The Forger by Cay Rademacher

Author:Cay Rademacher [Rademacher, Cay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education
ISBN: 9781911350323
Publisher: Arcadia Books
Published: 2018-08-15T23:00:00+00:00

The Gestapo legacy

Friday, 18 June 1948

The sun hadn’t yet risen by the time Stave re-entered the CID headquarters. He hadn’t even bothered to get into bed overnight. His apartment stank of mould and damp. He had left the windows open for hours. Hopefully it would dry out at some stage. His mind was full of thoughts — some of them ideas that led him down a blind alley, but also others he was afraid to think through. So he sat there shivering at the kitchen table before damp sheets of paper, on which he wrote two letters: one to Anna, the other to a former Gestapo agent.

He needed to see Anna again, to talk to her, to somehow come on to the subject of her past. He hadn’t mentioned anything about Dönnecke's snuffling around, let alone what his colleague had found out. He didn’t mention the ring. Or ‘G’. He had just asked to meet up and suggested the only restaurant in the vicinity of her flat. ‘Let's meet up tomorrow and eat at Sellmers Kellerwirtschaft.’ He wanted to add, ‘Call me at the office if you can.’ But he was afraid to speak to her without being able to look her in the eye. So instead he just ended with, ‘If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you’re coming.’

Stave had pushed the letter through the cap beneath the door of her basement apartment. He had walked to Röperstrasse along empty streets as it was still curfew. Layers of mist were rising from the Elbe, the walls of the houses glistening with damp. Her flat was in darkness. Hopefully she was still asleep, he thought, rather than the darkness meant she was somewhere else.

The other letter was also a request for a lunchtime meeting – though not one for which the chief inspector intended to pay the bill for two. During the ‘brown years’ Stave had tried to keep out of the way of the Gestapo — which wasn’t easy given that in Hamburg alone there were at least two hundred men working for the political police. People referred to their headquarters in the Stadhaus in whispers, or better not at all. Already by the April of 1933 the first prisoner there had died — or rather the first that Stave had heard of. The dockworker Gustav Schonherr had been tortured, and following this ‘in-depth’ interrogation had managed to ‘fall’ out of a window in broad daylight. It was not just among his colleagues that it was said one or another officer might have helped him plunge to his death. The whole city knew – and was meant to know: the more the Gestapo were feared, the more successful their investigations.

Nonetheless in the autumn of 1938, the morning after the Reichskristallnacht, a Gestapo man had turned up in Stave's office. Just why he had done so, the chief inspector never found out, because this Philip Greiner was so drunk he could hardly walk and clearly couldn’t string two words together.

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