Dollmaker

by J. Robert Janes

  She was really a very attractive young woman, this Blitzmädel who secretly had the hots for the Dollmaker. The blue eyes moistened nervously under scrutiny, the soft pink cheeks began to darken as the blush of embarrassment flooded across them. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I could lose my job.’

  ‘Who else is around?’

  Must he do this to her? ‘The other officers are all in the Tracking Room downstairs and that really is off limits even to a member of the Geheime Stattspolizei.’

  ‘Okay. Finish your telex, then let’s have a little chat in your office. We’ll even close the door so as to be totally private.’

  He left her then and she shut her eyes and tried to still the panic. Herr Kohler could not know what she had done. No one could or would except for the Captain, the Dollmaker.

  Delays in transmission only caused trouble. Forcing herself to do so, she completed the telex then sat a moment trying to collect her thoughts. What could Herr Kohler possibly want with her?

  Unbuttoning her jacket, she slid a hand in under her tie to pluck the buttons of her shirt-blouse. When she found the tiny, folded scrap of paper, she took it out and read again, as she had so many times since deciding to do this thing, the details gleaned from the two detectives’ dossiers. Things she thought might be useful to the Kapitän Kaestner. It had taken courage to sign the note Elizabeth.

  Kohler could hear her coming along the corridor. He had just time to scan the psychiatric report on the Dollmaker Doenitz had had done in Paris on the Captain’s last visit and never mind getting a bunch of ladies there to dress up a bunch of dolls. Over two years of constant duty had cut into the Captain’s psyche. During U-297’s last cruise, Kaestner had been on Luminalette. A case of nerves, nervous exhaustion and far too little uninterrupted sleep.

  Oh for sure he had brought them home and had taken them through hell – that’s why Doenitz still had faith in him. But there’d been the nightmares of corpses rotting on the bottom of the sea all tinned up in their little fish with the eels lying dormant and waiting for the barnacles. Few of the crew knew of these nightmares – Baumann and the other officers had somehow clamped a lid on things – but the boy Erich Fromm had once found the Captain staring at him after one of these episodes of fitful sleep and had never forgotten it. Hence the constant guard and the boy’s desire not to return to sea.

  The Dollmaker insists he is fit for duty and will not listen to your allowing the Kapitän Freisen to take over command of U-297. Subconsciously he is terrified of returning to sea. The dolls are a way of shutting it all out and of giving himself and the crew that sense of having something they are all going home to. A business for him, an investment for the others. But he knows it will be the last time for him if he does go back to sea and he thinks he can keep on hiding this from his officers and crew because to them he is their saviour.

  Luminalette was a phenobarbital, a sedative and hypnotic. The usual prescription was three times a day but the dosage had been increased to six times when necessary. The assessment had not been done in a clinic but at the Hotel Claridge on the Champs-Élysées where generals and holders of the Knight’s Cross often stayed.

  When she caught him reading the report, Elizabeth Krüger had to sit down and could not look up at him.

  ‘So, okay,’ breathed Kohler, softly closing the door. ‘I’m going to ask you only two things.’

  She waited. He felt sorry for her but could not let that interfere. ‘Yesterday, during the interrogation break, we gave you a cigarette. Presumably it came from the American freighter the Captain boarded last summer.’

  Again she waited, gripped her knitted hands so hard the knuckles were white.

  ‘With tobacco in such short supply, even with that hoard in the warehouse, how could an almost full packet of those cigarettes still be hanging around? We found it in a railway shed. A woman’s crumpled handkerchief was deep down in the straw.’

  Her blonde head fell to her knitted hands and she began to rock herself gently back and forth. Kohler hated himself for having to do it to her but they had to have answers.

  ‘I … I don’t know. How could I?’ she blurted. In tears, she tried to face him. He was standing over her. He wouldn’t stop! ‘The … the Dollmaker and … and who, please?’ she asked bitterly. ‘Madame Charbonneau? Was it her? Was it that …’

  ‘That bitch?’

  Again he waited. At last she nodded. ‘Then just answer my question truthfully, Fräulein Krüger. No one else will hear what you tell me.’

  ‘Oh?’ she demanded hotly, flinging her head up to look at him.

  ‘Kaestner’s a fool,’ he said and meant it too.

  ‘He … he asked me to keep cigarettes for him. A few packets … a carton. He … he made a little joke about the … the pianist needing a steady supply which unfortunately would have to be interrupted by their long absences at sea.’

  Kohler gave his thoughts aloud. ‘Then the Charbonneau woman met the Captain in that shed.’

  ‘For love? For sex? Then why, please, did she not take the cigarettes?’

  ‘Maybe she forgot. Maybe she was in too much of a hurry. Maybe someone came along to interrupt the …’

  ‘The fucking, the fornication?’ Angrily she wiped her eyes and cheeks with her fingertips.

  ‘The husband was there among the standing stones …’

  ‘The husband?’ she blurted tearfully and buried her face in a hand.

  ‘The cigarettes,’ he said so gently it was like a caress.

  Kohler laid a hand on her head then crouched and tilted up her chin. ‘Hey, I think you can smile. I don’t think I need your answer to my other question. Be good. Get yourself tidied up and say nothing to anyone. I’ll see you later and we’ll pretend we never met here.’

  He left her then and for a time she could not move from the chair but blew her nose and wiped her eyes.

  Then she took out the little piece of paper she would press into the Dollmaker’s hand, and wrote, Kohler believes the pianist did it.

  In her haste to put it back, the note got tangled with her neckchain and the spare key to that prison cell. Guiltily she brought both things up to her lips, then tucked them away and tidied her blouse and jacket.

  The key had lain unattended on the edge of a desk in the front office of that wretched little gendarmerie and when Préfet Kerjean had returned for it, she had told him he must have left it elsewhere.

  6

  West from Lorient, the railway line passed among grimy warehouses which had miraculously been spared the bombing. Alone, St-Cyr worked the lever of the handcar. Now easily up, now a push down hard, the sound of its iron wheels on iron rails the only sound in all this wilderness of shock and stunned disbelief. It was as if the RAF had unleashed on Lorient a reign of terror that had only paused. The silence made him uneasy. The clickety-clack of the wheels drove the uneasiness home.

  He came to a bend but there was still no sign of open fields or houses. He worried about approaching trains, for he’d had no schedules to guide him and had simply found this thing on a siding and had pushed it on to the main line.

  ‘Ah merde …’ he said and let the lever drift up of its own accord at the sight of splashed white paint on walls where giant letters still ran: the V-for-Victory … the Croix de Lorraine, the symbol the Resistance had adopted … and then … then the shrill slogans of bitterness: LAVAL AU POTEAU! (Laval up against the wall!); LA GUILLOTINE POUR PÉTAIN!; VICTOIRE! LIBERTÉ!

  NOUS SOMMES DES TRAVAILLEURS INVOLON-TAIRES POUR L’ALLEMAGNE! (We are involuntary workers for Germany!) This slogan stretched on and on around a broad bend. The handcar speeded up. Suddenly he had to be away from the place. Suddenly he was terrified of a lonely meeting here with those who would still accuse him of gladly working for the Germans, those who did not want to understand that he had had no choice just like them … NOUS LES AURONS! (We’ll get them!) was splashed on both sides of the tracks.

  With a sigh of relief, he reached the last of the w
arehouses and was soon passing through farmland, which like almost everywhere else in Brittany was a patchwork of tiny fields. Low stone walls or hedgerows of stunted hawthorn and bracken separated them, the landscape bleak, its whitewashed cottages with their pink or blue-grey slate roofs stark and tiny on a treeless plain.

  He was glad Hermann hadn’t seen the slogans. When it came, as surely as it would some day, the war’s end would bring a vendetta equal to or surpassing the one the Germans had initiated in June 1940. Right against Left, Fascist against Communist, businessman against competitor, shopper against shopkeeper, neighbour against neighbour, husband against wife. The anonymous letters the Germans encouraged were still far too much in use, the public denunciations too, and the secret ones, those whispered into the ears of the SS and the Gestapo. ‘Hatred only breeds hatred,’ he muttered sadly. ‘They have turned us into a nation which betrays itself only too willingly.’

  The news from Stalingrad was a disaster for the Germans. One hundred thousand men – the whole of the Sixth Army – were surrounded and about to be annihilated. The news from North Africa, where massive Allied landings had raised such hopes, was little better for them. It was only a matter of time until the invasion came and slogans like those appeared everywhere.

  Now he was in open moorland too poor for farming. Finally he reached the spur that serviced the clay pits. With all the delays – things no one in a hurry who knew the way would experience – it had taken just under forty minutes to run that gauntlet and cover the six or so kilometres.

  He was rhythmically pushing the hand lever down and letting it effortlessly rise of its own momentum, when he noticed white leaflets blowing across the tracks. Like tiny flocks of Bonaparte gulls, they lifted and settled only to rush on again. Momentarily some were caught against a rail or among the tall grass and bracken but were soon plucked away.

  Dropped off target by the RAF during the bombing raid, they gave in German and then in French the rates required to insure the lives of U-boat crews. 5,000 marks per man – 100,000 francs; 260,000 marks for a crew of fifty-two. In francs, some 5,200,000 (£26,000), all at the official rate of exchange which one simply did not use because it was impossible to do so and no one would be fool enough.

  Per tour of duty … ‘“If they should last so long,”’ he read aloud. ‘“Similar notices are being delivered to all families and loved ones of the German U-boat personnel, Keroman Base Lorient. We have their names and home addresses in the Reich. No doubt these same loved ones will soon be writing to demand of these same young men why their Führer and their Admiral have placed their lives at such terrible risk.”’

  War took many forms and the leaflets were but another of them. More subtle, yes, than guns and bombs but, like the denunciations, effective in their own way.

  Scrap paper was, however, always useful for notes if blank on one side, as these were, if not, then suitable for the stove and a faint suggestion of warmth and light. Foraging, he gathered several, stuffing them into his overcoat pockets, sometimes in wads as thick as bundles of 1,000-franc notes. Yawning hugely, he blinked to clear his eyes of sleepiness, and said, ‘I mustn’t take any more of those damned pills,’ and wondered if he, too, wasn’t becoming addicted.

  When he reached the shed, he could hardly keep his eyes open – it was all this fresh air and exercise, the sun …

  There was a man’s bicycle leaning against the inside wall next to the door, black and much muddied and with a metal seat that was naked of all padding and polished smooth by wear.

  The bicycle was padlocked twice. Woven through both the front and rear spokes and the pedal-sprocket, a sturdy chain not only made theft difficult by its added weight, but ensured much inconvenience to the would-be thief.

  It had not been requisitioned by the Occupier because its tyres no longer had inner tubes but were ingeniously stuffed with strips of old leather. Short lengths of rusty baling wire bound the tyres to their rims. Much-used wicker baskets were mounted front and back, and there were two shabby saddlebags as well.

  ‘The pianist …’ he said, yawning hugely and so suddenly he was caught off guard and had to pause. His heart was racing. ‘Easy, mon ami. Go easy, eh?’ he said to himself and shunned the pills.

  Lifting the bicycle over to the far wall, he moved the hay aside and buried the thing. A few places needed tidying. He stood back and stretched as he looked it over – yawned again. On first sight, the shed would appear quite empty, the bicycle gone.

  Only after a moment or two of consternation and panic would Charbonneau realize what had happened. ‘And by then I will have him right where his wife lay on the straw with the Dollmaker.’

  Or had it been like that on the day of the murder?

  He didn’t think so. The woman had been warned by Préfet Kerjean that there might be trouble. Both of them knew the husband and the Captain would be at the clay pits. The Préfet and the shopkeeper had argued violently.

  Between the time the Captain was seen leaving the clay pits and the time of the murder there could not have been time for lovemaking.

  A doll’s head had been broken, a hand had been cut.

  Otto Baumann had delivered the Captain’s message to the Charbonneaus two days before the murder. Paulette le Trocquer knew far more than she was willing to let on. A packet of American cigarettes had been left on a timber over there. The tightly crumpled ball of a woman’s handkerchief had been pressed down into the hay. The smell of its perfume had been good and definitely not cheap and not that girl’s, not yet.

  Softly closing the door, St-Cyr put the latch on and started out.

  Why had the pianist returned to the scene of the murder? Was Charbonneau so desperate or such a fool he thought he could get away with it unnoticed?

  Or was he so obsessed with the findings of his labours, he could not leave them?

  Alone beneath the sun and drifting cloud, the grey and lichen-encrusted pillars of the megaliths stood well beyond the site of the murder and their alignment on high, overlooking everything. Tall, and weighing several tonnes – feats of engineering would have been required to raise them – they appeared omnipotent, inducing doubt and fear.

  Wind played among the bunched grasses at their feet. The iodine and salt-fish smell of the sea was everywhere and when he stood directly opposite them, he saw that none were out of line and that the tallest of the seven stones was nearest the tracks yet still some forty metres from them.

  Already their shadows were long. They did not fall upon each other. There wasn’t a sign of anyone, only the sounds of picks and shovels in the clay pits just to the north and west. Denied diesel fuel, gasoline and dynamite, the miners had had to reverse a good seventy-five years of history and return to digging by hand.

  Retracing his steps to the site of the murder, St-Cyr left the tracks for the irregularities of the moor and began to make a wide detour so as to come upon the standing stones yet cast no tell-tale shadow of his own.

  When he found him on the far side of the sixth megalith and digging at its foot, Yvon Charbonneau, whom he had only seen in a black bow tie and tails in concert, was on his hands and knees and buried up to his shoulders. The laceless, shabby leather boots were smeared with sand and whitish clay, the dark brown corduroy trousers were patched and filthy and worn through in the crotch where his underwear showed whitely.

  A grey and crumpled handkerchief trailed from a bulging pocket. Mounds of earth containing bits of charcoal and charred bone were heaped on either side of him. To the left, there was an earth-encrusted shabby brown briefcase. A short-handled pick rested near the briefcase along with a short-handled shovel and stonemason’s hammer – tools that could more easily be carried on the bicycle.

  Laid out in a fan-shaped array on a mud-caked towel were three beautifully carved and polished deep green axeheads, some pale creamy brown flints – scrapers probably, or knives – several potsherds and a few broken bracelets of dark blue glass.

  Charbonneau withdrew from the exc
avation. He did not yet sense company or that the Sûreté now knew beyond doubt that he had hidden the shopkeeper’s briefcase on the day of the murder and had returned to recover it but had found his obsession too great for prudence to overcome.

  The blade of flint he carefully cleaned off was half the length of a callused, grimy left palm whose ham had been crudely stitched and was still red and swollen. Delicately, as if caressing the notes of Rachmaninoff, Schubert or Brahms, he ran the fingers of his right hand over the long oval blade. Each conchoidal hollow and cusp left by the pressure flaking was felt and judged perfect, the point too.

  Then he turned to reverently set it among the other pieces only to see that he was not alone.

  ‘Monsieur …’ began the Sûreté.

  The flint was dropped, the hammer seized. Charbonneau lunged at him. They grappled. The hammer was raised … His wrist, damn it! shouted St-Cyr, grabbing it. Must stop him. Must force him to …

  He was carried back in a rush and slammed hard into the last stone. Air … he needed air … Can’t breathe, he cried. My chest …

  His head hit the stone again and again. A last sight gave the pianist, whose thick and tousled black hair was flecked with iron-grey and whose dark ripe olive eyes soon lost their wild hatred and grew slowly sad.

  Ah nom de Dieu, de Dieu, he is about to kill me, thought St-Cyr. There was a sharp crease between the eyes. Well down from them, a mottled grey-black, thatched roof of a moustache extended right into side whiskers that ran across the cheeks but did not climb to the ears …

  A last image was of Paulette de Trocquer flicking a smile coyly at him as she stepped fastidiously over the corpses of her own making.

  Collapsing, he hit his head against the stone again but did not feel a thing.

  The hammer was raised. They were all alone. The hammer came down.

  Kohler awoke with a start to find himself on the back seat of a car, looking up into the eyes of Elizabeth Krüger. The girl was leaning well over the front seat. Cautiously she released his lapel and watched as he wet his throat.