The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  Who still cared about a few damaged works of art found in a bombed building? Who cared about a corpse with a curious wound to the head? What did any of that matter to the way the world turned? You can’t win them all, the public prosecutor had said. And Ehrlich should know.

  The play ended about midnight. Without hope. The battle between rebellion and suppression was eternal. Nothing good lasted; it all fell to pieces. Stave got to his feet cautiously and tiptoed over to the radio. He was about to turn it off when he looked around: Anna sleeping in the yellow light given off by the radio tubes. The sight made him deliriously happy; he wanted to dash to the window, throw it wide open and proclaim his revelation to the empty street. Instead he crept back into bed, put his arms once again around his lover and whispered into her hair what he had not dared to shout aloud: ‘Our lives are not in vain. We will not lose. Not this time.’

  St Nicholas's tower

  Friday, 25 June 1948

  The wooden boards of the Landungsbrücken glistened in the rain. Waves danced on the Elbe, tossed by hundred of barges, tugboats and freighters. An American ‘Liberty’ freighter was heading downstream towards the North Sea, the black plume of smoke from its funnel hanging in the damp air like a dirty sheet forgotten on the washing line. Anna had taken Stave's left arm. She had turned the collar of her coat up against the gusting wind and hidden her black hair under a headscarf. Stave was holding a bouquet of flowers in his right hand, trying at the same time to protect it with his torso against the rain.

  ‘Haven’t you got a Union Jack to wave us off with?’ MacDonald was hurrying with long steps down the gangplank that connected the Landungsbrücken to the Elbe embankment by Baumwall. He was wearing his dark dress uniform, the insignia shining, his shoes immaculately polished, all despite the rain. Erna was by his side in a white coat, pushing Iris in a pram, a little bundle also in white, like a tiny Egyptian mummy. Stave's former secretary was even rounder than he remembered though her cheeks were pale. Maybe she's already pregnant again, the chief inspector wondered. Or maybe it's just excitement.

  The women embraced as if they’d known one another forever, while Stave and MacDonald stood by awkwardly.

  ‘It's been a pleasure working with you,’ the chief inspector said, realising it hardly sounded impressive.

  The young Scotsman laughed, clapped him on the back and shook his hand. ‘These months in Hamburg have been the best I’ve spent in the army,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve just a few more years to serve, then I’m free. Maybe I should apply to Scotland Yard?’

  ‘I’ll write you a reference,’ Stave promised, smiling, although he felt dismayed to be losing his friend.

  Gradually more and more British officers turned up in dress uniform — but without companions. Stave wondered where Erna's son might be, and whether she’d ever see him again. And wondered if she was thinking exactly the same thing.

  A long blast on the ship's horn and suddenly there was a flurry of excitement. Suitcases, kit bags hauled on board, hasty words, handshakes, embarrassed waves. If Anna hadn’t nudged him in the ribs, Stave would have forgotten to hand over his bouquet. He coughed and awkwardly gave it to Erna.

  ‘Sometimes I miss the office,’ she said, blushing slightly.

  ‘Without you, Hamburg CID will never solve another case,’ Stave replied.

  ‘What are you going to do now that you’ve left Homicide and Department S is being disbanded?’

  Stave shrugged his shoulders: ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Promise me you won’t move to Vice.’

  Stave laughed and nodded. ‘I can do without the hookers and their pimps.’

  ‘Don’t be cross with me,’ Erna said to Anna, winking at her, before standing on her tiptoes and kissing Stave on the cheek.

  ‘It's a good job we’re not both on duty,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Excuse me for butting in,’ MacDonald said. ‘But I’m British and we find sentimentality awkward. Time to get on board.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me how you’re going to get from the Elbe to Berlin.’

  ‘We’re going to fly, old boy. Uncle Joe in Moscow has a thing or two to learn if he thinks he can keep out a lieutenant of His Majesty.’

  MacDonald pointed downstream. By the other bank of the Elbe, hardly recognisable through the rain, two grey shadows swam on the waves. Stave, who hadn’t paid attention until now, had just assumed they were freighters. Only now did he realise they were huge four-engined flying boats. On the sides of their nearly 25-metre fuselages were red, white and blue British roundels.

  ‘The Elbe-Havel Express,’ the lieutenant explained. ‘Our American friends are flying food, coal and medicines, everything the Russians have blockaded, into the city on board DC-3s. We’re using a couple of Short Sunderlands. They were used to hunt U-boats during the war. Now they’re flying tinned foodstuffs back and forth. You can make a career of that too. And between the sacks of salt and tins of corned beef, they’ve found a place for me and my good ladies.’

  Stave recalled the fleets of bombers flying through Hamburg's sky, the exploding flak shells in the beams of the floodlights, the burning planes and the tumbling silhouettes of pilots on parachutes falling into the darkness. ‘It won’t be a holiday excursion,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry, old boy. The Russians won’t shoot at us. Not yet at least. We’ll be flying over the Brandenburg Gate within the hour.’

  ‘The weather isn’t good.’

  ‘We’re British. We only worry when the sun comes out.’

  ‘You have an answer to everything.’

  ‘As a good policeman should have. I really should consider going over to Scotland Yard.’

  ‘It has the advantage of working in London rather than Berlin.’

  Two German sailors and the British soldiers carefully carried the pram on to the barge. Erna climbed on board with Iris in her arms. MacDonald shook his hand again. ‘We’ll be in touch.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  Stave smiled and tried to touch his hat with his right hand in a military salute. Then the engine roared and the barge pushed off into the waves on a course for the other side of the river near Finkenwerder. The people on board were crouched down against the rain and spray coming over the side of the boat. Only one stood upright by the stern waving.

  ‘He's a lucky dog,’ Stave whispered, taking Anna's arm. ‘There won’t be another James MacDonald.’ He sounded as if he wanted to persuade himself of something he didn’t quite believe.

  Anna had linked arms with him as they climbed up the knoll on the summit of which stood St Michael's church. Stave began to walk more quickly as they passed the ruins where he had been shot a few months earlier. Anna knew nothing about that, even if she had seen the scar on his chest long ago. She was waiting for him to tell her about it, he knew. And he would.

  ‘Karl's coming round this evening,’ he began, cautiously.

  ‘Dinner for three?’ A jovial expression. But he could feel the tension in her words.

  ‘We have a lot to talk about. His future. He's a student now. Did you know that? And our future. We’re getting married, did you know that?’

  Then she kissed him and laughed. ‘I’d already almost forgotten.’

  Behind the church they turned towards the Alster. Stave looked at a truck that roared past them, loaded with sand and beams. ‘You won’t always be able to hunt down treasures in the ruins,’ he said. ‘There are going to be builders everywhere soon. At some stage somebody is going to find you out.’

  ‘I know. In any case I think it might be more fitting for the future bride of a chief inspector to find a legal trade.’

  ‘That sounds as if you’re a street walker. It's not quite that bad.’

  ‘I’m going to open a shop,’ Anna announced. ‘An antiques shop. I’ll trade under my maiden name, if you don’t object. Old aristocracy, tasteful objects, the two go together – and my East Prussian past ought to be good for something. I’m just looking for premises. S
omething near the Alster would be perfect. You get the right sort of customers strolling along the Jungfernstieg.’

  He gave her a sceptical look. ‘Are you sure there are enough people who might wander into your shop?’

  ‘There's enough money about. It's just been hidden away. Now, with the new currency, it's creeping out again and looking to be spent.’

  ‘But on old things? New, new, new — that's what I hear from everybody. New shoes, new coats, even new cars. That doesn’t leave a lot to be spent on expensive antiques.’

  She gave him another smile. ‘You’d be surprised to see just how much money there is to be spent in Hamburg already.’

  ‘I ought to get up to date,’ he answered embarrassedly. ‘I need to find a new job.’

  ‘You’re not going back to Homicide?’ Anna's voice had risen a touch – as if she had difficulty suppressing a cry of joy.

  ‘Fraud is going to be the crime of the future. Can’t be bad to get in there at the beginning.’

  ‘Frank Stave, have I ever told you I love you?’

  ‘I don’t mind if you say it again.’

  They didn’t part until they reached the Jungfernstieg, where Anna wanted to see what shop premises there were for rent.

  ‘Don’t forget we have a date for dinner,’ Stave reminded her.

  ‘What do you plan to do with the afternoon? Are you going back to headquarters?’

  ‘I will later. But first I want to visit a crime scene.’

  ‘A new case?’

  ‘Quite the opposite: the old business about the bronze bust. For better or worse I need to put the file to bed. But I just want to revisit the place where it was found. Take a final look.’

  ‘Will it take long?’

  ‘It's only a few hundred metres from here on foot. An old ruined office building nobody cares about any more, except for a chief inspector who wants to take another look around, even though there's nothing more to be found. I’ll be back in headquarters in an hour at most.’

  The Reimershof. Stave had passed the city hall and walked through the ruined nave of St Nicholas. From the bridge leading across to the Reimershof he took a good look at the remains of the office building: eight rows of empty windows, no glass, not even the wooden frames. No roof, no ceilings. Just drizzle, soaked into the fire-scarred outer walls. The muddy water of the Nicholas fleet lapped against filthy wooden support piles by the bank. Early afternoon in midsummer but it had hardly even got properly light yet. Nobody about. Even the Trümmerfrauen weren’t to be seen – they must either have salvaged everything of use from the Reimershof or it was too dangerous for them to go into the unsecured ruins after the endless days of rain.

  The chief inspector walked through the arched walls where the main entrance would have been. Piles of rubble, broken bricks. No chimney pipes any more, no heaps of tangled cables, no undamaged stone. There was a chattering, chirping sound coming from somewhere: a nest of rats, the CID man guessed. He walked into the ruins. Half of the interior lay in the inky shadow of the walls: the collapsed cellar in which the damaged works of art had been found, the same place where the corpse of Rolf Rosenthal had lain. Stave wondered what secret might yet lie beneath that rubble. Suddenly he heard a noise. Stave lifted up his head, held his breath. Footsteps.

  The chief inspector glanced around quickly. A thick clump of blackberry bushes growing out of the rubble near the external wall opposite the entrance. He dashed over, squeezed between the wall and the thorns and ducked down, blood oozing from a scratch on his right hand, damp coming through his light summer trousers at the knees. He fumbled hectically in his coat pocket for his FN22. In vain; his pistol holster was still hanging on a hook in the cloakroom of his apartment.

  Schramm. It was the old banker standing in the burned-out entrance, staring suspiciously into the interior. A dark coat, a dark hat on his huge skull. The walking stick with its silver handle. Stave hardly dared breathe, bent further down to get his hands on a lump of brick. Better than nothing.

  Tentatively, the banker ventured into the ruins. He clambered with some difficulty over the first pile of rubble, struggling at the same time to put his monocle into his left eye. The shattered ceiling of the vault where the artworks had been, Stave realised, that's where he was heading. He was looking for something.

  Taking careful steps Schramm climbed down into the crater, poking with his walking stick into the brick dust and charcoal remnants of woodwork. Flakes of lime plaster dirtied his dark coat, but he paid them no attention. Schramm bent down, studying the rubble with the eye behind the monocle. He pushed a dinner plate-sized concrete block to one side, brushed away mortar dust and pulled up a beech sapling, complete with roots.

  Stave's knees ached and he was shivering in the cold, because by now both his trousers and the shoulders of his overcoat were soaked through. He was holding the half brick so tightly that the scratch on the back of his hand began bleeding again.

  Suddenly, the banker too fell to his knees, dropped his walking stick and began foraging with both hands in the rubble. He picked up something that looked like a damaged key, its edges serrated, covered in dust but part of it glistening black. Schramm lifted up his discovery and used his stick to support his massive frame as he clambered out of the ditch and staggered to the external wall, where more light was coming through what had been a window. It was a ceramic skull, Stave realised. Schramm had found the other half of the broken male head, the lower half of which he himself had discovered along with the bronze bust and concrete sculpture. The banker looked long and hard at the fragment, the expression on his face as inscrutable as that of the piece of sculpture he was holding. For a moment it made the chief inspector think of Hamlet holding up the skull of Yorick. These are all his things, Stave thought. He's the only one who knows what else lies buried under all this rubble.

  The banker was holding his discovery in his right hand, leaning on his walking stick with his left, limping towards the doorway. Stave waited until he had disappeared behind the external wall before jumping to his feet and hurrying after him. As he came out of the ruin he glanced around and saw Schramm on the bridge – his big dark shape above the opaque water.

  The CID man was thinking feverishly. There was no cover. Where would Schramm head? If he ran after him he would be noticed as soon as he reached the bridge, if not before. He suppressed a curse and waited. By now Schramm had reached the other side of the bridge and was stumbling through yet more rubble to the ruins of St Nicholas's, his shadow visible through the remains of a window, between remnants of walls and stumps of blown-up pillars. And then he vanished.

  Stave sprinted as fast as his left ankle would allow: the bridge, the rubble on the other side. The church nave. Nothing. He looked around in confusion. On his right, the remains of the choir, walls towering ten metres high, coming together like the prow of a ship, between them nothing but rubble. A Gothic portal leading nowhere. In front of him was a bombed side wall and beyond it the disembowelled remains of other office buildings. A movement to his left. Not next to him. Above him.

  The ripped open, fire-scarred tower of the St Nicholas church. Two of its walls were gone, but the floors were still there, with damaged walls and a half-intact stone staircase reaching into the grey air like the bare skeleton of some enormous backbone. Ever since 1943 it had been banned for anyone to venture into the towering, dangerously unstable ruin.

  Schramm's figure appeared on the crooked staircase, hurrying upward, seemingly untroubled by the abyss beneath his feet.

  Stave rushed towards the bombed tower ruin looking for the entrance to the staircase.

  The sky above Hamburg

  The stones at the base of the tower were red from old fires. On the steps was a slimy black layer of dirt. Pigeon feathers. The stench of cement and excrement. Stave sprinted up the stairs two at a time. The first landing. He lurched backwards. Air. A gust of wind pulling at his coat. He didn’t dare look down. No walls, no banisters. Pull yourself together. Th
at's barely ten metres. Keep going.

  He took the steps more slowly now, watching his feet constantly. Schramm couldn’t get away from him. What was the guy intending to do up there? Rainwater on his shoulders. At one point Stave stopped. Next to him was the shell of a blown-out window, filigree arches and rosettes. If I fall against that, it will all give way and carry me hurtling to earth, the CID man told himself. He thought he could hear the banker panting for breath somewhere above him. But it might have been his imagination. The wind was whistling in the walls, the gusts getting stronger. How high was the tower? Twenty metres? Thirty? Keep on.

  Dented bells hanging in a wooden frame. The verdigris-covered bronze housing shook in the wind. A beam creaked. His ankle ached with every step. His right hand hurt because he was still carrying the lump of brick. His chest wound hurt as if somebody was perforating his lungs with a needle. He shivered, his body wet with rain and sweat. At least fifty metres up. He wondered where the banker got the strength to charge up the tower at such speed. Onwards.

  The last landing. Seventy-six metres up. Don’t look down. It felt as if the church tower was swaying. It's just an illusion, he told himself; it has to be an illusion. Yet he could feel the stairs trembling even through the soles of his shoes. The wind was howling around him like an organ pipe.

  Carefully, Stave climbed on to a half-destroyed floor beneath the pointed spire of the church tower. A Gothic demon figure, burned black, perched at the top of the wall, grimacing down at the city: the houses blown apart, the stumps of walls, the empty windows, the black traces of fire. Grey sky, low black clouds, streaming rain. The sinister figure stared ironically down at the apocalyptic landscape as if its curse was responsible for the destruction. The evil eye, Stave reflected. Then suddenly he stopped. Schramm was standing at the opposite side of the devastated platform with his back to him. From where he stood the tower fell away to a view of the bridge and the Reimershof, looking from this height like a collapsed doll's house. The banker was staring down, his shoes almost touching the edge of the crumbling stonework, beyond them — nothingness.