Both the Chief Inspector and his Gestapo partner meant business. Préfet Kerjean had made a point of warning him to be careful of what he said. There had been a bus – Madame Charbonneau had thought the two detectives might have been killed. Préfet Kerjean had driven all the way to Lorient and the hospital and then to the temporary morgue just to find out if they had.
He’d been disappointed at the news but had quickly recovered. He hadn’t stayed and, though he had avoided saying where he was going, it was evident he had gone right back to tell her the news.
Everyone quietly said they were having an affair. Would the woman have wrung her hands in despair at not finding the detectives’ bodies in the wreckage of that bus? Would Préfet Kerjean have put an arm about her shoulders and tried to comfort her?
Were they in it together, harsh though that thought might be? Who, really, had killed that shopkeeper? The Captain? The woman – could it be possible? Had her husband been at the site of the murder too?
With a sinking feeling, le Troadec had to admit the husband could well have been there but why, then, would he have killed the shopkeeper? A mistake perhaps?
Everyone knew the Captain had also taken a decided interest in the woman. Yvon Charbonneau was a jealous man but had chosen to take himself away to search for the past rather than confront the couple – he, himself, had seen enough evidence of that, oh for sure.
Préfet Kerjean had deliberately not mentioned seeing things he would normally never have missed.
Then why protect the husband by arresting the Captain, if not to protect the woman from Herr Kaestner’s advances and keep him away from her?
The deep brown ox-eyes of the Sûreté opened. Suddenly there was a grin of welcome and relief, the explosion of, ‘Ah, grâce à Dieu, I am glad to find you alive!’
Such an outburst could only mean trouble.
The eyes swiftly narrowed. ‘Tell me about the Préfet’s son.’
‘The son …? But … but what has Henri-Paul to do with things? He’s in Paris. He was wounded twice and discharged. He works in advertising, I think, or is it insurance?’
And you are going madly back over the case to find the reason for my question, thought St-Cyr. They were quite alone. The patron was behind the zinc tidying things. Still, it would be best to keep the voice down. ‘The sardiniers, Sous-Préfet. Was one of them reported missing on the 3rd of November?’
‘The sardiniers …?’
Was the question such a calamity? Feeling suddenly sick, le Troadec clumsily searched his pockets for cigarettes but found none.
‘Please answer the question and then tell me what the cost is of sending not just one person but several to England?’
The Chief Inspector could not possibly see the zinc from where he was sitting, not without turning. Frantically le Troadec swept his eyes over the all but empty café before settling them on the owner.
‘I know of no such things, Chief Inspector. It’s preposterous. The Germans maintain a very tight control. Ah, what do you think you are saying?’
The Sous-Préfet’s shrug was massive in rebuke, a hand was tossed in dismissal at such idiocy.
‘Just answer me.’
The Chief Inspector hadn’t seen the patron take up his broom and come closer. ‘I don’t kn …’
A hand shot out to grip him by the wrist. ‘Do I have to tell you how it was?’ hissed St-Cyr. ‘Don’t be so loyal to your boss. It’s admirable. Oh for sure it is, but not when murder is being discussed.’
Le Troadec looked coldly at the hand that held him. ‘I tell you I know nothing of such things. Nothing, do you understand? Isn’t that correct, Monsieur le Cudenec?’
Ah merde, thought St-Cyr, have I given him away?
‘Now if we are finished, Chief Inspector, I must attend to my duties. There are still the dead who must be identified and whose families must be notified.’
From the square, the streets ran outwards in all directions, some miraculously spared, others a shambles.
Half-way up a ruined street, they stopped beside the shell of what had once been a school. Desperately le Troadec searched the street for possible witnesses. ‘They’ll kill me if I tell you.’
‘No one will know of it.’
‘So long as the Nazis don’t question you, Chief Inspector.’
This was true of course. Under torture one never quite knew what one might reveal until that moment but … ‘Please don’t force me to ask around, eh? It would not be wise.’
‘Then yes, a boat went missing. You could have found that out from anyone. The Germans made a great fuss – they always do. Twenty-six boats went out from Quiberon, Port Kerné, Port Quibello and other places in the last week of October. Twenty-five returned on the 3rd of November.’
‘Good. Now please, the fee per passenger? You can trust me.’
‘I’ve a wife and three small children, two others as well.’
‘That is understood.’
‘Is it that you think the money was stolen for this purpose, Chief Inspector, and by Préfet Kerjean?’
‘I am merely asking because I must examine all aspects of the case.’
As he had suggested, St-Cyr could well ask others who might then inform the Germans of his interest. ‘The fee is high because the risks are high. The Germans have minesweepers and patrol boats out there all the time. They board and search the sardiniers and other fishing boats whenever they feel so inclined. If there is anything at all suspicious, the captain and crew are arrested on the spot and their boat is confiscated.’
‘But it doesn’t stop there, does it?’ acknowledged St-Cyr quietly.
‘If guilty, they are shot and their families deported.’
He’d give the Sous-Préfet a grim nod. ‘There is also the risk of being spotted by the Luftwaffe’s long-range patrol planes which go out from here to search for Allied convoys.’
‘And the risk of being strafed by the fighter planes that are based along the north coast.’
‘Yes, those too,’ said the Sûreté with that same nod.
‘450,000 francs per man. There are some who say the British drop money and arms to the Resistance at night but of this I know nothing. How could I when I am forced to work with the Germans all the time? The Resistance wouldn’t trust me for a moment.’
A man with several children … A man in a very favourable position of authority and certainly most useful to them. Sacré nom de nom, why must God do this to them? ‘Of course not but, please, there will have been rumours perhaps. How many went with the Préfet’s son?’
‘Préfet Kerjean didn’t steal the money from Monsieur le Trocquer, Chief Inspector. He didn’t kill him either. He was nowhere near the clay pits. He was in Quiberon on New Year’s Day. He rang me up to wish us well and to tell me I was to take the afternoon off.’
So as to be out of the way? ‘How many went with the son?’
Again there was the searching of the street, again that look of desperation. Could he really trust St-Cyr to say nothing of it?
He would only pursue the matter elsewhere if not told.
‘I honestly don’t know. I have my informants – all of us do. Some say five others. Three from Paris, two from Brest. Don’t ask me how they got here.’
Six in all, for a total of 2,700,000 francs. It was a lot. ‘I won’t, but if anyone should ask you about me, please tell them I am not a collaborator as some hotheads in Paris believe, but a patriot and staunch supporter in spite of what happened to my wife and little son.’
Le Troadec surveyed this man who had so easily made an offering of himself in return. Now he held the Chief Inspector in the palm of his hand if needed. Death from the Resistance if necessary for betraying a trust, or from the Occupier for withholding information.
‘Now take me to the morgue and let us go over the autopsy report since all the other evidence you have gathered will have been destroyed in the bombing.’
The plaster casts of the bicycle tracks, the bits of leather from a pa
ir of gloves … ‘Look, the Préfet is seeing Madame Charbonneau. Of course I know of this but …’
‘But there is nothing to it. They’re just friends.’
Kohler shuddered inwardly and walked as a Neolithic farmer might have done at midnight to some horrific ritual among the standing stones. The Keroman U-boat bunkers were huge but until that moment of stepping into the acrid haze and metallic din, he had not realized the full extent of the Nazi menace. Oh mein Gott, the place tore the guts out of one. More than forty ‘boats’, some floating, others in dry dock and three to a bay, were being swarmed over by at least eight hundred grey-clad dockworkers and dark blue-clad German technicians. Arc welders flashed. Acetylene cutting torches sprayed sparks and droplets of molten metal while giving off dense clouds of pungent smoke. Riveting hammers went at it day and night. Rusty red-lead undercoating paint was being scraped and banged from hollow hulls, new sea-grey outer paint being applied elsewhere. Brush, brush, hurry, hurry. Torpedoes were being loaded. Anti-aircraft and cannon rounds were disappearing into another hull, hams, sides of bacon and big round loaves of black bread into yet another as if swallowed up by the ravenous tin fish of the thousand-year Reich before they went out to kill.
And in the far bay whose ceiling, like all the others, went up and up a good thirty metres of heavy, corrugated iron plates, a crew of fifty-two moth-eaten, stinking men had assembled on the deck of their boat in their ‘leathers’, grey-wrinkled and stiffened, stained and rancid.
Unshaven and unsmiling, they waited. Their bug-eyes were the size of ping-pong balls. Their faces were bleached of all colour, so much so, many would refuse to go home with the first half of the crew simply because their families would see them this way and not understand what forty-five or sixty days inside the hull of one of these things could do.
They were all so very young. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty-two, maybe twenty-four at the most. Not for them, or for any others now these days, the pomp and ceremony of the heroes’ welcome in the Rade de Lorient. Now the slinking inshore underwater as far as possible and then the tug, the RAF at any moment perhaps, and finally home. Right inside the womb.
Silently they waited, these heroes of the deep. One by one and from out of the gloom, the band of the local garrison assembled. Tubas, trombones, euphoniums, trumpets, flutes and clarinets and a big bass drum …
Still everyone waited, the band above on the concrete edge of the bay, the crew a couple of metres below them so that they looked up from the submarine with their bug-eyes, and the band in field-grey, and all the bulges of slack-assed troops and fat cats, looked down. The water around the boat reeked of dead fish, diesel oil and sewage.
At a signal, instruments were lifted, lips moistened. Freisen had arrived in his dress uniform, all spit and polish, to deliver the gongs. A Ritterkreuz for the captain, one for his first officer, North Atlantic Campaign badges and so forth.
The band began with ‘Deutschland über Alles’ – everyone to attention, ja, ja and Heil Hitler. Then they hit the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ and finally, having warmed up, blew their guts out in the ‘Western Wald’ as the crew and even Freisen shoutingly sang, ‘“Eins, zwei, drei, vier, Erika.”’ Boom, boom. ‘“Erika!”’ and grinned and laughed or smiled.
It was deafening but it didn’t even stir a glimmer of interest among an all-female crew in filthy dungarees who simply slammed home their rivets vindictively into a nearby sub and looked as if they would gladly throw handfuls of Carborundum into the gearboxes.
Freisen saluted the boat’s captain and shook hands before pinning to the salt-stiffened sheepskin jacket, the coveted Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves.
Then the Senior Officer U-boats Kernével went down the line. Every man got something, if only a handshake of congratulations and welcome.
‘He’s not the Lion, is he?’ spat a guttural voice into his ear. ‘The men don’t really warm to him as they did to Doenitz. Herr Freisen is like a cold woman not quite knowing what to do with a hot, stiff pecker before it loses interest. They say he should be forced to go back to sea and maybe he will if you and that French dog of yours fuck about with our Dollmaker.’
Oh-oh … ‘And who might you be?’ Kohler didn’t look up or down but straight into the laughing dark eyes that held the lark’s trace of insanity.
‘Schultz, Herr Kohler. Without me and my little stove, the Freikorps’s most decorated crew would not be able to shit so well in the only head we use aboard because the other one is my special larder.’
Fifty-two men were being fed by this … this giant with mitts like hams. The galley couldn’t be any more than a metre wide and deep. No one would complain about the food. No one.
Like Baumann, the eyes were deeply sunk beneath thick, dark bushy brows but here all similarity ended. The head was a blunt battering ram that had often been used ashore in the bars and brothels. The hair was thick and meticulously trimmed to two centimetres on top – shaved closely on the sides. In front, it receded well back towards the temples but came forward in a broad triangle to point directly down and over the massive brow to a fleshy, broad, well-picked nose and a thick, wide soup-strainer of a Kaiser’s moustache.
A fastidious man, one of many tastes, ah yes. A man straight out of fifty or one hundred years ago and some West African safari for diamonds and naked slaves of the female kind, the younger the better.
Kohler understood him only too well. Men like Schultz had made good corporals in the artillery but one had had to watch them all the time, lest they lose a couple of fingers while slamming a shell home to earn an honourable discharge and extra pension.
‘Got any pipe tobacco and cigarettes?’ he asked blithely.
‘Maybe,’ said the cook cautiously.
The Bavarian grinned. ‘Fifty-fifty. I feed you all the inside dope on the investigation, you lay off the bets and we make ourselves a bundle. Right?’
The lark’s glimmer never died but it didn’t brighten either. ‘A bundle …? I thought you wanted tobacco?’
‘That’s extra. That’s to help my partner think. Without it, he’s useless.’
‘Don’t you “think”?’ asked Death’s-head.
‘Not often. I’m too busy hustling supplies for us. We need some rubbers too. Maybe a hundred, and none of your “used” crap.’
A cool one. Even here in the Freikorps Doenitz they washed their condoms sometimes, was that it? ‘Okay, let’s see what we can do. Insider information in exchange for thirty per cent and a little tobacco. We’ll throw in the rubbers free of charge.’
‘Forty per cent.’
‘Hey, let’s think about it. Our First Officer is supervising the loading of the eels today. Tomorrow it’s the ammo and on Wednesday, it’s my turn to stuff her. Everyone helps. Then on Thursday we put to sea, Dollmaker or no Dollmaker, Freisen or no Freisen, it’s up to you and your “partner”.’
‘And you don’t want to sail with Freisen?’
‘On a Thursday? That’s too close to Friday, and it’s bad luck to go then, since we might be delayed and no one, I mean no one, goes out on a Friday unless forced to. Besides, bullets get flattened, dollmakers come home and if we have to go, we’d sooner Kaestner took us.’
Doenitz must have laid it on the line to Freisen. ‘Where are you from?’
‘And here I thought you were a big-shot detective from Munich and Berlin?’
‘Mainz or Koblenz and nowhere near Essen and the sea. That accent’s like cold cod liver oil and broken glass.’
The grin widened appreciatively. A tooth was sucked. ‘Rüdesheim, and yourself?’
‘I think you already know.’
They understood each other and that was good, yes good. They’d make a deal. ‘Come and lay a hand on one of our eels for good luck, Herr Kohler, then follow me to the Quartermaster’s stores, our Ali Baba’s Cave.’
Did everyone in the Freikorps have a nickname? It seemed so. The laying on of hands was simply a crude little test of guts from a man who was far too swif
t for such things. A puzzle unless someone less intelligent had ordered him to do it. An officer perhaps.
U-297 was a Type IXB Atlantikboot. Wider and larger than the Type VIIs, she was a little slower on the crash dive and cruising speeds but a lot steadier in bad weather and with substantially longer range. Hence the tours of duty on the east coast of America.
There was no number on her conning tower – none of the boats carried those for security reasons – only the insignia flag of a blue-eyed doll with blonde braids and a pretty green skirt with white apron and crossover ties above a red, long-sleeved blouse. White shoes and white stockings and nothing suggestive about her. Just a child’s love, the smiling face of innocence, a fringe that came all but to her eyebrows and a ribbon of lace across the top of her head to keep the hair tidy in the wind. Pink cheeks too, and red lips.
‘She even has pantaloons,’ quipped Kohler, grinning.
The cook lost the lark’s glimmer so fast, the eyes became dead in rebuke. ‘No one jokes about her, Herr Kohler. No one.’
‘Sorry. Does she have a name?’
Was Kohler really such a Dummkopf? ‘She has as many names as there are men aboard her. None speak those names. That, too, is considered back luck. The flag is cherished, yes? and taken down each time we put to sea.’
The heavily greased eels had to be handled like babies at birth, but they were going into the doll, not coming out. The guidance systems were tricky and could easily be knocked off kilter. The crews seemed to know what they were doing.
‘1,600 kilos a piece, Herr Kohler. 500 of torpex – do you know what that is, Herr Detektiv?’
‘High explosive. TNT and Cyclonite with, I think, aluminium flakes. If I could I’d like to see the detonators.’
‘Spoken like a former demolitions man, but you can’t. Top secret, yes? There’s no wake with the G7s. They’ve electric motors, not compressed air so they can’t give us away and the Captain refuses to load any other. What he says goes. Even the High Command in Berlin are tolerant of our Dollmaker. Four tubes forward, two in the stern and fifteen of these babies. It’s impressive, is it not?’
Dollmaker Page 12