The main film was 17 Grosse Freiheit, a 1944 musical set on the street of the same name in Hamburg. Starring Hans Albers and Ilse Werner. Just like in the old days. Stave dozed off.
It was late by the time the lights went up again, flickering as ever. Most people were in a hurry to get out. Stave glanced at his watch: it was just before 11 p.m. It would be midnight soon, after which nobody was allowed to leave their home before 4.30 a.m. The English word ‘curfew’ had entered current usage in German.
Purely out of routine Stave fumbled in his jacket pocket to check he had his papers, including the police ID that allowed him to be out on the streets during the hours of curfew. They were all there. They always were. So he had no need to hurry. He slowly put on his overcoat, wrapped his scarf around his neck and pulled his collar up high, then put on his hat, pulling the brim low on his forehead, and finally his tight leather gloves. He had a long walk ahead of him to the other side of the Alster. But he could take his time.
He wondered if the lieutenant had had a pleasant evening. With Erna Berg perhaps? He liked MacDonald. There were people in Hamburg, young lads, some of them fresh out of POW camps, who would mug British soldiers on dark street corners, out of ‘national pride’ as they called it. But they didn’t dare do anything worse.
Stave didn’t hate the occupying army, even though it had been an English bomb that had taken his wife from him. He felt more ashamed of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime and in a perverse sort of way was relieved that both his city and his life lay in ruins. It was just punishment of a sort. And now maybe it was time for a fresh start.
As he strode briskly down the road to keep warm, his thoughts turned from MacDonald to Maschke. He knew no more about him than he did about the British lieutenant. And he found him a lot less likeable. Why though? Stave didn’t like the vice squad man’s attitude: his cynicism, his sarcasm, his sour grapes, his lack of respect for other people. Maybe that was the way you turned out when you had to deal with prostitutes, pimps and madams every day, he thought to himself. And when you still lived at home with your mother.
If things go on like this, the thought suddenly struck Stave, who knows where they’ll transfer me to? Immediately he revisited his instinctive disdain for the vice squad man. He had two murders and not one lead. Everybody was expecting him to deliver results: Ehrlich, Breuer, the mayor even. He was expecting it of himself, goddamnit. I’m no rookie in this business, he told himself.
And there was one other thing nagging at him: what if this was just the beginning of something? If it proved to be a genuine serial killer at work? If again and again they kept finding out there in the ruins the naked bodies of strangled nameless people? If the murders continued until the killer finally made a mistake and they found him? But what if he didn’t make a mistake? Ever? What do I do next, Stave asked himself.
His thoughts turned to Anna von Veckinhausen. What had she been holding back from him? If she was holding anything back at all, that was. Did she have something to do with the murders? Had she seen something? Stave decided to interview her again, and soon. And that had nothing at all to do with the fact that she was pretty and secretive or that it was Saturday evening and he was on his way home from the cinema.
On his own.
All of a sudden he spun round. There was nobody to be seen. Obviously. It was almost midnight. He shivered: it was minus 20°C at least and freezing gusts of wind blew into his face, shredding his skin. A yellow half-moon shone down from a clear starry sky. The street lights were out, the streets themselves gloomy canyons, the mountains of rubble in total darkness, moonlight peeping through the empty windows of bombed-out buildings. Side streets blocked off with temporary barriers because at any moment a bombed-out building could collapse. It was silent. No sound of distant traffic, no human voices, no crackling radio, no late evening birdsong. Nothing. Nix.
Stave stopped for a moment and cocked his ear. Somewhere in the ruins he heard a soft crunch. A sigh. A stone rattling to the ground. The rhythmic creaking of a door to an empty building swinging in the wind, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. The quiet patter of rats’ feet as they darted amongst the fallen timber, squeaking to one another.
I’m getting paranoid, Stave thought to himself, but picked up speed, walking down the middle of the road now, as far as possible from the darkness and ruins on either side. He felt in his pocket for his FN22, the cold, oily feel of the metal suddenly reassuring.
When he finally got home he flopped on to the bed, too exhausted even to take off his clothes, too exhausted to be hungry. Too exhausted to think of Margarethe, or their son.
The Black Market
Minus 36 degrees Celsius. The moment Stave walked out of the building the wind hit him in the face like a fist. He pulled his woollen scarf up over his face, and with his left hand in its thick glove rubbed his nose to stop it freezing. The air was so dry every breath hurt.
Before even going to the office Stave hurried down to the Food Ration Card Distribution Centre. Even the name was demeaning. He had to pick up his own coupons for the coming month, then hurry off to the shops to see what he could get with them. Soap would be a result. Each adult was only allowed 250 grams for four weeks. But as it was too cold and heating fuel was too expensive to take a bath or a shower, most of Hamburg’s residents stank like soldiers returning from the front: of sweat, dirt, old clothing and dry skin. Stave hated feeling dirty and both used the soap and took a shower whenever he could, even if he had to stand there shivering. He wouldn’t turn his nose up at coffee either, but there was not much chance of that.
Start your text here…Stave joined the queue outside the distribution centre. It moved quickly. Most food and clothing had only been available on rations since 1939. The Brits simply changed the name of the Reich Ministry for Nutrition and told the officials who worked there to get on with it. And like most officials they took the bureaucratic procedure to extremes. There were currently 67 different food ration coupons in circulation: two for milk, two for flour, one for eggs, three daily-use coupons, 14 entitlement coupons, two coupons for potatoes, 21 coupons for use by different classes of consumers and 22 supplementary coupons. That was not counting the special coupons. If you needed to get your shoes re-heeled, you had to have a shoe repair coupon.
If only I could eat the coupons, at least then I wouldn’t be hungry, Stave thought to himself as he grabbed hold of his grey sheet of perforated paper. He was classed as a normal consumer with no supplementary entitlements. His coupons allowed him to claim 1.7kg of grey bread that tasted of sawdust, seven-eighths of a litre of milk that looked like blue-white dishwater, 2.5kg of turnips (because there were no more potatoes), 15g of a yellowy substance that was supposed to be cheese, 100g fat, 200g sugar, 100g sticky ersatz jam, 125g soya flakes. And that was his lot.
Come to think of it, it was a miracle that more people had not thought of strangling the next person they met in the street and stealing every last stitch from their backs.
Then it was time for the next queue: outside a half bombed-out house with a ground-floor shop, above the door of which someone had scribbled ‘Dairy Goods’ with chalk on the cracked walls. When he finally got to the front the shop owner – surprisingly fat for the times – handed him the miserable slices of cheese on a piece of grubby paper.