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 Page A

overhead, the cellar’s door opening. And she panicked. How could she explain this to the others, to her Hebrew teacher in hiding from the Germans?
    But she knew how it would look finding her with a German soldier, taking his food. They’d accuse her of collaborating when all she’d been was hungry and keen to feel the kindness he’d shown her.
    ‘I think you are playing. You like Hansi.’
    ’I do… I mean I don’t… can’t.’
    He smiled. A light lit in his eyes. ‘In the
vaterland
at school Hansi writes poetry. Now you inspire Hansi.’
    And La Rouquine, did she inspire him, too?
    ‘You have to go. Now.’
    Footsteps sounded on the stairs. She grabbed his hands, his warm hands, and pulled. If he didn’t leave the others would think she had betrayed their Resistance cell, sabotaged the tutor’s escape.
    ‘They’re coming, they can’t know… find you… please.’
    He shook his blond head, folded his arms across his uniformed chest unbudging. ’
Nein
. Hansi stay.’
    This was going horribly wrong.
    ‘The redhead…’
    That’s when she’d found the stone and smashed his head. Stupefied, he stumbled. She’d pounded his head again and again. Until his blood pooled in a puddle in the dirt, glinting in the candlelight.
    ‘Watch out.’ Lucien’s pick struck with a hard thud, then the bricks crumbled in a whoosh of billowing grey dust, revealing a hollow. Inside a mummified figure in the fragments of a Wehrmacht uniform leered with brown leathered lips, the dried-up hollow eye sockets open above pinched-in cheeks. The desiccated brown-skinned hands twisted as if clutching the wall.
    Mina gasped in horror. Hansi, once handsome, was now a grotesque mummy.
    ‘Well preserved, eh?’ Lucien said. He reached for the gold swastika signet ring on Hansi’s pinkie. He pulled, and the finger came away with his ring.
    The bile rose in Mina’s stomach.
    ‘Help me before he disintegrates more.’
    Lucien lifted and together, with effort, they pulled the corpse out. Awkward, like holding a store dummy, and quite light except for the heavy boots and mouldering wool uniform disintegrating at their touch. Hansi’s stiff hands like claws poking out. ‘See a sergeant’s stripes,’ Lucien said. He and Mina pulled the garbage bag over it. The black jackboots protruded. Before they could put another garbage bag over them footsteps sounded.
    ‘Lucien?’ said a voice.
    His red rheumy eyes batted in terror. ‘The concierge.’
    Mina pushed him forward. ‘Get her back upstairs.’
    An aproned woman in support hose, clogs and hair in a bun smiled. ‘Aaah, your friend…’
    Lucien walked forward, blocking her view. ‘Jeanine…’
    ‘Good thing you came, your other friend came looking for you,’ she said, peering over his shoulder.
    ‘That’s strange, I haven’t lived here in years, Jeanine. Who?’
    She shook her head. ‘A bourgeois matron, well dressed, red hair. But I didn’t give your address, I told her I’d tell you first.’
    Mina’s heart pounded. La Rouquine! Her pills, she’d taken her blood pressure pills at breakfast but didn’t know if her heart would hold out.
    ‘Jeanine, I’ll meet you upstairs,’ Lucien said, ‘and settle what I owe for the locker.’
    Lucien waited until her footsteps receded. ‘She’s curious. Put him back in.’
    ‘And have La Rouquine find him, she’s been here already!’ said Mina. ‘We’ll fit him in the bag, take it out the courtyard door to the trash.’
    ‘He’s too stiff, he won’t fit.’
    ‘Then break his legs, Lucien,’ she said, in exasperation.
    Mina turned away at the sight of Lucien leaning on the corpse’s shoulders, the brittle sounds of breaking bones. She shone the flashlight in the gaping hole. She saw what looked like old blankets and fished around with the flashlight. A black spider skittered across a man’s old-fashioned brown shoe with a raised heel. She pulled the rotting blanket apart, saw a trousered leg inside. And she