Murder in the Sentier by Cara Black Page B

loan.”
    “A loan?”
    “To tide us over until we get paid.”
    René was smart. Now she should make a dent in the pile of work on her desk. Upstairs, she filled Miles Davis’s water bowl, then tried Etienne Mabry’s number again. Still no answer.
    The door opened. “I forgot my briefcase,” René said, looking pointedly at the papers on her desk.
    Aimée returned the look as she stuck her detailed Paris Plan into her leather backpack.
    “Going someplace again?
    “I have to find Etienne Mabry so Christian Figeac can get out of jail.”

Monday Afternoon
    T UCKED DOWN BELOW street level, in the hollow of a quarry, the cemetery was a tangle of trees and pompous mausoleums. Stefan blinked as crunching noises sounded behind him. He balled his hand into a fist. Turned around.
    But it was just the grave digger shoveling shiny white stones into a wheelbarrow. Near the Virgin Mary marble statue, a squirrel nibbled an old furred chestnut.
    Stefan pulled himself up.
    Fear curdled his thoughts.
    Would he be killed next?
    Except for an old bag, the coffin, lined with dirty cobwebs, lay empty.
    Jutta had taken the Laborde stash and all the bonds. She’d demolished him.
    But whoever killed her would have them … wouldn’t they?
    Thoughts crowded his mind. Had Jutta joined forces with some new terrorist fanatics, planning to strike again? Had she blabbed to someone in prison? Or had one of the gang survived and followed her?
    Stefan went rigid with terror. As he rubbed the gray stubble on his chin, his mind spun. Everything ruined, his future gone. Greedy Jutta. He remembered. She hadn’t changed.
    Despair hit him as he crouched among the gravestones. A bird’s molted gray feathers lay clumped by his elbow. Still on the run. Still wanted after twenty years, and now he had no money.
    He hadn’t supported himself with his mechanic’s pay … he’d only done this work because he loved Mercedes engines. Now he couldn’t go back to the garage.
    That was the one rule branded into him by the Palestinians about going underground: If anyone makes a mistake, assume your cover is blown. Nine times out of ten, it was. Play it safe. Never go back to your old identity. The police might be waiting.
    He’d have to disappear. Once more. Over and over again.
    Paris had more than two hundred banks listed in the phone book—triple that, if one counted the branches of the main ones. With the old hunter’s ID, Stefan had opened accounts in many of them over the years. Always in Paris. Never in the countryside—people remembered there. Paris made him nervous but at least he could stay anonymous. Each account held the minimum balance. He maintained them only to enable him to cash the bonds and send his mother money.
    He’d waited years before he’d begun cashing the old bonds. Until he figured even if they were numbered and so eventually traceable by Europol, they weren’t high on any priority list. He’d cash them in every few months in a different arrondissement taking care not to follow a pattern. He supplemented this money with his poker winnings, though lately he’d been losing to Anton and others in the garage. A lot.
    He picked up a stone, trying to ignore the tremor in his hand. Briefly, he thought of the room he’d lived in for the past seven years. It was sparsely furnished, utilitarian. The reference books on Mercedes engines were the only things he’d miss. He kept nothing in his apartment. He remembered how thorough the Stasi were … the Stasi didn’t exist now but the French equivalent, the DST * , did. And somewhere, so did the flic who nursed a special grudge against the members of the gang.
    He thought of his Mercedes, parked a few blocks over, realizing he’d need to change the license plates. His palms, thick with encrusted grease, the curse of a mechanic, traveled over the rough bark of a plane tree.
    * Direction de Surveillance du Territoire
    The headstone opposite read “Alphonsine Plessis,” better known as