‘No one will know of it.’
‘So long as the Nazis don’t question you, Chief Inspector.’
This was true of course. Under torture one never quite knew what one might reveal until that moment but … ‘Please don’t force me to ask around, eh? It would not be wise.’
‘Then yes, a boat went missing. You could have found that out from anyone. The Germans made a great fuss — they always do. Twenty-six boats went out from Quiberon, Port Kerné, Port Quibello and other places in the last week of October. Twenty-five returned on the 3rd of November.’
‘Good. Now please, the fee per passenger? You can trust me.’
‘I’ve a wife and three small children, two others as well.’
‘That is understood.’
‘Is it that you think the money was stolen for this purpose, Chief Inspector, and by Préfet Kerjean?’
‘I am merely asking because I must examine all aspects of the case.’
As he had suggested, St-Cyr could well ask others who might then inform the Germans of his interest. ‘The fee is high because the risks are high. The Germans have minesweepers and patrol boats out there all the time. They board and search the sardiniers and other fishing boats whenever they feel so inclined. If there is anything at all suspicious, the captain and crew are arrested on the spot and their boat is confiscated.’
‘But it doesn’t stop there, does it?’ acknowledged St-Cyr quietly.
‘If guilty, they are shot and their families deported.’
He’d give the Sous-Préfet a grim nod. ‘There is also the risk of being spotted by the Luftwaffe’s long-range patrol planes which go out from here to search for Allied convoys.’
‘And the risk of being strafed by the fighter planes that are based along the north coast.’
‘Yes, those too,’ said the Sûreté with that same nod.
‘450,000 francs per man. There are some who say the British drop money and arms to the Resistance at night but of this I know nothing. How could I when I am forced to work with the Germans all the time? The Resistance wouldn’t trust me for a moment.’
A man with several children … A man in a very favourable position of authority and certainly most useful to them. Sacré nom de nom, why must God do this to them? ‘Of course not but, please, there will have been rumours perhaps. How many went with the Préfet’s son?’
‘Préfet Kerjean didn’t steal the money from Monsieur le Trocquer, Chief Inspector. He didn’t kill him either. He was nowhere near the clay pits. He was in Quiberon on New Year’s Day. He rang me up to wish us well and to tell me I was to take the afternoon off.’
So as to be out of the way? ‘How many went with the son?’
Again there was the searching of the street, again that look of desperation. Could he really trust St-Cyr to say nothing of it?
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.