One of the guards must have reported this but a sigh would be best. ‘Look, I know your eyes are as good as mine, if not better.’
Ach, how humble of Herr Kohler. ‘This toilet services both the laboratory and the administrative offices on this floor. The secretaries … there are five of them and one other woman, also the Lageroffizier, the Oberstleutnant Rudel and others of his staff, still others too. I tell you this only so that you will realize that they were in the habit of using it as well but normally not at that time of night.’
But had any of them left something they shouldn’t have? wondered Herr Kohler, unable to prevent himself from glancing up at the cistern.
‘There was nothing but water in it,’ said Dorsche. ‘I checked.’
‘But what led you to do so? Apart, that is, from your normally suspicious nature?’
A shrug had best be given.
‘Didn’t he have a guard with him?’
Had there been a note of panic in Herr Kohler’s voice? ‘Kein Posten. The one who killed himself needed no guard here and was free to come and go. Orders. … Who am I to question the will of my superior officers? Oberstleutnant Rudel is in charge of the Lagerfuhrung.’
The camp office.
‘It is he who issues the Passierscheine und Ausweise that allow such workers to come and go at all hours.’
The temporary passes and the more permanent ones and identity papers all such places would demand. ‘And the body?’
‘Was found by Gefreiter Hartmann at 0011 hours Saturday. He touched nothing and immediately notified me.’
‘Who, in turn, notified the Oberstleutnant.’
‘Who then notified Kommandant Rasche, as was his duty.’
‘All right, we’ve got the chain of command. Now tell me exactly what you saw.’
‘Hanging is never pleasant.’
‘And I’m fresh out of cigarettes. Sorry.’
‘Then try one of these. Ach, take two. You may need them. These days one never knows.’
They were Junos and right away they brought moisture to Herr Kohler’s eyes, for they were often a Berliner’s first choice and he’d once been a detective there. ‘Two?’ he asked, as if the truth were hard to accept and he’d been away too long.
‘Sweepings. Hay, chaff, dried herbs and other things like carrot tops. With tobacco, of course, or else they couldn’t legally have sold them as such, could they, a government that doesn’t lie?’
Berlin, and Louis should have heard him! ‘The Gauloises bleues and Gitanes we’ve been getting have rat shit in them. There aren’t many horses left in France, so it has to be that. I use the leaves of the red beech, cured in a biscuit tin I keep buried deeply in one of the manure piles out at the racetrack, but because of the threat of terrorism from the Banditen, the Resistance, if you like, they’ve had to move the races to Le Tremblay from Longchamp. When black and crumbled, the leaves have no taste and are perfect for thinning good tobacco, if you can get it. Twenty percent. More and they’re a waste; less and it just keeps getting better and better.’
A connoisseur. ‘Then you’ll understand that it’s hard to keep paper here.’
Dorsche indicated the all but spent roll of grey, unbleached tissue most POWs would never see. ‘Was he taking it for his pals?’
‘When he thought he could get away with it, but when one has nothing else but the pages of one’s Bible why, one does what one can, is that not so?’
It was. ‘What’s the ration?’
‘Two packets of twenty a fortnight, or fifty grams of the loose, with papers. The POWs are supplied through their parcels from home and those of the Red Cross, so they don’t always need what we bring in for their canteen, when we can get it, of course.’
And don’t need it! ‘Was there anything else here?’
‘A little something … ’
The copy of the magazine, Schone Madchen in der Natur, was thin, the full-page black-and-white spreads well taken. All the girls were totally naked and generously posed. They lounged, stretched, bent over backward and pressed their hands to the gymnasium’s floor as they grinned.
‘Every man, even a Kriegsgefangener, needs a little diversion from time to time,’ mused Dorsche.
‘Pants down when found?’
‘Up. Belt and buttons tight. No signs of an erection on death as can be quite common. None of the-’
‘All right, all right! Who left it and why?’
Now that was a good question, but a shrug would be best. Ach, the shoulders, the rheumatism …
Dorsche winced and Kohler let him be for the moment. Though the Nazis had a damp view of pornography, they encouraged healthy eroticism to boost the birth rate. All of the major hotels offered these above-the-counter ‘health-and-art’ magazines which often found their way to Paris where they were earnestly compared with photos the French produced in spite of the extreme shortages of photographic materials.
‘You’d best let me keep this, Lagerfeldwebel.’
‘Certainly.’
‘Anything else?’
A thorough detective, was that it? ‘His carpenter’s nail and stone, set carefully on the floor to one side. The left. Here, you can have those too.’
‘And this?’
Herr Kohler indicated the magazine and had best be told a little something to keep him happy. ‘Angrily folded and jammed behind that roll of tissue in the dispenser, and wet with his tears, I think, since there was also this.’
And torn from another magazine, the upfront buff-shot of a grinning young Wehrmacht stallion, one of the ‘boys’ the French girls in Paris and elsewhere were having such a time with.
‘He’s not from here, so don’t even bother trying to attach a name to him.’
The candle having burned down, the victim was again seen only in electric light. Shadows, cast by the lath and potatoes, fell on him.
‘You won’t mind, will you, if I take a look at these?’ asked St-Cyr, gesturing companionably with pipe in hand. ‘Please don’t think it an invasion of your privacy and detective meddling. Think of it as a necessity if we are to get at the truth.’
On the earthen floor at his feet were the last effects, taken from the pockets. Like soldiers everywhere, Eugene Andre Thomas had carried snapshots of his loved ones: the wife as a girl of twenty at Paris’s Lutetia Pool, then as a bride and as the radiant mother of a brand-new baby boy. One of little Paul at the age of six months, another at a year and a half, Madame Paulette Thomas holding him by the hand and delighted by his timid steps.
‘Radiant still,’ he said. ‘But last Friday night, monsieur, you ripped her photo apart, though taking care to save your son from such a fate. Had she betrayed you?’
As always these ‘discussions’ were as if with the living, and everything that could be was used. ‘Betrayal, mon ami. Certainly what has happened to her photos cries this out. Wayward wives are sadly becoming an ever-increasing problem at home, especially in the larger cities and towns where food is scarce and prices astronomical. Your rank was that of a private, though as a chemist you could have been an NCO, and I must ask, were you a bit of a rebel?’
There was no answer. ‘Had Madame Paulette taken to the streets to feed herself and your son?’
Again nothing was forthcoming. Perhaps some common ground would be useful. ‘Look, I know such a thought is hard, and that it takes time for one to adjust if true. Before she and our little Philippe were tragically killed early last December by a bomb that was meant for me, my second wife, my Marianne, had carried on a torrid affair with one of the Boche. Although I forgave her immediately, and was able to convey this to her, if only on one occasion, I do know what it feels like to be a cuckold. The long absences, the loneliness she had had to deal with-it was all my fault, and I readily admit it. And the bomb, you ask? The Resistance keep putting me on some of their hit lists. The Gestapo found the bomb and left it in place. Apparently neither side is content. The former think I’m a collaborator because I have to work with Hermann; the latter hate our guts for always pointing the finger of truth. Let’s face it, these days no one is happy except for those who are swimming in the gravy.’