Read Chapter 26: The Pawn's Return

The pawnshop bell was a thin, miserable thing, like a bird dying of thirst. Étienne pushed the door open with his shoulder, keeping his weight off his bad ankle, and the smell of old dust and cheaper lives closed around him. The counter was scarred mahogany, the display cases behind it mostly empty—a few wedding rings, a brass locket, a tarnished silver christening cup. The kind of items men sold when they had nothing left to sell.

Maurice appeared from behind a velvet curtain, fat fingers knotted at his belt. His eyes went narrow when he saw Étienne, then wide. “You.” The word came out like an accusation.

“I’m here for the watch.” Étienne kept his voice flat, even. He leaned his hand on the counter to take the weight off his ankle, and the pain shot up his leg like a wire pulled tight. “My father’s. I gave it to you months ago.”

Maurice did not move. His fingers worked at his belt buckle, a nervous habit Étienne had seen a hundred times. “People have been asking about you.”

“I’m sure they have.” Étienne reached into his coat and produced the pawn ticket. He slid it across the scarred wood. “Cash out. That’s the ticket, that’s the number, and you know the piece. Let’s not make this complicated.”

Maurice looked at the ticket for a long moment. Then he sighed, heavy as a man lifting a coffin, and turned to the safe in the back wall. The combination dial clicked under his fat thumb. Étienne watched the curtain behind the counter twitch, and for a second, he thought he saw a shadow move beyond it. Just the light, he told himself. Just the harbor light through the grimy window.

Maurice came back with a soft leather pouch, worn at the edges. He placed it on the counter but did not push it across. “You know what that watch is worth to the right buyer.”

“It’s not for sale.”

“Everything’s for sale, Morel.”

Étienne took the pouch. He did not open it. He did not need to verify—Maurice had never cheated him on the small things, only on the large ones. He slipped the pouch into his inside pocket, where it rested against his ribs like a second heart. His father’s hands had worn that watch for thirty years. The same hands that had taught him to write ledgers by candlelight, that had shown him how to spot a forged signature by the hesitation in the pen stroke. His father had been a fool, in the end. Honest to the bone and dead of a heart attack at fifty-two, leaving nothing but debts and a son who learned the wrong lessons from the right man.

Étienne had learned everything from his father except how to walk away clean.

“You need a doctor,” Maurice said, nodding at Étienne’s leg. The ankle had swollen inside his boot until the leather creaked with every step.

“I need a boat.”

Maurice laughed, a wet sound. “Plenty of boats in Marseille. All of them belong to somebody who wants you dead.” He leaned over the counter, and his voice dropped to something almost kind. “There was a man in here yesterday. Corsican. Scar across his cheek like someone drew a line through his face. Asked about you. Said you’d be coming to collect a watch.” He straightened, wiping his hands on his apron. “I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. But he didn’t believe me. He’s the kind who doesn’t believe anyone.”

Étienne’s fingers tightened on the pouch in his pocket. The scar-faced Corsican. He’d known the pawnshop was a risk. He’d told himself the man had no reason to watch a broken-down shop in the Fourth Arrondissement, that Moreau’s men could not cover every hole in the city. But Moreau and Lenoir and Guérini were not working separately anymore. They were one machine now, and Étienne was the only gear that didn’t fit.

“When?” he asked.

“Yesterday evening. He waited two hours, smoking by the window. Then he left.” Maurice shrugged. “Maybe he gave up. Maybe he didn’t.”

Étienne turned toward the door. Every step was a question his ankle answered with white-hot certainty. He had to find somewhere to sit, somewhere to splint the leg, somewhere to think. Paoli’s territory was across the port, a crawl he wasn’t sure he could manage. But the cathedral was closer—Notre-Dame de la Garde, the Good Mother, looking down on all the sinners of Marseille. The priests there did not ask questions. They took confession and offered absolution, and if you slipped through the side door and down the hill, you could lose yourself in the narrow streets of Le Panier for hours.

He pushed out into the salt air and stopped.

Two men stood across the street, leaning against a Peugeot that had no business being parked outside a pawnshop. One of them, a barrel-chested dockworker with a nose that had been broken more than once, was reading a newspaper. The other, younger, sharper, was watching Étienne with the patient attention of a man paid to wait.

Étienne knew them. Not by name. By the cut of their coats, the way they stood with their weight forward, the way they watched the street and not the buildings. They were Corsican. Paoli’s men.

His stomach dropped like a stone in the harbor.

He did not look at them. He did not hesitate. He turned left at a pace that was not running but was not walking either, and he made it to the corner of the Rue de la République before the young one called out behind him.

“Morel.”

Étienne kept moving.

“Morel!” Louder now. Insistent. “Paoli wants to see you. He wants to talk.”

Paoli wants to talk. That was the phrase men used before they put you in a car and drove you somewhere no one would find you. Étienne had heard it from the other side—he had been the one in the office during interrogations, taking notes while the customs officers asked their questions and the men from the docks squirmed.

He reached the corner. The street opened in front of him, a maze of apartment blocks and bakeries and fish markets. If he could reach the alley between the pharmacy and the butcher’s—if he could just—

The barrel-chested one stepped out from behind a parked delivery truck, blocking his path.

“He only wants to talk,” the man said. His voice was low, almost gentle. “That’s all. You don’t have to be afraid.”

Étienne laughed. It came out cracked and wrong. “The last time someone told me that, I ended up in a crawl space under a warehouse floor.”

The man’s eyes didn’t change. “That was Guérini’s men. We’re not Guérini’s men.”

“You work for Paoli. And Paoli, I find out, might work for anyone.”

The younger one had come up behind him now. Étienne could hear his footsteps, measured and unhurried. They had him bracketed, the way the customs officers had taught him to bracket a suspect—one ahead, one behind, no room to run.

His hand moved inside his coat. Not to the watch. To the ledger.

But the ledger was not with him. It was in the pawnbroker’s back room, in the place Maurice used for items he did not want the police to find. Étienne had left it there days ago, a copy in his own hand, insurance against a future he now could not reach.

The barrel-chested man took a step forward. “Come with us. Now. And maybe we can fix this before it gets worse.”

Étienne looked past him, up the hill toward the cathedral. He could feel the watch against his ribs with every heartbeat. Papa’s watch. The only clean thing he had left.

Then he lowered his head and walked toward the Peugeot, because there was no other road left open to him. And as the car door closed, sealed him in, he began to plan how he would talk his way out of this one.

He had talked his way out of everything else.