The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  ‘Cause of death: skull injury trauma. Of course I can’t rule out any other possibilities if the unknown victim did die in the bombing raid – the air pressure could have destroyed his lungs and he suffocated. Things like that. But there is no doubt that he had a serious injury to the head. It would seem he was hit from above with an L-shaped object.’

  ‘A bit of rubble from the collapsing house?’

  ‘I doubt it. Blocks of cement or beams do a lot more damage; the skull is often smashed to pieces. This would appear to be a single blow with a hard object. Not a hammer, not a piece of piping, not a truncheon, in all of which cases the damage would have been different. And there's nothing inside the skull that could relate to the injury, nothing such as shrapnel from a bomb or anything like that. It would appear to be an external blow from an object that left no trace within the skull.’

  ‘A murder committed with an L-shaped object?’ the chief inspector asked.

  ‘If the body had been found anywhere else, that is what I would have said straight away. But in a bombed ruin...’ Czrisini fell into a coughing fit that made his whole body shake like a sheet in the wind. ‘In the ruins of a bombing raid I cannot exclude that his death was the result of the explosion. How many of us really know what happens when a building we are in collapses?’

  Stave thought of his wife Margarethe. He had to hold on to the table, as inconspicuously as possible, until he no longer felt faint. ‘Are there photographs?’ he asked. His voice sounded somehow hollow, even to himself.

  The pathologist didn’t seem to notice. He was staring out of the window into the darkness — for so long that the CID man thought he had forgotten he was there. ‘Yes, well,’ Czrisini suddenly muttered, as if he had suddenly found himself back in the real world. ‘I don’t know if I should let you have a copy.’

  ‘Should it be found in my hands I can blame it on Kienle.’

  Czrisini gave a weak smile and delved into a file until he produced an A4 photo from an envelope: skull bones surrounded by decayed skin, an old wound in the centre of skull, an encrusted black hole.

  ‘Look here,’ the pathologist said, pointing at the injury.

  ‘It looks as if somebody had stamped an inverted “L”,’ Stave said.

  ‘A very big “L”, stamped very hard,’ Czrisini commented. ‘If the skin weren’t so decayed I would have found traces of massive blood loss.’

  ‘Fatal blood loss?’

  ‘You can bet a few bundles of Reichsmarks on it.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘The facts lead to the following conclusion: the deceased is a man – the shape of the pelvic bone makes that clear, as do the skull, hands, arms, legs. About 1.7 metres tall, slim. From the condition of his teeth and ligaments I would put his age at older than thirty and younger than fifty. He wouldn’t have been a soldier in the Wehrmacht.’

  ‘You can tell that from an autopsy?’

  ‘He had a deformity of his left foot,’ Czrisini replied drily. ‘In simple German, a club foot. Old Adolf wouldn’t have taken him.’

  ‘The Führer had a use for at least one club foot,’ the chief inspector replied, shifting his weight unconsciously on to his right leg. Absurdly, his wound made him embarrassed when the pathologist had mentioned a club foot.

  ‘There's more,’ Czrisini continued, as if he hadn’t noticed the CID man's reaction. ‘The deceased was wearing good leather shoes, which remained in far better condition than any other remnants of clothing on his body.’

  ‘He must have had them made by a cobbler.’

  ‘In which case we owe thanks to the unknown cobbler.’ Czrisini produced a pair of black leather shoes from a cardboard box: the right one looked smart, save for traces of mould on the uppers, the left however looked like a battered bag of coal with laces. The pathologist pointed at the soles: ‘Real leather. No rubber. Nice and smooth. But when you walk in those, everything you step on will scratch the surface, even a grain of sand. Over time the heel and ball of the sole will develop a pattern as if somebody had scribbled on them with a hard pencil.’

  He picked up a magnifying glass. ‘But look here.’

  Stave picked up the right shoe and examined it through the glass. Lots of lines on the heel and ball, but also several lines in the hollow where the arch of the foot would be. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said.

  Czrisini nodded in approval. ‘Classic clue. The man who wore these shoes fell and was lying on the ground. Normally we only get scratches on the soles of our shoes where we tread the heel and ball of the foot. But this man must have been lying on the ground with his feet against a wall, a kerb, something hard or rough, with the result that his shoes have marks where there wouldn’t normally be any. If he had stood up again later, the scratch marks in the arches wouldn’t have been as fresh as those on the heel and ball of his foot. That means the last movements he made with his foot were probably from a horizontal position and that means.

  ‘...he was still lying on the ground, or that in his final struggle for life his feet were pressing against something,’ Stave concluded. ‘A mighty blow to the head, that splits the bones of his skull,’ he went on, ‘the man falls to the ground, and in his death throes the soles of his feet hammer against a wall, or something similar. End of story.’

  ‘Nice theory.’

  ‘Is all that in your report to Dönnecke?’

  ‘The chief inspector wasn’t exactly thrilled. He said that in a collapsing building you find all sorts of marks on a corpse. I should forget all about the damn leather soles.’

  Stave was silent for a long while, then at last he asked, ‘What do you think you might find if you were to examine the body again?’

  Czrisini shrugged. ‘I can’t really say. All I know is that our anonymous friend deserves a more thorough examination.’

  ‘Now?’

  Czrisini shook his head. ‘I’m tired. He's not going to run off on me.’

  The chief inspector took a close look at him, his shrunken cheeks, his yellowish skin, his hands shaking ever so slightly. In the old days Czrisini would have worked through the night to discover the secret a corpse might be hiding.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Thanks for your discretion.’

  That evening Stave strolled along the Alster. He was not in a hurry, there was nobody waiting in his apartment for him. If only the Hamburg summer was worthy of the name then at least he might have spent the mild evening hours sitting on his balcony. His dark, damp rooms felt like a prison cell. Stave walked across the Lombardy bridge and decided to take a detour via Mönckebergstrasse. Through the rain he could see the red of the traffic light, one of only two working again in the city. The only traffic was a few cars and a couple of British trucks, but hundreds of pedestrians were standing diligently at the lights waiting for the green light allowing them to cross.

  Mönckebergstrasse had once been Hamburg's favourite shopping street. But it had become narrower because of the rubble and collapsed shop fronts on the pavement on either side. Even so, many of the shops had reopened. Stave passed the Levante store, then the massive bulk of C&A, which had once been a Jewish business but by 1938 had become artificially ‘Aryanised’. The chief inspector had thought that after May 1945 it would have been given back to its former owners, but it never happened. Maybe the former owners no longer existed.

  The CID man looked in the shop windows on either side of the street. His ration card allowed him ten American cigarettes for June. They had gone to his son, along with those for the previous month that he had saved up. He could have turned the little treasures into Reichsmarks on the black market. That's another nice little bit of business I have to give up now that I work for Department S, he thought. With a few bundles of Reichsmarks in his hand he felt almost as if it was back in peacetime, but that wouldn’t last much longer.

  The shop display windows were pathetically empty: here a plate, there a pair of trousers alongside a few thin overcoats. Stave walked into the shop opposite C&A, its
doorway guarded by a stone relief of a lion and martial figures.

  ‘Were the Russians here?’ he asked a tired-looking young shop assistant. ‘The place looks like it's been looted.’

  He got a dismissive look in return. ‘You just back from a POW camp?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘For weeks nobody's been talking about anything except X-day. That's why there's so little here.’

  ‘This is all down to X-day?’

  ‘Our second surrender. The surrender of the Reichsmark. The day the Yanks give us new money. But nobody knows exactly when the new currency is going to be introduced, or how much of it anyone is going to get. But the fact that we need a new currency is obvious. Nothing works any more.’

  ‘And that's why you’re not taking the old money now?’

  ‘We take it for whatever we have in stock, but firms aren’t turning stuff out any more. Or if they are, they’re hoarding it.’

  ‘Any shirts in my size left?’

  ‘No.’ Then the assistant looked around and leaned over conspiratorially ‘Try the Otto Reuter shop.’

  Stave gave a gentle smile. Otto Reuter, O.R. Ohne Rechnung – ‘No Receipt’, under-the-counter business. The kid would look pretty stupid if he pulled out his police ID. But on the other hand, maybe they would have a shirt for him.

  ‘What has Otto Reuter got?’

  ‘Just a simple work shirt, pale blue, 22.50 Reichsmarks.’

  The chief inspector didn’t scowl. Before the war a shirt like that would have cost 3.50 Reichsmarks. But what the heck? If what money he had would soon not be worth anything at all, then any price was a good price. He laid 23 Reichsmarks on the counter.

  The assistant disappeared out the back and returned with a shirt wrapped in packing paper. He handed him five ten-pfennig postage stamps as change.

  ‘No coins?’

  ‘People are hoarding coins. There are rumours going around that they will keep their value. And even if they don’t, metal is metal. At least you’ve still got something in your hand.’

  ‘Let's hope X-day comes soon. Or else we won’t even be able to send letters any more.’ Stave was fairly certain it was illegal to use postage stamps as money. He shoved the stamps into his wallet. ‘Any razor blades to be had around here?’

  ‘Three shops further along. Sixteen times the official price. At least that's how it was at lunchtime.’

  ‘Otto Reuter?’

  ‘You really have been gone a long time.’

  Late that evening Stave was sitting exhausted in his bare living room, looking out of the window. The window still bore marks made during the firestorm of 1943: little patches of molten glass that resembled amoebae in the yellow moonlight. The rain had stopped, and the blanket of clouds had broken. But the air was still cold, gusting from the north-west. It's just a break, the CID man thought to himself; the whole weekend is going to be foul weather.

  His thoughts drifted back to the damaged artworks in the Reimershof. And the unknown corpse. One of tens of thousands who had died during the war in Hamburg alone. Who cared about his fate nowadays? All anyone was thinking about was the new currency. He suddenly noticed that for several minutes now he had been stroking the scar underneath his heart. I was lucky there again, he told himself. And then he thought of Karl, squatting on his allotment growing tobacco. And Anna, who right now was maybe staring up at the same stars from her damp basement apartment in Altona. Or maybe she was wandering around in the ruins, looking for artworks and antiques. Or maybe then again, she wasn’t alone at all, and was laughing... He pushed such thoughts from his mind. Lucky, he realised, wasn’t exactly the word to describe his state of affairs.

  Unknown notes

  Monday, 14 June 1948

  Stave was in a pensive mood as he left the house the next morning. He had a neighbour in the basement: Kurt Flasch, some forty years old, small, sullen, the little hair he had left combed over his bald head, perched on his nose a pair of nickel glasses soldered together in the middle through which his dark eyes shone as if through a magnifying glass. His wife was nearly two heads taller than him and weighed at least twice as much. A man whose family gobbled up everything he earned and who lived in perpetual fear of losing his job. A worthy bureaucrat who in March 1933 had speedily signed up as a member of the Nazi Party and in 1945 had just as speedily been cleared by the British in the first round of the denazification process. Someone with whom the chief inspector had never exchanged more than the most basic neighbourly civilities — until that weekend. For Kurt Flasch worked in the Landeszentralbank, Hamburg's regional bank

  So that morning the CID man had hung around the doorway to Ahrensburger Strasse 93, knowing that it was about this time Flasch came back from his ‘men's morning’, an early glass or two in the corner bar, livened up by cheap beer and home-brewed schnapps. He approached him as he arrived back, acting as if it were purely a chance meeting. Stave wasn’t much of an actor but then Flasch wasn’t exactly sober enough to think anything of it. It was taking him long enough to get his keys out of his trousers pocket.

  ‘It won’t be worth anybody's while to lock the door soon,’ Stave had said nonchalantly, watching the man's clumsy efforts, and repressing the urge to snatch the keys from his hand and open the door for him. ‘We’ll all be so broke on X-day that it won’t be worth breaking in.’

  Flasch had given up struggling with his keys and was holding them like a teacher would his ruler. ‘After X-day we’ll all need to buy extra locks!’ he said in a slightly slurred voice.

  ‘The new currency won’t fill our bellies any more than the old Reichsmark.’

  ‘Stuff and nonsense. Paper money is all about trust. Nobody trusts the old rags any more. But the new currency is being issued by the Americans, and that will be solid. And when people earn real money again, then they will go back to turning out real things and buying real things. Things are getting better. You wait and see. The black marketeers will be scratching at our doors.’

  ‘When?’

  By now Flasch had forgotten all about his keys. He glanced around but in the bad weather, Ahrensburger Strasse was almost deserted. ‘In May, American freighters docked at a particularly well-guarded quay in Bremershaven. US soldiers unloaded some 23,000 wooden crates. They were immediately loaded on to eight special trains. To Frankfurt!’

  Flasch gave him a triumphant look, but then noticed that Stave hadn’t understood the significance. ‘Frankfurt is home to the Reichsbank headquarters!’ he added. ‘With the biggest vaults in Germany! What do you think was in those crates? Chocolate?’ He laughed.

  ‘Frankfurt is also the American army headquarters,’ Stave replied. ‘It could equally well have been ammunition. Or bundles of dollars for the soldiers.’

  Flasch tapped the side of his nose. ‘I’ve been at the Landeszentralbank long enough. I can smell money, even if it's locked in the vaults in Frankfurt.’

  You’re very skinny for someone who can smell money, Stave thought to himself, but he didn’t say a word beyond wishing his neighbour a good Sunday – and then opened the door for him.

  He ran over the conversation again on his way to the office. If the new money was already in Germany, that meant it would be issued soon. How long would something like that take? Another few weeks? Just a few days? Maybe a year? He couldn’t see what difference it would make replacing one mark note with another mark note. Why would the new one be worth something and the old one not? On the other hand, when he had joined the police at the age of 19, he had become a billionaire overnight just on the back of the money he had earned himself: in 1923 the mint had been turning out Reichsmarks in washing baskets. First in millions, then billions, then trillions. The noughts became a joke. Whether it was a newspaper or an egg, things that had cost pfennigs a few months ago, suddenly cost so much that you had to count the zeros on your fingers to work out whether it was ten million or already a hundred million. The pride Stave had felt in his wages soon gave way to cynical scorn.
Children were making paper dragons out of thousand mark notes glued together, his parents’ neighbours had used bundles of marks to fill gaps in the door. Then, overnight, a new mark had been introduced and everything went back to normal. Normal prices, no inflation, as if it all had been just a bad joke. The chief inspector had never understood how it had worked back then. It had taken years for him to shed the temptation to spend all his income immediately unless it lost all its value within a week. If it had happened back in 1923, it could happen again in 1948.

  Lost in memories he took long strides as he walked down Ahrensburger Strasse. The rain washed greasy brown rivers out of the ruins and sent them gurgling over the cracked pavement. He took care to avoid them so as not to ruin his shoes. He thought back to the days of the chaotic Weimar Republic, which had never seemed too bad to him. Perhaps because he had been young back then. With Margarethe. And Karl, who had still been a cheerful boy. Inevitably his thoughts eventually turned to the hail of bombs in 1943. To his son's incarceration in a POW camp. To Anna. And eventually it occurred to Stave that the only person he had spoken to that weekend was the drunk little bank clerk he had secretly sought out. He was relieved when he finally passed the bronze elephant in the doorway on Karl-Muck-Platz.

  Before he had even reached his office he was accosted by Bahr. ‘We need to go see Cuddel Breuer,’ the head of Department S told him.

  ‘Is the boss that unhappy with us?’

  ‘If he were he’d be a very unhappy man indeed. He's making every department hop to it.’

  Several dozen sleepy officers were already squeezed into the HQ's main conference room. A few of their colleagues had bleary morning eyes, and more than was good in such an airless room stank of sweat or schnapps. But nobody opened a window because the storm was lashing against the glass. Many of them had wet overcoats under their arms, as Stave had, because they hadn’t had time to drop them off in their offices.

  Cuddel Breuer came in, looking a lot fresher than any of his staff. ‘Children,’ he called out loud, ‘we’re going on a trip.’