Free Paris Noir: Capital Crime Fiction by Dominique Sylvain, Michael Moorcock, Jerome Charyn, Jason Starr, Cara Black, John Williams, Barry Gifford, John Harvey, Scott Phillips, Stella Duffy, Maxim Jakubowski, Jean-Hugues Oppel, Dominique Manotti, Sparkle Hayter, Jake Lamar, Jim Nisbet, Romain Slocombe

been deported and he was the only one who returned.
    Lucien pushed aside boxes and shone the flashlight on the bricked-up stone wall.
    ‘I remembered wrong.’ Lucien shook his head. ‘See, the bricked-up part goes further all along the wall. Which part was it?’
    The absurdity of the venture struck Mina.
‘Zut alors!
If we can’t find it, how can any one else? Let’s go.’
    He’d gone to the side of the locker, shone the beam and stepped back.
‘Mon Dieu!.
    The toes of faded black leather boots stuck through a hole in the crumbling mortared brick. The blood drained from Mina’s face. She turned to run and his cane landed across her arm.
    ‘No you don’t,’ he said. ‘It’s too late.’ Lucien blinked in fear. ‘They’ll find him. I didn’t live all these years to be arrested for murder,’ he said, his voice now edged with steel. ‘I promised the others.’
    ‘You’re crazy!’
    ‘So Mina, you’ll let her get away with lies… again?’
    ‘But what can we do?’
    ‘We can manage part of it,’ said Lucien. ‘Call your grandson, tell him there’s old furniture and we need his help. Get him to bring his butcher’s van. But first…’
    He took a pick, then handed Mina a garden hoe from the locker.
    ‘You expect me to use this?’ Mina asked.
    Lucien spread sheets of plastic from the locker over the dirt. ‘There’s no way to cover this up, we’ve got to get him out.’
    He was right.
    While they worked, a slow process, footsteps rumbled from the floor above. Lucien switched on an old transistor radio, the static and bad reception drowning out the noise of the chipping and scraping. The wartime-grade mortar chipped away and crumbled. Mina knelt on the ground removing the bricks, piling them one by one. After half an hour, scraps of the wool Feldgrau soldier’s uniform showed.
    Mina wiped the sweat from her brow and sniffed. A dry must-filled odour and sixty-year-old air emanated from the wall. The air of decay. Her mind went back to that night, this cavern lit by sputtering candles; they’d arranged for their Hebrew teacher to escape on a waiting canal barge and Mina had been early, the first of the group to arrive.
    But instead of Lucien and their teacher, she’d found the blond, well-fed Wehrmacht soldier, the perfect Aryan. The young, handsome soldier from the warehouse next door who’d turned a blind eye to her yellow star and given her food. Not once but several times. She’d never told the others or her parents where the food came from. Or about the warm touch of his hands when he held hers. Now the soldier held a bottle in his hand, beer fumes emanated from his breath. ‘I waited for you, thought you like this,’ he said. ‘Now why does Hansi think that?’ He squinted his eyes as if in thought. ‘Hansi thinks you’re nice. A nice girl.’ He slurred his words in broken French. Drunk, he was drunk.
    ‘You’ve been drinking.’
    ‘For courage.’ A fragment of a smile shone on his handsome rosy-cheeked face. ‘My Kommandant wouldn’t like me to share this.’
    She felt a wave of dizziness and looked down at her feet. Bread, cheese and slices of ham lay on a blanket on the floor. She’d only eaten a bowl of grey potatoes that day.
    ‘Hansi won’t tell about your friends.’
    ’My friends?’ She backed up, tripping on the pile of stones on the dirt floor. ‘Who told you?’
    He grinned, his blue eyes glazed. ‘The redhead.’ He staggered against the wall. Young, only eighteen, two years older than her. ‘Hansi wants his girl.’
    So La Rouquine informed on them, she realised d with a start, and the escape plan. And Hansi wanted La Rouquine. Now there’d be no more food. An irrational bolt of jealousy shot through her. No more of his kindness or the smile that lit up his eyes when he saw her.
    She stiffened.
    Waving his arm, he gestured to the food. ‘Eat. Then Hansi will teach you card game.’
    ’No, you have to go…’
    She heard the creaking of the floorboards