Read Chapter 30: The Journalist's Gamble

The address was a print shop on the Rue de la République, a narrow storefront wedged between a tobacconist and a shuttered haberdashery. Étienne had found the name in Vidal’s journal, written in the margins beside a list of dates that meant nothing until he’d cross-referenced them against the ledger. Press runs. Deadlines. The rhythm of a man who thought in ink.

The journalist’s name was Marcel Aubanel, and he wrote for a small Resistance-era paper that still believed in the power of the printed word. Étienne had read three of his articles in the library, each one a careful needle of accusation aimed at the port authority’s swollen underbelly. None had landed. Now Étienne understood why.

He stood in the shadow of a delivery truck across the street, the package heavy under his arm. The ledger pages were wrapped in oilcloth, sealed with wax he’d melted from a candle in his rented room. Inside were copies of Vidal’s journal entries, the account numbers, the dates, the names. Everything he had. Everything except the watch in his pocket, which ticked against his thigh like a second heart.

The print shop’s door opened. A man stepped out, fortyish, with the sallow complexion of someone who spent too many hours under fluorescent light. He wore a rumpled jacket and carried a canvas satchel. He locked the door behind him and started walking toward the Boulevard de la Libération.

Étienne followed.

He caught up with him at a café on the corner, where Aubanel ordered a coffee and sat at a table with a view of the street. Étienne took the seat across from him, sliding the package onto the table between them.

Aubanel looked up, his eyes moving over Étienne’s face with the quick assessment of a man who read people for a living. “You have the wrong table, Monsieur.”

“You’re Marcel Aubanel. You wrote the pieces on the Port Autonome procurement fraud in April.”

Aubanel’s expression didn’t change, but his hand tightened around his cup. “Who’s asking?”

“A customs clerk who’s tired of being a corpse.” Étienne kept his voice low, his eyes on the street beyond Aubanel’s shoulder. “I have something for you. Proof of a money-laundering operation running through the Banque du Sud. Names. Account numbers. Dates. It will make the April pieces look like a parking ticket.”

Aubanel looked at the package, then back at Étienne. “Why me?”

“Because you’re the only one still publishing the truth in this city. And because you don’t have a price.”

A thin smile crossed Aubanel’s face. “Everyone has a price, Monsieur. Some of us just haven’t been offered enough yet.” He reached for the package. “What do you want in return?”

“Nothing. Publish it. That’s all I ask.”

Aubanel weighed the package in his hands, then tucked it into his satchel. “I’ll need to verify these records. If they’re real—” He paused, looking at Étienne with new interest. “Where did you get these?”

“From a dead man.”

Aubanel nodded slowly, as if that answered more than it asked. He finished his coffee in one swallow and stood. “I’ll be in touch. Don’t call the print shop. I’ll find you.”

“How?”

“I’m a journalist, Monsieur. Finding people is what I do.”

Étienne watched him walk away, the satchel swinging at his hip, carrying everything Étienne had left to give. He felt lighter and heavier at the same time, like a man who had just thrown his last coin into a fountain and was already wondering if he could swim.

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Two days passed. Étienne spent them in a room above a bakery in the Panier district, watching the street through a gap in the shutters. He ate bread that was still warm from the ovens below and drank coffee that tasted of chicory and regret. He thought about Claire, somewhere in Italy, and wondered if she was safe. He thought about Paoli, and the look in his eyes when Étienne had walked away. He thought about the heroin shipment, now four days out, and the clock that was running faster than he could count.

On the third morning, he found the car.

It was parked in the alley behind the print shop, a black Citroën that had been there long enough for the windows to fog. Étienne approached it slowly, his hand in his pocket around the knife he’d taken from the Roquette warehouse. The street was empty. The alley smelled of garbage and diesel.

He peered through the driver’s window.

Marcel Aubanel was still in the seat, his hands on the wheel at ten and two, as if he’d stopped to think before driving on. His eyes were open, fixed on something in the middle distance that no longer existed. The canvas satchel was gone. A thin line of blood had dried from the corner of his mouth to his collar.

Étienne stepped back, his breath catching. He looked up and down the alley, but there was no one. No sound except the distant rumble of the port and the cry of gulls.

He forced himself to look again. The wound was neat, professional. A single shot to the base of the skull, the kind that left no mess and asked no questions. This was not a beating from Paoli’s men, who preferred to make examples with their hands. This was the work of someone who wanted the body found but not the story told.

The package was gone. The ledger copies, the journal, the account numbers—all of it had been lifted from Aubanel’s satchel before his body had even cooled.

Étienne backed away from the car, his mind racing. The journalist had been careful. He hadn’t told anyone about their meeting, Étienne was sure of it. He was a professional, trained to protect his sources. The only way anyone could have known about the package was if—

He stopped. The thought was a fishhook in his throat.

Aubanel had walked away from the café, satchel in hand. He would have gone back to his office. He would have opened the package, started verifying the records. And somewhere in that process, someone had found out.

Not an informant. Not a leak.

Someone had been watching Aubanel long before Étienne had arrived. Someone who knew that Marcel Aubanel was patient enough to keep digging, and that one day, someone would hand him the proof he needed. Someone who had been waiting for exactly that moment.

Étienne thought of Vidal. Of the journal entry that mentioned Lenoir’s name in a hand that didn’t quite match the rest. Of the account at the Banque du Sud, and the question of who else might be reading the numbers.

He looked at the dead journalist, still holding the wheel like a man who believed he had time.

Then he walked. He walked until the alley was far behind him, until the Citroën was a memory and the port was a smear of cranes against the grey sky. He walked through streets he knew and streets he didn’t, until he found himself at the edge of the Vieux-Port, looking at the water that led to the sea that led to everywhere else.

The corruption was not a web. It was a tide, and it rose to cover everything.

Étienne pulled his father’s watch from his pocket and looked at its face, ticking through the minutes of a life that was not his. He knew one thing with certainty now. The copies were gone. The evidence was ash. And the only proof he had left was the original ledger, still hidden in the wall of his old apartment, and the account number 447-19 that Vidal had written in his beautiful, deceptive hand.

But if Aubanel had been watched, if the police had known about the journalist and his suspicions, then they knew about the ledger too. They knew about Vidal, about the cooperative, about the money that had been laundered through accounts with numbers that were still warm in Étienne’s memory.

They knew everything.

Except where he was. And that was the only advantage he had left.

He looked up at the sky, where the clouds were gathering over the sea. Four days until the heroin shipment. Four days until he had to act, or vanish.

He put the watch back in his pocket and started walking.