The Ghosts of Altona (8 page)

Fabel and Susanne had been together for eleven years, the last four of which had been in this apartment. When he got back home, feeling more than a little worn-out, he noticed that Susanne also looked like she’d had a long day. Tiredness etched itself on her face more easily now than it used to and tonight it also tinged her speech: Susanne was originally from Munich and Fabel had noticed how her vowels stretched flatter with fatigue. He had also noticed that she had aged since the shooting: a vague, handsome aging but one Fabel felt bad about, felt responsible for. It was as if his shooting had been a toxic event that had radiated out to contaminate those closest to him. Susanne, his daughter Gabi, his mother. Anna. Each bearing a mark unseen.

Fabel cooked dinner, which he did often, and they ate in the kitchen, chatting aimlessly and, in Susanne’s case, a little wearily. Tonight was not a night to eat out in Altona. As he had driven home from the Presidium, he had seen more Readiness Police clustered at intersections throughout the Altstadt. Helmeted, carrying riot shields and with black body armour over their coveralls, they looked to Fabel like the ghosts of Breughelian knights prowling Altona’s streets. Storekeepers had pulled down shutters; many had nailed plywood sheets across their windows, as if bracing for the rage of a storm.

Tonight really was a night to stay indoors.

As they ate, Fabel and Susanne skimmed over their respective days – his at the Murder Commission and hers as a forensic psychologist at the Institute for Judicial Medicine at Eppendorf – and not for the first time it struck Fabel how odd it was that they talked about death and killing the way a couple of accountants would talk about balance sheets and tax returns. At one time, he would not have discussed work at home; they had had an unspoken rule about that. But things were different now. Fabel was different now, his attitude to life less compartmentalized, so occasionally domestic conversations would turn from everyday inconsequences to the twists of mind and deformities of soul that led people to perform acts of violence.

‘You’re sure it’s the same case you worked on back then?’ Susanne asked as she poured them both another glass of wine.

‘I’m sure. It’s funny, when I first worked the case, all those years ago, I knew somehow I’d end up back where I started, eventually – that Monika Krone would return to haunt me one day. I knew I’d get back to it. And now I am.’ He shrugged. ‘Strange.’

‘Not really. It was your first Commission case and it was left unresolved. It makes sense that you’d be left with a feeling of unfinished business. You working it with Anna?’

Fabel nodded. When he finished his mouthful of food he asked: ‘Why?’

‘How’s she doing? I know you were worried about her.’

‘I still am. She’s having difficulty putting what happened behind her, even after all this time.’

‘All this time? It’s barely been two years.’

‘I’m over it,’ said Fabel without rancour, ‘I don’t know why everyone else can’t be.’

Susanne put her fork down. A punctuation point. ‘Does everyone else include me? I’m not over it, I’ll tell you that. I think about it every day when you go into work.’

‘This is Hamburg, Susanne, not New York. Policemen don’t routinely get shot at here – what happened to me was the wild exception, not the rule. And that’s what Anna has to accept too – she wasn’t prepared for what happened because it’s not something you expect to happen. Anyway, I know you’re not over it and I understand that. But it’s different with Anna and me. We have to work together and I don’t want her judgement clouded. I’ve been biding my time . . . waiting for the moment to be right before talking to her about it. The moment was right today.’

‘And?’

‘And I think I got through to her. She opened up to me too. About the shooting, I mean. She feels guilty about it, which I already knew.’

‘Do you know something?’ said Susanne. ‘I always thought you had a bit of a thing for her.’

‘Anna?’ Fabel said, clearly surprised.

‘And I’ve always said I
know
she has a thing for you.’

Fabel laughed and shook his head dismissively. They fell silent for a while and ate, Susanne’s tiredness seeming to overwhelm her.

‘When do you have your next session?’ she asked.

Fabel laughed. ‘You mean the “Club of the Living Dead”? Tuesday.’

‘I do wish you wouldn’t call it that, Jan. It’s not something to be flippant about. Is it helping?’

‘It’s not meant to help. Or not at least directly. We’re subjects, not patients. Lorentz’s guinea pigs. His
zombie
guinea pigs.’ Fabel held up his hands, clawlike, and made a twisted face. Susanne gave him a look and he dropped his hands and expression. ‘I do get something out of it, I suppose. And I guess it’s interesting to others who’ve not had the experience.’ He paused. ‘How come you’ve never asked me?’

‘Asked you what?’

‘What it was like.’

‘What what was like?’

‘Being dead.’

Susanne looked at him for a moment, something glinting through her tiredness. ‘Because you can’t tell me. Because you weren’t dead. I work in neuroscience, Jan, and that means I know what you experienced wasn’t death. Being dead isn’t like anything. Being dead is nothing. Exactly that, nothing. You can’t experience being dead, because there is no experience to be had. What you experienced was dying, not death. The process, not the event.’

‘They said I did. That I was clinically dead.’ Fabel affected an expression of mock pride.

‘Your heart stopped. You stopped breathing. That isn’t death. Those were two physiological events and like I say, death isn’t a process, it’s a event. You’re only truly,
completely
dead with brain-stem death, when the last flicker of neural activity stops. They brought you back before you got to that stage. And if you’d got any closer to it I’d be spoon-feeding you your dinner – a couple more minutes of oxygen deprivation and they’d have brought you back brain-damaged. Any longer than that and you
would
have died. And once you’re dead, you’re dead, there’s no coming back.’

‘I’ll tell that to my fellow zombies.’ Fabel smiled. ‘I’m sure they’ll be pleased.’

*

Fabel was stacking the dishwasher when he heard the first sirens. Not too close, but not distant enough. He reckoned they were to the east, somewhere towards Altona Altstadt. Two at first, both coming from the same direction, then a wave of them from another. He switched on the radio and caught the news. The storm had broken, after all.

13

The rage burned in him as he watched the news. Georg Schmidt sat in his room and watched Altona once again fall victim to hate. The Nazi marchers had followed almost exactly the same route they had in 1932. How could that have been allowed to happen? And just like in 1932, the people of Altona had made their opposition known. Why could no one learn from history? Why did we always repeat the same mistakes?

The fury within him concentrated itself, clustering around a specific focus. Helmut Wohlmann. Wohlmann was as responsible for this current carnage as he had been for what happened in 1932. He had helped to create the history now doomed to repeat itself.

Georg Schmidt remembered. It had become a memory stored not in his mind, but in his notebook. Whenever something else came to him, some image from that day, he would add it to his journal. His mind held the pieces, but the notebook held the completed jigsaw. Whenever he needed to remind himself of who he was, what had happened and who was responsible, he read through his notebook.

And remembered.

*

It all happened that day. A bright, fresh day but otherwise seemingly unexceptional. Except it would be exceptional. Sunday 17 July, 1932.

Later, they would say that everything began that Sunday, that a ball had been set rolling that would crush out eighteen lives during the course of that one day, lead to four innocent men being beheaded a year later and more than fifty million lives lost beyond that. What unfolded that day in Altona would provide the excuse for the Prussian Coup and bring about the end of the Weimar Republic. That bright July Sunday had opened the door to the greatest darkness in the history of Germany, of the world.

*

It had been another Altona, back then. A cramped, smoky Altona of clustered apartments and terraces, each building with its own small square of yard, each yard with a fruit tree or vegetable plot. It was an Altona of narrow cobbled streets and fuming chimneys. No grand villas here. The people born here had been raised to toil, if toil could be found. This was the heart of workers’ Hamburg. Staunchly, proudly, resolutely working-class. Red Altona. Little Moscow.

Georg had been thirteen, but big for his age. His father, like many of the men here, was small, compact, hard-hewn. A man of fifty, Franz Schmidt had become a father late and a widower early. Again like so many in Altona, Georg’s father was unemployed but had been a stevedore at the docks, his hands calloused, thick-fingered and rough from rope work.

Georg’s father rarely smiled, had little to smile about, but never sought to conceal his pride in his son, who was not only growing tall and broad, but also clever. Nothing seemed to give Franz Schmidt more pleasure than seeing his son come back from the Christianeum library with a book in his hand. Franz Schmidt had been illiterate until adulthood and it had only been when he had joined the KPD that he had found someone to teach him the basics. It was his duty as a Communist, he had been told, to seize the most important capital of all denied the working classes: knowledge and education. But Franz Schmidt had known it was too late for him; that he probably never would have had the makings of a scholar, whatever social dice had been thrown for him. But his son . . . Georg was bright. Georg not only could read well, he ate books up. He lived in them, through them, for them. And Franz felt true pride swell in his breast every time he saw Georg with a book in his hands or when the boy sat reading to his father or telling him all about the latest book he was devouring. The truth was, Franz Schmidt knew, you were only ever given one life. There was no ‘after’, there was no better, simpler, purer, happier existence after physical extinction. The great lie of an afterlife for the hard-working, the loyal, the obedient, was just a device employed by church, state and patricians to enslave the masses. In the meantime, everyone was expected to know their place and accept their lot on the promise of something better to come. Franz was no deep thinker, but he knew he had been handed but the one life and that one life had been blighted. But one hope of an afterlife did gleam bright for Franz Schmidt: his son. He could live on through a son who would achieve things, would have a life that was worth living. Georg, his father knew, would go far in the world and Franz was sad only that the boy’s mother had not lived to see him grown.

Georg’s father had loved to hear the facts that his son seemed to soak up like a sponge, especially those facts about their home quarter: how Altona had started out as a small settlement of fishermen and craftsmen, how it had grown to become the second biggest city in Denmark, envious eyes cast on it by its German neighbour, Hamburg. How it had developed a very Danish character and became known for its tolerance and its religious and commercial freedoms, attracting Jews and others discriminated against in Hamburg. Even after becoming German and absorption into the Prussian state of Schleswig-Holstein, Altona had kept its individuality and had influenced the liberal and social-democratic policies of its Hamburg neighbour.

But to some, Altona was a symbol of something to be wiped out. A Red Flag to a Brown-shirted bull.

*

Seven thousand of them had come that day. They zigzagged their way through Altona Altstadt, a brass-band-heralded assault on the city quarter. It hadn’t taken long for the first trouble to erupt. The Nazis had shouted inflammatory chants, taunting the Communist Party and threatening Jews and other Altona inhabitants. In reply, Communist Party members had jeered and barracked the marchers. Shouts turned to scuffles and scuffles turned to fights, fists and improvised weapons flying.

Georg had been under strict instructions to stay indoors, his father going out to do his duty as a KPD member and stand up to the fascists. There was going to be trouble, his father had told him, maybe even bloodshed. But it had been too bright and warm a day and Georg too bright and curious a boy and, once his father had left, he had slipped out and followed him at a safe distance.

Georg had navigated through a dense forest of Altonaers, gathered along the route of the march, fenced in by often scared-looking policemen. Eggerstedt, the President of the Polizei Hamburg, was a Social Democrat, but had not heeded Communist Party warnings that allowing the Nazis to march through Altona would result in a bloodbath. But the political climate had been tense and the Nazis were being appeased, added to which neither Eggerstedt nor his deputy were in Hamburg on the day of the march. His officers, tense and outnumbered on both sides, had been left to deal with the consequences.

Georg had weaved through the crowds, keeping his father just in sight. The jeers and the strident sound of drums and brass swelled in the warm air and, despite himself, Georg felt a thrill.

Then the jeers turned to yells, the tension turned to fury. Georg could now see the marchers, in SS and SA uniforms, and he could hear them too, their full-throated singing of the chant,
Die rote Front schlagen wir zu Brei!
We will beat the Red Front to a pulp!

And it was then he saw Helmut Wohlmann. Wohlmann was four years older than Georg and had been his father’s apprentice until recently. After his parents had died, Helmut had lived for a while with Georg and his father and had become like an older brother to Georg. But then, at a time when it seemed like everyone was becoming radicalized, polarized, Helmut had joined the NSDAP. As fervent a Nazi as Georg’s father was a Communist, Helmut had moved out and all contact had been severed. And now Georg saw him, brown-shirted, marching with the others.

There was a pulse, a sudden swell and surge as the crowd lurched forward, straining the thin police line. In response, the SA marchers launched themselves at the bystanders, belts wrapped around their fists, using their buckles as weapons.