The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  He stopped dead a few paces before it; there was a smell of fresh bread. Real bread, made from real flour. He felt faint. The bakery was packed, excited voices filling the small space. He thought he was dreaming. On the glass counters lay loaf after loaf of white bread, rolls piled up in baskets, biscuits even. When had he last seen so much? Eight years ago.

  He was so mesmerised that he nearly didn’t notice he was at the front of the queue. ‘What can I get you?’ the young, dark-haired baker girl asked. Friendly, but impatient. Just like back in peacetime.

  ‘Two round rolls,’ he said, realising his voice was a croak. ‘No, make that four,’ he added quickly. Why save money? On the wall behind the baker hung a handwritten sign declaring, ‘No points required! No rationed goods!’

  Stave pushed a few of the new pfennig notes over the counter. He inhaled the smell of the bread, felt the firm, pale golden crust. Still warm. Somebody pushed him out of the way.

  When he got back to the apartment at 6 Röperstrasse, Anna had already made ersatz coffee. That will go soon, too, he thought. ‘Look what I’ve brought us!’ he exclaimed, holding up the paper bag with the rolls. ‘My finest gift for the bride.’

  ‘Your second finest gift for the bride,’ she said seriously, kissing him and pulling his coat from his shoulders.

  Later the pair of them sat at the wobbly table; Stave no longer noticed the shabby walls, the cracked cups. He was chewing thoughtfully at his roll, savouring every bite, delaying as long as possible before swallowing.

  ‘It's unbelievable,’ Anna muttered, ‘that all of a sudden everything is there again. One day we’re starving, the next everything is the way it used to be in the good old days.’

  ‘They must have had all this, the flour for the bread, the stockings and pans in the shop windows. Just nobody bought them. But now we have the new money and big business is all the go.’

  They chatted about what they wanted to buy. About how much he would get in his pay packet now every month, and whether there would be enough money to go round if everybody bought all the things they had been without for so long. There won’t be enough to last years. But what did that matter. They said not a word about the past, his or hers. But when they had polished off the last crumb, Anna looked at him over the rim of the cup, still steaming from the ersatz coffee. ‘Where do we go from here?’

  ‘Marry me!’ Stave burst out, almost shocked by his own outburst.

  She went pale, then a blush came over her cheeks. ‘You know that's not possible,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not divorced. And if I do get divorced, people will ask questions, want to see paperwork, do background checks. The whole story will come back to haunt me.’

  He got to his feet and took her in his arms. ‘Nobody is going to do background checks,’ he whispered, and then a moment later shook his head, realising what he had said. ‘That is the strangest thing a chief inspector should say,’ he explained. ‘There is no Anna von Gudow. The papers with that name were burned in Berlin. Either that or they’re mouldering in some local archive in a village that today is either in Poland or the Soviet Union, harder to reach than the moon. You are Anna von Veckinhausen. You’re free.’

  ‘What about you? Are you free?’

  He told her about Karl. About him being a student. About their dinner together and their complex conversations. ‘His childhood is gone forever. Irreplaceable. Destroyed. But his youthful years are not. He has rediscovered himself. He's starting over again.’ Stave kissed Anna. ‘I think we’ve all earned the right to start over again.’

  She smiled in a way she had never smiled at him before, pushed the strands of hair back from her face and said, ‘You’re going to be ever so late at the office today.’

  It had been years since Stave had felt so light-hearted. He felt free and full of energy cycling along Palmaille late morning. This time I’m going to hold on to Anna, he told himself. And Karl, too. I’m going to come through once again. He would even ask to take a holiday. For the first time since 1941. If it weren’t for the loose ends in this case: the death of Rolf Rosenthal, the works of art found in the Reimershof, the banker who denied everything. Like a sharp stone stuck in an otherwise comfortable shoe.

  He was overtaken by a black car, which for some reason or another struck him as strange. It was only a few seconds later that he realised why. It was a taxi. When had he last seen a motorised taxi? Before the war? In the early years of the war? Certainly not since 1945 with the initial ban on driving for Germans, followed by the need to fill out log books and the petrol rationing.

  A number 31 tram came rattling towards him, barely half full. That was also something new. Up until yesterday the few trams that were running were jam-packed, with workers and office employees, black marketeers, housewives with children, people going out to find food in the country, all squashed together until the doors would hardly close. Now the black marketeers and those going to search for food had disappeared. Stave found himself wondering if Bahr at Department S would find him another case. And if he did what might it be?

  The CID headquarters was buzzing like a disturbed beehive. Bahr rubbed his hands when Stave walked into the fifth-floor corridor.

  ‘Where have you been, then?’ his boss asked him.

  ‘I’ve been working on the investigation.’ Amazing how easy the lie tripped off his lips.

  ‘I understand. I was down at the Hansaplatz myself this morning. I wanted to see our clients sweat. All the fuss of the currency reform has been worth it just to see the sullen faces of the black marketeers.’

  ‘They can pack their bags.’

  ‘That's exactly what they’re doing. Literally. They’re flogging off whatever they’ve got left and packing up the stuff nobody wants. Take Lucky Strike cigarettes. They’d be lucky to get 25 new pfennigs for what was seven Reichmarks a few days ago. And the price is dropping. Cigarettes remain cheaper on the black market than in the tobacco shops, but only because the fences are emptying their warehouses. You can get a pound of butter now for five Deutschmarks.’ Bahr laughed as triumphantly as a general who’d just won a war.

  ‘So what happens to Department S?’ the chief inspector asked.

  ‘You can go over to Vice if you want. There are more than enough “swallows on the wing”. The ladies of the night used to pay for their rooms with cigarettes, but now they’re not worth anything any more, they’ve been thrown out and are walking the kerbs in broad daylight. With the introduction of the new mark ordinary German men are as viable a customer as Allied soldiers and black marketeers. Vice won’t be short of work.’

  ‘That's not exactly my thing.’

  ‘Well then, that leaves the two of us. There will still be economic crimes. I’m going down to patrol the station. A few wise guys spent the last few days buying railway tickets with the old Reichsmarks and are now standing by the tracks selling them on at exaggerated prices in DM. Whispering to passers-by just like on the good old black market. People always think of something. Want to come along?’

  ‘I’ve still got one case to file away.’

  ‘The art stuff down at the Reimershof? What is there left to do?’

  ‘Give me a couple more days,’ Stave replied and closed his office door behind him.

  The CID man worked his telephone until he got Kienle on the end of the line. ‘Can you look in?’ he asked the photographer.

  ‘A work thing?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Sounds like it might not be totally legal. I’ll be there.’

  Just a few minutes later the slim, red-haired man was standing in front of the chief inspector, the leather bag with his Leica slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Can you also take pictures of small objects,’ Stave asked him. ‘About as big as your hand. Indoors. Without a flash.’

  Kienle laughed. ‘When I was working for Signal on the frontline, none of the squaddies would have been very happy if I was following them around with a flash.’ He glanced into his bag and pulled out a thin l
ens. ‘A 1.5 Summarit. A five-centimetre lens with wide aperture. I can take photos under the bed sheets with this.’

  ‘I’m not working for Vice yet,’ Stave mumbled. ‘With that lens you can put the Leica in your jacket pocket. Nobody would notice.’ He fumbled around in his desk until he found a wooden ruler. ‘You’ll need to hide this on you, too.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be incognito?’

  ‘Leave the rest of your equipment here. You’ll come with me and I’ll introduce you as working for CID. It's not exactly a lie.’

  ‘Where am I supposed to take these secret photos? And what's the ruler for?’

  ‘I’ll explain to you on the way. We’ll take a car.’

  ‘You’re too late there. Now that you can get fuel at every petrol station colleagues like Bernd Rosen have been racing around the streets. Any excuse is good enough to put your foot down.’

  ‘In that case we’ll go on foot. It's not that far.’

  ‘A black market in the neighbourhood?’

  ‘That's not what we do any more, Kienle. Germany's on the way up. We’re going to see a banker.’

  As they left the head office a massive figure confronted them near the bronze elephant at the doorway. ‘Are you joining the foot patrols now, Stave?’

  Dönnecke. Right at that moment there was nobody Stave wanted less to meet. His deep-set dark eyes flicked between Stave and Kienle. Stave could actually smell the suspicion emanating from his colleague. He's nervous, wondering what I’m doing with the photographer, he thought. Let him wonder.

  ‘There's still work to do,’ he replied loudly, trying to push his way past Dönnecke.

  But two heavy paws landed on his shoulders. ‘You deal with the black market,’ the older policeman growled. ‘The black market no longer exists, since we’ve got the Allied money. So why do you need our snapper?’

  ‘A confidential investigation.’

  ‘You’re not going down to the Reimershof? I don’t like it when people stick their noses into things that don’t concern them.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ Stave replied and wrenched his shoulder free from Dönnecke's grip.

  ‘Our colleague Herr Dönnecke in top form,’ Kienle muttered when they had gone a few paces. ‘The success of the mark has given him bulging veins. He would have preferred to see half Hamburg starve to death. Then the other half would be calling for a new Führer.’

  ‘Do you want Dönnecke as an enemy?’ Stave asked.

  ‘No way,’ the photographer answered in horror.

  ‘Then maybe you’d better not come with me,’ the chief inspector said with a sardonic smile. ‘Because you’re going to be sticking your lovely Leica lens into our esteemed colleague's case.’

  They walked through Valentinskamp and the Gänsemarkt as Stave explained to Kienle what it was he had to do. He was speaking in a quiet voice but he need hardly have bothered. The pavements were heaving with people and nobody was paying the slightest attention to them. Everyone's eyes were trained on the shop windows. Awed amazement, indignant snorts at some of the prices. Men coming out of shop doors with triumphant expressions and wrapped parcels. Pipes in a tobacco shop. The chief inspector wouldn’t have believed they were still being made in Germany. Now there they were, lying on shelves everywhere as if the years between 1939 and 1948 had never happened. A clothes shop: poplin shirts from 8 DM. A bright red silk dress. Anna would look wonderful in that, Stave thought. Two hundred marks.

  ‘Not for your salary,’ Kienle remarked, following Stave's gaze. ‘But that’ll soon level out.’

  ‘Level out?’

  The photographer nodded towards the window of an electric shop. ‘Electric iron, 17.50 DM,’ he read aloud. ‘I came by yesterday as they were just putting out the first price notices next to the goods. I’ve been looking for an iron for years. Yesterday it was 27.50 DM. The good people who came by this morning have got a shock. The wholesalers have been hoarding this stuff for weeks, goods they either bought in Reichsmarks or got in barter exchange. They’re pricing it all randomly, but it’ll all level out. Before long a dress won’t cost a month's pay’ Then he added, curiously, ‘I didn’t know you were married.’

  ‘I’m not,’ replied Stave. ‘Yet.’

  On the Jungfernstieg by the Alster there was a market. Traders had put tables together and set out their wares. All perfectly legal. Hundreds of people were pushing their way between them. It seemed as if Hamburg hadn’t bothered to turn up for work. The embarrassed whispers and milling around associated with the black market was no more. Housewives and office workers were picking things up in their hands, looking at them and discussing the quality and price — still uncertainly, as if with a lack of self-confidence they were testing out skills long forgotten.

  Stave and Kienle walked through rows of vegetable stands, behind which somebody was offering an electric kettle for DM 27.50 and a matt-yellow porcelain dinner service for DM 2.60. A typewriter for 300 marks. The man who swapped his old bicycle for my Olympia could do a good deal now, the chief inspector thought. He didn’t care.

  They pushed their way through the crowds until they reached the quiet streets on the east bank of the Alster. Once there, they could walk more quickly.

  ‘You’ve understood everything?’ Stave asked, just to be sure, before they entered the driveway to Schramm's villa.

  ‘I know what I have to do,’ Kienle replied, tapping his coat pocket where the Leica was concealed.

  ‘You don’t give up, do you? Heydrich would have been proud of you,’ said Schramm when they were sitting face to face a few moments later.

  ‘Heydrich isn’t my boss,’ the chief inspector answered. Don’t let him provoke you. ‘Does the name Rolf Rosenthal mean anything to you?’ He held his breath.

  Dönnecke had let the case go to pot. He had never even interviewed the banker, so Schramm probably knew none of the details about the corpse found in the ruins, Stave hoped. ‘We came across a piece of paper in the ruins of the Reimershof,’ he said, praying the man wouldn’t realise it was a lie, ‘and made out that name on it.’

  Schramm stared at him, his right eye half closed, the left eye wide open behind an old-fashioned monocle. ‘As I told you, I used the place to store things I didn’t want in the bank,’ he eventually replied. ‘For example personnel files of Jewish employees. Herr Rosenthal joined the firm as a fourteen-year-old apprentice in 1917. Even back in the Kaiser's day a Jew with a crippled foot found it hard to find a job. But I spotted his abilities immediately: he was a natural with numbers. Discreet. Ambitious. Not a gossip. By 1930 he had almost become my right-hand man.’

  ‘And three years later?’

  ‘What do you think? That I got rid of him. I kept him in my employ. But his personnel files disappeared into the Reimershof.’

  ‘Did Herr Rosenthal continue to work there?’

  ‘From time to time, but occasionally he also had to work in the head office.’

  ‘Was he also advising you on art matters?’

  Schramm glanced out of the window. ‘Herr Rosenthal was one of my buyers. Why are you asking such curious questions?’

  ‘What happened to Herr Rosenthal?’ Stave asked.

  ‘Herr Rosenthal had a large family. His parents were still alive, and he had brothers and sisters. Nearly all of them stayed in Europe, too long. Only a niece emigrated, in 1939, to New York. In the summer of 1940 after France had been conquered, Herr Rosenthal told me that he and his family wanted to make their way via Paris to Marseille, and from there find a way to Portugal or North Africa. They had everything prepared. That was the last time I saw him. I assume he was arrested on the way.’

  ‘Do you mind if I wash my hands?’ Kienle interrupted. ‘It's this damp weather...’ He smiled apologetically.

  ‘Of course, go ahead. The first door on the left in the hallway,’ Schramm replied, mildly irritated, then stared again absent-mindedly out of the window. ‘It's remarkable how few traces we leave behind in this world,’ the old banker
commented. A piece of paper in a pile of rubble. That's all that remains.’

  Not altogether, Stave was thinking.

  A few minutes later Kienle came back into the room and gave the CID man an inconspicuous nod.

  ‘We’re about to close the file on this mysterious case,’ the chief inspector said, getting to his feet. ‘Many thanks for your full and frank answers.’ He tried to keep any sarcasm out of his voice.

  ‘You must be very busy at the moment,’ Kienle said. ‘As a banker. With all this new money.’

  Schramm stared at him through his monocle as a botanist might regard a misshapen plant. ‘The new currency has made many of my customers paupers overnight. Yesterday they might have had a thousand Reichsmarks in their account. Today it's just 65 Deutschmarks. Many of them are about to find out that they don’t have enough money for all the nice new things they’d like to buy.’

  When they were a few metres along Fährstrasse, the chief inspector asked Kienle, ‘Did you get the photos?’

  ‘You’ll have them in your hands within the hour.’

  ‘You don’t need to whisper.’

  ‘That guy frightens me.’

  ‘Schramm survived twelve years under the Nazis, despite the fact that the Gestapo made regular house visits. He's a hard old dog. And a liar.’

  ‘What banker could afford to tell the truth all the time?’

  ‘Not every banker has the corpse of one of his art buyers in the ruins of his office. Rosenthal didn’t try to escape via France in 1940. He remained in Hamburg until 1943. It was his body you photographed in the ruins of the Reimershof. Ruins that were created by the bombing raids of 1943.’

  ‘I thought as much. I didn’t come across anything like a piece of paper with a name on it during the crime scene investigation. What now?’