The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  ‘Unfortunately I seem to have forgotten my food ration card,’ he told the head waiter with a regretful smile, hating himself for doing so.

  The man nodded understandingly. ‘I could lend you mine,’ he said. ‘Against 30 Reichsmarks deposit.’

  Greiner glanced quickly from Stave to the waiter and back, before realising that he hadn’t got his ration card either. The waiter disappeared, with 60 Reichsmarks in his pocket and an order for potato salad and bread in his notebook.

  ‘You surprise me,’ Greiner admitted when the waiter was out of earshot.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ the chief inspector replied, and it wasn’t a lie.

  A bottle of Rhine wine was being nonchalantly uncorked at a nearby table and there was the seductive smell of mocha coffee in the air. ‘There are hundreds of Reichsmarks being wolfed down here,’ Greiner mumbled sourly.

  ‘This time next week all you’ll be able to do is use them to light cigarettes.’

  ‘I don’t have enough money for those any more.’

  ‘You’re finding things hard?’

  ‘Who would take me on? My old job clings to me like leprosy. And I’m at risk of facing trial. Even though I was only doing my duty.’

  ‘Who's accusing you?’

  ‘Public Prosecutor Ehrlich. A Jew. Typical.’

  Pour sod, thought Stave, without an ounce of pity. Aloud he said, ‘Maybe you’ll get off scot free. There are others who’ve had a soft landing.’

  He nodded with his chin towards the thin man in the long woollen coat who’d just walked in, his hair parted neatly, with a cravat, a hat and a serous expression on his face. He was greeted effusively, the waiter bowing and leading him to a free place at a well-lit table. The sound of glasses being clinked. Carl Vincent Krogmann, a businessman, a National Socialist — and up until 1945 chief mayor of Hamburg. He sat down along with some other distinguished gentleman amid jovial chatter.

  Greiner regarded him, white with fury, his lips trembling and his eyelid flickering.

  ‘Fresh from the internment camp in Bielefeld,’ Stave whispered. ‘Nothing much more will trouble him.’

  ‘The little guys get hanged, while the big shots live the good life,’ Greiner whispered, a murderous look in his eyes.

  Stave wondered what it would have been like to be sitting in a Gestapo cell in the Stadthaus when the door flung open and you found yourself staring into those eyes.

  ‘Sometimes the big shots come a cropper too,’ he said, attempting a sardonic smile.

  The Gestapo man nodded, pulled up the black briefcase and thumped it down on the table: ‘So, what do you want to know?’

  ‘Do you have the file on Schramm?’

  Greiner shook his head. ‘You do ask naïve questions.’

  ‘Never lose hope.’ It was clear to the chief inspector that in April 1945, when the British had already taken nearby Lüneburg, the Gestapo in the Stadthaus, in the jail out at Fuhlsbüttel and the Neuengamme concentration camp had destroyed all their traces: burned documents, executed prisoners. No witnesses, no evidence. Probably the reason the man sitting opposite him was still walking around free, despite all the efforts of Public Prosecutor Ehrlich.

  Greiner pulled out a grey cardboard file. ‘An index file,’ he whispered, smiling almost nostalgically. ‘We had two million of them: Jews, communists, homosexuals, bible bashers, incorrigible thieves, backstreet abortionists. We’ve got them all in here. Enemies of the Reich, military morale poisoners. Fall into the hands of the Gestapo anywhere in the Reich — and your name's on the index forever. People believed that spies were everywhere. Or that we beat everything they knew out of prisoners.’

  ‘And you didn’t?’

  ‘Of course we did. But first you have to have a prisoner. And this,’ Greiner stroked the box lovingly, ‘was our memory. Names, names, names. In the end, aren’t we all hunter-gatherers, just like our cavemen ancestors? The hunter is the hero. But the gatherer is the one who provides for hard times. We burned the detailed files under the noses of the Tommies. But these, at least a few of them, I held on to. In case times change.’

  Stave wondered if there wasn’t a card index somewhere with his name meticulously written on it. He took the piece of cardboard from Greiner's reluctant grip.

  ‘Schramm, Dr Alfred,’ he read, with the address he already knew written below. ‘Banker, foreign contacts.’ Comments that Schramm was suspected of channelling money abroad ‘to support’ the Jews. A list of several interrogations and searches of his property. But no indication of a single judgement against him. No reference to degenerate art. No names of anyone who might have been a suspected accomplice, helper or sympathiser. It would have been too much to expect to find some reference to expressionist art in the Gestapo's files, the chief inspector thought, or to come across a man with the forename ‘Rolf’.

  ‘Was he part of your business?’

  Greiner shook his head, ‘I never had anything to do with him. I just kept his index card because he has remained an influential man. And you never know...’

  Stave turned the index card over. The name of the police officials responsible for looking after the card. Two names that were barely legible and meant nothing to Stave. But right at the bottom: ‘Cäsar Dönnecke, K.z.b.V.’

  The abbreviation stood for Kommando zure besonderen Verwendung — ‘Special Purpose Detachment’ — an elite unit in Hamburg, feared in all the police stations. ‘Dönnecke did the right thing,’ Greiner grumbled, following the chief inspector's eyes. ‘Never moved over to the Gestapo. Stood his ground by CID. The Tommies let him walk free.’

  ‘I know,’ Stave muttered grimly. All of a sudden he understood why Dönnecke wanted the case of the dead body found in the Reimershof to be swept silently under the carpet. He was afraid that the Reimershof would lead somebody to Schramm — and that the mention of Schramm would lead them to the connection with Dönnecke. And nowadays Schramm was once more a powerful man. If the banker were to find out that one of those who once made his life a misery was still with the police and sniffing around in his former business, he would move heaven and hell to ruin Dönnecke.

  ‘Back then Dönnecke and the K.z.b.V. worked with us,’ Greiner went on, having failed to notice Stave's anger. ‘A real tough customer. In February 1945 he ran over two workmen who had found ration cards in a bombed factory and snaffled them. Both had been storm troopers from the beginning. Not that it did them any good.’ He formed an imaginary noose with his hands and placed it around his throat.

  Stave looked at the index card and put it in his pocket. He didn’t even consider asking permission. When the head waiter came over with the potato salad, Greiner rubbed his fingers together in embarrassment, waited until the waiter had gone again, then glanced around, before lowering his head confidentially over the table. ‘When SS-Sonderführer Heissmeyer, who had been carrying out tuberculosis experiments in the Neuhausen concentration camp, suddenly got cold feet, Dönnecke had twenty infected children taken to a school on Bullenhauser Damm. The children were given morphine in the cellar, and then when they were unconscious a few men hung them.’

  Stave looked at the potato salad, then out of the window. His stomach felt as if he had just swallowed acid. ‘Proof?’ he spluttered.

  ‘I could find some. Have you something against your colleague Dönnecke?’

  ‘You never know,’ Stave mumbled. If I make a fuss or just get up and go, then this guy will never trust me again, he thought to himself. And it could be that I will need him again. He put the first spoonful of potato salad into his mouth and forced himself to swallow the gloopy mush.

  ‘In the Führer's day you could drive to the sea for thirty Reichsmarks,’ Greiner said, ‘and a salad like that wouldn’t even be served to a Jew.’ But he nonetheless wolfed his down with remarkable speed.

  ‘Times change,’ Stave replied, wishing he was long gone.

  A vanished husband

  Saturday, 19 June 1948

  Stave was gratefu
l for the rain that night, if only because the raindrops beating against his window cancelled out the oppressive silence in his apartment. The empty half of his double bed. The room he had made up for Karl, which his son hadn’t set foot in for over a year. The big kitchen, where for years there had been no smell of coffee or fresh bread wafting in the air.

  He would have liked to read – it would have given his restless brain something to concentrate on — but he needed to keep his electricity bill low and his last candle had burned down weeks ago. So he just lay there, listening to the rain and his thoughts.

  I don’t understand anything, he told himself. Neither my work, nor the woman I love, nor my son. Dönnecke is a swine and a child murderer. But he's right: I’ve lost it.

  He swung out of bed and felt his way into the living room. Since just a few weeks ago a glow from the first street light outside had been coming through the window. He got down on the floor and began stretching exercises. Press-ups until his upper arms shook and his upper body collapsed on to the linoleum with a dull thud. Knee bends: sweat rolled down into his eyes and there was a taste of iron in his mouth. He was down to his underwear. His heart was racing. He counted aloud, each number an exhausted sigh between tortured breaths. The he stood on his left leg only, spread his arms out wide and tried to keep his balance. Up on to his tiptoes, down again until his heels almost touched the floor. Up again. Down again. Each time he rose up his damaged ankle felt as if somebody was hitting it with a hammer from the inside.

  It was not even 5 a.m. by the time grey dawn began to creep in. Stave stood in the living room, his body a slippery puddle of sweat. The scar on his chest hurt. He swayed into the bathroom and threw up into the toilet from exhaustion, then with his last ounce of strength climbed into the old enamel bathtub. No warm water, not that it mattered. He stretched out under the cold water, shimmering with a reddish tint of rust, scrubbed his skin down with hard soap, then forced himself under the water again.

  Eventually he got out and lay on the tiled floor between the bath and the toilet, shivering, his feet and hands blue, the latter too weak to grab the towel hanging on a hook on the door. But for a brief moment a wave of relief swept over him, happiness almost: his head was finally empty, his brain had capitulated to pain and exhaustion.

  Much later he sat at the table with a steaming cup of ersatz coffee clasped in his hands. Damp brown bread with ersatz honey, a spread that looked like warm wallpaper paste, tough and yellowish white, and didn’t taste any better. He felt as if he was returning to his own body after a long absence, partly wary, partly surprised, as if coming back to his own apartment after a journey round the world.

  An unexpected loud knocking on his door – it wasn’t half past seven yet and his visitor probably thought they were waking him – surprised Stave and had him jump to his feet even though a warm pain flowed through every muscle in his body, his chest was heaving and his left ankle was swollen.

  It was Constable Ruge. ‘You’re up already?’ he exclaimed, staring at him with a look that made Stave realise even cold water hadn’t erased all traces of his night-time exercises. I probably look as if I’ve been beaten up, he thought to himself, forcing a smile. ‘Early morning exercises,’ he explained. ‘Has anything new turned up?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘Only new orders.’ The young policeman held up his hands apologetically. ‘We’re being sent out by Cuddel Breuer to tell everyone in CID there's a special detail being held tomorrow and all officers are to be at headquarters by 8 a.m.’

  ‘A special detail? Sounds like something from Adolf's days.’

  ‘Am I to take that as a compliment?’

  ‘Single officers are being told first, Cuddel Breuer said. We’re to let married men sleep a little longer,’ Ruge said offhandedly, raising his right hand to the tip of his cap.

  Stave pulled on his best shirt, his best dark trousers, a light summer coat that was hardly good enough for the endless drizzle but nonetheless looked better than anything else he had to pull over his shoulders. He had two important appointments. He put the card with the bicycle seller's address in his pocket and bundled the typewriter up in some wrapping paper and a torn tablecloth he never used, and was out of the door before nine o’clock. There was gramophone music coming from Flasch's ground floor apartment. Jazz. Once upon a time that would have got him a visit from the concierge and maybe even the Gestapo, Stave thought to himself. Then two children began crying simultaneously, the complaint of a couple of lads shut up in their apartment because of the rain and feeling robbed of their normal Saturday run around. The CID man silently wished his neighbour the best of luck, pulled up the collar of his coat and headed off down Ahrensberger Strasse.

  He didn’t have far to go: across Eichtalpark, the grass as bright a green as an English lawn, the muddy pathways empty save for two young mothers pushing prams covered in rain hoods through the damp morning air. Oskarstrasse on the other side of the park was more like a pathway than a real street, but one that had been missed by the Allies’ bombs. On the right side stood tall nineteenth-century buildings with bright plastered exteriors and even brighter window sills, intact roofs and well-tended gardens. He glanced at the now thoroughly soaked piece of cardboard and realised he was to keep to the left-hand side: a row of tiny houses, like dolls’ houses glued together. But in a city that had been bombed so heavily even these humble dwellings looked like a bastion of affluence.

  The CID man couldn’t find any doorbell so he knocked on the door of number 7, hoping he hadn’t wasted his time lugging the heavy typewrite out here. He had to wait for a few minutes that felt like an eternity. A man in his dressing gown opened the door, releasing a cloud of stale air made up of cigarette smoke and the reek of day-old beer.

  Stave introduced himself and produced his identity papers, restraining himself from producing his police badge. It wasn’t a great idea when doing business like this. Not that it was exactly forbidden, but it didn’t look good for a CID man.

  ‘Schindler,’ the man introduced himself in return. Stave put him at about thirty years old, single and with a tough-looking face. I’m glad I don’t have him as a neighbour, he thought.

  ‘This might not be exactly the right time to be doing business,’ Schindler said, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his visitor was standing out in the rain while he himself was in the dry doorway.

  ‘Should I come back at another time?’

  ‘No, I mean so soon before they introduce the new money. I hadn’t anticipated that when I put the ad up. I’m not all that sure I want to exchange the bike at present. These are uncertain times.’

  ‘Times are getting better,’ Stave replied, trying to keep a pleading tone out of his voice. Just don’t turn me away, he prayed silently. Be bold, he told himself, pushing his way into the hall without being asked. Before Schindler could say a word, he pulled the tablecloth and wrapping paper off the Olympia.

  ‘Immaculate machine, pre-war quality,’ he said.

  The man looked at the typewriter and moistened his lips with his tongue. I’ve got him, the CID man crowed, seeing the greed in the other man's eyes. All of a sudden he was wide awake. Maybe the bike was rubbish? Maybe this was a bad deal.

  Schindler hesitated a few minutes as if he was doing calculations in his head. ‘Okay,’ he mumbled eventually. ‘Wait here, I’ll fetch the bike from the shed in the garden.’ He disappeared into a silent gloomy room at the end of the hall. A few moments later he came back pushing an old, black-lacquered everyday bicycle. The leather saddle was worn, the rubber on the inner-tubed tyres damaged, no hand grips on the steel handlebars, no light, and only a front brake.

  ‘The main thing is, it has all its spokes,’ Schindler muttered, not even sounding as if he was convincing himself.

  Stave bent down to look at the frame to examine the trademark: a leaping gazelle and beneath it the words: ‘No. 10 Heeren Rijwiel.’

  ‘Brought it back from Amsterdam,’ Schindler explained. ‘I was statione
d there. There has to be something to gain from being a grunt. But I have problems with my knee now.’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ Stave blurted out, before the man could have second thoughts — and before his scruples about taking looted property could kick in.

  Just five minutes later Stave felt unimaginably years younger. Even though the rain had soaked through to his shoulders and his thighs, even though every muscle was still aching from his night-time training, even though two links in the bicycle's chain had rusted together, which caused it to catch every time he pedalled, even though the front wheel rim was dented which made the handlebars shudder, and even though he continually feared that one of the tyres would burst, he was in high spirits as he cycled across the cobbles, weaving his way around piles of bricks, bomb craters and blackberry bushes growing out of the broken tarmac on the edge of the streets. Freedom! A minor triumph, a tiny way along the road back to normality. At last he no longer had to concentrate on concealing his limp. Endless routes along which the day before he would have counted his steps out of sheer boredom, giving up only when he got into the hundreds, and now he flew along them. He wobbled to and fro like a five-year-old because it had been so long since he had ridden a bike, but at the same time he felt as elated as a child at long last let out on his own.

  The closer he got to the city centre, the busier the streets became. He was taken aback the first time a car passed him, or another cyclist furiously rang his bell at him, though he had no idea why. Pedestrians on either side hurried along aimlessly. Groups on street corners, the men gesticulating. Again and again he heard ‘X-day, a new mark.’ Empty shop windows, displays covered over, nothing on show, no price tickets, not a single pair of shoes, not an electric bulb, not one ball of wool. Empty shelves, as if overnight the city had been completely plundered. It was a good thing the weather was so bad, Stave thought: it made people less keen on wandering the streets.