J. Robert Janes
Dollmaker
Behind the face of innocence,
the hardness of the firing
1
As they moved in single file through the night, the rain of bombs continued. Now the crump of an explosion, now a series of brilliant flashes to the east over Lorient and the submarine pens, now the throbbing of heavy aircraft among the constant bursts of flak.
‘It is nothing,’ said the police chief, lifting the hand that held the shaded lantern. ‘It happens all the time now. You’ll get used to it.’
‘Of course,’ grunted St-Cyr. ‘We’re old hands. Nothing troubles us.’
‘Not even the murder of a shopkeeper in the middle of nowhere,’ sang out Kohler acidly. ‘Christ, this wind would chill a polar bear, Louis! Couldn’t Boemelburg have made things easier?’
As Head of the Gestapo in Occupied France, Hermann’s chief had other matters to keep him busy. ‘I’ll speak to him,’ said St-Cyr, tossing the words over a shoulder.
It was always the same for them. Finish one case and start another. No time for a little holiday. No time even for a decent piss.
‘Turn away from the wind,’ shouted Kohler. ‘Don’t splash me this time!’
‘Pardon. That second bottle of Münchener Löwen you insisted I drink at an altitude of 5,000 metres has short-circuited my bladder. A moment. That is all I ask.’
Victor Kerjean waited in the pale lantern light.
‘Shouldn’t you douse that thing?’ shouted Kohler nervously — a 2,000-pound bomb had hit something important, causing secondary explosions. ‘Hey, my fine, I thought it was illegal to show a light?’
‘Especially at times like this,’ grunted St-Cyr under his breath. ‘Go easy, Hermann. Kerjean is good. It’s his territory and he knows it.’
Threading their way among the gorse and bald boulders of granite, they continued out across the irregularities of the moor, went down into a low, rocky defile and came, at last, to the railway spur.
Again the hand with the lantern lifted. ‘He is just along a little way. One cannot miss him.’
Blood everywhere probably, thought Kohler grimly. ‘Any idea why he was out here?’
‘Yesterday,’ muttered St-Cyr. ‘Friday, the 1st of January, 1943. At just after dusk.’
‘Give or take a few hours,’ sternly added Victor Kerjean, pausing to face them and raising the lantern so that they saw again the resolute dark blue eyes and rounded cheeks that were grey with the evening’s shadow. A Breton, fifty-eight years of age, big-shouldered and far taller than his peasant ancestors, the Préfet of Morbihan had come all the way from Vannes. Come personally, since the two detectives were from Paris Central and the Admiral Karl Doenitz, C.-in-C. U-boats, had summoned them.
Lorient, the telex had read. Dollmaker arrested in murder of shopkeeper. Most urgent you send experienced detective immediately. Fragments of bisque doll not — repeat not — his.
‘Dollmaker,’ said St-Cyr more to himself than to the others. ‘Paul Johann Kaestner, Kapitän zur See of U-297.’
‘Ah, yes, and that one is not going anywhere,’ said the police chief firmly, ‘even if he is one of the Occupiers.’
‘You’re certain it was him?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘Positive!’
‘Good. That’s what we like to hear. It makes things easy for us.’
A hand was tossed. ‘Ah, Paris! You people … You’ll see. You will have no doubts. He was out here at the time and has confessed to this.’
‘The fool!’ snorted Kohler under his breath. Murder was holding up the U-boat war in the North Atlantic and never mind that January and February were the stormy months and things ought really to have slackened off. The Führer must be pressing Doenitz to get the boys out there. ‘A good shot with the torpedo, is he?’
‘A hero. One of the best. His victim is at the next bend in the tracks, where the spur divides into its two branches and the iron switch-bar he has used to crush the skull, lies cast aside.’
Merde, another messy killing, thought St-Cyr, and Hermann’s stomach not right from the roller-coaster flight: Le Bourget to the nearby aerodrome courtesy of the Luftwaffe in a requisitioned Dornier without passenger seats or heat of any kind. The time was now 9.30 or 10.00 in the evening.
A shabby square of faded, wine-red sailcoth, pinned by stones, covered the corpse. When this was removed, they saw that the shopkeeper was indeed sprawled face down across the tracks. The tan-coloured trench coat had long been used, the coarse homespun scarf of beige wool was teased by the ever-buffeting wind.
Again and again the crump of exploding bombs came from the city and its dockyards. The brilliant flashes momentarily lit up the moor and the spur as if trying to lift a darkness that was too heavy.
‘Take the black-out tape off the lantern, please.’
‘Louis …’ began Kohler, alarmed.
‘One lonely light will not matter,’ said the police chief. ‘It will all be over in a split second.’
Was he some sort of humorist? ‘Twenty kilometres are nothing to those boys,’ grumbled Kohler passionately. ‘All they want is to drop their bombs and get the hell home.’
‘They are already leaving. They have made the circle, yes? and are now heading back out to sea so as to avoid the batteries of Finistère and the Côtes-du-Nord.’
‘Then give me the fucking lantern and let us have a look at him.’
Blood and brains and chips of bone were matted by glossy black hairs some of which stuck out oddly in clumps the wind played with. One hand, the left and out-thrown, had clawed at the pale, pea-sized granitic gravel, digging its fingers in deeply. The right hand, also thrown out, had swung back towards his assailant as if driven by impulse.
Glazed and wide, the eyes stared at the rusty iron sleeper-bolt that was not twelve centimetres from the face and held the burnished rail the forehead had struck as he had fallen.
Blood had run freely from a flared left nostril and, now congealed, webbed the coarse black hairs and made a little puddle on the gravel next to the larger mass from the mouth.
‘A man of between forty-five and fifty years,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Not old, not young. Not wealthy but not so poor he could not afford a pair of glasses.’
Both lenses were broken, and in the right lens, gaps had appeared where the shards had fallen away.
‘The frame is bent in the middle, Louis. Whoever did it, stepped around the poor bastard for another look.’
‘In panic?’
It was but one of many questions.
‘In panic, yes,’ said Kohler. The glasses lay on the shoulder of the railway bed about a metre in front of the corpse and slightly to its left. The last bombs fell. One by one the anti-aircraft guns ceased. Then distant on the air, came the sound of the all-clear, and finally only the sounds of the wind and the breaking seas.
‘Inspector …’
‘In a moment, Préfet. Please,’ said St-Cyr. ‘The Admiral mentioned fragments of bisque?’
‘Over here, then. Just along the tracks towards the washing plant. About twenty metres. Sous-Préfet le Troadec, my assistant in Lorient, has been most observant.’
The town cop. ‘Big Foot,’ grunted St-Cyr under his breath as they followed. ‘That’s what it means in Breton.’
‘But intelligent,’ offered Kerjean, not turning to confront these two from Paris. ‘He will not have trampled a thing. Believe me, Chief Inspector, the Sous-Préfet Big Foot knows his business and so do I, as you yourself have confided to your friend not long ago.’
Did the moor pick up sounds and magnify them? wondered St-Cyr. Somewhat miffed, he said, ‘Of course. Now the shards, please, and the lantern. Hermann, lift the glass a moment. Let the wind touch the flame and banish the soot of unfiltered paraffin.’