Read Chapter 5: The Handoff at Montmartre

The Café du Corbeau smelled of burnt coffee and desperation, the yellowed curtains doing nothing to hold back the Montmartre chill. Le Corbeau wasn't hard to find—he sat in the back corner, a thin man with a newsboy's cap pulled low, his fingers stained with ink from the maps he traced and retraced.

Lucien slid into the seat across from him, letting his coat fall open just enough to reveal the pistol at his hip. Not a threat. A statement. He'd learned long ago that men like Le Corbeau responded better to visible teeth.

"Word is you sell dreams," Lucien said, his voice low.

Le Corbeau's eyes flicked from Lucien's face to the pistol and back. "Word is wrong. I sell directions."

"How much for a direction to the place everyone's suddenly looking for?"

A thin smile cut across the man's face. "Depends which direction you want. The true one costs more than the rest."

"You sell false ones too?"

"Everyone else does." Le Corbeau leaned forward, lowering his voice to a whisper. "There are twenty copies of my map circulating through Paris right now. Fifteen will lead you to a wall of bones. Four will lead you to Gestapo bullets."

"And the one true path?"

"Fifty hundred francs."

Lucien didn't blink. He'd expected the ask, but the price told him something worth knowing—Le Corbeau was selling hope, not certainty. A man with the real location wouldn't be sitting in a Pigalle café trading it for pocket change.

"I don't need your paper. I need the man who sold it to you."

The smile vanished. "I don't know what—"

"Your maps have details—names scratched on the bottom, faint pencil marks. Three copies have a name repeated. I checked two already." Lucien hadn't, but the bluff cost nothing. "The other one's in your coat. I'm guessing Armand did business with a German who went missing. A colonel who liked to take walks near the cemetery."

Le Corbeau's hands went still, and Lucien knew he'd hit close enough to the truth.

"There's a man who drinks at the Moulin de la Galette," Le Corbeau said quietly. "Krause. Claims he was the colonel's driver. Says he knows where the old man went to ground. He's trying to sell the location himself, but he's scared. Stupid with fear. Drinks too much, talks too little."

"How do I find him?"

"He only comes out at night. Says the shadows keep him safe." Le Corbeau's laugh was hollow. "I told him the shadows are the worst place to hide in this city."

---

The Moulin de la Galette was a shell of what it had been before the occupation—the dance floor stripped of its polish, the bandstand converted to storage for bricks of ersatz coffee and sacks of turnips. But men still gathered there, the ones who couldn't risk the larger cafés, the ones who traded in whispers.

Lucien recognized Krause before the German said a word. He was a bear of a man gone to seed, the uniform he wore frayed at the cuffs, the eagle insignia torn half away. He sat alone at a table against the wall, nursing a glass of something that wasn't wine, glancing at every silhouette that crossed the doorway.

When Lucien sat down opposite him, Krause's hand dropped beneath the table.

"Easy," Lucien said in German, letting his accent carry the weight of the SS officers he'd sold to over the years. "I'm not Gestapo. I'm the man who can save you from them."

"Saving men is a German officer's business. You don't look like a German officer."

"I'm better." Lucien placed a small pouch on the table between them. It clinked with the weight of gold coins—Swiss francs, untraceable. "I'm a businessman who understands that some men need to be bought before they can be trusted."

Krause's eyes fixed on the pouch. Seven hundred francs in gold. The down payment Le Corbeau had said would buy the man's attention, if not his loyalty.

"I don't know what you've been told—"

"Colonel Brandt. Four hundred kilos of gold meant for the Reichsbank. Diverted in the chaos of the bombings. Your colonel hid it before he died. You were his driver. You know where he went."

Krause's face went gray. "That secret will kill me."

"That secret is the only thing keeping you alive. Once you sell it, you'll be free. Money in your pocket, papers in your hand. I can have you on a train to Switzerland by morning."

The German's fingers found the edge of the pouch, pulling it across the table with painful slowness. He hefted it once, twice, his rough hands turning the leather over.

"The colonel trusted me," he said finally. "More than he trusted the others. He knew the war was lost. Knew the gold would never reach Berlin. He wanted it to go somewhere it might matter."

"And he told you where."

Krause nodded slowly. "He had a map. Tore it in two before he died, gave me the piece that showed the approach. Said if I ever needed saving, I was to find the landmark and trust it to lead me home."

"Where's your half?"

"Where I stand when we close the deal. The rest is yours when I see silver in my hand." Krause's eyes grew hard, the drunk soldier's mask slipping to reveal something sharper beneath. "Ten thousand francs in gold. Not a coin less. Then I take you to the place, and you get what's in the ground."

Lucien felt his pulse quicken. Le Corbeau had said the maps were copies, laundry lists of false trails. But the driver was claiming firsthand knowledge, a torn original revealed only at the end.

"One problem," Lucien said. "The Reichsbank's ledgers still exist, and half the Gestapo is looking for them. Some come carrying names."

Krause's face flickered with something that might have been fear, might have been calculation. "I've covered my tracks. No one knows I go to see him."

"Then see him now. Off the record. You give me something real, something I can verify, and I'll bring your payment tomorrow night. Full price. No games."

The room suddenly felt colder, as if the building itself had taken a breath, and Lucien saw Krause's eyes shift to the door over his shoulder. He didn't turn. He knew better. He simply watched the fear bloom in the deserter's face, watched the man's hands begin to tremble around the pouch.

"You brought them," Krause whispered. "You brought them here."

"I brought no one."

But the words were too late. The café's doors crashed open, and suddenly the room was full of field-gray uniforms, SS men with machine pistols cutting through the smoke and the screams. Lucien dove sideways, his chair splintering as a burst of automatic fire chewed through the table where he'd been sitting.

Krause lunged for the back window, smashing through it in a shower of glass, and Lucien was right behind him, rolling through the shatterd frame onto the cobbled alley beyond. Shots followed them, ricocheting off stone, and he heard Krause grunt, saw the man stumble against a wall, his hand pressed to a spreading stain on his thigh.

"Run," Krause gasped, shoving something into Lucien's chest. "You want to know where he's buried? The Butte. La Butte. Now run!"

Lucien didn't need to be told twice. He sprinted down the alley as the SS boots hammered the pavement behind him, the torn paper crumpled in his fist. Another burst of fire, and he heard a wet sound and a final cry—not his own.

He didn't look back. He knew what he'd see.

---

By the time Lucien reached the safety of Barbès, breathing hard in the doorway of a shuttered boulangerie, his hands were shaking around the fragment of paper. Krause's final gift: half a map, edges rough and torn, stained with the German's blood.

He unfolded it in the gray afternoon light, his fingers tracing the pencil lines and folded creases. There was a curve of street, a triangle of green, and a single word scrawled in faded ink beneath a hand-drawn X.

*La Butte.*

Lucien closed his eyes. Montmartre's sacred hill. A hundred streets, a thousand stairways, and every meter of it crawling with German patrols and informants.

He had traded a dead man's secret for a location that could mean anything.

And Sabine and Camille were waiting for answers.