Dollmaker (16 page)

He would only pursue the matter elsewhere if not told.

‘I honestly don't know. I have my informants – all of us do. Some say five others. Three from Paris, two from Brest. Don't ask me how they got here.'

Six in all, for a total of 2,700,000 francs. It was a lot. ‘I won't, but if anyone should ask you about me, please tell them I am not a collaborator as some hotheads in Paris believe, but a patriot and staunch supporter in spite of what happened to my wife and little son.'

Le Troadec surveyed this man who had so easily made an offering of himself in return. Now he held the Chief Inspector in the palm of his hand if needed. Death from the Resistance if necessary for betraying a trust, or from the Occupier for withholding information.

‘Now take me to the morgue and let us go over the autopsy report since all the other evidence you have gathered will have been destroyed in the bombing.'

The plaster casts of the bicycle tracks, the bits of leather from a pair of gloves … ‘Look, the Préfet is seeing Madame Charbonneau. Of course I know of this but …'

‘But there is nothing to it. They're just friends.'

Kohler shuddered inwardly and walked as a Neolithic farmer might have done at midnight to some horrific ritual among the standing stones. The Keroman U-boat bunkers were huge but until that moment of stepping into the acrid haze and metallic din, he had not realized the full extent of the Nazi menace. Oh
mein Gott
, the place tore the guts out of one. More than forty ‘boats', some floating, others in dry dock and three to a bay, were being swarmed over by at least eight hundred grey-clad dockworkers and dark blue-clad German technicians. Arc welders flashed. Acetylene cutting torches sprayed sparks and droplets of molten metal while giving off dense clouds of pungent smoke. Riveting hammers went at it day and night. Rusty red-lead undercoating paint was being scraped and banged from hollow hulls, new sea-grey outer paint being applied elsewhere. Brush, brush, hurry, hurry. Torpedoes were being loaded. Anti-aircraft and cannon rounds were disappearing into another hull, hams, sides of bacon and big round loaves of black bread into yet another as if swallowed up by the ravenous tin fish of the thousand-year Reich before they went out to kill.

And in the far bay whose ceiling, like all the others, went up and up a good thirty metres of heavy, corrugated iron plates, a crew of fifty-two moth-eaten, stinking men had assembled on the deck of their boat in their ‘leathers', grey-wrinkled and stiffened, stained and rancid.

Unshaven and unsmiling, they waited. Their bug-eyes were the size of ping-pong balls. Their faces were bleached of all colour, so much so, many would refuse to go home with the first half of the crew simply because their families would see them this way and not understand what forty-five or sixty days inside the hull of one of these things could do.

They were all so very young. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty-two, maybe twenty-four at the most. Not for them, or for any others now these days, the pomp and ceremony of the heroes' welcome in the Rade de Lorient. Now the slinking inshore underwater as far as possible and then the tug, the RAF at any moment perhaps, and finally home. Right inside the womb.

Silently they waited, these heroes of the deep. One by one and from out of the gloom, the band of the local garrison assembled. Tubas, trombones, euphoniums, trumpets, flutes and clarinets and a big bass drum …

Still everyone waited, the band above on the concrete edge of the bay, the crew a couple of metres below them so that they looked up from the submarine with their bug-eyes, and the band in field-grey, and all the bulges of slack-assed troops and fat cats, looked down. The water around the boat reeked of dead fish, diesel oil and sewage.

At a signal, instruments were lifted, lips moistened. Freisen had arrived in his dress uniform, all spit and polish, to deliver the gongs. A Ritterkreuz for the captain, one for his first officer, North Atlantic Campaign badges and so forth.

The band began with ‘
Deutschland über Alles
' – everyone to attention,
ja, ja
and Heil Hitler. Then they hit the ‘
Horst Wessel Lied
' and finally, having warmed up, blew their guts out in the ‘
Western Wald
' as the crew and even Freisen shoutingly sang, ‘“
Eins, zwei, drei, vier, Erika
.”' Boom, boom. ‘“
Erika!
”' and grinned and laughed or smiled.

It was deafening but it didn't even stir a glimmer of interest among an all-female crew in filthy dungarees who simply slammed home their rivets vindictively into a nearby sub and looked as if they would gladly throw handfuls of Carborundum into the gearboxes.

Freisen saluted the boat's captain and shook hands before pinning to the salt-stiffened sheepskin jacket, the coveted Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves.

Then the Senior Officer U-boats Kernével went down the line. Every man got something, if only a handshake of congratulations and welcome.

‘He's not the Lion, is he?' spat a guttural voice into his ear. ‘The men don't really warm to him as they did to Doenitz. Herr Freisen is like a cold woman not quite knowing what to do with a hot, stiff pecker before it loses interest. They say he should be forced to go back to sea and maybe he will if you and that French dog of yours fuck about with our Dollmaker.'

Oh-oh … ‘And who might you be?' Kohler didn't look up or down but straight into the laughing dark eyes that held the lark's trace of insanity.

‘Schultz, Herr Kohler. Without me and my little stove, the Freikorps's most decorated crew would not be able to shit so well in the only head we use aboard because the other one is my special larder.'

Fifty-two men were being fed by this … this giant with mitts like hams. The galley couldn't be any more than a metre wide and deep. No one would complain about the food. No one.

Like Baumann, the eyes were deeply sunk beneath thick, dark bushy brows but here all similarity ended. The head was a blunt battering ram that had often been used ashore in the bars and brothels. The hair was thick and meticulously trimmed to two centimetres on top – shaved closely on the sides. In front, it receded well back towards the temples but came forward in a broad triangle to point directly down and over the massive brow to a fleshy, broad, well-picked nose and a thick, wide soup-strainer of a Kaiser's moustache.

A fastidious man, one of many tastes, ah yes. A man straight out of fifty or one hundred years ago and some West African safari for diamonds and naked slaves of the female kind, the younger the better.

Kohler understood him only too well. Men like Schultz had made good corporals in the artillery but one had had to watch them all the time, lest they lose a couple of fingers while slamming a shell home to earn an honourable discharge and extra pension.

‘Got any pipe tobacco and cigarettes?' he asked blithely.

‘Maybe,' said the cook cautiously.

The Bavarian grinned. ‘Fifty-fifty. I feed you all the inside dope on the investigation, you lay off the bets and we make ourselves a bundle. Right?'

The lark's glimmer never died but it didn't brighten either. ‘A bundle …? I thought you wanted tobacco?'

‘That's extra. That's to help my partner think. Without it, he's useless.'

‘Don't you “think”?' asked Death's-head.

‘Not often. I'm too busy hustling supplies for us. We need some rubbers too. Maybe a hundred, and none of your “used” crap.'

A cool one. Even here in the Freikorps Doenitz they washed their condoms sometimes, was that it? ‘Okay, let's see what we can do. Insider information in exchange for thirty per cent and a little tobacco. We'll throw in the rubbers free of charge.'

‘Forty per cent.'

‘Hey, let's think about it. Our First Officer is supervising the loading of the eels today. Tomorrow it's the ammo and on Wednesday, it's my turn to stuff her. Everyone helps. Then on Thursday we put to sea, Dollmaker or no Dollmaker, Freisen or no Freisen, it's up to you and your “partner”.'

‘And you don't want to sail with Freisen?'

‘On a Thursday? That's too close to Friday, and it's bad luck to go then, since we might be delayed and no one, I mean no one, goes out on a Friday unless forced to. Besides, bullets get flattened, dollmakers come home and if we have to go, we'd sooner Kaestner took us.'

Doenitz must have laid it on the line to Freisen. ‘Where are you from?'

‘And here I thought you were a big-shot detective from Munich and Berlin?'

‘Mainz or Koblenz and nowhere near Essen and the sea. That accent's like cold cod liver oil and broken glass.'

The grin widened appreciatively. A tooth was sucked. ‘Rüdesheim, and yourself?'

‘I think you already know.'

They understood each other and that was good, yes good. They'd make a deal. ‘Come and lay a hand on one of our eels for good luck, Herr Kohler, then follow me to the Quartermaster's stores, our Ali Baba's Cave.'

Did everyone in the Freikorps have a nickname? It seemed so. The laying on of hands was simply a crude little test of guts from a man who was far too swift for such things. A puzzle unless someone less intelligent had ordered him to do it. An officer perhaps.

U-297 was a Type IXB Atlantikboot. Wider and larger than the Type VIIs, she was a little slower on the crash dive and cruising speeds but a lot steadier in bad weather and with substantially longer range. Hence the tours of duty on the east coast of America.

There was no number on her conning tower – none of the boats carried those for security reasons – only the insignia flag of a blue-eyed doll with blonde braids and a pretty green skirt with white apron and crossover ties above a red, long-sleeved blouse. White shoes and white stockings and nothing suggestive about her. Just a child's love, the smiling face of innocence, a fringe that came all but to her eyebrows and a ribbon of lace across the top of her head to keep the hair tidy in the wind. Pink cheeks too, and red lips.

‘She even has pantaloons,' quipped Kohler, grinning.

The cook lost the lark's glimmer so fast, the eyes became dead in rebuke. ‘No one jokes about her, Herr Kohler. No one.'

‘Sorry. Does she have a name?'

Was Kohler really such a
Dummkopf?
‘She has as many names as there are men aboard her. None speak those names. That, too, is considered back luck. The flag is cherished, yes? and taken down each time we put to sea.'

The heavily greased eels had to be handled like babies at birth, but they were going into the doll, not coming out. The guidance systems were tricky and could easily be knocked off kilter. The crews seemed to know what they were doing.

‘1,600 kilos a piece, Herr Kohler. 500 of torpex – do you know what that is, Herr
Detektiv?
'

‘High explosive. TNT and Cyclonite with, I think, aluminium flakes. If I could I'd like to see the detonators.'

‘Spoken like a former demolitions man, but you can't. Top secret, yes? There's no wake with the G7s. They've electric motors, not compressed air so they can't give us away and the Captain refuses to load any other. What he says goes. Even the High Command in Berlin are tolerant of our Dollmaker. Four tubes forward, two in the stern and fifteen of these babies. It's impressive, is it not?'

Schultz pushed the visitor's hand down into the grease and held it there. Again Kohler took in the lark's glimmer of madness. The cook was either looking for praise or sadistically impressed with what they could do. Their power, their stealth … the rape of the seas. ‘What happens to them when a depth charge hits you?' he asked, just to put the bastard off. One had to do things like that sometimes.

The glimmer vanished. ‘They don't usually explode, if that is what you are wondering. Sometimes they simply fall out of their cradles and crush a few torpedo hands.'

Borne on railway trucks of their own, the eels were hoisted up and tilted front end down so as to slide in the torpedo hatches. Each torpedo bore a label from the Trials Command along the shores of the Baltic, giving its idiosyncrasies of deviation on test firing.

‘The Dollmaker likes to get in close, Herr Kohler. No more than 500 metres for that one. The Bullet shoots from the maximum range of 5,000 metres and that, my friend from the Gestapo, is why the Lion prefers our Dollmaker.'

‘Let's find Ali Baba's Cave and work us out a deal. There are at least three others who might have killed that shopkeeper. Your boy wasn't the only one.'

‘Then wipe your hands and smile sweetly at the Herr Oberleutnant, the Baron von Stadler, our First Officer. He's the one who likes to see that uninvited detectives get dirty.'

‘What's his nickname?'

‘Shit to some, when behind his back, Jesus at all other times because of his beard and piercing blue eyes, and because of his godly manner, especially after eight weeks at sea.'

‘He doesn't like your cooking?'

Was it so puzzling? ‘No, he doesn't. Now stop trying to have the last word. That always belongs to the cook. Even you should know a thing like that!'

Death's-head's laughter turned several female eyes and brought their smiles and catcalls, a popular man.

A dealer in the black market, swore Kohler inwardly. The son of a bitch has been selling stores on the side and getting all the ass he wants.

*

The city's morgue was overcrowded. Draped with bloodied, bomb-ravaged white sheeting, old bits of sail canvas, plum-purple curtains, a woman's red dress – whatever had come to hand – casualties from the raid all but covered the cold concrete floor.

Alone, at the back beside the ice storage vaults, the body of le Trocquer lay on its upraised pallet beneath a clean white sheet that had been drawn away to expose his battered head.

He was naked, of course, and the crude stitching of the coroner's incision would not be pleasant.