Half an hour later some one hundred uniformed police and several dozen bad-humoured CID men in wet overcoats were standing around the city hall and the Landeszentralbank. It was a great lump of a building next to the city hall, light grey and as solid as a giant safe. Up in the gable alongside the coat of arms was still the inscription ‘Reichsbank’, and, as if it were a commemorative coin, the date ‘1914-1917’. Beneath this were five stone figures staring grimly down on to the square and in their midst a Hansa trader holding a ship.
‘There haven’t been so many police standing in front of the city hall since the Führer last gave a speech here,’ Bahr mumbled, standing next to Stave. Both men had pulled up their overcoat collars and pulled down the brims of their summer hats to cover their foreheads. Even so the chief inspector could feel his head slowly getting damp and moisture penetrating the shoulders of his thin coat.
‘Nobody's interested in the city hall,’ he replied. ‘Cuddel Breuer may not have told us what's going on, but we’re here to protect the bank, not the mayor's retreat.’
‘X-day getting closer.’
‘I just wish I knew how much closer.’
They were standing by a cast-iron water pipe about a hundred metres from the bank building. The wind was blowing the rain across the square. A stench of mud and decay was rising from the Alster and the little rivers that fed into it. A tram rolled up and with screeching wheels came to a halt on the square. Its pale yellow and red paintwork glistened in the damp, the windows were milky opaque. A few dozen men and women jumped out of the doors and with hands holding down their hats and headscarves, hurried across the open space into the shelter of a building. Just like we used to do when there was an air-raid alarm, Stave thought involuntarily. Hardly anybody paid attention to the police in uniform and plain clothes a few metres apart forming a chain across the square.
‘Hardly. I hope something's going to happen soon,’ Bahr grumbled. ‘I’m getting too old to stand out on the streets in damp shoes.’
‘We’ve got a visitor,’ Stave said in reply, and put his hand on the gun in his holster.
Two English Jeeps were speeding towards them and with squealing tyres came to a halt on either side of the Landeszentralbank building. British military police with machine guns leapt out and positioned themselves next to the main entrance. Cuddel Breuer walked up to them, spoke briefly with a captain and then came back. His orders were passed down the line of policemen. ‘All streets are closed. The trams are stopped. Do not allow anybody on to the square. It's only for a few minutes.’
Eight heavy military trucks rolled up and came to a halt with their engines running. It was impossible to make out what they were carrying behind their tarpaulins. More military police arrived. Stave noticed two uniformed police to his left preventing a group of women from crossing the square. There was nobody near him.
Several bank employees emerged from the building. Stave spotted Flasch among them, despite the dark brown rain cape he had thrown over himself. They went up to the first truck, which had lowered its tailgate, and began dragging wooden cases from the load bed to the bank entrance, now guarded by a cordon of military police holding their machine guns at the ready.
Stave moved closer. The crates were long and narrow, made of rough wood. On the side was stamped CLAY-W-OCF-OFD-279.
‘Looks like a code number,’ Bahr observed. ‘The word “clay” in English could mean our gentlemen bankers are being put on a pottery course?’ he laughed.
Stave was watching the skinny shape of Flasch carrying one of the crates along with another employee, apparently effortlessly. ‘It doesn’t look as if the cargo's very heavy,’ he muttered.
‘Not coins then,’ the head of Department S commented. ‘Paper money, in crates. Eight trucks for the whole of Hamburg. I wonder how much that comes to.’
‘Hopefully not enough to draw the attention of a few of our usual customers.’ The chief inspector glanced around nervously.
In reality it took far longer than the few minutes they had been told it would to unload all the trucks. In the end a few of the military police joined in, apparently fed up waiting. It was only towards the end of the morning that the trucks finally lumbered off. Stave found himself actually thankful that it was raining so hard. On a normal warm summer's day there would have been hundreds of curious onlookers by now, but the bad weather kept the nosy parkers at bay better then the police could have done.
Breuer kept back a few of the younger detectives and twenty of the uniformed police. A few of the British remained posted next to the bank. All the others were finally allowed to leave. Before long the first tram screeched its way to the stop. Figures with caps and umbrellas began scurrying across the square again. All as if nothing had happened.
That afternoon MacDonald came into Stave's office. The chief inspector shook his hand, surprised, pleased — and ever so slightly hesitantly. ‘I had more or less persuaded myself that you might not come, not because of any bad feelings, but because you might want to seduce my secretary. But now I no longer have a front office for a secretary to sit in waiting for you.’
‘So that just leaves the bad feelings. I’m sorry, old boy. I’m not surprised you changed departments. Sooner or later even the toughest warrior has had enough of bullets and bodies. And as of an hour ago, I’m all the more pleased. The civilian governor wants to cooperate with Department S on, let's say, a sensitive issue.’
‘Discreetly, of course.’
‘You can tell your boss. But we don’t want to see it in tomorrow morning's newspaper.’
‘I’m already on a case.’
‘All the better. In that case it will be less obvious that you’re involved in something else on the side.’ MacDonald took a seat and lit up a John Players. He had long since given up offering Stave a cigarette. ‘The British administration has a few informants who’ve been relaying worrying news.’
‘Informers, you mean?’
‘Let's say attentive observers. One of the gentlemen came to see me an hour ago and handed me this.’ The officer took a leather wallet out of his briefcase and pulled two banknotes out of it: one had a greenish-yellow design on it with the number 5 in the middle and the words ‘Fünf Pfennig – BANKDEUTSCHER LANDER’. The other note was blue with a different design, a ten-pfennig note, the same issuing bank.
‘Somebody sold a bundle of these notes for Reichsmarks on the black market down by Goldbekplatz. At midday today,’ MacDonald added. It sounded as if he was just recounting an anecdote but his taut back and clenched jaw muscles betrayed how tense he was.
‘I have never seen a note for either five or ten pfennigs. And certainly never with either of those designs or that inscription,’ Stave replied with a smile, ‘but I can imagine why you’re here.’
The lieutenant used his left hand to dispel a cloud of tobacco smoke. ‘That's why we make such a good team.’
‘For weeks now people have been whispering about X-day and the new money,’ the CID man continued. ‘This morning my colleagues and I closed off the square in front of the city hall, for hours. Army trucks came up, crates were unloaded into the Landeszentralbank. Not exactly what I would call a secret operation. There are thousands of new rumours doing the rounds.’
‘And a clever forger is using that to spread fantasy money around, toy banknotes. But our informer says they’re being sold as the “money of tomorrow”. Most people dismissed it as nonsense, but a few more credible souls have actually bought these scraps.’
Stave thought back to a case the previous year which the CID team had found as incredible as it was hilarious: a printer in Hamburg had set up his equipment in the cellar to turn out ration coupons for lard and sugar and coloured them in by hand. They weren’t exactly first-rate forgeries but they were good enough for him to get hold of 430 kilos of lard and 320 kilos of sugar, a fortune. And he also remembered the lack of small change in the shop on Mönckebergstrasse. ‘Not a bad idea, printing pfennig notes,’ he muttered. ‘A lot
more credible than trying to pass off hundred-mark notes.’
‘And the more credible this forger is, the more people will buy his rubbish. And what then? Sooner or later they’ll realise that these things aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Yet again people will lose their trust in money. The Reichsmark is nothing more than a joke these days. I don’t need to tell you how much Germans are hoping for a new currency. And I’m not revealing any of my allies’ secrets when I tell you: yes, a new currency is coming at some stage. But what that currency will be and when it will arrive we have to keep a secret. On no account do we want to betray those hopes and destroy trust.’
‘Some wily forger could ruin the whole thing for you.’
‘In Hamburg and throughout the three western zones. If people get rattled they become suspicious. And when the new currency comes out, they’ll be suspicious of that too. And if they don’t trust it, then it will turn out to be a failure. You can’t have a stable currency without trust.’
‘Sounds as if you’d like this forger locked up today rather than tomorrow.’
‘Just get the guy, before he ruins everything.’
‘I’d like to have a chat with your informer.’
MacDonald gave a thin smile. ‘He's waiting in the next room.’
A young man. Early twenties, crew-cut silver-blond hair covering his chapped scalp, horn-rimmed glasses that were too imposing for his haggard face. The man didn’t get up when Stave came in and for a moment the chief inspector thought he was being deliberately impolite. Then he spotted that one trouser leg was rolled up and stitched together under his hips, and saw the crutches lying on the floor next to his chair.
‘So you’re the money collector,’ Stave greeted him, sitting down opposite. MacDonald fetched another chair from a room nearby, closed the door and reached to offer the man a cigarette.
‘Heinz Suchardt,’ he introduced himself, and lit up the John Players. His hands were shaking.
‘One of our most trusted friends,’ the lieutenant filled in, reassuringly.
‘So tell me about it,’ Stave said.
‘These notes were going around Goldbekplatz towards the end of the morning,’ Suchardt told him. He got less and less nervous with every word. Typical informer, Stave thought. ‘You can imagine all the black marketeers are worked up. All morning people have been talking about the trucks by the city hall. Nobody has any idea when it's going to kick off. And nobody knows what's going to happen when it does. Will anything change? Or will it mean the end of the black market? Or will it just get bigger? Ask three people and you get four different answers. There are some things you just can’t get any more. Sugar, for example. Everybody is hoarding everything. Even stolen goods fences are waiting for the new currency before they start selling. The price for one American cigarette has gone up overnight from eight Reichsmarks to twelve. People are frittering their money away as if they couldn’t care less if they had none left tomorrow. Everybody is nervous.
‘And now these bits of paper turn up. Somebody whispers, “That's the Allies’ new money!” Somebody buys it. Then he begins to think he's been done over, and sold worthless scraps of paper. So he sells it on. Not bad business in times when the fewer goods there are to buy, the faster prices rise. Then the next person sells them on again. And again. Eventually these two notes ended up in my hands. And they were expensive.’ Suchardt gave Stave a meaningful look.
‘You’ll get paid,’ the chief inspector assured him. ‘So who started circulating these notes?’
‘No idea. I bought them third or fourth hand.’
Stave had been on the point of telling Suchardt to come with him into the office where the CID kept their index of usual suspects, but right at the last moment he remembered the man's amputated leg. ‘I’ll fetch our index cards,’ he said.
A few minutes later he came back with a wooden drawer filled with hundreds of identification documents, the pride and joy of the Hamburg police since 1894, including every known hoodlum in the city, everyone who had ever been sought by the police, all in black and white on a sheet of paper. Photos taken face-on and from the side, fingerprints, last known address, any other identifying characteristics.
‘Take your time,’ he said.
‘Where am I supposed to start?’ Suchardt replied, clearly puzzled. ‘I don’t even know who started spreading these things on Goldbekplatz.’
‘See if you get a stroke of inspiration,’ the chief inspector reassured him, leaning back in his chair.
He sat there for half an hour while Suchardt slowly worked his way through the cards, until eventually the informer's hand did alight on one of the cards. He pulled it out: ‘I don’t know whether or not he had anything to do with these fake notes,’ he said hesitantly, ‘but he hangs around the black market sites and the regulars know he's a bad’un. He's dealt in forged currency before.’
Stave took the card from him, and MacDonald too leaned over to look. ‘Toni Weber,’ he muttered. Born in Berlin 1903. The police photos showed a thin man with short hair, not looking at the camera angrily or obdurately as most criminals did, but as if in shock. ‘An artist by trade,’ the CID man read aloud. ‘A painter, sculptor, graphic artist. Been in Hamburg since 1945, last known address one of the Ley huts, the emergency accommodation shelters on Langenhorner Chaussee. Fined towards the end of 1945 as a Hundertfünfund siebziger.’
‘That's not a word I learned in my German classes,’ the lieutenant said.
‘One-seven-five – “Paragraph 175” of the penal code made homosexuality punishable by fine,’ the chief inspector explained. ‘Dates back to the Kaiser's days. The Nazis upped the punishment and it's still in force today’ He gave a knowledgeable whistle. ‘Then Weber spent half a year behind bars in 1946, not for making eyes at a pretty boy but for forging food ration cards from edition 40. Using a paintbrush and ink.’
‘Not the same technique used on these notes,’ MacDonald commented.
‘Even so, somebody worth talking to,’ Stave replied.
‘Do I get my money now?’ Suchardt asked.
The chief inspector vanished into Bahr's office. For the past few months Department S had been allowed to pay informers in confiscated goods. Stave gave his boss the details.
‘Give the lad a pound of butter from our hoard of confiscated goods,’ he told him. ‘If it's really as important as your English officer friend says.’
‘Very generous. It would take a worker six weeks to earn enough for a pound of butter.’
‘We have hardly any informers left. As they say, nobody takes us seriously any more. We can afford to be generous. What do you plan to do next?’
‘I’m going to spread butter all over one happy informer and send him home. Then I’m going to take a walk down by Goldbekplatz.’
An hour later the chief inspector was sitting by the Goldbek canal in Winterhude in miserable drizzle. The square was shaped like a trapezium with five- and six-storey, colourfully plastered buildings from the late nineteenth century on two sides, and facing them were buildings of the same height, but cheap brick-faced rental blocks. On the western side of the space stood the abandoned Schülke und Mayr chemicals factory: all damp-marked bricks, missing windows, kicked-in doors, a fallen chimney and collapsed roofs. A good place, Stave thought to himself, for smugglers or black marketeers to hide things in the event of a raid. It was easy to recognise the professional dealers, the ones the press referred to as ‘food robbers’, by their good quality raincoats and expensive leather shoes. Apart from them there were children, housewives, office workers, perfectly normal everyday Hamburg folk. Stave had dealt with the black market for so long, both as a policeman and a customer, that he reckoned he knew the way things worked, even if previously he had only been familiar with the bigger illegal markets on the Hansaplatz and the Reeperbahn.
But something seemed to be different now, and it took him a few seconds to realise what it was. Things happened quicker. There was no longer the old pretence of st
rolling around aimlessly, half-discreet conversations, haggling behind umbrellas or shiny capes, no overcoats quickly opened and closed, no contraband goods quickly transferred by nimble fingers from one briefcase to another. People were walking back and forth briskly. There was a nervous energy hanging over the square, like the electricity in the air before a storm.
The chief inspector mingled in the crowd. It didn’t take long to realise why everyone was so worked up: there were a lot of would-be buyers, but not much for sale. The coffee beans that a week earlier would have cost 300 Reichsmarks a kilo, fifty times what they had cost before the war, had simply vanished, the Allies’ penicillin was gone too, as was the smuggled Sunlight soap.
Everything the dealers had to offer was either very expensive or very cheap, or very illegal. A young man tugged Stave's sleeve and opened his coat to reveal a dozen electric bulbs, tucked into specially sewn internal pockets. The CID man couldn’t help recalling the robbery down at Hamburg's main post office the week before last, when the labourers who were supposed to load mailbags on to trucks overnight had unscrewed two thirds of the light bulbs in the hall where they were working and sold them off. He could arrest the guy, but it would draw too much attention.
He came across a typewriter going for 2,000 Reichsmarks. An elderly woman whom Stave reckoned to be a war widow was selling a Leica for 40,000 Reichsmarks. ‘My husband was such a keen photographer, he always took good care of his camera,’ she was telling someone in a low voice. A beginner. What would Kienle do if he saw that? Pounce and buy it? A black marketeer pulled a thick bundle of notes from his hip bag and handed the women a few tattered notes. It might well be that she had just sold her last memento of her husband for a few pieces of worthless paper.
A boy was selling strips of asphalt that he had scraped off a road somewhere: ‘For the roof,’ he said earnestly when a puzzled Stave asked him about them. ‘You can heat them over fire and then stretch them out on top of cardboard. That’ll stop the rain coming in.’
The Forger Page 6