The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  ‘He hits the boy?’

  ‘The kid can usually dodge out of his way. He has only one leg.’

  ‘Is the guy out of work?’

  MacDonald gave a bitter laugh. ‘A cripple these days? Of course he's out of work. But he isn’t an adulterer. The divorce is Erna's fault, so she loses custody. That's the law. One way or another there's a price to be paid by everyone in this mess.’ The lieutenant stared religiously straight ahead.

  ‘What price do you have to pay?’

  ‘Right now, whatever Weber charges me.’

  ‘Art is expensive.’

  ‘All things are relative. Let's see if the artist's eyes light up when instead of Reichsmarks I wave pound notes in front of him. Maybe they’ll smell better. When the world's back to normal someone like Weber could become an international star: galleries in London, New York, Paris. I’ll resell his work, make a huge profit and quit the service.’

  ‘You’d sell a portrait of Erna?’

  MacDonald shook his head. ‘You’re right. I need to order two things in Travemünde, one sculpture for the living room and another for a safe in the bank.’

  ‘Sounds as if you got the idea from a certain Hamburg banker. And your nice little investment will only pay off if it isn’t Weber turning out the forged pfennig notes your superiors are so worried about.’

  ‘If that turns out to be the case, then he’ll have more time for painting. In that case, of course, there’ll be no trips to art exhibitions abroad.’

  ‘Do you think he is the forger?’

  ‘In the wake of all you’ve told me about Weber, it sounds absurd. But it does seem to be our only lead in the case.’

  ‘Not just in this case.’ The chief inspector told him in detail about Schramm apparently having no recollection of the bronze bust despite it being in his villa in 1938.

  ‘Do you think the two cases could be connected?’

  ‘What could these curious banknotes have to do with a bronze bust's sudden reappearance?’

  ‘Schramm is a banker?’

  Stave gave the British soldier a sceptical glance. ‘That's a very vague connection. Too vague to present to Cuddel Breuer, or even to Public Prosecutor Ehrlich.’

  ‘But it's crossed your mind, hasn’t it?’

  ‘You know me too well,’ the chief inspector admitted. ‘Art, money, a banker — it all fits together somehow. But I don’t have anything more to hand.’

  ‘Not yet, anyhow. We’re almost there.’

  The Baltic coast was an idyll. It was as if there had never been a war: houses for warm summer days with terraces, colourful window boxes, well-tended front gardens, hotels with rooms with a sea view for five hundred Reichsmarks a night, including breakfast with marmalade and real coffee. The air smelled of salt and grass and the rust from the funnel of a big Swedish ferry anchored in the harbour.

  ‘Glad to see my colleagues in the Royal Air Force at least forgot this town,’ the lieutenant said. Stave remained silent. The two of them drove past the casino – an elegant art nouveau building – recently reopened.

  ‘Is it just because of the rain that there's hardly anybody around?’ MacDonald asked. ‘The casino is empty, the terraces abandoned. Travemünde is supposed to be the paradise of the most successful black marketeers. The casinos and the hotels must have opened for some customers.’

  ‘For the black marketeers from all the occupation zones. You’re right. Up until a few weeks ago there were people up here having fun that was worth several thousand years in jail. But the rumours about X-day spoiled their mood. They all want to be at home when the time comes. My boss at Department S has stomach cramps because all the black marketeers, who in a normal summer have fled the city, are now squatting in Hamburg and he has far too few men to deal with their invasion.’

  MacDonald pulled up next to a hotel. Stave asked the bored porter for directions to the address Michel had given him. Five minutes later the Jeep came to a halt outside the house Toni Weber was supposed to be decorating: a villa with a square extension reminiscent of a lighthouse. A view of the Baltic. A front garden as big as a marketplace, and behind the house the chief inspector spotted the red earth corner of a tennis court.

  ‘Nice place,’ MacDonald commented admiringly.

  ‘It would be a real pity if we have to arrest him in the middle of his work,’ Stave said, hauling his bone-shaken body out of the car.

  The man who opened the door to them was gaunt and had a stoop that made him look smaller than he was. Brown hair, just slightly too long, big eyes and the brown skin of someone used to working in the open air, unusually powerful hands with long fingers. The chief inspector recognised him from his photo in the police file.

  ‘Herr Weber,’ he said, ‘we’d like to talk to you.’ The man's face displayed naked fear when he looked at the police ID card held up to his face and saw the British uniform and the Jeep drawn up to the door.

  ‘This isn’t my house,’ he stammered.

  ‘We’re not looking to buy it. We just want some information from you.’

  ‘Is this an interrogation?’

  ‘There are no charges against you.’

  Weber led them in. Tall windows, bright rooms that gave the impression of being bigger than they actually were, because of a lack of furniture or curtains. Weber walked through the house to the back where a room opened out on to a terrace and the garden. Roses in curved beds, the first blossoms already out: red dots in a world grey with rain. They reminded Stave of drops of blood.

  ‘I need to close the pots quickly to stop the paint drying up,’ the artist explained. There was a ladder in the room and newspapers covering the parquet floor. To the rear there was a picture outlined in black on the plaster which Weber had clearly just finished covering with a strong-smelling paint: a Baltic landscape with rolling waves, sailing ships, seagulls, clouds, a lighthouse on a steep slope to the shore and a steamer on the horizon.

  ‘It's what the owner wants,’ Weber explained in a tone of voice that made quite clear he wasn’t taken by his own work.

  ‘Not exactly expressionist.’

  ‘That's putting it kindly. But these days you take whatever you can get. And it's good exercise for the hand and eye and the feel for colours and proportions. But you haven’t come all the way out here from Hamburg to study modern murals.’ Weber looked at them nervously.

  Stave pulled the police photo of the bronze bust out of his coat pocket. ‘Do you recognise this?’

  ‘Anni Mewes,’ he exclaimed. All of a sudden his nervous tension disappeared. ‘She sat for me as a model, not long after I finished my training in Munich. Must be more than twenty years ago. Where did you find it? It looks in a dreadful state, and all that rubble around it.’

  The chief inspector told him about their discovery in the Reimershof, and showed him photos of the other pieces. ‘They aren’t mine,’ Weber replied, ‘even though they look somehow familiar. But there were so many expressionist works about then. Before 1933.’

  ‘How could your bronze bust have ended up in the Reimershof?’

  A shrug of the shoulders. ‘After Hitler seized power it was wiser not to hang around galleries or with artists any more. I got into UFA, which I am sure you know from your police file. I’d done the bust of Anni Mewes long before that for a film fan in Berlin. A rich guy. He might not have been just a film fan but maybe also one of Anni's lovers. But what business of mine was that? I had by then more or less forgotten it — until the summer of ’37. My bronze bust ended up in the Degenerate Art exhibition after that.’

  ‘You were in the company of some famous colleagues.’

  ‘As far as Goebbels was concerned we were all enemies of the people. You could read that every day in the newspapers. And in the weekly cinema news there were films saying the same. In one of them where Hitler and his propaganda minister were wandering through the exhibition making jokes, you could see the Anni Mewes on a pedestal in the background. When I saw that in the cinema I crep
t out while it was still dark. I worried every day that the Gestapo would come knocking on my door.’

  ‘And did they.’

  ‘No. The Degenerate Art exhibition contained hundreds of other pieces. I gradually calmed down. The most famous works were either destroyed by the Nazis or flogged off abroad. The rest ended up in warehouses and were simply forgotten about. My Anni Mewes was in the second group. I came across it later, however. It turned up in a propaganda film.’ He laughed. ‘The bronze bust of Anni nearly featured in more films than the good lady herself.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Spring of 1938. I don’t remember which day exactly.’

  Stave did his sums. The bust had been presented in the Degenerate Art exhibition in the autumn of 1937. Most of the works on display had been commandeered. He remembered the police helping, taking down unpopular works from the walls and carrying them off. They emptied whole rooms like that. By then, at the latest, the Anni Mewes bronze must have been taken from whoever had commissioned it. In the spring of 1938, it turns up in some little film – even if just as a prop, a scene setting designed by the ministry for propaganda. In the winter of 1938, however, the bust is suddenly in the private rooms of the Hamburg banker, Dr Alfred Schramm. Had he bought it from the propaganda ministry? A banker who was no friend to the Nazis? It seemed unlikely. Then in the summer of 1943, the bronze ends up in the ruins of an office building in which Schramm had rented rooms. It was an odd odyssey.

  ‘Do you know a Dr Alfred Schramm?’

  Weber made a pained expression. ‘The banker? A great patron of the arts and artists. And, unlike many such men, he doesn’t only favour the works of dead artists, but also contemporary masters during their lifetimes. At least a few of them. If he discovers an artist it's as good as winning the lottery. Unfortunately I wasn’t that lucky back in the twenties. And from 1933 on I didn’t do anything that anybody would have collected.’

  ‘And since 1945?’

  Weber laughed. ‘If Schramm were my patron, do you think I’d be pushing my paintbrush around here?’ He nodded at the Baltic scene on the wall.

  ‘Have you ever met Schramm personally?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Do you know if Schramm – whether through a middleman or a gallery — ever bought one of your works?’

  ‘I’ve never received money from him. And I doubt he has ever bought any of my works.’

  ‘No money from Schramm? Not even before the war — 1938 for example?’

  ‘Not one pfennig. Never.’

  In that case, there we have a motive for Schramm to say he’d never seen the bust, Stave thought to himself. He took a deep breath. The exhausting trip up to Travemünde hadn’t been in vain. He briefly wondered if he ought to tell Weber about the photo in Schramm's villa, but decided against it. Nor would he ask Weber about the anonymous corpse found in the Reimershof. He glanced at MacDonald. The Brit seemed unhappy. The chief inspector suppressed a smile. The lieutenant had little interest in the circuitous meanderings of the bronze bust. He wanted to know about the forged banknotes.

  ‘There's one other thing,’ the chief inspector said, sounding as chatty as possible as he pulled the pfennig notes from a bag.

  Weber stared at them as if they were live hand grenades. ‘Oh no,’ he spluttered, ‘I don’t do stuff like that any more. The business with ration cards was a mistake. I was hungry. But even so it was stupid.’

  ‘How do you know these are forgeries?’ Stave asked softly.

  ‘Pfennig notes in those colours? What else could they be? So that's why you’re here. The bronze bust means nothing to you.’

  The CID man refused to be drawn. ‘Where were you last Monday?’

  ‘In Travemünde. My client has sorted out a room upstairs for as long as I’m working here. I’m leaving tomorrow but I’ve been here on the Baltic for the last two weeks.’

  ‘Do you have witnesses?’

  ‘The baker down in the village. The cleaning lady who comes by once a week. The neighbour who must have seen me at work through the window. He's...’ Weber hesitated, ‘...a very good friend.’

  ‘We will check those out,’ Stave replied, and made a note, angrily underlining the words. If that was true, then Weber hadn’t been on Goldbekplatz when the five- and ten-pfennig notes turned up. That would have been too simple.

  ‘Take a closer look at these notes,’ he said to Weber. ‘You’re an artist. Maybe you’ll recognise another artist's stylistic signature. Could it be somebody you know who made them?’

  ‘I’m not in that business any more,’ Weber protested, but still lifted up the notes, looked at them, held them against the light, and then eventually shook his head. ‘I couldn’t have done these even if I’d wanted to. Nor could anyone else I know. When I forged the ration tokens, it was on cardboard, using a pen and Chinese ink. These have been printed on special paper.’

  ‘With a mint machine?’ Stave asked.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. In either case they’re from a professional printer. Look here.’ He held up the ten-pfennig note to the light and pointed to the edge. ‘That isn’t quite right. The colour and the lines are separated by a millimetre or two, the pattern overlaps the blue colour ever so slightly. It's either a print mistake or an imperfect forgery. But it hardly matters as the note itself is just ridiculous.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because ink and paper are hard enough to get in the occupied zones, as any artist will confirm,’ Weber replied despairingly. ‘Any forger would confirm it too. This scrap of paper and the blue colour on their own are worth more than ten pfennigs. Who's going to print banknotes that cost more to produce than they’re worth? Who would print banknotes if it would make him poor? Back then I spent a lot on the materials for the ration cards: pens, ink, the cardboard. But in the end I got more for them than it cost to make them.’

  ‘Not counting the six months in jail,’ Stave interjected.

  ‘If you’re having a go at banknotes,’ Weber continued calmly, ‘then maybe ten-mark notes might be worthwhile, hundred better still. But pfennigs? In notes that nobody will recognise? Forgers can do their sums.’

  The chief inspector thought back to when MacDonald first presented him with the notes and said that their sudden appearance could undermine confidence in the new currency. Maybe that wasn’t a side effect these odd notes might have, but actually their primary purpose? Maybe whoever turned them out wasn’t interested in profit but in creating uncertainty and chaos? The CID man was beginning to feel as if he’d been looking in completely the wrong direction.

  ‘You’ve been of help to us,’ Stave said, folding the two notes again. All of a sudden he felt tired.

  MacDonald had listened to the interview in silence. Now he looked out of the window and took a deep breath. He was clearly disappointed too, though he forced a charming expression on to his face.

  ‘I have one other matter,’ he began.

  Over the next quarter of an hour, he discussed rates with Weber for a portrait of Erna Berg. The artist became more friendly, excited even, and began gesticulating and walking up and down the empty room. A bronze bust? Impossible! There wasn’t enough metal available in the whole occupation zone, even if it was a British officer asking. A painting?

  ‘If the lady is willing to sit for me,’ Weber said.

  ‘Not enough time for that,’ MacDonald replied. Yet again Stave was taken aback. They’re leaving that soon, he thought to himself.

  ‘But I don’t even know the lady,’ the artist protested.

  ‘I have a photo here. From a studio.’ The lieutenant pulled out of his uniform pocket a sepia-brown photograph wrapped in greaseproof paper and handed it over to Weber as if it were a treasure.

  ‘To paint a portrait in oil based on a photographic print is about as artistically challenging as that Baltic landscape on the wall,’ the artist exclaimed.

  ‘I’ll pay you ten pounds for it,’ MacDonald promised.

  ‘I won’t even try
to convert that sum into Reichsmarks,’ the artist exclaimed, puzzled. ‘But I’m your man. I’ll have to borrow the photo for a while. A week?’

  ‘One week,’ MacDonald said, holding out his hand and shaking Weber's hand to seal the deal.

  One week, Stave thought. He's in Hamburg at least that long.

  When they said goodbye a few minutes later at the door of the villa, Stave, by then almost at the Jeep, turned back to the artist and said: ‘How much are you being paid for the Baltic idyll?’

  ‘Three thousand Reichsmarks cash,’ Weber replied, smiling nervously. ‘I’ve heard that may no longer be as much money as I thought when I took the commission. That's why I’m going back to Hamburg tomorrow. I don’t want to miss anything. It could be that what I’m involved in here might not just be bad art, but a bad deal too.’

  ‘It would appear you’re not the only one doing a bad deal,’ the inspector muttered, touching the brim of his rain-soaked hat in farewell.

  They hung about in Travemünde for another hour, asking questions of neighbours and local shopkeepers. Weber's story held up, he’d been on the coast for days and nobody had seen him leave, not even for a short walk.

  ‘Our artist has an alibi,’ MacDonald said.

  ‘And I have one more problem,’ Stave replied. ‘Even if I’m not particularly surprised.’

  On the long drive back Stave stared silently out of the window at the grey landscape. He reflected on the two cases, dissatisfied with himself. And on the secret investigation which nobody from Homicide dare find out about. I switch from Homicide to Department S, a step backwards in the eyes of most of my colleagues. And the next thing you know I’m dealing with another corpse. And I’m getting nowhere with my first official case. Cuddel Breuer is going to think I never recovered properly from the gunshot wound. That I’m burned out. And maybe he's right. I must have heard something in the interview today, some detail I need to get to grips with.

  He was only aroused from his thoughts, rudely, as they were already passing through Ahrensburg and the groaning of the twelve-cylinder motor made a strange sound almost as if the engine had swallowed itself.