Murder Below Montparnasse

NATASHA’S ROOM GAVE off that same cloying rose scent she’d noticed before, coupled with disinfectant. A hospital bed with a stained duvet, old Russian newspapers piled on a secrétaire desk with an old-fashioned inkwell—all bathed in light streaming in from the tall window. A small armoire and chest of drawers were topped by china figurines, giving off a sense of genteel disorder. Framed sepia-tinted ballet posters covered the walls, which were fringed by a ceiling of carved wood boiserie. So many places to hide letters.

“They’re listening,” Natasha whispered, gesturing to the ceiling. “They put special devices in the wallboards.”

Aimée gave a knowing nod, determined to get some sense out of her. Appeal to her somehow. “Between you and me, Natasha, I’m shocked Yuri and his father didn’t get along,” she said, trying again. “Any idea why?”

“Piotr always said he wanted Yuri to understand.” She leaned toward Aimée conspiratorially.

“To understand what?”

Natasha shrugged her thin shoulders. “So sad. He trusted me with everything.”

“The letters, that’s what you mean?”

“It’s all in the code.” Natasha’s blue eyes sparkled. “We celebrated Piotr’s one hundredth birthday last month. Big celebration. Even the priest from the Alexander Nevsky church came.”

Aimée knew the Russian Orthodox church on rue Daru—a gold cupolaed confection near the Parc Monceau. Nestled in an enclave called Little Russia in the chic 8th arrondissement, the church was well known for its Orthodox ceremonies. René had found a terrific freelancer, a dissident émigré hacker who went by the name Rasputin, on the job board at the side vestry. It was a Russian community hub.

Was Natasha dropping a clue here?

“Any bad blood between Yuri and Piotr?”

Natasha fiddled with the control on her oxygen tank. “Piotr abandoned his son and his mother.” A sigh. “I think Piotr wanted to make it up to Yuri. But never had the chance.”

Or maybe he did. In butter, the neighbor had said. And Aimée had Yuri’s cash in her bag.

“Didn’t Piotr leave Yuri something special, Natasha?”

Natasha yawned. “Where’s Piotr’s key?”

“Key?”

“In his drawer. There was a key.” A bell sounded from downstairs. “His son took it. But he didn’t take everything.”

“A key to what?”

“How do I know?”

“What did it look like?”

Natasha yawned again. Her lids drooped.

“Small, like for a bank safety deposit box? Or a bigger key, like to an apartment or storage? Try to remember, Natasha.”

“Old-fashioned.” Natasha rang a bell for the nurse. “I need my pills.”

Aimée scanned the room. Handed Natasha the pink pills in the oval plastic cup. “These?”

Natasha shook her head. “I want the purple ones.”

Now or never. She’d appeal to the paranoia. “I’ve got to find the cameras, Natasha.”

“The cameras? Mais, oui. I want to dance,” she said, her breathing labored. “Get my tights.”

Aimée opened the drawers: mothball-tinged lace camisoles, graying leotards crumbling to her touch. In the armoire she found folded linens, hanging vintage wool coats, a pleated Fortuny pale lemon chemise. Timeless.

The secrétaire drawers yielded worn leather boxes of costume and paste jewelry. A gray, gummed tarnish came off on Aimée’s fingers.

Perspiration dampened the back of Aimée’s neck, the thin skin at the crook of her elbow. The old woman had become quiet during her search. Aimée shot her a glance.

Natasha’s lids drooped. Short, shallow breaths issued from her. The oxygen tank meter level had dropped to the red range. What should she do?

Aimée twisted the oxygen meter knob, but the needle stayed steady on red. Her stomach clenched. The poor old woman wasn’t getting oxygen. Thank God the red call light lit up on the wall. A bell rang from the corridor. She figured she had a minute at most.

She shook the Russian newspapers. No hidden letters. Desperate, she reached under the hospital mattress, looked under the bed and found dust balls. Footsteps pounded in the hallway. She ran her hands under the crisp cotton pillow. Inside the pillowcase she felt something hard and cylindrical, recognized an old-fashioned pneumatic tube. She stuffed the tube in her waistband.

Of course it made sense now.

“Madame Natasha?”

A nurse stared at Aimée. She stiffened. “What are you doing?”

“Quick. Her oxygen’s.…”

“Low because she fiddled with the knobs again.” A sigh came from the nurse who turned on the reserve. “It happens every day. Why are you in here?”

“I can’t find her tutu.”

Natasha sat up, wide awake, with a glint of fire in her crow’s-feet eyes. “Stop her, she’s the Okhrana agent. She’s spying on me!”

Aimée fluffed the pillow, then shot the nurse a knowing look. “Bien sûr, Madame Natasha. Next time we’ll decipher the code.”

Aimée winked at the nurse on her way out the door. She took the stairs two at a time. Too bad the writing she’d glimpsed inside was in Russian.

But she knew where to start. She climbed on her Vespa, double-knotted her scarf, and headed back to Paris.

“PIOTR VOLODYA? I don’t know him,” said the plump, black-cassocked priest with matching black beard. He sported a thick gold cross on his chest. “Can’t help you, Mademoiselle.”

He reminded her of a black bear standing on the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral steps.

“You’re sure he’s not one of your flock, Father?” She smiled. “The nursing home at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois mentioned that one of your priests visited for Piotr Volodya’s one hundredth birthday party.”

“The rector might know, but he’s in Nantes until tomorrow, Mademoiselle. Check back then.”

The priest stepped down the last step of the cathedral’s wide staircase. He waved to several women setting out food on a table under an umbrella by budding plane trees. Young boys played nearby. A quiet islet of peace next to the church. Plates of smoked fish, thick black bread. Quite a spread. Reminded her she hadn’t eaten since a yogurt this morning.

“If you’ll excuse me, Mademoiselle?”

A dead end already?

“Sadly, Piotr passed away,” she said, thinking hard. “Alone. But I want to inform his relatives in Russia. Or here. Speak with someone who knew him.”

“Now I remember,” he said. “That was Father Ninkinov. But he’s down south for a retreat.”

Didn’t people confide in priests? Especially dying people? She pressed her card in the priest’s big hands.

“The man died without family here. I’m just trying to help out. Please ask Father Ninkinov to contact me.”

“A retreat of silence, Mademoiselle.” He turned away.

Now she didn’t hold out much hope. Her heels scrunched over the gravel, trying to keep up with him. As they passed the message board, paper slips with Cyrillic names and phone numbers fluttering in the breeze, she made one last attempt. “I need a translator. Who do you recommend, Father?”

He paused long enough to consider the board. “Marevna or Valeria. Try either of these two.” He tore them off. “Don’t forget to mention Father Medveyed recommended you.”

“You’re a close community, Father,” she said, biting her tongue before adding “closed against outsiders.”

“Cautious,” he said. “Introductions count within our community, just like in yours.”

Did they have such different cultures? Not for the first time she felt she was stepping into another world, complete with a language and alphabet she couldn’t decipher.

“Merci, Father.”

A few pops of the gravel and he disappeared under the trees.

THE TRAIL HADN’T iced up yet. The first twelve hours after a murder—crucial in an investigation—yielded the most. Her father had drilled that into her.

But she could kick herself for not insisting Yuri reveal what made this painting so valuable that it was stolen before the appraisal. Why he’d begged for her help, then changed his mind.

She reached the first recommended translator, Marevna, who agreed to meet with her. At last, some luck. Aimée circled chic Place de Catalogne in the 14th arrondissement and wound her scooter down rue du Château, run down in places, passing narrow lanes marked by two-story workshops, a bakery, a cobbler shop. The old Paris.

A rustle of tepid wind enveloped her. This weather forecasted a hot, wet summer. This thought took her back to a long-ago humid August in the countryside. Her grand-mère’s candles had gone limp, leaving a trail of wax tears on the wooden farm table. Hunting in the oak trees for birds’ nests of speckled blue quail eggs, the taste of Grand-mère’s cake perfumed with orange-blossom water. The hazy memory of her mother laughing in the orchard, kissing the fresh raspberry stains on Aimée’s small fingers.

A barking Westie on the pavement brought her back to the present, to the sun-dappled, rain-freshened street, the passersby. The ache of longing remained, the buried sense of guilt that she’d caused her mother to leave. Her mother had been an artist, a sketcher and painter, who probably saw the world through a delicate artistic temperament. Aimée could only guess that she had been too much to handle. Once, just once, she wanted to see her mother again. This painting led to her mother, she knew it in her bones.

And then Yuri’s battered face, his swollen tongue, filled her mind. Only a few hours ago she’d stood in bloody water and smelled that lingering floral note of muguet, lily of the valley, her mother’s scent. Her mother … Yuri’s murderer?

The light turned green. Horns blared behind her. She popped into first gear.

Le Zakouski, the meeting point, turned out to be part resto, part delicatessen—one red-ceilinged room with a glass refrigerator case crammed next to tables with red-checked plastic tablecloths. Old photos and bright paintings plastered the walls like wallpaper. Kiev kitsch circa 1967.

“You pay cash?” A woman’s round face framed by long, straight, platinum hair poked up from the deli counter. Early twenties, Aimée thought.

Nice greeting. Aimée nodded. “Marevna?”

“Take a seat. We open later for dinner.”

Aimée sat by the window, moving aside the red napkin holder. She set Piotr’s letter and the funny tube down on the red-checked plastic cloth and studied it for the first time.

La poste pneumatique, or “pneu,” had been in use until the mid-eighties, a system for delivering letters, télégrammes, or cards. These cylinders were propelled along tubes underground by compressed air or partial vacuum to post offices, which delivered them for a few centimes. At one time the National Assembly linked pneumatically with the Senate—a precursor to the intranet—via tubes under the Jardin du Luxembourg. She had childhood memories of watching her grandfather slip a pneu in the narrow slot at la poste. But she wondered why Natasha had kept this ugly gray metal tube. Aimée unscrewed the end. The musty smell of paper came out with rolled-up creased envelopes bearing forty-centime stamps. Circa 1920, she figured. The fat one was written in Cyrillic. Aimée put the few in French addressed to Natasha, and the one from Natasha’s scrapbook, to the side.

Marevna pulled up a chair. Sniffed. Her pink lipsticked mouth formed a moue of distaste.

“How much to translate everything?” Aimée pulled out her worn Vuitton wallet.

“You’re kidding, non?”

“I need the whole contents. I have to know what’s relevant,” Aimée said.

“Relevant? Father said you’re some volunteer at the nursing home trying to locate family back in Russia.”

So she’d checked. Aimée wondered again at the priest’s word, “cautious.” Suspicious, more like it.

Aimée took out the other slip from her pocket and showed her. “Valeria, the other translator, didn’t ask me questions. But Father said you’re better.”

Marevna’s long-lashed eyes blinked. “What your meaning?”

“You do a simple translation. We keep this between us.”

Aimée glanced around the deserted resto, the faded photos, the none-too-fresh tubs of orange salmon caviar in the cooler. Doubted Marevna earned much in salary or tips. “This now.” She slid a hundred-franc note over the table. “Two more like this when you finish. You interested or not?”

Marevna’s fingers clenched the hundred francs. “Deal.”

Smart. She understood.

Marevna untied her apron. Pulled out a pen and a notebook from her pocket, opened the rolled papers. A few moments passed. Only the ticking of a clock, the thumbing of pages. A slab of sun warmed Aimée’s arm through the window.

“Maybe I summarize, da? You looking for names and family in Russia?”

Aimée didn’t know what she was looking for besides a reason for Yuri’s murder. A clue to this painting. Or whether these old letters even led there. Two letters and several pages of writing on old, browned onionskin paper. Papers she’d stolen from an old Russian ballerina.

Far-fetched, maybe, but she couldn’t help wondering if Natasha had remained lucid long enough to contract the painting’s heist. Or more plausible that Oleg, Yuri’s wife’s son, had heard the stories and put it together. That’s if there was something to put together. She hoped this wouldn’t come back to bite her.

“Why don’t you just read?” Aimée said, trying to control her impatience. “You can write it up later.”

“Da, this from 1988.” She scanned a few pages. “He switches back and forth in time. What you say, not linear events?” Marevna read more.

Through the window, Aimée caught sight of a teenage boy straddling his parked motorcycle, smoking. Relishing every puff and blowing smoke rings into the air. She wished her fingers didn’t twitch for just one drag. Marevna was leaning forward, jotting down a word every so often. She was interested now. “Lucky for you. I study psychology.”

Aimée sat up. “Why?”

“Therapist recommends Piotr explain an old letter to his son, to—how you say—make his guilt be less? Make amends for past, yes, that’s better way to say. Do like an exercise in a journal for what he remembers. Write down as much as he can to flex brain muscles, prevent mental stagnation. For therapy.”

“Like a chronicle of his life?”

“Russians tell stories. That generation, like my great-grand-mère, that’s how they teach us about the past.” Marevna sighed. “Wars, siege of Stalingrad, all those things.”

“Piotr was born in 1898,” Aimée said. “How far back in his childhood does he go?”

“First he write about coming to Paris. Hungry, his own father looking for work. His father dying. That kind of thing you want to hear?”

The story was probably fascinating, but she didn’t have time. Aimée thought back to Natasha’s words. “Look for mentions of Lenin. Paintings.” For the first time, she noticed pages had been folded back. “What about here?”

“Lenin?” Marevna shook her head. “Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin?”

“That one, oui.”

Marevna flipped through the journal pages, scanning for the name. Aimée, suddenly irritated, wanted to snap at her to be careful with the thin paper.

“Piotr says he the second wave of Russes immigrants. I’m the fifth or sixth, depending how you count.”

“That doesn’t seem important,” Aimée said.

“Important you understand background.” Marevna’s face flushed. “Must understand Russian psychology to do with French. Make more sense for you to know.”

Aimée gave a quick, impatient nod. “Et alors?”

“Russian aristocrats at tsar’s court learned French, spoke it to each other instead of Russian,” Marevna said. “The elite had a love affair with French culture. French reciprocate—you know bistrot is a Russian word?”

Aimée didn’t much care.

“Tsar’s troops occupied Paris in 1871, but nobody served meal fast enough. ‘Bisto, bisto,’ meaning ‘faster, faster,’ they shouted in Russian. It became bistro—you know, for fast food.”

It was too much. “Look, can you just check if there’s anything about—”

Marevna huffed. “I try to tell you about why are Russians in Paris. You don’t know this, maybe his stories here don’t make any sense.”

Aimée sighed and nodded. The withered caviar was starting to look delicious.

“This Piotr.” Marevna tapped the pages. “He was poor in Russia. But you know even before the Revolution so many Russian aristocrats come to Paris. In 1900, the Exposition, they settle in little palais and give parties for French nobility. Later, Lenin and Trotsky, the revolutionaries, they come to Paris, and the tsar’s Okhrana, his secret service, also comes, to watch them.”

“Okhrana?” The ones Natasha feared. “How do you know all this?”

“Mandatory revolutionary teaching, before the fall of Soviet Union. Everyone my age learned history of our country and yours. We know white Russes aristos fled Revolution of 1917—dukes, counts leave everything. Now penniless. Drive taxis—you know about white Russians who drove taxis. Lana, the owner here, her uncle drove a taxi.”

Marevna pointed to a wall photo of a middle-aged woman and older man posing self-consciously in front of the restaurant.

“Then Jews before the Great War. After Great War, POWs and more Jews, who escaped Stalin’s stalag. Stalin say all POWs are traitors. After that, a wave of dissidents in the eighties, and like me, after the Wall tumbled, we came here.” Marevna shrugged. “The old white Russians look at us like trash. Soviet trash.”

Aimée had no idea.

“But essential you understand importance of Lenin in Paris.” Marevna’s voice rose, growing passionate. “This is where he … how do you say? Where he formulate his ideology. Like idealist. All his writings, he did in Paris. Cradle of Revolution, we learned. Right here.”

Enough of the Revolution. “Of course, but getting back to Piotr and Yuri. Does he mention Lenin?”

“Da. You see.” She pointed to the slanted Cyrillic letters, meaningless to Aimée. “That’s why I’m telling you. After his father died, Piotr and his mother lived on rue Marie Rose.”

“How’s that important?” Aimée wanted to explode.

“Piotr lived below Lenin’s apartment,” Marevna said. “He writes how Lenin bounced him on his knee.”

Aimée nodded. Natasha had quoted that almost verbatim.

“Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, made Piotr borscht,” Marevna continued. “Lenin helped Piotr’s mother get work as a cook. His father had died, the mother was so poor. Da, here he mentions Lenin,” Marevna said, pointing to a sheet. “He’s writing now how Lenin never had children. Piotr writes about him with affection, saw a human side.”

Aimée watched as Marevna read more, jotted notes. Laughed. “Piotr’s describing his first taste of absinthe, when he’s eighteen. ‘Green like firewater,’ he write. At la Rotonde in Montparnasse, Modigliani buy him drink. Modigliani would sketch in the café for five francs. Then buy drink for everyone.”

Aimée blinked. The ravings of Alzheimer’s or …?

Drink, drugs, women, the legends and myths of Modigliani in Montparnasse. Or Modi, as they called him, rhyming it with maudit, cursed. A drunk lunatic.

That was when Aimée noticed a photo sticking out from the pages. Much-thumbed, black-and-white and grainy. Three men stood squinting at the sun. One wore a bowler hat, another a scarf, and both towered over the short man between them. Aimée recognized the sign of la Rotonde café behind. And the men. Her heart skipped. She turned it over to see what was written on the back.

André Salmon, Amadeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso, 1916, signed Cocteau.

Stunned, Aimée turned it over again. Studied the faces. Happy.

She picked up an envelope stamped UNDELIVERABLE—RETURN TO SENDER, addressed to Yuri Volodya with an old forty-centime stamp, a café name imprinted on the upper left. From days gone by, when cafés supplied writing paper to their patrons, who could count on twice-a-day postal service. Or la pneu delivery. She stared at the faded blue paper covered with Cyrillic—wondered where a salutation would go. But most of all, whether this involved Lenin.

This was taking too long. Too much payout and no real information. Unless this photo had something to do with the letter. She opened the envelope, handed it to Marevna. “Do you see a date here? Anything about a painting or Lenin?”

“Patient, please. June 2, 1925. This letter say, To my son Yuri.” Marevna’s eyes scanned intently. “Piotr writes about his bistro job when he was twenty-two, in 1920. Just married. About to have him, his son Yuri.”

Marevna read further.

“Piotr writes Modigliani was terribly sick. Tuberculosis. Like a plague, if people knew. Everyone avoided you.”

Like AIDS today.

“Modigliani hid disease, Piotr says, few knew. Or understood him.” Marevna looked up. “He wants Yuri to understand. Here it’s very sad.”

Her voice had changed. Aimée leaned closer, struck by Marevna’s tone. “Go on.”

“Piotr says no one saw Modigliani for several weeks. Piotr worried, so he snuck a pot of cassoulet from bistro to Modigliani’s atelier, on rue de la Grande Chaumière. Found Modigliani in his studio, in a very cold December, burning with fever. Coughing blood. No heat. Only ashes in the grate. He wished he’d brought coal. He saw empty wine bottles, moldy sardines in a tin. Modi’s mistress helped feed him but she was very pregnant, like his own wife. Difficult for her to get around. Modi said—to thank him—for Piotr to take a painting, anything he wanted.”

The resto fell away and Aimée felt the cold, the worry a twenty-two-year-old Piotr knew for this genius, this man who’d been good to him.

Marevna shook her head. “Here I try to quote. ‘Modi was always generous and kind to me growing up. The man lived to paint, to express. A purist. Genius. It pierced me to see him forgotten in this freezing room, surrounded by art he barely made a living from, shivering with fever. But Modi says then I must take the portrait of my old friend, Lenin. The one Lenin commissioned in 1910 but didn’t like.’ ”

“Didn’t like?” Aimée interrupted.

Marevna scanned the page. “An argument. Modi said they’d had some kind of fight. Lenin left for Switzerland and never took the painting.”

Aimée sat up. A portrait of Lenin by Modigliani? Rare, unique, unknown. But if Modigliani painted this portrait as a commission in 1910, before Lenin returned to lead the Revolution, who else knew about this? What did this mean?

“He writes Modi was coughing, coughing,” Marevna continued. “Blood over the blankets but Modi insists to sign the painting to him, ‘For my friend Piotr.’ He writes, ‘Modi said to me, “This means something to you, Piotr. You must have it.” And that’s the last thing he ever said to me. Two days later he died at the Hôpital de la Charité. Next day his mistress, big with child, jumped off a roof.’ Tragic.”

Aimée noticed Marevna’s hands quivering. The paper was stained with a watery blotch of faded ink. As if Piotr had cried while writing this.

So Piotr had a portrait of Lenin painted by Modigliani. A gift from the artist. Unless this letter had been forged afterward to give the painting a provenance. But the feel of the old blue letter, the stamps, the café address told her it hadn’t.

“Is there more?”

Marevna translated on. “ ’That night you were born, Yuri, all I remember was the cold wind on my way to fetching midwife. And your pink, wrinkly face hours later. That’s what I want to explain—this painting belongs to you, too, Yuri. The painting was of Lenin, the man who lived above us, who talked to me when my own papa died. I will try to make things up to you since I had to go away.”

Go away? Aimée checked the faded postmark. She made out 1925, the letterhead of Café de la Gare in Marseilles.

“ ‘When you are older, can appreciate, the portrait belongs to you.’ That’s all.” Marevna looked up. “If the painting exists, it’s very sad. Very rare.”

The painting existed, all right. Yuri’s murder attested to that. But who had stolen it last night?

Piotr had written this as a testament, kept this letter for Yuri as an authentication. Yuri, not Natasha, should have had it. Why hadn’t it come to light while old Piotr was alive?

Questions, so many questions.

She figured Oleg, his stepson, knew of the painting’s existence—that was why he’d been snooping around for money lately. Were there others? She’d start with him.

A door slammed in the back. Marevna jumped. Fear flashed in her eyes.

“I have to work. You go, please.”

“But there’s another letter,” Aimée said.

“Not finished yet, Marevna?” came a voice from the kitchen.

“Leave before Lana asks questions.” With a quick motion Marevna piled the papers together.

“Careful. That’s delicate.” Before she could stick them in her apron pocket, Aimée gripped her hand. “Not so fast.”

“But I translate more after work.”

She’d discovered what she needed for now—the rest later. “We’ll meet then,” she said, noting Marevna’s mounting uneasiness. “I might need these.”

Did Marevna see another avenue of cash? A conduit using the Russian grapevine—the tight community—to broker the information? A portrait of Lenin by Modigliani … and the letter to prove it. One needed the other. But then Aimée knew zero about the art world.

A priest’s referral didn’t guarantee she could trust Marevna, but she had to keep her options open. Aimée stuck two hundred francs in Marevna’s pocket. “That’s for now.”

She paused at the Trotsky photo by the door. A piece of the puzzle clicked in the back of her mind. “Lana’s political, a Trotskyist?”

“That’s all so passé,” Marevna said, glancing back at the kitchen. “It’s her old uncle’s.”

“He around?”

Marevna tipped an imaginary bottle to her mouth. “Fond of the drink. Like all that generation.”

Like Yuri.

“Ask him to call me, will you?” Aimée handed her a card and another bill. Yuri’s money. “But this we keep between us, d’accord?”

Marevna nodded.





Tuesday Early Afternoon, Paris


AIMÉE KNEW LITTLE about art, even less about the art world. But she knew who to ask.

“Lieutenant Olivant?” said the receptionist at the préfecture de police. “He works out of OCSC now.”

She never remembered the meaning behind those acronyms for various police branches. The terms changed all the time.

“He still works with stolen art, n’est-ce pas?”

“Bah ouais,” came the typical Parisian reply. “That’s what they do there, Mademoiselle.”

“Mind transferring me?”

A click. Another receptionist, who transferred her to the third floor, then another series of clicks. A bland recording of extension numbers. Finally, after punching in Lieutenant Olivant’s extension, she got his voice mail. Didn’t anyone answer their office lines anymore?

She got as far as giving her name and number before the recorded voice came on. Message box full.

Great. She’d try later. Right now a big, fat zero.

The old man’s letter hadn’t shed any light on one mystery, though. How did Yuri know her mother? Dead, he couldn’t tell her. But if there was any chance to learn something about her mother, she’d find it.

By now the flics would have questioned people on the street, the inhabitants of Villa d’Alésia. The mink-coated neighbor knew something—even if she didn’t know she did. She’d heard the raised voices. Aimée had to risk going back there to find this Oleg. She didn’t even know his last name.

“YOU AGAIN?”

Yuri Volodya’s neighbor, Madame Figuer, whose name Aimée discovered by reading the mailbox, stood in her door in a black jogging suit. Her red-rimmed eyes darted under freshly applied black eyebrows. “The flics want to talk to you, Mademoiselle. Ask you why you ran away.”

“Please, Madame, I need your help,” Aimée said. “I’ll explain.”

Madame Figuer gripped a pink cell phone. “May I help?” She punched in a number. “Explain it to them.”

Aimée reached out and hit END. “Pardonnez-moi, Madame, but no phone calls. Desolée, it’s important.”

Alarmed, Madame Figuer stepped back. Started to close her door. “Leave me alone.”

Aimée stuck her foot in the door. “Please, we need to talk.”

“They said you could be an accomplice.” Her voice rose. “Dangerous.”

“Can you keep a secret?” Aimée shouldered her way inside, going with her plan B: on-the-fly improvisation—approaching plausible, she hoped. She needed to keep this woman quiet and glean information.

“Madame, my unit investigates stolen art of national cultural importance,” she said, reaching in her bag. “Not many know of us. We work out of 3 rue de Lutèce.”

At least her contact did. Unless the bureau had moved. Openmouthed, Madame Figuer stared at her.

“Art investigator? In that outfit?”

Aimée noticed a nick on her Prada boots. The pair she’d borrowed from Martine.

“You think we wear uniforms? Forget those crime shows you watch on the télé, Madame,” Aimée said. “Nothing exotic. Our cases involve painstaking investigation. Any detail could lead to recovery.”

Madame Figuer pulled herself ramrod straight. She was about to throw Aimée out the door.

“We work independently, but often in tandem with police,” Aimée said. “Our interest coincides here, but I’m working another angle.”

“Likely story. You ran off.”

Aimée nodded. “I’m undercover. But I shouldn’t have told you.”

“So I should believe that? Show me your credentials, your ID.”

Undercover never carried ID. Too compromising if they were rumbled. But Madame Figuer wouldn’t know that. She pulled a card from her alias collection.

“Ministry of the Interior?” asked Madame Figuer.

“Thefts from cathedrals, state museums. In certain cases we investigate robbery from private collections. But that’s all I can say.” Aimée leaned forward as if in confidence. “I’ve told you more than I should. Yet your brother was an artist. Talented.” She gestured to the watercolors in the hallway. “You of all people will understand. That’s why I came to explain. Enlist your aid.”

Madame Figuer blinked several times. Cheap to use the dead brother? But Aimée had struck a nerve.

“You can’t think old Yuri possessed …”

“A national treasure, Madame Figuer?” she said. “We do.” Suddenly she noticed a wonderfully buttery smell emanating from the kitchen. Her overwhelming hunger, which she’d forgotten in the excitement of the letter, came roaring back.

“Yuri was tortured and murdered for it?” Madame Figueur’s hands shook.

“I’d rather talk here, but we can go to headquarters.”

Madame Figuer adjusted the jacket zipper of her jogging suit, played with the snap on her coin purse. “But I’m late for the market. The melons. Then the plumber’s coming to repair the water damage.”

“We’ll make this quick.” Aimée gestured to Madame’s kitchen.

By the time Aimée had eaten half the plate of Madame Figuer’s fresh-baked crisp almond financiers plus leftover pain perdu, she’d gleaned an outline of Yuri’s movements for the past three days.

“The flics questioned me,” Madame Figuer said, “but then I didn’t volunteer much. Couldn’t. The shock. I took one of my pink pills.”

“Pills?” The woman was elderly but seemed clear and alert to Aimée.

“For my nerves, you know. When I think of Yuri tortured next door … just like my brother was betrayed and tortured in forty-three … it’s all so.…” Her voice trailed off.

Coincidental? But Aimée kept that to herself. Perhaps Madame’s retelling over the years had, like such stories steeped in shame, become unspoken common knowledge?

Madame Figuer shuddered. “Do you think la police will ask me more questions?”

“Possible.” Aimée needed to work fast. “Let’s go back to when you noticed Yuri got ‘in butter,’ as you said.”

According to Madame Figuer, Yuri had borrowed her wheelbarrow from her garden shed four days earlier to clean up his father’s cellar—that was how she knew his father had died. But when he’d returned it, he’d brought her a bottle of wine. “Soon we’ll be celebrating,” he’d said.

Saturday he’d driven his old Mercedes somewhere with Damien Perret, the young long-haired man from the printing shop on rue de Châtillon. A nice boy, she added, in spite of his radical politics, but then everyone’s young once, non? Yuri’s stepson, Oleg, visited in the afternoon.

But of last night’s accident she knew nothing, having stayed at her sister’s. She’d returned this morning to a flood in her apartment and loud voices from his open window across the courtyard wall.

Aimée thought back to earlier that morning; she’d been at the morgue when Yuri had left that message. Not much later, he called to take back his words. After contact with her mother? An acid taste filled her mouth. She took a deep breath. “Did you hear a woman’s voice?”

Madame Figuer shook her head.

“Didn’t you say Russian before?”

She shook her head again. “Thought so at first, but no, that I’d recognize,” she said. “The quartier used to be full of them. Thick with artists, too. Giacometti used to live here. He was like a stick man, the wild hair.…”

More stories of the past?

Madame Figuer gave a little sigh. “Everything’s changed. So different now.”

Aimée compiled a list of everyone Madame Figuer mentioned. Oleg—at the top of the list—wasn’t answering his phone, so she left a message. Damien’s name was next. It was time she spoke with him.

RUE DE CHTILLON, the next narrow street over, paralleled Villa d’Alésia. Earlier, climbing Yuri’s back wall, she’d noticed little of it, except the bit of hay she found clinging to the rosemary.

Now, trying to figure out how the killer escaped, she eyed the maison de maître, typical bourgeois townhouse shutters framing its tall windows. Why did it strike her as familiar? It was fronted by what would have been a rose garden in the nineteenth century, now weed-choked patches of grass and wild lilac. The sign at the gate indicated the house’s current function was a youth job training center.

She found Damien’s printing shop further in, beyond an open-gated courtyard. On the cobbles under the chestnut tree, a man in blue overalls loaded the back of a camionnette. A few stacks of playbills for theaters, concert posters, and ads for a traveling circus. Posters emblazoned with STOP THE DEVELOPERS in red were bundled against the wall on wood pallets.

The pounding of the printing press competed with the chirping of birds in the bushes.

“Monsieur, I’m looking for Damien Perret.”

“Come to pick up the posters, eh? All ready, Damien made sure.”

He mistook her for someone from the demonstration.

She shook her head and smiled. “Where’s the office?”

“Inside and to the left,” he said. “But he’s with his aunt at the hospital.”

Great. “Any idea where he went Saturday?”

“You mean deliveries?” The man rubbed his neck. He was bald and overweight.

She thought quickly. “That’s it, regarding a delivery order we received Saturday.”

“I don’t think so.” His eyes narrowed.

“Can you check?”

“Don’t need to. Today’s our delivery day.”

Stupid to lie when she didn’t know the schedule.

“Damien used the camionnette that afternoon,” he said. “Helped the old man.”

Yuri.

He eyed her legs. “Maybe I can help.”

Not the help she needed.

“Florent!” A shout came from inside the glass-roofed printing works.

He dusted off his thick palms. Winked. “Don’t go away.”

Like hell she’d wait for him. But she stared at the inside of the camionnette. Stacked full to the roof. She peered through the open front window. Old newspapers on the floor, Styrofoam cups, candy wrappers, and detritus strewn below the passenger seat. She looked closer at the newspapers; something was unusual. They were copies of Le Matin, yellowed, the typeface faded. A newspaper her grandfather had read that didn’t exist anymore. She reached in, unfolded a crumpled portion. The date—February 1920—above an article about horse cart traffic dangers on Boulevard du Montparnasse.

No doubt this came from Yuri’s father’s belongings. What if there was more? She glanced around. No Florent or other workers. She opened the passenger door, went through the trash on the floor again. Nothing else of interest but a parking ticket. She dropped it, then picked it up again. A hefty one hundred francs. She looked at the date. Saturday, issued at 3 P.M.—the time Damien and Yuri had gone out. The address: 34 rue Marie Rose.

“Guess you’d like to ride on my deliveries with me, eh?”

She felt hot garlic breath in her ear. The texture of Florent’s grease-stained overalls on her arm.

“In your dreams.”

Then a knee was shoved between her legs. Rough arms shoving her onto the seat. Hands pinning her legs. Panic raced through her. The way he had eyed her should have put her on high alert. His thick fingers dug into her skin.

“You know you want it,” Florent said.

How could she be so stupid?