The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  ‘Sounds a good enough reason to risk a career by staging a break-in,’ MacDonald replied.

  Late that afternoon, Stave returned to his office. He had pointed out to MacDonald a particular window to the rear of the CID where the lieutenant should wait for him. Stave waited on the fifth floor until late. Eventually Wilhelm Bahr, the head of Department S, left for home. All of the other staff had left long ago. He could hear no doors banging on other floors, no loud voices, no clatter of footsteps on the linoleum. The great slab of a building was sunk in a sea of silence, the abandoned corridors lit only by the glimmer of emergency lighting. Stave tiptoed down the stairs carefully, feeling as if he were creeping through a labyrinthine witch's castle. From the bottom of the staircase he took a careful glance into the anteroom: an elderly uniformed duty officer flicking through a copy of Die Welt, an ancient ‘people's radio’ next to him, its valves glowing as it poured out the gentle music of NWDR's evening programme. The man was hard of hearing. All the better.

  Stave crept down the ground floor corridor to the lavatory, the window of which he had indicated to MacDonald. He went into a cubicle, locked the door and pushed open the window.

  ‘Easier than I thought,’ MacDonald whispered, pulling himself up and through the opening. He was out of uniform, in dark trousers and a similarly dark old shirt. ‘Maybe I should change jobs.’

  ‘If they get you, you’ll end up in jail.’

  ‘If they get you as a soldier, you end up in a hero's grave, and that's clearly not the better alternative. Breaking and entering – the longer I work with you the more criminal experience I acquire!’

  ‘Follow me,’ the CID man said in a low voice, closing the window.

  ‘Have you got a torch?’

  ‘This isn’t the first time I’ve done this,’ Stave reminded him. He turned on the little torch and a yellow light danced around the washroom. ‘We need to get up to the sixth floor,’ he whispered.

  Dönnecke's office wasn’t locked. There was a stench of cigar smoke and sweaty clothing in the air. On his desk several sets of documents and files were piled up askew, while several of the doors and drawers of the cupboards were part open, the office of a man who felt sure nobody would dare snuffle around in it.

  MacDonald took a quick glance around. ‘I’ll leave this mess to you,’ he whispered. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start and haven’t a clue what I’m looking for.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ Stave admitted. ‘Keep watch at the end of the corridor, where you can keep an eye on both this office and the stairwell. If the duty officer should decide to do his round, warn me.’

  The chief inspector carefully thumbed his way through the documents, taking care not to let any of them slip out of position. For the most part the files covered cases long closed. What did Dönnecke actually do? Eventually, almost hidden between two towers of paper, he found a thin folder with a badly typed label that read, ‘Unidentified body, Reimershof, 11 June 1948’.

  Stave grabbed the folder, sat down and flicked through the contents quickly: Kienle's official photos, a very brief record of an interview with the Trümmerfrauen, carried out by a very young officer and only days after the body and artworks had been discovered. Czrisini's autopsy report – with the reference to the Jewish star the pathologist had found among the remnants of clothing. No note next to it, no follow-up investigation, at least none that could be found in the files. The chief inspector asked himself if his colleague had even bothered to read the autopsy report. No more interviews with any other potential sources. Not even a Red Cross missing persons search. Dönnecke's final report, barely one page. The conclusion read: ‘No evidence to suggest either murder or suicide. Probably a victim of the 1943 bombing raids. Unidentified. First name: Rolf (see attachment).’

  The CID man blinked, and flicked through the rest of the documents. A handwritten comment, probably by one of Dönnecke's underlings, along with another official photo showing crushed together scraps of leather found underneath the corpse when it was lifted up. Maybe the remains of a briefcase, disintegrated in the rainwater and bodily fluids. No coins, no keys, no photos. But a remnant of paper, grey cardboard, maybe the membership card for a club or a library or something of the sort. The ink on the scrap was smeared with only one word, barely legible: ‘Rolf.’ The cardholder's forename? Or that of whoever had issued the card? One way or the other, no matter how vague, it was the only reference that they had to a name connected with the deceased.

  Stave could feel his heart beating faster. That was what had kept him in CID all those years: the fever of the hunt. He could see no trace of that in the other paperwork in front of him. Sober words, no suggestions, no speculations. If nobody else had noticed the fragment of paper with the name on it, Stave suspected Dönnecke would simply have ignored it.

  He closed the folder. What had he expected?

  More out of disappointment at this meagre discovery, and in genuine hope of finding anything else, he pulled open the desk drawer: a pair of glasses, two cigars, a couple of pencils and a single piece of paper, a page from a notebook, scribbled in Dönnecke's stiff, pedantic handwriting, the heading underlined twice: ‘Memo re: Stave.’

  The CID man leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. His hands were shaking. He recalled the rumour that Dönnecke had had something to do with the Gestapo. Their headquarters in Hamburg had been the Stadthaus, and old Dönnecke had never worked there. As far as anyone knew?

  ‘Stave is investigating the “artworks” case,’ he read.

  This guy was running a dossier on me, he realised in amazement.

  ‘Stave no comrade: politically and professionally unreliable. Contacts with the English. Unstable since the death of his wife in 1943, condition aggravated by bullet wound this past summer. Left Homicide, just working for Department S.

  His artworks investigations have led him to Schramm! Schramm's Gestapo file — vanished. Burnt? Check out.

  If Stave makes difficulties, exert pressure: son returned POW, divorce (A. v. G. alias A. v. V.)’

  Stave felt so faint he was almost sick. It was clear that Dönnecke felt threatened by the investigations. Something to do with Schramm, the bronze bust and the Gestapo. Something I’m not supposed to find out. And if I do find it out, he’ll interview Karl. Or... he closed his eyes in exhaustion. ‘Divorce,’ he thought, and ‘A.v.G. alias A.v.V.’ Anna. The guy somehow or other knows we had a relationship. He knows I’m a widower. Divorce — that has to mean that Anna was married. That it would be Dönnecke of all people who would remove his final doubt. That damned ‘G’.

  He felt like ripping the office to pieces, smashing everything, big and small, recklessly, rushing out into the city by night, kicking in the door of Dönnecke's apartment and... Get a hold of yourself. He sat on Dönnecke's chair and took a deep breath. It was more than just recognising his own fury that somebody had been snuffling around in his private affairs. Anna was married. He glanced out of the window, the drops of drizzle running down it shining like diamonds in the light of a streetlamp.

  Diamonds. The thought took him back to last summer when he had watched Anna going into a jeweller's in the colonnade to buy something: an old wedding ring. I’m an idiot, he told himself, idiot, idiot, idiot. Dönnecke's right. Pathetic.

  He jumped with shock when suddenly the office door opened. ‘Have you found anything?’ MacDonald appeared like a worried ghost in the torchlight.

  ‘More than I wanted to,’ Stave answered wearily.

  ‘The case is closed?’

  ‘No, but a few jigsaw pieces have turned up and might be forming a picture. The body found in the Reimershof may have had the forename Rolf. There may have been a Gestapo file on Dr Schramm that Dönnecke is determined shouldn’t fall into my hands. That may be why he dragged his feet on the investigation.’

  ‘So our adventure has paid off.’

  ‘More than I imagined.’ Stave got to his feet. He wished he had never set foot in Dönnecke's office. But there
are things you can’t tell even to a friend. ‘Let's get out of here, before somebody sees us.’

  The Gestapo legacy

  Friday, 18 June 1948

  The sun hadn’t yet risen by the time Stave re-entered the CID headquarters. He hadn’t even bothered to get into bed overnight. His apartment stank of mould and damp. He had left the windows open for hours. Hopefully it would dry out at some stage. His mind was full of thoughts — some of them ideas that led him down a blind alley, but also others he was afraid to think through. So he sat there shivering at the kitchen table before damp sheets of paper, on which he wrote two letters: one to Anna, the other to a former Gestapo agent.

  He needed to see Anna again, to talk to her, to somehow come on to the subject of her past. He hadn’t mentioned anything about Dönnecke's snuffling around, let alone what his colleague had found out. He didn’t mention the ring. Or ‘G’. He had just asked to meet up and suggested the only restaurant in the vicinity of her flat. ‘Let's meet up tomorrow and eat at Sellmers Kellerwirtschaft.’ He wanted to add, ‘Call me at the office if you can.’ But he was afraid to speak to her without being able to look her in the eye. So instead he just ended with, ‘If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you’re coming.’

  Stave had pushed the letter through the cap beneath the door of her basement apartment. He had walked to Röperstrasse along empty streets as it was still curfew. Layers of mist were rising from the Elbe, the walls of the houses glistening with damp. Her flat was in darkness. Hopefully she was still asleep, he thought, rather than the darkness meant she was somewhere else.

  The other letter was also a request for a lunchtime meeting – though not one for which the chief inspector intended to pay the bill for two. During the ‘brown years’ Stave had tried to keep out of the way of the Gestapo — which wasn’t easy given that in Hamburg alone there were at least two hundred men working for the political police. People referred to their headquarters in the Stadhaus in whispers, or better not at all. Already by the April of 1933 the first prisoner there had died — or rather the first that Stave had heard of. The dockworker Gustav Schonherr had been tortured, and following this ‘in-depth’ interrogation had managed to ‘fall’ out of a window in broad daylight. It was not just among his colleagues that it was said one or another officer might have helped him plunge to his death. The whole city knew – and was meant to know: the more the Gestapo were feared, the more successful their investigations.

  Nonetheless in the autumn of 1938, the morning after the Reichskristallnacht, a Gestapo man had turned up in Stave's office. Just why he had done so, the chief inspector never found out, because this Philip Greiner was so drunk he could hardly walk and clearly couldn’t string two words together. He was puffy-faced from tears and had soiled himself. Precisely at that moment a furious senior SS officer turned up, complaining that the tyres of his Mercedes had been slit during the night. Stave managed to move the tottering Gestapo man into a next-door room and then take down the details of the incandescent officer's complaint. If the SS man had seen the drunkard he would have exploded with rage. Stave had done Greiner a favour that day, a favour he had never called in. Until now.

  Greiner had been sacked by the British in 1945 like all the other Gestapo. Stave had lost touch with him, but it hadn’t been hard to find out his address: there were still members of the CID who went out to play cards in the evening with former Gestapo agents. He told Greiner in a few brief lines that he wanted the information the Gestapo had held on Dr Schramm and on Dönnecke. He had invited him to lunch in the Winterhude Fährhaus — big, unobtrusive and far enough from the CID headquarters to make it unlikely they would bump into a colleague. Then he had called Constable Heinrich Ruge to his office and told him to make sure he handed the letter to Greiner in person. ‘And don’t mention this to anyone!’ It was vital that Dönnecke did not find out that Stave was suddenly getting in touch with a former Gestapo officer.

  The young policeman had by now given up clicking his heels together militarily when he was given an order. Instead he just nodded and smiled conspiratorially. ‘What am I to do if he refuses to accept the letter?’

  ‘Tell him I’ll come and remind him about November 1938.’

  The ring of his telephone made him start. It had been days since he’d heard a phone ring in Department S.

  ‘Old boy,’ said MacDonald. The line was bad even though it was a local call. ‘Can we meet at midday at the workshop on Holstenhofweg. I have no time to meet earlier. But I can pick up the Jeep there, then we can arrange our meeting with the movie mogul for one of the coming days. I should have got permission to meet him by then.’

  ‘Gladly, as long as you drop me at Winterhude afterwards.’

  ‘In my next life I’m going to be a taxi driver. Make it 11.30.’

  Stave heard a click, then the hum of the unused line. He stared out of the window lost in thought. The music hall across the way was veiled by a thin mist as if covered in sheets of thin, dirty gauze. His office stank of old cleaning fluid. The chief inspector's head was still filled with swirling thoughts. Anna. MacDonald working for the British secret service. Suddenly it occurred to him that the lieutenant might be able to find out something about Anna von Veckinhausen. If a Gestapo man had noticed her, surely a British agent might do the same? Might there be a British file on her as well as a German one? Lying in an office somewhere? And if there is do I really want to know?

  Don’t kid yourself, there was no way he was going to be satisfied until he knew everything. Once a policeman, always a policeman. I’ll ask MacDonald. He glanced at the clock on the wall and counted the minutes until their meeting at the workshop, at the same time dreading it.

  Given that he was still holding the telephone receiver in his right hand, he used his left to flick thorough his notebook and then dialled a number. The Landeszentralbank.

  A few minutes later he had Kurt Flasch on the line.

  ‘I really don’t have the time, Chief Inspector.’ Flash sounded more stressed than ever.

  Good opening line, Stave thought. He would just lean back now and ask as many searching questions as he wanted. But he liked his neighbour, who seemed always to be struggling against drowning in his vast family.

  ‘X-day getting close?’ he replied understandingly.

  ‘That's hardly a secret by now.’

  ‘You’ve been particularly busy since this morning?’

  ‘A few colleagues and I had to work through the night.’

  ‘So it's all ready to go?’

  ‘This might sound ridiculous, Chief Inspector, but I really can’t tell you that. Rules are rules.’

  ‘What colour will the new notes be?’

  There was a silence on the other end of the line. ‘I really don’t know if...’

  ‘Blue, salmon-pink. And green in all variations: yellowish green, bright green, turquoise.’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Printed on banknote presses?’

  ‘Obviously But that...’

  ‘In Germany?’

  Silence again. Stave thought he could hear strained breathing over the crackle of the line. ‘No. The notes are being printed in one of the Allies’ countries.’

  ‘Would it be possible to print notes like that in Germany?’

  ‘Not yet anyway. There are still printing presses and material in Frankfurt, but they were hit by bombs, which will hardly surprise you. But when they’re repaired and set up again, yes, of course. But that is going to take time.’

  The CID man sat upright in his chair, surprised and suddenly attentive. ‘You mean to say that right now there isn’t a printing facility in all four occupation zones that could turn out the new banknotes? Not even a private one?’

  Flasch laughed. ‘That would be forbidden. And it wouldn’t be possible even if somebody wanted to. Too complicated, too expensive. The old Reichsmark rags are still being knocked out in Frankfurt. But the new notes? Nowhere.’

  ‘I won’t take up
more of your time,’ Stave replied, and hung up.

  The business of the pfennig notes on Goldbekplatz was becoming more and more curious. Weber had already told him it would be complicated to turn out such notes. And now Flasch had emphasised it was so complicated that nobody in the occupation zones could do it. No surprise then that nobody in Department S had been able to find a print works. If nobody in Germany has the capacity to produce notes like this, then it can only mean one thing: the notes are being printed abroad. I wonder what MacDonald will make of that.

  He flinched when his boss pushed open the door to his office without knocking. His flabby cheeks were bright red and he was breathing heavily.

  ‘Stave, you must be the only one here who hasn’t been listening to the radio?’

  ‘We started shooting back at 5.45 this morning?’

  ‘Don’t try any jokes that’ll make me nervous. It's official: we’re getting new money. Mayor Brauer has just announced it on NWDR. They’ve been making an important speech on the radio since early morning. Don’t you keep up?’

  ‘I’ve been working,’ the chief inspector replied brusquely. ‘When does it start?’

  ‘The day after tomorrow.’

  Stave gasped for breath. No wonder Flasch had been working through the night. ‘They’re going to distribute the money on a Sunday? I would have thought the mayor might have given us a bit more warning to prepare for a new currency.’

  ‘They don’t want to give speculators any opportunities. In any case all the shops are closing. It's chaos at the stations with everyone trying to get home. You’ve got the day off too. We’ve no interest in the black market today.’