Dollmaker

by J. Robert Janes

  Was it so puzzling? ‘Yes. The big house that overlooks the sea near Kerouriec. She’s a friend of the Captain’s. Well, he … he fancies her but she’s married and has a little girl.’

  The urge to shake some manners into this … this budding fille de joie was almost too much to bear for St-Cyr. Sporting herself like this when she should be …

  ‘Are you certain that is all you overheard?’ he asked harshly.

  Her answer must be modest – shy like a schoolgirl whom a priest was instructing. ‘She’s a friend of the Préfet’s too, Inspector. A good friend, if you know what I mean.’

  The bitch! ‘So, they argued. Where were you? In the shop, outside or upstairs?’

  ‘I was in the cellar at the back. That’s where he puts me from time to time. At least, that is where he used to put me but no more, I guess. Is he really dead?’

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘Good! Then as soon as mother goes I can begin to have a life of my own. Aren’t you going to light your pipe?’

  Ah Nom de Dieu, de Dieu, he thought, this one, like so many Breton girls he had come across over the years in Paris, was heading straight for the streets. ‘Yes, I will light my pipe and stay awhile, I think, and you will answer my questions both truthfully and succinctly since my partner is from the Gestapo and no doubt now on his way to find us.’

  ‘The Gestapo …?’

  ‘Yes!’

  The Mégalithe was just that, thought Kohler grimly. A great barn of a place. Stone Age in its outlook and with glass display cases in the upstairs hall, of all places. Stone axes, flint arrowheads, shards of primitive pottery and a couple of skulls whose teeth, due to the coarse diet of rock-ground wild grains and chewing leather, were blackened stumps. Ugh!

  ‘Look, Madame Quévillon, I’m asking you once again. Give us something else. My partner had his honeymoon in Quiberon. His wife’s dead. Let him at least have a …’

  ‘All rooms overlooking the sea are reserved.’

  ‘But you have no guests?’

  ‘You are our guests.’

  Ah Gott im Himmel … ‘But … surely we could have a couple of rooms with a glimpse of the sea? What could be nicer?’

  She would look at this one from the Gestapo, noting the dissipation of sagging jowls, puffy eyelids and faded blue, unfeeling eyes, the long scar on the cheek, of course, and the graze across the forehead – had it been from a bullet? she wondered and decided that this must be so. A hard man, hard-living. A womanizer and fond of drink and tobacco as well. ‘It is the threat of spying, Inspector. The Admiral Doenitz has ordered that all rooms overlooking the sea be closed and placed off limits.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, the damned U-boats don’t even use those waters out there. They approach the base well to the west of the peninsula. There are far too many islands, too many shoals.’

  ‘That does not matter and please do not raise your voice at me. The ordinance is for all hotels and places with rooms for rent and it has been in effect now for the past year and a half.’

  Kohler let a sigh escape. ‘But you have no guests other than ourselves?’

  ‘That, too, does not matter. The Admiral believes perhaps – who is to say with such a one? – that there are those among us who give the British very up-to-date news of the comings and goings of his submarines.’

  ‘By clandestine wireless?’

  ‘Or by fishing boat. Some leave and fail to return.’

  ‘In those crappy little sardiniers and under sail?’

  ‘That is what I have just said.’

  ‘To England?’

  ‘Ah, now, that is another matter and of this I would know nothing.’

  ‘Spying … But we’re on Herr Doenitz’s side? Louis …?’

  ‘Your associate is French and a Parisian, is he not?’

  ‘From Belleville, yes, but he loves the sea, madame. At least a few oysters, a bottle of …’

  She drew herself up. ‘I have already discussed the impossibility of such things with him.’

  ‘Then tell me where Doenitz beds down his U-boat crews between operations?’

  ‘The Hotel of the Sunbathing Mermaid. It is on the boulevard Chanard overlooking the beach. Their shutters are all open, of course.’

  ‘And the Captain? Where is he being held?’

  ‘At the jail – yes, even here in such a place as this, in summers we found the need for one. It is on the rue de la Côte-Sauvage, not far from the Port Maria and right between the sardine canneries.’

  The stench must really be something. ‘If Louis comes back, tell him I went to see the Captain.’

  ‘Of course. And which of you will be paying, monsieur?’

  Were all Bretons so practical? ‘Neither of us. You’re to bill the Admiral and that’s an order right from the top, from Gestapo Mueller in Berlin.’

  God curse the Nazis. ‘You could telephone your friend?’

  Was it a crack in her armour at last? ‘It might disturb him. He gets miserable when interrupted. I want him happy, madame. He works much better and … why, then our stays are so much shorter.’

  She knew he would be grinning like a wolf. She listened as he left the hotel by the front door and only then did she hastily cross herself and find in the skulls of others a quiet moment of contemplation. Everyone knew things had not been right in the household of Monsieur le Trocquer. Several would most certainly have wanted that one dead. He had not been a nice man. Uncouth, a drinker, a visitor of certain houses whose women should be driven into the streets and sent to prison. Why even at the best of times, he had resented the shop of his dear wife and she, poor thing, was now in such constant pain from a crippling arthritis of the hips, she could no longer walk and must leave her chair only for her bed.

  ‘That daughter …’ began Madame Quevillon. ‘That Paulette … What will she do without the father to put her in her place?’

  Everyone said the Kapitän Kaestner’s money was missing. 6,000,000 of the new francs. A fortune.

  ‘That girl will vanish,’ she said on seeing Ginette le Gonidec come up the stairs to find her. A good girl, Ginette, one given to much piety and very dutiful. ‘That Paulette will take the money and disappear or someone will think she has it and kill her when she fails to tell them where it is. Then that person or persons will hide that body she loves to sport so much, and those two from Paris can look all they want but they will never find her. Not in a place like this.’

  Not along the Cote Sauvage where the cliffs held caves no one could see from above. Not with the tides in the Baie de Quiberon either, or the salt marshes and tidal flats of the Golfe du Morbihan or the presence of bogs no one chooses to enter. Not with the passage graves of such as these, she said, looking at the skulls. Yes, there were so many secret places none of which would be known to those two from Paris or many others for that matter.

  *

  St-Cyr could hear the mother complaining upstairs as the daughter got her ready to receive him. He thought to leave it and concentrate on the daughter and the money – after all, was it right to disturb the woman so soon after the death of her husband? She wasn’t going anywhere, was trapped. He thought to call an apology up the stairs, then thought better of it.

  The trap door to the cellar was behind the counter, under a frayed runner the cat must often use at night. The staircase was steep, the timbers low. Boxes, bales, old trunks and suitcases were crammed with things the shop might or might not sell.

  Picking his way through the rubbish, he passed the coal bin and noted that it was empty, most probably not entirely due to the rationing but from sheer parsimony. Though coal was exceedingly difficult to obtain, there ought to have been a little driftwood. There had been perfectly suitable pieces on some of the beaches Marianne and he had visited on that last day when her stomach had settled a little and the blotchy attack of hives and the temperature had abated somewhat.

  Right at the back there was a small, dark storeroom, quite empty and without an electric bulb in
its overhead socket. High on the wall there was a ringbolt and from this dangled a length of rope.

  ‘Jésus, merde alors!’ he sighed. ‘Le Trocquer tied her up, then left her in the dark to punish her.’

  There was no stick with which to beat the daughter, only that rope. No gag. No chair or stool of any kind, and the rope not long enough for her to have sat on the floor. ‘The bastard,’ he said and knew then that the daughter had had every reason to have wanted her father dead.

  ‘Does she have a bicycle?’ he wondered. ‘Did she go after him?’ She could have hitched a ride with the Germans perhaps. They’d be going to and from the base several times a day. Pretty girls were always in demand. She could have taken another autobus. He must find the schedule. ‘Lorient,’ he said, ‘and then the road out to the airfield and from there across the moor to that shed and then along the tracks, or perhaps she simply followed the tracks right from the city?’

  But had she done so?

  Reaching up, he touched the knot in the ringbolt and let his fingers trail down the rope. The things one discovered about others. Death often hid so little.

  Then he went upstairs to the shop to find the dolls all looking at him with widened eyes of blue or brown, and long dark lashes or blonde ones. Their cheeks were touched with the pink flush of health, their lips were so beautifully red.

  ‘Fashion dolls,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Exquisite needlework. Everything perfect. Some with many skirts and billowing evening gowns, others in capes or simply dresses.’

  The colours of the fabrics glowed with quality in spite of the severe shortages. Cashmere and lamb’s wool, silk, satin and cotton, with lace petticoats beneath and, he thought, everything precisely in order. Everything exactly as it should be, ‘because that is the kind of man the Captain is.’

  ‘Inspector …?’

  ‘Ah! Pardon me. I was entranced by the Captain’s dolls.’

  She would give him a coy look and delicately brush a curl away from her ear. ‘So was my father.’ She threw the fullness of her china blue eyes at him. ‘Entranced – fascinated and so eager, for you see, Inspector, the Captain modelled his dolls after people he knew.’

  Merde …

  She gave a nonchalant shrug. ‘Oh for sure he dressed them up. What man wouldn’t enjoy such a thing? Some ladies in Paris make the clothes for him. They’re very good and quite expensive, isn’t that so?’

  What was the girl driving at? he wondered. ‘Exquisite,’ he said warily. She grinned but then grew serious and went over to take down two of the dolls.

  ‘But the faces, Inspector, the figures, they are from memory. His two sisters.’ She held the dolls up. ‘His mother and his aunts when they were young ladies, his cousins, a lover or two or perhaps those were just girls he desired but could never possess. Yes, that is how it must have been, for he would not otherwise have made them into dolls.’

  She turned and, stretching on tiptoes, replaced the dolls and tidied their dresses. Then she stood there looking at him across a clutter of pressed glass and paste. ‘Others too, from around here. Yes, of course they must not be forgotten. But if you ask me, Inspector, it’s a queer enough thing for a man to want to make dolls, let alone to make them of people he knows, especially if they are from around here and can be identified by others.’

  Ah Nom de Dieu, what had they found themselves in this time?

  ‘The men from the U-boats and the other Germans come here to buy things, Inspector. Sometimes one of the dolls if … if they think it will amuse their fellow crew members to undress it on a long voyage or they have children or girlfriends at home.’

  The girl went on, this time shamelessly tracing a fingertip over a suggestive vase of pale yellowish-green Depression glass and not looking at him. ‘Me he would not use as a model, though I offered the use of myself many times. He said he understood me only too well and that the expression on the doll’s face would betray my innermost thoughts and that …’ She paused to suck in a breath and look frankly at him. ‘… and that he wanted no more trouble with my father since he already had enough of that.’

  The missing money – was this what she meant? – or did she go with men from the Captain’s crew? he wondered. Had she thought it best to hint at this since he’d find out soon enough? ‘Your mother, mademoiselle. We had best not keep her waiting.’

  How cautious of him!

  Half-way up the stairs, she turned so swiftly at some thought, they all but collided and he felt her sudden breath on his brow and pulled an accidental hand from her hip. ‘Please try not to upset her, Inspector. Right now she is beside herself with worry about the future and very depressed.’

  Their eyes met. St-Cyr searched hers deeply, asking himself, Why is it you think it so necessary to tell me this?

  Then they went on up the rest of the stairs and into the flat.

  Kohler was taken aback. The gendarmerie, a skinny, two-storeyed affair of soot-encrusted grey granite block, was squeezed between two rusty, corrugated-iron sardine canneries that stank to high heaven of fish boiled in their own oil. The din was unbelievable. Legions of young girls and older women, some wearing the stovepipe coifs or others of starched white lace, worked, sang, gossiped and threw curious glances at him through the wide-open double doors.

  He thought to light a cigarette but found he had none and wondered why, if Doenitz valued the hero of U-297 so highly, he had allowed him to be incarcerated in such a place? Surely house-arrest at one of the Ubootsweiden, the U-boat ‘pastures’, the rest centres in the countryside, would have suited better? The Captain could not help but have a constant headache. Whistle blasts would wake the dead and if not the whistles, the wooden clogs of two hundred hurrying females every change of shift.

  ‘Trust the French to put a police station here!’ he snorted. They never ceased to amaze him and were always throwing up some new twist of character.

  Expecting to find a surly flic on duty, he was brought up sharp. Three pairs of U-boat eyes stared at him through the layered haze of tobacco smoke. The oldest of them, a man of no more than thirty but looking fifty, had a thick black Vandyke and the perpetually haunted, sorrowful expression of death perceived.

  The youngest, a boy of seventeen, had the ever-moving, furtive gaze of one who has stood at death’s door and been suddenly reprieved but for how long?

  They had been playing a favourite board game, Mensch ärgere Dich nicht – Man, don’t ‘shoot’ yourself. All wore, at rakish angles, the dark blue forage cap with submariner’s badge and the faded blue coveralls that rumour said had been modelled after the British Army’s battledress for its ease of getting about, especially when firing torpedoes or their 88-millimetre deck gun.

  ‘Kohler to see the prisoner.’

  The one with the beard took the stem of a cold pipe from between his teeth and got slowly to his feet. ‘Herr Kohler, ah yes. We’ve been expecting you. Obersteuermann Otto Baumann at your service.’

  The accent was definitely of Lower Saxony and Bremerhaven most probably. Chief Helmsman of U-297 and no doubt one of the Captain’s Watch Officers. As if to emphasize this to all and sundry, even though it wasn’t dress-up time, the Ritterkreuz, the Knight’s Cross, hung on the left breast pocket below the Atlantic U-boat badge. There were also two of the black-and-white wound badges and the underwater escape badge, this last signifying a real test of luck and skill and just plain guts.

  ‘Obersteuermann …’

  ‘Otto, please, Herr Kohler. Rank means certain things, yes, of course, but in the Freikorps Doenitz we prefer not to stand on ceremony.’

  The U-boat Service … ‘Good. All I want is a few words with the Captain just to introduce myself and to make it clear my partner and I are on his side.’

  ‘We’re not guarding him,’ offered the boy tremulously. ‘We’re looking after him.’

  ‘Then why isn’t he playing?’

  ‘Because he’s busy,’ said Baumann unwaveringly. ‘Vati doesn’t want to see anybody right now
.’

  ‘Oh, come on now. How else can we begin to …’

  ‘Establish his innocence?’ asked Baumann.

  ‘Yes.’

  The Chief Helmsman pocketed a ring of keys that had lain on the table and picked up what was obviously the Captain’s Luger. ‘It’s loaded, I think,’ he said non-committally. ‘It always seems to save argument. You tell him, Martin. Martin, here, is our Second Engineer, Herr Kohler. You wouldn’t know it to look at him but he can make our electric motors whisper like a woman in heat and whose whispers, my friend, have saved our balls many times.’

  The one with the clean-shaven, prominent jaw, wide lips, high, bony forehead and big hands still could not find the will to smile. ‘Herr Kohler, the Captain isn’t to be interviewed without Special Officer U-boats Kernével being present.’

  Verdammt … ‘Do you mean to tell me we can’t talk to Kaestner without Freisen being present?’

  Baumann hefted the Luger. ‘Martin, be so kind as to ring up Base Kernével and ask the Kapitän Freisen to drop everything so that he can join us. That’ll solve Herr Kohler’s problem and we can get back to our game.’

  ‘But it’s more than fifty kilometres …?’

  ‘Vati has no legal counsel, Herr Kohler,’ offered the Second Engineer. ‘In the absence of one we, who owe our Dollmaker so much, are insisting all interviews be in the presence of our Special Officer.’

  Shit! They had kicked the French flics out. Either the crew were making a circus of it or they were trying to save the Captain from himself. ‘Then while you’re at it, ring up the Admiral and tell him my partner and I are off the case as of right now, eh? Then call le Trocquer’s shop and ask the Chief Inspector St-Cyr to pick up two tickets for the evening train to Paris.’

  ‘Don’t be difficult,’ sighed Baumann. ‘Humour us. Vati’s special.’

  ‘Piss off! You’re keeping us from talking freely to the one who needs us most. He could have done it, my fines. We’ve evidence to suggest he damned well did!’

  It was the Second Engineer who said levelly, ‘Then that is ample reason why the Kapitän zur See Freisen must be present. Please, it is but an hour or two, yes? It is not for nothing that we call our C.-in-C. Base Kernével the Bullet. He’ll come, and when he does, you can talk to Dollmaker all you want.’