The dust was everywhere in the shed and like pastry flour, felt Kohler. The tattered blue coveralls of Raymond Maillotte, the test weaver and fabric designer, were caked with it, his face, ears and neck stark white under a dust-covered cap, the goggles clouded, the filthy rag over the mouth and nose useless.
As thick stacks of the metre-square sheets of pure white cellulose were fed by him into the machine, they were grabbed by the rotating blades, sucked in and ripped from his hands. No gloves, for they’d already been lost. Not much purchase for the sabots either, for he was standing perched up there on a narrow, steel-meshed gantry at about four metres from the concrete floor. Bins and chutes caught the mountains of dust. A conveyor hurried metre-high stacks of the sheets up to him, giving no time to do anything but hustle them bunch by bunch into the blades. No time to pause like the dust which had to age before it was treated with carbon disulphide to turn, as if by magic, to a brilliant orange in the ‘crumb’ factory at the far end of the shed.
Pungent with the stench of rotten eggs, the eyes weeping, the throat tight, the Xanthate Shed converted the purified soda cellulose to sodium cellulose xanthate which was, in yet another shed, dissolved in dilute caustic soda.
Sprayed through spinnerets that were drowned in sulphuric acid, the xanthate became ‘viscose’ rayon-artificial silk.
The weaver was but one of many. Stopping his conveyor belt, Dorsche motioned for him to come down. Blinking, choking-trying to brush himself off and still terrified of being sucked into the shredder, Raymond Maillotte looked like death in white on a ramrod.
He coughed. He tried to clear his eyes, sneezed maybe thirty times and broke a blood vessel. ‘Excusez,’ he blurted and, finding another rag, clamped it over his nose and threw his head back.
‘Sit, mon ami,’ said Kohler. ‘Tilt your head forward a little and breathe through your mouth while you pinch your nose tightly. Take five. Don’t blow.’
Holding him by the back of the neck, he looked questioningly at Dorsche, for the bastard had deliberately chosen this man for this job. The weakest link in the combine, eh?
Maillotte’s neck was scrawny, the crinkly black hair matted with sweat, though this end of the shed was freezing.
He began to shake. Like Savard, he had to piss but had, unfortunately, no rubber boots. Tufts of straw stuck out of the sabots-straw to prevent his feet from slipping and to keep them warm, but sabots the Russians would have carved.
Gently Kohler patted Prisoner 220374 on the shoulder. ‘Rest for as long as you need,’ he said sadly. ‘No one’s going to hurt you while I’m here. I promise.’
‘Eugene … Eugene had been sentenced in absentia, Inspector.’
Finding two of Chairman Schrijen’s cigarettes, Herr Kohler lit them, placing one between Prisoner 220374’s quivering lips. It fell, of course, noted Dorsche, and the Detektiv tried to rescue it from the piss-soaked dust only to fling it away and donate the one he’d lit for himself. ‘Sentenced?’ he asked in Deutsch.
The head was nodded. Tears and blood streaked the pancake makeup of dust. The harried dark brown eyes were gaunt. A bronchial cough was given.
‘To death?’ hazarded this Detektiv, still not wanting to believe that prisoners could well attempt to hide such things from their Lagerfeldwebel.
‘Ja, but … but we could not agree on how to carry out the sentence,’ managed Maillotte, ‘nor could we decide who should do it.’
And so much, then, for Victim Number Two not having had any enemies.
Almost imperceptibly Eugene Thomas trembled, and when one laid a hand on him, the vibrations were transmitted.
‘It’s the Works,’ said St-Cyr. ‘It’s all that heavy machinery.’ Pipe smoke drifted from him and he waved it away. ‘I need to put myself in your shoes. Sophie Schrijen would have seen you nearly every day. Among her many duties she would have liaised with you on fabric quality, production problems, dye batches, the length of each run, the types of cloth planned, all such things. Is it not safe to say, then, that over the past two and a half years you became the dear friend she has claimed?’
There are friends and there are friends, Inspector.
‘And certainly you, or any other POW, would have encouraged such a friendship, but did it grow to much more than that, and if so, then when she learned that Renee Ekkehard had been found hanged, did she not come to you at some point? Understand, please, that she desperately needs help and will sacrifice the bookseller if necessary. Of this I’m certain.’
A bookseller, a secretary and a chairman’s daughter, Inspector-three, who though they took terrible risks to help us in such tiny ways, were definitely not equals.
‘Two soft, rose-coloured buttons from a summer’s frock, monsieur? I’ve been a fool, haven’t I? These were lost last summer on the twentieth, of August but why, then, did I find them in your pockets?’
Renee had a blanket pass to the Works and could come and go after hours without the colonel.
‘And Renee and Sophie had much to discuss. Lowe Schrijen would often work late …’
But could have been asked for much needed materials.
A carnival …
‘Colonel Rasche would have gone through your pockets but given that failed seduction of his, would not have left those buttons for us to find which means, of course, that they must have been left after you had been laid out here.’
And since Victoria Bodicker doesn’t have a pass, that leaves …
‘Either one of your combine or Sophie Schrijen.’
Who must have become very close to Renee.
‘Victoria was the odd one out.’
A girl whose notebook was then taken by Yvonne Lutz.
‘At the request of Colonel Rasche.’
A torn page being found crumpled in my pocket.
‘With the precisely written chemical equations, much simplified, for making viscose rayon, something Sophie desperately needed to understand.’
And I was well able to teach.
‘But didn’t write down the formula for trinitrophenol. Instead, it suggests that it was quickly done by someone who was leaning over your shoulder and since Raymond Maillotte, the fabric designer and test weaver, is the only other one from your combine who has a pass allowing him to come to that laboratory of yours …’
Experiments, Inspector. Didn’t Sophie tell you of them? Since May of 1941 that camp at Natzweiler-Struthof has been in those granite hills to the southwest of Strasbourg. We learned early on of what was happening to some of those who had been sent there. A failed hanging, isn’t that what her friend had to witness?
‘The Fraulein Schrijen is ashamed of her brother but why would he have forced that fiancee of his to have witnessed an execution unless he had already overheard the girl crying out things his sister would not have wanted anyone to hear?’
Renee really didn’t want to marry him.
‘Victoria Bodicker not only knew that girl was in danger but also despondent and suicidal.’
POWs always have three things in mind, Inspector. First there is the hope of mail from home, then that of a parcel once a month, and then …
‘Escape.’
That cutthroat your partner found yet left behind the photograph of a striptease artist.
‘Trinitrophenol, monsieur, especially if in its dry, crystalline form, which it would have been in a place like this and used well up into the late twenties or early thirties as a yellow dye. Unfortunately even unscrewing the lid of a jar of it can set it off. It’s highly unstable and definitely highly explosive. You see, though we in the trenches of that other war all knew about it under its other name, picric acid, others around the world soon learned. Halifax, Nova Scotia, 6 December 1917 the news flashed: World’s Biggest Man-Made Explosion. It still is, though we’re in another war. Sixteen hundred dead in that city; 9,000 injured, the sight taken from 200 by the flying glass from their very homes, 250 hectares of factories, et cetera absolutely flattened by the blast whose plume reached nearly two kilometres into the sky, or by the tidal wave*** that quickly followed, or by the fires that were caused as walls collapsed onto household stoves. Two vessels, the Belgian Imo, and the French Mont Blanc, collided in the harbour at 8.45 a.m., and at 9.06, you ask?