When the British occupation force had taken over in May 1945, they had sacked hundreds of policemen – anyone who had been in the Gestapo, anyone who’d been in a position of power, anyone who’d been politically active. People like Stave, who under the old regime had been considered ‘on the left’ and been relegated to low-ranking unimportant jobs, were kept on. New people were brought in, boys like this Ruge, too young to know anything about life, let alone anything about police work. They were given eight weeks’ training, a uniform and then sent out on to the street. These rookies had to learn on the job what it meant to be a policeman. They included poseurs, who were no sooner in uniform than they were snapping orders at their fellow citizens and striding through the ruins like members of the Prussian nobility. Shady characters too, the sort you’d have seen in police stations back in the days of the Kaiser and the Weimar Republic, except that then they were in the cells, not behind a desk.
‘Cigarette?’ Stave offered.
Ruge hesitated a second, then reached out and took the Lucky Strike. Smart enough not to ask where the chief inspector got an American cigarette.
‘You’ll have to light it yourself,’ Stave added, apologetically. ‘I’ve hardly any matches left.’
Ruge put the cigarette in his uniform pocket. Stave wondered if the lad would smoke it later or keep it to exchange for something else. What? He pulled himself together: he was starting to suspect the motives of everyone he met.
Ready at last, he turned towards the door, then reached for his shoulder holster. The boy in uniform stared and watched as Stave fastened the leather belt around him, with the FN 22, 7.65mm calibre pistol in it. Uniformed police carried 40cm truncheons on their belts, no firearms. The British had confiscated them all, even air rifles from funfairs. Only a select few in the serious crime department were allowed to carry guns.
Ruge seemed to be getting more nervous still. Maybe he had just realised that this was serious. Or maybe he’d just like a gun himself. Stave dismissed the thought.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, feeling his way out into the dark stairwell. ‘Watch out for the steps. I don’t want you falling down them and leaving me with another corpse to deal with.’
The two men plodded downstairs. At one point Stave heard the young policeman curse quietly, but couldn’t be sure if he had missed a step or stubbed his toe on something. Stave knew every creaking step and could make his way down even in total darkness by the feel of the banisters.
They emerged from the building. Stave’s room was at the front, on the right on the top floor of the four-storey rental block in Ahrensburger Strasse: an art nouveau building, the walls painted white and pale lilac, although that was hardly obvious under the layers of dirt and grime; an ornamented facade, tall, white windows, each apartment with a balcony, a curved stone balustrade with wrought iron. Not a bad building at all. The next but one was similar, only with brighter paint. The one that used to be in-between was similar too, but all that remained was a couple of walls and heaps of bricks and rubble, charred beams, a stove pipe so tightly wedged into the ruins that no looter had managed to steal it yet.
That used to be Stave’s house. He lived there, at number 91, for ten years until that night, the night the bombs fell and took the houses down with them: one here, one there. Leaving holes in rows of houses along the city’s streets like missing teeth in a neglected mouth.
Why number 91, but not number 93 or number 89? There was no point in asking the question. And yet, every time he left the building where he now lived, Stave thought about it. Just as he thought back to pulling his wife’s body out from under the rubble, or rather pulling out what remained of her body. A while later, somebody – he couldn’t remember who now, he could hardly remember much at all from those weeks in the summer of 1943 – had offered him the flat in number 93. What had happened to the people who had previously lived there? Stave had forced himself not to ask that question either.
‘Chief Inspector. Sir?’
Ruge’s voice seemed to come from miles away. Then a surprise: there was a police car standing in front of him, one of just five functioning vehicles at the disposal of the Hamburg Police Department.
‘Now that’s what I call luxury,’ he mumbled.
Ruge nodded. ‘We need to hurry up before anyone gets wind of what’s up.’ He sounded particularly proud of himself, Stave thought.
Then he threw open the door of the 1939 Mercedes Benz. Ruge had made no move to open it for him. Instead he went round the box-like vehicle and climbed into the driver’s seat.
He put his foot down, driving in a zigzag. Before the war Ahrensburger Strasse had been dead straight with four lanes, almost too wide, the houses on either side not quite big enough for such a grand boulevard. But now there were ruins in the road, house facades lying like dead soldiers who’d fallen on their faces, chimneys, indefinable heaps of rubble, bomb craters, potholes, tank tracks, two or three wrecked cars.
Ruge swerved round the obstacles, too fast for Stave’s liking. But the boy was excited. The street lights, those that were still standing, no longer worked. The sky hung low above them; an icy north wind blowing down Ahrensburger Strasse. There had to be a crack in the old Daimler’s rear windscreen, letting Siberian air into the car. Stave pulled his collar up, shivering. When was the last time he’d felt warm?
The headlights swept over the brown rubble. Despite the early hour and a temperature of minus 20°C, a few people were already wandering like zombies along either side of the street: gaunt men in dyed Wehrmacht greatcoats, skeletal figures with one leg wrapped in rags, women with wool scarves wrapped around their heads, covering their faces, laden down with baskets and tin cans. More women than men, many more.
Stave wondered where they were all going so early. The shops were only open between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. in order to save electricity for lighting, and that’s if they had anything to offer on the rations.
There were still nearly one and a half million people in Hamburg. Hundreds of thousands had died in the fighting or in the bombings; many more were evacuated to the countryside. But their place had been taken by refugees, and DPs, Displaced Persons, liberated concentration-camp inmates and prisoners-of-war, most of them Russians, Poles, Jews who either couldn’t go back home or didn’t want to. Officially they lived in the camps the British provided for them, but many of them preferred to struggle along in the devastated metropolis on the banks of the Elbe.
Stave looked out of the window and saw the jagged remains of a house, just walls, like those of some mediaeval ruin, only thinner. Behind them more walls, and then more, and yet more. It’ll take centuries to rebuild, he thought to himself. Then he jumped, startled.
‘One Peter, One Peter’. The Hamburg police call sign these days.1 A tinny voice, but louder than the groaning eight-cylinder engine. The radio.
For the past year the British had allowed the police to use the old Telefunken boxes to transmit from their headquarters in the Stadthaus. However, the five radio-patrol cars could only receive and not send messages – none of them had a transmitter on board – so the people at headquarters had no idea if the messages got to them.
‘One Peter,’ the tinny voice continued. ‘Please report in when you reach location.’
‘Bloody bureaucrats,’ Stave muttered. ‘We’re going to have to find a telephone when we get there. Where are we heading anyway?’
Ruge braked; a British jeep was coming towards them. He pulled to the side, letting it pass, acknowledging the soldier at the wheel, who ignored him and drove straight past leaving a cloud of dust in the dry air.