‘Kid, listen to me. Just try not to worry, eh? Everything is going to be all right. You’ll see.’
‘It’s too late. He can’t hear you. He’s slipping away. Leave it.’
‘Don’t be stupid. He has what it takes.’
The boy could only watch the man with the big face who tried to tie tourniquets around his legs. Perhaps he noticed the scar down the left cheek. Perhaps that was what caught and held his attention.
‘Louis … Louis, he’s gone.’
‘And he’s left you thinking of your sons.’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re gone too, Hermann. Look, I’m sorry. I knew I had to tell you sometime. Boemelburg left it to me. A telex from Army HQ Eastern Front just before we left Paris.’
‘Missing in action and presumed dead?’
Hermann couldn’t look up. He would deal with it in his own way. He was like that sometimes. ‘What else can I say?’
‘We’d best get to work. Try that, Chief. You sure can choose your times.’
‘I’m sorry. I really am. I didn’t want to have to tell you.’
They shook hands and held each other firmly that way, two shabby, dust-covered weary men from opposite sides of this war. ‘It isn’t right,’ said St-Cyr, seeing the anguish in the Bavarian’s eyes. ‘None of it is. You could go home, Hermann. Compassionate leave? Surely they wouldn’t deny you that.’
‘I might never be allowed to come back. What would Oona and Giselle do, eh? What would you do without me, a patriot wanted by the Resistance in a land of the Gestapo?’
They had been through so much and Hermann did like to feel wanted and useful. ‘Come on then, let’s see if we can find ourselves a ride back to Quiberon.’
‘The bunkers first, and then Doenitz’s former command post at Kernével. It’s time the Kapitän zur See Freisen coughed up a little information. I want a look at Dollmaker’s report on the morale of U-297’s crew. I want a lot more. I want answers, Louis. Answers.’
*
Kohler pulled up the collar of his greatcoat and tucked his head down further against the cold and the fog. Mein Gott he needed a cigarette, would have to latch on to some soon.
A catwalk had been laid across a bomb crater full of filthy water where the tracks had been torn up, and the long line of shuffling dockworkers had to cross this in single file to get to the checkpoint. Damage crews were everywhere — picks, shovels, cars, lorries, ambulances and pumper trucks — yet through the chaos and the fog, the Keroman bunkers rose like megaliths of their own. Long, grim, tall and menacing with huge black armour-plated doors for each of the forty or so bays and grey, rust-stained concrete. Concrete that had resisted even the 2,000-pound bombs. There wasn’t a scratch. Seven metres of ferroconcrete on the roof and walls — concrete with iron filings in it plus reinforcing rods — had allowed work to go on non-stop inside. ‘The bloody things will still be here a thousand years from now,’ he snorted lustily to no one but himself.
So savage was the Admiral’s penchant for dealing with spies, the warning signs had been among the first things to be replaced or straightened. One stark poster near the guardpost showed a goitred little dockworker hanging by the neck. His sobbing wife and children knelt in prayer under the steel-grey Schmeissers of jackbooted heroes who, everyone knew, were just about to pull the triggers.
The SS had put that one up. The Sturmscharführer with the snappy cap and snazzy uniform reminded him of Klaus Barbie and Lyon, a recent case of arson and a naked woman on her hands and knees under torture. ‘I spit on you,’ breathed Kohler, standing back to take it all in. ‘My sons are gone because of types like you.’
No letter writer, he would have to write to Gerda — she’d be crying her eyes out and remembering. Like Louis had said, he ought to go home for a visit but after nearly two and a half years, he wasn’t Bavarian any more or French but something in between, a pebble that had been thrown into a pond to make its own ripples.
‘I even forget myself and swear in French half the time.’ Merde, what was he to do?
‘Get on with it,’ he said grimly. ‘Admit that deep down inside, you’ve known for some time the boys weren’t coming back.’
Verdammt! but it was a piss-assed life. ‘I really have had it,’ he said, trying to probe the fog to find the end of the bunkers. No tears yet. ‘Concrete coffins to hold the iron ones,’ he snorted. ‘Like Baumann, death is with me all the time. I see it in Oona’s eyes sometimes and in Giselle’s too, and I worry about them both because when this war turns sour, it’s going to do so with a vengeance.’ Both would be classed as collaborators.
Louis would be thinking of him and worrying too. He would have seen the Admiral’s signs and automatically understood that for him the bunkers were off limits. He would find the Sous-Préfet and then head back out to the clay pits for another look.
Louis seldom missed things. They had both been lucky to be assigned each other. Boemelburg had known of Louis from before the war. A Gestapo watcher had been needed for the Frenchman, someone to take care of the guns and hand one over when the shooting started.
He had wanted detectives and that’s what he had got.
It would be best to use the badge and shield. ‘Kohler, Gestapo Central, here on the orders of Gestapo Mueller.’
Kohler … Kohler of the Kripo, that most insignificant arm of Herr Himmler’s police force, Common Crime. The whip scar was there, the graze of a bullet wound on the forehead, the shrapnel scars from that other war. ‘fa, it is him, Heinz.’ The Feldwebel with the bulbous nose, the warts and the blackheads thumbed the ID and shrugged, then plucked a notice from a clipboard on the wall and proceeded to read it slowly.
‘Good Gott im Himmel, Dummkopf, I’m on a murder investigation! Let me through or Gestapo Mueller will have your ass.’
The puffy blue eyes blandly surveyed him. The nose, with all its curly black hairs, was pinched in thought, the fleshy chin grasped. ‘Herr Mueller’s in Berlin. We’re here, or hadn’t you noticed?’
‘Nom de Jésus-Christ! I only want to have a look at the place, eh? A bit of background to flesh the thing out and get the Dollmaker off.’
‘Heinz, our detective even swears in French and is both judge and tribunal. It was the woman’s husband who did it, Herr Kohler, or the Captain. At the moment we’re undecided and the odds are about fifty-fifty. You can, if you like, put your money where your mouth is.’
‘How much?’
Herr Kohler had understood only too well the price of admission. ‘250 Reichskassenscheine, 5,000 francs.’
‘Now look …’
‘Take it or leave it. The Captain had his eel into the bone-digger’s wife. The shopkeeper found out there wasn’t enough grease and tried to put the squeeze on him. The husband was jealous. Money was missing, a lot of money, so it’s all quite simple, yes? The Dollmaker should have left that cunt alone and gone for the less sophisticated but some men, they need a challenge. They need to climb the highest mountains, those with the peaks that are always cloaked in snow and ice.’
A poet! ‘You’re full of news but what if neither of them did it?’
The fleshy lips widened in a grin to betray broken teeth. ‘Then you put your money on that and take your chances.’
The son of a bitch had been fishing for news on the Préfet’s involvement. ‘Okay, I will. I’ll mess up the odds and cause you all a tumble, eh?’ He dragged out a wad of bills that would have choked a horse and peeled off the necessary. ‘Oh, by the way, who’s the bookmaker?’
The Feldwebel took his time. ‘Death’s-head Schultz. Siegfried to his mother and father, if he had one. U-297’s cook.’
The acorn-and-barley coffee was full of saccharine and plaster dust but at least an attempt had been made. Suddenly overcome by exhaustion, St-Cyr slumped into a chair and fought to keep his eyes open.