Read Chapter 10: The Missing Dockworker

The morning came with a gray port sky and no Vidal.

Étienne arrived at the customs house at his usual hour, coffee in hand, already rehearsing the lies he would tell about the night ahead. Berth seven. A shipment of Tunisian olive oil, according to the manifest he would prepare. The oil would be real—barrels of it, stacked neat as soldiers—but nestled among them, wrapped in waxed cloth and buried deep, would be the heroin.

He pushed through the glass door and checked the clerk's desk near the dock entrance. Empty.

Vidal was always early. The dockworker took pride in it, always there with his clipboard before the foreman arrived, smoking a cigarette and watching the cranes stretch awake. But the chair sat vacant now, the desk impossibly tidy, nothing but a worn pencil cup and the faint watermark of a coffee ring from months of use.

Étienne stood there longer than he should have, coffee cooling in his hand.

"Morel." Vasseur's voice came from behind him, clipped and impatient. "I need the Beaumont invoice reconciled before noon. Stop gawking at the furniture."

"Yes, sir."

He moved to his desk and began the mechanical work of sorting invoices, but his mind stayed fixed on the empty chair. He was still staring at it when a woman burst through the customs house door.

She was small, dark-haired, wrapped in a thin coat that did nothing for the March chill. Her eyes were red-rimmed and wild, scanning the room until they landed on him.

"Monsieur Morel?" She crossed the floor in quick, desperate strides. "You're Étienne Morel?"

He stood, uncertain. "Yes."

"My husband. Gérard Vidal." The words came out cracked. "He didn't come home last night."

Étienne's stomach dropped into the cellar.

"I'm sorry, madame—"

"He talked about you." She gripped the edge of his desk, knuckles white. "He said you were a good man. That you'd know what to do if anything—" Her voice broke. "He didn't come home."

Vasseur appeared at the doorway of his office, watching with narrow eyes. "Morel. Take that somewhere else. This is a place of work."

Étienne guided the woman into the corridor, past the rows of filing cabinets, to the small alcove by the stairwell where workers kept their coats. She was trembling.

"When did you last see him, madame?"

"He left yesterday morning for his shift. Same as always." She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. "He never came home. I phoned the foreman this morning—they said he never showed. His lunch pail is still in the cupboard. He never goes anywhere without his lunch pail."

"Have you been to the police?"

Her face twisted. "They told me to wait. That men disappear from the docks sometimes and turn up drunk in a gutter two days later. They said they'd file a report and I should check the hospitals."

Étienne's blood turned to ice. The police were already treating this as routine, as nothing. Either they genuinely didn't care—or they had been told not to care.

"There are places he likes," he said carefully. "Cafés after shift. Friends he drinks with—"

"He has no friends he drinks with." Her voice was sharp with sudden bitterness. "Gérard wasn't the type. He went to work. He came home. He read his paper. He—" She stopped, and a sob escaped her. "He was a simple man, monsieur. He didn't deserve—"

She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.

Étienne stood in the narrow alcove, surrounded by the smell of wet wool and floor wax, and felt the weight of what he'd done settle into his bones. He had told Vidal to stay silent. He had warned him. And Vidal, stubborn and righteous, had walked off to investigate on his own anyway.

But Étienne had also told him about Moreau. He had confirmed the inspector's corruption. He had given Vidal something to chase—a thread that led straight into the heart of the mob's fishing nets.

He thought of the two Corsican enforcers watching his house. Of Guérini's smooth voice in Vasseur's office, demanding loyalty. Of the heroin at berth seven, waiting for tonight.

"Do you have somewhere to stay?" he asked. "Someone who can sit with you today?"

"My sister. In La Joliette." She looked at him with desperate hope. "But you'll find him, won't you? He said you'd be able to help. He trusted you."

The word landed like a fist.

"Yes," Étienne heard himself say. "I'll find him."

He walked her out to the street, watched her disappear into the crowd of dockworkers streaming toward the gates, then stood at the curb with his hands in his pockets. The port hummed around him—the rattle of trolleys, the deep call of ship horns, the shouts of stevedores moving cargo. Life continued. Work continued. The machinery of the port didn't care that a man had vanished.

But Étienne cared.

He cared because Vidal had been a witness to Moreau's corruption. He cared because Vidal knew things—about Étienne's forgeries, about the network, about the papers that moved cargo that didn't exist. And he cared because Vidal's disappearance had left a loose thread, and loose threads were what undid everything.

But as he stood there, the guilt slowly crystallized into something harder.

Vidal was gone. The police weren't investigating. The mob had taken him, or Moreau had, or someone else in the chain of corruption that Étienne had helped build with his careful, beautiful lies. And the authorities had written him off within twelve hours of his vanishing.

Étienne could find out what happened to him. Not by shouting for justice—that path was closed, walled off by bribes and threats and the taciturn silence of the docks. No. He could find out the way he found out about everything: quietly. Patiently. Using the paper trail.

He walked back into the customs house and sat down at his desk. Vasseur was still in his office, door open, watching. Étienne pulled a ledger from the pile, opened it, and began to work.

He knew the movements of every shipment that passed through the port. He knew which guards stood where, which corridors had blind spots, which clerks could be trusted and which could be bought. He knew the schedules of the night crews, the manifests of the cargo ships, the small irregularities that no one else noticed because no one else had spent fifteen years staring at paper until the ink moved and breathed.

Somewhere in that web of information, Vidal's disappearance had left a mark.

He started with the gate logs from yesterday evening. Vidal's shift ended at six. He had clocked out—Étienne found the entry, neat as always, the 7 written with Vidal's distinctive straight downstroke. So he had left the port normally. After that, he would have walked toward the tram stop on the Rue de Lyon, following the same route he'd taken for years.

Étienne checked the incident reports from the evening shift. Nothing. No accidents, no disturbances, no fights reported near the docks. He checked the police communication logs, the ones they shared with the port office. Nothing.

A man didn't simply vanish between the dock gates and the tram stop. But a man could be made to vanish. Into a car. Into a warehouse. Into the sea.

Étienne sat back, fingers drumming on the ledger's spine. Guérini had summoned him yesterday afternoon. Vidal had likely gone to the police yesterday evening. The timing was too close. Too neat. Guérini had men everywhere; it was entirely possible that Vidal's complaint had been logged and passed along before the ink dried.

But there was another possibility. Moreau. The inspector had been seen taking a bribe from Bartoli. If Vidal had gone to him directly, tried to confront him— Moreau would have had no choice but to silence him somehow. An inspector couldn't leave witnesses to his corruption walking around the port.

Either way, the mob held the secret. Guérini would know what happened to Vidal.

Tonight, Étienne would be in Guérini's operation. Berth seven. The heroin shipment. He would be standing among them, proving his loyalty, and he could ask questions—careful ones, casual ones, the kind that seemed like idle curiosity rather than investigation.

The thought sickened him. But it also sharpened something in his chest.

He spent the rest of the morning chasing Vidal's paper trail. He visited the gate office, spoke to two night guards who remembered Vidal leaving at his usual time. He walked to the tram stop himself, timing the distance—nine minutes at a normal pace. He spoke to the tobacconist on the corner, who knew Vidal by sight but hadn't seen him yesterday evening.

The trail stopped at the tram stop. Clean. Tidy. As if Vidal had simply stepped aboard and never arrived.

Étienne stood at the stop as the noon sun broke through the clouds, watching the rails shimmer in the heat haze. A tram clattered past, empty of passengers, headed toward the city center.

Behind him, the port growled and clanged. Ahead, Marseille waited, indifferent.

He would go to berth seven tonight. He would pass the heroin through. He would smile at Guérini's men and accept their congratulations. And while he was among them, he would learn what they had done with Gérard Vidal.

If Vidal was dead, Étienne would carry that guilt to his grave. But if he was alive somewhere, held by the mob—there might still be time. And if the mob had killed him, then Étienne would know that too. He would file that knowledge away in the ledger he kept in his head, the one no one else knew about, and when the time came to escape this life, he would have a weapon ready.

His wife thought he was losing himself. His son thought he was a coward. The police shadowed him, and the mob owned him. But Étienne Morel was still a man who noticed things. And no one in this city knew better than him that even a silenced man left traces.

He turned from the tram stop and walked back toward the port, toward his desk, toward the night that waited for him at berth seven.

The afternoon passed in a blur of forms and invoices. At five o'clock, Vasseur emerged from his office, hat in hand, and paused beside Étienne's desk.

"The shipment tonight," Vasseur said, quiet enough that the other clerks couldn't hear. "You're prepared?"

"Fully."

Vasseur nodded once, a clipped gesture of approval. "Guérini's men will meet you at berth seven at nine. Don't be late." He walked toward the door, then stopped. "And Morel—the dockworker who went missing. Vidal. Stay away from that. The family will make noise, but it will pass. Understand?"

Étienne kept his expression flat. "I understand."

When Vasseur was gone, he sat for a long time in the emptying office, watching the light fade from the windows. Then he took his coat, his ledger, and his careful mask of obedience, and walked into the evening.