The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  He was hungry and tired, his damp clothes stuck to his skin. He would have liked a warm meal and a hot bath. Another time. If he was to turn up on time at the Winterhude Fährhaus, he would have to hurry. The chief inspector could go part of the way on the tram, but after that he had to hurry along on foot. He didn’t care right now if people noticed his limp. He glanced at his watch. On his way he passed through Goldbekplatz; now, at suppertime and in the rain, it was almost deserted. The only people on the square were three girls, two of them holding a skipping rope for the third who was singing a song as she jumped, a song the Nazi League of German Girls used to sing on their street parades. He continued down Sierichstrasse, passed under a bridge of the elevated railway held up by rusty steel beams. It looked as if the whole construction could fall down as soon as the first train passed over it. It actually dated from the Kaiser's day and Stave wondered, not for the first time, how it was that massive buildings had simply collapsed in the hail of bombs, while a few more fragile things had remained untouched. Things like trees, or statutes. Or artworks in a ruined building.

  The Winterhude Fährhaus was a destination bar and restaurant on the chestnut tree-lined Hudtwalckerstrasse, right on the shore of the Alster, built in art nouveau style, with a little tower at one corner and a glass-fronted café along the pavement. It was lit up like a pleasure steamer, with shadows visible behind steamy windows. There had to be hundreds of people inside, the chief inspector was amazed to see.

  He pushed his way through the doors, at exactly five minutes to eight. The air was stuffy, from dozens of damp overcoats hanging to dry on the cloakroom hooks. His heart was hammering in his chest. He scoured the room. Anna. She was sitting in the last of the twenty rows set out in front of a podium draped in white velvet. There was a murmur of voices, clouds of smoke, and the scent of perfume. The atmosphere was as electric as at a theatre premiere. She hadn’t seen him yet. She was on her own, the seat next to her still free. Stave dashed over before somebody else got there first.

  ‘You?’ she exclaimed. For a moment her dark, almond-shaped eyes opened wide in shock, then they lit up. I just hope she's pleased to see me, Stave thought. How beautiful she was. That slim body he used to embrace. How long ago was it now? Her soft black hair, shimmering like velvet. She had put her hair up, but it seemed even longer than ever to Stave. He wondered whether, let down, it would reach her hips. He was so beside himself that all he could say was, ‘Your hair's got longer.’

  She smiled in confusion. ‘No hairdressers are working in Hamburg any more, unless you have cigarettes to push across the table. Nattenheimer here is the only one still taking banknotes. But what are you doing here? Are you trying to turn the remains of your savings into something silver?’

  What are you doing here, the chief inspector nearly asked in reply. He was painfully jealous of Ehrlich. Just don’t start playing the policeman, he reminded himself. ‘I’m educating myself,’ he managed to say instead, and in a few brief sentences explained to her about the artworks from the Reimershof.

  ‘Are you no longer with Homicide?’ she interrupted.

  ‘It just wasn’t for me any more.’ Should he mention his gunshot wound? The weeks he’d spent in hospital? His doubts? It would sound too dramatic. He was embarrassed in her presence. And so he left it at that.

  ‘Good,’ she said. Just that single word. No smile. But Stave took a deep breath and leaned back. This isn’t going to be a bad evening, he said to himself.

  There was a growing murmuring across the room, rising in waves along the rows and then dying away to an expectant silence.

  ‘Nattenheimer,’ Anna whispered, as if that would explain everything. ‘Just pay attention. We can talk later.’ She had pulled a notebook out of a small, elegant, leather handbag Stave hadn’t seen before. Also a typed list. Ehrlich's inventory of his stolen collection, the chief inspector assumed. But he did as he had been told and kept silent.

  A man leapt up to the podium with a lively step. In his early thirties, with an elegant suit. ‘A hearty welcome also to our guests from the other occupation zones.’ It was the pleasantly sonorous voice of an experienced speaker. ‘However, I have to inform you that anyone planning to journey abroad is barred from the auction, on the instructions of the military government.’

  He held up the first piece of jewellery. ‘A good, flawless piece,’ he announced. Stave stared in amazement at the necklace in Nattenheimer's hand, wondering how such things could still exist in the ruins of Germany. ‘Twenty-five gemstones, one point five carats, gold,’ the auctioneer continued in a seductive voice. ‘Offers?’

  There was silence for a moment. Nobody wanted to be the first. Eventually a bored-looking young man in the front row held up his hand. ‘Ten thousand!’ he declared, in an almost indifferent voice. Stave would have had to work another seven or eight years to earn that much. Where had the guy got the money from?

  Nattenheimer just gave a weary smile. ‘No jokes, please!’ he responded. There were a few laughs from the audience. And some muttering.

  ‘Eleven thousand!’ someone called.

  ‘Twelve grand.’

  ‘Thirteen.’

  The hammer finally fell at nineteen. Nattenheimer had only taken two minutes to boost the price of the necklace. Now he held up the next lot on the podium. One after another, like numbers performed by a variety artist: seventeen thousand for a gold ring, twenty-eight thousand for a large diamond. The expensive jewellery always attracted the same six or seven well-dressed young men with hard faces and calm voices throwing thousands about. After half an hour – the chief inspector had long since stopped adding up in his head how much money there had to be in this one room – Nattenheimer had flogged off his supplies of gold and gemstones.

  Now he brought out the silverware, a canteen of silver cutlery one minute, the next a single dessert spoon. All of a sudden there were other bidders: elderly men, fathers, younger men in less expensive suits. The sums offered dropped to about a single thousand, sometimes into the hundreds — until eventually a butter knife went for half a pound of butter.

  ‘That is worth a hundred and twenty Reichsmarks,’ Nattenheimer grinned. ‘Anybody offer more?’ The hammer fell.

  Next he turned to paintings. Kitsch in oil with gold frames, expressionist drawings, Romantic watercolours, two marble heads of young girls, dating from the nineteenth century — everything went, every style, any age. Anna studied every piece closely but in the end just shook her head almost imperceptibly, as an exhausted Nattenheimer finally abandoned the podium.

  ‘None of Ehrlich's treasures?’ Stave asked.

  ‘This was Nattenheimer's fifteenth auction. They have become a sort of popular spectacle. No fence in his right mind would try to sell off stolen goods here. It would be too noticeable. And in any case three quarters of those who come are just here to watch, beginners. But you can’t rule out the possibility of one of them trying to sell something of interest to the public prosecutor.’

  ‘Have you found anything for Ehrlich yet?’

  ‘Two sketches by Nolde. On the black market down by Nobistor.’

  ‘Does Ehrlich pay well for things like that?’

  ‘With his useful connections.’ A smile flitted across her face. ‘Very useful in my business.’

  Salvaging artworks and antiquities from the ruins, restoring them and selling them on to black marketeers or the British. Highly illegal. If Anna von Veckinhausen were to be picked up, an English summary court magistrate could sentence her to a year in jail. Unless a German public prosecutor were to put in a good word for her.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Was this evening professionally useful for you?’

  ‘I’ve also salvaged a couple of pieces of art from the ruins,’ he replied. ‘But none of them seemed as recherché as what Nattenheimer just showed us.’

  ‘The man is a born artist. Did you know that he's a trained opera singer? Bass baritone. The auction house belonged to his father up until 19
35. Then the Nazis closed it down for “racial reasons”. Somehow or other the Nattenheimers survived. After the war he couldn’t make much money singing, so he had a go at his father's business. And as you can see: trade is booming.’

  ‘People were throwing banknotes at him as if they were worthless scraps of paper.’

  ‘They are scraps of paper. People would do better to invest in gold and diamonds. And if they can’t afford that, then silver cutlery.’

  ‘Or just butter knives. I keep asking myself where people have got so much money from. In some cases, I can imagine.’ The chief inspector nodded towards two young men chatting with Nattenheimer behind the podium, clearly settling formalities. ‘The kings of the black market. But what about the others?’

  ‘The kings of the Nazi era,’ Anna laughed bitterly. ‘There were people who didn’t do badly out of it, providing they knew the right people.’

  ‘Or were themselves the right people.’

  ‘There was probably a thousand years’ worth of Nazi Party membership sitting on the chairs here tonight. Not all the savings stockings were burnt in the bombing. There are still more than enough Reichsmarks lying around, waiting to be turned into real valuables.’

  ‘Something solid,’ muttered Stave. ‘And so easy to vanish without trace. A canteen of silver cutlery complete with a receipt from an auctioneer and a note from the finance ministry certifying that the 15 per cent tax has been paid honestly. And all of a sudden there is no longer any link to Reichsmarks, or the question of how you might have earned them.’

  ‘But you’re not here looking for old Reichsmark notes?’

  ‘Old artworks. Or rather not really old artworks, more artworks with no owners. Let's have a cup of coffee here. We can talk about my case.’ And hopefully about us too, he hoped, though he didn’t dare even hint as much.’

  They strolled into the room next door and found one of the few free tables. There were lots of people who had been at the auction, Stave noticed, but not one of the well-dressed gentlemen who had bought gold or gemstones.

  ‘A coffee, please,’ Anna said to the thin, sweaty waitress.

  ‘Ersatz or real coffee?’

  ‘Ersatz coffee.’ She smiled at her companion. ‘Unless you’ve had a pay rise.’

  ‘Two ersatz coffees,’ Stave said. He pulled out the photos from the Reimershof and briefly explained what he had found out.

  ‘I would like to have found those,’ Anna murmured, studying the pictures closely.

  ‘You recognise them?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘No, not so far. But they’re expressionist pieces, probably from the twenties. Solid. Not something English officers would pay a lot for. Nor any of my black market customers. But there are connoisseurs who would be interested.’

  ‘Valuable pieces?’

  ‘Who can say for sure nowadays? You just saw someone pay more than a month's salary for a butter knife. But when we get proper money again, the game may be up – who would give valuable cash for a damaged concrete head? In the Weimar Republic sculptures like that would have cost a few hundred Reichsmarks, maybe a thousand.’

  ‘And afterwards?’

  She frowned. ‘Not even you are quite that naïve. As far as the Nazis were concerned that was “non-Aryan art”. Unsellable, except abroad.’

  ‘Abroad?’

  ‘The Nazis sold off lots of pieces they had looted from museums or had stolen from collectors in galleries in London, Paris or Switzerland. They plundered as comprehensively as the Red Army would do later.’

  The chief inspector sipped at his coffee. It had little taste, but at least it was hot. The Reimershof stood directly on one of the little rivers from which an inconspicuous barge could reach the harbour. The banker had certainly had better connections abroad, one of the reasons why the Gestapo had left him alone. Had he perhaps been planning a bit of smuggling, only to have the plan ruined by a couple of firebombs? Works that all of a sudden had become unsellable in Germany, but would fetch good prices overseas? Perhaps a little bit of a payback for the decline in his financial business since 1933? But how had Schramm come across these pieces of exotica? It might have been that these pieces didn’t actually belong to Schramm, but rather to museums or collectors. People who might now be asking themselves how their treasures had come to end up in the ruins of the Reimershof. Stave thought of Ehrlich's stubbornness, his genial implacability. The public prosecutor had built up his collection together with his wife, a wife who had later been driven to suicide by the Nazis. For Ehrlich it wasn’t about money, it was about memories. And he was the merciless enemy of whoever had stolen them from him. It will be interesting to interview the banker tomorrow, he told himself.

  ‘Do you know a Dr Alfred Schramm?’

  Anna shook her head. ‘A suspect? Or a victim?’

  ‘The one doesn’t exclude the other.’ He told her what he had found out about the banker.

  ‘May I keep the photos?’

  He handed her one of the few prints he had. She put it into her elegant handbag.

  ‘A new acquisition?’ Stave asked, nodding towards the handbag.

  For a second or two she blushed like a young girl who’d been caught out. ‘On the contrary,’ she admitted, stroking the soft brown leather. ‘I’ve had it for years. It was more or less the only thing I managed to save when I fled west. It's amazing what useless things we drag around with us, isn’t it?’

  Stave glanced at the handbag and stopped. Anna von Veckinhausen. There was a monogram in gold on it: ‘A.v.G.’. He felt faint. If this had been an interrogation, he would have asked her then and there about the ‘G’. As it was he just sat there, as if somebody had slapped him in the face.

  ‘I’ll ask around a bit,’ Anna went on, not having noticed his confusion. ‘Somebody must have seen these busts somewhere.’

  Stave's heart was hammering in his chest. He tried hard to keep the disappointment out of his voice. Disappointment that she had told him so little about her past. Fear. Jealousy. And then a wild irrepressible hope. ‘So we’ll meet again?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ve found out. In the Fiedler. Let's say five o’clock? Could you accompany me home now? It's curfew soon and I’m too tired to run.’

  The rain had died down. The walls of the bombed-out houses still shone damp, and the air was cool and heavy, the evening sky a dark violet between the empty window frames. Anna didn’t take his arm as she would once have done, but strolled alongside him at arm's length under the darkening sky. But Stave was happy just to inhale her perfume. When they passed through the glow from one of the few functioning streetlights, her hair shone.

  They exchanged only a few words. Not one word about their time together, or about his son, Karl. He made a point of not asking her questions, trying not to act like a policeman, which he so often did: What are you doing these days? Do you see Ehrlich often? Or have you found someone else? What does the ‘G’ stand for? He didn’t mention it, even though it was torturing him. Just concentrate on being a man walking through the city at night with a pretty woman at his side.

  An hour and a half later they were standing outside the door to her basement apartment in Röperstrasse in Altona. The Elbe was glistening like a strand of silver beyond the end of the street. A fishing boat was steaming slowly upstream to the moorings by the Altona warehouses, the bitter smoke from its funnel reaching as far as the building where they stood.

  ‘Thank you for accompanying me,’ she said.

  ‘Anna...’ but suddenly Stave couldn’t find anything sensible to say.

  She smiled, bent towards him and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You should spend your wages on razor blades,’ she whispered. ‘Before the money become worthless.’

  ‘It already is.’ He held the door open for her, and stale air met them.

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ she said.

  ‘Today is my lucky day,’ Stave replied, closing the door gently behind her, to prevent it slamming shut and waking the neighbours
. ‘I’m being serious,’ he added, but she could no longer hear him.

  Signs of recognition

  On his way back home Stave had the feeling, simultaneously uncomfortable and yet strangely pleasant, that he was somehow detached from the world around him. The partial façades on either side of the street felt like a gloomy set for some experimental piece of theatre, where the main roles were played by Death and Destruction. Yet he wanted to whistle a tune and dance just like the stars had done in the musicals of the thirties.

  He wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. At one point he was stopped by a British patrol, two soldiers in a Jeep, who let him go when he showed them his police ID, even giving him a friendly salute. The days were long gone when the slightest sound among the ruins had the British brandishing their machine guns.

  After three quarters of an hour the CID man found himself back in Neue Rabenstrasse, not even halfway back from Anna’s place to his own apartment. He hurried along, pulling his overcoat collar up against the drizzle that had resumed, then suddenly stopped and turned around.

  There was a light on in the pathology building, a warm yellow square in the façade of the badly maintained former villa. Behind the window lay Czrisini's office.

  Too worked up and too hungry to be tired, Stave tried the handle on the door on impulse. Unlocked. Who was going to break into a morgue, after all? He felt his way along the dark corridors until he found the door to Czrisini's office, knocked and walked in.

  ‘You scared me to death,’ the pathologist exclaimed.

  ‘I assume that doesn’t happen often in your job.’ Then he paused. Czrisini was in the process of packing books and files into a chest. His office, which normally looked like a shambolic museum storage room, now looked like the storehouse of a company that had gone bankrupt. ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘I’m tidying up. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I was out walking. It's pure chance. I saw the light was on. Is everything okay?’

  ‘Because I’m tidying up?’ Czrisini smiled. ‘Even old dogs can learn new tricks. I’m learning to be tidy. Or at least trying to.’