Read Online 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 - Free Book Online Page A

that night, Mina?’
    As if she could forget.
    ‘But h… he attacked. It was him or me, Lucien!’
    She’d tried to push it away after all these years. The real reason, the haunting past. Mina thought of their years of work supported by donations now at risk. But La Rouquine wouldn’t pursue this, she wouldn’t dare unless… something else incriminating lay in that cellar.
    The telephone drilled. Lucien sat up startled. ‘The
flics
already! Questions…’
    She had to act calm.
    ‘They won’t necessarily link this to us,’ Mina said. ‘Let me handle it.’
    She picked up the receiver of the old black rotary dial phone, the tattooed numbers on her arm visible.
    ‘Resistance Association,
bonjour
.’ She listened. ‘A murdered
Feldwebel
… Sergeant?’ Mina’s wrinkled face sagged. ‘Sadly, many of our members who could provide insight have passed… concerning this memoir? Monsieur, the war spawned countless stories and rumours… I have no idea… an interview? We’re very busy… next week… call back and we’ll make an appointment.’
    ‘Who was that?’
    ‘A reporter sniffing a story,’ she said. ‘We’ll leave it alone, he’ll go away.’
    ‘La Rouquine won’t let it go away. You can’t bury your head in the sand now.’
    Mina noticed Lucien’s stricken face. Once he’d been young, the ringleader of their Resistance youth group, and wore wooden-soled Occupation-made clogs like the rest of them. At the beginning, their meetings were innocent, Mina remembered. Politically ripe, they met with their friends after Hebrew lessons at Saturday-
shut
, collecting money for the Spanish Civil War, for the children in Madrid, determined to open people’s eyes. Lucien and the others came from families living in one room like hers. One bag of coal a month for heat. Always the smell of leather seeping from the factory on the heels of the cold. The one metal courtyard spigot, the only source of water for the five-storied building, carried up worn winding stairways. The toilet on the
palier,
in between floors, the buckets rimmed with ice on January mornings.
    Now he was a frightened old man afraid of secrets. More afraid than she was.
    She stared at him. ‘What aren’t you telling me, Lucien?’
    ‘They’ll find them.’
    His tone sent a shiver up Mina’s spine.
    ‘Them? What do you mean?’ A quiver of unease ran through her.
    ‘Him. That’s what I mean, Mina. We have to check the cellar, make sure there’s no trace of him,’ he said, his thin mouth set in a determined line.
    She shook her head. Her arthritis had kicked in, she was on blood pressure medication. No way would she budge.
    ‘You’re panicking over nothing,’ she said. ‘I need to go home, cook for my great-granddaughter’s bat mitzvah party.’
    ‘So you want to take the chance when La Rouquine shows up with the press…?’
    ‘Non
… I don’t know.’
    Fearful and confused, she had no answer. With a sinking feeling she knew the past had come back to haunt them. But then, had it ever gone away?
    Lucien dialled a number on the phone. Mina stared out the window at the budding plane trees lining the
quai.
Could anyone ever get away from the past?
    He slammed down the phone, interrupting her thoughts.
    ’Get your bag,’ he said. ‘According to the concierge’s daughter they’re doing electrical work in the cellar. It could mean they’re opening the walls.’
    Mina’s shoulders twitched. She dreaded the five-minute walk she’d avoided with painstaking care all these years, the street full of memories. Now it looked like she had no choice.
    Out on the
quai
Mina’s misgivings ballooned as they turned the corner into rue du Faubourg Saint Martin. Her hands trembled seeing the wrought-iron balconied sand-stone apartment building, like all the others except for the deeper blackened patina of soot. Next door stood the old Lévitan warehouse. Now a remodelled publicity firm but during the Occupation, the German warehouse storing