The Wolf Children

by Cay Rademacher

  ‘You’re becoming an expert gardener.’

  Karl nodded, taking him quite seriously.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe how much I enjoy it. Snuffling about between the leaves, even the heat and the mosquitos that bite me overnight. It's so quiet. Nobody shouting at me, nobody shooting. A bed that is hard, but at least clean. Neighbours who lean over the fence to say hello, but don’t ask any questions.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound as if you want to come home with me for dinner.’

  ‘This is my home now, Father.’

  Black Market Practices

  Thursday, 12 June 1947

  Stave left the house just before 8 in the morning to head out on the kilometre-long walk that took him towards the station, then down Danziger Strasse, and along Brenner Strasse to his destination, the Hansaplatz. The smugglers and black market dealers never turned up before ten or eleven and things only really got going around midday, at the moment when office and shop staff took their lunch break. But the chief inspector couldn’t bear it in his apartment any longer. The rooms were too quiet, the space too small.

  In the restaurant of the Würzburger Hof hotel in Brenner Strasse he had a cup of ersatz coffee with skimmed milk. ‘We’re out of sugar,’ said a podgy waitress who looked as if she’d been working all night.

  He had seven more days. No pressure. Pressure made for mistakes. But MacDonald was his friend, perhaps the only one he still had in this city. And for Erna Berg it was a potential disaster. She risked losing her lover and father of her unborn child, as well as custody of her first son. If Stave didn’t come up with something better than he had so far within seven days, then he would also lose MacDonald and Erna Berg. He might already have lost Anna, and his son. From the following week on, he could find his life empty.

  He only left the stuffy café late in the morning and strolled inconspicuously – or so he hoped – in the direction of the Hansaplatz. He hoped the revolver in its holster under his jacket didn’t make too much of a bulge. At the end of Brenner Strasse, where it opened out on to the square, he spotted the people he was looking for. Two adolescents standing smoking in the doorway of a house occupied by several families. Lookouts. The uninteresting minor criminals of the Hansaplatz, the small fish who didn’t even get picked up when the police carried out a raid. They were allowed to run away without anyone chasing them. No CID officer ever interviewed them; the worst that ever happened was that they’d end up before one of the British summary courts and get put away for a day or two.

  He had nearly reached the doorway. If they decided to make a run for it now, he could probably reach out and grab at least one of them. But the pair just glanced at him indifferently. They clearly considered him just another citizen come to check out what was available on the black market.

  He moved quickly shoved them both backwards through the doorway into the stairwell. Stave followed, closing the door behind him.

  ‘CID,’ he hissed. He hoped neither of them had a knife; he had never had to fire on children before. His heart was pounding and he blinked fast to get his eyes used to the low light in the stairwell. The walls were painted green gloss, the closest apartment was up the steps towards the rear of the building. To one side was a closed door, which he assumed led down to the coal cellar.

  The boys were about ten or twelve years old, and wore short leder-hosen, open patched shirts; one of them had dark black hair, sandals that were too big for his dirty feet, the other was brown-haired, badly undernourished and barefoot. He turned towards the staircase.

  ‘Forget it,’ Stave called after him. ‘I’m faster than you.’ It was a bluff and he hoped neither of them had noticed his limp.

  ‘We haven’t done anything,’ the brown-haired one insisted.

  ‘Are you arresting us?’ the black-haired one asked. ‘My parents think I’m at school.’

  ‘I don’t care what your parents think. If you’re smart they’ll never even know about this conversation. If you aren’t smart, they’ll have to come and pick you up from the police station.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘That's the way.’ Stave took a deep breath and pulled out the photo of Adolf Winkelmann. ‘Have either of you seen him before?’

  The pair exchanged rapid glances, then the black-haired one shrugged his shoulders. ‘If he's who you’re looking for, you’re a bit late. He's a goner.’

  ‘You can see he's dead from the photo,’ the other commented.

  ‘You know who he is.’

  ‘That's Adolf. He used to hate his name.’

  ‘Surname?’

  They shook their heads. ‘He wasn’t a friend of ours so we didn’t ask.’

  ‘But you know what he did?’

  ‘It's a trap,’ the brown-haired one blurted out. ‘If we sing, you’ll take us in.’

  ‘On the contrary, if you don’t sing I’m taking you in.’

  ‘It hardly matters,’ the black-haired one sighed. ‘We stand lookout here every day. We know everybody who turns up here.’

  Stave nodded understandingly.

  ‘Yeah, so Adolf, he was like a courier. He picked stuff up at the station and brought it to the dealers here. Did the exchange either in the Würzburger Hof or the Lenz bar, in the back room.’

  ‘What did he use to carry the things he was transporting?’

  ‘Suitcases usually, unless it was something really small when he’d just put it in his jacket pocket. Once he used a shoe polish box to transport some stuff. But it was usually suitcases. We called him “the page boy” because he looked like the ones who carry stuff for rich people in hotels.’

  ‘Not to his face though,’ the brown-haired one added.

  ‘Or he would have hit you?’

  ‘Yeah, he could hit hard.’

  ‘What was in the suitcases, usually?’

  The two boys laughed. ‘If we were that nosy, we wouldn’t have a job as lookouts for very long.’

  ‘But you must have wondered? Maybe got wind of something from one of the dealers? Maybe got a look inside when somebody opened one of them?’

  They glanced at one another again, hesitated, then nodded. ‘Adolf was dealing with pills, and ciggies, of course, and Dutch butter.’

  ‘Pills?’

  ‘Something that began with “P”. Some people would go really wild to get hold of them.’

  ‘Penicillin?’

  ‘Yeah, that's it. No idea what it does. Some sort of Schnapps?’

  ‘A bit more healthy than that,’ Stave replied, thinking hard. Pity. Up until then he’d been reckoning it had been some sort of drug for athletes, like the cocaine or heroin they’d given a cyclist in the six-day race. Stuff like that would have been useful for boxers too. It would have been an excuse to interview Walter Kümmel again. But penicillin? Expensive stuff on the black market, but not exactly something that would interest a boxing promoter any more than anyone else.’

  ‘Who was Adolf dealing with? Who picked up the suitcases from him?’

  ‘No idea. The page boy would disappear into a back room with his suitcase and come out without it.’

  The chief inspector thought the answer was a bit too quick. ‘Well, that's a shame. I guess we’d better head on down to the police station.’

  Within thirty seconds he had the names of three black market dealers, not that any of them meant a thing to him. He wrote them down. They might be of interest to his colleagues in Department S, if they didn’t already know them.

  By now the two boys were dripping sweat, and not just because it was so stiflingly hot in the stairwell. The longer the interview went on, the greater the chance someone would get wind of it. Nobody liked seeing the police around the Hansaplatz. And if a couple of the big dealers turned up, Stave too could find himself in a tricky situation. He took down the boys’ names and let them think he was about to let them go. They both smiled with relief.

  ‘One more thing,’ he said, trying to sound as uninterested as possible. ‘Adolf never had
anything to do down by the port, did he?’

  The brown-haired boy shook his head, but his friend nodded. ‘A couple of weeks ago. Adolf didn’t want to be just a courier. He was ambitious. I heard somebody mention it, somebody telling somebody, the page boy's down by the port.’

  ‘Somebody who? When and where?’

  ‘I really don’t know. Not my business.’

  Stave believed him. ‘Do you know what he was smuggling from the port? Penicillin? Cigarettes?’

  ‘No. He wasn’t smuggling. At least not in this direction. Not according to what I heard. He never brought suitcases back from the port.’

  The CID man thought for a moment he’d misheard. ‘He never brought anything back from the port?’

  ‘He didn’t bring anything back, but he did take stuff there.’

  ‘You mean he’d take stuff from the Hansaplatz down to the port? Stuff that was intended to go somewhere else?’

  ‘What he did with it down at the port I have no idea. I can’t imagine what anybody would want with that stuff.’

  ‘You know, then, what it was that he was taking down there?’

  ‘Recording tapes. Adolf was dealing in tapes. He was so proud he even boasted about it once, said he’d got a whole carton of Lucky Strikes. That was the last time I saw him.’

  Stave strolled across the Hansaplatz. He’d given the boys a friendly nod and let them go. They’d slope off behind his back to warn the dealers who’d posted them as lookouts. But the chief inspector wasn’t interested. He looked about. A well-dressed gentleman was talking to a haggard elderly man. Stave stopped a few paces from them, watching from the corner of his eye. The old man opened the long overcoat he was wearing despite the heat. From behind him three tough-looking characters ran up, jostling him, quickly, expertly frisking him inside the coat. There was a choked cry, sarcastic laughter, then the well-dressed gentleman threw the old boy a bundle of Reichsmarks.

  The old boy was a dealer who needed to learn the ways of the world, Stave thought to himself. It was amazing people still fell for it. The trick was as old as could be, as old as the black market itself. The well-dressed type was a plant, who would look for an inexperienced, greedy or desperate dealer and pretend he was interested in doing a big bit of business. The dealer would show off his wares, and then the heavies would rob him at lightning speed. Then the plant would toss him a bunch of notes, so the victim could hardly complain he hadn’t been paid. Not that he could exactly lodge a formal complaint anyway, given that what he was doing was illegal in the first place.

  Stave wasn’t interested. He had glanced across while the old boy was being searched just to see what he had: coffee. But it was tapes he was looking for. He spent two hours wandering around the Hansa-platz. Maybe he stood out too much, or maybe he was just unlucky, maybe he was looking for the wrong stuff in the wrong place. But he saw no sign of recording tapes.

  The chief inspector was well aware that stuff from the black market found its way abroad: watches, jewellery, anything that was both small and valuable. There were big profits to be made: bring a couple of pounds of butter from Holland into the occupation zone and pick up a couple of diamonds in exchange. But recording tape? Who abroad was willing to pay for recording tape. You could buy it cheap enough in England or America. Why pay for it on the black market?

  In the end he gave up, disappointed and uncertain what do next. Hildegard Hüllmann had said Adolf was dealing in recording tapes. The two boys had confirmed it. There had to be something in it, but what?

  Stave walked down Ellmenreich Strasse towards the station. When he reached the corner where the Garrison Theatre was, he quickly pulled back into the shadows: Anna.

  She was speaking to two men, a British captain and the plant conman he’d been watching just a couple of hours earlier. It looked as if they were all chatting like old friends, the two men smoking, Anna smiling and gesturing with her right hand. The scene wrenched at Stave's heart. Eventually Anna reached into her handbag and pulled out something white, something painted, porcelain. Stave resisted the impulse to get closer. Two tiny cups, it looked like, and a tiny figurine, that of a woman maybe. It had to be Meissen porcelain, what the British called Dresden china, or something similar. For a moment Stave thought Anna was trying to get the conman and the British officer bidding against one another. But it seemed the deal had already been agreed in advance: the captain was interested in the figurine, the other man in the cups. The CID man was impressed by the sophistication of the trade. Because there was a British officer there, nobody was going to come up and arrest them. And Anna could be sure the black marketeer wasn’t going to mug her. It had to have been her idea.

  The pieces of porcelain, wrapped in old newspaper, disappeared into the pocket of a uniform shirt on one hand and the conman's brightly coloured jacket on the other. The thick bundles of Reichsmarks quickly, smoothly, changed ownership. Stave noticed how Anna swiftly put the English officer's money into her handbag, but took her time counting the notes the black marketeer had passed her. He realised that in that brief moment she had earned more money than he did in a month.

  Anna said her goodbyes to the two men, who remained standing on the street corner. Maybe the black marketeer also had something to offer the British officer, Stave thought. He followed Anna discreetly, primarily to protect her now that he knew how much money she was carrying. Or at least that's what he told himself.

  Without glancing right or left, she crossed the station, headed down Mönckeberg Strasse, without stopping at a bank. She passed the city hall and headed on down the Jungfernstieg. Stave's leg was hurting because he could hardly keep up with her. Anna turned left, along the Alster. Past the grandiose Four Seasons hotel, which still looked as if the war had taken place somewhere else. Anna disappeared into a shop next door to the hotel. The CID man edged closer: a jeweller's.

  Stave stared at the exterior with its fresh plaster, its curved display windows, everything within them laid out against a black background: watches, earrings, necklaces. He was too far away to clearly see the prices written in an elegant hand on cards next to each item, but close enough to see that they were all at least in six figures. He squinted to try to make out anything inside the shop. He could just about see a petite, well-dressed woman behind the counter, and Anna leaning over a glass case. She's not just looking, Stave thought to himself, she knows exactly what she wants. Anna and the salesgirl moved towards the shop window in order to examine a piece in the daylight. The chief inspector quickly hid behind a builders’ truck parked in front of the colonnade, and cautiously peeked out. Anna was holding up a ring, gold, without a stone.

  Stave turned away, leaning back against the wooden side panel of the truck, blood pounding in his head. For a moment he couldn’t shake off an image of Anna and Public Prosecutor Ehrlich standing together at the altar, with a golden ring glittering on her finger. Absurd. Maybe she was buying back an old wedding ring she had at some stage sold to the shop. But a wedding ring meant a husband. And if she was buying it back at some huge price, what did that mean?

  I’m standing here like some fourteen-year-old kid watching the girl he fancies from the next class going to the cinema with another boy, he told himself. But he couldn’t quite find it in him to laugh at himself.

  He turned away from the jeweller's. He didn’t wait to find out whether or not Anna actually did hand over the money in exchange for the ring. He hurried off, trying to meld in as inconspicuously as possible with the casual strollers along the colonnade and on the Jungfernstieg. He couldn’t bear it if Anna saw him here.

  Stave spent the rest of the day looking for recording tape. He walked up and down between Steindamm and Deichtorplatz, even going on one occasion as far as the steel girders of the Elbe bridges. Ruins on either side of him, broken here and there by the well-used short cuts that had sprung up. The air was a haze of heat. The chief inspector stopped to look at a wooden shelter built against a two-storey-high remnant of wall. A young woman ha
d dropped a bucket on a string down into the river and was struggling to pull it back up. In the end she managed it and poured the water over the roof of her shelter. ‘If I don’t cool it down, the tar will melt,’ she said, as if in explanation.

  Stave was embarrassed to have been looking and hurried on. He took to the pathways between the bombed-out houses, feeling how the ground under the soles of his feet had been trampled by thousands of other passers-by until it was as hard as concrete. Adolf Winklemann could have taken any of these pathways, if he hadn’t wanted to be spotted on the main roads. All of them eventually led close to the harbour.

  The chief inspector looked around. He could make out dark openings of little caves amid the ruins, half-ruined entrances to cellars, broken water pipes, old heating stoves, as well as hollow spaces that had somehow remained intact when bits of concrete and stone balconies had crashed to the ground. A few of these spaces were as big as wardrobes, some so tiny that you could hardly put a hand in. Nearly all of them at least partly covered by grass or shrubbery. Every one of them an ideal place to hide something. Places that could be used to temporarily store stolen goods, more or less safe from the elements, easy to relocate, but for someone who wasn’t looking for them, almost invisible. He wondered whether recording tape could be stored here without harm. Just on a whim he tried feeling around in a few of them, but apart from a few scratches on his hand from thorns, he found nothing. But then to search all of these little cavities just on the banks of the Elbe, it would take hundreds of men.

  He wandered back to the little hut where the young woman was now sitting against the wall, resting next to her empty bucket.

  ‘CID,’ he said, pulling out his ID card.

  ‘Better than the building control police,’ she said.

  The chief inspector couldn’t help thinking how young she was. ‘Have you been living here long?’

  ‘Ever since the cold weather ended. Before that I was living in the flak bunker, and before that in Breslau.’

  Stave nodded as if that was the most reasonable explanation in the world. He took out the photo of Adolf Winkelmann. ‘Did you ever come across this boy in the ruins around here?’ he asked.