Read Chapter 29: The Hunt for Truth

The dawn came gray and oily off the Vieux-Port, the light struggling through a sky full of diesel smoke and salt. Étienne kept his head down as he crossed the Quai des Belges, the pawnbroker's ticket burning in his pocket like a confession. He'd been a fool to go back for the watch—a sentimental fool—and now Paoli's men had his face fixed in their minds.

He made for the narrow streets behind the Opéra, where the morning fish delivery trucks groaned up the cobbles and the whores were just closing their shutters. No tail that he could spot. But he'd learned to distrust his own eyes.

The apartment building on Rue Haxo smelled of cabbage and Gauloises, the same as every other building in this quarter. He climbed to the third floor, stopped cold.

The door was ajar.

His hand went to the knife in his jacket—Paoli's men had taken his gun, another humiliation to stack with the rest—and he eased the door open with the flat of his palm.

Claire stood at the window, her back to him, watching the street below. Her hair was shorter than when he'd last seen her, cut tight to her skull like a boy's. She turned when the floorboard creaked.

"You're alive," she said. Flat. No accusation, no relief. Just a statement of fact.

"Last I checked." He closed the door behind him, slid the bolt. "You were supposed to be in Genoa."

"I got as far as the station. Paoli's courier talked too much on the platform—told me he had orders to make sure I boarded. Not that I stayed there. Orders from him meant something was wrong with the plan." She crossed her arms. "So I came back. What did you do?"

Étienne sat on the edge of the bed—her bed, the one they'd shared twice, the sheets long since stripped and laundered by a woman who didn't ask questions. He told her everything. The trap at the Roquette. Moreau and Lenoir standing shoulder to shoulder with Guérini like old friends at a cards table. The crawl space. The watch. Paoli's men at the pawnshop, the Corsican's confession about Vidal.

He didn't tell her about the bluff. Not yet.

Claire listened without interrupting, a habit he'd always admired in her—a rarity in a city where everyone talked over everyone else. When he finished, she was silent for a long moment, chewing the inside of her cheek.

"You told Paoli you had copies with journalists."

"I had to say something. He had me at a table with his knife in reach."

"So you've made yourself a target for three different groups of killers, and the only thing protecting you is a lie that any of them can check by making a single telephone call."

"I'm aware."

Claire moved to the small kitchenette, poured two glasses of wine from a bottle that had been open for days. She handed him one. "I didn't come back to run," she said. "I came back because I've been thinking about what you said. About the ledger. About the names in it."

"I told you too much."

"You told me enough to know you're in over your head." She sipped her wine. "But I also know you're the only one who's kept his head so far. That counts for something."

Étienne drank. The wine was sharp, vinegary. "I need to get to the Banque du Sud. Account 447-19. Vidal's journal gave me enough to know the money's moving through there, but I need paper. Actual records. If I can get those—"

"Then what? You're going to walk into Lenoir's station house and lay them on his desk? Étienne, the man runs the precinct. Whatever evidence you bring, he'll bury it before you've finished your sentence."

"Not Lenoir's desk. A journalist's."

Claire set her glass down with a click. "You said that to Paoli as a bluff."

"It's a bluff until it isn't."

She studied him for a long moment, her dark eyes searching his face. He'd forgotten how she could do that—make him feel like a document she was trying to authenticate, checking the watermark, the weave of the paper.

"There's a woman," Claire said slowly. "At *La Provence*. Muriel Courtet. She covered the docks in '58, before they moved her to the crime desk. She's the one who broke the story about the customs officers taking bribes under the old prefect."

"You know her?"

"I know of her. She's got a reputation for not backing down." Claire picked up her glass again. "But you'd need to give her something solid. She won't print accusations from a man on the run—not without proof she can verify herself."

"That's why I need the bank records. The account numbers. Signatures. If I can show her the money trail that connects Guérini's operation to Lenoir's police work—"

"Lenoir's *name*," Claire corrected. "Vidal's journal said someone else might be using it."

Étienne nodded slowly. That detail had been gnawing at him too. The chief inspector was dirty; he'd seen it with his own eyes at the Roquette warehouse. But if there was another figure operating under his name, someone who had enough power to command officers like Moreau...

"Then we find out who's really pulling the strings," he said.

"We?"

"Claire. You should be in Genoa. You came back—"

"Because I want to help you finish this." Her voice was quiet, but there was steel in it. "Not because I'm running from Paoli. I've spent enough years being afraid of men like him. I want to see the look on his face when he realizes the little clerk he killed for took everything from him."

Étienne looked at her. She was younger than him, but the lines around her mouth had deepened in the months he'd known her. She'd lost as much as he had to these men, maybe more. He thought of the ledger, the names scrawled in Vidal's cramped hand, the web of money that connected every level of the port like rigging on a ship.

"If we do this," he said, "there's no going back. No pretending we're innocent bystanders who got caught up in someone else's fight. We're declaring war on every faction in Marseille."

"I know."

"And if we fail—"

"We won't." She reached across the table, took his hand. Her fingers were cool. "But if we do, I'd rather fail knowing we tried than live the rest of my life watching over my shoulder for Paoli's men."

Étienne squeezed her hand. For the first time in three days, he felt something other than the cold terror of the hunted.

"All right," he said. "There's another thing. The photos."

Claire raised an eyebrow.

"Of Lenoir. I told you about them once—the ones I took of him meeting with Guérini's lieutenants at the dock. I left the film with Vidal. He wrote about it in the journal, but the negatives were never recovered from his apartment."

"Paoli's men cleaned it out?"

"Or Lenoir's. Either way, they're gone. But I still have the original receipts from the photo lab where I developed them. The lab keeps copies of every job for a year—police regulations, they say, though no one's ever enforced it."

"You think the lab will just hand them over?"

Étienne smiled for the first time in days. "I kept my receipts in the ledger's false back. Invisible to anyone who didn't know where to look. The lab doesn't have them yet. But they will."

Claire's eyes brightened with understanding. "You're going to present yourself as a customer who's picking up a long-overdue order."

"The clerk at the lab is a woman named Béatrice. She doesn't ask questions, and she doesn't remember faces. I've used her before for other things—always on commission, always with a wink." He stood, drained his glass. "You stay here. If I'm not back by noon—"

"I won't stay here." Claire rose too. "If you're going into that district, you need someone watching your back. Paoli's posted men at every intersection between here and the port."

"They'll recognize you too. You just came back from one of their cars."

"Which means they'll have already reported that I'm here. By noon, every man in Marseille will know I'm calling this apartment home." She grabbed her coat from the hook by the door. "So we go together, and we go now, before word spreads."

Étienne hesitated. Every instinct screamed at him to keep her out of this—she'd been the one clean thing in his life, and dragging her into the blood he was already knee-deep in felt like a betrayal of everything he'd tried to protect.

But he'd seen what happened when he acted alone. The Roquette trap. The pawnshop. Each time he'd walked into someone else's game with only his wits and his forged papers, and each time he'd barely escaped with his life.

"Fine," he said. "But if this goes wrong—"

"It won't." She pulled open the door. "Because we're not going to be the ones who make mistakes this time."

They went out into the gray morning, two figures blending into the wet concrete of Marseille, carrying between them a ledger's worth of secrets and a plan that could burn the whole city down.