The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  Stave ignored the comment, pulling out a battered notebook. ‘What do you know about Toni Weber?’

  Michel just closed his eyes and sighed – rather too theatrically, the CID man thought. ‘Toni has a talent, a habit of doing favours for the wrong people. It's his only failing. He's a good man. And a very good artist. If we didn’t live in such barbaric times, you wouldn’t have to come to a tip like this to find out about him. You’d be reading his name in the newspapers.’

  ‘But we do live in barbaric times.’

  ‘Which is why you’re here. Toni Weber is no friend of mine, but he is a professional colleague. He was an independent artist in the Weimar Republic, a sculptor, graphic artist, did a bit of oil painting. When the economy started to go downhill in 1929, he caught the wind and became a prop supplier for UFA.’

  ‘He moved into film?’

  ‘It was a wise move. The more miserable people become, the more they go to the cinema. Apart from anything else, that was when “talkies” were first coming in. Those were gold rush days. The studios in Berlin needed people who were good with their hands to build the sets: castles, magnificent interiors, factories, costumes from all down the years, copies of works of art to decorate the set. Weapons of all sorts, chandeliers, ships, strange cars. You can’t imagine what we concocted from chipboard and plaster.’

  ‘And you two met up at UFA?’

  ‘Two failed artists on a pleasure steamer, yep. There was no way our works were going to end up in galleries any more, but we still brought a wage packet home every week. I started a family. Weber was a good colleague, if a little taciturn.’

  ‘Taciturn?’

  ‘Particularly after ’33. His private life was...’ Michel hesitated, ‘somewhat unconventional. And the art he had produced in the Weimar years wasn’t exactly the sort that Adolf would have featured in his planned museum in Linz.’

  ‘Degenerate art?’

  ‘Things wouldn’t have gone well for him after ’33 if he hadn’t moved into film. The movies were the great passion of old “Hopalong”. Goebbels was in love with the studios, as long as they produced what the gentlemen in the propaganda ministry wanted to see. We turned out movies, Goebbels was happy, nobody asked what we had done before ‘33. No visit from the Gestapo, no call-up to the front.’

  He pulled a face. ‘But in the end I’m afraid the front came to us. We were still shooting movies when the Ivans were already in the Berlin suburbs. While fighting our way back from a movie shoot, we got shot at with bullets! A few of the survivors said it was a low-flying Soviet plane. Others said it was a T-34 tank. The argument between them was heated and totally irrelevant.’ He tapped his prosthesis. The iron sounded hollow.

  ‘Did you and Weber come to Hamburg together?’

  ‘No, I was in the field hospital for a long time. My wife and the kids were somewhere in Berlin when the Russians marched in.’ He fell silent, staring at the ceiling. ‘Well, anyhow we found our way back to one another and made our way here by the end of ’45. She didn’t want to live anywhere there were Russians. I only came across Weber again here. I had thought he had been killed in that attack, but he had escaped. We met up again by chance at a meeting of the Artists’ Economic Community.’

  ‘Sounds like something bureaucratic.’

  ‘Actually, it was a self-help organisation. Members got ten sheets of watercolour canvas a month at a fixed price. Not much, but better than nothing. A simple hairbrush that I would once upon a time have picked up for eighty pfennigs was now costing twelve Reichsmarks on the black market. I made my own canvases. Jute sacks, picked up for fifty Reichsmarks a load, treated with lime and chalk. That way a finished painting would last long enough to still be hanging in some museum in five hundred years’ time. But that was hardly my biggest concern.’

  ‘Is it still even possible to sell paintings?’

  Michel gave a bitter laugh, and nodded at the cracked walls of the room. ‘Not for me. It would seem I lost my talent at some stage while working for UFA. When I was young I was quite a decent sculptor and woodworker.’

  ‘How about Toni Weber?’

  ‘His talent was undiminished, to say the least. In both fields. He got back into the movie business. Worked with Helmut Käutner, on the production of In jenen Tagen. Put the props together. And at the same time he was doing watercolours. Portraits.’

  ‘Of living people.’

  ‘Who else? There are a few Hamburgers who came through the whole mess just fine. The most successful painter in town is Ivo Hauptmann, the son of the famous author. It’d cost you three thousand Reichsmarks to have your wife immortalised. At least Weber would only charge you eight hundred.’

  Stave thought back to Schramm, the banker, and nodded: ‘A small but lucrative market.’

  The one-legged man scratched his head. ‘But it's growing. Nobody might know what will happen after X-day, but art is a good investment in uncertain times. The more insecure things get before the new currency comes out, the better things are for artists. For most of them anyhow, not for me. Weber had an exhibition recently at C&A. They had an opening day called “Art Special”. In a department store. But it was a success, as far as I heard.’

  ‘If he was so successful, why then was Weber forging ration cards in 1946? The rations cards you had hidden in your prosthesis.’

  ‘Thanks for the reminder. I had almost forgotten,’ Michel replied with a sour face. ‘Back in 1946 Weber hadn’t made his name yet. He was an artist but couldn’t sell anything. You have to keep at it. But when he came out of jail he made up his mind not to let anything like that happen to him again. And one way or another he succeeded. When he came out of Fuhlsbüttel, he actually began to sell a few paintings. Then Käutner came along with his movie. And since then things have gone well for him.’

  Stave wondered if he should ask Michel about Weber's sexual preferences. About any of the artist's ‘special friends’. But maybe he knew no more than he had already alluded to. The chief inspector was well aware that the ‘175ers’ kept their private lives very private. Unsurprisingly. He decided against pursuing the issue.

  ‘Do you know where I might find Weber?’

  ‘In Travemünde.’

  The CID man leant back, somewhat pleased at last to have got something to go on, but somewhat disappointed to find out that the man wasn’t in Hamburg. ‘Why?’

  ‘He met a new client at the C&A exhibition. One of those gentlemen who’ve come into a large sum of money recently.’

  ‘A black marketeer?’

  ‘You can say something like that out loud; if I was to say it, there’d be a few well-built young men at the door kicking hell out of my one remaining shin bone.’

  ‘But why is Weber in Travemünde?’

  ‘His new client has a holiday home on the Baltic. He's hired Weber to decorate it for him. The client invited him up there. He's been there for a few days now.’

  ‘Do you have a name?’

  ‘Yes, as it happens. Weber was so proud of getting the contract that he told everybody about it.’

  Five minutes later the CID man left the apartment, relieved that the ruin hadn’t collapsed on his head. He took a deep breath and shook his overcoat in the hope that it might somehow get the stench out of the fabric. He had an address in Travemünde in his notebook and a bad feeling in his gut. Toni Weber was a good businessman, getting a job as a prop assistant for one of the few movie production companies still functioning in Germany. As a painter turning out portraits of the well-to-do for a few hundred Reichsmarks. As the decorator of a house belonging to a black marketeer. Why should someone like him bother to forge a few obscure currency notes? As a repeat offender he would be risking several years behind bars. Stave feared that once again he was heading up a dead-end alley.

  It was just before five o’clock. He walked into the Fiedler dance-café, a one-storey flat-roofed building squeezed into a bombed space between two of the six-storey rented apartment blocks. On the shabby white-p
ainted façade beneath the café name, two words had been painted on: ‘Hot food’. Stave, who once again had had no lunch was for a moment tempted to grab an early evening meal, but then he remembered Anna's preferences and ordered two cups of ersatz coffee. As he handed the young waitress a single Reichsmark note she dropped her head shyly.

  ‘I can’t bring you any change. We haven’t got any coins, and no postage stamps either.’

  Stave was about to reply that he was happy for her to keep the change, when he realised just in time how absurd an answer like that was nowadays. Was the waitress to cut off a corner of the note? No coins meant no tips. So instead he handed her another Reichsmark note and said, ‘That's for you.’

  The café was quiet at that time of day. The CID man sat down at a wobbly Formica table by the window, with a view of the door. He wondered fleetingly how Anna knew this place. They had never come here together. Then he remembered the ‘G’ in the initials on her handbag, and the wedding ring she’d sold to the jeweller. You needn’t have worked for years for the CID in order to draw certain conclusions. He was suddenly seized by jealousy and lust. As well as the policeman's natural curiosity. Who was this G? Was it because of him that Anna had withdrawn from their relationship? A husband who had turned up again and his wife discreetly ended an affair? Should Stave use his connections with the police to take a little look into Anna's past? And while he was at it, maybe a little research into her present. Put her under discreet observation, just for a day or two, to find out who she might be meeting up with? Don’t do that to her, he told himself! Don’t do that to yourself!

  Ten minutes later Anna walked in, a little out of breath and her face red. His heart stopped for a moment at the sight of her. He wanted to kiss her, but only awkwardly held out his hand.

  ‘I’ve got something for you!’ she exclaimed, before throwing off her raincoat and sitting down next to him. ‘That's why I’m late, bogged down in the art market.’

  ‘Where else?’ he replied. The reality was that he was relieved she hadn’t been somewhere else. With another man.

  She pulled the photo of the bronze female head out of her handbag. ‘This is a depiction of the actress Anni Mewes,’ she declared triumphantly.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Stave asked in amazement.

  ‘One of the female curators at the museum recognised it as Anni Mewes.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of her.’

  ‘She was a middling-level star in the silent movies of the twenties. When she was a young woman living in Hamburg she played alongside Gründgens. In 1920 she moved to Berlin and appeared on stage alongside Marlene Dietrich. Then she had a few roles in UFA movies, and then a few turns on the stage. But nobody has seen anything of her for years. I’m not even sure she's still alive. But I know who made this bronze sculpture of her.’ Anna paused for effect and smiled at him, as happy as a young girl, a sportswoman who's just won a race. Stave thought she looked simply adorable. ‘An expressionist from Berlin, called Toni Weber.’

  The CID man choked on his ersatz coffee.

  ‘A friend of yours?’ asked Anna in surprise.

  ‘He's a man with a lot of friends. But I’ve only heard the name,’ Stave spluttered. ‘And not that long ago.’ He coughed a few times more and told her, without going into details that MacDonald would have preferred kept secret, about forged notes turning up on Goldbekplatz and that he wanted to question the artist about them. At the same time thoughts were whizzing through his head: expressionist art, degenerate art, portraits of silent movie stars. That would explain how someone like Weber had ended up in the movie business when the financial crisis struck: he had old contacts. It also explained why he had got back into the business after the war. All along he had maintained a certain reputation for painting portraits of the rich and famous.

  ‘Are the other sculptures that were found at the Reimershof also by Weber?’

  ‘The art historian I spoke to doesn’t think so. She's known Weber ever since the Weimar era. Did you know that he survived the war and is now living in Hamburg?’

  ‘In a Ley hut on Fuhlsbüttel Strasse. But he's rarely at home. He prefers to spend his time on the Baltic coast.’

  She laughed in surprise. ‘We complement one another remarkably well!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Indeed,’ Stave said pensively and then, before his reaction should become awkward to one or the other of them, abruptly changed the subject. ‘Was the banker, Schramm, ever a patron of this Toni Weber? Do they know each other?’

  ‘It's possible but my friend at the museum knew nothing about that.’

  The chief inspector leaned back. Weber's artwork had been in Schramm's bombed-out office building, and before that in his villa. Schramm's denial that he recognised the bronze. A dead Jew. Weber as a suspect, or a witness, maybe not at all involved in the forgeries circulating on Goldbekplatz. There was no pattern, he told himself, no pattern at all. Even so, he felt like a hunting dog that had caught the first wind, and at the same time he suddenly felt as if his luck had turned. I’ll ask Weber about the mystery of the bronze bust, he thought. That will allow me to get to him without it seeming suspicious. And only afterwards will I confront him with the other case. Normally a suspect guesses why a policeman wants to talk to him, and immediately puts in place a defensive strategy. But not in this case: Weber has to be made to think it's all about his old artwork. He won’t be on his guard, and that meant he might be able to take him by surprise and squeeze a few clues about the Goldbekplatz case out of him. That's if he was in any way involved in it.

  Stave managed to persuade Anna to have an early evening meal. That gave him the opportunity not just to sate his own hunger but also to spend another hour with her. The shabby café with its wobbly tables and the rain running down the dirty window had become the most beautiful place in the world. But eventually she got to her feet. ‘I have to go,’ she said.

  ‘Will we see each other again?’

  ‘Gladly.’

  And in that second Stave knew that he wasn’t heading down a dead-end alley after all.

  Travemünde

  Wednesday, 16 June 1948

  Stave and MacDonald were travelling in a dark-green British Jeep north-east up the old Reichstrasse 75. They had left Hamburg half an hour earlier. Fields on either side of the cobbled road, pale yellow flattened ears of corn, fields of potatoes like swamps. A bent-over farmer coaxing a carthorse across a meadow. The storm was blowing rain from the north-west. It must have looked just like this in the Middle Ages, Stave thought. Water was coming in through a rip in the car's canvas roof, which was already so damp that every time the vehicle with its hard suspension hit a bump in the road, the pair inside got a shower. The tiny windscreen wipers flicked back and forth but even so the chief inspector could see no more than a hundred metres ahead. He was glad he wasn’t driving.

  He had suggested to the British lieutenant first thing in the morning that he might accompany him to Travemünde. He had accepted and, as Stave had secretly hoped, suggested they take a British military vehicle so he wouldn’t have to borrow one of the patrol cars and go through the hassle of dealing with paperwork and petrol rations.

  For a while they sat behind a dented brown Opel Olympia that dated back to before the war. It had to be a German driving. The car had a number plate with the letter ‘BH’ followed by four numbers. Up until a few weeks earlier the occupation forces had used number plates beginning with ‘HG’ for ‘Hamburg Government’. Now it was called the ‘British Zone Hamburg’ — a tiny formality, expressed in just two letters, but nonetheless a sign of decreasing tension and a return towards normality, an abbreviation in one's own language and not that of the foreign soldiers. As they moved out on to the rural roads with less traffic the man in front accelerated away from the Jeep.

  ‘He’ll be at the Baltic coast before us,’ MacDonald muttered, trying to sound indifferent. But he didn’t fool the chief inspector, who could hear in his voice the disappointment of a drive
r who finds himself left behind.

  ‘I hope this journey isn’t for nothing,’ Stave said. ‘We haven’t reported it in advance.’ Telephone calls were banned between 7.30 in the evening and 7.30 in the morning to avoid the chance of the decrepit telephone network failing. That very morning the CID man had tried to make a call but the operator had told him he could be waiting up to six hours for a free line. He declined the opportunity to send a telegram via Lübeck: they were often conveyed to their ultimate destination by bicycle or on foot – it would be faster just to take a car.

  ‘Our artist won’t run off,’ the lieutenant said, clearly happier again. ‘Not when there's a bit of business in it for him.’

  ‘I’m not going to order something from him.’

  ‘No, but I am.’

  Stave looked at the officer in surprise. ‘Are you interested in art?’

  ‘I’m not a barbarian. I quite liked the bronze bust you showed me from the police files. I could do with one like it for my living room back in Scotland at some stage. With Erna's features. And if we can’t get hold of the bronze, then he can paint a portrait.’

  ‘Maybe somebody can melt down the shell of a hand grenade and make a piece of art out of it.’

  ‘You’re starting to sound like a pacifist. But I would prefer something solid in metal rather than a work on paper. And it would be a suitable reminder of Hamburg for Erna.’

  Stave's right hand tightened around the grip on the dashboard. ‘You’re leaving soon?’

  ‘Later this month. It's breaking Erna's heart. On the one hand she wants out of here, but on the other she's going to have to leave her son behind. He's just eight years old.’

  ‘Is he still living with his father?’

  ‘The court gave him custody. Even though...’ the lieutenant hesitated, looking for the right expression, ‘he's rather bad-tempered.’