’t be in your hands.’

  ‘I get it,’ Stave said, and pulled out his tattered notebook.

  Czrisini smiled. ‘The victim had been dead for a long time. How long is hard to say. The Reimershof was destroyed some five years ago. That could fit with the verdict, hypothetically at least: dead for five years, but it's only the vaguest of guesses.