Cay Rademacher - The Murderer in Ruins

The handle was turned. Quietly. Stave looked up. It was public prosecutor Ehrlich.

The two men stared at one another for a minute, both of them clearly awkward.

‘Good evening,’ Stave said, breaking the silence first. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Have I got the wrong floor? I thought this was Inspector Maschke’s office.’

‘Spot on, but I fear my colleague has already gone home for the day.’

‘And you’ve been transferred to the vice squad?’ The prosecutor looked puzzled.

Stave used the few moments to make up a story. ‘Tomorrow Maschke is to go round all surgeons who might have carried out an operation like that undergone by the fourth victim. I’ve already sent him out to talk to medical people. The truss, the dentures, you remember? It occurred to me that there might be specialist doctors who deal with hernias in men and abdominal operations in women. If the victims belonged to the same family, that might be a lead. Given that Maschke had already left, I thought I’d look and see if I could find anything. But,’ he nodded at the mess on the desk, ‘I guess I’ll have to wait and ask him tomorrow.’

Ehrlich looked at him sceptically for a moment, then smiled and said, ‘I understand.’ It didn’t sound as if he understood anything. ‘Then I will also just have to wait to speak to the inspector. Pity.’

The prosecutor made a little bow, then closed the door behind him. The steps receded down the corridor.

Stave took a deep breath. Cold sweat ran down the back of his neck. Had Ehrlich swallowed his story? Would he mention this unfortunate meeting to Maschke? At the very least he would now have to mention his idiotic idea about the surgeons to the vice squad man, if only to keep his story consistent.

He waited a few minutes more, until he was sure that Ehrlich was really gone, put the papers back as they were, wondered if he should replace the map of France but decided in the end to hold on to it. For the time being. Until he had worked out what the ‘Hans Herthge’ business was about.

He turned off the light, went out into the corridor, and left the dark building as quickly as possible. It was only when he was outside, on the cold and draughty square, that it occurred to Stave that Ehrlich hadn’t told him what he was doing looking for Maschke so late in the day.

Dark streets. The ruins like ghostly castles. Somewhere the motor of a British jeep growled. A curtain, frozen solid, blown out from a load of fallen tiles, waving back and forth in the wind. Otherwise it was painfully quiet. Over the past few years Stave had got so used to the view of the city in ruins that he hardly noticed it any more. But now, hurrying home, he felt uncomfortable, insecure. Threatened.

Shadows haunted empty windows. Reflections of half-destroyed walls. Corpses? Or a killer lurking in wait for some nocturnal wanderer? I’m becoming paranoid, the chief inspector told himself, not for the first time.

He too now walked down the middle of streets, as far as possible from the ruined lots. He felt a tingle down his spine, as if somebody was watching him. Turned on his heel. Nobody there.

But still he felt he was not alone.

He reached for his gun, flicked off the safety on the FN22, began walking faster despite the pain in his left leg. It seemed to take forever.

When at last Stave got to his building, he took the steps two at a time and threw open the door to his apartment. His heart was pounding; he was covered in sweat and panting for breath.

I’m acting like an idiot, like a rookie, he told himself. If somebody had come up to me to ask the time I might have shot them. He waited until his hand stopped trembling then clicked the safety on his FN22 back on. I need to get more sleep, he thought, and I need to get warmed up properly for once. If only this bloody frost would come to an end. But at the same time, that was something else he was afraid of: the smell of stinking corpses thawing.

He got himself dinner: bread that tasted of paper, a thin slice of cheese, water, an old potato that needed heating for an hour on the stove before he could get it down his throat. Then he lay down on his back, waiting for sleep, like a dead man stretched out on a bed, motionless, under a ton of tiredness. Yet something else was weighing on his mind, holding him back from drifting off to dreamland.

Eventually his hand found the radio. The old box gave off a yellowish glow as it warmed up. He hadn’t turned it on in months. In the ‘brown days’ all you got was endless Liszt, and then, ‘The High Command of the Wehrmacht announces…’ The shrill voices of Hitler or Goebbels interspersed with the cries of ‘Heil!’ from the devout in some sports arena, like a storm of hail on a window. Then Wagner. He was so fed up with it all that he preferred not to turn the radio on at all. He knew of colleagues and neighbours who secretly listened to the BBC, but he never dared.

But today there was supposed to be a new station starting up: Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk , Northwest German Radio, run by British officers and young German journalists. A sort of BBC for Germans. Stave had heard about it but not shown much interest, although he had overheard colleagues now and then looking forward to it starting.

But now, as sleep wouldn’t come, he gave it a go. At least it would give the illusion there was somebody else in the room. An announcer, then a whooshing sound, the crackle of static, complete silence and darkness for a few moments when the electricity gave up. And then he was listening to a play. Stave didn’t get the name of the writer, and only half listened to the narrator; he just enjoyed having the sound and the glow of the radio, a splinter of normality.

He heard the story of a man returning from the war, rejected by everybody. Heard the man talking to the Elbe. Odd, he thought, how could anybody talk to the Elbe when it’s under a metre of ice?

And gradually he drifts into a dream in which his son is talking to the Elbe and the waves have somehow taken on the contours of Margarethe. It’s warm, the undamaged apartment buildings shine in the sun. Stave feels sad and lucky at the same time as he glides beyond the dream into the realm of deepest darkness where he sleeps as he has not done for years.

Monday, 17 February 1947

Stave had been in his office on the telephone since 7 a.m. His fingertips had turned red from dialling so much and he was now using a pencil. He had tried on Friday to get hold of Maschke. He was desperate to speak to him before Ehrlich so that he could give him his version of their evening encounter in his office. But his efforts had been in vain. He had completely failed to reach his vice squad colleague in any hotel, police station or even hospital in the whole of northern Germany. On several occasions he had reached people who had seen Maschke recently, often just a few hours earlier. It’s as if he was trying to avoid me, Stave thought. But that was absurd.

He had spent the weekend at the station – which gave him lots of time to think things over. The longer this awful winter lasted the less coal there was to deliver. And more and more locomotives were out of action due to burst pipes or frozen boilers. By now there were fewer trains in a day than there used to be in an hour.

Stave spent his time wandering up and down deserted platforms, if only to keep the cold from getting to his leg. He was worried because he had convinced himself that Ehrlich had wanted to talk to Maschke about him. Or that Maschke had unexpectedly come back for the weekend and gone into his office. Stave imagined Maschke coming into the room that appeared to be in such mess, maybe just to pick up a packet of cigarettes, and discovering that one particular piece of paper amidst the pile on his desk was not at the oblique angle he had left it. Then he imagined Maschke checking out the whole desktop and working out that his carefully arranged chaos had been disturbed. He would know that it had been thoroughly searched because he would open the lower right desk drawer, go through his maps and realise that one of them was missing. Then Ehrlich would call…