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conveyed to the Admiral.’
    â€˜What of Freisen? Wouldn’t he have informed the Admiral of this?’
    â€˜We’ll find out later. He’ll be there at 1530 hours.’
    The potatoes were without butter, margarine or even a sprinkling of parsley but when salt and ersatz pepper were liberally added, a tiny particle of taste crept forward to remind one of the past. Poor Marianne had not been able to keep even potatoes down. Four days of agony and then … why then Paris and life with a man who had seldom been home for more than a few days at most and had neglected to think his absence might have been troubling. Young and healthy women do need sex. When denied it, they crave it and who can blame them if they are tempted by another?
    â€˜We have also the distinct possibility of a marriage of convenience, Hermann. A Madame Charbonneau is married to a Parisian concert pianist who has a ten-year-old daughter whose mother was machine-gunned to death during the blitzkrieg.’
    Marriages of convenience these days were so often done to hide one’s identity or past. Verdammt! ‘Does the kid still have nightmares?’
    It was spoken like a father. ‘Probably. Was the doll hers, Hermann? That is what I want to know since the Admiral insists the bisque was not the Captain’s.’
    St-Cyr dragged out his pipe and tobacco pouch only to gaze ruefully at the few remaining shreds. Hermann mopped up the last of the juice with a bit of bread from the inside of the loaf. Like many who had once been in the front lines of that other war under intense bombardment, he ate stolidly.
    He was really a very uncomplicated person, this former detective from Munich and Berlin, a man who had seen so much of death, his stomach had finally rebelled. A man who had two sons at Stalingrad … Ah merde , the telex Boemelburg gave me, thought St-Cyr guiltily. The boys were missing in action and presumed dead, and Boemelburg, being the Chief, had left the dirty work to Hermann’s partner who was a coward, yes, when it came to such things.
    â€˜The Captain must have told Freisen the fragments weren’t from one of his dolls,’ said Kohler. ‘Bullet then passed it on to the Admiral.’
    Did they all have nicknames? ‘Why don’t they simply let U-297 put to sea without the Dollmaker?’
    Kohler found his mégot tin and made the supreme sacrifice of sliding it across the table. ‘Because, my fine friend, if you ask me, the men won’t sail without him. They must have had such a bad time on their last cruise, the Admiral is willing to humour them by asking for a couple of detectives to prove his boy is innocent.’
    The tin contained Hermann’s collection of cigarette butts, most saved, some picked up from God knows where. Several had lipstick on them, that last case? wondered St-Cyr. A cache of butts in a Louis XVI-style concrete urn that would hold geraniums in season. The garden of the Palais Royal, a missing eighteen-year-old girl and a bank robbery …
    He heaved a sigh. ‘More than two years of constant stress, never knowing if the next moment would be their last. Even Paulette le Trocquer was sympathetic to their plight and knew the odds.’
    â€˜Obersteuermann Baumann wears the look of death, Louis. He knows he’s going to die no matter what, so it’s all to the good if the Captain’s case keeps them ashore for a little longer.’
    Packing his pipe, St-Cyr lit up, coughed suddenly at the hot fire, and, wincing, tried to settle down. ‘Please clear the plates,’ he choked, and when this was done, laid out his little bits and pieces: the fragments of bisque, the clots of coarse black wool, one packet of American cigarettes, a crumpled white handkerchief and lastly, wrapped in paper, a small and much kneaded wad of kaolin no doubt taken from the Captain’s satchel.
    Reluctantly he withheld the cigarettes, forcing Hermann to clumsily