Dollmaker

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘And the money you left with him?’

  ‘He said he needed time and I gave it to him. I had every reason to believe and still do, as did he himself, that his daughter Paulette had either stolen it or had had a hand in its stealing but that the money would soon be recovered in total.’

  An optimist to say the least! ‘And you know of no reason why the pianist might have wanted to kill him?’

  ‘Only that Yvon feels very threatened when one of his discoveries appears to be intruded upon by others before he has finished excavating the thing.’

  But not by you yourself, eh? thought Kohler. Is that how it was? ‘And the Préfet?’ he asked, closing the notebook.

  There was a brief smile of admission. ‘No reason whatsoever. My God, a Chief of Police? Don’t be an idiot.’

  You bastard, thought Kohler, sizing him up. You’ve already accused Kerjean once. You get me to think it was the pianist, then you throw the blame right back on to the Préfet by telling me you had no reason to accuse him even though Kerjean obviously thought you had.

  ‘This session is concluded. I’ll want a copy of your telex to the Admiral, Fräulein Krüger. See that it is delivered to my hotel along with the first one and make goddamned sure both are in a sealed envelope. I don’t want Madame Quévillon having a read. I don’t want her steaming the envelope open either.’

  *

  The fish stew – or was it the soup? – was cold and not very good. The dining-room at the Hotel Mégalithe was lighted only by one parsimonious candle stub. Every sound was magnified – the creaking of the damned floorboards, the sighing of timbers, a clogged drain that sucked hollowly at its fuzzy plug and gulped to the building of a sou’wester. Christ! were they now to have four days of solid rain?

  Kohler shoved the soup plate forward until it lay like a sick moon just before the fanned-out, biliously chartreuse ration tickets the Préfet had left for them. Louis hadn’t shown up here. He hadn’t been with Kerjean either. Ah damn, where the hell was he? In trouble … was that it?

  Reaching down to the floor, he caught up the Lebel Model 1873 six-shooter the Sûreté carried when needed. Guns were this Gestapo’s responsibility when not in use, a stupid rule of Boemelburg’s that ought to have been done away with long ago.

  Breaking the gun open, he squinted down the barrel at the candle flame. Clean as a whistle and ready to go as always. A careful man. Louis could knock the head off a pigeon at thirty paces but was a lover of nature, a tree-planter on occasion even when investigating a murder! He seldom used a gun, preferring his precious bracelets and leaving the guillotine to do its work. ‘The basket always catches them,’ he’d say.

  He had come here with Marianne on his second honeymoon. She had been a very pretty thing. Blonde, blue-eyed and quite innocent at first, no doubt. But in the buff, she had had an absolutely gorgeous figure, not only awakening to the joys of sex but eager for them, so eager. The poor Frog. The Hauptmann Steiner had made damned good use of her for far too long and Gestapo Paris’s The Watchers had photographed the couple at play on several occasions, none of which had been cluttered up by bedcovers or clothing. Half the boys at the rue des Saussaies had seen the films. They were still holding regular showings when they thought it funny and Louis, who had yet to see the films and never would, wasn’t around.

  But now the cuckold was missing and the pretty wife was dead. And oh for sure, someone else had come along and Gabrielle Arcuri, the chanteuse, was superb both in voice and looks, et cetera, et cetera, but that romance had yet to be consummated. Kohler was certain of this. ‘He’s too shy. He’s still feeling the loss, still loyal to the wife in spite of everything and unwilling to commit himself a third time.’

  Idly he wondered what Louis’s first wife had been like. She had run off with a truck driver, or had it been a door-to-door salesman? He never said much about her, out of deference to the second wife. Truth was, the Sûreté was seldom home. Truth was that even when awakening to a naked woman in his bed, a gift from his partner and friend, he had remained steadfastly faithful. Politely muttering excuses, he had always been kind to these nocturnal visitors and afterwards would say, ‘Hermann, you must always remember that girl was someone’s daughter. I would not wish to offend the mother, not to mention the father, of course, or the husband or the lover.’

  Closing the revolver’s cylinder, he slid his right arm through the straps and buckled up. Then he checked the Walther P38 on the other side of his chest, popping the clip, banging it back in and shucking cartridges rapidly before reloading and making certain there was one up the spout.

  Satisfied, he put the safety on and slid the pistol away.

  ‘Madame Quevillon,’ he sang out – at least it sounded as if he did. His voice crashed from the walls and fled among the fully dressed tables that waited in the all but darkness as schoolgirls wait to dance a first dance when no one asks them and the boys haven’t come.

  ‘Monsieur?’

  Still mesmerized by the artillery probably, that formidable giant in black sackcloth and boots stood watch from just inside a far doorway. Arms were folded defiantly across her chest. The headgear towered above her.

  ‘Madame, the cotriade is among the finest I’ve tasted but until I find my partner, I’m …’ He shrugged and threw her a lame look. ‘I’m afraid I simply have no stomach for it.’

  ‘Perhaps he is already with the others.’

  With the dead? ‘At the party?’ he bleated.

  ‘Or at the shop of Madame le Trocquer. The shop will, of course, be closed and that girl, that Paulette will be at the …’

  ‘The party?’

  ‘You might call it that, Inspector. For myself, I would call it the work of the Devil. Such drunkenness and goings on are shameful. Debauchery, licentiousness …’ She crossed herself. ‘… and now murder. It is only to be expected. That girl …’ The lips compressed themselves tightly. ‘Paulette le Trocquer is trouble. Some are saying she knows where the Captain’s money is hidden, others that she helped the thief to steal it and now waits for him to return. Hah, there’s fat chance of that! You’ll see. She’ll go to the party now that her father’s dead and never mind the required days of mourning. Those she will spend on her back, the silly thing. Please stop her. Her mother needs her.’

  Ah merde, the giant had reduced herself to tears in front of the enemy, something she would never have done otherwise. ‘Hey, it’s going to be all right, madame. The U-boat crews may be rough – hell, they don’t have easy lives or long ones, but they’re not criminals. They wouldn’t harm a pretty girl.’

  ‘Even if she had stolen their money or knew who had taken it and where it was?’

  Verdammt, she had sucked him right in with those tears! ‘If you’ve got any thoughts on the matter, you’d best let me have them,’ he said warily.

  She would tell him now. It would be for the best, a free conscience and a pure heart. ‘The Cöte Sauvage, Inspector, and the caves no one sees from atop the cliffs. I am worried someone will take that girl to a place no one else knows of. Then they will force her to tell them what they want to know and then they will kill her.’

  The rain came suddenly to the standing stones. The darkness was everywhere as the wind shrieked across the moor. Dazed and aching badly, St-Cyr clawed himself to his feet to lean against the stone and try to still the agony in the back of his head.

  ‘This way,’ he gasped and lurched from the stone to stumble and fall into the grass and lie there letting the rain wash over him. ‘Hermann … Hermann, where are you?’

  A memory came of their first meeting, 13 September 1940, each warily regarding the other with open hostility and doubt. Then Hermann had grinned and extended that big hand of his. ‘Ah what the hell, eh, Monsieur Jean-Louis? Let’s work together and show them all it’s possible. I like your car.’

  Hermann had been living at the Hotel Boccador then with others of the Gestapo. Girls in, girls out, the traffic jams in the rooms and corridors had been heavy.r />
  When the gale struck him, he was pushed along to teeter madly, to slip and let out a piercing cry. Then the clay pits took him. Down and down he went, banging into the rocks, shooting over muddy, rain-washed slopes until, with a sound he did not hear, he was swallowed up. Clay to the left, clay to the right. It sucked at his arms and pinned his legs. It threatened to drown him.

  For a while he tasted the chalky milk of it that poured down the cliff face behind him as he squeezed its unctuous-ness between clenched and useless fists.

  Only by easing a foot around did he find rock solid enough to stand on and by sheer force of will pry himself upright. ‘H … ermann!’ he cried out into the beating rain. ‘H … ermann!’ It was no use. ‘Where am I?’ he asked. ‘My head …’

  The clay was so greasy. It took all his strength to pull himself out of the hollow. He began to climb rocks that crumbled at the least touch or simply rushed away in torrents of gravelly mud that struck him in the face. ‘I must,’ he said.

  Hermann had immediately taken possession of his car, that big black beautiful Citroën four-door sedan all the boys on the rue Laurence-Savart in Belleville had admired so much. Now he drove it nearly always and his little Sûreté Frog sat as a passenger – a passenger in his own vehicle!

  Half-way up the cliff, he had to stop. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘I haven’t the strength. Hermann, damn you, help me!’

  A pair of green-glass candlesticks appeared before him in colour, the shattered face of a doll.

  The Parian head of Angélique Charbonneau loomed suddenly and he saw it with a clarity that shocked because the head was so perfect, so exquisitely sculpted. ‘But there are no arms or legs?’ he said, now greatly troubled. ‘There is no torso?’

  The child knew more than anyone. The child held secrets of her own.

  Her hand stretched out to him. Desperately its fingers tried to grasp his own as he strained to reach them and only then wondered how this could possibly be.

  ‘Inspector, it’s Hélène Charbonneau. Have you seen my husband?’

  ‘My father.’

  ‘Not since he tried to kill me.’

  ‘You’d be dead then,’ swore the child. ‘He’d have smashed your head open like a buttered egg but he didn’t, did he?’

  ‘No … ah, no, I guess he didn’t.’

  ‘But he could have if he had wanted to.’

  ‘Just help me up. We can discuss it later.’

  7

  Sparks danced up from the driftwood logs in the fireplace, and when she turned to stand beside where the Chief Inspector St-Cyr lay asleep on the old brown leather sofa in her father’s study, Angélique Charbonneau’s shadow fell over him. And she wondered at the casting of shadows among all the things her father had collected, and she raised both arms and stretched up on tiptoes in her nightdress like a spectre.

  The Chief Inspector snored sometimes, but not too loudly. She nudged his shoulder more sharply this time, more bravely.

  ‘Asleep and dead to the world,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t need to worry about him any more tonight.’

  Passing by the cluttered billiard table, she saw that shadows from the fire flickered hauntingly over the skulls and bones. ‘Father’s out there somewhere,’ she whispered sadly to a skull whose clenched teeth and hollow eyes grinned and stared back at her. Light … it was so amazingly light without its flesh. ‘Musty too,’ she said, sniffing delicately at it. ‘And porous but not like the feel of broken bisque. Much coarser.’

  Raising the skull high above her as a druid would, she turned so that its shadow was thrown with her own across all the bones and things and finally on to the wall.

  ‘My father is hiding the briefcase he found on the railway tracks,’ she whispered to the skull. ‘Having buried it once, he has taken it to a place where no one will ever find it.’

  Late in the day, Préfet Kerjean had come to the house looking for the Chief Inspector, wanting to talk to him in private, to explain perhaps and to plead for help, who’s to say? Together, he and the stepmother and herself had driven to the aerodrome near the clay pits and had left the car on a lonely road. With the Préfet in the lead, they had walked across the moor and along the railway tracks past a shed the murderess had refused to look at, past the place of the killing which had made the murderess cringe.

  ‘By accident or by some trick of the standing stones, we heard the Chief Inspector crying out to his partner and friend. Brought back to the house and given brandy and soup, he has had the huge bath in the kitchen and afterwards, though very sleepy, has washed his clothes in that same bathwater and hung them up above the stove to dry. His shoes also, and his overcoat, but not his fedora, alas, for this has been irretrievably lost.’

  ‘Offered a bedroom, he has refused and has chosen instead, this study.’

  She killed the skull’s fleshless cheek and set it soundlessly among its fellows. ‘The Chief Inspector is waiting for my father to return. He is going to confront him with assaulting a police officer and with attempted murder. She is beside herself with worry and despair and cannot forgive herself but can only wring her hands and pace the floor or lie weeping the cold tears of remorse in her cold bed.’

  Préfet Kerjean had not stayed to talk to the Chief Inspector after all. Indeed, he had left in such a hurry. But had he gone, as he had said he would, in search of her father? The alignments at Kerzerho crossed the main road not five kilometres from the house. The Dolmen of Crucuno, said to be the finest in the Morbihan, was nearer Plouharnel and the Quiberon Peninsula. The alignments at Saint-Barbé were even a little closer than this.

  At each of these prehistoric sites the briefcase could be hidden.

  But had Préfet Kerjean really gone in search of her father, or had he gone to Quiberon itself and the shop of Monsieur le Trocquer, the shop of the daughter and her mother?

  Yes, he had been very worried and not without good reason, for he had been seen through the telescope of truth, seen talking on the beach last summer to Madame Charbonneau, and many times since then. Talking very seriously about things only they thought they knew.

  The sardiniers and a son who, with his comrades, would at last escape to England if not first discovered and killed. Their families too.

  When she had reached the top of the stairs and, without the aid of a light, had crossed the attic, Angélique touched the cold brass tube of the telescope and remembered another warm day last summer in early August, not a stormy night like this. The Captain had returned.

  She had been half hidden by the marram grass and pine needles, and by the edge of the bluff and some rocks so that only her chest and middle had shown while the Kapitän zur See Kaestner had stood facing her.

  He had laughed. He had said something and had smiled. He had reached out to her and … and had touched her pure white blouse, had plucked at a button.

  She hadn’t moved. She hadn’t even objected and when her breasts had spilled into the sunlight, she had let him kiss them.

  ‘You shouldn’t have let him do that to you,’ whispered Angélique spitefully. ‘You should have stopped him long before this. Did you really think my father wouldn’t discover your treachery? I didn’t need to tell him, madame. He saw it in your eyes, in the way you could not look at him. He saw it, too, from up here – oh yes he did on other occasions. There were many of these liaisons sexuelles weren’t there?

  ‘I found him watching you. I heard him crying but even then I did not go to him. Poor father, poor rejected pianist, poor symphony.’

  Raindrops were being killed against the spyglass window. Now a sudden gust, a blast of gunfire from the rain-Messerschmitts, now a pause while the raindrop-blood ran down the glass and cannon-breakers pounded the beach where she and the Captain had lain together.

  Only their bare feet had been seen and watched from up here that time. Her feet had been spread widely. The heels had dug deeply into the soft, clean sand, digging deeper and deeper and deeper, the toes stiff and upright, his toes dug
into the sand … the sand …

  ‘I mustn’t tell the Chief Inspector what I did on the day before the murder. I mustn’t!’ she blurted.

  When St-Cyr found the child in the attic, Angélique was quietly playing with her dolls. Dolls that Kaestner had made but others as well. Lots of them.

  The Bar of the Mermaid’s Three Sisters was packed. The telegraphist’s silk-stockinged knees were really very nice, and when she sat primly subdued and worried on her bar stool facing him, Kohler was tempted.

  ‘Another beer?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘I’ll drown if I do.’ Longingly she looked across the crowded dance floor towards the stage and the Dollmaker’s wind-up Victrola with its lovely stack of records. Everyone took a turn; everyone got a chance.

  Teutonic, bare-breasted, blue-eyed and blonde-haired mermaids in a turquoise sea of their own formed a backdrop to this icon of heroism and daring. Neptune blew on a conch among the jade-green, trailing weeds while wrapping an arm about a slender waist. Was he calling others to supper? Giant clams, still in their closed shells, were being held aloft to the gods of gluttony by the mermaids. Fish tails and dolphins swam about or wiggled from the prongs of Herr Neptune’s fork. His muscles bulged.

  No art critic, Kohler grinned and tried to make conversation. ‘Whoever painted that backdrop did a damned good job.’

  ‘He’s dead. The Fähnrich zur See Johannsen was a volunteer from Oslo, Herr Kohler. A draughtsman in his father’s firm. Midshipman Paintbrush went down with U-356 on the 30th December, just two days before the murder of that lousy shopkeeper who has caused us all so much trouble. Fourteen of the enemy’s convoy were sunk using a Rudeltaktik of eleven boats, fanned out in an arc to the south-west of Iceland and well beyond the range of the enemy’s air patrols but not, apparently, of their destroyers. He was a nice boy, full of fun and we shall sadly miss him. His photograph has not yet been hung on the wall but as you can see, space is so hard to find, we are now covering the opposite wall.’