Russians in rags with mismatched boots-a laceless black dress shoe and no sock on one-yanked, pulled and threw the frozen logs down from atop mountain-high lorry loads whose heavy chains had been released, and mein Gott the danger to those boys, nimble as they were and all but bones.
Once the bark had been removed, the logs were then grabbed by other Russians and thrown or shoved-packed a dozen or so at a time-into the iron magazine boxes of the grinders where hydraulic rams held them lengthwise against grindstones that were half-sunk in the concrete floor and constantly spun in large vats of water. Jets of it too, the grindstones rotating at from eighteen to twenty-four metres a second.
In five minutes … ten … he didn’t really know how long, ninety years of patient forest growth were reduced to a soggy mass of yellowish-brown wood pulp. Giant augers carried this draining mush upward to screens and towering tanks but then, farther down the cavernous length of the shed, in the cooking department, the redrained, resqueezed pulp was being conveyed to digesting tanks where it was boiled, stewed in a sulphate liquor of caustic soda and sodium sulphide, steeped, screened, washed, bleached and washed again and again to produce pure white cellulose fibre, the feedstock of the Textilfabrikschrijen.
A brief glance upward was all it took to add to the lack of safe working conditions. High in the corrugated iron roof above him, long daggers of ice had formed from the constant clouds of steam and hung there waiting to fall. The air, too, was either freezing or jungle-hot, the stench gut-wrenching, a pungent, eye-nose-and-throat irritation to which the cloying scent of spruce gum intruded. No man was idle. All sixty or eighty of them were busy, for Jakob Dorsche was right beside him and the Lagerfeldwebel far from happy.
Intuitively the men had sensed this.
‘Herr Kohler, you will now do everything through me.’
‘WHAT’S THAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU!’
‘Don’t listen and find out the cost. You have fifteen minutes.’
Mein Gott, it would take that long just to walk to the far end of the shed and how the hell was he to find anyone in this? ‘Look, I’m sorry Frau Macher misunderstood my being in that office. I only wanted to use the telephone. Rudel …’
‘Sorry? How is it, please, that you even knew the Fraulein Bodicker’s bookshop would have such an instrument?’
He had a point. In Paris, and especially in the rest of France, and here too, telephones were simply not that common. ‘Okay, I didn’t. Look, there are things-’
‘You need to know. For a Detektiv that is, of course, understandable, but-’
‘So where is the assistant machinist?’
One of the five who had worked at the Karneval. ‘Find him, mein Lieber, since you are so good at finding things.’
Dorsche had been acidly chewed out by Karl Rudel who had been summoned to find a certain detective in an office where he had no right to be, but Rudel had not only done it in front of a woman and the chairman’s secretary at that, he had done it in front of Lowe Schrijen. ‘Couldn’t you give me a hint?’
Had Herr Kohler finally seen the light and enough of the dangers of this place to unwanted visitors such as himself? A careless step, a missing leg or arm … ‘Look beneath your feet. Look as if you had lost your last pfennig.’
Moody, a real son of a bitch when he wanted to be, Dorsche buggered off, leaving this Kripo to realize he had wounded the pride of the very man he should never have wounded.
Waist deep in a soup of fresh pulp, his hairy arms bathed by it, Martin Caroff, the assistant machinist, didn’t acknowledge the summons. A wrist-thick, arm-long spanner had at last found its fist-sized nut just above mush level. A two-metre length of steel pipe, a lever, was fitted over the handle of the spanner. ‘Now heave, you two!’ he yelled in passable Deutsch to the Russians on the lever and, still not turning to look up, ‘Loosen the old whore so that we can unscrew her.’
The heavy iron housing had been thrown back, the metre-and-a-half-long grindstone exposed. Kohler wet a forefinger in the pulp and tapped him on the forehead as the nut came loose. ‘A moment, my fine one,’ he said in French since that would be better.
The eyes were dark, the hair black, the stubbled, narrow face with its lines of worry and fatigue smeared with draining pulp. ‘Who are you?’
‘Kohler, Kripo, Paris-Central.’
‘Paris …’
And forty or forty-two, thought Kohler. A Breton by the accent and a long way from home. Thin, bony, hairy-chested and angry … was he angry?
Grease- and nicotine-stained fingers fled over a break in the red sandstone of the grinding wheel. ‘Thermal cracking,’ spat Caroff to take the detective’s mind off himself. ‘The stone heats up with the friction. Normally these tiny, parallel grooves and ridges on the surface-the burrs, we call them-are sharpened every fifty to one hundred and fifty hours, but here they like to stretch things. Two hundred, two-fifty? Merde alors, I ask you, why shouldn’t the stone burst? I’ve told that plant foreman of ours a thousand times, the Russians too. I also keep telling the foreman these old machines need to be replaced, but he keeps telling me the Fuhrer knows everything and won’t listen anyway. This is a new stone but there are also flaws in it. Thin partings of shale in the sandstone. Here …’ A crack-nailed, tapping forefinger traced out a millimetre-thin layer. ‘The bastards who quarry these stones patently ignore the flaws so that we’ll get blamed, but you’re lucky to have missed the bang. When a stone such as this bursts, the Russians usually shit themselves not because of cowardice, you understand. Because of the watery soup and black bread we have to eat. They’d play hell with anyone’s guts. Mine especially, let me tell you. Dysentery … You should see the latrines, the-’
‘Here, have one of these. Maybe it’ll help.’
A small cigar, a fortune … ‘For this, the hands must be dried. You two,’ he called out to the Russians. ‘Take five.’
‘Make it ten and lead me to a place our Jakob will have trouble finding.’
The dark black eyebrows were questioningly raised, the look swift. ‘The boilers, then. It’s warmer there but watch the pipes. We had to undress them. It was best.’
Hawking up a lump of phlegm, he spat it out, causing immediate worries of tuberculosis.
‘A cold,’ he grunted. ‘We have them constantly. Each is a little different from all the others so as to preserve some sense of individuality. Mine is deep down and I can give you the precise anatomy and symptoms if you wish.’
Leading the way, he found a narrow gap between two giant, wood-fired boilers whose shirtless stokers were bathed in sweat. The corridor narrowed. The pipes, totally bare of their asbestos wrappings, threatened. ‘You can get the burn of your life if you’re not careful,’ he shouted. ‘The Lagerfeldwebel once did and now is far too respectful to venture in here. We warned him and he obeys. After all, why should he risk it?’
Gauges and valves clung to the girders above Caroff. The hands were quickly dried on a filthy wiper rag, the cigar eagerly taken. ‘Please, the light, Inspector.’
‘Don’t inhale.’
‘Ah, merde, I would have. Still, to taste such a thing will be reward enough for a few answers-it is answers you wish, is it not?’
It was. ‘Then you must take the cigar with you when you leave. I can’t be singled out. The others would only accuse me of accepting something I shouldn’t have and of yielding things they might not wish you to hear.’
A wise man, the assistant machinist drew on the cigar and sat on a wooden box, the remains of the French Army fatigues leaking all over the place as he leaned back against a girder whose rivets were rusty.