Carnival (17 page)

‘Sip it slowly,' said this Victoria Bödicker to the Fräulein Schrijen, the bookseller now the one with a hand on the other's shoulder. ‘Take deep breaths. Yes, yes, that's it. Inspector, you can see the way she is. Could the interview not be left until another time?'

The two of them were far from feeling easy. That neither wanted to be questioned was clear enough, but was it because each feared what the other might say?

‘Another time … ? Of course it's possible, but my partner and I have only a limited amount of it and I've come on foot.'

The
Stube
they were in was directly behind the bookshop and gave onto a short, terra-cotta tiled corridor at the far end of which a heavily timbered and carved staircase rose steeply from a leaded window and rear door. On the limestone banquette of the tiled
Kachelhofen
, a grey tabby contentedly half-lifted sleepy eyelids to its mistress who was still tensely standing nearby with that hand firmly clamped on the shoulder of her friend—were things that desperate for them?

The Fräulein Schrijen sat with head bowed, clutching the cup and saucer in her lap, her blonde hair having fallen loosely forward over that shoulder and the other's hand. ‘What did you find?' she managed, not looking up but shuddering at the thought. ‘Please don't lie to me, Inspector. I can't take any more lies. I can't! I sent Renée out to the
Karneval
instead of going myself. It was all my fault. Mine! Had I not done, I could well have been the one in that … that horrible coffin the colonel had made for her. I
could
, don't you see? I
could
!'

The other was shattered by the outburst.

‘Sophie,
please
. It wasn't murder. You mustn't think that.'

‘Were you there, Victoria? Did you see her do it and not try to stop her?'

Tears … there were plenty of them, the hand of the bookseller tightening as if to stop the flood and give warning yet unable.

‘You know I wasn't, Sophie. How can you even think such a thing?'

The bookseller's deep brown eyes registered both concern and despair. ‘Inspector, Renée was very upset. She had seen a man hanged three times at Natzweiler-Struthof—that is how long it took for him to die, and when they had finally cut him down, one of them …'

‘Victoria,
please don't tell him. Please don't. I … I couldn't bear to have you do that.'

The tisane had spilled, the cup had rattled, a handkerchief was now being used, the skirt ineffectually dabbed at.

‘Then stop this craziness. No one would have killed her.
Liebe Zeit
, why would they?'

‘And Eugène, what of him?' challenged the other.

‘Sophie, his death can't have had anything to do with what Renée saw. I made her swear she wouldn't tell another soul, not even yourself.'

Anxiously the hand that held her by the shoulder was grabbed and pressed against a cheek then kissed, the tisane again spilling. ‘Why
didn't
she come back from the
Karneval
, Victoria? Why did she have to stay out there all night? That lorry was to have picked her up at about 5.00 in the afternoon. 5.00!'

‘What lorry?
Meine Damen, bitte
, let us take this one step at a time. Did the Fräulein Ekkehard ask you to provide a lift in one of the firm's lorries?'

Why hadn't he been told? Why had no one let him know? ‘Colonel Rasche telephoned the office to ask if I could arrange things. Renée had left the
Polizeikommandantur
by then to change and get her skis. He was going to give her a lift himself but had found he couldn't. Something urgent had come up.'

The tear-dampened grey-blue eyes were puzzled by his also not having known what had just been said of the facts.

‘So a lorry was sent from the Works?' he asked.

She would let him see her tears. ‘That is correct.'

‘And was it sent to pick her up that same day?' he asked, she to touch the rim of her cup and no longer find the will to look at him.

Her voice was ashen. ‘The driver waited a good half-hour. He … he honked the horn several times but when Renée didn't appear, he … he felt the colonel must have come by and taken her home. Colonel Rasche hasn't told you any of this, has he?'

Alarmed, she looked questioningly up at her friend, before wincing and lowering her eyes to the tisane as if the truth were too hard to bear.

The shoulders were gripped, the hair brushed back into place, but it did no good. Instead, she said, ‘Renée wouldn't have hanged herself, Victoria. Not even if Alain had shot that man, and I know he must have once they'd cut the poor soul down and turned him over so that the shot could be to the back of the neck as a further warning to the other prisoners.'

‘Sophie, please don't cry. Renée didn't love your brother. She was trapped. Afraid not to say she'd marry him, and terrified if she did. You know what they're like up at that camp. You know the pressure that was put on her.'

‘So she killed herself, is that it?' snapped the Fräulein Schrijen.

‘I know it's hard for you to accept, but …'

‘A good Catholic, damn you?'

‘Sophie, I
held
her when she came back from that weekend at Natzweiler-Struthof. I tried to calm her just as I'm trying to calm you. Now drink that, please. Take all of what's left of it. You're overtired—exhausted. That father of yours has got you doing far too much.
Ach
, how can he expect so much of anyone, let alone yourself who has always to fill two pairs of shoes? Your mother's and your own. You know it as well as I do. Go and lie down on the daybed in the kitchen. Leave me to talk to this one. You
don't
always have to do everything.'

‘Are you sure?'

Disconcerted by the swiftness of the response, the bookseller hesitated and then found her voice and said, ‘Of course. Now leave us. Take an hour. Surely the Works can spare you for that long. Samson and I will wake you.'

Samson being the cat.

5

Ground wood was everywhere in the Pulping Shed, water everywhere, steam too, noted Kohler. Screens shook, pumps sucked, augers turned, pulley belts flapped and bounced as they spun and reached out warning everyone in sight to keep out of the way, but these sounds were as nothing to that of the debarkers. Each time a metre-and-a-half-long log of spruce was shoved into one of the tooth-wheeled strippers, the sound would begin with a crucifying chatter that instantly mushroomed into that of ten thousand demented woodpeckers, but there were six or seven of these Christly machines and hardly a moment's reprieve. Already he had a splitting headache. Already he was right on edge.

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 Fräulein Bödicker'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 Löwe 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 Führer 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.

This one would want to hear it as it was, thought Caroff, and had already concluded that Chairman Schrijen was reinvesting zero in the Works while earning the maximum. ‘Eugène's wife was spreading her legs behind his back, Inspector. When a wife bares that little orifice to others, she insults her man.'

‘Or so the anonymous letter he was shown implied.'

‘Letters like that are cruel, aren't they, but often contain elements of the truth. Did it tell you that Paulette Thomas had scraped up enough cash to buy a brand-new bicycle?'

It hadn't. ‘Just how the hell did she get the cash then, Inspector, if not by offering herself to others? A nice one, too. A brunette. Thick, wide and curly, a real bush.'

Sex-starved were they all, or had it been said simply to reinforce Eugène Thomas's feelings of betrayal? In Paris, as this one must know, a new bike was all but impossible to obtain unless one had very highly placed friends and even then it would cost 8,000 francs, the prewar price of a brand-new two-door Renault or Peugeot sedan yet working-class wages had been frozen at those levels while everything else had had only one way to go.

The detective's mind was racing along the line of thought given, so that was good, felt Caroff, but a little reinforcement would be useful. ‘Eugène's Paulette had about 7,000 francs a year on which to live, Inspector. Understandably he worried constantly about how she could possibly manage. When the parcels, a considerable expense, didn't come, he forgave her by saying she needed things for their little boy. When that letter arrived, he wept.'

Cigar smoke was savoured as it should be, a far-off look coming into those eyes.

‘
Papa
used to buy these in England, Inspector, before returning home to Roscoff on the Breton Coast.
Maman
and us kids—there were eight of us then—grew the onions and shallots he carried round on strings draped over that old bicycle of his. Five months he'd be gone across the Channel. Swansea, Cardiff and Newport, Plymouth sometimes, though he preferred the Welsh simply because they could sing better and were closer to his ancestors. Women … I know he must have had several, but
maman
, she was very religious and never once mentioned it. But when I was old enough, she took me to the door and sent me to the naval yard at Brest, to her brother Martin, after whom she had named me. “Avoid loose women,” she said. “Get a trade. Don't sell onions others are forced to grow. Become a machinist.”'

In the Age of the Machine, and so much for nostalgia. POWs the world over would indulge in such reminiscences particularly if they thought they had a captive audience.

‘We asked Eugène about his Paulette, Inspector. How was she in bed? Was she always wet or only at certain times? He didn't like to talk about her that way, was too protective of her, but the wire soon destroys all that. She had a way with her, he confided. A look, a gesture, sometimes even the simple touch of her hand and he'd know what she wanted and soon be hearing her cry out for more.
L'orgasme. Le grand frisson, n'est-ce pas?
'

The great shudder, but it was time to put an end to this. ‘Look, my friend, I was once one of you and know all about what it's like, so let's cut the crap and you tell me what I need to know.'

Herr Kohler wouldn't be easy to convince but one had best try so as to reinforce what the others would confide. ‘Eugène was really depressed. The poor bastard just didn't want to live anymore. Awake all night thinking terrible things were happening at home? Two men at a time, three … We tried to convince him his Paulette would never do such things, but …'

‘Now listen, you. He had only one anonymous letter. There weren't any more of them.'

This could be checked if challenged but would the inspector then begin to wonder if someone here had gotten a friend or relative at home to write such a letter? Would it not be best to give him a little something else to think about? ‘The guards in this place suggested all sorts of liaisons­, knowing they would upset him further. The Jardin du Luxembourg when their little son was watching the puppet show or sailing one of the toy boats …
Sacré nom de nom
, but we had to keep an eye on him, though in a place like this, with all of us being worked to death, how could we possibly have stopped him?'

The fabric designer and test weaver having been deliberately forgotten since that one had a pass which allowed him to visit the laboratory at any time.

Fishing into a wet khaki pocket, Caroff pulled out a black armband of artificial silk. ‘I only took it off because of that puddle I had to jump into. All of us are wearing them in honour of Eugène. We swore we would even though Herr Dorsche would bitch.'

‘We?' asked Kohler.

‘The other members of our combine to which Eugène was a member in good standing. Eat, sleep, fart and live together, all cooped up in one room in that place when not here at work? We shared everything we scrounged or got from our parcels, even though Paulette forgot to send him one last month and the month before that, the Christmas one.'

A member in good standing could only mean that some were not or had not been in the past, shunning being common in such cases, but it would be best to sadly say, ‘A broken man, then.'

‘Précisément!'

Pleased with this
détective's
conclusion, was he, this popgun fixer? ‘Ping-Pong balls,' muttered Kohler. ‘I seem to remember seeing your name plastered beside that on the roster.'