The Wolf Children

by Cay Rademacher

‘This would be a good opportunity,’ Stave said, ‘for us to make ourselves scarce.’

  They pushed their way forward to the ruins of a slipway of which only a part remained intact, its concrete beams rising above them. They would be less conspicuous in the shadow of the ruins. They moved slowly, talking to each other like two men on their way to work who knew exactly where they were going and what they were doing. At the end of the slipway was the skeleton of a giant crane, which they had to climb over carefully They found themselves in an open area, baking hot with bushes as tall as a man growing between railway tracks that hadn’t been used for years. They were at the end of the Kuhwerder basin. A slight turn to the left and the freighter now blocked any sight of them from the quay. MacDonald took a deep breath and ran a finger around his shirt collar.

  ‘Do you think I dare take my jacket off?’

  ‘Perhaps you ought to get used to the heat. I imagine it's pretty hot in Palestine.’

  The lieutenant gave him a sidelong look. ‘Maybe I should take you with me as my adviser?’

  ‘A German policeman in the Holy Land? The Jews would just love that.’

  ‘It's nice to be able to do one's friends a favour.’

  MacDonald stopped suddenly. ‘Bells,’ he exclaimed.

  Along the empty space next to the quay a row of bells gleamed in the morning sun, some as tall as a man, some as small as a beer bottle, some of them badly dented, others lying on their side as it they’d been casually tossed away like some giant's unwanted toy. Others sat there on wooden beams as if they’d come straight from the foundry. They had crosses, reliefs, coats of arms inscribed on them, as well as names of saints, and words in German, French, Polish, Danish.

  ‘The bell cemetery,’ the chief inspector said. ‘We’re going to have to fight our way through and it won’t be easy.’

  ‘Which churches do all these bells come from?’

  The chief inspector waved an arm towards the horizon. ‘From all over Europe. The Nazis took down the bells in every church, first of all those in Germany, then eventually in all the occupied countries. Important materiel for the war effort.’

  MacDonald looked around him. ‘It doesn’t seem like they got round to melting many of them down.’

  ‘That's where you’re wrong. They collected them all here in Hamburg, because most came by ship. There were supposed to have been 75,000 altogether.’

  ‘There aren’t 75,000 here.’

  ‘These are just the ones that are left. About 8,000, people reckon. The rest are all either cartridge cases, artillery barrels or other weapons of war.’

  ‘Rubbish, in other words.’

  ‘These bells survived by chance. They had all been loaded on to a barge in 1945 to be transported elsewhere. Then your planes flew by again.’

  ‘Let me guess: a direct hit.’

  ‘Right here in Kuhwerder basin. A team of Hamburg salvage experts dredged them up again at the end of May 1945. Now they’re waiting here until somebody takes them back to the churches they came from, provided, that is, they still exist, and if representatives of the churches from the countries they were taken from ever get around to collecting them.’

  ‘Sounds like a money-making opportunity.’

  ‘There will certainly be men who will make a small fortune out of it, probably the same people who took them down in the first place.’

  ‘It's a skilled job.’

  ‘Over there is the gateway to the shipyard,’ Stave said, when they had finally made their way through the army of bells. ‘That's the easy bit of our job over with.’

  In front of them stood the gateway, with a barbed-wire fence and two bored-looking British military police. Out of bounds. If they had taken the right ferry they would have landed next to the shipyard itself. There were British guards there but in the mass of workers arriving in the morning it was unlikely they would have been individually checked. But here on the land side, there were only a few figures heading in the direction of Blohm & Voss, workers who lived on the south side of the Elbe or who preferred to walk through the long tunnel to the dockyard. Near the gate, on the right-hand side, was a little coffee shop, or rather a shack that sold old ersatz coffee and bread rolls with nothing much on them. A few workers were standing next to it with their Reichsmark notes already counted out, for the sake of speed.

  The chief inspector was once again wondering how Adolf Win-kelmann could have got into this prohibited area: by ferry he might have been able to sneak past the British, but wouldn’t the workers have wondered what he was doing there, given that Blohm & Voss no longer employed adolescents? Nobody apparently had ever seen him, or at least nobody had admitted as much to Kienle, the police photographer, when he had gone round the shipyard showing the workers his photo. He must have come this way, from the land side, the CID man thought to himself, through the Elbe Tunnel, then made his way through the ruins to some point along the fence that was neglected by the guards and not noticed by the coffee shop customers, cut the wire and crawled through. He then wondered if he and MacDonald would have to do something similar.

  The Briton had read his mind. He produced two pieces of paper from the pocket of his jacket and whispered, ‘Just keep going as if everything were perfectly normal. Walk right up to the guards.’

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘Passes, in the name of Walter Holz and Werner Schmidt.’

  ‘Forged?’

  ‘Please! Genuine, I can assure you. My job gives me a few privileges.’

  What sort of a secret service was this, Stave wondered, that could provide MacDonald with the papers he needed within a few hours, but would cut him loose because of a relationship with a married German? It had to be that British attitude to things. ‘Do the guards know who we are?’ Stave hissed.

  ‘No, apart from a very few friends in the service, nobody knows. But if that sergeant had seen us sneaking around he would have shot us.’

  ‘I’ll try to keep you between him and me.’

  ‘You know, you really should have been a soldier.’

  By now they had reached the gate. The sergeant examined MacDonald's paperwork longer than he had that of the others wearily trudging past the guards. Stave hoped it was only because he had never seen them before.

  ‘Move on,’ the NCO said at last, handing back the passes and waving a hand impatiently.

  ‘Where to now?’ MacDonald whispered to Stave.

  The chief inspector nodded towards a five-storey, dirty brown building in the centre of the yard. ‘That must be the administration building,’ he said, ‘the only place where men in jackets and ties won’t look out of place. We’ll see where we go from there.’ The warehouse in which Adolf Winkelmann had been found lying on the unexploded bomb was at the far end of the shipyard, hard to make out from where they were in the hazy air. None of the workmen headed in that direction; they were all off down towards the docks. It wouldn’t be very clever of them to make straight for that building, Stave reckoned. And in any case, he couldn’t imagine there’d be anything new to find.

  At the entrance to the administration building they were nearly knocked down by a whole clutch of men in collars and ties, carrying briefcases, notebooks, clipboards, all apparently in something of a hurry. They were led by a man of about fifty, with an aristocratic appearance, wearing good linen and a pair of shoes of a quality Stave hadn’t seen since the outbreak of the war.

  The chief inspector nodded to MacDonald that they should follow the others. They got a couple of suspicious looks at first, but nobody said anything.

  ‘That's Rudolf Blohm,’ Stave hissed. ‘The older of the two brothers who own the shipyard. I recognise him from pictures on the weekly newsreels.’

  ‘The weekly newsreels from before 1945 or after?’

  ‘From before 1945. He was a great friend to the Nazis. On the board of the German Museum in Munich, given all sorts of honorary positions, regularly a guest of the Führer.’

  ‘Well, if the Nazis had paid
me as much as they paid him to build the Bismarck, I might have shouted “Heil Hitler!” too.’

  ‘You British sacked half of my colleagues, but you let this character still run around his shipyard.’

  ‘A shipyard we are in the process of dismantling,’ the lieutenant replied with a brief smile.

  ‘Or so you think,’ mumbled Stave but quietly enough to be sure the British officer wouldn’t hear him. They were the last pair in the party hurrying along on the heels of Rudolf Blohm. Far enough back that any of the others who wanted to say something to them would have had to turn around, which none of them were prepared to do. But they were still close enough that the others assumed they were part of the group. They marched through the shipyard without anyone paying the slightest attention to them, until Stave suddenly realised where they were. ‘That's where the boy's body was found,’ he whispered.

  Blohm stopped by the entrance, and immediately the youngest man in his entourage ran up and opened the wooden door. The shipyard owner marched in with the group following, Stave and MacDonald among them. The door slammed behind them, and Stave noticed that the young man who had opened it remained outside. Keeping watch, he thought to himself. Which was hardly surprising.

  Because the building was no longer empty. All the machinery which on Stave's last visit had been lying outside had since been brought inside, supported on wooden beams or even packed in wooden cases, the metal gleaming and smelling of oil and grease, all polished up as if it had come straight from the factory. The hole in the roof through which the bomb had fallen had not, however, been repaired as yet. Stave thought he could still make out traces of blood on the ground, but told himself he was imagining it.

  ‘Do we have all the documentation?’ Blohm asked, without even turning round. A man with a briefcase dashed up to him and opened it. ‘Soviet freight certificates, confirmation that everything was loaded on board the Siberia.’

  ‘What was really loaded on board?’

  ‘A few old bits of machinery that weren’t usable, a pile of old iron, a lot of cigarettes and some cognac.’

  Blohm nodded in satisfaction, pointed to the machinery in the hall and barked out orders. ‘We need to build a solid wall in front of all this. Tall, solid, ideally made of iron, but wood if needs be. We need wooden cases. Get them from the freighters down at the docks, ones they’re finished with and which are not needed any more. Fill them up with bits of machinery, engines primarily, from the cranes, or diesel engines — dismantle one of those old narrow gauge locomotives. Everything should be as old, rusty and dirty as possible. Pour some oil over it all and spill some on the ground too. We want our machinery to disappear behind a wall of junk covered in oil and grease. The Tommies don’t like getting their uniforms dirty. If a British patrol should turn up, all they will find is rubbish and they’ll soon clear off.’

  ‘That's what you think,’ MacDonald whispered.

  ‘When will the trucks be ready?’ Blohm asked.

  ‘Next month,’ the man with the briefcase answered.

  ‘Good. As soon as they’re ready, load all this on board and take them to the warehouses over in Harburg. It’ll be safe there. But don’t move all the rubbish. That would take too long. Knock a hole in the exterior wall and load the trucks from behind, but make sure it's somewhere that can’t be seen by the British sentries. Have you got all that?’

  A few of his hangers-on headed for the door and Stave indicated to his companion that they should follow them as they would be less conspicuous than if they stayed behind with Blohm and the core of his group.

  ‘That man has no scruples,’ MacDonald said.

  ‘That's the way to get by no matter what happens,’ Stave replied.

  ‘What do we do now?’ MacDonald whispered when they were out of the building.

  ‘Head for the Leland Stanford. I’d like to know if it's really broken down. Sounds a bit of a coincidence.’

  The men who had been part of Blohm's entourage were heading in all directions, so Stave thought it best if the two of them made their own way across the shipyard to the large quay where the Liberty ship was moored. It took them only a few minutes. The air round the ship's stern was so hot, you could have fried eggs on the deck. A few American sailors were standing bare-chested, smoking, next to the railings and glanced at them disinterestedly. A young officer standing on the bridge was reading the Stars and Stripes and blowing pink bubblegum. A couple of sweat-soaked workers were carrying a big, strangely shaped metal object in their oil-covered hands.

  ‘Looks like a bit of damaged machinery,’ MacDonald said. ‘Maybe it was a coincidence after all.’

  ‘Let's wait a bit,’ Stave said. He nodded towards a crane lying on the cobbles as if it had been cut down by a scythe. ‘Act as if we’re following the boss's orders. He wants crane engines. There has to be one somewhere in that thing.’

  ‘We’re not supposed to be the sort of people who get their hands dirty.’

  ‘We’re just organising it, if anyone asks. Our real purpose here is to keep an eye on this American freighter to see if anyone takes something other than oily spare parts on board.’

  They clambered over the wreck of the crane, pulling open a piece of metal plating here, tugging at a cable there. ‘You do realise that if any of the shipyard workers is watching us, they’ll realise we haven’t a clue what we’re doing?’ MacDonald said, the sweat running down his brow.

  ‘I do. It's the perfect cover. Workers always assume clerical staff to be idiots.’

  ‘As long as they don’t decide this is the moment to launch the revolution.’

  ‘If they do, we jump on board the freighter. The Americans aren’t keen on communists. We’ll be safe on board the Leland Stanford.’

  ‘Except that it has an engine problem,’ MacDonald reminded him. ‘But in any case we might do better to delay our escape,’ he prodded Stave. ‘Look over there.’

  Stave ducked behind the operator's cabin of the crane and looked up at the bridge of the ship where the bubblegum-chewing young officer had folded up his newspaper and was talking to one of the young shipyard workers, handing him a cigarette.

  ‘No officer would normally allow a shipyard worker on to the bridge,’ MacDonald said. ‘And certainly not a German.’

  ‘But there he is, even offering the guy a smoke,’ Stave noted, nodding towards the ship. ‘Look, the worker is holding something.’

  ‘It looks like a jute sack, and obviously not very heavy.’

  ‘Nor covered in oil. Clearly not a spare part.’

  ‘Maybe it's something for the bridge? A compass or radio instrument?’

  ‘There haven’t been any precision instruments at Blohm & Voss for ages now’

  ‘Maybe. Remember what we just saw in that warehouse.’

  ‘Yes, but Blohm isn’t stupid enough to try installing something on an American ship that they themselves banned back in 1945. And in any case, precision instruments are transported in wooden or metal cases, not in cloth sacks.’

  ‘A cloth sack that is just changing ownership.’

  The shipyard worker handed over the sack to the young officer, lit up a second cigarette, gave an awkward wave in farewell and left the bridge.

  ‘Right now what I’d like to do is storm that bridge and interrogate that officer,’ Stave declared.

  ‘I’m afraid you’d have to have won the war to do that,’ MacDonald replied.

  ‘In that case we will have to do with grabbing the worker as soon as he leaves the ship.’

  ‘Now that sounds like a plan we can get away with.’

  ‘As long as the other workers don’t spot us, or we might start an October Revolution.’

  ‘That wouldn’t do me any favours.’

  Stave would have given anything for a glass of water. His bottom lip was so dry it had split and hurt. Just to be sure he checked his revolver in its holster. At least he didn’t have to worry about the weapon slipping out of his hand just when he needed it: he had
sweated himself dry.

  The shipyard worker appeared on the gangplank: he was stocky and muscular with hair a little longer than used to be common. He seemed relaxed, stopped in the gangplank linking the freighter to the quayside and lit yet another cigarette.

  ‘Now?’ MacDonald asked.

  ‘The officer on the bridge will see us. Whatever the two of them were up to, we’d be warning him if we stopped the other guy right now.’

  ‘But what if he rejoins his team? He obviously works somewhere here and will have workmates. If we grab him when he's back with them, then we really will start a revolution. And we can’t spend all day here or somebody will eventually notice us.’

  ‘Patience. Our friend doesn’t exactly seem in a hurry to get back to work.’

  For a moment the chief inspector forgot how hot it was, and how thirsty he was: the drama of the hunt had replaced both. The young worker strolled down the quayside, and along the narrow gauge railway tracks in the direction of one of the factory sheds that was little more than a ruin.

  ‘There can’t be anyone working in there,’ MacDonald said.

  ‘All the better. Come on, let's follow him.’

  They clambered off the remnants of the crane. ‘Don’t look back at the ship,’ the chief inspector advised MacDonald. ‘We just walk along the quayside chatting, like any two ordinary clerical workers.’

  The shipyard worker didn’t look round. Then, by the remains of a brick wall, about a metre high and five or six across, he stopped.

  ‘Maybe he's got something to hide?’ the lieutenant wondered.

  ‘Maybe it's himself he's hiding,’ Stave suggested. ‘I think he's having a little ciggie break where none of his colleagues can see him.’

  And indeed, the worker disappeared behind the wall. Stave nodded to the British officer. ‘Take your time,’ he murmured. ‘You never know if somebody on the freighter might be watching us. We walk along to the end of the wall, then turn around and come back on the other side.’ Thirty metres to go, twenty, ten. The chief inspector pulled out his police ID card, and his gun. MacDonald had a gun in his hand too. Five metres to go. They turned the corner.