He pulled up a wooden chair and sat down on it on the balcony, thinking about Karl, about Anna, about how life would be from now on. There was no chance of him going to sleep.
* A famed early twentieth-century writer of cowboy stories.
Off His Own Bat
Monday, 9 June 1947
Heat. The stench of faeces rising from a stretch of wasteland because the pipes leading to the drains had collapsed. Stave wasn’t looking at the ruins of the city; he was trying to breathe as shallowly as possible so as not to inhale any more than he had to of the suffocating haze. He headed slowly towards the office. Monday at last, a relief after a torturously quiet Sunday. His son had slept soundly, so soundly that the chief inspector eventually ventured into his room, afraid that the boy might have died during the night. By the time he finally got up, the room was bright with noonday sun, too hot to sit out on the balcony. Breakfast was laid out on the wobbly kitchen table: bread, Quark, tap water, which still only trickled out.
‘We’ll be sitting here with nothing to drink if this goes on,’ Stave had said jokingly. He couldn’t think of anything more to say to his silent son. What will you do now? That would sound like a demand. The boy had to get back on his feet first. In any case Stave wouldn’t have known what advice to give him. Study at the bombed-out university? Should he train as an engineer, even though the Allies had forbidden any new German industry? No ships, no aircraft, no cars. A teacher — in one of the ruined schools full of criminal kids? Maybe even the police?
Should he take Karl on a tour around Hamburg and show him what was destroyed in the final years of the war? How miserable a life they would be leading from now on? A boy who just two years ago considered himself part of the ruling class of a new elite. And now would have to work like a coolie in a rice field just to live from day to day. You’ve first of all got to bond with him, Stave told himself.
But how? Go to the cinema? Karl and he hadn’t gone to see a movie together since the boy was twelve years old. Stave had hated the news magazines, the weekly droning of Hitler and Goebbels. But at the same time he had been ever so slightly afraid of his son in his Pimpf uniform, watching his face for the slightest sign of weakness or mistrust of the Führer. Karl had understood why his father wouldn’t take him to the cinemas any more. But Stave had never said anything: he had known he would never manage to get Karl out of the clutches of the Nazis. At first he hadn’t taken the Pimpf uniform and all the parroted repetition of propaganda seriously. He’d grow out of it. It was only when it was too late that he realised he’d lost Karl to Hitler and Goebbels. And after the death of Margarethe, he simply hadn’t the strength left to fight against the undertow sweeping his son away from him.
And so they had spent Sunday talking occasionally about trivia, Stave carefully, helplessly, Karl in monosyllables, still exhausted. But at least they had talked.
No word from Anna, but how could there be. If only we had telephones, Stave thought to himself. I wouldn’t mind the expense just to exchange a few words with her, to explain things and arrange another meeting.
So he had crept out of the apartment without breakfast, leaving his ration on the kitchen table for Karl, who was still asleep. Stave was hungry and thirsty but relieved. He had taken his son's documents with him to go down to the housing department and register permission for him to move in, get him ration cards and a normal ID card. It would take time, but Stave was determined to get everything in order. He felt he wouldn’t be at so much risk of him slipping away if he had signed and stamped official documents, something that still seemed like a dream.
He came back to the apartment and set down the papers, forms and new documentation on the kitchen table next to the bread. Not a sound from the room next door. At least Karl didn’t have nightmares that woke him up screaming. He would have to tell him about those.
As a result it was nearly noon before the chief inspector turned up at CID headquarters. As he trudged up the stairs it suddenly occurred to him that none of his colleagues knew about Karl. They all knew the story about his missing son, of course, but should he now tell them that the boy was back home again? What would the others think, those whose boys hadn’t come back from the front? Stave wasn’t particularly popular as it was, and that would hardly win him any new friends.
He only made his decision when he opened the door of the anteroom to his office. Erna Berg, heavy and round now, crouched behind her typewriter as if it was a defensive barrier. She looked tired and unhappy. It was her divorce, Stave reckoned, her lover MacDonald, her husband who’d come back from the war with only one leg, the courts, her worries that she wouldn’t be able to retain custody of her elder son. This was hardly the right moment to tell her about Karl. So he just gave her a nod, forced a smile and disappeared into his office. Sort out this case, he told himself, and then you can deal with the rest when your mind is clear.
His best witness was still the young prostitute. It might be worth having another word with Hildegard Hüllmann, he reckoned. The girl was one of the wolf children. She had been in Planten un Blomen with the victim. Maybe she’d got wind of more about Adolf's problems with the coal thieves than she’d let on at their last meeting. Maybe she knew which of the Bahndamm gang disliked him most.
‘I’m off down to the station, investigating,’ he called to Erna Berg, as he grabbed his hat. There was no point in going down to the girls’ orphanage in Feuerbergstrasse. She’d have got out of there ages ago.
First of all the chief inspector went past the station to the Hansa-platz, an almost exactly rectilinear square which had once been a model of middle-class propriety. It was cobbled and lined with five- or six-storied apartment buildings from the late mid-nineteenth century with white stucco fronts, now black in places or just blown out, with pillars or railings in front of tall wooden doors. The rows on the north and east sides had gaps where the bombs had found their targets. In the middle was a 17-metre high golden fountain with a female figure meant to represent the Hansa, the medieval trading organisation, with a gold crown on her head. In her left hand was a trident while the right pointed into the distance. Pathos from the days of the Kaisers, a queen presiding over a sea of rubble. Stave asked himself, as he had done so many times before, why so many hospitals and schools had been reduced to ruins, yet something like that remained standing. Was it chance? Or was it that, as MacDonald sometimes joked, those in the Royal Air Force who aimed the bombs were extremely accurate? Did one of them, flying high over Hamburg in a night sky alight with raging fire and searchlights, decide in a moment of cynical omnipotence to destroy the populace's morale by wiping out everything but the most useless monuments?
Stave went into the Lenx bar on Brenner Strasse, which led off the Hansaplatz, to get the lie of the land, and to fill his stomach. A potato salad, a glass of water and an ersatz coffee all for a few Reichsmarks. A customer was complaining loudly to the tired manager. There was jazz on the radio, but the customer wanted old German songs.
‘I’ll turn the radio down,’ the manager said to appease him and fiddled around with a knob under the counter. Stave thought the jazz was as loud as ever, but the customer seemed satisfied and ordered another coffee – a real coffee, the chief inspector recognised from the smell. Damn black marketeer, he thought, you make a fortune out of selling American cigarettes, then complain about their music.
A bit later Stave wanted to head back to the Hansaplatz again. It was afternoon and the black marketeers would be out. He might see if he could find anything for Karl. It would be awkward though if his colleagues from Department S picked him up. He kept a look out from his table by the window for any of their grasses he might recognise. For half an hour he sat there, then an hour, playing with his potato salad. He didn’t spot any of them. There won’t be a raid today, he told himself.
The air on the glass station concourse was still. Stave could taste coal dust in his dry mouth. At this time of day the platforms were empty. There were only a few long-distance tr
ains leaving. The suburban lines were quiet. But even so he didn’t have to go looking for the young prostitute; she found him. All of a sudden she was standing next to him, plucking at his sleeve.
‘I can tell you aren’t a punter, that's for sure. Those lads have their eyes on you; you walked straight past me.’
‘What makes you think I’m looking for you?’
‘Going on a journey, are you? With no suitcase? Going foraging, without a sack or a basket? You still haven’t found Adolf's murderer, that's why you’re here.’
‘Word gets around.’
‘I’ve been asking questions of my own.’
Stave looked at her. So thin. Her braided hair glowing strawberry blond, even though it almost certainly hadn’t been washed for days. He tried to imagine Hildegard Hüllmann as a schoolgirl, but somehow he couldn’t picture it in his head. He led her down to a bench at one end of the platform.
‘You’re investigating off your own bat?’
‘It's not illegal, is it? As long as I don’t break any laws.’
‘Have you broken any?’
She smiled, happily rather than cheekily. Stave was astonished to realise she liked him. ‘The boys down at the tracks were pretty annoyed, I hear, to find you spying on them on Saturday’
‘Have you spoken to any of them?’
‘I’ve been keeping my ears open. Can’t exactly say they’re friends of mine. They weren’t Adolf's best mates either.’
‘I believe there was some trouble.’
‘Whatever that Jim Meinke boy said, Adolf wasn’t responsible. He never pushed anybody off a freight train, not even by accident.’
‘Meinke doesn’t agree.’
She snorted angrily. ‘They didn’t like him because he was cleverer than they were. All they could do was steal a sack of coal. Any ten-year-old can do that. But Adolf, he had a bigger view. He had built himself a business. He only went down to the tracks to have fun with his friends.’
‘The wolf children?’
‘Anyone who's found their way here from the east isn’t stupid, Chief Inspector. We’re a lot smarter than these mummy's boys from Hamburg.’
‘Meinke is no mummy's boy. His parents are dead too,’ Stave said, a little more sharply than he had intended.
‘Don’t make me cry.’
‘You mean Adolf was doing other business besides coal?’
‘On the Hansaplatz.’
‘Black market?’
‘And smuggling.’
‘Cigarettes? Jewellery?’
‘Sometimes, but Adolf really was one step ahead of the others. Tapes.’
‘What was the point of that,’ the chief inspector asked, puzzled. ‘Nobody has a tape recorder any more. And in any case there's no electricity for it.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Like I said, I’ve been asking around. There's a kid on the Hansaplatz who acts as a lookout, he told me about it. Adolf was dealing in tapes.’ She gave a shy smile. ‘Off his own bat, so he said.’
Stave took out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow. Why would Adolf Winkelmann be smuggling tapes? Who would he sell them to? Big players on the black market who had too much money? Farmers from Holland who had made enough from selling potatoes to buy themselves a tape recorder and now wanted to record music?’ Absurd.
‘Who bought these tapes?’
‘I don’t know but I’ll find out.’
Stave thought back to where the body had been found and what MacDonald had said about Blohm & Voss in the war. ‘Was Adolf doing business with DPs? Former forced workers? Russians? Poles?’
‘If he’d been doing anything with the Russians, I wouldn’t have had anything to do with him,’ Hildegard Hüllmann said with conviction.
But maybe that's why he didn’t tell you anything about it, the chief inspector thought to himself. Nothing new about the coal thieves. He wondered if this young prostitute was holding out the tapes story in front of his nose as bait to distract him from the real story. Or if that really was all she knew. She had only met the boy a few times, after all. Or so she said.
‘Be careful,’ he said to her and got up from the bench. ‘Keep away from Meinke.’
‘He's nowhere near as dangerous as the aunt.’
Stave stopped. ‘Greta Boesel?’
‘If that's her name, it’ll do. Adolf told me more than once that his aunt was an iron-eater.’
It wasn’t a term the chief inspector had ever heard before. He raised an eyebrow.
‘It's a boxing expression. Hard-headed. She was raking money in. Adolf said she was into really big business. He was afraid of her.’
Stave found himself trying to imagine Greta Boesel stabbing her big nephew on top of an unexploded bomb down at the shipyard. Clearly the aunt and her nephew had their secrets from one another, and clearly both of them were playing a game on either side of the law. But murder?
‘Did he feel threatened by his aunt?’
‘No, no,’ Hildegard Hüllmann conceded. ‘He was just wary of her. From all I knew of him, she was the only person he really respected.’
Which in turn meant that Adolf Winkelmann was hardly in awe of Meinke and the coal thieves and he had probably let them know, the chief inspector thought. That might have been his mistake.
‘Can I go now?’ she asked politely. ‘No little excursion down to Feuerbergstrasse? Don’t forget. I approached you. I could have avoided you.’
He smiled and shook his head. ‘It might look a bit suspicious if the same policeman kept bringing you back.’
She blew him a coquettish kiss and strutted off. He watched her go, then turned around, towards the Hansaplatz. Slowly he limped along the platform, almost alone. There was only one female passenger waiting, just a few metres ahead of him. Stave was thinking about what he had heard, and what he would buy for Karl. He had nearly walked past the woman when he finally recognised her.
Anna.
‘I tried to invite you to lunch. Your secretary told me I’d find you here,’ she said in a cool voice. ‘But I didn’t want to interrupt.’ She nodded with her chin towards the skinny little figure of Hildegard Hüllmann, running up the stairs at the other end of the platform.
‘I’m in the middle of an investigation,’ the chief inspector stammered.
‘Do all your suspects blow you a kiss when they say goodbye?’
Stave wanted to take her arm, at least stroke her arm with his fingers. But he didn’t dare take the two steps that separated them. ‘It's about the murder of a boy down at the shipyard. I told you about it. She knew him.’
‘Maybe. I don’t seem to know you any more.’
The air in the station tasted like a damp sooty soup. ‘You don’t think ... that girl and I ...’
‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to think.’ Anna's face was pale.
‘Nor do I.’
She gave him a sad smile. ‘I know. I’m the one who didn’t answer any questions. I thought we could take our time. We could get to know one another slowly. But neither of us was coming from nowhere. We both were carrying the burdens of our past. The days before all this.’
‘My son has only been back two days,’ he whispered.
‘And you mustn’t send him away,’ she interrupted quickly ‘You told me about Karl. I knew that I would have to meet him sooner or later. But only when you yourself had got back together with him. When you yourself knew how things would work out with him. Do you know that yet?’
Stave held up his hands, then dropped them helplessly to his side. ‘I can’t think more than a few hours ahead,’ he admitted. ‘I’m going to the black market to buy a few things. As long as none of my colleagues spot me there. Then I’m going to go home. That's as far as my plans go right now.’
‘Karl is angry. Angry about the years he's lost. About the life he missed. Angry at you. And at me, because I’m here instead of his mother.’
‘Please don’t leave me,’ Stave said, choking.
‘I can hardly st
ay. Imagine it. I come round to your place in the evening, sit down at the table next to your silent son, who looks at me the same way he might have looked at a Russian soldier. Then we go to bed, and he's in the room next door and we both imagine he's listening. Or you come round to my place? You tell him he has to spend the evening on his own, next door to your old family house, where his mother died? And you’re spending the night with me?’
‘We can start all over again,’ he whispered. ‘We can’t all sit here forever, vegetating amid the rubble of the past.’
‘Listen, we grabbed hold of one another, like two people drowning. But we’re not drowning any longer. We’re swimming now.’
‘Please don’t go.’
‘You have to get your life back on the rails, you and your son. And I have to work out for myself how I might fit into that life.’ She took the two steps between them, stroked his cheek briefly with her right hand. ‘I’m not going away forever,’ she whispered. Then she turned on her heel and went down the stairs to the platform.
Stave watched her go, her lean body, her dark hair tied back tightly, her white summer dress tossed by a rare breath of wind. So frail, he thought to himself. And wondered if her last sentence had been anything more than an empty promise.
It took him nearly half an hour to get to the Hansaplatz, even though it was only a few hundred metres away from the station. Stave felt dejected, his ankle ached, he was so distracted that he didn’t even sweat. He had a headache, as if there was a tumour in his brain, as if every movement he made caused something to irritate the inside of his skull. His life was a void. He thought back to that night four years ago, when the fires made the night as bright as day and he pulled Margarethe's corpse out of the ruins of their home. At first he had felt no pain, just the impression of being trapped in a dream, from which he would soon wake. Was he now going to find his new love slipping away from him, after a few gently spoken sentences on a station platform? Once again he felt he was caught up in a dreadful dream.
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