The Phantom Patrol (A Billy Boyle WWII Mystery, Band 19) - Hardcover

Benn, James R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1641295430 ISBN 13: 9781641295437

Verlag: Soho Crime, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

An investigation into a gang of Nazi-affiliated art thieves leads Billy Boyle directly into the line of fire at the catastrophic Battle of the Bulge.

Winter 1944: Months after the Liberation of France, ex-Boston cop Billy Boyle finds himself in Paris. It is a city reeling from the carnage it has endured, but many are hopeful an end to war is in sight. When Billy finds a rare piece of artwork after a tense shoot-out in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, he thinks it could be connected to the Syndicat du Renard, a shadowy network of Nazi sympathizers known to be smuggling stolen artwork out of France.

Trailing the Syndicat, Billy discovers that someone with a high level of communications clearance—someone in the Phantom regiment of the British Army—may be using his position to aid the thieves. Billy, determined to stop the abettor, heads up to the frontlines where he experiences a last-ditch battle against overwhelming odds. There, the ruinous Battle of the Bulge unfurls in the Ardennes Forest. Can Billy and his team survive the bracing onslaught and return the stolen artwork to its rightful protectors?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James R. Benn is the author of the Billy Boyle World War II mysteries. The debut, Billy Boyle, was selected as a Top Five Book of the Year by Book Sense and was a Dilys Award nominee, A Blind Goddess was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, The Rest Is Silence was a Barry Award nominee, and The Devouring was a Macavity Award nominee. Benn, a former librarian, lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida with his wife, Deborah Mandel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One
Paris, December 13, 1944

The night was cold, cloaked in a deep darkness brought on by a bank of clouds sailing in on the winds and vanquishing the moonlight. Dead leaves, crisp and brittle, swirled in man-sized cyclones on the cobblestones, one so dense that I mistook it for someone sauntering through the graveyard.
     But no one was strolling through the Père Lachaise at this hour. I knew that for a fact, having been here lying in wait for the last five hours. Standing in wait, as a matter of fact, with only Marcel Proust for company. He didn’t have much to say, being six feet under. I had a small cemetery chapel to lean against. But that didn’t stop my legs from cramping up, and not for the first time, I sat on Marcel’s cold tombstone, offering up my apologies for the disrespect.
     I heard a scrunching sound, maybe leaves being crushed underfoot. Or the wind, sending leaves skittering against a wall.
     Scritttch. The sound drew nearer.
     I squinted, trying to locate where the noise came from. Somewhere along the path, close to where Kaz was hiding. I couldn’t see him, but we’d been through enough that I trusted he was right where he needed to be.
     I spotted it. A large leaf, its curled lobes arched downward, its stem pointed upward like the tail of some gruesome insect dancing down the cobblestones. I almost laughed. Spooked by a dead leaf. I checked the luminous dial on my watch. A little past four in the morning. We’d expected them at one o’clock, or oh-one-hundred, the way the army liked to say it. I began to think about giving the whole thing up. Blame it on bad intelligence, but it seemed to me that the Syndicat du Renard was not coming out tonight.
     I thought about slinking back through the tombstones and monuments to where Kaz was hidden near the grave of Oscar Wilde. The Père Lachaise Cemetery, all eighty acres of it, was a ritzy final resting place for the rich and famous, as well as regular Parisians who were lucky enough to get in. We were here with a team of Counter Intelligence Corps agents, waiting for a gang that aimed to do a little grave robbing. Or so we’d been told.
     I stretched, trying not to stiffen up. I moved around the tiny chapel, watching for any sign of movement before I headed in Kaz’s direction.
     Then I heard the footsteps. The fall of a bootheel on gravel.
     Silence.
     A sliver of light, quickly extinguished.
     I froze, listening for another sound. It was impossible to see any distance through the crowded grave markers, crypts, and mausoleums, but from what I could make out, the light and sound had come from behind me, deep within the cemetery.
     Had they already gotten in? We had the entrances covered. Two CIC agents were at the rue des Rondeaux gate, thirty yards in the other direction. Our source had said they’d use that entrance, but I guess his dope didn’t extend to their arrival time.
     I took off a glove and unholstered my Colt, stepping over graves and catching the slightest of sounds, probably much like the noise I was making. I stopped beside a tree, about halfway to Kaz’s location. I edged around the trunk and saw a mausoleum, not six feet in front of me. The thick wooden door was open.
     They’d been inside the cemetery all night. Before we got here.
     Patient bastards.
     I heard the clink of metal on wood. The sound of tools being carried.
     I followed the sound, which was headed for Kaz’s position. There was no way our guys outside or even the two agents at the gate had heard, and I could only hope Kaz had picked up on the clatter.
     The wind kicked up, swirling leaves again and making enough noise for me to barrel around a couple of tombs and make my way to the path. That’s when I saw them, four guys gathered around a flat gravestone. They were blurs, the darkness too complete to make an identification. Which was why we had CIC special agent Jerome Salinger with us. He’d interrogated a few men who were suspected of black market activities but had been let go for lack of evidence. Later they were found to have links to a syndicate run by an unknown character known only as the Fox.
     We were hoping the Fox would turn out to be one of the men Salinger had interrogated, or that one of his men could be convinced to turn against him. We wanted an identification badly. The Fox had been responsible for the assassination of a CIC agent who’d gotten too close. Which is why we’d laid this trap. The syndicate might think they’d outwaited us, but we still had the place surrounded.
     I heard the brush of fabric against stone.
     A hand gripped my shoulder.
     “Billy,” came the whisper. It was Kaz, light on his feet and his Webley revolver at the ready.        
     “They’ve been inside all along,” I said softly, leaning close.
     “Yes. They failed to extinguish their light when they opened the mausoleum. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. What shall we do?”
     I knew Kaz would be up for a fight. The only question was, how to make sure we won it.
     “Let’s take them,” I said.
     The scrape of stone on stone told us they’d gotten to work with a pry bar.
     “We could wait for them to remove whatever they are after,” Kaz said.
     “Or grab them while they’re busy with the stone,” I said.
     “Good,” he whispered. “Let us announce ourselves with a gunshot. That will bring the others running.”
     I nodded and squeezed his arm. We stepped onto the path, each of us automatically keeping to one side, maximizing the space between us. The figures ahead and to the right hadn’t noticed us yet, which told me they’d expected us to be gone.
     Or, that waiting for hours was their regular routine. A routine of extraordinary patience and caution. I didn’t like it.
     But it was too late for second thoughts. Kaz raised his pistol as I leveled my automatic at the men clustered together over the grave.
     “Halt!” I shouted. Kaz fired, the discharge shattering the still night.
     Two shots came at us, and we each dove for the cover of the nearest stonework. It looked like only one man had fired, probably a lookout who was at the ready. But the burst from a Sten gun announced they’d come loaded for bear.
     Or for us.
     I fired at the afterimage of the muzzle flash, then ducked as another burst slammed into the mausoleum. Kaz let off two more shots and I backed up, taking cover behind a tree as a gunman fired into the position I’d just vacated. I didn’t have a clear shot at him, but as I scrambled between the graves, I realized these guys must be soldiers. Deserters, probably, but they knew to outflank an opponent after keeping him pinned down. I got behind them and heard frantic shouts in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Soho Crime
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1641295430
• ISBN 13: 9781641295437
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Soho Press; https://sohopress.com/the-best-of-soho-press-2021/; ; 4 rue Fernand Laguide; Corbeil Essonnes; Ile de France; 91100; Frankreich