Read Chapter 5: Family Dinner

The smell of Claire’s daube simmering on the stove usually meant home. Tonight it meant a tribunal.

Étienne had barely settled into his chair when Claire set his plate down with a thump. The ceramic cracked against the oak. She slid the salt cellar across the table without meeting his eyes, then took her seat opposite him. Their son, Luc, dunked bread into his stew, oblivious to the weather front moving through the room.

“You’re late again,” Claire said. Not an accusation. A statement of fact she intended to test.

Étienne reached for the wine bottle. “Vasseur had me inventorying the night shift. The port never sleeps.”

“It’s Thursday. You were late Monday and Wednesday, too.”

“It’s an audit month.” He poured himself a generous glass. “Everything comes due before the quarter ends.”

Claire’s knife cut through the beef with surgical precision. “You used to come home smelling of paper and salt. Now you smell of nervous sweat and cheap café coffee.”

Luc looked up. “Papa, why are your hands shaking?”

Étienne lowered his hand from the glass. He hadn’t noticed the tremble. “Cold. The harbor wind.”

Claire stared at him over the candle flame. In the flicker she looked like the woman who had once known every thought in his head. Now he could see her scanning for the gaps he’d carved between them.

“Your father didn’t come to dinner tonight,” Claire said. “Again.”

“He’s busy.”

“He’s avoiding me.” She set her fork down. “He knew I’d ask about the watch.”

Étienne felt the floor shift beneath him. He’d told Claire he lost the watch in a card game. She hadn’t believed him then. He could see she still didn’t.

“I told you—I misplaced it while running after the tram.”

“You wear your father’s watch every day for twenty years, then one day you misplace it.” Claire tilted her head. “You never run after trams. You say they make you look undignified.”

Luc giggled.

Étienne forced a smile and reached over to ruffle his son’s hair. “Your mother remembers too much.”

Claire didn’t smile back. “There’s a question I haven’t asked you in a while, Étienne. I want to ask it now.”

He lifted his wine glass to buy a moment. The table had stopped feeling like home. It felt like an office, and Claire was Vasseur’s boss.

“Ask it,” he said.

“Is there another woman?”

The question landed like a dropped anchor. Part of him wanted to laugh. Another woman. If only she knew—his secret companion was a ledger hidden beneath his floorboards, full of numbers that weighed more than any mistress. The other woman was the law, and the law wanted to crawl into bed with him.

“No,” he said. The word came out steady. Honest.

Claire watched him. “Then why don’t you sleep?”

“I sleep fine.”

“You whisper in your sleep. Names. Numbers.” She picked up her wine. “Last night you said ‘manifest’ three times in a row. I know what that work means. You used to never bring it home.”

Étienne’s throat tightened. He hadn’t known he talked in his sleep. A new leak in a hull already full of them.

“I’ll see the doctor if it worries you,” he said. “Maybe it’s the Mediterranean pressure.”

Behind them, the radiophone crackled softly from the kitchen. Marseille hummed outside the window, alive with the sounds of a city that never stopped trading.

Luc pushed his empty plate away. “Papa, will you take me to the harbor tomorrow? You promised.”

“I can’t tomorrow, Luc. Something’s come up.”

“You always say that.”

Claire looked away. The words hung in the air, a small defeat that echoed a larger one.

Étienne cleared the plates. He needed to move, to do something with his hands. Working the routine of the household kept the room from strangling him. When he returned from the kitchen, Claire had already retreated to the balcony with a cigarette. Through the glass doors he saw her silhouette against the deepening twilight, a woman standing at the edge of a marriage she sensed was tilting.

He sat on the sofa beside Luc, who was flipping through a worn copy of Jules Verne.

“What are you reading?”

“Twenty Thousand Leagues.” The boy looked up. “Everyone in that book is running away.”

Étienne’s chest ached. He kissed the top of his son’s head and sent him off to wash up. When the boy left, the apartment went quiet except for Claire’s soft exhalation on the balcony and the distant, syncopated rhythm of the harbor cranes.

Étienne pulled the curtain shut on the night. Then he froze.

Out on the street, double-parked beneath a burned-out lamppost, sat a dark Citroën. Engine off. Windows rolled down despite the cool evening. Two men inside. One of them smoked, the end of his cigarette a tiny orange signal from the city’s dark.

They weren’t the DST detective. This wasn’t the subtle work of police surveillance. The men were massive, built like dockworkers with suits that strained at the shoulders. Étienne recognized the shape of them from years watching men get made or unmade on Marseille’s docks.

Corsicans.

He let the curtain fall and stepped back from the window. His heart had begun to play its own percussion now.

Claire came inside, crushing her cigarette into the ashtray near the door. She saw his face and read something in it. Her eyes went narrow and careful.

“Who’s outside?” she asked.

“No one. Just the wind rattling the shutters.”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

He forced a smile that felt like a stranger’s mask. “I’m fine. Long day.”

Claire studied him for a long moment. Whatever she saw didn’t give her comfort. She turned and went to the bedroom, closing the door behind her without a goodnight.

Étienne stood alone in the dim light of the living room. He pulled aside the curtain a centimeter, just enough to confirm what he already knew.

The Citroën hadn’t moved.

Men like that didn’t stake out a customs clerk for pleasure. Someone in the network had flagged him. Maybe Vasseur delivered a report on his recent hesitation. Maybe Paoli and the Corsican faction had decided he needed a reminder that he belonged to them. The police watched him because he was a suspect. These men watched him because they owned him.

But inspection had always taught him one thing: a manifest can be altered, forged, rewritten. What appeared on paper did not always reflect the truth in the cargo hold.

He was both. And both sides now had eyes on his door.

Étienne looked at the floorboards beneath which he’d hidden the ledger, the cash, the pawn receipt. The secrets of a lifetime packed into the space where a man might store stale bread if he were poor enough.

He had thirty days on the watch. An even shorter countdown on the shipment. And now enforcers outside his window, run by men who did not accept resignations.

Claire’s light clicked off in the bedroom. The apartment settled into a dark hum.

Étienne unfolded a sheet of paper from his pocket—the café napkin where he’d scribbled Moreau’s contact number that afternoon. He stared at the ink, then at the window. Between the man who wanted him to speak and the men who wanted him silent, there existed only one route that didn’t end with cement shoes.

He turned off the lamp and stood by the window until the Citroën finally coughed to life and rolled away into the night.

But it returned before dawn. He saw it from the bathroom window, idling again under the dead lamppost. They weren’t leaving.

They were marking him.