Herr Kohler had two women in Paris. A twenty-two-year-old former prostitute and a forty-year-old Dutch alien he had rescued and would shelter even though by rights she ought to be deported. His wife back home in Wasserburg was suing him for divorce so as to marry an indentured French peasant.
But could the Captain use the information in those dossiers? Could she somehow see that he got it without anyone else knowing?
The cigarette was from the American freighter, the Esther B. Johnson out of Charleston, South Carolina. The Captain had found her alone and drifting off Cape Hatteras and had used his last eel on her then had finished her off with the deck gun. 8,000 tonnes right to the bottom.
But first they had boarded her and had found such treasures everyone still got a laugh out of it. Lipstick and silk underwear for British girls her crew would never meet. Silk stockings, her captain’s wind-up Victrola and phonograph records, ah such records. Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Bing Crosby, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday and others …
They had returned in triumph with their loot stuffed into every nook and cranny, having spent all their torpedoes, eaten nearly all their food and burned up virtually every last drop of fuel.
August 7th of last year. She had been among the welcoming party that had crowded the Isère, the old wooden ship that had once taken convicts to Devil’s Island but now served as a tender to U-boats tied up to before finally slipping into the bunkers.
The band from the garrison had filled the harbour with the sound of the ‘Siegfried-Line’. There had been flowers and French girls too. Girls who gave themselves willingly to members of the crew and even had had children by them. No whores among them. Those the boys saved for later as a warm-up to the homecoming party in the Cafe of the Three Sisters which was now no more due to the bombings. Now the homecomings were not so nice and the parties had been moved here to Quiberon for safety’s sake.
The bombing raids had spoiled things in Lorient. The Happy Days of 1940 were long since over. One whole wall in the Bar of the Mermaid’s Three Sisters here was covered with photographs rescued from the other place, photographs of those who had been lost. Karl Jährmarker of U-192, Otto von Jacobs of U-200, Franz Kellner of U-187, all of them gone within the last ten days. One hundred and fifty-six men sunk ‘with man and mouse’, as the boys would say. And to dance in the presence of those photographs, while she waited for the Captain to show up, was a bad thing. Yet no one would take the photos down. They had a thing about it. They honoured their dead.
‘While fucking some drunken French girl in the toilets!’ she said bitterly. ‘Why is it that most men are so coarse they would even take turns?’
Not all of them were. The Captain seldom stayed long at these parties or at the Saturday-night dances. Oh for sure he would always put in an appearance unless something came up, but he preferred to keep to himself ashore and sought diversion elsewhere or with his dolls.
The cigarette was now down to its last but still she held it cupped in her hand and stared emptily at the thin trail of smoke until awakened to its threat. ‘The cigarettes should have all been used up by now. The detectives will have realized this but have said nothing of it.’
Ah damn, what was she to do? Would they discover she had kept a carton for the Captain so that he could dole them out as he saw fit? Cigarettes for the husband of that woman and cigarettes for the Préfet.
Crumbling the last of the cigarette to dust, she let the remaining flakes of tobacco fall into the toilet and stood a moment staring at them. The RAF had rained depth charges on the boat that last time in early November. U-297 had had a gaping hole in her bow, no deck gun — a British destroyer had rammed them in the North Atlantic some 1,327 kilometres to the south-west of Iceland and just outside the southern limit of the Greenland pack ice, but even that damage had not stopped the Captain from putting her on the bottom.
‘The Totenallee,’ she said in a whisper. ‘Death Row, that’s what they now call the final approach to Lorient.’
There had been panic aboard. Four had been killed. One had had his head crushed to a pulp. Gas had escaped from the batteries. Its deadly hiss had been heard all the time, the air choking … Sweat had run into their eyes as they had all looked up and had hung on in the darkness waiting for the next explosion. Dear God, why must it end for them this way? Obersteuermann Baumann knew it would. No one could escape that look of his, not any more.
She vomited. She gripped her stomach and, kneeling, threw up everything. Gasped, ‘Sweet Jesus, spare him.’
Kohler heard her gagging. The chain was yanked and he wondered what had upset her so much. Nerves of course. It didn’t take a donkey to see she had the hots for the Captain.
But there must be something else. The truth? he wondered.
Préfet Kerjean withdrew into that dark, brooding silence so typical of the Breton. The Captain remained intensely aware of everything around him. His very being evoked command.
Freisen was perturbed and, unlike the Captain, betrayed a sour disposition. He and the Captain had used the interlude to exchange a few words in confidence. None the wiser, the C.-in-C. U-boats Kernével was not happy.
Dollmaker would go his own way as in everything else. That’s what it took to survive and he was a survivor most certainly.
The girl waited tensely. Unable to lift her eyes from the pencil and pad, she knew the Chief Inspector was looking her over slowly and that … Ah what is it that troubles you so, Fräulein Krüger? wondered St-Cyr. Love rejected, truth denied or something you yourself have hidden? A spare key to this cell perhaps? A little something you can slip to the Captain if necessary?
‘So, let us begin again,’ he said magnanimously the peacemaker. Relighting his pipe, he puffed happily away to show that there were no hard feelings and that it was all just routine.
Kohler smiled inwardly but remained outwardly impassive. Apart from Kerjean, none of them could possibly know what Louis was really like.
‘A matter of blackmail …’ began the Sûreté.
‘It’s impossible. I wouldn’t have stood for it. He wouldn’t have had the guts. A shopkeeper? Le Trocquer? Most certainly not!’
Louis tossed the hand of dismissal. ‘Good. Then let us turn to something else. The fragments of bisque you collected, Captain? Since they are the proof the Admiral wishes us to see, might we not examine them?’
Kaestner gave him a curt nod and, digging deeply into a trouser pocket, brought out a crumpled white handkerchief and laid the ball of it before him.
No one moved to open it, most notably himself.
‘The bisque is French,’ he said at last. ‘Though it might be from a Bru doll or a Steiner, I am inclined to believe it is from a jumeau.’
‘Perhaps the most successful of our dollmakers,’ breathed the Sûreté and, setting the pipe aside, reached for the handkerchief and began to unravel it.
Kaestner watched him like a hawk, noting every nuance no matter how insignificant, thought Kohler, but at the same time, recording the reactions of everyone else. He seemed to have antennae even in his fingertips which favoured the edge of the table and tapped out the Morse of a keyed-up nature.
But even this outward sign of agitation could simply be to put the Gestapo’s Bavarian detective off. Verdammt, what was it with him?
St-Cyr spread the fragments. Some were up to two centimetres across, others but a few millimetres. ‘There are some shards of blue glass?’ he said, looking up and across the table while reaching for his pipe.