Power: A Historical Crime Thriller by Richard Wake

Author:Richard Wake [Wake, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B0CCMWVX2T
Publisher: Manor and State, LLC
Published: 2023-08-24T06:00:00+00:00

The 14th arrondissement, a nice enough place, was a waste when it came to the business of organized crime in Paris. Sleepy JoJo Tanguay ran it as befit his nickname. It was a tired place, with tired prospects and a tired boss. The most important fact about the 14th was not what was in it, but what wasn’t: Gare Montparnasse. The big train station, which linked Paris to the south, was close, just across the street, but it was outside the 14th and in the 15th. The only potential economic engine for Tanguay, then, was a traffic light away — and the light always shone red.

A ton of the acreage of the 14th arrondissement was taken up by Montparnasse Cemetery, and another ton in the far corner by Parc Montsouris and the International City University and its various buildings that housed students from all over the world. The university was founded in the 1920s with the idea of promoting peace and harmony among nations, and Sleepy JoJo Tanguay’s neighborhood was the perfect place for it. Peaceful. Harmonious. Comatose.

The bar, called Descartes’ Horse, was on one of the side streets behind the university. It was a student joint and, at any given time, conversations in a half-dozen languages could be detected by someone who took a lap around the perimeter. By scientific calculation, 90 percent of the conversations featured this phrase: “Will you look at that ass? No, that one. The red. Yeah, her.”

At the booth that was deepest into the darkest corner of Descartes’ Horse, four men sat and drank from a pitcher of beer. They could pass for students, but none of them had the credentials for university. Two were 21, one was 22. Philip Tanguay was 23, the oldest. That gave him the most stature in the group — that, and the fact that he was Sleepy JoJo’s grandson.

They were on the third pitcher but showed no signs of coming down. The adrenaline was still pumping almost two hours after the hit on the casino. It had not gone without incident — Philip fired twice and hit at least one guy, he knew — but the money in the safe had been worth the effort. The masks they were wearing — half-masks that covered their eyes, like the Lone Ranger — were enough of a disguise. More than enough. No one knew them over there in the 10th, and none of the four of them were very distinctive looking to start with. The whole thing was clean. Or, as Philip pronounced every few minutes, “Fucking immaculate.”

Philip’s parents died in a car accident when he was an infant. He was raised by his grandparents until his grandmother died when he was eight. After that, it was just him and Sleepy JoJo in the big house on Rue Jourdan — and the old man raised Philip as he ran his business, with the lightest of touches. The kid had a generous allowance from the time he was 16 and no real supervision.

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