“I need a hammer to close it proper,” she said, and I was just about to look for one when the shop’s front door tinkled open, and my stomach turned to pudding.

“Kill the light!” I hissed. Hellida killed it, and we dropped to the floor.

“Where is it?” snarled a voice from outside. “Now, you skinny tramp, or you’re done.”

“Takes a lot of nerve to hit a woman,” said the unmistakable rasp of Madame Fournier.

“I don’t have to hit you. See?”

“You think that scrap iron scares me?”

“It should, sister. It should.”

I was wedged between the shelves and the walls. Hellida was on the other side of the room, her great bulk not quite concealed by the merchandise. The door swung open. Light poured in from the shop’s main room. I held what was left of my breath.

Fournier and her tormenter entered. I screwed my eyes shut and dug my fingers into the sawdust. The goon rapped hard on the crate closest to my head.

“Which crates?” he said.

“You’re stealing from dangerous people, you know that?”

“The man that looked out for you is dead. You wanna join him? Where’s the booze?”

“Any of ’em,” croaked Fournier. “Just follow the bloody fist.”

“How come this lid is loose?”

“I don’t know.”

“What the hell kind of operation are you running here?”

Another pause, another awful pause. I couldn’t understand how, in that evil silence, no one else could hear the thumping of my heart.

“What do you care?” she said. “It’s free liquor.”

“You know, woman, that’s the first smart thing you’ve said all night.”

A cork popped out of a bottle. I twisted my neck and peered out above the crate. The thug, a squat figure in tattered linen pants with a gap between his teeth as wide as my thumb, tilted the bottle down his throat. In his hand was a stubby pistol, shiny with grease, from which Fournier could not look away. Across the room, the crown of Hellida’s blond head peeked up past the crates. I tried to catch her eye, to make some silent plan, but she was looking the other way.

I tried to make myself smaller. I must have made some kind of noise, because in the moment before I disappeared, Madame Fournier looked at me, her defiance tinged with terror. With a word, she could have gotten me killed. Yet she kept silent. I’d told her she could trust me, and this is what it looked like. I tried to smile for her.

The ogre erupted into a hideous belch and smashed the bottle on the floor.

“That’s more like it!”