The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  ‘It was actually a real pleasure,’ Michel admitted, blushing. ‘At last I could work in my own profession again, and legally.’

  Stave was thinking of Chief Inspector Dönnecke and that on no account should he see this. ‘You’ve well earned your American visa,’ he said.

  ‘That isn’t a joke, then?’ Michel said, incredulously.

  The CID man wrote down MacDonald's name and room number in the offices of the British civilian administration and handed them over. ‘Introduce yourself to the lieutenant and he’ll send you and your family on a long journey.’

  ‘I’m on my way!’ the artist exclaimed.

  ‘Not quite so hasty,’ Stave got to his feet. ‘I’ll take you downstairs,’ he said, not wanting Michel to bump into any of his colleagues on the way and start talking.

  Immediately after, Stave got on his bike, the pottery copy of the walking stick handle hidden in his coat pocket. He rode along the Alster. The elegant district seemed deserted – nobody collecting the cigarette butts of English soldiers, no one-legged men poking around in their bins. Things were on the way up, people no longer felt humiliated. In Neue Rabenstrasse he came across a group of medical students, young people with pale faces coming out of the pathology building.

  ‘I have an experiment involving one of your corpses,’ Stave said to Dr Czrisini when he found him.

  ‘If you want my job, you can have it,’ the pathologist said, coughing. ‘Which corpse would you like?’

  ‘The one from the Reimershof.’

  ‘Still tiptoeing through the minefield, are you? Come into the cold store. I’ve dealt with the students and most of my colleagues are on their lunch break. We’ll be on our own. I imagine you don’t want witnesses.’

  ‘I’m grateful to you.’

  ‘You’d better be quick, though,’ Czrisini muttered.

  The CID man wondered what that last cryptic comment meant as he followed the doctor down the steps to the cellar.

  Czrisini pulled open the drawer with the mortal remains of Rolf Rosenthal in it, and Stave produced the pottery copy from his coat pocket.

  The pathologist gave a wry smile. ‘I understand now. I won’t ask where you got that or to whom it belongs.’ He took the pottery model carefully and laid it against the skull of the dead man. ‘It fits,’ he said in a satisfied voice. ‘This handle fits perfectly into the hole in the skull: same size, same L-shape.’

  ‘Imagine a walking stick with a heavy silver handle: could it have caused the fatal blow?’

  ‘Use the subjunctive. It's hardly proof. Not even with a clay model of such a potentially deadly handle.’

  ‘But a clue.’

  ‘Straight out of the book. It might even be enough to push Chief Inspector Dönnecke into relaunching his investigations.’

  ‘I wasn’t so much thinking of my colleague as the public prosecutor,’ Stave explained.

  ‘I don’t think it's enough. An L-shaped wound to the head and an L-shaped walking stick handle aren’t enough to press charges. And no pathologist would swear in court that a head wound and a walking stick are the same as a lock and a key. If that was the case every lame man in the city could be charged with the Reimershof murder.’

  On the way back up from the cellar the pathologist fell into a serious coughing fit. Czrisini bent double, his thin hands grasping the banister like a drowning man holding on to a piece of driftwood. He held his handkerchief tight against his mouth. When he stood up again, there were beads of sweat on his forehead. The handkerchief was blood-red.

  ‘You really need to get that cured,’ Stave said, shocked.

  ‘The cure for lung cancer hasn’t been invented yet,’ Czrisini coughed, forcing his blue lips into a grimace that the chief inspector thought didn’t so much resemble a smile as the expression on the face of the dead man he had just seen in the morgue.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he stammered. He felt as if he were in some absurd dream. It seemed somehow undignified to hear a man he was as close to as a good friend casually pronounce his own death sentence in a dirty, badly lit stairwell.

  ‘That's how much English cigarettes cost,’ the pathologist blurted out as he forced himself up the remaining steps.

  ‘Maybe there are new treatments, in America or England?’ The CID man tried to encourage him. He was thinking of MacDonald. ‘Maybe I...’

  ‘I’m afraid there's nothing you can do for me,’ Czrisini interrupted him. ‘The Americans haven’t yet found a way to explode atomic bombs to destroy tumours in the lungs. Thanks all the same for the offer.’

  Stave followed him silently until they reached the pathologist's office. Once upon a time it was piled high with files, reports and specimens. Now it was ghostly empty. ‘How much time do you have left?’ Stave asked falteringly.

  ‘It's a miracle I’m still alive!’ Czrisini replied, lighting up a Woodbine. ‘Normally a cancer like this kills its victim within six months. I’m well overdue. No idea why I’ve been given so much time. It’ll be the last post-mortem I’ll be present at.’

  ‘Should I take you home?’ Even while he was saying the words, it occurred to the CID man that he didn’t even know where Czrisini lived.

  ‘I spend as little time as possible in the house,’ the pathologist replied. ‘That increases the probability that I will drop dead at my workplace, as befits a man in my position. Also it means my colleagues won’t have to bring the body so far.’ He laughed, before falling into another coughing fit.

  Stave didn’t know where to look, what to do with his hands. He wanted to say something to Czrisini to give him hope. At the same time he was eager to leave, leave the smoky office and the scent of death, which he felt he was inhaling with every breath. ‘I’ll drop by again soon,’ he said, knowing himself how false it sounded.

  ‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ the pathologist said indifferently. ‘Either here or somewhere else.’

  Stave took his hand and held it longer than normal. He knew it would be the last time.

  He had agreed to meet MacDonald for lunch in Sellmers Kellerwirtschaft. ‘This is the last time I’m inviting you,’ the young lieutenant said jovially. ‘Since you’ve had the Deutschmark, I’ve felt like a visiting poor relative with my British pounds. I have to ask myself who actually won the war.’

  Stave studied the menu. There was no longer a waiter wanting a ‘deposit’ for ‘forgotten’ marks. The prices on the menu were the ones that actually had to be paid: a cup of real coffee for DM 1.30, a three-course meal for DM 3.50.

  ‘The victors won’t live cheaper,’ the CID man muttered. He wouldn’t be able to afford the restaurant much longer.

  ‘The lunch menu is still the same old burned sole,’ the Briton warned him.

  ‘No wonder the room is half empty. I’ll have one anyway. Otherwise the sole will have died in vain.’

  ‘That's the right attitude. So let's be sure two fish didn’t die in vain.’ MacDonald waved the waiter over. Then he pulled out a large envelope from a briefcase next to his feet.

  ‘It's Erna,’ the chief inspector exclaimed in surprise. A portrait of MacDonald's wife — head and shoulders, intense eyes, hair like blond flames, her cheery round face outlined in bold black brush marks.

  ‘Very modern,’ Stave said carefully.

  ‘As if it came straight from the Weimar Republic. You can tell Toni Weber hadn’t been able to do any expressionist work for a long time. He really put his foot down.’

  ‘Has Erna seen it?’

  ‘Do you think she’d give me a thick ear for it? I’ll wait for the right circumstances to present this little darling to my little darling.’

  ‘If you want my advice, I’d wait until you’ve been posted to Calcutta and left Erna behind in Europe.’

  ‘Smart idea,’ the lieutenant said, putting the painting back into the envelope. ‘There's only one little thing wrong with it: I’m not going to Calcutta, I’m going to Berlin.’

  ‘I thought as much,’ the chief inspector r
eplied, a feeling of despondency running through him. ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow. We’re setting off from the Landungsbrücken.’

  ‘From the Landungsbrücken? The quayside? You’re going to Berlin on a boat? But the reds have closed off the city.’

  ‘You’d be surprised. We’re going to tweak Ivan's nose.’

  ‘You said “we”. Are Erna and your daughter going too?’

  ‘Erna's never been to Berlin.’

  ‘You’re having a laugh. A million Red Army troops have cut the city off. Nobody says it but everybody knows what they’ve done there since 1945. And you’re asking your wife and daughter to go there with you?’

  MacDonald sighed and gave a tired smile. ‘I would prefer to persuade Erna at gunpoint to remain in London. But she wasn’t exactly...’ he paused, searching for the right expression, ‘about to compromise,’ he said at last, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘She said she’d already let one husband go off to war. And we know that story didn’t end well. She wasn’t about to let it happen again. She’ll come with me, but live in the British barracks: a privilege granted officers’ wives.’

  ‘We’ll come down to the quayside tomorrow to wave goodbye.’

  ‘You said “we”.’

  ‘Anna and I.’

  A broad smile appeared on MacDonald's face. ‘That’ll be a greater honour than having a bagpiper come to see me off.’ He nodded towards the waiter. ‘Here come our soles. Let's hope for the best and be prepared for the worst. And while we hack our fish to pieces, you can tell me about your case. I’m going to miss the CID investigations here when I get to Berlin.’

  I may be missing the CID investigations, too, thought Stave to himself, as he walked down the Department S corridor a little later. He might not have much more time to deal with what could be his last case in this department: he had an appointment with the public prosecutor. Once in his office, he collected up all the documents about the body and the artworks found in the Reimershof. He hesitated for a moment, then included the grey index card given to him by the former Gestapo man, Philip Greiner. The card with a précis on it of the old Gestapo investigation into Schramm. The card that included the note ‘Cäsar Dönnecke, K.z.b.V’, the ‘Special Purpose Detachment’. Stave had added to the file a note of Greiner's statements about Dönnecke's investigations carried out in February 1945, which ended in two executions. It was from memory, but it was better than nothing. And also Dönnecke's involvement in the murder of children from the concentration camp. Stave glanced up at the ceiling. The Homicide department was on the floor above. You’ll regret the day you started running a dossier on me, he thought to himself.

  A quarter of an hour later, Ehrlich was sitting listening to the chief inspector's report. ‘You and I have a confidential agreement which goes against a dozen regulations. Under dubious, not to say illegal, circumstances, you had a copy of a walking stick handle made,’ the prosecutor summed up. ‘Made by a man who has already been involved in making illegal copies. It just happens that by chance this copy fits the hole left by an injury to a skull, which for the past few years has been lying in a bombed-out building. You don’t seriously think I can press charges on that basis? Against a respectable citizen, an opponent of the Nazis and protector of Jews? You can’t even prove that the dead body is that of Rolf Rosenthal. According to what Dr Schramm has said, it can’t be. Apart from all of that, can you even prove that at the time in question, 1943, Schramm used that walking stick? It would be embarrassing to say the least if he could prove in court that he only bought it in 1947.’

  ‘A silver handle? Nobody's been able to buy anything like that since 1939.’

  The public prosecutor raised his hands to prevent argument. ‘The silver handle isn’t even the problem — your whole story's the problem. If you really want to know the truth: you haven’t remotely convinced me.’

  ‘It all fits perfectly.’

  ‘Just like the silver handle and the skull injury. Indeed, it could have come from a Sherlock Holmes story. But let me play the dim Dr Watson here and ask you: why would Schramm have killed one of his employees? What's the motive? During the Nazis’ time the banker protected Jews; he didn’t go around bashing their heads in.’

  ‘It has to have something to do with the artworks, seeing how Schramm so vehemently denies ever having owned them.’

  ‘And that's all you’ll be able to say when the judge summons you to the witness stand? “Something to do with artworks”? At that point, at the very latest, the case will be an unconditional dismissal and your career will be ruined.’

  ‘It's already ruined.’

  ‘You can always fall further than you think.’

  ‘So you’re not going to raise any charges?’

  ‘I don’t want to go down with you. Are you really surprised?’

  ‘No.’ Stave admitted, taking a deep breath. ‘If I were still working in Homicide, I’d keep digging.’

  ‘Even then I wouldn’t bet a single Deutschmark on your chances of success.’

  ‘I have one more thing for you, by the way,’ the CID man said with a thin smile. ‘Let's just say it's a postcard from a colleague.’ He laid on the desk in front of Ehrlich the Gestapo man's index card, and his own notes, and told him everything he knew about Dönnecke's past during the Nazi era. ‘This Greiner, the Gestapo man,’ he said in conclusion, ‘is one of the men you’re investigating. I suspect he’d testify against Dönnecke if you spoke nicely to him.’

  ‘You mean if I let him off the hook?’

  ‘Greiner might be a bastard, but Dönnecke's a sadist and a murderer.’

  ‘Killers like him very rarely get caught; they leave too few traces.’

  ‘This is one.’

  Ehrlich picked up the old filing card. ‘Are there any more of these?’

  ‘As far as I understood from Greiner, yes.’

  The prosecutor took off his spectacles and began polishing the lenses. ‘That would be enough to press charges against Dönnecke.’ His tone of voice was businesslike, but behind it Stave could hear a determined decisiveness. His heart beat a little faster: they might send Dönnecke to the scaffold!

  ‘You have to promise me something,’ said Ehrlich, pointing the frame of his glasses towards him: ‘You will appear in court. As a witness for the prosecution.’

  ‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ Stave promised him.

  Stave went silent for a long time, contemplating the trial to come. Dönnecke would be the worst murderer he had ever got convicted, and that when he was no longer working for Homicide.

  Eventually his glance fell on a copy of Zeit, the latest issue, lying on a side table. ‘The newspapers are full of stories about Israel,’ he said. ‘This new state in Palestine. Utopia. A safe harbour for Jews.’ And to Ehrlich, ‘Why are you doing all this here? In Hamburg you were humiliated, sacked. Your wife was driven to death here. Your children have been at boarding schools in England for ages. Yet you hear stories here about some guy who hung unconscious children in a cellar and decide to press charges that could keep you fighting in court for months if not years. Why don’t you just leave and let all the culprits come back to this heap of rubble?’

  ‘Look at me,’ Ehrlich proclaimed with an expression on his face that projected sadness and pride at the same moment. ‘Do I look like some Zionist with a spade in one hand and a gun in the other who wants to go set up a kibbutz in the desert? My place is here in Hamburg, precisely because it was here I was so humiliated. Precisely because children were murdered in cellars here, and a crippled art buyer killed in an office building.’

  Stave smiled. ‘I’m glad to hear not everyone's leaving. I’ll talk to Greiner again and put together some more facts on Dönnecke. If I ever turn in a watertight case, this’ll be it.’

  ‘What about your other investigations?’

  ‘I’ll keep looking for clues on Rolf Rosenthal, clues that at some stage might point the finger at a certain Hamburg banker. The artworks can go to a museum a
nd the files into a cabinet.’

  ‘You can’t win them all.’

  That evening he held Anna in his arms. She was spending the night with him. They hadn’t even tried to conceal the fact. The neighbours were going to have to get used to it. Gusts of wind blew the rain against the windowpanes, as if someone was flicking a wet handkerchief against the glass. A motorbike spluttered down Ahrensburger Strasse, its misfires ringing out like gunshots.

  NWDR Radio was broadcasting a play about pigs that egged on the animals on a farm to stage a revolution against their masters, but in the end they themselves became dictators. ‘Just like animals,’ the announcer called it.

  Stave caught himself as he was about to contradict him with ‘just like people’. Don’t start talking back to the radio, he warned himself. Anna had fallen asleep much earlier, but he sat there listening to the talking pigs, and thought about war and revolution.

  His thoughts drifted to MacDonald who was taking his wife and child to a besieged city. A new war? Berlin had to be a paradise for spies — a city where you only had to cross the road to be in another sector. A city where the ghosts of murder and rape hovered amid the ruins. Where men had still been making propaganda films in an inferno until one of them lost a leg to a grenade. Where a diplomat called Klaus von Gudow had last been seen alive. A city that just a few days ago you could reach in two hours on the train, but was now as sealed off from the world as Moscow.

  Might Karl be dragged into a war again? Could he once again find himself wandering through the ruins of bombed houses looking for bodies? The wearier he became the more his thoughts wandered. Dr Czrisini who was coughing himself to death and didn’t trust himself to go home to his empty house, who was maybe even this minute breathing his last. Chief Inspector Dönnecke who might even be listening to the same radio play. Would that make him too uncomfortable? Or did someone like him sleep easily, always convinced of being on the right side? Kurt Flasch from the Landeszentralbank, downstairs in the basement. Was he able to sleep? Or after two days in jail for black market offences, would he forever fear that his breach of the regulations at work would one day come to light and ruin him? If a few misprinted pfennig notes could yet signal his doom?