‘He did it, didn’t he?’ swore Kohler exasperatedly. ‘You bunch think the Captain slammed that shopkeeper so you want to give him every bit of help you can.’
Baumann shrugged, the boy wet his lips and nervously brushed the faded blond hair from his brow. The Second Engineer merely picked up the dice and shook them.
St-Cyr sat uncomfortably in the straight-backed, uncushioned chair the daughter had fetched from the tiny kitchen. No more funereal a bedroom could be imagined. Madame le Trocquer wore black lace over a black robe and nightdress. Exquisite black lace flowed from her withered, white-dusted, blue-eyed face like an ancient spider’s tent to cover the ample double bed. Black pillows and cushions propped her up. She even wore a square of black lace over her head whose iron-grey and yellowish hair was like wire and braided into two tight pigtails that were tied with black ribbon. The hair was short, so the pigtails stuck out a little.
Having enjoyed her illness, she was now to enjoy her grief. A widow at what? he asked and put her age at sixty and a good ten years older than her husband.
He would try again. ‘The woman at the big house near Kerouriec, madame? Your husband and the Préfet argued. Her name was …’
‘Mentioned? Is that what you told him, Paulette?’
Dutifully the daughter stood with downcast eyes like a handmaiden across the bed from him. ‘Yes, maman,’ came the whisper.
‘You little fool! Préfet Kerjean and your father were the best of friends. The woman was nothing to them. Nothing, so why should they have argued about her?’
Livid, Madame le Trocquer hunched her thin, bony shoulders. ‘It’s cold,’ she said spitefully. ‘There never was enough heat. That’s why I have the arthritis. There’ll be heat enough now, Paulette.’
‘Yes, maman.’
St-Cyr heaved a desperate sigh. ‘Madame, there was an argument. So violent was it, several items in the shop were broken. Your daughter has said she overheard Madame Charbonneau’s name.’
‘That’s all I heard.’
‘Yes, of course. It’s enough for me to demand the truth.’
‘The house is by the sea and some three kilometres from the main road, Inspector. The bus does not always go to Kerouriec. The woman is from Paris. The husband was a famous pianist, though there is never much work for such as those. You’re from Paris. How is it, please, that you do not know of him?’
Charbonneau … The Rachmaninoff and the Schubert. The Palais de Chaillot in mid-April 1940 with Marianne at his side, a rare evening out. She had worn the azure blue silk dress with matching high heels. She had looked even younger. ‘I do remember, madame. Yvon Charbonneau … the critics were most unkind to savage him. He was marvellous.’
‘Humph! Marvellous or not, he and that new wife and child of his elected to come here for the Duration to that house his Great Aunt Danielle foolishly left him some time ago. Such legacies only produce indolence. Now he no longer plays the piano but searches the megaliths for clues to the past while the wife, she …’
‘She what?’ he asked.
Ah! the detective so wanted to hear scandal he was leaning forward in his chair and Paulette was nervously touching the base of her beautiful milk-white throat and looking pale. ‘People say she is the Captain’s mistress, Inspector. Others say she is the Préfet’s and since my husband was sometimes asked to deliver messages for either of those two, well …’ She sucked in on her cheeks. ‘One cannot say what one will find.’
Was the woman naked, madame? Was she fornicating on the beach with the Captain perhaps, or the Préfet? ‘There was a doll?’ he hazarded.
‘Not one from the shop. Paulette would have seen that it was missing. None are.’
‘But did you hear either of them mention this doll?’
The woman shrugged and kept her shoulders up tightly like the folded wings of a vulture. ‘I heard nothing, Inspector. Nothing! These old walls may not be much but they are soundproof, thanks be to God!’ She crossed herself.
‘As is the room in the cellar?’ he asked.
Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. ‘What room?’
Must they do this to her? wondered Paulette. ‘He knows, maman. The Inspector will have visited my little cubicle when I was upstairs here with you.’
‘Then perhaps he will understand that young girls who disobey their fathers need to be taught a lesson and that even though it can tempt a man to baseness, beauty means nothing and soon fades.’
Ah merde … Had the father abused the daughter or was it that the woman only suspected this?
‘Some money is missing, madame. A lot of money. Is there anything you can …’
‘Tell you about it? Only that it was a piece of foolishness. The Captain Kaestner may be good at U-boats but he’s an imbecile at business. Reviving his grandfather’s dollmaking has become an obsession. If you ask me, he uses it to take his mind off things.’
It was the daughter who hesitantly confessed, ‘Everyone knows their chances of survival are less than two in ten now. U-297 has been through a lot, Inspector, and very nearly didn’t make it home the last time.’
The woman gave the daughter a scathing look. One could hear her shouting, You little fool! Why not tell him everything then? That those men are using you!
The girl dropped her hands to her sides in defeat at that look and stood with eyes downcast waiting for the rebuke.
It was not long in coming. ‘Well, tell him then, since you’re so proud of it. A boy of seventeen, Inspector, a first time for that one, I believe.’
Jésus, merde alors, did they hate each other so much? Fists were clenched, a foot was stamped. Tears rushed into the girl’s eyes. ‘I didn’t do anything with him! He … he was dancing with Renee when … when suddenly the drummer hit the cymbals and … and Erich went all to pieces and began shrieking for his mother.’
The girl wiped her eyes with her fingertips, then used the back of a hand for her nose. ‘Some of the others held Erich and pulled his pants down. Their … their Chief Engineer gave him a needle to calm him. He … he wasn’t allowed to go home on leave this time.’
‘He still pisses himself,’ seethed the woman acidly. ‘He says he’s not going back to sea but everyone knows he’ll have to, otherwise they will shoot him.’
And those are the kind of friends your daughter seeks, thought St-Cyr. War made instant friends and lovers, often turning young girls and housewives wayward because there was little future for them and the Occupier had everything, as well as being handsome and exciting and from faraway places.
‘The Captain saved them by taking the boat well below its maximum diving depth,’ said the girl softly and not looking at him. ‘They got stuck in the bottom muds and the RAF rained depth charges all around them for more than an hour.’
‘Where?’
It was such a gently given question. Was the detective so sensitive a man? ‘Off Lorient, on their final approach after being nearly two and a half months at sea. The men now call the Bay of Biscay the RAF’s playground. U-297 was already very badly damaged. They … they didn’t think they could dare to go so deep but the Captain, he … he insisted it was their only chance.’
A man of steel then. A Dollmaker.
‘The money, madame. The 6,000,000 francs.’
Must they come back to that? ‘It was to be used in large part to purchase and improve one of the faience works. My husband kept it in one of the cardboard shipping boxes they use for the dolls. He refused to let the Crédit Municipal keep it. Taxes … he was worried about their having to pay taxes on it.’
‘And the Préfet threatened to bring the tax collectors.’
‘If she says so,’ the woman indicated the daughter. ‘For myself, I heard nothing, as I have said.’
‘Yes, but what do you think became of the money?’
Fiercely she darted a look at him. ‘How should I know? I can never leave my bed or chair. Never! Perhaps someone broke into the shop and stole it, perhaps my husband took it to Quimper on one
of his so-called “business” trips and lost it there. Who’s to say?’
‘Quimper?’
‘Yes. That is where the dolls are made. The faience works. Did you not listen to me? They are then sent to Paris to be clothed.’
‘But … but I thought the Captain made them?’
‘Only the first ones, the prototypes. He makes the head and then the mould, isn’t that so? And from the mould, fifty or so copies are made and fired. One of the faience works in Quimper allows the use of a kiln. The heads are then painted, given hair and eyes and attached to their bodies before being shipped to Paris for completion. In time, the Captain hoped it could all be done here in Brittany but, though we are good at making lace, we apparently lack the necessary imagination for fancy clothes.’
Whores was what she meant, and loose women.
St-Cyr glanced over his notes. Visits to Quimper and Paris would most probably be necessary but would there be time, and would they turn up any answers?
‘The child of Madame Charbonneau …’ he began.
‘It’s not hers, it’s the pianist’s. A girl of ten. Her mother died when she was seven and a half.’
‘In the blitzkrieg?’
Was it so terrible? ‘Yes. A Messerschmitt took her.’
Ah Nom de Dieu, the poor thing. ‘Would the child have a doll perhaps?’
Did the Inspector think she was such a fool as not to realize which doll he meant? ‘All girls of such an age have dolls they used to play with when little.’
‘Yes, of course. How stupid of me. Did the child and her stepmother ever visit the shop?’
‘And leave behind a doll that was not like one of the Captain’s? If they did, I heard nothing of it, Inspector. She was of money but has fallen on hard times, though still for such a one to visit our shop … Ah, that one would not do so even if reduced to her last centime.’
For a woman who was bedridden, Madame le Trocquer was exceedingly well informed. The town gossip perhaps or certainly included among them.
Paulette looked as if wanting to say something about Madame Charbonneau and the child but at a glance from the mother, held her tongue.
‘Inspector, I do not know why my poor husband was killed nor who would do such a horrible thing. He was a good man, the soul of consideration. I never wanted for anything, did I, Paulette?’
The girl stood like a pillar of salt with head bowed.
‘Paulette?’ said the mother sharply. ‘Please answer me.’
They broke down then and hugged each other with a show of wet kisses, much weeping and protestations of loss and everlasting love. Heaving an impatient sigh, St-Cyr muttered, ‘I will show myself out and will put the lock on, have no fear.’
The girl’s bedroom door was tightly closed and as he passed it, he thought to duck in for a little look. Clearly she knew far more than she was letting on and just as clearly things in the household had been far from what they should have been.
The door was locked. Alarmed, he threw a look back along the all but barren corridor, then gave it up and went down into the shop. They would have to get a magistrate’s order to search the place. Days … it could take weeks!
A last glance about revealed the row of dolls all looking at him with the widened eyes of innocence betrayed.
Reaching up, he took down one of them and, shutting his eyes to better concentrate, ran a fingertip delicately over a cheek.
‘The bisque is very fleshlike, very lifelike,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Hard and yet soft feeling, finely porous like skin and cool, and that is why the Captain sought only the finest kaolin.’
Taking out the shards he had picked up from the railway bed, he was saddened to find them too small to compare, or the one too smeared with blood.
It wasn’t hard to find the Hotel of the Sunbathing Mermaid who gave her favours to lonely sailors and tourists who might well lose their wallets. Her pale blue tail fin, voluptuous body, bright blue eyes and extra long lashes, sparkles and ravishingly long blonde hair added that little touch of whimsy to the stark facade of a fifty-room hotel that had been built in 1890 out of granite and given Gothic spires to make it interesting.
Like Madame Quévillon had said, all the shutters were open.
Kohler grinned appreciatively. The mermaid was at least five metres tall and had, before the war, been neon-lighted so as to make her visible from well out to sea. ‘I like it, Louis. Yes, I can see why the Freikorps Doenitz chose the place.’
‘A few oysters, a bottle of the Muscadet, some lobster perhaps and the fillet of sole or turbot.’
‘Stop whining like a collaborator! Hey, I’ll see what I can do.’
The plate was heaped with sauerkraut around whose soggy, steaming nest a curve of coarse, thick, boiled sausage huddled.
Boiled potatoes lay pathetically to one side, a sort of horsd’oeuvre perhaps. No one else was in the mess, the former dining-room. They were to be fed a submariner’s standard fare after thirty days at sea. There was even black bread with a suspiciously thick crust of mould.
Kohler took up his knife and fork then reached decisively for the mustard.
‘Your stomach, idiot!’ shot St-Cyr testily. ‘Don’t scorch it and bellyache to me.’
‘I’ll see if there’s any tomato sauce.’
Sacré nom de nom!
‘So, Louis, what’s with the stovepipe coifs?’
It was too good an opportunity to miss. Besides, Hermann would file the information away. His curiosity about the French was like that of a man in a flea market. Everything of interest was a bargain to him.
‘The stovepipes, yes,’ began St-Cyr. ‘The Bretons are Celtic but due to the absence of phosphates in the soil, most are not so tall – you will have noticed.’
He hacked off a chunk of sausage and examined it suspiciously. One never knew these days. Cat, rat, fishmeal, sawdust – edible seaweeds perhaps …
‘Eat it, Dummkopf!’
‘The Bretons, the Armoricans, Hermann, they wanted their women taller so they bound their heads with wire as the ancient Chinese did the feet of their princesses. When France took the region over, of course the practice was stopped, but …’
‘But the stovepipes remain,’ breathed Kohler. ‘I think, I’ve got it, Louis. The influence of Paris and of refinement.’
‘Yes, you’ve got it.’
‘Then it’s just like the Captain must have said. The dolls had to be dressed in Paris because only there would they know how to do things properly.’
The sauerkraut was salty. Beer was called for but it was deliberately thin and flat, and by the time Kohler had managed it, his sausage was cold.
They ate in silence. Not another soul ventured into the darkly panelled dining-room. Though there must be other U-boat crews on rest and recupe, there wasn’t a sound but that of the wind which had decided to bring more rain.
‘We’re being shut out, Louis.’
‘Ostracized is the word you want.’
‘No matter. U-297’s crew are convinced the Captain did it and that, my fine Sûreté, is not something they conveyed to the Admiral.’
‘What of Freisen? Wouldn’t he have informed the Admiral of this?’
‘We’ll find out later. He’ll be there at 1530 hours.’
The potatoes were without butter, margarine or even a sprinkling of parsley but when salt and ersatz pepper were liberally added, a tiny particle of taste crept forward to remind one of the past. Poor Marianne had not been able to keep even potatoes down. Four days of agony and then … why then Paris and life with a man who had seldom been home for more than a few days at most and had neglected to think his absence might have been troubling. Young and healthy women do need sex. When denied it, they crave it and who can blame them if they are tempted by another?
‘We have also the distinct possibility of a marriage of convenience, Hermann. A Madame Charbonneau is married to a Parisian concert pianist who has a ten-year-old daughter whose mother was machine-gunned to death during t
he blitzkrieg.’
Marriages of convenience these days were so often done to hide one’s identity or past. Verdammt! ‘Does the kid still have nightmares?’
It was spoken like a father. ‘Probably. Was the doll hers, Hermann? That is what I want to know since the Admiral insists the bisque was not the Captain’s.’
St-Cyr dragged out his pipe and tobacco pouch only to gaze ruefully at the few remaining shreds. Hermann mopped up the last of the juice with a bit of bread from the inside of the loaf. Like many who had once been in the front lines of that other war under intense bombardment, he ate stolidly.
He was really a very uncomplicated person, this former detective from Munich and Berlin, a man who had seen so much of death, his stomach had finally rebelled. A man who had two sons at Stalingrad … Ah merde, the telex Boemelburg gave me, thought St-Cyr guiltily. The boys were missing in action and presumed dead, and Boemelburg, being the Chief, had left the dirty work to Hermann’s partner who was a coward, yes, when it came to such things.
‘The Captain must have told Freisen the fragments weren’t from one of his dolls,’ said Kohler. ‘Bullet then passed it on to the Admiral.’
Did they all have nicknames? ‘Why don’t they simply let U-297 put to sea without the Dollmaker?’
Kohler found his mégot tin and made the supreme sacrifice of sliding it across the table. ‘Because, my fine friend, if you ask me, the men won’t sail without him. They must have had such a bad time on their last cruise, the Admiral is willing to humour them by asking for a couple of detectives to prove his boy is innocent.’
The tin contained Hermann’s collection of cigarette butts, most saved, some picked up from God knows where. Several had lipstick on them, that last case? wondered St-Cyr. A cache of butts in a Louis XVI-style concrete urn that would hold geraniums in season. The garden of the Palais Royal, a missing eighteen-year-old girl and a bank robbery …
He heaved a sigh. ‘More than two years of constant stress, never knowing if the next moment would be their last. Even Paulette le Trocquer was sympathetic to their plight and knew the odds.’
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