‘The daughter of some well-to-do household,’ MacDonald speculated. All of a sudden it seemed the officer was enjoying the investigation, Stave thought to himself.
‘Possibly. But daughters who’ve disappeared from well-to-do households tend to be reported as missing fairly soon. Of course, it’s perfectly possible that someone will report her missing in the next few hours. But if we don’t receive such a report by tonight, then at least we won’t have to make a painful trip out to some villa in Blankenese.’
‘So who could the victim be?’
‘A “nightingale of the street”,’ Maschke suggested, having finally given up his anguished concentration on Stave’s smouldering cigarette.
‘I’m afraid that’s not an expression I know from my German lessons,’ MacDonald admitted.
Maschke laughed out loud. ‘A hooker. A whore. A woman of easy virtue. A pros-ti-tute. That’s why I’m part of the team, isn’t it?’
Stave nodded. He was coming to understand why so many officers didn’t like Maschke. ‘She could be taken for one, superficially,’ the chief inspector reluctantly admitted. ‘The circumstances of death too; there are certainly grounds enough to take Maschke’s usual customers to task.’
‘Sorry, what does that mean?’
‘It means we’re off to the Reeperbahn,’ Stave said, with a sour smile.
MacDonald gave a gleeful grin. ‘My colleagues down at the Officers’ Club won’t believe I got to do that in an official capacity.’
‘Always worth winning a war,’ Maschke said under his breath. Softly enough that Stave wasn’t sure the Brit had understood him.
‘I have to warn you, Lieutenant, that the gentlemen on the Reeperbahn won’t exactly be delighted to see us. And, I’m afraid, nor will the ladies.’
Then he called his secretary in. ‘We need copies of the photograph. Just the victim’s head, enough to be recognisable. And not too grisly, if possible.’
‘How many?’ Erna Berg asked, looking at the British officer rather than Stave.
So much for my authority, Stave said to himself. ‘A dozen for Inspector Muller of uniform. He should get a few officers together to send round the hospitals and stick the photo under the nose of every surgeon they can find. The vitamin had an appendectomy and maybe one of the gentlemen will recall performing the operation. Then one more copy for the print works. We need 1,000 posters,’ he hesitated for a second, then changed his mind and said, ‘no, make it just 500. I’ll do the words later. Tell the relevant people on the beat police that we’ll need their men to put up posters the day after tomorrow. And I’ll need a further three copies for these two gentlemen and myself.’
‘Consider it done, boss,’ Erna Berg said and hurried out.
MacDonald watched her go and then, when he saw Stave was looking at him, made a show of looking all around the room. ‘Nice place you’ve got here,’ he said.
Stave gave him a long smile. Then he took a stub of pencil and a sheet of paper from his desk drawer and said, ‘Right, I’m going to write the wording for the poster. We’ll meet up outside the main entrance in half an hour. To take a stroll down the Reeperbahn.’
Exactly 29 minutes later Stave was standing in the entrance hall by the huge doors. He was hungry and cold, and there were a thousand things he would rather do than question a load of pimps and whores.
MacDonald was already waiting for him. Much to Stave’s annoyance, Maschke came running down the steps two minutes late, his coat flapping behind him. He wondered what his colleague from the vice squad had been doing for the past half hour.
When they got outside, MacDonald turned to Stave and in astonishment asked, ‘But where’s your car?’
‘Petrol is rationed for the police too, Lieutenant. We usually go on foot or take the tram. It’s only a stroll from here to the Reeperbahn.’
‘If I’d known, we could have used my jeep,’ MacDonald said, clicking his tongue in sympathy.
‘Oh yes? We’d have driven down the Reeperbahn from whorehouse to whorehouse in a British jeep,’ Maschke grunted, ‘with every British patrol saluting us.’
Stave shook his head in annoyance. Then he handed each of them a photograph of the victim, still reeking of chemicals.
‘Let’s go.’
He pulled up his coat collar. It was now early afternoon and he hadn’t had anything to eat since his miserable little breakfast. An icy wind was still whistling through the ruins. Stave felt like he was being beaten up by it. MacDonald on the other hand, in his pressed uniform and rosy pink cheeks, looked as if was going out for a pleasant afternoon stroll – which, Stave supposed, he probably was. Maschke had his second English cigarette clamped between his lips and walked a few paces behind, as if he wasn’t with them.
On the dirty wall of an apartment building were yellow posters, some as big as blankets. ‘Military Government – Germany/Law No. 15’ Stave read as they walked past. Bilingual proclamations of the occupation. As a matter of routine, Stave scanned them. There was nothing new. Posters like these, a few handwritten notes, chalk scribbles on bare wall. These are the newspapers we’ve earned for ourselves, Stave thought. The actual local press appeared just once or twice a week, a few thin sheets; there wasn’t enough paper for more. He’d heard that a German radio station was going to be allowed to start up in the coming weeks. The newsreels in the cinemas depended on film supplied by the British or the Americans.
How else could you reach ordinary citizens other than by putting things up on walls? The military government stuck their proclamations all over buildings or on the few Plakatsaule advertising columns that had survived: new rations, curfew extensions, new laws – no German could say he hadn’t known And the Germans themselves, out of necessity, copied their new masters: posted notices up on the brick walls seeking information about missing relatives, swap offers, looking for accommodation. And we police join in, Stave thought, with our photos of criminals and murder victims on our ‘wanted’ posters.
They had got as far as Heiligengeistfeld, a vast, filthy square with no shelter from the freezing winds. Two giant bunkers stood out against the sky, massive heaps like temples of some ancient, extinct and dark religion. A makeshift sign indicated that the ground floor of the bunker housed the editorial of ‘Northwest Magazines’. On the other bunker was another sign, only slightly larger, which read, ‘Scala’. Underneath was the current programme: 1001 Women. The bunker now housed a revue theatre, boasting a thousand seats and skimpily dressed girls in fantasy costumes made out of coloured cellophane. Stave found an establishment of the sort in a place like this particularly perverse. At the moment, however, it was totally deserted.
Even Hamburg’s amusement mile was a ghost town at present. The light was fading but nobody had electricity for neon signs. Several of the bars and clubs had been bombed: the Panoptikum, the Volksoper and the Cafe Menke all lay in ruins. Barkeepers had set up shacks made of planks of wood and salvaged tiles amidst the rubble, tawdry dens in which men who still hadn’t had enough of shooting could practice their skills firing crossbows at wooden targets. But nobody was out to try their luck right at this moment.
There were, however, a lot of people about; men, women, children, washed-out coats strolling about apparently aimlessly on the street at the corner of Reeperbahn and Hamburger Berg, wandering around in circles, looking up at the sky. Black marketeers. As the three investigators approached, the crowd drifted away from them, as if they carried the plague. Stave cursed under his breath: it’s that bloody British uniform. On his own he could have wandered around unnoticed. But under the circumstances he could only watch as bottles of schnapps or cartons of cigarettes disappeared beneath coats while women and children turned their backs and a few lads disappeared down the alleyways. The only ones who actually came up to them were two young girls, about 18, Stave reckoned, not even proper adults. Blond, polecat furs around their necks, easy smiles, only a few dozen metres away, coming straight towards them.