Banquet of Beggars

by Chris Lloyd

Genres: Historical Fiction; World War I; World War II; Police Procedurals; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

THE BRAND NEW NOVEL IN THE AWARD-WINNING OCCUPATION SERIES, FEATURING DETECTIVE EDDIE GIRAL

In Paris 1940, survival means sacrifice. Like most in the city, Detective Eddie Giral has already lost so much under Occupation: the people he once loved, the job he once believed in.

And his latest investigation into the murder of a black-marketeer has made it clearer than ever: Eddie is no longer just catching criminals. He's working for them. Because when a German trader is the next to die, the authorities decide it's innocent civilians who will pay the price - unless Eddie can find the killer in time.

As hunger grows, tensions rise and a fierce rebellion brews, Eddie will tread a dark path between doing whatever it takes to live with the enemy... and also with himself.

*****

PRAISE FOR CHRIS LLOYD'S OCCUPATION SERIES:

'Ranks alongside Alan Furst and Philip Kerr ... Powerful stuff' SUNDAY TIMES

'A thoughtful, haunting thriller' MICK HERRON

'Such a powerful and morally nuanced crime novel. Both a gripping murder mystery and a vivid recreation of Paris under German Occupation' ANDREW TAYLOR

'It's up there with luminaries such as Philip Kerr, Sebastian Faulks and Manda Scott - in fact, it's probably better than all of those' DAVID YOUNG

'A haunting and eye-opening portrayal of life under occupation' ADELE PARKS

'Lloyd does a masterly job of conjuring a hungry, defeated Paris. Eddie is a convincing protagonist; a flawed man trying his best to be a good one' THE TIMES

Release date: August 15, 2024

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 368

Sample

‘A tense and gripping mystery which hums with menace and dark humour as well as immersing the reader in the life of occupied Paris.’

HWA Gold Crown Award

‘Terrific … chillingly evokes the horror of living under a brutal occupation.’

Sunday Times, Best Books of the Month

‘A brilliant, breathtaking tour de force … It’s up there with luminaries such as Philip Kerr, Sebastian Faulks and Manda Scott – in fact, it’s probably better than all of those.’

David Young

‘Lloyd’s Second World War Paris is rougher than Alan Furst’s, and Eddie Giral, his French detective, is way edgier than Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther … Ranks alongside both for its convincingly cloying atmosphere of a city subjugated to a foreign power, a plot that reaches across war-torn Europe and into the rifts in the Nazi factions, and a hero who tries to be a good man in a bad world. Powerful stuff.’

The Times

‘A thoughtful, haunting thriller.’

Mick Herron

‘A page-turning, morally complex thriller.’

Sunday Times, Best Historical Fiction Books of 2023

‘Excellent … In Eddie Giral, Lloyd has created a character reminiscent of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther, oozing with attitude and a conflicted morality that powers a complex, polished plot. Historical crime at its finest.’

Vaseem Khan

‘Such a powerful and morally nuanced crime novel … Both a gripping murder mystery and a vivid recreation of Paris under German Occupation.’

Andrew Taylor

‘The best kind of crime novel: gripping, thought-provoking and moving. In Detective Eddie Giral, Chris Lloyd has created a flawed hero not just for occupied Paris, but for our own times, too.’

Katherine Stansfield

‘A terrific read – put me in mind of Alan Furst and Philip Kerr … Gripping and well-paced. The period atmosphere is excellent.’

Mark Ellis

‘Monumentally impressive … I’m blown away. A truly wonderful book. If somebody’d given it to me and told me it was the latest Robert Harris, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Eddie Giral is a wonderful creation.’

Alis Hawkins

‘Tense, emotional, and vividly written.’

Woman’s Weekly

‘Lloyd does a masterly job of conjuring a hungry, defeated Paris. Eddie is a convincing protagonist; a flawed man trying his best to be a good one.’

The Times

‘A page-turning, morally complex thriller.’

Sunday Times, Best Historical Fiction Books of 2023

‘A haunting and eye-opening portrayal of life under Occupation.’

Adele Parks

‘Excellent.’

Nation Cymru

‘More than a historical crime novel, it’s a tour de force.’

Alis Hawkins

Three hours in and I was ready to kiss the cellar wall.

With my fingertips I traced the cold bricks for the dozenth time. Water from a leak somewhere had run down them and along the gridlines of mortar and had frozen there, its texture uneven but smooth, a patina of ice over the coarse grain of the sand and lime. I touched it a moment longer than I should have. What lingering warmth I had in my hands melted the ice. I felt the water between my fingertips and almost weakened.

I had nothing to drink. Forget the whisky I could no longer get; right now water would have been a gift from the Teutonic gods. My mouth was so parched I was tempted to lick the wall for its moisture. But I held back. The grit embedded in the ice would have had me choking and gasping for proper water the moment I tried. There was a lesson to be learned there, but I couldn’t be bothered to go looking for it.

There is one thing I will say. The one good thing about being thirsty is that it takes your mind off the sheer, numbing, incessant cold. The gnawing ache that worms its way through to the bones and freezes the mind.

A shiver ran the length of my body. All I’d been given was a single grey blanket that was as thin as a Nazi promise and a palliasse sparsely filled with ancient straw. I had my coat, but no scarf and no gloves, so I’d wrapped the blanket round my legs and pulled the old overcoat tightly around my upper body, trying to tuck my ears and nose down into the collar. My bed of hay and sackcloth at least shielded me from the cold of the stone floor. I tried to ignore the scratching noises that came from inside it. The water on my fingers was beginning to freeze again. I wiped them dry on my coat and shrank them up into the sleeves. I lay back, resigned, and tried to let my senses do the work for me.

As I calmed again, my nose began to bristle. A scent of mushrooms withering in the dank earth stung my eyes. I blinked twice and the tears froze in their ducts. Sighing, I accidentally filled my nostrils and was surprised to find myself savouring the aroma. In the cold and dark, it wasn’t a sense of decay, but a memory of forgotten meals. I could almost hear the butter sizzling in the pan as, in my mind, I fried a reducing heap of freshly picked ceps. The sort I remembered from my childhood in the Pyrenees. My older brother, Charles, and I would go out to pick them, my mother would clean them and my father would cook them. I’d cooked them in Paris since. They were good, but they never had that sweetness that distance and longing gave them. I imagined now that I could taste the butter, rolling its gentle sheen around my tongue before biting into the tender flesh. It was a sad lifetime ago. My mouth began to water – finally – but then the hunger in my belly came knocking.

Smell and taste. I’d chosen the wrong senses.

In vain, I opened my eyes and stared at what lay above me.

Outside, it had been just a day or two short of a full moon. The last one before Christmas. A bomber’s moon, some called it. A night when whatever air force might be lurking overhead could see what they were looking for, even in cloud. A night when the city was vulnerable.

Not that I could see any of it. I was in complete darkness.

I shivered at the thought. That brought other memories.

Instinctively I looked around me, despite the pitch black of my world. There were no windows to let in any light or to give me a glimpse of the night outside. No bars made this prison. My ears strained to hear if there were any planes circling. During the day, we heard little but the incessant drone of Luftwaffe aircraft patrolling the sky. So much so, we’d ceased to notice them. But at night, the friend became the enemy and the enemy the friend. We wanted the RAF to bomb the hell out of the Germans. Just not in Paris. Not when we were around.

‘Quiet tonight,’ a voice nearby said.

I nearly jumped. I’d almost forgotten where I was.

‘Like last month,’ a second voice replied.

Elderly voices. Women. Talking in hushed tones across the blackness. Somewhere to my right.

‘Shh,’ a man’s voice admonished them.

A fourth voice joined in. Another man, behind my head. Close. ‘Not like last time, mind. In November. The sirens.’

‘The Boches,’ one of the women agreed. ‘Playing a prank on us. Sounding the sirens when there wasn’t any air raid.’

‘I heard it was so they could get all of us underground so they could see what Paris felt like with just the Germans in it,’ the man behind my head replied.

‘They wanted to search our homes,’ the second woman piped up.

The other man shushed them again. I just sighed. Nothing like the Occupation to get the imagination going. It’s not just truth that’s the first victim of war. It’s thought as well.

I sighed again and buried my face further into my coat. The low voices and occasional shushing were surprisingly sedative, and I felt myself drift off.

In one way they were right. There had been no sirens. It wasn’t an air raid. Or even a German prank like so many believed. That wasn’t the reason why we were all in this cellar.

I heard movement around me before the sound of the warped old door scratching sharply on the cellar floor, setting my teeth on edge. The first noise had ended my hunger-induced dream of butter melting in a giant pan. The second had made me start, suddenly fully awake.

A serpent of light from a faint bulb outside on the steep staircase slithered into the room. Enough to make out shapes in movement. Not enough to distinguish individuals. I looked for last night’s conversationalists, but had no idea who they were. There were too many of us in the cellar, almost all now rushing to get up and make for the door. A sense of urgency filled the dank gloom, overcoming the stiffness brought on by the cold. Untouched by the same spirit, I lifted myself slowly from the palliasse, surprised to find myself resenting being torn away from its relative warmth and comfort. Figures funnelled past me to the door, most of them silent, some of them grumbling, one or two emitting eager sounds.

Then I remembered why I was there, and began to find the same urgency as my unknown companions.

An impatient queue had formed at the door, the stairs up to the ground floor narrow and sharp. I held onto the wall on either side as I climbed. I wanted the person in front of me to hurry up, not for the same reason as everyone else, I imagined, but because I needed to be out of the cold, damp ground. I tilted my head down so I couldn’t see the walls or sloping ceiling, just the scuffed shoes of the elderly lady ahead patiently edging up the dark flight.

The concierge was waiting at the top when I got there. She was checking everyone, no doubt making sure no one had sneaked their way in somehow in the previous night’s curfew. Wearing the same thick brown housecoat she’d been wearing the evening before, she sniffed at me as I went past. Her coarse grey hair was tied in a plait and wrapped around her head like a Cossack hat. Underneath it, her eyes were colder than her cellar and more avaricious than Adolf eyeing up another country to invade. I tried to think what I could arrest her for, but nothing came to me.

‘Very comfortable,’ I told her. ‘Can’t think why I haven’t stayed here before.’

She sniffed again. I wished I could get that much scorn into my mucous movements. ‘No one forced you to come.’

‘That’s arguable,’ I told her, choosing not to.

She ignored me as I passed her and turned her open contempt to the man behind me. Just as she’d done with everyone else who’d spent the night in the cellar, she’d taken my franc for the heady pleasure of a night on a palliasse in the pitch black and was keen to get rid of us all now. Until the next time.

If the cellar had been cold, the outside world was polar. In the early-morning gloom, I shivered and tightened my coat around me. With the weight I was losing thanks to rationing, it was well on its way to becoming double-breasted. If they cut the meat allowance any further, I might even become fashionable.

A queue had formed by the corner of the street, just a few metres to my left. Before I had a chance to move, an old dear with whiskers and halitosis jostled past me out of the building and joined the end. I hurried to get in line behind her but was beaten to it by a man twice my age and half my height. I had to make do with third in my private race. Hunger took us all differently, I supposed.

‘Thieving bastards,’ the man muttered to no one in particular.

I recognised his voice. He was the one shushing the others in the night. A young woman two places in front of him turned and agreed. Another woman who’d come to stand behind me joined in.

‘A franc,’ she grumbled. ‘For a louse-ridden sack in a wet cellar.’

I kept quiet but had to agree.

‘I heard there’s a concierge over on Rue de Prague who’s charging two francs,’ the man replied.

We all tutted at that.

‘And all for butter,’ the woman behind me said.

‘From Brittany,’ the old man piped up. He said it with the glee of anticipation, a non-sequitur in misted breath.

Slowly we shuffled forward. There was some commotion ahead, at the front of the queue. Snapping out of my thoughts, I leaned out to take a look, but saw nothing behind the line of some twenty souls ahead of me waiting their turn.

‘I haven’t had any butter since the summer.’ The elderly woman spoke, in a hushed tone, for the first time.

‘None of us has,’ I couldn’t help replying.

But I’d thought about it. Almost endlessly. And even more so since the rumours of a local grocer getting a consignment of it today had started to do the rounds. So here we all were. On a miserable December morning in the first winter of the German occupation of Paris, queueing in the cold for something we’d all once taken for granted. Butter. That’s all. We’d each paid our franc to spend a night in a cellar of the building next to the grocer’s so we’d be first in the queue. This is what we’d become under Nazi rule.

The commotion up ahead had turned into a ruckus. People squabbling over a pat of fat. Risking my place, I left the queue to see what was going on. Outside the door to the small shop, a crowd was gathering around a man in a brown cotton coat. I didn’t recognise him, but I knew he had to be the owner. He was holding his hands up, placating the people slowly thronging towards him. His look was an odd mix of scared and uncaring.

‘I know as much as you do,’ he was telling two women who were pressing on him the most.

‘All night we queued,’ one of them told him.

He shrugged. ‘That’s not my problem.’

I thought for a moment that one of the women was going to take a swing at him, so I stepped in.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked him.

He eyed me up and down, evidently thinking better of coming back at me with a smart retort. There’s nothing like a night in a cold cellar to sharpen a mean gaze. Or it might have been because I was a good head and shoulders taller than him.

‘There’s no butter,’ he said after a moment’s hesitation.

A murmur of discord ran its way along the queue to the stragglers at the back. The crowd began to bunch up as the ones at the rear came forward to see for themselves.

‘What do you mean, no butter?’

The grocer shrugged again. Under his work coat I could see a thick roll-neck sweater and trousers that didn’t dance on thinning hips like everyone else’s did. An unshaven neck emerged from the coat and held up a head that was just that bit too big and a face that was just that bit too small, like a child had drawn a tiny face on an overblown balloon.

‘It hasn’t arrived. I was promised it would be here.’

‘When will it be arriving?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where’s it coming from? And don’t say Brittany.’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘It’s black market, I take it?’

He pulled himself up to his full height and gave me a scornful look. He was evidently more afraid of whoever he bought the butter from than he was of me.

‘You really don’t want to know.’

I pulled out my police ID and showed it to him. ‘Yes, I really do want to know. I’m a cop.’

He looked at my ID incuriously and shrugged again. One more shrug and I’d let the woman at the front of the queue slug him.

‘So arrest me. You’re not supposed to be buying from me anyway. You’re not registered with me.’

He had a point. ‘Who were you supposed to be getting it from?’

‘Black market. That’s all I know.’

‘You must know who you’re buying it from.’

‘I don’t. I just spoke to some guy who said he knew where to get some. He wouldn’t tell me who he got it from and I didn’t ask. I’m telling you, they’re not people you want to know.’

I turned away in frustration. ‘I paid some money-grabbing concierge a franc so I could get this butter.’

‘That’s my wife you’re talking about.’

‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’

‘What are you going to do about it?’ the woman in the queue asked me. ‘You’re a cop. Make him pay us back.’

The grocer snorted. ‘Yeah, sure, pay back what you didn’t pay me because you wanted to buy something on the black market.’

‘I could arrest you for selling on the black market,’ I told him.

He looked around in an exaggerated gesture. ‘You see any black-market goods here? You’ve got nothing on me.’

I had to hide my frustration. ‘I will,’ I promised him.

‘You can’t threaten me.’ Again the snort.

I smiled brightly at him and addressed the crowd. ‘No butter,’ I told them, pointing to the grocer. ‘There never was. Here’s your man. The concierge you all paid a franc to is his wife.’

He blanched. ‘You can’t do that.’

The disappointed butter buyers turned their angry gaze on him as I started to walk away.

‘I just did.’

I walked back past the angry failed shoppers, now more of a scrum than a queue, and pulled my coat tighter around my body. Hunger made you cold, I was learning.

For one idle moment I wondered if my snipe at the hapless trader had been right. That it had all been a ploy with his wife to con us all out of a franc for butter that was never going to materialise. I decided not. That wasn’t the sort of ruse you could pull more than once. In fairness, he was probably telling the truth and had been conned himself by whatever black marketeer he was dealing with. I turned, with half a mind to go back and demand one more time who his supplier was, but he’d retreated into his shop and pulled the shutters down. The butterless mob milled around outside, unsure what to do, blocking any way in or out.

Instead, I carried on along the street. I was on the Right Bank, not my part of town. As a cop, I knew pretty much all of Paris, mostly the bits you didn’t want to know, but this was one neighbourhood I’d never had much call to visit, despite being just over the river from my own home in the Fifth.

It was early. Too early to go to Thirty-Six, the police headquarters on Quai des Orfèvres, and my icy office on the third floor. The commissioner was threatening to assign me some run-of-the-mill burglary case, so I was in no hurry. After buying butter, I’d planned on going home to drop off my treasured purchase and grab a shower before heading back out to work. With a shiver, I recalled the sound of what I’d imagined to be insects crawling inside the palliasse of straw I’d slept in last night and decided I would go home to wash after all. My shirt collar felt like it was moving independently of my neck, and something I didn’t want to know was dancing a tango on my scalp. I shivered again, and not just with the cold.

But first I needed coffee. I had none at home. None that you could call coffee anyway. Looking around, I could see no cafés open, and I didn’t know the surrounding streets well enough to know where to find one.

I was heading along the narrow road towards the hospital that gave the quarter its name. Quinze-Vingts. Supposedly named after the number of beds in the eye hospital, founded in 1260 by old Louis the Prudent to house three hundred poor, blind Parisians. As a schoolkid in Perpignan, I’d always been taught that good King Louis had been the one to pull France out of the Middle Ages, so it’s a pity Paris chose to remember him and his hospital with the archaic vigesimal counting system of the time. Quinze-vingts. Fifteen-twenties. Three hundred. And they insisted it was us lot from down south who were behind the times.

My mind was wandering with the cold, I realised. I yawned deeply and pulled myself together. Beyond the hospital was Place de la Bastille. I knew places there I could get a hot drink, maybe even some bread and a thin sliver of ham if my luck was in.

As I quickened my pace and gathered my thoughts, my annoyance returned. Not with the grocer. He’d just been trying to feed a need and got stung in the process. Butter was the new cocaine. As were a lot of things we’d once dismissed as everyday essentials. My anger was at the black marketeer who’d cheated us all out of our fix of fat. We could have done with it. I pulled my coat even tighter around me and hunched my head down into the collar, like some old guy shuffling home after a game of cards and too many wines.

Two things hit me as I walked towards my fate with coffee. The first was the faint smell of glue. It was sweet and somehow comforting in the cold air. Almost warming. I slowed as I came to the tiny enclosed entrance to Passage du Chantier. Its dingy depths had been home for centuries to cabinet-makers, and there was always the soft aroma of wood glue and tanned leather to entice you in. It was deserted now, but later it would be bustling. In warmer weather, old men would cheekily sit for a rest on the armchairs displayed outside the various makers’ workshops and chew the fat, commenting on the people passing by, using the alleyway as a shortcut. I stopped and inhaled deeply, my eyes shut.

The second thing to hit me was a fist.

The back of my head stung from where I’d been thumped.

Two other hands shoved me from behind into the narrow alley. One of them slapped me on the head again for good measure. The other tried to turn me around to the right.

‘Give us your butter,’ a voice snarled at me.

Since I didn’t have any to give, I twisted around to the left instead and lashed out with a roundhouse punch. The oath it caused told me it had connected. That and the sudden sharp pain in my right hand.

I turned and looked at my assailants and paused in surprise for a moment. I knew them both. Brothers. As a cop, I’d come across them over the years more often than their own mother had. This wasn’t their part of town either. Jacquot, the younger of the two, was lying on the ground, blood streaming from his mouth.

‘Bastard,’ he cursed again, and scrambled to his feet.

His older brother, Firmin, who I’d always seen as the brains of the two, although that was relative, had to try and step over Jacquot to get to me, so it was a moment before he looked up and saw me.

‘Fuck, Eddie, it’s you.’

He stopped in his tracks, straddling his brother, who almost toppled them both over when he tried to get up. They sorted themselves out and stood side by side in front of me. In the shadow of the passage, I couldn’t see their expressions clearly, but I could sense their shame. I’d arrested them so many times when they were younger that I was the nearest they had to someone who cared. In the gloom, I could see the years hadn’t been kind to either of them.

‘What the fuck are you playing at?’ I asked them.

‘Sorry, Eddie,’ Firmin replied. ‘We didn’t know it was you.’

‘What with the coat and everything,’ Jacquot added, his voice muffled. He cupped his hand under his chin to catch the blood pouring from his mouth. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been a snot-nosed kid. He’d grown up into a snot-nosed adult.

I pointed to the wound. ‘Sorry about that, Jacquot, but what the fuck do you think you’re doing hitting me?’

‘It was your butter we were after,’ Firmin explained, like that would make it all right. In the gloom, I could see his teeth, grey and chaotic, like tank traps in a swamp.

‘It was nothing personal,’ Jacquot agreed. Gingerly he waggled one of the few ceramics left in the front of his mouth and winced. ‘You still pack a punch, Eddie.’

‘You should know better than to try and steal butter off a starving cop. What made you think I had any?’

My eyes had grown used to the dim light filtering through into the passage and I saw the look the brothers exchanged with each other.

‘Nothing,’ Jacquot said.

‘Everyone knew,’ Firmin contradicted his brother.

‘Everyone knew I had butter?’

I waited for a reply. I’d learned years ago that if you waited long enough with the brothers grim, they’d almost always give something away without meaning to.

‘Not you, Eddie,’ Firmin said after a moment’s thought. ‘Everyone knew there was a load of dodgy butter going on sale today.’

‘So you thought you’d steal mine?’

‘Not just yours,’ Jacquot spoke up. The blood had stopped gushing now, and he was cleaning his mouth on his coat sleeve. Firmin turned to shut him up.

‘We knew people would be buying black market butter,’ Firmin clarified, ‘so we thought we’d have some of it.’

‘By nicking it from people who can barely afford it and who’d queued all night in the cold to buy it? Nice.’

‘Got to live.’ For the first time, I recognised the old truculence in Firmin’s voice. I was tempted to slap it out of him like we used to in the good old days.

‘How many people have you taken butter from?’

‘None, Eddie, I swear. Our hearts weren’t in it. What with the Germans being here and all.’ That was Firmin. He even tried crossing the spot where he thought his own heart would be.

I withered him with a look. ‘Cut the crap. It’s because no one had any.’

‘Yeah, we noticed,’ Jacquot muttered. His voice was bitter. Firmin hit him across the head and told him to shut up.

‘Try not to talk, Jacquot,’ I told him. ‘You’re giving the game away. No one had any because there was never any butter in the first place.’

‘That’s what you know,’ Jacquot crowed. ‘We saw it. Not so smart now, are you?’

I turned to look at Firmin. ‘You see how easy it is? Where did you see it? Not the grocer’s, I take it, so whoever was selling it to him.’

Firmin gave the slightest of tics. I could see the nervousness in his eyes. ‘Don’t know what you mean, Eddie.’

‘And you’re scared of whoever it is, so that means you won’t want to tell me who it is or what’s going on.’

‘Fucking right we won’t,’ Jacquot swore.

‘So I reckon we’ll have to do it the hard way.’

I saw the brothers tense, ready for fight or flight. I reached out and slapped Firmin gently on the cheek.

‘Don’t worry, boys. I’m not going to hurt you.’ I glanced around us at the passage. ‘Bit of a way from home, aren’t you? You’re still around the Porte de Vincennes, I take it? South of Cours de Vincennes. Unless you’ve come up in the world. So my money’s on you having seen this butter somewhere around there, wouldn’t you say?’

I kept up eye contact with Firmin all the time. The flicker his eyes gave at each of my comments told me I was right. That was always how I’d caught him out in his younger days. Some crims never learn, not at this end of the food chain.

‘Please don’t ask, Eddie,’ he begged me.

‘I’m not asking, I’m just passing the time of day. You see, I reckon if you’d seen the butter, it had to be at wherever it’s being kept. And that’s where you got the bright idea. You know, the one about stealing butter from some black marketeer who scares the shit out of you.’

To my left, Jacquot snorted, but it was the half-hearted derision of someone slowly being caught out.

‘On the back foot, Jacquot?’ I asked him, my eyes still on Firmin. ‘So how come you were in the black marketeer’s place in the first place. Buying?’

‘We don’t buy butter,’ Jacquot said.

‘So you work for him.’

Firmin’s eyes danced a waltz and I knew I was right.

‘We’re not saying a word,’ he told me.

‘No, but it seems to be working.’ We stared at each other for a moment. I shook my head. ‘Tch, stealing from your employer, boys, that’s not a good thing. Bit too close to home.’

We waited in mutual stand-off for a few moments. My mind ran through my options.

‘So what are we going to do? You see, the problem here is that I’ve run out of clever ways of tricking you into telling me what I want to know, and I’m a bit tired and not a little grumpy at not getting the butter I’d been so looking forward to.’ I shrugged expansively. ‘So I guess we’re just going to have to go old-school on this.’

Still looking Firmin in the eyes, my face centimetres from his, I whipped my left fist out and caught Jacquot squarely in the mouth again. The loose tooth finally gave up the fight. So did Jacquot. He staggered back, holding his jaw and screaming.

‘You next, Firmin. What do you say?’

I backed him against the wall of the narrow alleyway. He looked sideways at his brother then back at me. Jacquot was still on his feet, moaning now in pain and spitting more blood onto the ground.

‘Impasse Vassou,’ Firmin whispered. He gave me a street number. ‘Please don’t ask me for a name.’

‘No good. You know I need a name. Is it Julen le Basque?’

I studied his face. Julen le Basque had been the grand fromage in Porte de Vincennes in my day as a young cop and had kept half the criminal youth in terrified thrall. Firmin just looked surprised.

‘Julen lost it years ago. Doesn’t know his own name these days.’

‘Who then?’

‘It’s no one you know, Eddie, I swear.’

‘Someone new?’

He nodded his head vigorously. ‘Ever since the Boches came.’

‘So give me a name.’

A movement to my right, at the entrance to the small passage, distracted me. I half turned to see an elderly man shuffling past. He glanced at us as he passed but slowly went on his way.

I felt Firmin shove me. I stumbled on a cobblestone and lost my footing, falling backwards onto the opposite wall. The two brothers took their chance. Firmin grabbed Jacquot by the coat and dragged him away, before they both broke into a shambling run along the passage towards Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, at its northern end.

I regained my balance and watched them go. I was far too old to bother giving chase.

‘Catch you later,’ I told their now-distant backs.

I decided to forgo my shower. Paris would just have to endure its suffering a little longer.

Instead I followed in Firmin and Jacquot’s footsteps along Passage du Chantier. It was still too early for the local cabinet