Dollmaker by J. Robert Janes Page A

patriot even though the Resistance still had him on their list and had killed his wife and little son.
    He had a new girlfriend in Paris, a chanteuse, a Gabrielle Arcuri whom he had met on a case at the time of his wife’s death, which only showed that war speeded such things up greatly and there still might be hope for herself.
    But did St-Cyr feel guilty about it? Could this be used against him? His wife had been unfaithful, a German, a Hauptmann. Most Frenchmen would hate their women for such a thing, a patriot only more so. The wife had been a Breton. The mistress was a White Russian who had fled to Paris as a teenager at the time of the Revolution.
    Herr Kohler had two women in Paris. A twenty-two-year-old former prostitute and a forty-year-old Dutch alien he had rescued and would shelter even though by rights she ought to be deported. His wife back home in Wasserburg was suing him for divorce so as to marry an indentured French peasant.
    But could the Captain use the information in those dossiers? Could she somehow see that he got it without anyone else knowing?
    The cigarette was from the American freighter, the Esther B. Johnson out of Charleston, South Carolina. The Captain had found her alone and drifting off Cape Hatteras and had used his last eel on her then had finished her off with the deck gun. 8,000 tonnes right to the bottom.
    But first they had boarded her and had found such treasures everyone still got a laugh out of it. Lipstick and silk underwear for British girls her crew would never meet. Silk stockings, her captain’s wind-up Victrola and phonograph records, ah such records. Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Bing Crosby, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday and others …
    They had returned in triumph with their loot stuffed into every nook and cranny, having spent all their torpedoes, eaten nearly all their food and burned up virtually every last drop of fuel.
    August 7th of last year. She had been among the welcoming party that had crowded the Isère , the old wooden ship that had once taken convicts to Devil’s Island but now served as a tender to U-boats tied up to before finally slipping into the bunkers.
    The band from the garrison had filled the harbour with the sound of the ‘ Siegfried-Line’ . There had been flowers and French girls too. Girls who gave themselves willingly to members of the crew and even had had children by them. No whores among them. Those the boys saved for later as a warm-up to the homecoming party in the Cafe of the Three Sisters which was now no more due to the bombings. Now the homecomings were not so nice and the parties had been moved here to Quiberon for safety’s sake.
    The bombing raids had spoiled things in Lorient. The Happy Days of 1940 were long since over. One whole wall in the Bar of the Mermaid’s Three Sisters here was covered with photographs rescued from the other place, photographs of those who had been lost. Karl Jährmarker of U-192, Otto von Jacobs of U-200, Franz Kellner of U-187, all of them gone within the last ten days. One hundred and fifty-six men sunk ‘with man and mouse’, as the boys would say. And to dance in the presence of those photographs, while she waited for the Captain to show up, was a bad thing. Yet no one would take the photos down. They had a thing about it. They honoured their dead.
    â€˜While fucking some drunken French girl in the toilets!’ she said bitterly. ‘Why is it that most men are so coarse they would even take turns?’
    Not all of them were. The Captain seldom stayed long at these parties or at the Saturday-night dances. Oh for sure he would always put in an appearance unless something came up, but he preferred to keep to himself ashore and sought diversion elsewhere or with his dolls.
    The cigarette was now down to its last but still she held it cupped in her hand and stared emptily at the thin trail of smoke until awakened to its threat. ‘The cigarettes