Dollmaker

by J. Robert Janes

  Kohler waited. Schultz tried to grin but succeeded only in wetting his lower lip. He would need a flying wedge to get him through that door, then the legs of a gazelle and the lungs of the damned.

  ‘I …’ stammered the cook. ‘Look, I was only trying to protect Vati. It… it was nothing. Nothing!’ he said, his voice breaking.

  ‘Take his gun,’ said Baumann.

  It was now or never. Kohler launched himself from the cremation pit and threw himself at the cook, carrying him into the men behind. They fell, they fought. Fists pummelled him. He pushed, he grabbed a leg, an arm, a neck … A burning candle rolled away. They were in the passage … the passage. ‘Run,’ he gasped. ‘God damn it, go while you can!’

  Seized from behind, Kohler was carried forward in a rush as they pelted after the cook. He bucked. He hit the stone walls and tried to stop the men, tried to shake loose of them in the darkness going down the tunnel … down it …

  Someone cried out and fell. Others fell on top of the man and soon they were all shouting, all trying to scramble up and he was free and running … running towards the light of day, the light … Fog … was it fog?

  Schultz was right behind him. The bastard had darted aside into one of the rooms and had tripped the others. Now the cook reached daylight and they slammed the door shut and threw their weight against it.

  Breathlessly Schultz tried to fit the ancient key into the lock before it was too late.

  Kohler did it for him.

  The cook grinned hugely but he still had the pistol and now it was pointing the wrong way. There was fog everywhere.

  ‘Let’s find the pianist and the woman said,’ Death’s-head, catching a breath. ‘If they’re alive, I’ll tell you about the doll. If they’re dead, I won’t.’

  ‘And what about the Préfet?’

  ‘What about him, eh? You’re the detective. You tell me.’

  10

  St-Cyr stood still. The woman – he was certain it was her – took another patient, careful step. Only with difficulty did the bog relinquish her foot. It made sucking noises and of these she was very conscious.

  He cursed the fog. He asked, God, why must You do this to me, a simple detective?

  God only gave him the sucking noises and, over the open water in the middle of the fen somewhere back there behind him, the crying of the gulls and ravens.

  A punt, he said. A body. Blood, death and torn flesh had drawn the birds. The woman no longer called out to her husband. She knew what awaited her.

  There had been no sign of Kerjean. It was as if the Préfet had vanished from the face of the earth or had been swallowed up by the bog.

  She took another step. Sphagnum squished. Water as black as strong tea and stinking of rotten eggs, bubbled up to icily swallow her boots. When she found the spiked and spindly trunk of a blackened spruce rising up from the peat, she ignored the pain in her hands to frantically pull it free – strained at it, tried so hard she had to rest.

  She went on and he could not understand her doing so. The tree trunk only made her progress more difficult by catching on things. Twice she fell and stifled her cries by burying her face in the soggy moss. Once she went down so hard, she lay there between the mounds of sphagnum and leatherleaf and he did not see her for some time.

  Then she pulled herself up and dragged the trunk free. Her long dark hair was awry with twigs, moss and mud, her face and hands bore smears of peat and blood, the bandages were gone, the coarse black woollen overcoat was soaking wet and very heavy yet she did not shed it.

  Quite by accident or design she crossed the path but did not take it. instead, she stood off some distance straining to hear and see all that was around her. The fog swirled. He hid among the scattered cranberry and stunted spruce and saw her only now and then.

  Satisfied that she wasn’t being followed, she made her way towards the road but always kept the path well to her left.

  When she fell to her knees with a cry and cast the only weapon she had aside, he knew something was wrong. Frantically she dragged at the peaty muds. She dug her feet in, sat back and, stiffening her legs, pulled hard at the thing. He heard her gasp. She gave a ragged sob, then said not loudly, ‘Yvon, I never wanted this to happen.’

  The bicycle’s rear wheel was so bent and twisted, it took all her remaining energy to pull and pry it free until at last, it stood above the surface of the bog.

  He waited – everything in him said to go to her, that she needed help and comfort, but he could not do so.

  Kerjean had approached from the other direction. He had hardly spent a moment in the bog. He had known the bicycle was there. He had not known she would find it.

  ‘An accident, Hélène,’ he said and his voice, muffled by the fog, had a judgemental finality to it that was only reinforced by the eerie crying of the gulls and the deeper, harsher cawing of the ravens. ‘I found it on the road. I thought it best to hide it here since your husband …’

  ‘Yvon, damn you. Yvon!’

  ‘Since your husband intended to kill himself.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, the word torn from her. Anguish, pain and disbelief were in her voice, hatred too. ‘Yvon had no reason to kill himself, Victor. He had every reason to live for Angélique’s sake.’

  ‘He tried to kill St-Cyr.’

  ‘You know that is not true. He was only trying to protect Angélique. Yvon didn’t even know about that damned doll until Monsieur le Trocquer confronted me with it. My husband didn’t want people to find out what his daughter had done to me. He … he was afraid the inspectors and others would see it and he couldn’t have that, could he?’

  She was desperate. ‘Where is Jean-Louis?’ he asked.

  ‘Nowhere near. There are only the two of us.’

  ‘You should have taken the cyanide. It would have been better.’

  ‘Better? Better than what, please? Your hands on my throat? My face in the mud until I can struggle no more? I know too much. You cannot let me continue to live.’

  ‘Please don’t be difficult.’

  ‘You wanted Yvon to kill himself so you hid the bicycle you had smashed with your car. You let him crawl all the way out there to his boat. Was he badly hurt, Victor? Was he bleeding, damn you?’

  Sacré nom de nom, thought Kerjean, why had Jean-Louis not called out? ‘Hélène, I searched for Yvon. I tried to find him and found the bicycle at the side of the road. I swear it, but I could not have stopped him even if I had found him. He was insane and you know it. He was always hearing the ancients and their whispers. This place was very sacred to them, sacred to himself also. Yes … yes, don’t deny it. A relic, he called it, from the Ice Age, from that time of much colder climate. He wanted to be buried here and unless I am very mistaken, we will find him in that little boat of his still clutching the boulder he intended to take to the bottom with him.’

  ‘Yvon did not kill Monsieur le Trocquer,’ she said harshly and, catching up the blackened tree trunk, wielded it to defend herself.

  Kerjean found a cigarette and lit it. He made no move to approach her. He calmed himself and as he did so, the tree trunk was gradually lowered until its end dug itself into the bog beside the bicycle.

  She looked like a witch, a hag, as pagan as the rest of the place. He finished the cigarette in silence and when it was done, pushed it well into the peat. Then he took a step towards her and said, ‘Hélène, please let me help you.’ Another step followed and another – the peat was sucking at his boots. It wasn’t any easier for her to move. Frantically she tried to pull the tree trunk free but it wouldn’t come … it wouldn’t.

  With a cry that was more of the distant past than of the present, a blurred brown shape rushed out of the fog across the tops of the hummocks to leap at Kerjean and grab him from behind and drag him down … down into the bog. They fought. Something green and sharply pointed was raised up in two fists. A bronze spear point … A …

  St-Cyr fired two shots into the air and all at once the gulls began to
scream while the ravens went to silence.

  ‘Yvon …’ she said. ‘Chéri …’ The words were ripped right out of her.

  ‘Monsieur, please put the weapon down. Please do not force me to shoot you.’

  Kerjean was face down. His arms were bent to give purchase. Involuntarily the hands clutched at the peaty mud and it squished between the futile fingers.

  ‘He thought I had been badly hurt and would surely kill myself,’ said Charbonneau, ‘and I let him think it. I cut up a goat I stole from a nearby farm and made a sacrifice of it to the gods of this place. I knew he would have to come back here and I waited.’

  ‘Please drop the spear point.’

  ‘Yvon, do as he asks.’

  It was Kerjean who said, ‘Kill me, Yvon. Don’t let the Nazis take me.’

  Schultz was not good company. Oh, he grinned and thought it all a great joke locking his buddies up like that, but from the Tumulus of Saint-Michel to the alignments of Kerzerho, a good eight kilometres, the muzzle of the Walther P38 had never wavered. Not for one second, and through the damnedest pea-souper Kohler had ever experienced.

  He geared down one more time, put the lorry right into low-low and eased the Freikorps Doenitz’s lumbering old sow among the standing stones.

  The megaliths ghosted grey and ancient and a hell of a lot like some witch doctor’s phalluses, and he had to wonder if this wasn’t what the bloody things represented. ‘Not astronomical sight lines but peckers!’ he snorted richly. ‘The fountains of youth to dazzle all the tribe’s females and make the old druids randy!’

  It didn’t even get a rise out of Schultz. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ he asked.

  ‘Just find the house by the sea and find the woman and her husband.’

  ‘So, tell me about the doll, eh? Give me a break.’

  Kohler was just fucking about. ‘Not until we know they’re dead. If they’re not, you can forget it.’

  ‘Then I’ll never know? That isn’t fair. Hey, how was Paulette? I meant to ask, and bugger that crap about your trying to help the Dollmaker. You had her, Schultz, and you killed her and I’m going to make it stick.’

  The shot shattered the side window and nearly put them into one of the larger stones. Kohler jammed on the brakes and shook his head to clear it. ‘I’m deaf, damn it! Deaf, you son of a bitch!’ he roared.

  To prove it, Schultz fired again. ‘All right … All right, you win. Was she juicy? Was she just begging for it, eh?’

  ‘I didn’t kill her and I didn’t kill her mother either. She was already dead when I found her.’

  Somehow he had to get that gun away from Schultz. ‘You’re lying. You raped her and then you killed her.’

  ‘I might have but I didn’t. Now shut up and keep driving. Don’t try to put us off the road. You do and it’ll be the last thing you ever try.’

  They started up again. He had to keep him talking. ‘Admit it. You knew that shopkeeper. You’d been working a fiddle with him and trying to get a hand up Paulette’s skirt. When the pianist and Angélique went into the shop, and you saw that doll the kid had – you saw it, my friend – you put two and two together and went to see what would happen. That can only mean you knew well beforehand exactly what le Trocquer was going to do with that doll.’

  ‘What if I did?’

  Kohler brought the lorry to another halt. ‘It makes you an accessory to murder but I happen to think you were there to stop that shopkeeper from ever meeting up with the Captain. I’m right, aren’t I?’

  The engine idled – it was a bit rough. Ah damn … Schultz had raised the pistol and taken aim at the Gestapo’s forehead.

  ‘One neat little hole and no more problems,’ he said. ‘Your dossier and that of your Frog friend tell me few will regret your passing.’

  Kohler wet his throat. ‘Look, I … I was only casting about for answers. Doenitz wants this thing solved. Mueller in Berlin is on the line to my chief in Paris all the time. He and Boemelburg are old friends.’

  Several seconds passed. The cook was going to kill him. Ach Du lieber Gott, had it come to this?

  ‘Paulette was a tease, a virgin. She kept it locked up like the Bank of France. Her old man always figured she was up to mischief, but the truth is, Herr Kohler, she was as pure as the new-fallen snow.’

  ‘She wanted out into the big world. You offered a chance but she wouldn’t go all the way with you.’

  ‘She wanted an officer. She was “worth it”, she said. She wasn’t going to give it to just anyone.’

  ‘Even though you’d brought her all sorts of little treasures? Silk stockings, perfume, underwear and …’

  ‘Condoms,’ grinned the cook.’ A nice big box of them.’

  It was coming now. Kohler tried to prepare himself for the bullet. Louis, he said to himself, Louis, where the hell are you?

  But Louis wasn’t with him, and Schultz was right. No one at the rue des Saussaies in Paris, the former HQ of the Sûreté Natiohale and now that of the Gestapo in France, would shed a single tear. Least of all Boemelburg who would only say, I told you so. Someday it was bound to happen.

  Giselle would cry and would go into mourning for about a week. Oona would shed blue-eyed tears and try to comfort the girl. One blonde, the other black-haired. Day and night. Half Greek, half Midi French and twenty-two, Giselle was the sweetest, most gorgeous thing in Paris, but Oona, who was forty and lovely too, wouldn’t be able to stop her from going around the corner to console herself at Madame Chabot’s with the other girls. Whores all of them. Real patriots too. The rue Danton and a house for Frenchmen only, even though the money was not very good and he’d won his way into their hearts in spite of being one of ‘the others’, one of les autres.

  Kohler let go of the steering wheel and switched off the ignition. Gingerly he raised his hands. ‘Why make it messy for yourself? I’ll get out. I won’t argue.’

  Schultz shook his head. ‘You forget the Préfet. You forget your side window. Someone had to break it. Not me. I’m just here to protect Vati.’

  ‘The others will tell Louis I was with you.’

  ‘They won’t say a thing. Vati won’t let them. Vati must know all about the doll by now, but I’m loyal to him, Herr Kohler. He’s our Dollmaker. He’s the only one who can bring us home.’

  In single file, and tightly grouped, the four of them made their way through the fog. St-Cyr brought up the rear. The Préfet’s gun was in his hand. Would they ever reach the car? Would one of them not try to bolt and run or take the revolver from him?

  Kerjean was immediately in front, then the woman. The pianist, who knew the bog best, was in the lead but would he take them on a wide detour so as to stall for time, would he lose them and slip away?

  He had set the spear point carefully on a hummock and had gingerly raised his hands in surrender. As he had got up, the Préfet had said, ‘Why didn’t you do as I asked?’

  Charbonneau had replied, ‘Don’t ask when you already know the answer.’

  No one had spoken since then. Exhausted, afraid, each had kept their thoughts but which was the killer of le Trocquer, or was that person still absent?

  There were so many questions and all of them raised others. Worst of all perhaps was his not being able either to sit down quietly to think things through, or to meet with Hermann to bounce things off him and get his feedback. They worked as a team yet were forced by circumstance and this blasted terrain, this … this pagan landscape, to work largely alone. Each half of the partnership would know things the other half did not.

  The last time they had been together, a little more than twenty-four hours ago, they had helped with the bomb damage in Lorient and he had told Hermann of his two sons and had used their deaths to make him see things from Kerjean’s point of view which had not been fair. Ah no, most certainly, but war makes even the best of friends from opposite sides think first of their own kind, stupid though that is and always has been.

  He had told Hermann of the telescope and the
Préfet’s son. He had asked him to say nothing of it. ‘Victor’s a good man,’ he had said. ‘Don’t blame him for wanting to get the boy out of France.’

  Hermann had wanted to know if the shopkeeper had been aware of the escape. He had said he wanted to look at the Dollmaker’s report on the state of the crew.

  Had he found a report on the Captain? Had the Dollmaker been in Paris for some kind of medical assessment – was that why Kaestner had gone straight to the clay pits with such an urgency it defied rational comprehension? Surely the day after New Year’s would have sufficed? U-297 wasn’t putting to sea immediately on his return. Yet he had sent messages on ahead to tell others where he would be on a day when the pits would be closed and only the watchman would be present.

  Baumann had taken the message to the Charbonneaus. Both had known of its contents as had the child.

  Angélique, wanting to put a stop to the love affair, had got her father to take her to Quiberon the day before the murder to buy some candlesticks from the man who would then take the doll she had left in the shop and go out to confront the Captain with it. The child had known of the shopkeeper and had seen so clearly what he would do. The man had delivered messages to their house.

  ‘Kämmer and Reinhardt …’ he muttered, his voice well muffled by the fog. Hélène Charbonneau had caught up with that shopkeeper who had then thrust the doll into her hands. She had backed away in terror until out of sight and had stood and dropped the doll at the sound of … of another voice, yes, yes, a sharp accusation of its own, then a skull’s crushing, perhaps a gasp, perhaps only the sound of the switch-bar as it had hit the rails on being cast aside.

  But had she told the complete truth? Was she still trying to protect the husband, just as he had been trying to shield the daughter by hiding the briefcase and the doll?

  She had had ample reason to kill le Trocquer, so, too, had the husband, and if she had lied before, could she not still be lying?

  Quickly he ran through the sequence of events: the confrontation, the receiving of the doll, the backing away, the challenge to le Trocquer from behind, then the killing, the dropping of the doll and, a few minutes later, the hesitant viewing of the body and escape, after which the husband recovers the doll and the Captain then finds the bisque.