For some reason or other, Stave felt uncomfortable without knowing why. ‘When you’ve learned, you won’t be able to drop by and see me any more,’ he said, and tapped his forehead with his right hand in farewell.
‘Wait a minute,’ the pathologist called after him. ‘I have something to show you, if you’re not too tired yet.’
‘The Reimershof corpse? That would wake me up.’
Czrisini smiled and walked off. He's shuffling, Stave thought. Normally the pathologist was first to turn up when a body was found, as agile as an excited bloodhound. Czrisini flicked a light switch and led him along a few corridors to the autopsy ward in the basement. He pulled a box out of a shelf and opened it.
‘Be careful. The fabric is fragile after so many years in the dirt and rubble.’
‘The dead man's clothing?’
‘What remains of it. Or at least what we could remove from the skeleton. The corpse was on its back. The shreds of clothing were just those in front of his ribs, the pelvis and the legs, plus the special leather on the shoes, which you already know about. No wallet, no documents, no coins or keys in the pockets.’
‘The bombing raid took place in the summer of 1945, a warm day if I remember rightly.’
‘It got a lot hotter when the firestorm broke out,’ Czrisini's voice faded. ‘But you’re right: at the time of his death the man was probably wearing light summer clothes. Summer slacks without a belt, a light shirt and a blue jacket.’
‘Dönnecke won’t get anywhere much with that.’
‘He knows nothing about it.’
‘Why did you keep your mouth shut?’
‘I didn’t keep my mouth shut – our colleague kept his ears shut. The chief inspector wasn’t very interested in what I had found. He wanted to relegate the case to the filing cabinet as quickly as possible. One way or another he fobbed me off. Of course it's all in my report, but I doubt it will ever be read. Including this interesting clue I found at breast level on the corpse, between his shirt and jacket.’ With a tweezers the pathologist held up a ragged scrap of cloth that lay beneath the other bits of clothing in the box. Yellow, with a black mark.
‘I recognise that,’ Stave mumbled. ‘It's a Jewish star.’
After he had said farewell to Czrisini, the chief inspector walked the rest of the lengthy trek to Ahrensburger Strasse, his head filled with his thoughts. From the first of September 1941, all the Jews in the Reich were obliged to wear the yellow six-pointed star. He remembered it well because their bosses ordered the enforcing of the rule ‘under penalty of severe punishment’ and every Jew known to the police who did not follow the regulation was to be arrested. It had seemed sordid to him to patrol Mönckebergstrasse to enforce the rule. And indeed he had come across a Jew, an ENT doctor Karl had gone to see when he was little. Those were the days when Jews were still allowed to treat non-Jews. The man had been walking down Hamburg's most prestigious shopping street without the star. It was as if he was challenging the law. Stave neither arrested him nor even spoke to him, just pretended not to know him. Afterwards he had worried for days someone might have noticed and denounced him for dereliction of duty. But nothing happened. He never saw the doctor again.
By the summer of 1943 everyone wearing a yellow star had vanished from the streets of Hamburg. The few citizens who referred to them merely said, ‘They’ve been resettled in the east.’ If the dead man found in the Reimershof really had been a Jew, then by summer 1943, he was definitely somewhere he should no longer have been. A Jew who’d gone into hiding and was holed up in an unused office? An office where somebody who didn’t dare venture out into the street was killed by a bomb?
It was Dönnecke's case, he reminded himself. But his former colleague wasn’t interested. And even if he had known about the Jewish star: after millions of Jews had died, Dönnecke above all people wouldn’t bother to look into the fate or even the name of a single dead Jew.
Maybe I should have stayed in Homicide, after all, Stave thought. Aren’t people and their fate more important than things, even works of art? But then he thought of Anna's remark when she had found out he had changed department. ‘Good.’ She had hated Homicide as if it were a rival: all his cases had stolen Stave's time, evenings, weekends, nights. And anyone who dedicated his life to deaths and murders would find in the end their soul poisoned by permanent suspicion, perpetual questions. That — and the look on Karl's face when he came back from the war and found Anna instead of his mother by his father's side.
Back home he found there was still a piece of bread in the fridge. The damp air meant a white mould had grown on the upper side of the loaf. He cut it away carefully, making sure he was wasting as little as possible. Then he cut it into slices and chewed each one individually and thoroughly. Washed down with water from the tap and his last pickled gherkin. He also had a few rubber potatoes but he was all of a sudden too tired to cook them on his old iron stove. Maybe tomorrow.
When he finally fell into bed, the short summer night already giving way to a grey mist, he fell straight into a dream: Anna and the skeleton dancing in the Winterhude Fährhaus, a mad dance to shrill music played by his son Karl on a violin. Nattenheimer, the auctioneer, was swinging his hammer like a conductor's baton and telling jokes. Dr Czrisini, a Woodbine in either side of his mouth, was piling the spectators’ chairs into giant crates. But what about me, Stave asked himself in his dream. I can recognise everybody, but where am I? He couldn’t see either his hands or feet, he opened his mouth but no sound passed his lips. As if he were a ghost, floating through the room, invisible to everyone else.
An artist's life
Tuesday, 15 June 1948
There was one person who wasn’t in his dream — the person he went to see the next morning, as early as he politely could: Public Prosecutor Ehrlich
‘We need to talk about the corpse.’
‘That's no longer your business, Chief Inspector.’
‘It's Dönnecke's business.’
‘But you have something to tell me about the Reimershof corpse? What's the problem?’
‘Dönnecke's the problem. He's not taking the case seriously.’
‘One of innumerable corpses in an innumerable number of bombed buildings. I have no intention of supporting your colleague's lack of engagement. But I have a certain understanding in that he has other murder cases to deal with. He is currently also working on two others.’
‘The dead man in the Reimershof was a Jew. The Reimershof was destroyed in 1943. It doesn’t take forty years working in Homicide to see that there's something that doesn’t fit there,’ Stave replied.
The public prosecutor leaned back in his chair. ‘That wasn’t mentioned in the report Dönnecke gave me. Tell me more.’
The chief inspector told him about his visit to Dr Czrisini and the remnant of the yellow star that the pathologist had found hidden under the corpse's clothing. And the scratches on his leather soles. And his club foot.
When he had finished Ehrlich beat a tattoo with his fingers on his desk. It was only then that Stave realised how exhausted he looked. ‘Have you heard the expression “drawing a line”?’ the prosecutor asked.
‘You’re laughing at me.’
‘It's very fashionable nowadays. “We need to draw a line.” You hear it everywhere. Time to move on, time to put the past behind us, time to start over. It's better to look towards the future than back to the past.’
‘In my opinion the unidentified dead man is a murder victim. Even if the murder happened a few years ago.’
‘The act of Navy Captain Rudolf Petersen also took place a couple of years ago. His story might be a lesson to you, as it was to me. He was a commodore of the German fast attack boat fleet. He had three deserter sailors shot – on the tenth of May 1945, after the German unconditional surrender. I took him to court.’
‘The old Aryans are afraid of you.’
‘Maybe not for much longer. I lost the case yesterday. He was set free. Obviously I am g
oing to appeal. But if a similar case comes up I’m not going to be so over-optimistic, to put it mildly.’
‘You aren’t going to ask Dönnecke to revisit the case?’
‘Petersen had three men shot in public after the end of the war. There are witnesses, documents, the man himself doesn’t even deny it. And even so I didn’t have him locked up for even a single day. And the evidence you’re presenting me with is a few patches of yellow cloth and scratches on old leather soles.’
‘It's not enough to charge somebody,’ Stave admitted, ‘but it is enough to pursue an investigation.’
‘For Homicide but not for Department S.’ Ehrlich looked at the man sitting opposite him, with the sad expression of an old owl. ‘What a shame you switched departments,’ he muttered eventually. ‘I could confront Dönnecke with what I know about the Jewish star. I could put pressure on him. I could force him to revisit the investigation.’
‘But you can’t set me on Dönnecke's heels. You’re the public prosecutor. But our old colleague is the one who has to produce results. If he can’t be bothered to get his fat backside off his office chair, then you won’t get any evidence with which to press charges.’
‘So what do you suggest?’
‘I could investigate it. Secretly.’ Then quickly added, ‘Discreetly.’
‘That was just the answer I was waiting for,’ the prosecutor said, with a thin smile. ‘I’m not a man to draw red lines. Ever. Ask about, Chief Inspector, discreetly, that's obvious. Use the artworks case as camouflage. It might be that they have something to do with the dead man? Give the man his name back. Give me proof that it really is a murder case. Then I will open formal charges, in the first place against person or persons unknown. And afterwards, if maybe you find out more, who knows?’
‘If anybody finds out I’m secretly interfering in Homicide matters, I’m screwed,’ Stave muttered. ‘Dönnecke will want my head on a plate. And Cuddel Breuer won’t lift a finger to help me. He's got me down as a quitter.’
‘There couldn’t be better cover for what you have in mind. And don’t forget me,’ the public prosecutor assured him.
‘I’ll keep you posted. Discreetly,’ Stave said, and got up off his seat. He was wondering if it was really a good idea to suggest this secret collaboration with the public prosecutor. But he had got his old adrenalin back: the joy of the hunt.
‘By the way, Stave,’ Ehrlich held up his right hand in a sort of greeting as the chief inspector put his hand on the door handle, ‘welcome back on board!’
An hour later Stave and Ruge were trundling along the streets in an old patrol car. The chief inspector was filled with the seduction of power given him by the fact he had a secret he couldn’t share with any of his colleagues. He felt like a secret agent. MacDonald would slap me on the back and laugh, if he knew about it. The rubber on the windscreen washers had gone weeks ago and they were leaving semi-circular streaks on the glass. Not even the police could get their hands on replacements; there were no more pre-war supplies in the warehouses, and making new ones wasn’t exactly one of the priorities of German industry right now. The chief inspector drove more slowly than he would have liked to, straining to peer out through the smeared and fogged-up windscreen.
‘Be careful on the narrow streets,’ the young constable warned him. ‘There's hardly any tread left on the tyres.’
‘I drove a panzer on the eastern front.’
When he saw Ruge open his eyes wide and stare at him, he made a face: ‘That was a joke.’ He slowed down further.
‘Is Dr Schramm expecting us?’
‘I didn’t call him. I thought it might be better to surprise him. That has its advantages when you’re interviewing someone.’
‘Even if he's not in?’
‘There’ll be somebody who can tell us where he is. Even if it means we have to spend half the day rattling around the streets in this old bath tub.’
Stave drove the awkward old banger over Lombardbrücke bridge and turned left. To their right was the white fairy palace of the Hotel Atlantic, to the left the Alster, grey under a layer of cloud. There was a solitary rower forcing his boat through the waves. Stave watched him, then suddenly turned the wheel and nearly crashed into the kerb. A big black car squeezed past them drenching them in a shower of water, dirt and the stench of exhaust fumes.
‘A Mercedes 170 V,’ Ruge called out, recognising it. ‘Should we pull him over?’
The chief inspector grabbed the steering wheel more tightly and forced himself to breathe calmly again. ‘We’ll get that blind driver another day, there aren’t that many new cars driving around Hamburg.’
Within a few seconds they had caught up with the black car because there was a British lorry grinding along the street and even the impatient driver did not dare overtake that. Stave stared at the curved wing, the chrome bumper and the perfect lacquer bodywork, as if it was an expensive piano. For a second he was almost tempted to shunt the old patrol car into the rear of the shiny bodywork, and had to pull back a bit in order not to get hit by the spray of the Mercedes.
‘That thing’ll do over a hundred kph,’ Ruge mused. ‘One-point-seven litre engine, thirty-eight horsepower, at least as good as the pre-war model.’
‘You’re in the wrong job to get your hands on a car like that.’
The policeman laughed. ‘Cars are my passion. Even as a child I knew all about them. For 170,000 Reichsmark cash, Mercedes will deliver a 170 V to your door. At least that was the case but the word is now that there are none in stock.’
‘Mercedes also waiting for X-day?’
‘Delivery issues is the official explanation. Whatever that means.’
They crossed the bridge by Schwanenwik and down Adolfstrasse towards Uhlenhorst: white villas, trees, hedges, almost no bomb damage. Nobody on the pavements.
‘Our racing driver is taking the same route as us,’ Stave observed as he saw the black limousine turn left into Fährstrasse. Beech trees and lindens on either side of the road, their branches dark and wet from the rain. White and ochre-coloured villas behind them and at the end of the narrow street a view of the Alster.
The black 170 V turned into the gravelled drive of a three-storeyed, bright yellow residence resembling a villa in Tuscany.
‘Number 80,’ Stave noted. ‘Nice house for a racing driver.’ He turned into the drive behind the Mercedes, parking the old patrol car diagonal so that he blocked the way.
A man in his mid-sixties with a large angular head, thick white hair, blue eyes and a cigar in the corner of his mouth climbed out of the Mercedes. A Prussian blue wool overcoat protected his massive body from the rain. The chief inspector recognised the brown and yellow checked lining: a Burberry, he reckoned, that had been the uniform of the Hamburg well-to-do before the war. The man was limping, his left hand leaning on a dark wooden walking stick with a heavy silver handle.
‘He's not happy that we’re parked in his entranceway,’ Ruge whispered.
‘Next to that villa our patrol car looks like an outsize ashtray,’ Stave replied as he opened the driver's door and stepped out. ‘We’ll give the gentleman something else to think about.’ He pulled out his ID card and announced ‘CID’ in a voice loud enough to be heard up and down the quiet street.
The elderly man stopped suddenly as if Stave had slapped him in the face. ‘Please come along.’ His voice was deep and used to giving orders. He turned round rapidly and, as fast as his limp would allow, walked past the Mercedes towards the house.
‘Dr Schramm?’ Stave asked when they reached the porch to the villa's entrance, protected from the drizzle. He introduced Ruge and himself.
‘What do you want of me?’
‘I have a few questions relating to the Reimershof. I have reason to believe you know the building?’
‘It was hit by a bomb. 1943. Totally destroyed.’
‘Not totally,’ the chief inspector replied, with a narrow smile. ‘May we come in?’
Schramm fumb
led a large key into the lock. Arthritis in his hands, Stave thought. Before the banker had fully turned the key in the lock it was opened from inside. A housemaid opened the door to them, a young woman in a white bonnet and black dress. The last time the chief inspector had seen a servant like that had been in the cinema, before the war.
‘Herr Direktor,’ she stammered.
‘It's alright, Elfriede,’ Schramm reassured her, took off his coat as if it was the most normal thing in the world and handed it to her. He placed his walking stick in a wicker basket next to the door, more carefully than the way he had handed the maid his coat. ‘These gentlemen and I are going into the piano room. We won’t be needing you.’
The maid vanished like a shadow: Stave thought he could almost smell her sense of relief. The banker took them into a room illuminated by a grey light through the multi-paned windows. Beyond them Stave made out a well-kept garden. His eyes wandered back to the room they were in to the Bechstein grand piano, to the heating stove with silver-framed sepia photographs on its shelves. The one in the middle showed a group of people posing together in an impressive room: Schramm, younger than now, a wizened woman in a wheelchair, a few much younger men and women dressed in the style of the 1930s. None of them was smiling. Rays of sunlight fell through the windows behind them, similar to those here in the piano room. The walls were covered with bookshelves. In front of them stood sculptures, vases with sumptuous flower arrangements and framed certificates behind glass.
‘My wife's last birthday,’ Schramm said, having noticed his visitor's gaze. ‘Christmas, 1938.’
‘She was poorly?’ Stave hinted that Ruge, who was clearly uncomfortable, should take a look. Maybe the uniformed officer would spot something.
‘Anaemia. The doctors tried everything, but nothing helped. She died in 1939, on the first of September. I don’t believe that was a coincidence.’
‘My condolences, though I realise it's far too late.’ The chief inspector turned away from the photo and turned to the elderly banker. ‘I was called to the Reimershof yesterday. Or rather to what remains of it. You had been a tenant there?’
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