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 B

screamed.
    ‘Shut up.’
    ‘Who else did you kill, Lucien?’
    Lucien’s shoulders shook. And a single tear slid down his cheek. He pulled the blanket aside. Black hair drooped over a desiccated brown face, a hunched figure in brown rags.
    ‘But I don’t understand,’ Mina said, bewildered. ‘I helped you brick up the wall…’
    ‘La Rouquine said she slept with the German to save her family,’ Lucien said. ‘She lied. Never did it.’
    ‘What? But I thought…’
    ‘Everyone did. She was protecting her club-footed father, who worked next door in the Germans’ warehouse. He took deportees’ jewellery and sold it on the black market.’
    Her heart thudded at the revelation. She’d got it all wrong. Mina swallowed hard. ‘You mean…’
    ‘You took our teacher to the canal barge and we finished bricking him up,’ Lucien interrupted. ‘But La Rouquine showed up, made excuses and beat a quick exit. Later her father came down to his locker, he saw the blood.’
    ‘And then?’ Mina stared at the corpse’s twisted foot.
    ‘Her father threatened first to turn us in to the Kommandantur, then to blackmail us.’
    ‘Never. He was a Jew!’
    Lucien shook his head, venom in his eyes.
‘Non,
only her poor mother. He had a club foot, that’s the trouble. Too easy to identify.’
    ‘You killed her father and bricked him up, too?’
    ‘Like you said, either him or us,’ he said.
    Her shoulders crumpled in shame. She averted her eyes, regret filling her. But she couldn’t tell Lucien the truth.
    ‘Mina, you remember the Wehrmacht patrols on the street,’ Lucien said. ‘What choice did we have?’
    She struggled, pulling more bricks away. ‘Hurry, before the busybody comes back.’
    ‘I lied to her mother, to everyone in the building.’ Lucien kicked the dirt. ‘I looked them in the face every day! And I’m still lying. Now La Rouquine’s going to find him. It’s prison!’
    ‘Be quiet,’ Mina said, now determined. ‘Get him in the bag, then keep the concierge busy, then it’s out in the courtyard. I’m calling my grandson.’
    Lucien refused and collapsed against the wall, staring with a vacant look. She stood by the staircase and punched in her grandson’s number. Only his answering machine. Why didn’t these young ones ever answer their cell phones?
    In the end Mina manoeuvred the stiff hunched figure of the father into the bag, wrapped it with duct tape. Her breathing grew laboured, coming in short gasps. The air was a miasma of dense dampness, the odour of desiccated corpses and rotting wool.
    Lucien, immobile on the floor, clutched his knees, mumbling.
    ‘Lucien, we have to get them upstairs,’ she said, shaking his shoulders. ‘Get up, I can’t do this alone.’
    His eyes batted in terror. ‘The diamonds… prison…’
    Mina twisted her hands; the more the past unravelled, the worse it grew. ‘I don’t want to know.’
    ‘We funded the Association by selling the diamonds her father stole.’
    Mina recoiled in horror. ‘All these years and you never told me,’
    ‘How do you think we kept the Association going?’ Lucien gave a short laugh. ‘All blood money.’
    She thought of all their work, the effort. ‘But if he stole from Jews, it’s helped Jews for years.’
    Lucien shook his head. ‘And I took some to open my shop.’
    Shocked, she looked around. ‘Quit living in the past. It’s over. Look, we’ve got to get them out of here. Now!’
    Lucien looked at her with unseeing eyes.
    Mina needed to think, but with the bodies and Lucien, and the tainted air, each breath was an effort. Somehow she had to carry the man she had killed upstairs.
    Back by the soldier’s corpse, Lucien was crawling and crying on the floor.
    ‘Help me, Lucien,’ she said, ‘get his boots.’
    ‘The Wehrmacht’s coming,’ Lucien said. ‘I saw them.’
    Terror clutched her. He was back in the past. Gone.
    ‘That’s why you have to help, Lucien, or they’ll find him… right?’
    He nodded,