Murder Below Montparnasse Read Online Free PDF

was Saj’s voice, tired and confused.
    “There’s a robbery involved. Say nothing else until.…”
    A loud buzz. The speakerphone disconnected.

Monday, 9:30
P.M.
    M ORGANE WATCHED HER accomplice, Flèche, peer out the half-open blue shutter. In the moonlight, tendrils of ivy curved over the potted geraniums on the window ledge. Morgane hated working with amateurs. Amateurs with hairy palms, her uncle would say, so lazy they grew hair on their palms.
    Where the hell was Servier? Twenty minutes late already and they didn’t have much time to hand over the goods. Her ears perked up as the gate clicked open below.
    Flèche shook his head. “Just the hipster with a new conquest, like clockwork.” He yawned, running a matchstick under his fingernail. A pigeon cooed from the low rooftop of a two-story house across the courtyard. “Bores me stiff.”
    “That’s a good thing,” Morgane said. Her shirt collar, damp with perspiration, weighed on her neck. She gathered her lank brown hair in a twist and clipped it up on her head.
    “Too quiet. I don’t like it.”
    Wary, she checked the walkie-talkie signal. All bars lit. “Nothing from control. Nerves got you?” Was he worried about the talkative owner of the
café-tabac
around the corner, where he’d bought cigarettes an hour ago? Like she’d told him not to. Never leave a presence, she’d warned him. “You think there’s a spotter?”
    “I mean it’s dead here,” Flèche said. “Old people, kids practicing piano after dinner, the retiree on the ground floor who never goes out. Spooks me.”
    “She’s agoraphobic.” That was the one Morgane worried about. An insomniac who telephoned her brother in Marseilles every night. A watcher with eyes like a crow’s. “You’re correct. It is dead quiet. The perfect place to hide.” She’d told him time and again. The 14th arrondissement was ideal, residential, a mix of working-class and arty types. “You know, at the turn of the century, the tsar’s Okhrana had more secret agents hidden in this quartier than in Saint Petersburg.”
    “
Merde
. Don’t start with the history lessons again.”
    “Hasn’t changed much. These people mind their business. Working-class solidarity.”
    He flicked his cigarette ash in the Ricard ashtray, stuck the cigarette back in his mouth and inhaled. In the dark, the redorange glow from the burning tip made his face look ethereal. “A bunch of Commies.”
    She rolled her eyes. The Wall came down in 1989. “Who calls anyone Communists any more?”
    Nearby lay Parc Montsouris, sloping grass hills and the reservoir, just beyond
la petite ceinture
—the abandoned and overgrown rail tracks edging the old Montrouge quartier. She’d grown up in the clustered lanes of small houses. Generations of her family had been dairy farmers here. Now almost all the farms were gone.
    But she knew the quartier in the marrow of her bones, from the Montparnasse artist ateliers on rue Campagne Première—including famous ones, like Gaugin’s and Picasso’s—where publishing bohos now lived, to the Catacombs at Place Denfert-Rochereau, the only tourist attraction. The screams piercing the night from the psychiatric hospital of Sainte Anne. The nineteenth-century prison of La Santé hunkered scab-like on the fragrant lime-tree-lined Boulevard Arago.
    A good place to lie low. Wait for the drop. And strategic. Access to the Périphérique ring road less than two kilometers away. A quick twenty minutes to the baggage handlerconnection at Orly Airport. Morgane could almost taste success.
    The walkie-talkie squawked. “Painting arrived?”
    Morgane’s lips pursed. “Not yet,” she responded. Late. Even using the van, he was late for a simple snatch-and-grab. She hit the talk button. “Complications?”
    “Unclear. We’re in a holding pattern.”
    But the cargo plane wasn’t. This was their only chance until next week.
    “Keep me updated.” The walkie-talkie channel went